New York City

New York City exists in the novel less as a physical place than as a promise and a reckoning, the fixed star around which Maddie Schwartz's imagination orbits and the destination that ultimately divides her youthful dreams from her adult reality. For Maddie, New York is the city of Greenwich Village, of art and adventure, of a passionate life she was promised but never lived. It is also the city where her first love, Allan Durst Sr., actually resides, and where she must finally confront the man who painted her portrait, took her virginity, and left her with a secret she has carried for twenty years. And in the novel's final revelation, New York becomes the refuge of Cleo Sherwood, the woman who faked her own death and walked away from Baltimore, her children, and her former identity to build a new life in the city that Maddie herself never reached.

The Promised Land of Youth

Maddie's earliest and most formative association with New York City is as the promised destination of her first love. When she was seventeen, Allan Durst Sr. promised to take her away from stodgy Baltimore, to live in Greenwich Village, where they would devote themselves to art and adventure. He painted visions of a future in which they lived as true libertines, caring about nothing but art and love, and he was better with words than he ever was with a brush. Maddie swore she would become someone creative and original, someone who cared not at all about public opinion. The promise was so vivid that she kept Allan out of her mind for all these years, until he returned to her thoughts like Elijah showing up for his Passover wine. The dream of New York was the dream of escape from the conventional life her mother expected, a life of marriage and domesticity in Baltimore. When she finally lost her virginity to Allan on a green silk sofa the summer she was seventeen, he asked her to stay a little later because there was going to be an eclipse that night, practically a once-in-a-lifetime event, and he knew her parents never worried when she was with him. The sofa, like the city itself, became a site of irreversible consequence.

The Journey That Never Happened

When Maddie was seventeen, the most significant event of her young life was being hauled onto a moving truck and transported to New York of all places, but probably not the Village, never the Village. The movers carried the green silk sofa into the van, the same sofa where she had lost her virginity. She suspected they were going to live on the Upper East Side, in the kind of house and household that Allan said he despised. The journey to New York was not the beginning of her passionate life but the end of it, a transportation rather than an escape. Years later, as an adult, Maddie reflects that the worst fate was no one's knowing what had happened to her. She had kept their secret too well. All the promises, the whispered words, the vows made in exchange for taking from her something she could never reclaim, had no witnesses. Only Allan knew how he had spoken of their running away together, and she could not prove it had happened, any of it. The most significant event of her young life was being hauled onto that truck, transported to New York, but probably not the Village, never the Village.

The Confrontation on the Upper East Side

Sixteen years after their affair, Maddie discovers that Allan Durst Sr. has painted her portrait, a debutante's likeness that appears for sale at a local Baltimore gallery. The painting hurts to look at, partly because she must admit that Allan was a terribly mediocre artist, his brushwork proficient but lacking any spark or wit now that she is not gazing at it through a love-struck haze. It also hurts to realize that the girl in the painting ceased to exist when the painting was finished, that she could never be retrieved, the prize that Allan had insisted on having for himself. Maddie asks the gallery's owner how the painting came to be in his possession, implying that the provenance is questionable, that it is clearly a portrait of her that had gone missing from her parents' home. She assumes it would be Allan's wife, forcing him to purge his studio of his trophies, but it is Allan himself, and the address listed is in New York, on the Upper East Side, as she always suspected. Two weeks later, she takes the bus to New York, telling Milton she is going on a B'nai B'rith trip to see Carousel, that she will be staying over at a midtown hotel, sharing a room with Eleanor Rosengren, a lie on top of a lie on top of a lie. She stands outside the address she has for Allan in April, while it is snowing, holding a book as if it would provide an adequate excuse for standing on a snowy New York corner. Eventually Allan comes out, hatless, looking his age, which is forty-four. He had always looked his age, actually, it was just that she couldn't see it when she was seventeen. He is attractive, though, she had not been wrong about that. The one-time coupling in New York was not a mistake that time, she reflects sixteen years later, sitting on a bench in downtown Baltimore. She had broken his spell, and that was why she could finally conceive with Milton. But she also sees how close to disaster she had flown, how easily her life could have been upended by their affair and even the one-time coupling in New York.

The Ghost of a Child

New York is also the site of Maddie's deepest trauma, the ghost of a child left behind in the basement office of the doctor that Allan Sr. had found for her the summer she was seventeen. She tries never to think about it, how her heart felt as if it folded in half when anyone said it was a shame that Seth had to grow up an only child. Milton might have forgiven her for being with another man before marriage, but what happened in that doctor's office when she was seventeen would be something he could never accept. She had been punished for her sins, she reflects, with only the one son when she had wanted a houseful of children, at least three, at least one daughter. She could have been such a good mother to a daughter. The city that promised art and adventure instead delivered an abortion in a basement office, a secret that would define her marriage and her motherhood. Even good girls make mistakes when they're in love, she thinks, but they don't deserve to die for them. Maddie had gotten out alive, but Cleo Sherwood hadn't.

Cleo's Escape to a New Life

In the novel's final revelation, New York City becomes the destination of Cleo Sherwood's faked death and new life. Speaking from beyond her supposed death, Cleo addresses Maddie directly, explaining that she walked out of that hospital and said goodbye to Cleo Sherwood forever, saying goodbye to her parents, her babies, and Baltimore. She did not say goodbye to life, or to love. Her life has been a rich one, a full one, a happy one. She sacrificed a lot, so she doesn't feel guilty about being happy now. Her boys might not have had her, but they both went to McDonogh, growing into fine men, then on to college. Her sister told her mama they got scholarships and she decided to believe her because she didn't have the luxury of looking too closely at good fortune. Knowing her fate, the way she has been able to care for those she loves, she wouldn't do anything differently. She tells Maddie that she wasn't about to trust her with her secrets, that Maddie was careless with her life and her death, and that she is happy, that she got what she wanted. The city that Maddie dreamed of but never reached became the place where Cleo actually found the freedom and happiness that Maddie's youthful promises had only imagined. Where Maddie's New York was a broken promise, a site of loss and betrayal, Cleo's New York is a genuine escape, a place where a woman could shed her identity and build a new life. The contrast between the two women's relationships to the city underscores the novel's meditation on the different fates available to women who dare to want more than their circumstances allow.