Lady in the Lake(38)

I go to my desk and start working the phones for a story I plan to file later this evening. The bosses hate how I schedule my day, but I’m too good at what I do for them to make me change. Still, they complain. It’s an afternoon paper, Edna. What if there are developments overnight or in the morning? What if we have to chase something in the morning papers? As if anyone in town has ever scooped me. I come in when I please, make notes on how today’s copy was butchered, scream at Cal, then start writing tomorrow’s copy. I file about eight or nine, so Cal has to move my stories. I like working with Cal. He’s a little scared of me, as he should be. But, still, he tinkers.

Today, he has all but tinkered his way into a correction box and you better believe it will say Due to an editing error, something they are loath to admit, but I make ’em say it. I will talk to Cal about this later and scare him sufficiently so he won’t try it again for several months. He’s like a dog, a dumb one, who has to be trained over and over again. Frankly, I should be allowed to hit him with a rolled-up newspaper when he misbehaves. There are plenty at hand and I think my lessons would stick better.

My desk looks like a fortress, one of those children’s castles made with large, lightweight blocks, only the blocks are my files, stored in cardboard boxes. I wasn’t trying to wall myself off from the newsroom, not at first. I simply wanted my files nearby and I ran out of space in the drawers. I know where everything is, can find anything I need in less than ten minutes, much faster than anyone in the library pulling clips. But no one else would be able to locate a specific file in my little warren. Perhaps that is by design.

I have a highly specialized beat, one I practically invented at the Star. They call me the “labor” reporter, which means I track the city’s various unions. Inevitably, I am often the secondary on big stories coming out of the port or Beth Steel. Cops and firefighters and teachers. Labor touches everything in Baltimore. The only union about which I have never filed a story is the Newspaper Guild, which might end up striking by year’s end. If it does, I will not join my colleagues on the picket lines. I will claim that would make me appear biased. I wouldn’t cross a picket line—that would be foolhardy, make for hard feelings once the strike is resolved, and strikes are always resolved—but I won’t march in one, either.

The truth is, I hate unions and negotiated for one of the so-called exempt slots when I joined the Star, so I’m not a dues-paying member of the guild. Marching is for children; strikes are games that distract the workers from the singular fact that no one is on their side. Not management, not their own leadership.

Some of my colleagues have tried to argue that it’s biased for me not to be in the union, but I think it makes me more objective. My stories, my relationships with Baltimore’s union leaders, speak for themselves. The fact is, the various union bosses prefer to talk to me because I don’t cut them any slack. My questions—direct, skeptical, even adversarial—often help them see the defects in their strategies.

I have been the labor reporter eleven years, at the Star for nineteen years, a newspaper reporter for twenty-four years, twenty-eight if you count my years on the school paper at Northwestern. (I do.) Add the two years I spent stringing for the paper in my hometown of Aspen, Colorado, in high school and that puts me at three decades of newspaper work. I was never the first woman in the newsroom, but there were only a few of us, and fewer still who wanted to do the hard, masculine beats.

It helped, of course, that I am homely as a mud fence. Oh, I know some people would say I’m unfair to myself, but I was small and thin as a teenager, coming of age at a time when the hourglass figure was worshipped. And my nose, while not unsightly, is too big for my face. Other women dealt this hand might have gone the Diana Vreeland route, or emulated Martha Graham. I can’t be bothered. At my first two jobs, in Lexington, Kentucky, and then in Atlanta, I ignored men completely, confident that I would be moving on very quickly. What was the point of romance in places I would never deign to linger?

But I am, despite what some of my colleagues say behind my back, a woman with a woman’s needs, and when I landed in Baltimore, I considered the men available to me. Colleagues, cops, assistant state’s attorneys, labor bosses. Those were the sort of men that a female reporter met. None were to my liking. I found a gentle young man, a junior high school English teacher, drinking coffee at Pete’s Diner and fixed my sights on him. Shy and inexperienced, he was so grateful for my romantic interest that it never occurred to him that he wasn’t obligated to propose. We have two children now, well into their teens, and if the early years were hell—they were—the good news is that I no longer remember all the particulars of how we survived it. We did, that’s all that matters.

And now here comes this housewife, who has decided she can waltz into the Star and become a reporter, just like that. Certainly, many people on staff have made similar journeys, rising from clerical jobs, even the switchboard, but they started young and humble. This one—she doesn’t burn to know things, I am sure of it. She wants the accessories of a newspaperwoman’s life—a byline, a chance to perch on a man’s desk and swing her pretty legs while bumming a smoke. One of the reasons that I seldom smoke at my desk is because it’s a fire hazard. But also, by meting cigarettes out to myself—rewards for stories filed, phone calls made—I make myself efficient. I call it my three C’s—copy, then cig and coffee. I proof the pages in the ladies’ room and most of the women on staff have learned not to bother me.