The Baltimore Book of the Dead

by Marion Winik

  And so the beautiful blond babies became a pair, cared for by the tall drink of water, who was full of pep and enthusiasm for talking toys and cut-up apples and playground slides, even after she got pregnant with her second child. She read them Christian storybooks featuring a cast of vegetables and took them down the street to a playgroup at the church. Her daughter, already tall and skinny at three, began to show a gift for mischief. Unmaking all the beds to build a fort. Sprinkling talcum powder over a second-floor railing to make it snow. Doing gymnastics on the shower curtain rod of a newly renovated bathroom.

  By the time the girls were eleven, both of us had moved away and my relationship with this mom was down to mass messages and holiday portraits. Then we received an email sent from a hospital waiting room. She is wearing a bandanna now most of the time, even at home. When she takes it off she looks like a little bird. It is like she is reverting back to being a baby, when no one could see her hairs except me and John. If she will allow it, I will get her a haircut after her CT at the hospital salon. But she may just want to go home.

  Five years of treatment followed, with just a few short interludes of hope. Though she never really got to be a teenager, she died at sixteen. After a few dark, empty months, her mother returned to babysitting, making up energetic outdoor games and doing puzzles with the preschoolers of her neighborhood. She doesn’t send out so many mailings anymore, but on last year’s Christmas card, her son, now fourteen, holds up a photo of his sister, who looks like a little bird. My own beautiful baby, no longer so blond, brought it in from the mailbox, eyes shining.

  The Montessori Teacher

  died 2014

  AFTER MY DAUGHTER’S YEAR at the Christian preschool in Central Pennsylvania, I was delighted to find out there was a Montessori up the road in Jacobus, which also featured an Amish butcher and a fishing supply. The school was run by a mother-daughter team, an appealing yet unlikely pair. The mother was a put-together blonde who wore wool suits and taught fractions to toddlers using a special set of blocks called the Pink Tower. The daughter, Miss Nancy, was nearly a foot taller than her mom, big and soft, with dark, bushy curls and eyes like an Italian movie star. Miss Nancy had a special-needs son the same age as my daughter. She was clearly the most nurturing person in the world.

  T, T, TLC. Mon-te, Montessori! We love eve-ry-bo-dy, at TLC Montessori. I had composed a long ballad about the school, which I sang to my daughter at bedtime, adding verses for each teacher, aide, and playmate. What a joy it was to find something to sing about in this place that had turned me into a perpetual kvetch machine.

  Not long after we moved away, Miss Nancy’s brother died in a motorcycle accident. Her mother took an indefinite leave of absence; Miss Nancy carried on. But one evening six years later, she got home from work and rushed into the house—a ringing phone? a bursting bladder? a boy with a nosebleed?—accidentally leaving her car running in the garage. Steadily, the colorless, odorless carbon monoxide gas seeped into the house; she and her son very likely went to bed with headaches. In the morning, both of them were found dead in their beds, each with one of the dogs. What her mother did after that I do not know.

  I have looked up the directions for using the Pink Tower, which consists of ten pink wooden cubes, increasing in volume by powers of three: 1, 8, 27, 64, and so on. To begin, tell the child you have something to show him. Say: for this lesson, we will need a mat. Have him fetch and unroll a mat. Then bring him over to the Pink Tower. Say: this is the Pink Tower.

  This is the Pink Tower. It is something even a child can understand.

  The Ambassador’s Wife

  died 2008

  THE MOTHER-IN-LAW OF MY second marriage, an actress and a writer whose place in my life has long outlasted the bond that connected us, lives in the shadow of the Blue Ridge Mountains in Rappahannock County. Back in the seventies and eighties, this county of Virginia farmers filled with retirees from Washington, D.C.; with refugees from the Foreign Service; with artists and artisans; with older women who didn’t color their gray, far ahead of the trend. Among the interesting and distinguished characters in my mother-in-law’s circle was a woman from all three groups: an ambassador’s wife, a brilliant painter, an older mother of three with a troubled marriage. She had lived many years in Kazakhstan, St. Petersburg, and Moscow and was particularly known for her luminous Central Asian faces. I met her once, when we were all going to a show at the town’s little theater. She offered to have my little girl stay with her daughter at their house, looked after by her twenty-something son. I remember the family as three gentle souls, all a bit anxious. The painter had spent time in an institution not long before.

  My mother-in-law owned a large painting this woman had done for her, a nearly life-sized Russian peasant who ruled over the entrance to the kitchen. Wearing a blue-and-white dress and flowered scarf around her head, she watches the viewer with blue eyes and an almost-smile. Her wooden table, shown in flattened perspective, holds a bowl of borscht and all its ingredients: beets, cabbage, carrots, garlic, bay leaves, scallions, and salt. The canvas has a decorated border, and there are two beets floating in the air that resemble hearts. I loved how this painting was also a recipe, the same recipe I used myself, and how the image so dominated the small farmhouse that when you visited my mother-in-law, you felt you were also visiting this lady.

  The year the artist killed herself, my mother-in-law sold the painting to help her granddaughter pay her college tuition. The buyer was kind enough to tell her it was worth double what she was asking and pay her the true value. As much as I might have hoped to get my hands on it someday, I didn’t mind. By now, the artist’s daughter must be going to college herself. It is difficult to imagine what her life has been like. Perhaps she has paid her tuition the same way.

  The Playwright

  died 2008

  SHE WAS NOT A woman one ever saw with a computer or a cell phone, a curly-haired earth goddess in fringed scarves and jingly jewelry, a devotee of travels in India and rain dances, of storytelling and Kathakali. She liked her art forms as old as fire. Yet when I summon her via Internet mumbo jumbo, she appears. One site lists ten plays she wrote, among them this Obie winner from 1971: A panel of two blacks and two whites is brought together, representing four points of view on America’s racial problem, but before the discussion is concluded, a riot breaks out in the theatre. And look, here she is on YouTube, singing with her composer husband the year she died. He smiles at her encouragingly, playing his guitar. She is a wasted husk of herself, two days after surgery. This thin, off-key sound is not her real voice. Okay, enough of this séance.

  Have you heard the story of how she got that husband? Once upon a time, a hippie playwright who had won a theater prize in New York decided it was time to get married. There were five men in the running. She went and visited all of them. One was too fat, one was too thin, one was too rich, one was too poor. One was just right: a musician, a man who loved women, a man who lived in the shadow of the Blue Ridge. Instead of children, they had followers and protégées. They gave workshops and made records and put on shows.

  What happens when an earth goddess gets uterine cancer? Eastern medicine, Western medicine, no medicine. If I had been her daughter, I might have fought her on these decisions. But I would have been wrong, because she lived as long as anyone can reasonably stand under the circumstances. Just as useful as any toxic treatment was the flock of white origami birds the followers hung in her house. She wrote her own ending, in her own bed, with her own hair. The End.

  The Belligerent Stream

  buried 1962

  EVERYONE WHO DRIVES INTO Baltimore is shocked to discover that the interstate—a part of I-83 known as the JFX—stops dead and disappears in the middle of town. Whether you are coming from the north or the south, your route into the city will dump you off near the Inner Harbor and leave you to wend your way through downtown traffic. Before the JFX vanishes, it wanders through town like a drunk, swerving drast
ically left, then right, for no apparent reason.

  But there is a reason. This road is built right on top of the Jones Falls, which once burbled through town to the bay, a “belligerent stream” according to early twentieth-century historian Letitia Stockett, who taught at the high school my daughter now attends. Perhaps because it was always prone to flooding and filled with trash, few mourned in the 1960s when the tough little waterway was paved over, sacrificed to suburbanites’ need for speed. The alternative was tearing down buildings and slicing through neighborhoods. On the other hand, if they had finished the road as planned, the Inner Harbor would now be covered with concrete ramps. A terrible thought indeed. Though it didn’t look like much back then, the decaying port has since become the city’s sparkly little Disneyland; all of Baltimore most tourists ever see.

  Meanwhile, the belligerent stream has never submitted entirely, as I learned recently while reading a novel set in Baltimore with a secret waterfall. I immediately emailed the author: Where is this? In the abandoned industrial neighborhood beneath the elevated part of the highway, he wrote back, look for an overgrown trail. Once we found it, my daughter had to help me down the steep makeshift steps to the rickety deck. And there it was: the surprisingly emerald waters of the Jones Falls, bursting out of the culvert, rushing to a rounded cliff, tumbling over and pounding noisily into a pool. Graffiti adds a caption to the postcard: PERSISTENCE IS KEY.

  The Southern Gentleman

  died 2012

  I MET HIM MANY years after he changed his whole life: he quit drinking, came out, and left his wife in a single day. Sitting in the audience at his book signing, I instantly loved him; he had a deep, luscious Georgia accent, a courtly manner, and a wicked sense of humor. I rushed right up to start telling him my life story, eager to begin our friendship without delay. Soon I was on the guest list for his many gatherings. Dinnah will be ready in one ow-ah and fawty-fahv minutes, he would say at the door. Finally at the table, he blessed the food and his guests and always, last of all, the New York Times.

  He was rarely on time for anything, spent money as if he had a trust fund, wrote slowly, lusted randily, and could always be counted on for special requests in restaurants. Ah’d lahk it molten, he’d tell the waiter, sending a piece of chocolate cake back to be microwaved. At his regular spots, his ice water arrived at the table with eight slices of lemon. They know me heah, he explained. As at the apartment, dinner took hours. Then he drove me home in his old boat of a car, airily bouncing, then noisily crunching over every bump.

  At the time he learned he had Lou Gehrig’s disease, I was pretty sick myself, about to finally start the yearlong treatment that cured me of hepatitis C. At first, it was fun to complain together, but that wore off. Soon nobody could understand him but his daughter. The last time I saw him leave the house, he had invited me to go to a production of The Rocky Horror Picture Show. He sat stoically in his neck brace as half-naked cast members shimmied and shook inches from his face. Some people should really keep their clothes on in public, he remarked as we left.

  Even that night, making our interminable way back to the parking garage, there was something magical about him, a rare combination of chivalry, joie de vivre, and ease. Being his friend was like some kind of painless cosmetic surgery, leaving you just a little prettier and more interesting than you were before.

  The Squash Player

  died 2016

  I MET HER BECAUSE she was madly in love with her upstairs neighbor in the apartment building, the dashing, handsome, totally gay Southern Gentleman. The first mention of her in my inbox is him telling me—typos galore, he’s already failing—that she’s brought red roses for the party he’s having that night, the last big one. The two of them with their sprightly gatherings! What with that creaky old elevator and its upholstered bench, you felt you were going to a cocktail party in the 1940s. Her “salon” involved a potluck hors d’oeuvre spread on her mahogany table, deviled eggs, smoked salmon on brown bread, and a generous open bar. She drank martinis, but you have whatever you want, dear. The walls were crimson, covered with paintings.

  She had once been the top-seeded women’s squash player in Maryland, but now she was the skinny, kooky old lady with bad hips and a fluffy dog, whom she took everywhere, as if Baltimore were Paris, and several months a year they would go to the real Paris, where I assume she met with less resistance when taking him to restaurants and theaters. Fucking A! she would say, if they wouldn’t admit the dog, and throw her tickets in the trash and go home.

  Despite her jaunty air and festive urges, there was something desperate about her. She was lonely and secretive, deeply miserable about growing old. I did not fully grasp this until the night I arrived in her lobby with a plate of tuna canapés and no one answered the buzzer. Then I saw the note taped to the door: our hostess had been hospitalized. A few months later, she failed at suicide for the third time, destroying her liver and kidneys. A committee went to the hospital to beg the doctors to let her go.

  I had many questions, but most of them would never be answered. I did learn, at the cocktail party held in her apartment instead of a funeral, that she had appointed guardians and left a bequest for the care of her dog. Which led to the realization that, despite certain worrisome similarities, I am far luckier than she. I was never an athlete, I have no secrets, and I would not in a million years leave the dog.

  Her Son

  died 2017

  ONE DAY MY NEIGHBOR took me with her to something called a shooting response. It was just a couple of miles from our house, on a corner in East Baltimore. Right there, a few days earlier, a high school senior had been shot in the face, though there was nothing in the backpack the killers took but a change of clothes. Now there were sixty people assembled, friends, family, neighbors, teachers, and members of an organization called MOMS, Mothers of Murdered Sons and Daughters. This Baltimore-based association is open to all: whether your child is killed by the cops, the dealers, the gangs, or the racists, you can join.

  People brought boxes of white candles and Mylar balloons. They taped photos to a brick wall and placed tea lights on the sidewalk. Then his mother, a young woman with a turned-up nose and gold highlights in her long, loopy waves, arrived, and they handed her a microphone. Last Thursday started out like any other day, she said, telling her boy to do his chores, trying not to be late for work, missing a call from him on her phone, and by the end of it, finding herself in a hospital emergency room, realizing by how people were treating her that her son must be dead.

  At seventeen, she told us, she had walked across the stage at her own graduation pregnant with her boy. They grew up together. He had quit school for a while himself, overwhelmed by deaths among his peers and the general negativity about his future, but he went back and would have graduated this June. The two of them planned to go together to community college. Lord, are you serious? she said. All these years I fought for my son? All the times I told him stay off these streets? All these people who loved him? My neighbor and I were the only two white people at this gathering, but when tears started pouring down my face, a tall young man put his arm around me.

  A few months later, the boy’s mother attended his graduation, where he was awarded an honorary diploma. According to the Baltimore Sun, he was the fourth of five students from his high school to be killed during this school year. Look beyond the boundaries of Baltimore, one of the teachers urged the graduates. Their mothers must be thinking, where?

  His Brother

  died 1998

  THERE’S JUST ONE DEGREE of separation between me and Freddie Gray, who was called “Pepper” and sometimes “Freddie Black” by his friends. So I heard from one of my memoir students who knew him slightly—their connection was a hood-hopper named Gorgeous. A hood-hopper, you know, a clown who claims to be from every block in town. Anything I know about hood-hopping, or about the life of black boys in Baltimore, comes through this young writer, now the author of several published books. His
career took off the week of the uprising in 2015, when he published an op-ed in the New York Times explaining that being beaten up by cops, as Freddie Gray was on the day of his death, was a routine part of his childhood. During basketball games. Walking to school. Anytime.

  This boy was mostly raised by his older brother, a powerful and popular drug dealer who was fiercely protective of his younger sibling. He’d moved him out of their father’s house when the younger boy was fifteen, desperate to keep him off the streets and in school. He hadn’t finished himself, but he was a passionate reader. Their house was full of books. And basketballs, and boxes of sneakers. Three years later, the slam dunk: little brother accepted to Georgetown University! The future college student took the letter over to his mother’s place to celebrate. Left a message for his big brother. Then there was a knock on the door. A breathless messenger. He ran downstairs, pushed his way through the crowd on the sidewalk.

  The first thing he saw were his brother’s Charles Barkleys. Still perfect, still gleaming white. His legs went limp; he flung himself onto the body. Moments later, the police arrived. They dragged him away, cuffed him, threw him in the squad car, questioned him for hours. Grief counseling, East Baltimore style.

  Seventeen years later, the Baltimore police killed a man named Freddie Gray. I often wonder what Pepper would think if he could see who he has become, the strange destiny he was posthumously chosen for. His death was senseless, and it could have been meaningless, but instead it is history. So, by way of my student and his brother, by way of Gorgeous the hood-hopper, I send something I can only call a prayer.