Baltimore Blues

by Laura Lippman

  Nada, nada, nada.

  Chapter 23

  Tess had known Jonathan was Jewish. But it was only when he was dead, and she was staring at heads covered with yarmulkes, that she really believed it. Sitting in the back of a suburban Washington funeral home, trying to be inconspicuous among the journalists who had gravitated toward the final rows of white folding chairs, she found herself wondering if his parents had left the diamond earring in his left ear, or trimmed his unruly hair. She had met them a couple of times, back when she and Jonathan really dated, and they had wasted little time letting her know they disapproved of journalists, Baltimore, and the lowlifes Jonathan chronicled for the newspaper. Oddly they had approved of her, although Tess suspected it was because of Weinstein Drugs and their mistaken belief she would come into money one day.

  Obit-wise, the Blight had done well by Jonathan, assigning one of its best writers and placing the story at the bottom of the front page, all editions. Most accidental deaths don’t merit p-i, newsroom jargon for the front page, but Jonathan’s stories had always gone there, so his death did, too. “Sheer force of habit,” Feeney observed. Tess knew it was also one of the unacknowledged fringe benefits of working for a newspaper: One’s death is treated very seriously.

  Of course, the Blight hadn’t taken Jonathan’s death seriously enough to go beyond the police report. No one had called Tess to ask for her eyewitness account. Too bad; she could have told the writer how Jonathan saved her life, breathing some much-needed action into a story almost as moribund as its subject. The prose had been too flowery and portentous for her taste, more suitable to the treatment The New York Times gave some onetime ambassador or an inventor of something one had never heard of. Then again, giving interviews would have necessitated confronting once more the tricky questions about why she was with Jonathan at 6 A.M. Tess had never realized how suggestive a time of day could be, but now she saw there was a large space of time, from midnight to almost nine, in which there was no decency.

  “I never thought I’d grow up to be Megan Marshak,” she whispered to Whitney, who smiled, one of the few people who would instantly recognize the name of the woman with Nelson Rockefeller at the time of his untimely death.

  Even without the hero angle, Jonathan would have loved his obit. Good play, a serious, hushed tone, a few good anecdotes. He had outlived one of his oldest fears. When he started in the business, before coming to the Star, he had put in a year on a medium-size newspaper in Peoria, Illinois. Jonathan spent every day he was there—467 in all, he once told her—writing about labor problems at Caterpillar and trying to get out. He had worried he would be linked to the town for posterity, that he would be on a plane when it crashed outside of Chicago, the only local angle on board. He saw the headline—Peoria Man Dies in Crash—and he knew he had to leave before he became Peoria Man.

  And he had, had escaped it altogether. In his obituary there was no mention of his humble beginnings, just his Baltimore résumé, and the prizes won, and the belief shared by everyone that great things waited for him. Jonathan did not die as Peoria Man, or City Man, or Local Man, or under any of those generic rubrics newspapers are so quick to bestow. He was, in the headline, for posterity, a “Beacon-Light reporter, prizewinner, dead at twenty-eight.” Tess had never thought about the fact he was younger than she.

  Whitney was on her left and Feeney on her right, goyishe spies in the temple. Many of those attending had never been at a Jewish service before, but Whitney, shiksa incarnate, was the one who drew the most skeptical looks. Jonathan’s relatives seemed to regard her presence as a kind of sacrilege. Perhaps they, privy to details the newspaper had not printed, thought she was the mystery woman of the morning. Dignified and stern looking, Whitney paid no attention. At one point she handed Tess a handkerchief smelling of Shalimar. Taken with the fact she knew someone who carried a perfume-scented handkerchief, Tess stopped crying immediately.

  Bruised and dazed, feeling more Jewish than usual, she saw a certain wisdom in the custom of burying the dead as quickly as possible. As a child she had always thought the practice was dictated by a practical fear of germs, much like the ancient bans on pork and shellfish. To be Jewish, she learned from her mother’s family, was to embark on a never-ending campaign against germs and bacteria. But it was nice, she realized, to still be numb. It seemed a little surreal. Jonathan would be long buried before she really felt his absence.

  He had saved her life. Or had he? More importantly had he intended to save her life? Less than thirty-six hours later, all she could remember was dropping his hand in the damp, sultry morning, unwilling to have any contact. The last touch of his she had to remember was a hard shove. Because of it she was alive and Jonathan was not.

  She suspected he had intended to live. If he had sensed it was an either-or situation, he might have handled it differently. His heroism had been reflexive, his desire to survive instinctive. He was avid to live, sure of the accolades and successes so close at hand. Greedy Jonathan, he had assumed he could save Tess and himself, much as he had assumed he could have his girlfriend and Tess.

  The rabbi, a young man who had actually known Jonathan, was trying gamely to bring him back to life. But the hot spell had not broken, the funeral home’s central air-conditioning was inadequate, and the sweaty mourners were impatient. Tess glimpsed the woman she assumed was Daphne, between Jonathan’s parents down front. The name had always evoked for her someone sultry and petite, not unlike Ava Hill. But Daphne was a friendly-looking redhead whose natural demeanor was probably warm and cheerful. She looked like Tess, although a little shorter and a little rounder. She even had an overbite.

  “Jonathan was a deeply spiritual person,” the rabbi was saying.

  Feeney whispered: “Yeah, he used to pray every day he would win the Pulitzer.”

  “And when I was thinking today what would be appropriate to his death, I thought of a poem, a poem a lot of us studied in school….”

  The journalists and ex-journalists throughout the small, muggy room shifted nervously in their seats, worried they might laugh. Many were professional funeralgoers who had sat through too many memorial services in which they had nothing at stake. They could sense a cliché rushing toward them.

  The rabbi cleared his throat once, then twice, and began in an earnest, adolescent voice that seemed on the verge of cracking: “The time you won your town the race/We chaired you through the marketplace…”

  Whitney passed a note to Feeney, which Tess read over his shoulder: “You owe me one drink. Told you it was going to be Housman’s ‘To an Athlete Dying Young.’”

  “Who knew?” Feeney scribbled back. “Thought Catholic church owned the rights and would lend it out to other denominations only when deceased was varsity football player who had run his Trans Am up a tree.”

  For all its adolescent timbre, the rabbi’s voice was compelling, bringing emotion to the time-worn lines. “Smart lad, to slip betimes away/From fields where glory does not stay/ And early though the laurel grows/It withers quicker than the rose.”

  A few rows ahead, Tess saw Nick, the old rewrite man who had made Jonathan’s life at the Star so miserable. Not even fifty, he looked old and bent. His job in public relations at a local hospital had aged him fast. She saw a few other Star folks, but far more Beacon-Light staffers. Jonathan was theirs. Police officers also were scattered through the crowd, even the chief. The mayor had sent a representative. The city council president, who wanted the mayor’s job, was there in person. Tess wasn’t sure if she believed in an afterlife, but she hoped it provided the bittersweet pleasure of watching one’s funeral. Only if it was cheering, as Jonathan’s would be to him. If you drew a small or indifferent crowd, you should be spared seeing it.

  “Now you will not swell the rout/Of lads that wore their honors out,/Runners whom renown outran/And the name died before the man.” The rabbi bowed his head.

  “Good choice, ending there,” Feeney whispered. “This bunch wouldn’t know what t
o make of ‘the garland briefer than a girl’s’ that is on the athlete’s head in the last stanza. They’d think it had something to do with Jonathan’s earring. I’m buying everyone a drink when this is over.”

  Everyone proved to be Whitney and Tess. The other reporters and ex-reporters hurried back to their jobs, while Feeney turned his beeper off and Whitney phoned the office to say her engine had thrown a rod.

  “I’ll tell you one thing,” Feeney said to Tess when they were well into their third pitcher of Rolling Rock. Whitney was at the bar, trying to convince Spike’s cook to make her a sandwich that didn’t require frying or grilling. “He read the wrong Housman poem. You couldn’t have dragged Jonathan kicking and screaming from these fields, no matter how short-lived the glory.”

  “What would you have read?”

  “Terence, this is stupid stuff.”

  “Hey, I’m not a Housman scholar. No reason to get rude.”

  “That’s the name, ‘Terence, This Is Stupid Stuff.’ It was going to be part of a volume called The Poems of Terence Hearsay. It’s about a guy who drinks and eats until he’s stupefied.”

  “That doesn’t sound like Jonathan. He ate and drank, but only to fuel some inner machine. He didn’t want to dull his senses.”

  “How’s this? ‘Luck’s a chance, but trouble’s sure,/I’d face it as a wise man would/And train for ill and not for good.’”

  “Better, but I’m not sold.”

  Feeney took this as an invitation to perform. He stood up, placing one foot on the booth’s cracked vinyl seat, his right arm across his chest. He looked like Washington crossing the Delaware. But when he spoke, his voice stripped of its gruffness, everyone in the bar turned to listen. The words took on an Irish lilt, the kind Tess’s father developed midway through a six-pack of Carling Black Label.

  “…And down in lovely muck I’ve lain,

  Happy till I woke again.

  Then I saw the morning sky:

  Heigh-ho, the tale was all a lie;

  The world, it was the old world yet,

  I was I, my things were wet,

  And nothing now remained to do

  But begin the game anew.”

  He gave a little bow and took his seat. It was a side of Feeney Tess had never seen. The editors he terrorized would tear him limb from limb if they had ever sensed the melancholy poet beneath the crust.

  “How do you know so much Housman by heart?”

  “Mad Ireland hurt me into poetry.”

  “That’s Auden, writing about the death of Yeats.”

  “She shoots, she scores!” Feeney gave her a high five.

  Whitney approached with a huge sandwich, overflowing with cold cuts, cheese, lettuce, and hots. “Oh, great, the English majors’ convention is in town. How would you like it if I started jabbering in Japanese, my major?”

  She took the top slice off her sandwich, picking at the contents with her long fingers, licking mayonnaise from her French-manicured nails.

  “Whitney, that’s gross,” Feeney said.

  “Am I offending somewhere here at Spike’s? This is the only way to eat a sandwich. Bread is just a buffer, something that gets in the way of you and the meat. It’s like the preface and the footnotes. You don’t really need it. It’s nothing. It’s nada.”

  “Nothing,” Tess repeated. “Nada.”

  “Nada, nada, nada,” Feeney droned, then laughed. “An old man is a nasty thing.” He was quite drunk, Tess realized.

  “Hemingway,” Whitney said. “A Clean, Well-Lighted Place. I can play, too.”

  Tess stood up abruptly, grabbing Feeney’s car keys from the table and tossing them to Spike. “Have someone drive them home when they’re done, OK?” She turned back to her startled companions. “You’re both too drunk to drive. Just tell Spike when you’re done, and he’ll have someone take you home. And tell him to put everything on my tab.” Which was another way of saying it was on the house. Spike had never taken a dime from Tess.

  “What about you?” Whitney asked. “Are you in any shape to drive?”

  “Unfortunately, yes. I’ve never been more sober.”

  In the Toyota she raced along the curves of Franklintown Road, running every yellow light and a few red ones. She took the stairs to her apartment two at a time and thought of Jonathan doing the same thing not even a week ago, when he was on the verge of a discovery. Now she knew what he had felt.

  She turned her computer on. Abramowitz’s disk was still in the drive. There it was again, the nada wallpaper at beginning and end. But she had never looked at the middle of the long manuscript. That was the problem with shortcuts. She instructed her computer to look for the one word she knew was in everyone’s copy, the word one could not write without.

  “Find ‘the,’” she told her Mac. The computer complied. Twenty pages into the file, she found the meat in the sandwich.

  “Monday, Monday,” it began. “I actually like the beginning of the week now. I can trust this day. I come in, thinking, ‘This time will be different. I will find work to do. I will force them to give me work to do. I will take a criminal case pro bono.’ But it’s no good. Having forced myself in here, I can’t remember what I hoped to gain. I can’t bear to practice law, in any form, yet I can’t leave here. So I come in each day and draw my percentage as a partner and I count paper clips and I make bets with myself about the seagulls I see outside the window. I can’t wait for spring. I wish there were more day games at Camden Yards. With the radio on and a pair of good binoculars, it’s better than a sky box.”

  The writer—Abramowitz, it must be Abramowitz—had then written in the words to “Take Me Out to the Ball Game.” This was followed by several lines of poetry, many of which meant nothing to her. But she recognized Milton toward the end: “When I consider how my light is spent.” This line was repeated for three pages, until it changed subtly: “When I consider how my life was spent.” And then, for two more pages, increasing in type size as if he were screaming: “My life!” “My life!” “MY LIFE!”

  It was like a little boy writing on the blackboard after school, but this little boy had devised his own punishment. It was like Finnegans Wake, if Joyce had been a pudgy Baltimore lawyer without much feel for language. It was like a frog dissecting himself. Fascinated, she continued to work her way through the dense, difficult prose.

  He wrote about Northwest Baltimore in the 1950s, going to synagogue in the old Park Heights neighborhood, where many of his mother’s people still lived. His family apparently was Orthodox, and he was obsessed with trayf.

  “I am nine,” he wrote. “I must eat something nonkosher. I have thought about my betrayal at great length. My sin must be a large sin. I walk miles, so I am far from the neighborhood, so I am somewhere no one I know has ever been. Or so I think. I order a cheeseburger and a milk shake. It is amazing how much significance I place on these two foods. I am certain that the world will change when I take a bite from that cheeseburger. And I’m right. I still remember that first bite, juice coming out of the burger like venom, cheese running down its side. I have high expectations for sin, and all of them are met. Sin is wonderful. I will be drawn to it all my life.”

  The Proust of Park Heights, she thought. What an odd little guy. Then, just as the narrative seemed to be leading somewhere, he spent ten pages writing the Bill of Rights over and over again, italicizing different words in each version. Was he having a nervous breakdown, or just trying to fill his days, days that were mysteriously empty? A little of both, she suspected.

  The Bill of Rights gave way to a discussion of the death penalty, filled with legal cites. Now he appeared to be working on a brief, aimed at releasing everyone from Maryland’s Death Row. But the legal argument gave way abruptly.

  “Because I didn’t want to face the difficult decisions posed by my personal life, I chose a professional life. Now that I’ve lost my professional life, I have no personal life to go back to. After being asexual for much of my life, how do I start
being sexual, much less homosexual, at age forty-two? I don’t have a clue.”

  Homosexual? Tess did a double-take, reading the sentence again. Michael Abramowitz was gay. No, he must be bisexual; he had made a pass at Ava, after all. The circumstances of their affair may have been in doubt, but she had seen them together, and Abramowitz had admitted the relationship to Rock.

  Or had he? She went to her desk, where she kept copies of the transcripts she had prepared for Tyner. What had Rock said?

  “And he said, ‘But she really is beautiful.’ So I hit him.” Rock had treated this as a confession, much as Mr. Macauley had assumed Abramowitz was a smart ass when he agreed someone should kill him. Macauley had tried to pummel Abramowitz, and Abramowitz had held him in his arms and protected him from arrest. Rock and Macauley had expected a villain, and so they found one. But what if Abramowitz had been sincere? Then, “But she really is beautiful” became a compliment from someone trying to be polite. And “Maybe you’re right,” the rejoinder to Macauley’s assertion that someone should kill Abramowitz, was simple agreement.

  She scrolled through the memoirs, looking for some other reference to his personal life. She was barely fifty pages into the 1,000-plus pages and Abramowitz had returned to his brief, slogging his way through case law again. Then she found these words.

  “Burned all your bridges. I know the term, of course, but I always saw it as linear. You burned a bridge and moved on. There was always another road ahead, a place to go. I burned a bridge at the public defender’s office, got out. I burned another bridge, came here. Now I see I am a little island and I have burned every bridge that led to me. I am alone now, isolated, and no one can help me. I put myself above the law and, by doing so, lost it. I have nothing now but time.”