Mystery Writers of America Presents Ice Cold: Tales of Intrigue From the Cold War

THE EVERYDAY HOUSEWIFE BY LAURA LIPPMAN

The summer that she was a newlywed, Judith Monaghan watched The Newlywed Game almost every day, except when it was preempted by the hearings. She watched those, too, marveling at Senator Ervin’s eyebrows and Maureen “Mo” Dean’s outfits, but she preferred The Newlywed Game, despite the fact that she had once been vitally interested in politics. Actually, maybe that was why she preferred the game show to the hearings; it seemed more real to her.

The Newlywed Game came on at 2 p.m. on Channel 13, and Judith set aside the next two hours to accomplish whatever could be done while seated in the living room — darning socks, shelling peas, whipping in hems, teaching herself to knit. She was sure that she and Patrick could answer every question correctly, as they had known each other for six years before they married. But how would they get to California from Baltimore? Would her mother be upset about the inevitable “Making Whoopee” questions? And was it possible to angle to be on the show when the top prize was a washer-dryer? Judith didn’t like the look of the furniture sets given away as prizes — too shiny new for her tastes — and the Monaghans already had a perfectly good television, a wedding gift from her second-oldest brother, who owned two electronics stores.

The Newlywed Game was followed by a show called The Girl in My Life, about women who had made a difference to others. Judith didn’t care for it as much. She usually switched to The Edge of Night, which led right into The Price Is Right, where she won almost everything. Or would have, if she had been in the studio audience. Judith was a very focused shopper, paying attention to prices, calculating the per unit cost among different brands.

Judith did have a washer, but no dryer, a problem during that clammy, damp summer, when the sun rose every day only to disappear until 4 p.m. — the time that Judith tied an immaculate apron over one of her pretty, hand-tailored dresses and began to prepare dinner for her husband, who arrived home at 5:30 p.m. and expected his food at 6. (He spent the intervening half hour with a beer and the evening paper, the Orioles pregame show on WBAL.) She liked making Patrick dinner. She liked doing things in general. Judith was as restless as a hummingbird, and the small brick duplex required so little of her. She cleaned the woodwork with a Q-tip, vacuumed the Venetian blinds, scrubbed the long-discolored grout with a toothbrush, and still she ended up with time on her hands. She even started ironing the sheets when she changed the linens on Fridays and she might have washed them more often, but they took so long to dry on these strangely overcast summer days. She tried to bake her own bread, once. The loaves were flat and dense; Patrick said he preferred store bread, anyway. He liked Wonder Bread, and Judith liked Maranto’s, the fresh, paper-wrapped Italian loaves.

“Those only taste good the day you buy them,” Patrick said. “Wonder Bread tastes good all week long.”

They had only one car, and of course Patrick took that every day; the bus stop was four blocks away and he would have been required to change buses on Route 40. Besides, he needed the car for his job, which involved driving from bar to bar, doing inspections. Judith didn’t mind. She did a big grocery shop on weekends and could do any daily marketing on foot — vegetables, last-minute items — at the High’s Dairy Store on Ingleside, or even the grocery stores on Route 40 if it came to that. She knew if she shopped efficiently, she wouldn’t have to do these daily runs to High’s, but the walk down Newfield Road was another way to fill the long days.

Married life was lonely, which seemed strange to her. Shouldn’t marriage be the end of loneliness? She tried to find a neutral way to express this thought to her mother, who called every day at 9 a.m., despite the fact that Judith told her repeatedly that was when she cleaned the kitchen.

“The days seem so long that I find myself cleaning even more than you did.”

“I,” her mother said, “had four sons. No one could clean more than I did.”

“I cook a lot, too. I’m getting pretty good.” Judith was proud of her cooking, the meals she put together for Patrick. She would never be like the woman in the Alka-Seltzer commercial, the one who made heart-shaped meatloaf. “Sometimes I wonder if I should have kept my job until I got pregnant.”

A quick laugh at her own expense, as if what she was saying was silly. But she did miss work, the intrigues of an office, being around others. She had lived at home until she married. She had wanted to take an apartment with another girl after she finished college, but her parents wouldn’t hear of it.

“Marry in haste, repent in leisure.”

Judith adjusted the phone, which she had cradled between her ear and shoulder, thinking she must have misheard. For one thing, no one could call Patrick Monaghan’s courtship hasty.

“I didn’t catch that,” she said. “I’m washing the breakfast dishes.” Patrick liked to start the day with eggs, bacon, toast, and juice. She had made the juice fresh until he told her he preferred Minute Maid concentrate. That was okay, she used the empty cartons to set her hair after he left in the mornings, the best way to get the smooth look that he liked.

“Mrs. Levitan died that way. She was washing the dishes and the phone slipped in the sink and she was electrocuted.”

“I don’t think that’s what happened,” Judith ventured.

“You’re right. Mrs. Levitan is the one who died while talking on the phone in a thunderstorm. It was Irene Sandowski who dropped the phone. Although I think it was in the bathtub.”

“Oh, Mother, how could someone drop the phone in the bathtub? The Sandowskis aren’t the type of people to have a phone in the bathroom.”

“She thought she was so clever, that one. And grand. She had her husband find an extra-long cord — I think he had to call Bell Atlantic special — and she hooked it up to a princess phone, pink, a birthday gift, and she would take it into the bathroom and prop it up on the toilet and take bubble baths like she was Doris Day or somebody, talking the whole while. Well, one day, the whole thing fell in.” A pause. “I just realized — I never did understand why she got a pink phone, when her bedroom was all gold and white, but the bathroom was pink.”

“Irene Sandowski is alive,” Judith said.

“Are you sure?”

“She was alive as of last week when I got the invitation to Betty’s wedding. Irving and Irene Sandowski request your pleasure, et cetera, et cetera.”

“I didn’t say she died. But that’s why she has that white streak in her hair and now she has to be careful when she gets her teeth cleaned because her heartbeat is irregular. So Betty is getting married? Someone nice, I hope.”

Nice meant Jewish. Nice meant rich, or at someone who might be rich, some day. It also meant: Not like your husband, the Irishman, the Mick, who took you to the far side of town, where I suspect you are eating HAM every day. Yet the Weinsteins didn’t keep kosher and ate pork when they had Chinese carry-out, while crabs were okay as long as they were eaten outside on newspaper. However, her mother had never tasted lobster, a fact of which she was strangely proud.

“It’s nice over here,” Judith said. Sometimes, saying a thing could make it true. It wasn’t not nice. It just wasn’t where she had expected to live.

“It’s tacky, sharing a wall with another house,” her mother said.

“You grew up in a rowhouse.”

“You didn’t,” her mother said. “I’ll talk to you tomorrow.”

“You don’t have to call every—” but her mother had already hung up.

Judith thought maybe she should spend less time talking to her mother and more time with her brother, Donald, the one closest to her in age. A bachelor who worked for a state senator, Donald was used to listening to people. Plus, he liked Patrick, had helped get him the job with the liquor board. Donald had lots of connections, lots of pull.

“Maybe you should get a job, Judith,” Donald said. “I can help you if that’s what you want.”

“Oh, no,” she protested. “I’m a married woman now. And the babies will start coming any day. I’d just end up quitting.”

Those wished-for babies were the reason for the house on Newfield Road, which Patrick had rented without consulting her. “With three bedrooms, a yard, and a washing machine — no dryer, but it has one of those umbrella like things to hang the clothes on and the yard gets good sunlight, I made sure to check that. And a garbage disposal, Judith. Plus an unfinished basement, which we could make into a rec room, the landlord said improvements were fine. Of course, we probably won’t be there long enough to care. I mean, it’s okay for one kid, but once we get past that—”

Patrick had never said so many words at one time in all the time Judith had known him.

“Newfield Road? I don’t even know where that is,” she had said.

“Edmondson Heights. Over by Social Security, but closer to Route 40. You know Mr. G’s, where I used to take you for soft ice cream when we started dating? And the drive-in where we saw that movie together the night we met? Sort of between those two places.”

Judith had fond memories of both Mr. G’s and the drive-in. But Judith had considered those exotic adventures, akin to going on an African safari. Observe the Baltimore Irish Catholic in his natural environment, eating soft ice cream and onion rings after a movie. The boys Judith knew congregated at diners, after dropping their dates at home. Edmondson Heights was seven exits away on the Beltway from where she grew up in Pikesville. It might as well have been seven hundred miles.

“I don’t know people who live over there.”

“You’ll meet some. I have lots of cousins in the neighborhood, if it comes to that.”

“I mean, I mean”—But she could not say: I don’t mean people, people. I mean my people. Your people are not my people. How could she point out that there wasn’t a single temple along the Route 40 corridor? Patrick thought she wasn’t going to go to synagogue any more. They had thrown in their lot together, Romeo and Juliet, vowing to disown their disapproving families and live their own lives, by their rules. Only it turned out their families would not be disowned so easily and what were supposed to be their rules, Patrick’s and Judith’s, were turning out to be Patrick’s rules. He chose where they lived. He chose how they spent their weekend hours. She suspected, come December, he would choose to have a tree in the living room. At which point, should Judith’s mother visit, she would drop dead on the spot.

But, so far, her mother had inspected the rowhouse only once. She had walked through it without comment, unless sniffs could be counted as comments. In which case, she had made roughly forty, fifty comments, five to ten per room. The thing that seemed to bother her the most was the umbrella-like drying line in the backyard that Patrick considered such an asset. She had placed a hand over her heart and shook ever head ever so slightly, the way she did when she watched the war coverage on TV.

Certainly, her mother could not be surprised that Judith didn’t have an automatic dryer, and she had to admit the washer in the duplex was a step up from the coin-operated machines in the Bonnie Brae Apartments. Louise Weinstein, as a newlywed, had pinned clothes to a line strung behind a Butchers Hill rowhouse, not that far from where the Monaghans lived in Fell’s Point. Both families had moved up and out, of course, but the Weinsteins had headed northwest, while the Monaghans marched due west. Judith and Patrick might never have met if they hadn’t ended up on a double date together, and it wasn’t even with each other. Judith’s date, Harold, asked to find a boy for her friend Thelma, had suggested Patrick Monaghan, an enthusiastic volunteer in the governor’s race. Thelma was a pretty girl, but Judith could feel Patrick’s eyes on her neck throughout the entire film, Sweet Charity. The next day, Patrick called and asked if she was really as interested in politics as she had claimed over soft ice cream at Mr. G’s because the Stonewall Democratic Club was always looking for volunteers. Oh, she was interested. She was interested in politics and interested in this stoic Irish redhead. Go figure — the man was trustworthy, but politics broke her heart. Patrick’s, too, if it came to that. They never quite got over what happened in that governor’s race. The Watergate hearings, as far as Judith was concerned, were just an opportunity for the rest of the nation to learn what they already knew. It was all a shuck, a game, business as usual. Patrick and Judith had presented their youth and idealism like a burnt offering to pagan gods, then comforted each other when it came to naught. At least they had a marriage to show for it. Lots of young couples were marrying early if only because of the lottery numbers the boys had been assigned. But Patrick had a high number. Judith knew he really loved her.

Besides, whatever the pace of their courtship, she was not repenting. She didn’t regret her marriage. The house was fine, just fine, especially for a place to pass through. The neighborhood was—

There, her resilience failed her. She hated Edmondson Heights, the blocks and blocks of brick rowhouses just like her own, thrown up in the ’50s to address the shortages after the war. She could and did walk for miles, but the scene seldom changed. Sometimes, she walked all the way to the Westview Mall, but it was a dark, jerry-rigged place, an open-air shopping center that had closed itself in to keep up with the times. Besides, she had no money to buy the things she really wanted, clothes and shoes and books, so she ended up at Silber’s Bakery, eating those abominations known as pizza rolls, hunks of white bread with tomato sauce and cheese smeared on top. She would probably weigh an extra ten pounds if it weren’t for all the walking.

Over the summer, she gradually began to see the small distinctions from block to block along Newfield Road, which had initially looked all of a piece to her. She could tell, for example, where the neighborhood changed over from renters to owners. The tiny front lawns were better-kept and often had shrubberies, the ones hung with bright red berries that Judith had always heard were poisonous, but perhaps that was just a story told to scare children. The doors and shutters were painted in glossier colors, and the houses had storm doors. Renters kept iridescent globes on pedestals in their yards. Owners nailed ceramic cats to their brick facades. Some even had those hitching posts that looked like jockeys, although the faces had all been whitewashed. There were more children, too, in these blocks. Judith’s block was almost childless. Two blocks over, the Lord Baltimore diaper truck was a daily presence. Go another five blocks and it was the Good Humor man.

Walking as she did, day in and day out, Judith felt like a spy in her own life. She looked like the other women she saw, she lived a life like theirs, and yet she was not one of them, she was sure of that. Was it merely being Jewish in a neighborhood where almost everyone else seemed to be Catholic? Her face burned with the memory of her humiliation when she served pot roast to one pair of neighbors on a Friday night, only to have Mrs. Delaney say quietly, “We go meatless on Fridays.”

“Oh, who gives a crap, Frances?” said Mr. Delaney, who took seconds. It was a good pot roast; Judith couldn’t help preening a bit. Mrs. Delaney limited herself to potatoes and the Jell-O salad, said she was considering giving up red meat anyway.

“Frances would be a hippie, if I let her,” Mr. Delaney said. “But I’m not going to be married to a hippie. And I’m not going to live on rabbit food. She’d grow her own vegetables if I let her.”

Judith’s face had burned at that, too, thinking of the plot that Patrick had planted in their backyard.

Frances Delaney was young, younger than Judith, yet Judith still thought of her as Mrs. Delaney, perhaps because Mr. Delaney was so much older, in his 40s, closer to her parents’ generation than hers. He had been career military until a year or so ago, and Judith was unclear where he had met his bride. His attitudes, too, made him seem old. Gruff, bossy. He worked at the Social Security Administration, as did many in the neighborhood. At the dinner table that night, he placed his large hand over Mrs. Delaney’s and said: “No hippies and no women’s libbers for us, right, Pat? Our wives stay home and take care of us, as it should be.”

“Judith worked at her father’s variety store before it went bust,” Patrick said, missing, as he often did, the point beneath the actual words, words not being something he used very much. “She was a secretary at Procter and Gamble when we met.”

“Before you married,” Mr. Delaney said.

“Yes.”

“That’s okay. Frances here was a nurse.”

“And you met—” Judith began.

“Oh, it’s such a boring story,” Frances Delaney said. “Don’t bore them with it, Jack. Where did you two meet?”

“The movies,” Patrick said. No one would ever accuse Patrick Monaghan of telling long stories. At night, when Judith tried to share her observations about their neighborhood, he would say: “I’m not much of one for gossip, Judith.”

But Judith didn’t mind that Patrick was the strong, silent type. She had come from a family of big talkers. Patrick was her Quiet Man. She loved his silences. Except when she didn’t and then she locked herself in the bathroom, wishing she had a phone cord that stretched all the way in there. Only whom would she call? Her mother, who would repeat the line about marrying in haste? Her girlfriends, who had married proper Jewish boys and were living proper Jewish lives in the northwest suburbs? Judith might be able to find a cord long enough to stretch into the bathroom, but she wasn’t sure that there was any phone line long enough to take her back to the life she had known. She was a spy. A spy in what her mother called the land of Mackerel Snappers and Shanty Irish.

She did not look that different from the other women. Her hair had a reddish cast and she was given to freckles, even in this sunless summer. She was often asked, in fact, what parish she had grown up in, a question she eventually realized was meant to suss out whether she preferred St. William of York or St. Lawrence. There was some confusion in the neighborhood about which parish to join, and the choice was considered a tip to one’s ambitions. Would you be moving southeast, to the larger houses in Ten Hills and Hunting Ridge, or west, closer to Social Security, where Jack Delaney worked? It was all very complex, a mathematical equation made up of the husband’s ambitions and prospects, the pace at which the children arrived. Even if Judith managed to sidestep that first question, the other questions were still lying in wait. Patrick had a good job as an inspector for the city liquor board. Safe, solid. But how high would they rise? How many children would they have? And when those children arrived, how would they be raised? All very well to say love was all when it was only the two of you, but baby makes three and some very difficult questions, as Judith was now realizing. Who was she? Who would her children be?

So while others might call what she did on her walks snooping or spying, Judith believed she was simply trying to find a way to be. Would she move toward Ten Hills or Woodlawn? Would she have an iridescent globe on a pedestal in her yard? (Probably not; they struck her as tacky.) She definitely would not have one of those whitewashed hitching posts. And she didn’t know what to make of the people who affixed those two pairs of kittens to their brick-fronts, always a white one and black one. What was that about? Who were they? Who was she?

The summer continued cool and damp. Good for sleeping and good for walking, but not for much else. Judith imagined this was like summer in London, not that she had been there, or San Francisco, not that she had been there, or — well, she really hadn’t been anywhere. She had grown up in Northwest Baltimore, the youngest of five, the only daughter. Spoiled, she saw in retrospect, but does anyone ever realize they’re spoiled until the spoiling ends? Yet spoiled as she might have been, she could put her little house shipshape by 11 a.m. and then what? She could have stayed in and watched soap operas, but she was more interested in the soap operas playing out in the neighborhood. In plain sight, once one knew where to look. The battling Donovans. The literally bursting-at-the-seams Kate O’Connell, who had just given birth to her fifth child in five years. The Horton hooligans, as they were known, a brood of terrifying brothers. Judith took to walking down the narrow lane that led to the carports behind the houses of Newfield Road. This was where real life could be glimpsed. Almost no one here had a proper garage and some didn’t even have carports, only concrete pads. She saw Betty Donovan sitting on her back steps, which could use a coat of paint, smoking a cigarette and holding a frozen package of succotash to a swollen eye. She saw the Horton boys trying to burn ants with a magnifying glass, which made her glad that the sun was weak and fitful. She saw Katie O’Connell tie one of her children to the useless umbrella drying rack in her backyard. “He tried to run away,” Katie said when she saw Judith looking. “What else can I do?”

And Judith saw the Lord Baltimore diaper service truck parked in the carport behind the Delaney house, despite the fact that the Delaneys had no children.

“They do shirts,” Frances Delaney said one July morning as Judith headed out again for a walk, thinking she might do a little marketing, or even have an ice cream cone at High’s for lunch. She always left by way of the street, then returned via the alley, her bag of groceries a cover of sorts, a legitimate reason for being in the alley. It would be natural, with a bag of groceries, to want to enter the house through the kitchen door.

“Excuse me?”

Frances Delaney was on her knees in her front yard, tending to a small flower bed. The men did the lawns, the women did the flowers. Judith did not have a green thumb, perhaps because her own mother did not, so her lawn was just lawn.

“Lord Baltimore Diaper Service,” Frances said, rising to her feet, brushing off her knees. She was wearing short shorts and a halter that left a strip of her midriff bare. A good outfit for tanning if the sun ever came out again; Judith just didn’t feel comfortable in such clothes since she married. She thought the whole point of being a wife was to look polished, grown-up. To look as if you had some place to go, even if it was only High’s Dairy Store. She was wearing Bernardo sandals and a hot-pink shift that she had made from a remnant at Jo-Ann Fabrics, a coordinating scarf over her hair, which she would wash and set later today in the loose straight style that Patrick liked. “They do shirts, too.”

“You send your husband’s shirts out?”

“Jack’s fussy in his way.”

Judith thought about Mr. Delaney. Jack. He had come to her home for Friday night supper in a Banlon shirt. He wore his hair very short, even shorter than Patrick wore his, practically a crew cut. He had picked his teeth at the table and touched his wife a lot, stroking her, patting her. He reminded Judith of the fairy tale in which a Chinese emperor kept a nightingale to sing for him.

“His work shirts,” Frances Delaney continued. “They’re particular at Social Security. Always looking for something to hold against a man, Jack says. He liked the Army better, he says. The rules were clear. He even liked Germany when we were stationed there.”

“Is that where you met? Germany?”

Frances laughed as if the idea were absurd, meeting someone in Germany. “Anyway, he likes his shirts just so, and I like Jack to be happy.”

“Isn’t that expensive? Sending out shirts?”

“Jack doesn’t know I send his shirts out. He just knows that they’re ironed and starched to his standards, which are very high.” She smiled shyly. She looked like a gypsy to Judith, but Patrick said Frances Delaney was pure black Irish — dark hair, blue eyes so pale that they were barely there. But there was something in her voice, a suggestion of an accent that had been vanquished, or was being kept in place through strict discipline.

“Where did you go to high school?” she asked Frances. It was usually the first thing Baltimoreans asked of one another.

“All over,” she said.

“Army brat?”

“Of a sort. My father’s work took us to Asia and Europe.”

That probably explained her accent, although it wasn’t so much an accent as a complete absence of accent, unusual here in Edmondson Heights, where almost everyone, except Judith, spoke with the exaggerated o’s and extra r’s that marked what people called a Baltimore accent.

Judith knew she shouldn’t ask more questions, that part of being a good neighbor was to respect all the little boundaries — the cheap white pickets that people placed down the middle of their shared lawns, the invisible lines dividing the parking pads, the shouts and sounds heard through the paper-thin walls late at night.

Yet she pressed, curious: “Don’t you get an allowance? Doesn’t he go over the checkbook?”

“I’m clever with money. I economize on the groceries — I’m a good cook, if I do say so myself. No one’s ever left my table unhappy.” Was Frances Delaney suggesting that she had left Judith’s table unhappy? That was so unfair. It wasn’t Judith’s fault that she forgot most Catholics didn’t eat meat on Fridays. “And I use what’s left over for the laundry. What he doesn’t know won’t hurt me.” She clapped a hand to her mouth. “I mean what he doesn’t know won’t hurt him. I always get that wrong. Would you like to come in for a Tab?”

“Sure,” Judith said.

Over the next two weeks, she stopped at Frances Delaney’s house almost daily, enjoying Tab or Fresca and, sometimes, a white wine that was quite unlike anything Judith had ever tasted. They talked about everything and nothing. They complained, in the self-deprecating code that was allowed, about their husbands’ foibles. Silent, oblivious Patrick. Gabby, grabby Jack. They watched the Watergate hearings and made fun of Sam Ervin’s eyebrows, talked about Mo Dean’s style, which Judith admired but Frances thought drab.

“If my husband had that kind of job, I’d look better than that,” said Frances, who almost always wore cut-offs and halter tops. “She looks dowdy to me.”

“I worked in politics,” Judith confided in Frances. “I thought I was going to change the world.”

“The world never changes,” Frances said, smoking a Virginia Slim. Judith yearned to join her, but she had worked too hard to give it up.

“That’s what I found out.”

Inside the Delaney house, she saw enough evidence of money to believe that Frances Delaney did have a household budget with considerable fat in it. The appliances were new, unusual in this block of renters. The dining room set could have come straight from the grand prize package on The Newlywed Game. Mahogany, shiny. Tacky, but expensive, and Frances seemed to loathe it, too, neglecting to use coasters beneath their sweating glasses. The television set was color and huge, a Magnavox with a stereo built in.

“Do you own or rent?” Judith asked one day.

“Own.” Frances made a face. “It was his mother’s house. She died, left it to us, so we moved here. We could afford something nicer, but he says there’s no point in moving until we outgrow it.”

“So you’re going to have a family?”

“Of course.” She looked — insulted, that was it. As if Judith had given offense. “Why wouldn’t we? Jack’s only forty-two.”

“My oldest brother is forty,” Judith said, a peace offering. “I’m the youngest of five, the only girl. I grew up in Pikesville.”

“Pikesville. Isn’t that all Jews?”

“Yes,” Judith said, thinking it the most tactful way to reply. If she knew anything about her new friend, it was that she was delicate and sensitive, not at all like her coarse, belligerent husband. She would appreciate the chance to avoid hurting Judith’s feelings.

“Wow. How did you stand it?”

Judith thought very hard about what to say next.

“Hasn’t it been the worst summer?”

“Yes, but it’s a blessing in a way,” Frances said. “These houses get so hot, you have no idea. The second floor is usually unbearable during the day.” Frances stuck out her bottom lip and blew a few errant tendrils from her face. “You know, I suppose we should have you over to dinner, in return. I should have thought of that sooner.”

“Oh, please — don’t worry about that.”

A rumbling noise from the carport. From where they sat, in the dining room, Judith could see a white truck pulling to a stop. The Lord Baltimore diaper truck.

“I should go.”

Frances didn’t protest. “Friday night,” she said, not rising from her chair. She dangled a hand between her thigh absentmindedly, then across her collarbone, caressing herself. Judith left behind a half-full can of Tab, desperate to be out of the house before the Lord Baltimore Diaper Service driver crossed the threshold.

When she returned from High’s forty minutes later, the truck was still there.

The next day was Thursday. It rained all day, and Judith decided not to walk anywhere, but to stay inside and watch the hearings.

Friday night Judith and Patrick walked down their front walk, traveled perhaps fifteen yards, and went up the Delaneys’ front walk. Judith carried a loaf of zucchini bread, although the Delaneys had come to her dinner empty-handed. But proper people, truly mannerly people, did not come empty-handed in her experience.

“I wonder what they’ll serve us,” she said.

“Probably fish sticks,” Patrick said mournfully. “I thought I was leaving this behind when I married you.”

They were both surprised — Patrick happily, Judith ambivalently — to learn that Frances Delaney was an outstanding cook. Yes, dinner was fish, but poached salmon, served with little potatoes unlike anything Judith had have ever tasted, something called “fingerlings.” The salad was served after the main course, which Frances said was how the French ate.

Her husband rolled his eyes. “Judith studied cooking in France. I promised not to bitch about her pretendions as long as her grub is good.”

“Pretendions?” Judith couldn’t help asking. “France?”

“You know,” Jack said. “Putting on airs. Pretendions.”

“Oh, pretensions,” she said, then hated herself for it. She was trying to show Frances Delaney, by example, how a well-mannered person behaved, but Frances Delaney seemed to be one step ahead of her. She was even better dressed than Judith tonight, in a modest, knee-length lace shift that exposed only her arms. As she moved back and forth between the dining room and the kitchen, serving dinner with an ease that Judith had yet to master, Frances seemed not to notice Jack Delaney’s proprietary pats on her rear end. Judith did, though. She also noticed, with a sinking heart, Patrick’s approving looks at the house, the furniture. He probably thought this dining room set was classy.

“What the fuck is in my salad?” Jack Delaney held up a fork with a yellow blossom on the tines.

Judith had wondered the same thing, but would never have questioned it and would certainly never have used that word, which she did not remember ever hearing spoken aloud before, except through the walls late at night, when the Mulcahys were fighting. At least, they started out fighting. Where they ended up was more shocking still.

“Nasturtiums,” Frances said. “They’re edible.”

“They’re flowers,” her husband sputtered. Patrick looked hopeful, as if his host’s temper tantrum might get him off the hook.

“Don’t forget your promise to me, Jack,” Frances said, her tone even and polite. “To try anything once.”

“And don’t forget yours to me,” he said. “Try everything once.”

Frances seemed paler than usual, but she said nothing, not even when he patted her rear end again, leaving a grease stain on the white lace that she had managed to keep spotless while preparing and serving this meal.

“Hey, Pat, do you know what they call the alley behind our houses?” Jack Delaney did not wait for an answer. “Bonk Alley! Could there be a better place to live? Bonk Alley.”

“I don’t get it,” Judith said. She didn’t. She looked at Patrick. Patrick busied himself, making a little pile of flowers on the side of his plate. He was a polite man, but he had his limits.

“Bonk — it’s slang for screwing.” In some ways, Judith found that Jack’s use of that word even more shocking. “Something I picked up from the Brits.”

“Brits?”

“You know, when I was in London. God, that city is a shithole. They’re pre-verted, too, the Brits. Think they’re so superior to us. But they’re the preverts.”

“Perverts,” Frances said quietly. “The word is pervert.”

“Well, you would know honey. You would know.”

Jack fondled his wife’s rear end again as she collected the salad plates, making way for dessert. “Coffee?” she asked brightly. She made it in a Chemex, Judith observed. Judith and Patrick normally drank Nescafé. He said he preferred it, yet he had seconds of Frances’s coffee.

Frances did not serve Judith’s zucchini bread for dessert. Judith could not fault her for this lapse, as Frances had prepared something called tiramisu. “Could you get the recipe for this?” Patrick asked Judith.

“I’m not sure I could make something like this,” Judith said. She couldn’t even spell it.

“It’s not so hard,” Frances said, “if you use store-bought lady fingers.”

“Do you?” Judith asked.

A slight pause. “Sometimes I do, sometimes I don’t. I made these. But then, I like to bake. It fills the long afternoons.”

Judith felt she had lost a contest, although she wasn’t sure what it was, or who she was playing. She was almost tempted to make a crack about long afternoons, but she knew the women were in this together.

At least Judith could help clean the kitchen. She scraped the plates into the trash — the Delaney house did not have a garbage disposal, score one for her — and tried not to think about the white Silber’s bakery box she saw in the can, a box that clearly had held something nowhere in evidence. Lady fingers?

They parted, promising to do it again, knowing they never would.

The next time Judith walked to High’s, she did not return via what she now knew was Bonk Alley. She did not want to see the white Lord Baltimore truck coming and going, did not want to risk being taken into Frances Delaney’s confidences, confidences she sensed would be too heavy for her to bear. August passed. The gavel came down on the hearings and the country went on, as Judith knew it would. Everything goes on. The weather turned glorious around Labor Day, just in time to mock the children returning to school. The days were shorter, technically, although they still felt long to Judith. The vice president resigned, and while some Marylanders felt ashamed of their native son, Judith and Patrick, Stonewall Democrats, toasted the news, he with a beer, she with vermouth, which she had bought under the mistaken belief it would taste like the white wine that Frances Delaney had served. But the two couples, the Monaghans and the Delaneys, did not socialize again. Nor did the two women. Judith kept to the street, eyes straight ahead, trying not to see or hear the secrets all around her.

But it was impossible to miss, ten days before Halloween, the ambulance parked outside the Delaney house, lights twirling, Jack Delaney being carried out in a gurney, face covered. All the women of the neighborhood gathered to watch, somber yet excited in some horrible way. At least something was happening.

“Is he okay?” Judith asked Katie O’Connell, who may or may not be pregnant with number six under her shapeless coat. Probably better not to ask.

“He’s dead,” she said. “They don’t pull the sheet up over your face unless you’re dead, Judith.”

“But how?”

“Who knows? Heart attack probably. That’s what a man gets, taking up with a younger woman.”

“You mean they — in the afternoon?” The O’Connells shared a wall with the Delaneys. She shrugged.

The news would not make its way up and down the street for several days. Frances Delaney, in her quest for culinary sophistication, had harvested the yew berry bushes at a neighbor’s house a block over, asking permission before she did so. She had researched the berries carefully at the Catonsville library — or so she thought. It turned out the berries themselves were not poisonous if prepared properly. But everything else about the plant was so toxic that any preparation was risky. She had made her husband a tart. The only reason she hadn’t eaten any was because she had given up desserts, worried about her weight. He had awakened with a stomachache and called in sick to work, but Frances hadn’t thought it could be that serious. He was dead by the time the ambulance arrived.

Within a week, a for-sale sign went up in the yard. Within a month the sign was gone, and the neighbors, who had felt sympathy for the young widow, were incensed: Frances Delaney had sold to the first Negro family in Edmondson Heights. The gossip flew up and down the street. Who did she think she was? Where was she from, anyway? Not here. She hadn’t even gone to high school in Baltimore.

A week after that, Judith saw a moving truck pull into Bonk Alley. Not a regular moving truck, a Hampden Van Lines, or a Mayflower. A U-Haul. Not even a U-Haul, just a gray, no-name thing.

But it was driven by the dark-haired man who used to drive the Lord Baltimore Diaper Service truck. Frances Delaney came out with a box of things, caught Judith watching, gave her a cheery wave.

“I’m moving to San Francisco,” she said. “Isn’t it exciting?”

“Is that where you’re from?”

“I’m not really from anywhere.”

“Army brat, right?”

“Something like that.”

A week after that, the men in black suits came to Newfield Road. They walked up and down, up and down, knocking on doors. They said they were insurance investigators. They asked questions about the Delaneys. Nice people? Friendly people? Did Jack Delaney talk much about his work? Where had Frances Delaney said she was going? These conversations were reported along the back fences and the sidewalks of Newfield Road. More gossip, Patrick sighed, when Frances tried to talk to him at night, when he just wanted to watch Kojak. Katie O’Connell, who shared a wall with the Delaneys, had the most to share and tell.

Until the day the men in the black suits knocked on Judith’s door.

“Did Mr. Delaney talk about his work much?”

“Just that he worked for Social Security.”

“Doing what?” There were two men, one named Simon, the other Arthur.

“Oh, goodness, what does anyone do at Social Security? Make sure all the checks go out, I suppose.”

“But did he ever say what he did?” pressed Simon. Or Arthur.

“No. I remember his wife said he liked it better in the Army. That the rules were clearer.”

“He said he was in the Army.”

“Yes, in Germany, I think. Although he also said he spent time in London. I guess things are awfully close over there.”

“And the wife, Frances — she cooked with plants a lot?”

“I wouldn’t say a lot,” Judith said. “There were nasturtiums in the salad, the one time we ate over there. She was a good cook. Still, I would have known she wasn’t from here, once I heard about the yew berries. No one who grew up in Baltimore would ever touch a yew berry.”

“Anything else?” The two men, Simon and Art, looked at her with so much hope that she felt obliged to try.

“She said she made her own lady fingers from scratch. But she didn’t.”

They left, clearly unimpressed by this intelligence, but Judith thought it meaningful. Why had Frances lied about the lady fingers? Later, when Judith relayed the story to her brother Donald, who liked to talk in the way that women did, she asked what insurance company they represented. She went to look for the card, only to realize she didn’t have one. But she had seen one, surely. Something State? State something? Something State Something?

“Jesus, Judith, don’t you even know who you let into your house?”

“Don’t be so paranoid,” she told her brother.

“Everyone’s paranoid,” Donald said. “It’s in style, like sideburns.”

A few days later, her brother dropped by, looking serious. “That neighbor of yours. What did you say his name was?”

“Jack Delaney.”

“And he worked at Social Security? That’s what he told you? Do you know what he did there?”

Hadn’t Simon and Arthur asked the same thing? Judith gave the same answer. “What does anyone do there?”

Donald’s question turned out to be rhetorical. “He was developing computer programs, Judith. Computer programs that don’t have anything to do with senior citizens getting their checks every month. Yeah, he went to Woodlawn every day, parked his car in the lot. He worked at Social Security, but not for them.”

“I don’t understand.”

“Judith, have you ever heard of a guy named Oleg Lyalin?” He didn’t wait for her answer. “KGB. Defected two years ago in England, in part because he fell in love with his secretary. The Russians don’t like that, in-house adultery. They think it makes you vulnerable. So he defected, got to be with the love of his life, in return for whatever information he had.”

“I guess it sounds familiar.” Judith used to be so up on things. What had happened to her? A summer of The Newlywed Game, walks on Newfield Road, ice cream cones from High’s Dairy store, Frances Delaney’s brief and baffling friendship.

“You don’t get it, do you, Judith?”

“Get what?”

“The Delaneys — I have an old friend working for Mac Mathias. This guy, your neighbor. He’s a computer whiz. He was married to someone else. He wanted to be with his secretary. Someone made it happen. Not officially, not like Lyalin. But Jack Delaney — or Boris Badunov, or whatever his real name was, and maybe he worked for the East Germans, not the Russians — this guy, he came in from the cold on the condition that his girlfriend could come, too.”

“The house belonged to his mother. Frances told me that.”

“Yeah, she told you that. Did she tell you where they met?”

It’s a long boring story. “No.”

“Did you tell you where she was from?”

All over. Asia. Europe. An Army brat? Something like that. “No.”

“They brought her over, thinking they were going to make him happy. Wanting their computer whiz to be happy. But I guess the KGB, having lost one agent to his secret love, had a better plan. She killed him. Killed him and took off.”

“Took off with the Lord Baltimore diaper truck driver.”

Donald laughed. “Where did you hear that? He was her handler. CIA. And he was found dead in St. Louis three weeks ago.”

“He used to be parked in her driveway. For long stretches. I thought—”

“That’s probably what they wanted all you gossipy housewives to think, Judith.”

They were sitting at the little built-in breakfast nook in Judith’s kitchen, drinking coffee from the Chemex she had bought a few weeks ago. It really did make better coffee. She looked at the clouds forming in her half-empty cup, glanced up at the kitchen clock. Almost 4 p.m., time to fix Patrick’s dinner. Then it would be time to clean up. Two hours of television after dinner. Tonight was a Wednesday, which meant Adam-12 and the NBC Mystery Movie. She hoped it was the Snoop Sisters tonight and not Banacek, although George Peppard was very cute.

“Donald, how is what you do — talking to people, finding out stuff, then telling other people — how is that different from what housewives do? Isn’t it all just gossip?”

“You have a point there, Judith. I guess it’s a thin line between gossip and espionage.”

“Do you think your boss could help me get a job, the way he did with Patrick? Given that he knows Mathias?”

“You want a job with the feds, not the city or the state? I suppose I could swing that. What are your qualifications? What type of job are you looking for?”

“I type eighty words per minute. And I see things. I want to work at the CIA.”

“You didn’t see two spies under your own nose.”

“I will,” she said. “You see what you look for. Once I start looking for spies. I’ll see them.”

She did not tell him everything else she had seen that summer, things that no one thought mattered. She saw Katie O’Connell, worn down by a baby-a-year and a husband who was never going to advance in his career. She saw Betty Donovan, smoking and weeping on her back steps. She saw the Horton boys, who had stopped trying to burn up things and moved on to suffocating cats in milk crates, cats that Judith freed. She saw ceramic cats nailed to walls, iridescent globes on pedestals, whitewashed lawn jockeys. She saw a laundry truck parked for hours behind the Delaneys’ house. Donald was wrong. Judith wasn’t just seeing what someone wanted her to see. The Lord Baltimore driver may have started out as Frances Delaney’s handler, but Frances Delaney had learned how to handle him before long. He probably knew about the yew berries, thought they would end up together.

“You know I’ll ace the civil service exam,” Judith said. “And with two salaries, we can move up and out of here.”

“Not sure you need to take a test,” her brother said. “Anyway, I’ll see what I can do.”

The CIA meant a two-hour commute to Langley, so Judith settled for NSA, just down the parkway in Fort Meade. She accepted a clerical position, but even that demanded absolute nondisclosure on her part. When her neighbors, soon to be her old neighbors, asked what she did, Judith smiled and said: “I can’t tell you. But I can assure you that we are not involved in domestic spying. NSA is forbidden by law to spy on our own citizens. So domestic spying is just my hobby.”

Then she winked, as if it were all a big joke. The women of Newfield Road — talking over back fences, drinking Tab during the soap operas, running into each other at High’s Dairy store, tying their children to the clothes line, holding frozen vegetables to their bruised eyes, pretending not to see the little boys who tortured living things — the women of Newfield Road said to each other: “Did you hear? Judith Monaghan claims she’s a spy. A spy in Edmondson Heights. Did you ever hear of anything so ridiculous?”