New Year's Eve

New Year's Eve, 1965, is the hinge on which the entire novel turns. It is the night Cleo Sherwood walks out of her apartment on Druid Hill Avenue for what she tells everyone will be a "big, big night," and it is the last time anyone sees her alive. It is also the night Maddie Schwartz, still married to Milton Schwartz and still living in her beautiful house, first lays eyes on Cleo outside a temple a block from Druid Hill Park. The two women lock eyes for a moment on the sidewalk, each tallying the other's looks, and that single glance binds their fates together across the ten months that follow, until Maddie, by then a reporter, drags Cleo's body from the fountain and turns the dead woman's story into her own beginning.

The Night of the Disappearance

Cleo's last night begins in the small hours of January 1, 1966. At three A.M., she goes to her closet to pick clothes for her date, taking care to make sure that none of her friend Latetia Tompkins's clothes are mixed up with her own. "We borrowed one another's clothes, but mine were so much nicer," she recalls. It is not the first time she has made a late date, and she is always alone on holidays — "that's how it works," she says, thinking of her arrangement as "the second shift." Her man is generous, but she always needs more, and she does not make the tips she deserves stuck behind the bar. Everybody knows she has late dates, except him; she hopes he never finds out, but she is sure that those who want to turn him against her see to it that he does. Before she leaves, she pushes her fur coat far back into the closet, making sure it is in a dry-cleaning bag, as if winter were over. "It was for me. Everything was over for me," she says. She goes out on her date with dread bubbling up in her stomach, but she has to go: "The ending had been written, it was out of my hands."

The day itself had been unusually fine for December, a finer one still for January, topping sixty degrees. It was, as Cleo later puts it from beyond the grave, "excellent dying weather." Tommy, who worked the bar at the Flamingo Club, remembered her last words: "They say whatever you're doing on January first is what you'll do all year. I don't need to eat any black-eyed peas to know that 1966 is going to be a great year." Her family, meanwhile, ate black-eyed peas for the New Year, a custom meant to bring luck that her father tolerated despite his disdain for anything with "the faintest shade of hoodoo." When Cleo did not show up on January first to eat with her family, no one paid any mind. They knew the life she was living. "Flighty," her father would say to her mother, Merva Sherwood. "She is a flighty girl and I have to blame you for that, Merva."

The First Sighting

On that same New Year's Eve, Maddie Schwartz stands on the temple steps with her husband, Milton, who has just lost his father. People gather around him, pat his back, clasp his hands in theirs, and Maddie can tell from the way they wait to comfort him that Milton is a big shot. Cleo, taking a roundabout way to Druid Hill that afternoon with a book in her purse — a Jean Plaidy or a Victoria Holt — passes by and notices Maddie because Maddie catches her looking. "Back and forth, back and forth," Cleo remembers. "Good-looking women do that. Lock eyes, then look one another up and down." Cleo sizes Maddie up and concludes that Maddie gives herself the crown because she saw a Negro woman, a poor one at that. But Cleo notes that she was in the minority that day: "You were in our neighborhood and almost everyone else there would have picked me. Younger, taller, shapelier me." She even guesses, from the way people gather around Milton, that it must have been his father who died, and she remembers Milton's father with some affection — a man she cannot say the same about regarding Milton himself.

The Aftermath and the Search

The mild weather quickly ends, turning bitter, followed by a blizzard at month's end. It is only then that anyone begins to take Cleo's mother seriously. There had been rumors that Cleo had gone to Florida, along with Latetia, who ran away to Elkton, Maryland, and eloped on New Year's Eve. Latetia cabled Cleo that she was moving to Florida with her new man, but the cable sat unread in a pile of bills and junk shoved under the door of Cleo's place on Druid Hill Avenue. The landlord discovered it when he came by on January 15 to complain about not being paid. He was ready to put all their stuff on the street, but Cleo's mother made good on her portion, ransomed her possessions, the ones worth keeping. She bundled up Cleo's beautiful clothes and took them back to the family's place, wanting so to believe that Cleo would wear them again. The Afro-American ran the first piece about Cleo on February 14 — "Happy Valentine's Day to me," Cleo remarks — and only then did the police begin to ask questions, if only out of respect. The last anyone had seen her for sure was heading out on December 31, early January 1, for what she told everyone was going to be a big, big night.

The Burden of the Night

The weight of New Year's Eve presses on several other characters as well. Ferdie Platt, the man who would later help Maddie and who worked for Shell Gordon, remembers asking Cleo questions about her clothes — "Whatta you call a coat like that, open in the front? What's the point of gloves with holes in them?" — because he knew he had to be able to give a very specific description later. After he puts the reporter lady in a cab, he does not want to go back to work. His heart is sore and lonely, as it has been every night since December 31. "I miss her. I miss her every day. I might miss her more than anyone else in the world. I didn't mind that she didn't love me," he says. There is another thing he tries not to think about. Ezekiel Taylor's wife, Hazel Taylor, is also drawn into the night's orbit when Maddie comes to her door asking specifically about "what you and your husband did New Year's Eve. Was he here with you? The whole night?" Hazel shuts her door slowly, majestically, wanting Maddie to glimpse the world behind her — the beautiful rooms, the fine antiques, some of them French — and reflects that she has done everything a man can ask a woman to do, other than give him children.

The Reckoning in the Hospital

Ten months later, in a hospital bed, Maddie wakes disoriented after being stabbed by Angela Corwin. She has helped police find the accomplice — perhaps the perpetrator — and she reflects on the unnaturalness of a mother who would happily see her son dead if it meant a better outcome for her. Then a Negro woman in a drab, baggy uniform enters the room, fiddling with the trash. Maddie thinks it inconsiderate that the trash cannot wait until tomorrow. The woman sits in the Formica chair for visitors, the one where Milton had sat not even six hours ago, and when Maddie asks who she is, the woman says, "I was Cleo Sherwood." Maddie is certain she is hallucinating or dreaming; she pinches herself near the base of her elbow, but the woman does not disappear. "Cleo Sherwood is dead," Maddie insists. But Cleo, speaking from the vantage of years later, explains that Maddie was the last person who saw her alive — the actual her, Eunetta "Cleo" Sherwood — not Tommy on New Year's Eve, although that will always remain the official story. "It was you, in your hospital bed, ten months later, and you were too groggy and overwhelmed by your own drama to pay close attention to mine." Cleo walked out of that hospital and said goodbye to Cleo Sherwood forever — goodbye to her parents, her babies, to Baltimore — but not to life, or to love. Her life has been a rich one, a full one, a happy one. She sacrificed a lot, so she does not feel guilty about being happy now. Her boys both went to McDonogh, growing into fine men, then on to college. "Knowing my fate, the way I've been able to care for those I love, I wouldn't do anything differently," she says. "Can you say the same thing?" She did not tell Maddie everything — she was not about to trust her secrets to a woman who was careless with her life and her death. "Thank God you found another dead girl to pursue. I'm happy, I got what I wanted."