Cleo Sherwood

Cleo Sherwood is the woman whose fate drives the novel's investigation, yet she is far more than its victim. Born Eunetta Sherwood, she was known to everyone as Cleo, a nickname bestowed by other children who mocked her by comparing her to Cleopatra. Alive, she was a young Black mother of two sons; dead, she became the Lady in the Lake, a name given by Maddie Schwartz, a "nasty broken thing, dragged from the fountain after steeping there for months, through the cold winter, then that fitful, bratty spring, almost into summer proper." Her face was gone, much of her flesh gone. But the novel's deepest revelation is that Cleo Sherwood did not die in that fountain at all. She faked her death, walked away from her old life, and lived on, making her simultaneously the story's central tragedy and its most defiant survivor.

Identity and Background

Cleo was born Eunetta Sherwood, the name she considered her real one, though she preferred Cleo. The nickname came from a school lesson on ancient Egypt: a boy, mocking her, pointed to a drawing of Cleopatra and said she looked like Cleo, "her with her nose always up in the air." Her nose, she insisted, was beautiful—"straight, delicate, perfectly formed. It was like walking around with a ten-carat diamond, only no one could take it from me." She had light eyes, a pretty mouth, and slanting cheekbones, and she never had an awkward phase. Men started coming around when she was fourteen or fifteen, and by twenty-one she was tired of fighting them off. That is how she ended up with two babies and no husbands. She lived in a crowded apartment with her father, mother, sister, two brothers, and her two boys—eight people in all—and there was never a moment's peace. She would slip a book into her purse, a Jean Plaidy or Victoria Holt novel, and tell her mother she was going to the library. Her mother, who never faulted her for picking two good-for-nothing men, let her go. Cleo was her first child and her favorite, but not so favored that she could get away with a third mistake; her mother pressed her to go back to school and become a nurse, a job Cleo could not imagine taking because it meant touching people she did not want to touch.

The Lady in the Lake

After her disappearance, Cleo's body was found in the Druid Hill Park fountain, where it had steeped for months through the cold winter and into the spring. Her face and much of her flesh were gone. No one outside her family was supposed to care. She was, in the official telling, a careless girl who went out on a date with the wrong person and was never seen again. The official story held 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 Schwartz, in a hospital bed ten months later, when Maddie was too groggy and overwhelmed by her own drama to pay close attention. It was Maddie who gave her the stupid nickname, the Lady in the Lake, and began rattling doorknobs and pestering people, going places she was not supposed to go. Cleo resented this bitterly. "You came in at the end of my story and turned it into your beginning," she says. "Why'd you have to go and do that, Madeline Schwartz? Why couldn't you stay in your beautiful house and your good-enough marriage, and let me be at the bottom of the fountain? I was safe there. Everybody was safer when I was there."

The Hospital Revelation

Cleo's survival is revealed in a hospital room, where a woman in a drab, baggy uniform sits in the Formica chair for visitors—the same chair where Milton Schwartz had sat not even six hours earlier. Maddie, groggy and disoriented, sees that the woman's bone structure is striking, her eyes pale beneath dark lashes. When Maddie asks who she is, the woman answers, "I was Cleo Sherwood." Maddie believes she is hallucinating or dreaming, and pinches herself near the base of her elbow, but the woman does not disappear. When Maddie protests that Cleo Sherwood is dead, the woman's presence only sharpens into focus. Cleo walked out of that hospital and said goodbye to Cleo Sherwood forever—goodbye to her parents, her babies, and to Baltimore. She did not say goodbye to life or to love. Her life after that was rich, full, and happy. She sacrificed a lot, so she felt no guilt about being happy. Her boys did not have her, but they both went to McDonogh, growing into fine men and then going on to college. Her sister told their mama the boys got scholarships, and their mama decided to believe it because she did not have the luxury of looking too closely at good fortune. Cleo, knowing her fate and the way she had been able to care for those she loved, says she would not do anything differently.

Narrative Role and Thematic Significance

Cleo's posthumous narration frames the entire novel. She is the one who first saw Maddie Schwartz, on the temple steps a block from the park, when Maddie stood next to her husband Milton at what must have been his father's funeral. Cleo, taking a roundabout way to Druid Hill with a book in her purse, noticed Maddie because Maddie noticed her—two good-looking women locking eyes and looking one another up and down. Cleo guessed that Maddie gave herself the crown because she saw a Negro woman, a poor one at that. She reflects on the strangeness of human courtship, noting that in the animal kingdom the male performs for the woman, but humans do it the other way around. "Men need us more than we need them," she concludes. She also remembers that Milton, Maddie's future husband, made her cry when she was a six-year-old first grader; he was a miserable fat boy sitting in his family's corner grocery, taunting her because he heard another child use her nickname. It was Lady Law who comforted her then. Cleo's narration is deliberately withholding: "Did I tell you everything? No. I wasn't about to trust you with my secrets, Maddie Schwartz. Who could blame me? You were careless with my life and my death." She is glad Maddie found another dead girl to pursue. Her final words to Maddie echo her first: "I saw you once, Maddie Schwartz, before any of this began. You had a man you didn't want. I ended up wanting a man everyone said I could never have." She describes the infinite regress of their mutual observation as a child's joke about painting a picture of oneself painting a picture of oneself, until the picture is so tiny that nothing can be seen at all. In the end, Cleo Sherwood is both the novel's ghost and its most alive character—a woman who turned her own death into an escape, who was careless with nothing except the story the world told about her, and who reclaimed that story by refusing to let it be the last word.