Lady in the Lake
“What’s up?” Maddie asked Bob Bauer, who had just pulled his column from his typewriter. But instead of calling “copy,” he crumpled it and inserted a fresh sheet.
“Damn thing’s too close to call. With all the precincts in, Mahoney’s got the lead by less than a hundred fifty votes. There’s going to be a recount. Clarence Mitchell the Third is already saying he’ll organize Negroes for Agnew if Mahoney is the candidate.”
“How could Mahoney win?” Maddie had followed the governor’s race in the papers all summer. Mahoney was a six-time loser in state politics.
“Sickles and Finan split the base. And Mahoney had a message that resonated, ‘Your home is your castle.’”
“But wasn’t that racist?”
“Maybe to you. To some guy who’s watching the value of his home plummet because his neighborhood is changing, it’s different. You can’t mess with a man’s home. It defines him.” He looked at the paper in his typewriter. “That’s it, that’s it. You can’t mess with a man’s home. I’ve got my lede, Maddie, so if you’ll excuse me . . .”
It rained all day the next day. It rained almost four inches, a record. It was not a cleansing rain, the kind that left a city refreshed. Humidity lingered and Maddie’s straightened hair seemed to shrink as her natural waves returned. Everyone at the paper was tired and cranky, working on too little sleep and too much coffee.
On Thursday, she went to her mother’s house, carrying a dish of homemade chicken liver with pistachios.
“Is this from Seven Locks?” her mother asked.
“Actually, I made it myself.” She had, a laborious job that involved pushing the chicken livers through a sieve. “It’s kosher.”
Her father picked the nuts out—“They’re bad for my bowels,” he said—but her mother’s inability to criticize the dish was a kind of validation. Unfortunately, it also freed her to move on to Maddie’s personal life.
She began: “Yom Kippur is coming.”
“Of course.”
“So, are you going to go back home? If you ask Milton to take you back, he would probably consider it. After all, part of atoning is to forgive others.”
“I have nothing to atone for,” Maddie said sharply. “And nothing for which I need to be forgiven.”
“Are you dating?” There was something sly about her mother’s question, a hint of things unsaid, but Maddie’s mother had no way of knowing what happened at the corner of Mulberry and Cathedral.
“No.” It wasn’t a lie. Maddie reasoned it wasn’t a date if all you did was have sex in your own apartment. She thought about the night at the ballpark, how thrilling it was simply to sit by him, shoulder to shoulder.
Then she thought about John Diller, eyes narrowed, saying, “That source.”
Her mother said: “Really, Maddie, I understand, believe me. The summer before your senior year in high school, I went a little crazy. It’s natural. You spend your life raising a child, then it’s time for the child to move on. It happens to every woman I know. Debbie Wasserman got caught shoplifting at the Giant over on Ingleside. She drove all the way over there to steal a Sara Lee swirl cake.”
Maddie slathered some chicken liver on a piece of toast. It really was excellent. She was a better cook in her galley kitchen with the two-burner stove than she had been in Pikesville, with a freezer full of Hutzler’s cheese bread and all her little tricks for making dinner parties seem homey and homemade.
“I don’t think that’s my situation. I have a brain. It almost atrophied from lack of use and now I want to use it.”
“At a newspaper. And the Star, of all places.” The Morgenstern household took the Beacon in the morning, the Light in the afternoon, and was suspicious of those who didn’t follow suit. Her mother had never even seen Maddie’s work. “Look, I’m just telling you, Madeline. I know.”
Her mother leveled her gaze at Maddie and suddenly she was sixteen again, but only for a moment. She wondered what her mother did know. Did she suspect that Maddie was not a virgin before she married, that she had visited an abortionist on lower Park Heights? It seemed impossible that she would figure out that Maddie had sought Allan out, made love to him again, then come home and conceived a child with Milton. More impossible still that she could have heard any whispers about Maddie and Ferdie. (How silly their names sounded together, she realized, and yet how right.) And if Diller knew about them—well, so what? It wasn’t as if her mother was going to run into the Star’s cop reporter, or even his wife, at the Seven Locks market.
“You could be home by October first,” her mother said now. “Every marriage has its bumps.” She glanced at her husband, who had made a neat pile of pistachios on his plate. He had been chosen for her, Tattie’s parents designating him as the only acceptable suitor for their oldest daughter, not that different from a shidduch or the Fiddler on the Roof days. Her mother’s German Jew parents would be horrified by such a comparison, even in the privacy of Maddie’s mind, but it was apt enough. Her father wasn’t even first generation; he had been born on the boat en route to the United States. Nineteen oh six. Sixty years ago. How could 1906 and 1966 be part of the same century? In 1906, there had been no world wars, most people didn’t have telephones and cars. In 1906, women couldn’t vote and black men could by law, but not in practice.
Her parents seemed impossibly distant from her. She seemed distant from herself. Maddie couldn’t believe that she was related to the woman who used to sit in this same chair, eating this same Rosh Hashanah meal, minus her fancy chopped liver. She felt a chill, almost as if a ghost passed through her, but it was the ghost of who she used to be. Forget 1906 and 1966. Maddie couldn’t believe that 1965 and 1966 were part of the same century. She was different. Couldn’t her mother see how different she was?
A week later, on Yom Kippur, she didn’t attend synagogue, although she fasted until sundown out of habit. She then ordered too much food at Paul Cheng’s with Seth, taking home the leftovers, confident that Ferdie would drop by.
He did.
October 1966
October 1966
“When’s your birthday?”
Ferdie and Maddie were in a tangle of limbs, enjoying that first truly chilly night of fall, the night when quilts return to the bed and one leaves the window open a scant two inches. Even here, above the traffic and dirt of Mulberry Street, the air smelled fresh and new.
“Why do you ask?”
“Why wouldn’t I ask? We’ve been seeing each other almost a year and you haven’t had a birthday yet, not that I know of.”
“Only nine months,” Maddie said.
“That’s almost a year, isn’t it?” Amused, but also with a tinge of hurt, as if she were downplaying whatever they had.
“November,” she said. “November tenth.”
“And you’ll be thirty-eight.”
Her turn to be hurt. She didn’t think she looked her age. Ferdie must have realized his gaffe because he added: “I asked for your driver’s license the day we met. I remembered the year but not the date. What do you want for your birthday?”
“Oh, I don’t need a gift.”
“Maybe I need to give you one, have you ever thought about that?”
It was almost instinctive, almost, to begin kissing him, to move her body down the length of his, past that lean torso, that knot of a belly button, down, down, down. It was only later that Maddie realized how many times she had done just this to avoid certain conversations. When Ferdie said anything that sounded romantic, partnerlike, she distracted him with sex. Distracted herself, too. She liked pleasing him because he always pleased her back. Her pleasure had seemed secondary to the other men she had known. Sometimes she enjoyed it, sometimes she faked it, and Milton couldn’t tell the difference. Allan had loved seduction, the buildup. She wondered now, for the first time, if Allan preferred taking virgins because they had nothing to which to compare the experience. As someone’s first lover, one is inevitably the best.
“Thirty-eight is such a stupid age,” she said later. “It’s not forty, yet it’s not not forty.” A beat. “How old are you? When is your birthday?”
“December. December twenty-fifth.”
He didn’t give his age, though.
“Ah, so you probably never have much of a birthday. But December twenty-fifth means nothing to me. We can do what the Jews do, eat Chinese food.” She didn’t add, and go to a movie, although a matinee, then Chinese food, had been the tradition in the Schwartz household.
“In bed.” He seemed glum.
“That’s the old joke. Take your fortune cookie, read the fortune, and add the words in bed. It always works.” He didn’t laugh. “We can do whatever you like on your birthday.”
“I would like—” Her heart almost stopped, terrified that he would ask for something she could never give him. Instead, he buried his face between her breasts, but he wasn’t trying to distract her. “I would like to give you the world, Maddie.”