Edward Jones - Lost in the City

“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.

As the House of the Solitary Savior Baptist Church burned to the ground one December Sunday morning, Vivian L. Slater was in her bath, arranging a program of gospel songs her group was to sing at the church. A Sunday morning bath was just about the only constant in her life, and every Sunday God sent she stretched out in a fragrant mixture of baby oil and water and the most expensive bubble bath she could find. On a stool beside the tub, she always placed a huge glass of soda, grape or some kind of cola. She chilled the drink with several small plastic balls containing water that had been frozen. And beside the glass was a large transistor radio tuned to WYCB or to some station broadcasting church services that offered more spirituals and gospel songs than preaching.

If someone telephoned for her while she was in the tub, her husband, Ralph, would answer and tell the caller that Mrs. Slater was indisposed for the time being. From time to time, without her even calling to him, Ralph would get up from reading the Sunday newspaper and come in without knocking and refilled her glass and replace the colored balls of ice. He was seven years older than she and a man of extreme handsomeness, with no sign of sickness, and when she accompanied him to D.C. General every week for his treatments, men and women of all ages would stare at him, pitying a man who was saddled with a cancer woman perhaps not long for this world. It bothered her that the world did not know which of them was sick. As Ralph refilled her glass and dropped in fresh balls of ice, he never once would look at her nakedness.

As the House of the Solitary Savior burned down, she was also arranging a program for the Holy Tabernacle AME Zion, a magnificent church of three thousand members where her group, the Gospelteers, was to sing later in the day. She knew it was the sin of pride, but Vivian no longer got any pleasure from singing at the House, as the members called it; it was something she did only because she knew that for singing there, God would make some small, positive notation beside her name in that book of His.

The House of the Solitary Savior had had but one pastor in its thirty years — a tall, gaunt man who made his living as a plumber’s helper. His wife, an elementary school teacher, was as tall and gaunt as her husband, so that anyone seeing the couple would have mistaken them for brother and sister. In all the time that Vivian had known the Reverend Wesley Saunders, the church had never had more than fifty members, despite the reverend’s boast that he preached more of God’s truth than any pastor in Washington.

About eleven o’clock she was dressed and ready to go. Ralph was in the easy chair in the living room, and that was undoubtedly where she would find him, drunk, combative, that night when she came home.

He said, “Paper say maybe some snow tonight, sugar.” He was a man who loved profoundly and he had not stopped looking at her since she came into the room. He watched her now as she put on her coat and considered herself in the mirror on the back of the hall closet door. She said, “If it does snow, them new snow tires’ll get a workout.” She turned to the side and considered herself in the mirror that way. He said, “You look real good today, sugar.” From the closet she took the slippers and gown she wore when singing. She turned her other side to the mirror. Finally, she leaned over him, put her finger an inch from her lightly rouged lips and touched it to his cheek. She said, “I’ll see you when I get back.” He said, “Okay, sugar. Be careful.”

To get to Diane McCollough, her best friend and the first member she had recruited for the Gospelteers, she came down Martin Luther King, Jr., Avenue and crossed the bridge over the Anacostia River. Generally, she did not like driving, particularly not over the bridge, for having so many cars around her made her feel as if she were a part of some uncontrollable tide and could only be helplessly swept along. But on a Sunday morning the traffic was tolerable, and after she had crossed the river, she relaxed and reviewed the day’s programs in her head. Now and again, she looked at herself in the rearview mirror.