Lady in the Lake(3)
Seth was a junior in high school now. It had been years since she’d watched Donadio, or even WOLD. She preferred WBAL, the number one station.
“He’s a nice guy, this Wallace Wright,” Milton continued. “Not full of himself at all. I told you, we’ve been playing singles at that new tennis barn in Cross Keys.”
Milton was a bit of a name-dropper and just silly enough to be impressed by playing tennis with a television personality, even one known as the Midday Fog because of his distinctive baritone. Sweet, starstruck Milton. Maddie could not begrudge his tendency toward hero worship, given how much she had benefited from it. Eighteen years into their marriage, he still had unguarded moments in which he gazed at her as if unsure how he had ever won such a prize.
She loved him, she really did, they had a harmonious life together and while she publicly made the right lamentations about their only child’s heading to college in two years, she actually couldn’t wait. She felt as if she had been living in one of those shoebox dioramas Seth had built—she had built, let’s be honest—in grade school, and now the lid was coming off, the walls breaking down. Milton had started taking flying lessons recently, asking how she felt about a second home in Florida. Did she like the Atlantic side or the gulf? Boca or Naples?
Are those the only choices? Maddie had found herself wondering. The two sides of Florida? Certainly the world is bigger than that. But she had only said that she thought she would like Naples.
“See you soon, darling.” She hung up the phone, allowed herself the sigh she had kept at bay. It was late October, the High Holy Days finally over. She was tired of entertaining, exasperated by disruptions to her routines. Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur were supposed to be a time to reflect, take stock, but Maddie couldn’t remember the last time she had been able to go pray before breaking the fast. The house had finally returned to normal and now Milton wanted to bring a guest home, Wally Weiss of all people.
Yet it was essential to impress Wallace Wright with dinner. The chicken breasts thawing in the fridge would keep another day. And meatloaf, even with scalloped potatoes, wasn’t the note she wanted to hit. Maddie knew a clever way to make a beef casserole that everyone loved; maybe it wasn’t Julia Child, but there were never leftovers. No one guessed that the key ingredient was two cans of Campbell’s cream of mushroom soup, plus several generous splashes of wine. The trick was to surround such a casserole with things that suggested elegance, planning—biscuits from Hutzler’s bakery, which Maddie kept in the freezer for just this reason; a cheeseless Caesar salad that Milton would dress at the table, then chop using the same technique as the waiters at Marconi’s. She would send Seth to Goldman’s for a cake. It was a chance to practice his driving, after all. She would tell him that he could have whatever fast food he wanted, too. He would choose trayf, no doubt, but Milton asked only that they keep a kosher home.
Maddie checked the bar, but they were always well stocked. There would be two rounds of cocktails before dinner—oh, she would do something clever with nuts, or maybe serve paté on toast points—wine flowing through dinner, brandy and cognac after. She didn’t remember Wally drinking much, but then she hadn’t spoken to him since the summer she was seventeen. Nobody drank then. Everybody in Maddie’s crowd drank now.
He would be different, of course. Everyone changes, but pimply teenage boys especially so. They say it’s a man’s world, but you’ll never hear anyone claim it’s a boy’s world. That realization had been brought literally home to Maddie when Seth entered high school. She had told him to be patient, that he would sprout to his father’s height, that his face would be smooth and handsome, and her prophecies had already come to pass.
She could never have said the same thing to Wally. Sad little Wally, how he had yearned for her. She had used that yearning, when it was to her advantage. But then, that’s what girls do, that’s the power available to them. Who was he kidding? He may have been taller, the pimples gone, the hair tamed, but everyone in Northwest Baltimore knew he was a Jew. Wallace Wright!
Was Wally married? Maddie recalled a wife, possibly a divorce. The wife wasn’t Jewish, she was pretty sure of that. She decided to balance the table with another couple, the Rosengrens, who would provide the wide-eyed wonder that Maddie would have a hard time faking. She could never see Wallace without seeing Wally. Would it be the same for him? Would he see the Maddie Morgenstern that lurked inside Maddie Schwartz? And would he consider the new version an improvement? She had been a beautiful girl, there was no use pretending otherwise, but terribly, almost tragically naive. In her twenties, she had lost herself to raising a baby, risked frumpiness.
At thirty-six, she had the best of both worlds. She saw a beautiful woman in her mirror, still youthful, but able to afford the things that kept you looking that way. She had one streak of silvery hair, which she had decided to consider incongruous, dashing. She plucked the rest.
When she opened the door to Wally that evening, his open admiration was delightful to see.
“Young lady, is your mother at home?”
That irritated her. It was such obvious flattery, something one would say to a simpering grandmother who wore too much rouge. Did Wally think she required that kind of buildup? She tried to hide her frostiness as she served the first round of drinks and snacks.
“So,” Eleanor Rosengren said after gulping her first highball, “did you really know each other at Park?” The Rosengrens, like Milton, had gone to public high school.