World War II

World War II stands as the buried foundation of the novel's 1960s Baltimore, a conflict that ended two decades before the main action yet continues to determine who its characters are, where they live, and what they are willing to do. The war functions as a historical hinge: it pulled families into the city for defense work, launched careers built on wartime reporting, and created the economic conditions for postwar entrepreneurship. But the novel refuses to treat the war as a clean, triumphant memory. Instead, it returns again and again to the war's uneven consequences—the prosperity it brought some, the devastation it inflicted on others, and the secrets it enabled people to keep. The war is the era's great unspoken reference point, the event that separates the generation that fought from the generation that inherited its aftermath.

The War as Economic Migration and Opportunity

The war's most concrete effect on the novel's characters is demographic. Cleo Sherwood's family came to Baltimore during the war, drawn by the promise of Glenn Martin money—the aircraft manufacturer's wartime contracts that turned the city into a hub of defense production. The move did not work out as hoped. "That didn't work out," the narrator recalls. "Nothing worked out for them." The parents drank, divorced, and got back together, a cycle worse than either the drinking or the divorce. For the young Cleo, the war's economic disruption meant she had to find her own way out, taking a job waiting tables at thirteen, a leggy thirteen who could pass for sixteen. The war thus set in motion the very circumstances—poverty, instability, early independence—that would later shape Cleo's adult life and her fate in Baltimore.

The war also created the entrepreneurial opening that Ezekiel Taylor exploited. Taylor, born with the surname that means tailor, started at Hamburgers in alterations, but he understood that a man gets a suit altered only once while he has to get it cleaned over and over again. He opened the first EZ Kleeners six blocks from his starting point right after the war, and the timing was everything. The postwar prosperity, the rise of a Black middle class with aspirations, the desire of working women to own nice coats and furs—all of it fed his business. "Names are destiny," Taylor tells Thomas Ludlow, and the war was the moment when that destiny became possible. The conflict that had drawn Cleo's family to Baltimore in search of work also created the conditions for Taylor's dry-cleaning empire, a business that would eventually make him the respectable face of Willie Adams's political ambitions.

The War and the Making of Careers

For Bob Bauer, the war was the credential that authorized his entire career. He introduces himself with a full résumé: "I served in World War II, came home and married my high school sweetheart, started at the bottom and wrote my way to the top." The war service is the first item in his self-definition, the foundation on which he builds his identity as the two-thousand-pound gorilla who sits wherever he wants in the newsroom. But the novel immediately undercuts this public narrative. The same war that made Bauer a man also, in a sense, unmade his home life. His wife, the woman who inspired "Betty" in his columns, sits in a wheelchair, her body riddled with multiple sclerosis. The war's aftermath is not glory but a sad, dark house in Northwood, where the fantasy life Bauer creates for his readers—the jolly wife who cooks and cleans and makes good-natured mayhem—is a lie. The daughter who would have been part of that imagined family died of leukemia when she was three. The war gave Bauer his career and his public identity, but the private cost is a loneliness so profound that he cannot even accept a colleague's invitation after work.

The war also shaped the younger generation's aspirations, though in a more idealistic register. Maddie Schwartz and Wallace Wright met in their school's ham radio club, where they discovered a shared, intense admiration for Edward R. Murrow, whose London reports during the war had made a deep impression on both of them. For the teenage Maddie, the war's journalism represented everything she wanted to be: creative, original, indifferent to public opinion. She and Wally were going to live in New York City, in Greenwich Village, and lead a passionate life devoted to art and adventure. The war, filtered through Murrow's broadcasts, became the template for a romantic, heroic vocation. Wally, for his part, would go on to build a career in radio and television, eventually becoming Baltimore's Midday Fog, a famous oracle whose wartime-inspired idealism curdled into a comfortable, compromised celebrity. The war's legacy, the novel suggests, is not one thing but many: it made some men into stars and left others stranded in the wreckage of their private lives.

The War as Moral and Historical Shadow

The war's deepest function in the novel is as a moral shadow, a source of secrets and unspoken compromises. Maddie Schwartz, reflecting on her own history, thinks of the ghost of a child left behind in the basement office of a doctor that Allan Durst Sr. found for her the summer she was seventeen. The abortion, performed in that basement office, is the secret she believes Milton could never accept, the sin for which she has been punished with only one son when she wanted a houseful of children. The war is not directly responsible for this event, but it frames the moral universe in which such secrets are kept. Maddie's generation, shaped by the war's certainties and sacrifices, carries its private transgressions in silence.

The war also surfaces in the novel's treatment of race and class. Ezekiel Taylor, reflecting on the changing neighborhoods and the religious Jews along Park Heights Avenue, observes that "there's no one more anti-Semitic than a middle-class Jew." The war's Holocaust, the ultimate consequence of anti-Semitism, hovers unspoken behind such observations. The novel's 1960s Baltimore is a city still living in the war's aftermath, where the old certainties of the conflict have given way to new anxieties about race, class, and belonging. The war is the historical baseline against which the present is measured, and the present is found wanting.

The War's Enduring Presence in the Present

The novel's present-tense action is saturated with the war's residue. When Maddie stages a false burglary to escape her marriage, she shoves her engagement ring into the dirt of a potted African violet, creating the appearance of chaos. The scene is a private performance, but it echoes the larger deceptions that the war generation has learned to practice. When Ferdie Platt, a Black police officer, begins his affair with Maddie, he arrives after dark and disappears in the early morning hours, always wearing his uniform. The war's racial hierarchies, the segregated police department, the unspoken rules about who can be seen with whom—all of it is the postwar order that the characters navigate.

Even the novel's climactic violence carries the war's echo. When Angela Corwin stabs Maddie with a steak knife, Maddie experiences a supercharged clarity, a sensation wholly new to her, aware that she should be in pain but feeling none. The scene is a private war, a domestic ambush, and Maddie's survival depends on the same cold calculation that soldiers learn in combat. Later, recovering in the hospital, Maddie reflects on the unnaturalness of a mother who would happily see her son dead if it meant a better outcome for herself. "What is natural?" she wonders. The question is the war's legacy, the moral uncertainty that the conflict's certainties were supposed to resolve but never did.

For Cleo Sherwood, the war's aftermath is the entire shape of her life. Faking her death and walking out of the hospital, she says goodbye to her parents, her babies, and Baltimore, but not to life or to love. Her boys went to McDonogh and on to college, growing into fine men, and her sister told their mother they got scholarships, a story their mother chose to believe because she did not have the luxury of looking too closely at good fortune. The war that brought Cleo's family to Baltimore in search of Glenn Martin money ends, for her, in a different kind of migration: a permanent disappearance, a life lived under an assumed identity, a happiness purchased at the cost of everything she once was. The war's promise of a better life is fulfilled only in the most ironic way possible—by a woman who had to die to claim it.