Gist Avenue

Gist Avenue is the Baltimore street where Maddie Schwartz rents a small apartment after separating from her husband Milton Schwartz, a move that marks her transition from a comfortable married life into what her mother Tattie Morgenstern unfailingly calls her reduced circumstances. The apartment itself is charming enough—the landlord persuaded her to meet in the afternoon, when the neighborhood was empty and quiet, and at that time of day the place reminded Maddie of a 3-D Paul Klee painting, with warm winter sunlight creating golden squares on empty wood floors and glinting on the tiny pink-and-blue tiles in the bath. All she saw were shapes and light, space and possibility. But the reality of the location soon asserts itself: Gist Avenue, while on the right side of Northern Parkway, was not nice, it turned out. The neighborhood was decidedly mixed, mixed on its way to being not so mixed, and Maddie, a solitary white woman who happened to own a fur coat—only beaver, but a fur nonetheless—found herself uncomfortably visible in her new surroundings. The neighbors snubbed her, as if she were the undesirable one in this neighborhood of maids and laundresses, milkmen and streetcar conductors.

The Staged Burglary and the Buried Ring

The Gist Avenue apartment becomes the setting for one of Maddie's most decisive and deceptive acts. Shortly after moving in, on what she wanted to believe was an impulse, she took her engagement ring and shoved it deep into the dirt of a potted African violet she kept on a rickety table near the patio door. She pulled the sliding door so only a faint wisp of winter air sneaked through, then methodically created the appearance of chaos by opening drawers in the kitchen and bedroom and tossing some of her clothes to the floor. Taking a deep breath, she ran into the street screaming for help, and within a block a patrolman, a Negro, rushed toward her. "I've been robbed," she said, her breathlessness making it easy to sound frightened. The matter was turned over to two detectives, who took a report and told Maddie they would check with the pawnshops, but she shouldn't expect much. Because she knew there was no ring to be found, she put the matter out of her head. The staged burglary was a deliberate act of self-liberation, a way of severing the last tangible tie to her marriage while manufacturing a story that would explain its absence.

The Secret Affair with Ferdie Platt

Gist Avenue is also the backdrop for Maddie's clandestine relationship with Ferdie Platt, the police officer who drops by the apartment two days after the "burglary." "Just checking on you," he said, every word seeming layered with irony and innuendo. Maddie wondered if his all-seeing eyes stopped on the African violet as he scanned the apartment, if he knew its secret, and whether it was racist to think that a Negro cop suspected her when she hadn't worried about the white detectives who took the official report. The affair that follows is conducted almost entirely within the walls of the Gist Avenue apartment. Ferdie would call before he came so she could sneak down and leave the lower door unlocked; he arrived after dark and disappeared in the early morning hours, always wearing his uniform. Inevitably, people saw him—and her next-door neighbor did more than see him, Maddie knew. Funny, she had not been loud before, but she wanted someone to hear, to know that she was having sex two, three times a night, even if it was just her motley assortment of neighbors. Sometimes Ferdie liked to bend her over the sink in her bathroom, and while he kept his eyes tightly shut, she was mesmerized by their images in the mirror. She had never looked so pale and tiny; before Ferdie, she had thought of herself as dark. The apartment became a space of transgression and self-discovery, where Maddie explored a side of herself that her marriage had never allowed.

The Kitchen Magician and the Ermine Stole

The Gist Avenue apartment also serves as the point of origin for a chain of connections that will eventually lead Maddie into the heart of Cleo Sherwood's story. It was from this apartment that Ferdie led her to a stranger's home not that far away, where Maddie's cheek was pressed against the gingham cover of an ironing board, waiting for the kitchen magician to straighten her hair. The woman was tall and broad, wearing a shapeless dress and slippers, her own hair covered by a kerchief. "How'd you hear about me?" she asked, and Ferdie had coached Maddie on what to say: "My mother's cleaning lady." This same network of informal connections and borrowed identities would later surface in Maddie's investigation into Cleo's disappearance, when a psychic spoke of an ermine stole, a very fine piece of clothing that Cleo's mother believed had great meaning to her daughter. The question of how a young, single woman came to have a fur—the psychic's look was disdainful, as if the answer were obvious—echoes the world of borrowed finery and secret transactions that Gist Avenue represents.

The Apartment as a Turning Point

Gist Avenue is more than a setting; it is the physical embodiment of Maddie's choice to leave her old life behind. When Milton learned her new address, he said Seth couldn't visit at all, not overnight, though he offered to vacate the old house so mother and son could spend weekends together. Maddie wondered if Milton had already started seeing someone, and consoled herself that a new lady was probably the only thing that could persuade him to stop fighting the divorce. The apartment itself was hard to think of as home—no Seth, so little furniture—and yet it was here that Maddie began to imagine a different future. It was from this base that she would eventually move to the corner of Mulberry and Cathedral Street, closer to the newspaper world, and it was here that she first began to understand the kind of woman she might become. Years later, looking back as a grandmother about to turn fifty-seven, Maddie would reflect on the arrangements that followed—a forty-year-old gardener who came to her apartment, fucked her silly, and left, very much like the arrangement she'd had with Ferdie but with different drinks and snacks. The pattern of clandestine visits and secret pleasures that began on Gist Avenue would prove to be a template for her later life, even as she rose to become one of the first female columnists at the Beacon with license to write about the world at large. The modest apartment on Gist Avenue, with its golden squares of winter sunlight and its buried engagement ring, was where Madeline Morgenstern Schwartz began the long process of becoming herself.