Lady in the Lake(77)
“What’s up?” Maddie asked Bob Bauer, who had just pulled his column from his typewriter. But instead of calling “copy,” he crumpled it and inserted a fresh sheet.
“Damn thing’s too close to call. With all the precincts in, Mahoney’s got the lead by less than a hundred fifty votes. There’s going to be a recount. Clarence Mitchell the Third is already saying he’ll organize Negroes for Agnew if Mahoney is the candidate.”
“How could Mahoney win?” Maddie had followed the governor’s race in the papers all summer. Mahoney was a six-time loser in state politics.
“Sickles and Finan split the base. And Mahoney had a message that resonated, ‘Your home is your castle.’”
“But wasn’t that racist?”
“Maybe to you. To some guy who’s watching the value of his home plummet because his neighborhood is changing, it’s different. You can’t mess with a man’s home. It defines him.” He looked at the paper in his typewriter. “That’s it, that’s it. You can’t mess with a man’s home. I’ve got my lede, Maddie, so if you’ll excuse me . . .”
It rained all day the next day. It rained almost four inches, a record. It was not a cleansing rain, the kind that left a city refreshed. Humidity lingered and Maddie’s straightened hair seemed to shrink as her natural waves returned. Everyone at the paper was tired and cranky, working on too little sleep and too much coffee.
On Thursday, she went to her mother’s house, carrying a dish of homemade chicken liver with pistachios.
“Is this from Seven Locks?” her mother asked.
“Actually, I made it myself.” She had, a laborious job that involved pushing the chicken livers through a sieve. “It’s kosher.”
Her father picked the nuts out—“They’re bad for my bowels,” he said—but her mother’s inability to criticize the dish was a kind of validation. Unfortunately, it also freed her to move on to Maddie’s personal life.
She began: “Yom Kippur is coming.”
“Of course.”
“So, are you going to go back home? If you ask Milton to take you back, he would probably consider it. After all, part of atoning is to forgive others.”
“I have nothing to atone for,” Maddie said sharply. “And nothing for which I need to be forgiven.”
“Are you dating?” There was something sly about her mother’s question, a hint of things unsaid, but Maddie’s mother had no way of knowing what happened at the corner of Mulberry and Cathedral.
“No.” It wasn’t a lie. Maddie reasoned it wasn’t a date if all you did was have sex in your own apartment. She thought about the night at the ballpark, how thrilling it was simply to sit by him, shoulder to shoulder.
Then she thought about John Diller, eyes narrowed, saying, “That source.”
Her mother said: “Really, Maddie, I understand, believe me. The summer before your senior year in high school, I went a little crazy. It’s natural. You spend your life raising a child, then it’s time for the child to move on. It happens to every woman I know. Debbie Wasserman got caught shoplifting at the Giant over on Ingleside. She drove all the way over there to steal a Sara Lee swirl cake.”
Maddie slathered some chicken liver on a piece of toast. It really was excellent. She was a better cook in her galley kitchen with the two-burner stove than she had been in Pikesville, with a freezer full of Hutzler’s cheese bread and all her little tricks for making dinner parties seem homey and homemade.
“I don’t think that’s my situation. I have a brain. It almost atrophied from lack of use and now I want to use it.”
“At a newspaper. And the Star, of all places.” The Morgenstern household took the Beacon in the morning, the Light in the afternoon, and was suspicious of those who didn’t follow suit. Her mother had never even seen Maddie’s work. “Look, I’m just telling you, Madeline. I know.”
Her mother leveled her gaze at Maddie and suddenly she was sixteen again, but only for a moment. She wondered what her mother did know. Did she suspect that Maddie was not a virgin before she married, that she had visited an abortionist on lower Park Heights? It seemed impossible that she would figure out that Maddie had sought Allan out, made love to him again, then come home and conceived a child with Milton. More impossible still that she could have heard any whispers about Maddie and Ferdie. (How silly their names sounded together, she realized, and yet how right.) And if Diller knew about them—well, so what? It wasn’t as if her mother was going to run into the Star’s cop reporter, or even his wife, at the Seven Locks market.
“You could be home by October first,” her mother said now. “Every marriage has its bumps.” She glanced at her husband, who had made a neat pile of pistachios on his plate. He had been chosen for her, Tattie’s parents designating him as the only acceptable suitor for their oldest daughter, not that different from a shidduch or the Fiddler on the Roof days. Her mother’s German Jew parents would be horrified by such a comparison, even in the privacy of Maddie’s mind, but it was apt enough. Her father wasn’t even first generation; he had been born on the boat en route to the United States. Nineteen oh six. Sixty years ago. How could 1906 and 1966 be part of the same century? In 1906, there had been no world wars, most people didn’t have telephones and cars. In 1906, women couldn’t vote and black men could by law, but not in practice.