They were destiny’s odd couple: a Jewish boy and a blackgirl who met in ninth grade as Baltimore City College classmates, lost touchafter graduation but found each other 20 years later and fell in love.
And then, they lost touch with each other all over again, inthe most heartbreaking way.
He was Scott Zervitz, who grew up in Northwest Baltimore’sCheswolde neighborhood, the eldest son of a couple of public school educators.She’s Leslie Gray Streeter, who grew up in Northwood, in the shadow of MorganState University, the twin daughter of a mother with a master’s degree insocial work and a father who works in school bus services.
Approaching 40, Scott and Leslie discovered in 2008 that they were both living in Florida. He was a salesman, she was a features columnist for the Palm Beach Post. They discovered secret affections leftover from high school, fell in love, got married and adopted a little boy they named Brooks, after their favorite old Oriole. (Today, Feb. 28, would’ve been their 10-year wedding anniversary.)
It’s a storybook love affair and marriage. In fact, Leslie’s written the whole story. The book comes out next week, called “Black Widow” (Little, Brown and Company), whose title tells you the worst part of it.
One night after they were married for five years, Scott, 44,had a heart attack and died in bed, in Leslie’s arms, on July 29, 2015.
The book is remarkable. Though her heart is clearly broken,Leslie never gives in to self-pity. She writes with a newspaper columnist’ssense of irony, a wry overview of the sheer absurdity of a young man who’s justasked her, “You want to make out?” and then moments later “lets out twodesperate, involuntary breaths,” and never breathes again.
But the book’s not only about death. It’s about a loveaffair, about race, about marriage and family and mixed-race adoption, aboutsurviving in a newspaper profession struggling to stay alive, and keeping your composureafter fate has thrown you its cruelest punch.
Also, Streeter happens to be a very funny writer with an eyefor the oddball moment and the sweet anecdote.
Like the time “we found ourselves at a mightily fancy PalmBeach dinner party that I was writing about, something right out of a MarxBrothers movie I would not have been cast in.
“We were seated at different tables, because I guess that’swhat fancy people do. I noticed that the only other black people in attendancewere clearing the dishes. One of the ladies at Scott’s table was going on andon about a trip she’d taken to the Ivory Coast to shoot white doves, and allScott could think was, ‘You went all the way to Africa to kill the Jewish birdof peace!’”
And then there was Leslie’s “introduction to kugel at hiscousin’s Yom Kippur break-fast dinner. I was holding up the line trying tofigure out what all these noodle-looking dishes were when I really just neededto move the hell on because folks had been fasting and were getting testy.
“’It’s all just kugel!’ one of his exasperated aunts finallyshouted. ‘Pick a kugel and go!’”
In the face of death, “Black Widow” manages to be full ofhope and joy and humor. Streeter paints a loving picture of her marriage, andof Scott, and tells us, too, of their enduring ties to Baltimore.
Scott was buried in his Brooks Robinson T-shirt.
A former Baltimore Sun columnist and WJZ-TV commentator, Michael Olesker is the author of six books. His most recent, “Front Stoops in the Fifties: Baltimore Legends Come of Age,” was reissued in paperback by the Johns Hopkins University Press.
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