Maison Marconi's

Maison Marconi's is a Baltimore restaurant that enters the story as the carefully chosen setting for a charged reunion between Maddie Schwartz and her estranged husband, Milton Schwartz, in November 1966. It is a place Maddie selects not for romance but for its strategic ordinariness: it sits within walking distance of her apartment, allowing her time to go home and change before a respectable six-thirty dinner, and although its food is delicious, the dining room is overlit and decidedly not the least bit romantic. That very lack of atmosphere is precisely what Maddie wants, a deliberate counter to the grander, more intimate Tio Pepe's that Milton had proposed. The restaurant thus becomes a quiet battleground of intention, where Milton's desire for a significant, perhaps reconciliatory, setting meets Maddie's insistence on a neutral, practical ground.