Lost in the City

A BUTTERFLY ON F STREET

The man Mildred Harper was legally married to for twenty-seven years had been dead and buried five months when, standing on an F Street traffic median, she came upon the woman her husband had lived with for the last two years of his life. Mildred had crossed to the island from Morton’s, going to Woolworth’s, her eyes fixed upon a golden-yellow butterfly that fluttered about the median. A child swatted half-heartedly at the butterfly, which rose as high as seven or so feet at moments, zigzagging back and forth over people’s heads and around an advertising kiosk and around the small, lifeless trees. Then the butterfly set off into the traffic heading toward 13th Street. It astonished her to see such a thing, wild, utterly fragile, in the midst of the buildings, the noise, the cars and buses, and she figured the thing must have lost its way. Before long, the butterfly was consumed in the colors of 13th Street.

When Mildred turned back toward Woolworth’s, she came face to face with the woman her husband had left her for, whose leaving had picked Mildred up by the hair and dropped her down at the doorstep of insanity. She had seen the woman four or five times before, always from the back seat of her son’s car. But to see her now so close was like finding that a being from a recurring dream had stepped out into her life.

“Mildred,” the woman said, “I’m real sorry for your loss.”

Two months before, the woman had turned over to Mildred’s son all the belongings of Mansfield Harper, including dozens of pictures of his family. “She didn’t say nothing much, Mama,” her son kept telling Mildred. Then he said, “She just said, ‘I’m real sorry for your loss.’”

The woman stood but a few feet from her on the median. Perhaps if she had said something else, Mildred might have walked away. But she was surprised by the note of sincerity in the woman’s words. “Thank you,” Mildred said.

He had not, this man she was married to for twenty-seven years, told her he was leaving. One day his things were in their 12th Street home (“God Bless This House”), and the next day when she came home from work, many of those things were gone. The imported Swiss razor. Mildred had put his note in her Bible. (“Place your hopes among the Psalms; the Psalms is good luck.”)

“The doctors,” the woman was now saying, “had given him all this medicine, so he didn’t suffer any. Cancer, you know, can kill you twice. Once with all that sufferin, then with the final dyin itself. But he passed on peacefully into the next world.” She was a rather plain woman, Mildred decided, but only because she did not fix herself up. Her hair was combed back with the ends captured in a red barette at the nape of her neck. She wore no makeup and her thick eyebrows grew together, meeting in a neat line over the bridge of her nose that would have been becoming on a woman who fixed herself up.

They had lived, this woman and the father of Mildred’s four children, in a small house on Maple View in Anacostia, where Mildred had forced her son to take her. “I live in Northeast, Mama. I don’t know one thing about Anacostia.” “Buy a map. Get a map. I want to see where they live, where him and her live together.” “You just actin crazy.” “Do what I say.”

“I haven’t been downtown in so long,” the woman was saying. “They sure have built it up.” Mildred’s oldest son had forgiven his father almost from the first day, but their only daughter, Gladys, Mansfield’s favorite, could not forgive. And on those days when Mildred managed to get far enough away from insanity’s doorstep to see hope, she would come upon her daughter tearing up still one more treasure Mansfield had given her. This little piggy had roast beef…. This little piggy stayed home….

“I hadn’t been down here in a long time either,” Mildred said.

“I really miss the way we used to be able to cross right in the middle of the street when all the lights changed,” the woman said. “You know, the lights would change and the people on the four corners could just walk right out in the middle of the street to the other side. I miss that.”

“I remember,” Mildred said. She wanted to go now. The pain was coming back, day by hour by minute by second. She wanted to go on across the street to the things of Woolworth’s. (“If it ain’t at Woolworth’s,” Mansfield had said once, “they ain’t makin it.”) The woman’s plainness continued on down her body, with a gray sweater and a blue blouse, both of which had had all the life washed out of them. Her skirt, a darker blue, was pleated, but it had been ironed by someone who had not quite lined up the pleats correctly, so in some places there was the definite line of the original pleat only a fraction of an inch from the less pronounced line made by the iron.

“Mildred, I hope you didn’t mind that I didn’t make it to the funeral,” the woman said. She expected the woman to say that it would not have been proper for her to be there, but instead she said, “I was not well and couldn’t make it.”

Mildred began to feel she was back in that chair in front of her television, talking back to the people on the television. She thought what an easy thing it would have been to strike the woman. But she looked away, up 13th Street, at the sign at Kitt’s music store, at people looking in the store window. Then she looked down. The woman’s shoes were loafers, black and shiny. They appeared new and there was a dime in each one. It was something her husband had always done, and something her daughter did as well, following her father. (“No pennies in penny loafers for me. Put in a dime, and if a quarter would fit in there, I’d put in a damn quarter.”)

The dimes were very shiny, too, and it slowly came to Mildred that perhaps all the woman had was now in Harmony Cemetery, six feet under, returning to ashes and dust. It came to her, too, that the woman must have been in a kind of mourning, and she began to feel like something of an intruder, as if she had come into that woman’s house and disturbed the woman, kneeling in prayer.

“It’s all right,” Mildred said about the funeral. “His own brother didn’t make it in from California.”

“He ain’t gonna die, Mama,” her son had said the first time they waited in his car for Mildred to get a look at them. They were across the street from the house in the twilight of the day, and Mildred sat in the back. “I see him a lot, and I should know. He ain’t gonna die no more than you or me.” It was about then that her husband and the woman had come up the street, his strong arm around her, lovers, whispering into the woman’s ear every sweet word that had ever been invented. She had expected it, but it still surprised her. (“Say you want me. Say you can’t do without me. Say you can’t live without me. Say you want me day and night, and all the time in between. Say it. Say it now.”)

“Don’t start anything out here, Mama. You just stay put, y’hear? Don’t get out a this car.” But they were not walking that way at all: The woman was actually holding Mansfield’s elbow. And when they got to the house, she opened the gate and led him up the few steps, and they stood on the porch as moths circled the overhead bulb that offered next to no light. Mansfield waited patiently while she unlocked the front door, then she guided him into a dark room.

“Well, I’d best get along,” the woman said now. “I been huntin a winter coat, but I ain’t seen nothin I like. And the prices so high, it make you wanna cry. I’m gonna try Morton’s, then go home.”

“I just come from there,” Mildred said.

She had, toward the end, sent her daughter down there to Anacostia under the pretense of taking some of his things to him. She had hoped that Gladys, after seeing her father, would come back home with some love restored. But Gladys had come back cursing him, and she had cursed him all that night, and all the next day, and well into the next, a Sunday.

The woman extended her hand. “My name’s Elizabeth Ann Coleman, but all my friends call me Lady,” the woman said, shaking Mildred’s hand. “God is with you.” But Mildred knew that that had not been true for a long time, and that it would never be true again. The woman walked across F Street against the light and entered Morton’s. Mildred did not turn to look at her. She went to the corner of the traffic median and waited for the light to turn green. People on either side of her crossed against the light. But she stood waiting as if she had the whole day and a good part of the next.