Valentine's Day

Valentine's Day, February 14, functions in the novel as a date of double significance: it is the day the Afro-American first publishes a story about the disappearance of Cleo Sherwood, and it is a recurring marker in the private romantic history of Maddie Schwartz. The holiday thus binds together the public world of journalism and police investigation with the hidden, often illicit emotional lives of the central characters. Its appearance in the narrative is never incidental; each mention of the date carries weight, whether as a milestone in a missing-person case or as a moment of personal reckoning in a love affair that cannot be acknowledged openly.

A Public Milestone: The First Newspaper Story

The most consequential Valentine's Day in the novel is February 14, 1966, the date on which the Afro-American runs its first piece about Cleo Sherwood's disappearance. The story appears only after weeks of neglect: Cleo had last been seen heading out on December 31, early January 1, for what she told everyone would be a big, big night. Her mother, Merva Sherwood, had insisted that her daughter had not simply walked away on her own, and her persistence finally convinced people to take the disappearance seriously. The police began to ask questions, if only out of respect. The timing of the article is pointed: "Happy Valentine's Day to me," Cleo's ghost observes wryly, noting that her mother's love was what compelled the public to care. The holiday, conventionally a celebration of romantic love, is here recast as an occasion for a mother's love to force the world to notice a missing daughter. The article appears only after a blizzard at the end of January had turned the weather bitter, and after rumors had circulated that Cleo had gone to Florida with Latetia Tompkins, who had run away to Elkton and eloped on New Year's Eve. The cable Latetia sent from Florida sat unread in a pile of bills and junk under the door of Cleo's place on Druid Hill Avenue until the landlord discovered it on January 15, when he came to complain about unpaid rent. Cleo's mother ransomed her daughter's possessions, bundling up her beautiful clothes and taking them back to the family's place, wanting so to believe that Cleo would wear them again. The Valentine's Day article is thus the culmination of a chain of small, private acts of care and neglect, and it marks the moment the case enters the public record.

A Private Marker: Maddie Schwartz and the Holiday

For Maddie Schwartz, Valentine's Day is less a public holiday than a private index of her romantic circumstances. In the weeks before the Afro-American article appears, Maddie is living alone in an apartment on Gist Avenue, having separated from her husband Milton Schwartz. She has staged a false burglary, shoving her engagement ring deep into the dirt of a potted African violet on a rickety table near the patio door, and has begun an affair with Ferdie Platt, a Black police officer. The affair is conducted in secrecy: Ferdie calls before he comes so she can sneak down and leave the lower door unlocked; he arrives after dark and disappears in the early morning hours, always wearing his uniform. Maddie's feelings about the holiday are never stated directly, but the date's proximity to the beginning of her affair and her new, precarious independence gives it a charged quality. She is a woman who once kept a notebook with a code to remember how far she had progressed with each boy she dated, with entries like K, SK, OC, OB, UB, and US, and who had married the second of only two boys who had gone US. That history of calculated romantic progress makes the secrecy of her current relationship all the more striking: with Ferdie, she has no code, no notebook, only the risk of exposure in every sense of the word. The holiday that celebrates open, sanctioned love thus becomes, for Maddie, a reminder of a love that must remain hidden.

The Holiday in the Lives of Others

The novel also uses Valentine's Day as a quiet point of reference in the lives of other characters, each of whom experiences the holiday's conventional associations of love and pairing as a kind of irony. Donald Weinstein, Judith Weinstein's brother and a closeted gay man, reflects on his own romantic situation in terms that echo the holiday's themes of coupling and concealment. He is a bachelor, content to be one, as Judith tells Maddie, and he has built a life in which his preferences are known but never spoken of. He thinks of himself as a b'hoy, a man who calls the shots and makes the deals, and he takes relief in places like Leon's, a discreet bar on Park Avenue where he can finally be himself, in total. The holiday that celebrates romantic union is, for him, a reminder of a love that cannot be named. Similarly, Cleo Sherwood's own romantic history is marked by gifts and gestures that carry the weight of the holiday's associations. She brought her children presents every week, and after she moved out she began wearing fancy clothes with lots of fur, an entire cape of fur, which she said she was allowed to borrow from the clothing store where she worked. Her son remembers that she gave him and his brother Tonka trucks a few days after Christmas, even though they had just had Christmas, and she gave her mother an envelope and her jacket with the fur on the wrists. These gifts, given outside the calendar of conventional holidays, suggest a woman who tried to make every day a kind of Valentine's Day for the people she loved, even as her own life was unraveling.

The Date's Recurrence and Its Ironies

The recurrence of February 14 across the novel creates a pattern of ironic contrast between the holiday's public meaning and the private realities of the characters. The day that celebrates love and commitment is, in the novel's world, a day of disappearance, secrecy, and unspoken desire. Cleo's disappearance becomes public on Valentine's Day, but the love that compelled the story was a mother's, not a lover's. Maddie's affair with Ferdie, which begins around the same time, is a love that cannot be acknowledged in public, and the holiday's emphasis on open affection only underscores what must be hidden. Even in the novel's later years, the pattern holds: Maddie, now a grandmother about to turn fifty-seven, has a relationship with a forty-year-old gardener that is very much like the arrangement she had with Ferdie, with different drinks and snacks, and a daytime arrangement with a pompous old judge who requires a presentable companion. These relationships, conducted outside the conventions the holiday celebrates, suggest that the novel's characters live their most significant emotional lives in the spaces the holiday does not recognize. Valentine's Day thus becomes a kind of counterpoint in the narrative, a date whose conventional meaning is repeatedly contradicted by the actual experiences of the people who mark it, whether they are aware of doing so or not.