Lady in the Lake(85)
“But how—”
“Some other cop saw me leaving here once, in a patrol car. That’s what they got me on. Not talking to you, but unauthorized use of a vehicle. Got me and my friend in the garage, who would let me borrow patrol cars at night, using them for a few hours before they were to be put back into service the next day. Did you ever wonder how I got here at night, Maddie? Do you know where I live, how far it is from here, how buses don’t run in the middle of the night?”
“You never wanted to talk about yourself.”
“Maybe I was waiting to be asked.”
She had tried to ask him questions, she was sure of it. He had always deflected them. Hadn’t he?
“I thought you were married.”
“I’m not.”
“That you had other women.”
“I won’t lie to you. I did. At first. But then—Maddie, I love you.”
She had nothing to say to that.
“I guess that’s my answer. You don’t love me.”
“I do, Ferdie. But you have to know it’s impossible.”
“Because I’m black.”
Yes and no, she thought. It was illegal because he was black. But it was impossible because he was younger. Because he was a cop and she was Madeline Morgenstern Schwartz and she wasn’t going to be a newspaper clerk forever. She could go out in public with—her mind groped to think of a black man of stature—Sidney Poitier. Andrew Young. Harry Belafonte Jr. But Ferdinand Platt was impossible on many levels, and race was only one of them. Wasn’t it?
“That’s really not it.”
“You know my happiest day of the past year? Going to that ball game with you. Even if I couldn’t hold your hand or put my hand at the small of your back as we moved through the crowd. Some people knew we were together. I could tell, by their looks. We fooled most people, but we couldn’t fool everyone. I was so proud to be with you. I love you, Maddie.”
She still could not say the words back, even though it would be so easy, so true. She would not be bound by them, and yet she could not say them, even in past tense. “I don’t think I want to be anyone’s wife again, Ferdie. I don’t want to lose you, but I don’t want to lose myself, either.”
“Well, I’ve lost my job,” he said.
“For using a patrol car off hours?”
“They let me resign. I could have stayed, but I wasn’t going to go anywhere. I put our business out on the street. Almost got a civilian killed.”
It took Maddie a beat to realize she was the civilian. She lifted her nightgown, showed him the bumpy loop of a scar, then lifted the gown off her head.
“Maddie—”
“I’m so sorry for everything. I’m sorry about the job. I’m sorry—” She could not tell him her other regrets. She was sorry for Thomas Ludlow and sorry for Cleo’s father. Sorry that Cleo’s mother could never know that her daughter was alive. She was even sorry for Shell Gordon, trapped inside so many identities, never allowed to express what he really yearned for, small and mean enough to want others to be denied what he could not have. She was sorry for Latetia, dead and unmourned, fixed in history as a careless girl who eloped and was never heard from again. She was sorry for Mrs. Taylor, living in her beautiful house with a man who loved another. She was sorry for Cleo’s children.
Most of all, she was sorry for herself. Because, like Ezekiel Taylor, she was so close to having a second chance at real love and she wasn’t brave enough to take it.
“We shouldn’t,” he said. “We never should have started in the first place.”
“My ring wasn’t stolen,” she said. “I did that to get the insurance money.”
“I know,” he said. “I told you about Tommy Ludlow because we thought it would make you stop. Shell told Tommy he had to confess, to make you stop.”
“I know,” she said. She hadn’t.
He came to bed. For one last time, he came to her bed, and for the first time ever he stayed until the sun rose. Maddie walked him downstairs and kissed him goodbye at the front door, in full sight of the cathedral and whoever was walking down Mulberry Street at seven a.m.
And then she went to work.
The Woman’s Club of Roland Park, October 1985
The Woman’s Club of Roland Park, October 1985
“And now, our speaker. Madeline Schwartz has worked at the Beacon since 1966, where her career began with a harrowing first-person account of her near death at the hands of Angela Corwin, who was eventually convicted of the first-degree murder of Tessie Fine, a young Jewish girl killed in the tropical fish store where Corwin’s son worked. Stephen Corwin was given the death penalty for his role in the crime, but that was changed to life after a US Supreme Court decision struck down most of the nation’s death penalty laws in 1972. Schwartz started at the Beacon as a general assignment reporter, went on to cover city hall and the legislature, but is best known for her work in the Living section, first as a reporter of human-interest stories, now as a columnist. In 1979, she was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in feature writing.”
Maddie edited her introduction in her head. This was not the copy she had provided, she was sure of that. Close, but embellished here and there. Although, yes, she was the one who had written the Star out of her official history. She had taken her first-person near-death story about Angela Corwin, parlayed it into a job at the Beacon, and never looked back. The Beacon was a little stuffy and dull after the Star, but it was willing to give her a chance as a reporter.