Lady in the Lake(5)
We’re supposed to break a glass.
What are you talking about?
Never mind.
The Classmate
The Classmate
I grip the steering wheel of my new Cadillac, talking my way through the drive from Maddie’s house to mine, short as it is, a dog’s leg down Greenspring, past The Park School—our alma mater, although Park was in a different location in our day—then a right turn on Falls Road, and finally up the hill into Mount Washington. I talk to myself like a coach, not that I ever played for any team. Couldn’t even make water boy. Focus, Wally, focus.
In my head, I’m always Wally. Everyone looks up to Wallace Wright, including me. I wouldn’t dare try to talk to him the way I talk to Wally.
I’m terrified that I’m going to cross the center line, hit another car, maybe worse. WOLD anchorman Wallace Wright was arrested for vehicular manslaughter near his Northwest Baltimore home.
“The newsman can’t end up as the headline, Wally,” I tell myself. “Focus.”
A cop stop would be almost as bad. WOLD anchorman arrested for drunk driving. News only because it involves a newsman. Who doesn’t drive a little tipsy from time to time? But a cop also might wave me off, even ask for an autograph.
Where did Maddie learn to drink like that? I guess it’s like the old joke about Carnegie Hall, practice, practice, practice. I’ve never had a chance to develop the cocktail habit because I’m seldom home before eight, have to be at work the next day by nine, on air by noon. That routine doesn’t lend itself to liquor. Or marriage.
Mount Washington is so dark at midnight, so hushed. How have I never noticed that before? The only sound is the crunch of the fall leaves beneath my tires. By the time I creep up South Road, it seems the better part of valor to park by the curb, not attempting the driveway, much less the garage.
Why did I stay so late? It certainly wasn’t the scintillating conversation. Because it’s not every day you get to show your first love what a mistake she made.
If you had asked me even this morning—and people ask me many things, you’d be amazed what an oracle I am—I would have told you with all sincerity that I never thought about Maddie Morgenstern.
But the moment I saw her on her own threshold, I realized she had always been with me, my audience of one. She was there Monday through Friday, when I faced the cameras between noon and twelve thirty on the midday news show. On Wednesday nights, when I did “Wright Makes Right.” Whenever I was lucky enough to substitute for Harvey Patterson, whose job I will take one day. Maddie somehow managed the trick of being a seventeen-year-old girl and a suburban matron, sitting at home with a cup of coffee, the morning housework finished, watching channel 6 and thinking: I could have been Mrs. Wallace Wright if I played my cards right.
She’s even there when I put on makeup and play Donadio, the sad, silent clown that was my fluke entree at WOLD-TV.
I had been working in radio, prized for my voice, but not considered camera ready. The Donadio gig meant an extra twenty-five dollars a week. The only stipulation was that I must never tell anyone, and I was more than happy to keep that promise.
One Saturday, as I was removing my makeup, a cop killing came over the scanner. I was the only reporter available. Somehow, during the fourteen months I had been masquerading as Donadio, I had gotten taller, my hair smoother, my complexion paradoxically clearer. Maybe I did a better job cleaning my face once I started wearing clown makeup. At any rate, my face and body finally fit my booming baritone. I went to the scene, I gathered the facts, a star was born. Not Maddie, not that putz she dated in high school, not her perfectly nice lawyer husband. Me, Wally Weiss. I’m the star.
We met in, of all the unlikely places, our school’s ham radio club. We quickly established that we shared an intense admiration for Edward R. Murrow, whose London reports during the war had made a big impression on us. I had never met any girl who wanted to talk about Murrow and journalism before, much less a pretty one. It was like that first great work of art that transfixes you, that novel that stays with you the rest of your life, even if you go on to read much better ones. It was all I could do not to stare at her, mouth hanging open.
Maddie’s appearance at the ham radio club turned out to be a one-off; she had thought it was a radio club, for people interested in writing and performing, not a room full of losers who liked to tinker. She switched to the school newspaper, quickly landed a column and started running with a very fast, goyish crowd, including Allan Durst. Obviously, Maddie Morgenstern could never be serious about him, but her parents were shrewd enough not to fight a high school romance. I heard they had even invited the Durst parents to their home for Shabbos. The mother was a famous artist, painting huge abstracts that hung in museums, the father a competent painter of portraits, specializing in Baltimore dowagers.
Allan dropped Maddie right before prom. I found her weeping in an empty classroom. It was an honor to have her confide in me. I suggested she take me as her date.
“What could be a greater insult?” I said, patting her back with a flat up-and-down motion, almost as if burping a child. My hand brushed what felt like the clasp of a bra, my most erotic experience to date.
She agreed to my plan with an almost painful alacrity.
I bought her a wrist corsage with the most expensive orchid to be had in Baltimore. She did her part, ignoring Allan, who had come stag, and laughing at my jokes as if I were Jack Benny. Allan approached her at one point and asked for a dance “for old times’ sake.” Maddie cocked her head to the side as if she were trying to remember exactly what old times they had shared, then said, “No, no, I’m very happy to spend the evening with my date.”