Lady in the Lake(56)
But Mama’s never coming back, not really, and things aren’t getting better.
It’s summer now. Yesterday, Granny almost laughed again, at something Teddy did or said. Teddy looks exactly like my mama, only he’s a boy. Aunt Alice used to dress him up like a girl when he was a baby, as a joke, and people said things like, “What’s a boy going to do with those eyes?” “Look at things,” I said, and people laughed and laughed, which I liked and didn’t like. After Mama went away, I kept trying to say funny things and do funny things, to make people laugh. Everybody’s laugh is different now. It used to be so easy for me to make people laugh, but now they rarely do, no matter how hard I try, and when they do laugh, usually at Teddy, they sometimes end up crying.
So when I see that white woman, with her notebook and her schoolteacher voice, making my granny cry, I get up and I hit her with the truck, the last thing my mama ever gave me, I hit her as hard as I can, in the legs. Everybody begins shouting and I’m in a lot of trouble and Granny says I’m going to have to find a way to pay for the lady’s stockings, which got tore up where I hit her. But I know I won’t have to. Even Granny was secretly happy that I made her go away.
I make people go away. That’s what I do. I made my mama go away and now she’s gone forever. I used to worry that she was going to come back and take only Teddy with her because Teddy is pretty like her and he belongs in a place where there is fur everywhere. I wasn’t sure I would fit in if we moved to a fancy house. Besides, I have a father and Teddy doesn’t. They called him and asked if he wanted me to come to Detroit, but he’s real busy. Besides, he said, I’d miss Teddy, and maybe I would. Although sometimes, I can almost remember when it was just Mama and me. I think I do.
And even once Teddy was here, I was special, we had things that were just for us. She used to ask me to zip up her dress before she went out. She’s the one who named me Little Man. “Give me a hand, Little Man, you’re the only man I’ll ever need.” “What about Teddy?” “He’s a sweetheart, but you’re my first, baby, and nothing can ever change that. You’re the one I count on, Little Man. You’re going to steer this family’s ship.”
I think that means I’m supposed to join the navy because we don’t know anybody who has a boat. I know how to swim, though. My mama taught me. She didn’t like to swim because of her hair, but she knew how, she was strong and fast and she would take me to the big pool at Droodle Hill, near the zoo, and get her hair wet, just for me. Just for me.
You deserved every bit of it, Maddie Schwartz.
You deserved every bit of it, Maddie Schwartz. I wish Little Man had hit you harder. I wish he had bashed your head in with that truck.
And you weren’t done yet, were you? It wasn’t enough to make my mama cry and to incite my sweet gentle Lionel to lash out. It wasn’t enough to touch that fur, as Madame Claire had done. You had to know where it came from, who gave it to me. You had to pick, pick, pick, prod, prod, prod, never considering what you were kicking up.
Was I even real to you? Was I ever real to you? I don’t blame you for not seeing me in the body at the morgue, that faceless monster. But you saw my photographs, you touched my clothes, you invaded my parents’ home. You probably would have tried to walk through the rooms where I lived with Latetia if they hadn’t been inhabited by new tenants.
You didn’t care about my life, only my death. They’re not the same things, you know.
July 1966
July 1966
“Here you go,” Bob Bauer said, tossing an envelope onto Maddie’s desk.
“Are you delivering paychecks now?” she asked. She liked being pert with Bob Bauer, managing the trick of not quite flirting with him, but also not not flirting with him.
“Boss gave me two tickets to the Orioles game tomorrow night. For my work on the Corwin story. I can’t use ’em and I figured—”
He did not finish the thought. Maddie wasn’t sure he’d even had the thought, that he was capable of admitting that she had traded what was turning into one of the best stories of the year for this little-more-than-clerical job. Bob Bauer had published story after story about the stubbornly silent killer, his still-unknown accomplice, and the equally mysterious experiments at Fort Detrick, where Corwin had been posted after objecting to the draft on religious grounds, as a Seventh-Day Adventist, then dosed with bacteria. Bauer had even interviewed Corwin’s mother, who had said sorrowfully that her son never seemed quite right after his time in the army.
Maddie felt like Jack from “Jack and the Beanstalk,” only the beans she had received in exchange for her family’s cow were just beans. She was not particularly impressed by a pair of baseball tickets, even if they were good ones, four rows behind the Orioles’ dugout. But she took them, thinking that she would ask Seth, who would love the outing, might even be impressed that his mother had such good seats. Seth collected baseball cards and spoke about Brooks Robinson as if he were an Old Testament prophet.
“I have plans,” Seth said when she called him that night. “I can’t go.”
“Can they be changed?” Maddie asked. “This seems like such a wonderful opportunity. The team is good this year, right?” She was pretty sure the Orioles were good this year. She didn’t follow sports, but the Star had a tradition of running a page one cartoon that encapsulated the previous night’s game. The pen-and-ink Oriole had been joyous and celebratory more often than not this summer.