1965

The year 1965 stands as the novel's dark genesis, the twelve months in which its central tragedy unfolds and its protagonist's dormant life begins to crack. It is the year Cleo Sherwood, alive and vibrant, walks into a date from which she never returns, and the year her body is found months later, steeped in the Druid Hill Park fountain, transformed into the broken thing the papers will call the Lady in the Lake. It is also the year Maddie Schwartz, still married to Milton Schwartz and living in a beautiful house with a good-enough marriage, first feels the pull toward a different life, a pull that will eventually lead her out of that house and into the newsroom of the Beacon. The year functions as a hinge: everything before it is the quiet, unexamined past; everything after it is the consequence of what happens in these months.

The Year of Cleo Sherwood's Disappearance

For Cleo, 1965 is the year her life ends and her legend begins. In October of that year, she goes out on a date with the wrong person and is never seen again, a careless girl whose disappearance is noted by her family but ignored by the wider world. Her body is not found until months later, having steeped in the fountain through the cold winter and the fitful, bratty spring, almost into summer proper. By the time she is dragged out, her face is gone and much of her flesh is gone, leaving a nasty broken thing that no one outside her family is supposed to care about. She reflects that she was safe at the bottom of the fountain, and that everybody was safer when she was there, a bitter irony given that her death will eventually become the foundation of Maddie Schwartz's new life. The official story will later hold that Tommy was the last person to see her alive on New Year's Eve, but Cleo herself insists otherwise: the last person to see the actual her, Eunetta "Cleo" Sherwood, alive was Maddie, in a hospital bed ten months later, too groggy and overwhelmed by her own drama to pay close attention to Cleo's.

Maddie Schwartz's Year of Reckoning

For Maddie, 1965 is the year the past returns with force. She has kept her first love, Wallace Wright, out of her mind for years, but his reappearance in Baltimore—and his dinner invitation to her home—brings him back like Elijah showing up for his Passover wine. The encounter stirs memories of the prom and the phone call three days later, and of the promise he made to take her away from stodgy Baltimore to live a passionate life devoted to art and adventure in New York City's Greenwich Village. She had sworn she would be someone creative and original, someone who cared not at all about public opinion, but instead she finds herself in a kosher household where the only concession to Judaism is the refusal to mix meat and dairy, and where she and Milton feel superior to the more religious Jews along Park Heights Avenue. The dinner with Wallace Wright exposes the gap between the life she imagined and the life she has, and it sets her mind racing. She falls asleep paging through an imaginary calendar, trying to calculate the best time to leave her marriage, settling on November 30, twenty days after her thirty-seventh birthday. The year 1965 is thus not only the year of Cleo's death but the year Maddie begins to plan her own rebirth.

A Year of Hidden Lives and Public Facades

The year also exposes the secret lives of those around Maddie. Bob Bauer, the veteran reporter who will later help her, goes home to a sad, dark house in Northwood, where the woman who inspired "Betty" in his columns sits in a wheelchair, her body riddled with MS, drinking all day. In his columns, "Betty" goes to dances and makes good-natured mayhem, but the real woman can no longer clean, much less cook. The son lives in California; the daughter died of leukemia when she was three. Bauer reflects that everyone has secrets, and that he will find a way to write around Maddie's, even as he suspects her source is a man, because a woman like her always has a man. The year is also when the political landscape begins to shift: Spiro Agnew, running for governor, has contacted Edna Sperry, offering her the press secretary's job, which she counters by demanding a cabinet post, preferably Commerce. She then reaches out to Congressman Sickles, the likely Democratic nominee, and tells him that Agnew wants her, positioning herself for a win-win come November. The year 1965 is thus a time of calculation and concealment, where public personas are carefully constructed and private truths are buried.

The Year's Enduring Legacy

The events of 1965 cast a long shadow forward. By October 1985, Maddie Schwartz is a celebrated columnist at the Beacon, introduced at the Woman's Club of Roland Park as a woman whose career began with a harrowing first-person account of her near death at the hands of Angela Corwin. The year 1965 is the seed of that career, the moment when Cleo's death and Maddie's ambition first intersect. Cleo, speaking from beyond the grave, notes that Maddie came in at the end of her story and turned it into her beginning, asking why she couldn't have stayed in her beautiful house and let her be at the bottom of the fountain. The year is also the origin of the novel's own historical grounding: the author's note explains that the book's small details are largely factual, and that the two murders at its center are inspired by two cases from 1969, while the gubernatorial race in Maryland in 1966 is represented accurately, down to the weather on the day after the primary. The year 1965, then, is not merely a date but a point of origin, the moment when the lives of a murdered Black woman and a restless Jewish housewife become entangled in a way that will define both of their afterlives.