Lady in the Lake(31)

“Thank you,” she said. “I’m just glad to be here, twenty-nine years later. But my work is not done, not yet.” She leaned hard on that last word.

“Here’s to twenty-nine years more,” someone shouted from the back of the room. Inane, Maddie thought. Rude, even. It sounded sarcastic, as if the man who had spoken was mocking Mrs. Whyte. She wondered if Ferdie was here. Certainly, other Negro officers should have been called downtown for this particular celebration. But the crowd was very sparse, and very white.

She asked Diller as much. Not about Ferdie, but the lack of Negroes in general.

“It’s a dog-and-pony show for the press,” he said. “Who gets a party for her twenty-ninth year? They threw it together at the last minute. Straight-up public relations ploy to remind everyone that they do more with Negroes than bust their heads open.”

“Then why are we covering it?”

He gave her an odd look: “Wait, are you with the Star?”

“I am, I’m Maddie—”

But he had already moved away, having secured his slice of cake, a brick of a corner piece. He was with a group of men. Reporters like him, probably. What did one call a group of reporters? A gaggle would be good, Maddie thought. A murder of crows, a gaggle of reporters.

She approached the guest of honor, notebook out, and introduced herself as a reporter. She was doing a reporter’s job, was she not?

Mrs. Whyte demurred. “I’ve had many opportunities to talk about myself. If you checked the files before you came here—and, of course, I’m sure you did—you must know everything about me.”

A veiled rebuke and a fair one. Maddie should have pulled the clips from the library. Her face flamed, but she was not going to go back to the newsroom without a story. She was being tested, and Maddie had always aced her tests.

“What’s it like, being a first?”

“Not that different from being the second or the third or the thousandth.”

“But the department still doesn’t have that many Negroes. And they’re not allowed to do as much as their white counterparts.” Ferdie had told her that, of course. Negroes could be patrols or vice cops and that was pretty much it. No cars, no radios. Maddie had chosen not to ask Ferdie how he wrangled a patrol car for his late-night visits to her.

Mrs. Whyte, clearly surprised by Maddie’s knowledge, softened a little. “Well, I’m an old hand at making more out of less. I walked a beat on Pennsylvania Avenue when I was younger. I felt like I did more for the children of that neighborhood in that job than I did as a teacher. I’m not criticizing teachers. I was one and my husband has spent his entire career in the school system. But there were plenty of women teaching. The children saw them every day. When I walked down the street, in my uniform, I showed them that there were other things to be. We cannot imagine what we cannot see.”

Maddie scribbled furiously. She was so taken by Mrs. Whyte’s fierce pride in her job that she almost forgot the basic questions—her age, her husband’s name. She then asked a little about where she had grown up, how her parents had felt about their daughter’s vocation, what she did to relax at day’s end.

The last question amused Mrs. Whyte. “Watch a little television,” she said. “Read the newspaper. I tried knitting, but all I could make were scarves and even then, the shapes were all over the place. My sister said I was loose with my needles.”

Maddie was back at the paper by four thirty. She was a fast typist, but not a fast writer, and she labored over her copy. But she was enjoying herself; it was like working on her column back in high school, coming up with witticisms, bestowing nicknames on the other popular kids. It was almost eight by the time she turned in the requested four hundred words. She was too shy to call out “copy” as the other reporters did, so she walked the pages to Cal herself.

“Too long,” he said, without even reading the copy, and promptly crossed out the final paragraph with a red X.

“But that’s the best part,” Maddie said. “That was her quote about how she hoped she inspired the children she saw every day.” We cannot imagine what we cannot see.

“You’re not supposed to put the best stuff at the end.”

Since starting at the Star, Maddie had been reading the newspaper with an attention and focus that her previous self had never mustered. She had noticed what made some stories sing, while others were Dragnet-style: all we want are the facts, ma’am.

“It’s a feature, right? Features can have . . .” She paused, unsure of the word and her right to use it. “Features can have kickers. Can’t they?”

“It’s supposed to be six inches about a Negro who’s not rioting or stealing.”

“But she’s interesting,” Maddie said. “I think there’s more there.”

“We’ve written about her plenty. Be glad that there’s even a story—we could have done this with a photo and a cutline. But if you’re good, maybe I’ll throw some more stories your way.”

If you’re good. Maddie was not fooled. Cal was going to try to use her for future late-afternoon assignments, counting on her ambition and decorum to accept them. Counting on her to be too meek to push for what she was owed.

“It’s past eight,” she said. “I’ve worked three hours overtime. How do I enter that on my pay card at week’s end?”