Lady in the Lake(4)

“A little,” Maddie admitted with a laugh, a laugh meant to signal: It was so long ago, let’s not bore the others.

“I was in love with her,” Wally said.

“You were not.” Laughing, flustered, and—again—not complimented. She felt mocked, as if he were setting up a joke for which she would be the punch line.

“Of course I was. Don’t you remember—I took you to the prom when—what was his name—stood you up.”

A curious glance from Milton.

“Oh, not stood up, Wally. Sorry, Wallace. We broke up two weeks before prom. That’s very different from being stood up.” She wouldn’t have cared about going at all if it weren’t for the new dress. It had cost $39.95—her father would have been scandalized if it had gone to waste after all the begging she had done.

She did not provide the name for which Wally had fumbled. Allan. Allan Durst Junior. When they had first started dating, the name had sounded Jewish enough to placate her mother. His father was Jewish, sort of. But Mrs. Morgenstern was not fooled once she saw him. “That’s not someone to be serious about,” her mother had said, and Maddie had not argued. She was becoming serious about someone else, someone even less likely to win her mother’s approval.

“Should we go into the dining room?” Maddie asked, although people were still in the middle of their cocktails.

Wally—Wallace—was the youngest of the five at the table, but he had clearly grown used to people wanting his opinions. The obliging Rosengrens pelted him with questions over dinner. Who would be running for governor? What did he think about Agnew’s latest gaffe? Baltimore’s crime rate? What was Gypsy Rose Lee really like? (She had recently been in Baltimore to promote her own syndicated talk show.)

For someone who did interviews for a living, Wallace was not much on asking questions. When the men offered their opinions on current events, he listened with patient condescension, then contradicted them. Maddie tried to steer the conversation toward a novel she had read, The Keepers of the House, which made some excellent points about the race problem in the South, but Eleanor said she couldn’t get through it and the men had never heard of it.

Yet it was a successful dinner party, Maddie supposed. Milton was delighted that he had a famous friend; the Rosengrens were charmed by Wallace. He seemed to genuinely like them, too. Late in the evening, deep into his brandy, the lights dimmed so that the burning ends of their cigarettes looked like slow-moving fireflies in the living room, Wallace said, “You’ve done okay for yourself, Maddie.”

Okay? Okay?

“Imagine,” he continued, “if you had ended up with that fellow. Durst, that was it. He’s a copywriter. An adman.”

She said she hadn’t seen Allan Durst since high school, which was true. Then she said she knew about his job from The Park School alumni bulletin, which was not.

“I never heard there was a big high school love,” Milton said.

“That’s because there wasn’t,” Maddie said, more sharply than she meant to.

By eleven p.m. they had sent everyone home weaving, insisting they do it again. Milton toppled into bed, felled by drink and excitement. Maddie normally would have left the heavy cleaning to her Friday girl. There was no crime in letting dishes sit overnight as long as you rinsed them. Though Tattie Morgenstern had never left so much as a fork in her sink.

But Maddie decided to stay up and put things to rights.

The kitchen had been redone last year. Maddie had been so proud of the project when it was completed, so happy with her new appliances, yet the pleasure had burned off quickly. Now the remodel seemed silly, even pointless. What did it matter, having the latest appliances, all these sleek built-ins? No time was actually saved, although the reconfigured cabinets did make it easier to maintain two sets of dishes.

Wally had expressed surprise when he realized, during the salad course, that the Schwartzes kept a kosher household, but that was a nod to Milton’s upbringing. Two sets of dishes, never mixing meat and dairy, avoiding pork and shellfish—it wasn’t that hard and it made Milton happy. She deserved his devotion, she told herself as she soaped and rinsed the crystal, dried the good china by hand.

Turning to leave the kitchen, she caught a wineglass drying on the drain board with the tip of her elbow. It plummeted to the floor, where it shattered.

We’re supposed to break a glass.

What are you talking about?

Never mind. I always forget what a heathen you are.

The broken glass meant five more minutes with dustpan and broom, ferreting out every sliver. By the time she finished it was almost two and yet Maddie still had trouble falling asleep. Her mind raced, going over lists of things undone and overlooked. There was nothing here in the present. The things she had failed to do were twenty years behind her, when she had first known Wally—and her first love, the one her mother never suspected. She had sworn she would be—what, exactly? Someone creative and original, someone who cared not at all about public opinion. She—they—were going to live in New York City, in Greenwich Village. He had promised. He was going to take her away from stodgy Baltimore, they were going to live a passionate life devoted to art and adventure.

She had kept him out of her mind for all these years. Now he was back, Elijah showing up for his Passover wine.

Maddie fell asleep paging through an imaginary calendar, trying to calculate the best time to leave her marriage. Her birthday was next month. December? No, not over the holidays, unimportant as Hanukah was. February seemed too late, January a cliché, a mockery of New Year’s resolutions. November 30, she decided. She would leave November 30, twenty days after her thirty-seventh birthday.