Of course, the flower’s existence proves nothing; we are agreed that we attended the prom. Yet to me it is the smoking gun, irrefutable evidence—but of what? That everything happened as I said. Why did she deny it? My story is a testament to her power, the glory of her youth.
Anyway, it’s a good thing that nothing came of our date. At thirty-five, I am still young, my life nothing but possibility. I might be interviewing second-raters now, but one day I will talk to presidents and kings, maybe work for one of the networks. Whereas Maddie Schwartz, pushing forty, has nothing to look forward to.
January 1966
January 1966
It was only when the jeweler put the loupe to his eye that Maddie realized she had already mentally spent the money from selling her engagement ring. What would he pay her? A thousand? Maybe even two thousand?
She needed so much. The new apartment was a two-bedroom, sparse on furnishings. She had assumed Seth would be living with her. But he refused, said he would rather stay with his father in the Pikesville house, near his friends and his school. Even after she offered to drive him to school, he refused to move. Milton’s meddling, Maddie suspected. She comforted herself with the knowledge that Seth had only two years left at home.
But she would have chosen a one-bedroom in a better neighborhood if she had anticipated Seth’s resistance. And then she might actually have a phone, although not having a phone wasn’t completely tragic. It meant her mother couldn’t call her every day to discuss Maddie’s future and what Tattie Morgenstern unfailingly called her reduced circumstances.
Now that you are living in reduced circumstances, Madeline, you might want to clip coupons. I saw that Hochschild’s was having a good sale—you’ll have to get used to shopping sales and cutting coupons, Madeline, because of your reduced circumstances. With your reduced circumstances, it might make sense not to have a car at all.
The infuriating thing was that her mother was right. Everything about Maddie’s post-Milton life was smaller, shabbier. The apartment was pretty enough, but Gist Avenue, while on the right side of Northern Parkway, was not nice, it turned out. The landlord had persuaded her to meet in the afternoon, when the neighborhood was empty and quiet. At that time of day, the apartment reminded Maddie of a 3-D Paul Klee painting, with the warm winter sunlight creating golden squares on empty wood floors, glinting on the tiny pink-and-blue tiles in the bath. All she saw were shapes and light, space and possibility.
It was only when she started moving her things in that she realized while the apartment was charming, the neighborhood was decidedly mixed. Mixed on its way to being not so mixed. Maddie wasn’t prejudiced, of course. If she had been younger, without a child, she would have gone south to join the voter registration project a few years back. She was almost sure of this. But she didn’t like being so visible in her new neighborhood, a solitary white woman who happened to own a fur coat. Only beaver, but a fur nonetheless. She was wearing it now. Maybe the jeweler would pay more if she didn’t look like someone who needed the money.
When Milton had learned her new address, he said Seth couldn’t visit at all, not overnight. He said that she could spend her weekends with Seth at the old house if she liked, that Milton would vacate the premises so mother and son could be together. A kind act, a gracious act, but Maddie wondered if Milton had already started seeing someone. The idea annoyed her, but she consoled herself that a new lady was probably the only thing that could persuade Milton to stop fighting the divorce.
She had leaned farther over the counter than she realized, close enough that her breath was forming little clouds on the glass.
“You didn’t buy this here?” The jeweler made it sound like a question, but she had already provided that information.
“No, it was from a place downtown. I don’t think it’s there anymore—Steiner’s.”
“Yes, I remember. Very fancy place. Put a lot of money in the fixtures. We keep things simple here. I always tell my employees: In a jewelry store, it’s the jewels that should shine. You don’t need to arrange them on velvet if they’re of good quality. You don’t need to be downtown, where the rents are high and there’s no parking. Weinstein’s may not be fashionable, but we’re still in business and that’s good enough for me.”
“So my ring . . .”
He looked sad, but it was a polite, fake sad, as if an unlikable acquaintance had died and he was pretending to care more than he did.
“I couldn’t do more than five hundred dollars.”
It was like a gut punch, not that Maddie had ever been punched or hit in any way.
“But my husband paid a thousand dollars and that was almost twenty years ago.” Aging herself a little, for she was only thirty-seven and had married at nineteen. But two decades had more gravitas than eighteen years.
“Ah, people were giddy in the forties, weren’t they?”
Were they? She had been a teenager, a pretty girl; giddy had been her natural state. But Milton was a practical young man, careful about debt, smart about investments. He would not have chosen a ring without resale value.
Except—Milton never expected this ring to be sold. The most cynical man in the world didn’t expect his engagement ring to be sold; even the men who courted Elizabeth Taylor thought they would be with her forever.
“I don’t understand how a ring that cost a thousand dollars in 1946 could be worth half that amount today.” Even as she spoke, she was aware how quickly she had moved from an exaggeration to a lie, how “almost twenty,” which was essentially correct, had become twenty.
“If you really want to know, I could bore you with a lecture on the used diamond market and profit margins. I could tell you about clarity and cut, how the fashions change. I’m happy to explain all those things, but the bottom line is, I can’t do better than five hundred dollars.”
“We had it insured for two thousand dollars,” she said. Did they? It sounded right. Or maybe it was that she had hoped to get as much as two thousand dollars.
Milton had been giving her an allowance since she left, but it wasn’t quite enough and it was fitful, with no fixed date or amount. Because she had assumed that Seth would come with her, she had expected a more generous stipend. Milton would never deny his only son. But with Seth’s remaining in the house in Pikesville, she had no such leverage. She needed money. Milton was trying to starve her out, force her to come back to him by being stingy.
“He’s not kidding about the boring part,” said a young woman with reddish hair, polishing the top of the case. Maddie was surprised that an employee would dare to speak so impudently to her boss, but Jack Weinstein only laughed.
“That’s enough out of you, Judith. Tell you what, Mrs. Schwartz—leave your number with us and if a customer comes in looking for a ring like this, maybe we can work something out. It’s not the style—”
“It’s a classic solitaire.”
“Exactly. The young girls getting married today, they have interesting ideas. Some don’t want stones at all.” Now he looked genuinely sad.
“I don’t have a phone yet. I’m waiting for it to be installed. C & P says there’s a terrible backlog.”
He put away his loupe and handed the ring back to Maddie. She was loath to put it on. That would feel as defeating as moving back to Pikesville. The young woman, Judith, understood immediately what was bothering Maddie. She pulled out an envelope and said: “For safekeeping. I’d give you a box, but I can’t endure the lecture that my brother would give me on how much everything costs.”
“Your brother? That explains a lot.”
“You have no idea.”
The young woman was more handsome than pretty. But her expressions were droll and her clothes went together in a way that came only with hours in one’s room trying things on, creating combinations, pressing and mending, shining and brushing. Maddie knew because Maddie had always been the same kind of woman. This young woman’s style was almost too matchy, which aged her a little. But her kindness w
as overwhelming, as kindness sometimes is, and it took enormous self-control for Maddie to not burst into tears.
She made it to the driver’s seat of her car, only barely, before her sobs started.
She had expected that money. She had imagined a new bed, something sleek and modern. A phone on the wall in the kitchen, maybe an extension in the bedroom, too. It was so terribly inconvenient not to have a phone.
However, she was crying not for the things she might have had, but for the embarrassment of being found out, of being caught yearning. It had been a very long time since Maddie had let anyone see her dare to want something. She knew how dangerous it was to let one’s desire be glimpsed, even for a moment.
A tap on the window; the droll girl’s face—Judith, her brother had called her—filled the frame. Maddie fumbled for her dark glasses, rolled down the window.
“So bright today,” Judith said, politely offering an excuse.
“I know. I don’t really believe it’s going to snow later this week. If we can believe what the weathermen say.”
“A big if. Look, we don’t really know each other, but I know who you are. Of course.”
Of course? Why of course? For a confused second, Maddie thought she was the woman she almost became, a seventeen-year-old girl embroiled in a scandal. But, no, she had avoided that fate. The problem was all the other fates she had avoided as well, the lies she had told herself, which she had come to believe. When Judith said she knew who Maddie was, it was probably because of gossip at the club, that terrible nouveau clique run by Bambi Brewer, with her airs and her Salems and her acolytes. The Morgensterns were old money relative to that crowd.
“Is there something you need from me?”
As if anyone wanted advice from a middle-aged woman trying to sell her engagement ring. The world was so different now. This young woman crouching by Maddie’s car couldn’t possibly have had the same problems Maddie had known twenty years ago. Today, young women could have sex worry-free by taking a daily pill. Of course, most probably still pretended to be virgins when they found the men they wanted to marry, but that was as much for their mothers as for the husbands.
“I thought you might be interested in attending a meeting at the Stonewall Democratic Club. There’s an open governor’s race this year. It’s a good way to meet people. My brother—not Jack, Donald, Jack’s a bit of a jerk, but Donald is a sweetheart—he’s very active in politics.”
“Is this a fix-up?”
This question seemed to amuse Judith. “No, no, Donald’s not—in the market, best I can tell. He’s a bachelor, and content to be one. When I say ‘meet people,’ I mean just that—people. Some are men. Some are single. For me, it’s a way to get out of my parents’ house without so many questions. And if I started going with a nice lady from Northwest Baltimore, they might not worry so much about what time I come home.”
Maddie risked a tremulous smile. Kindness could be so much more painful than cruelty. She scrambled for a piece of paper from her purse, wrote her mother’s number on the back of a cash register receipt from Rexall, checking first to make sure there was nothing embarrassing on it, like feminine products.
She drove home, although it was hard to think of the apartment on Gist Avenue as home. No Seth, so little furniture, and the neighbors snubbed her, as if she were the undesirable one in this neighborhood of maids and laundresses, milkmen and streetcar conductors. Once inside, she felt strangely warm; the landlord, usually so stingy with heat, had the radiators set too high. She opened the sliding door to the little patio off her bedroom. Then, on what she wanted to believe was an impulse, she took her engagement ring and shoved it deep into the dirt of a potted African violet she kept on a rickety table near the patio door. She pulled the sliding door so only a faint wisp of winter air sneaked through. Methodically, she created the appearance of chaos by opening drawers in the kitchen and bedroom, tossing some of her clothes to the floor.
She then took a deep breath and ran into the street, screaming for help. Within a block, a patrolman, a Negro, rushed toward her.
“I’ve been robbed,” she said. Her breathlessness made it easy to sound frightened.
“Here on the street?” he asked, looking at the purse in her hands.
“My apartment,” she said. “Jewelry—mostly costume stuff, but I had a diamond ring and that’s gone.”
Ferdie Platt, for that was his name—“Short for Ferdinand? Like the bull?” she asked, but he didn’t answer—walked her back to the apartment. His eyes studied the not-quite-closed patio door, the apartment in disarray. Did his keen brown eyes also sweep across the African violet, taking its measure? It suddenly seemed to Maddie that the impressions of her fingertips were visible in the soil. She checked her nails surreptitiously for signs of dirt. He was one of those men who seemed particularly spick-and-span, always smelling of soap. Not aftershave or cologne, just soap. He wasn’t particularly tall, but he had broad shoulders and moved like an athlete. He was too young to have to worry about getting exercise, maybe ten years younger than she was.
“Let’s call the burglary detectives,” he said.
“I don’t have a phone. That’s part of the reason I ran into the street, calling for help. But also—I was worried that the burglar might still be here.”
Her fear was almost real. She was beginning to believe that she had been burglarized, that a stranger had done these things. She could have been a very good actress if only she had pursued it.
Patrolman Platt said: “And I don’t have a radio because—well, I don’t have a radio. But I have a key to the call box, which is close to a drugstore. I’ll put in the call and we’ll wait there. We don’t want to risk disturbing anything here.”
At the drugstore, his call made, he bought her a soda. Maddie sat at the counter, sipping it, wishing it were a cocktail. Wishing, too, that he would sit down instead of standing over her, arms folded, watching her like a sentry.
“I don’t see you in this neighborhood,” he said.
“I’ve lived here only a few weeks.”
“I don’t mean it that way. I mean—this isn’t the right area for you. I don’t see you living here.”
“Because I’m white?” She felt pert. She felt things she hadn’t felt in years, maybe ever.
“Not exactly. You need to be in a place where you don’t stick out quite so much. A place where you’d have privacy. Maybe more downtown, you know?”
“I signed a lease. I paid a deposit.”
“Leases can be broken. For cause.”
Two weeks later, Ferdie Platt did just that. Convinced the landlord to break her lease without penalty, even got her deposit back. Maddie thought it better not to ask how he had accomplished that. Then he inspected the apartment she found near the downtown library, a location he decided was at once safe and private. “Your comings and goings won’t be notable here.”
A week after that, he helped her break in her new bed, the one she bought with part of the insurance. She had the money for selling her car, too, although that had required Milton’s permission, of all things. So infuriating. But she had a new phone on the bedside table, in a delicious shade of bright red. Next to it, the African violet stood guard, serene and silent.
The Clerk
The Clerk
I have always been preternaturally patient. Everyone says so. Well—everyone says I am patient; only Donald, my favorite brother, uses words like preternatural. When I want something, I can plot and plan for months to make it happen. Possibly years if it comes to that. From the moment I sized up Madeline Morgenstern Schwartz, trying to sell her engagement ring as if she couldn’t care less how much money she got for it, I saw a means to an end. Maddie Schwartz is my best chance to get out of the house without marrying first.
I am the youngest of five children and the only girl. My brothers were not forced to live at home until marriage, but they are men. My mother, who rules the household, has decreed that I must stay here until I marry, something
I am not keen to do. I wasn’t a wild child, quite the opposite, and I’m not a wild girl. But I am increasingly sure of what I do not want. I do not want to teach school or go into nursing, the kind of stable jobs that would free me from my parents’ home. I do not want to date men like my brothers or my father. I don’t really want to marry, not yet.
But because I am a nice Jewish girl, I have to live at home until I marry. My parents are old-fashioned that way. “We would be comfortable letting you live with another girl, if we approved of her, but your friends are so flighty,” my mother said. Are they? It doesn’t matter. My mother has spoken. The only tactic available to me is to tease out information about what actions might merit my mother’s rare approval.
That’s how I managed to attend college. My parents were not going to let me go away, even if I received a scholarship that covered everything. They didn’t trust me to be out of their sight. Besides, money was too tight after my father’s bankruptcy, no matter how much my brothers kicked in. College Park was impossible for a commuter without a car.
So I got a scholarship to UB, then worked all summer to earn money that would cover my other costs—books, bus fare, clothes. They could muster no objection to this plan and I graduated last year with a degree in political science. Now I have to apply the same line of thinking to the problem of moving out. What are my parents’ objections? Cost. (So I took the job, working at Jack’s jewelry store, although I have no affinity for retail—all that lying and persuasion.) Safety. A roommate, then. Morals. Not just any roommate. Someone reliable, grounded. And, it goes almost without saying, Jewish.
Maddie Schwartz might be just the ticket. If she needs to sell her ring, she should welcome a roommate to share her bills. True, everyone is saying it’s odd that she didn’t take her son when she left Milton, but it must be Milton’s fault. Everyone in Northwest Baltimore is just waiting for the day that Milton shows up with a secretary or a nurse on his arm. Whoever it is, it will be a comedown from Maddie.
Lady in the Lake Page 3