Mulberry and Cathedral

Mulberry and Cathedral is the downtown Baltimore intersection where Maddie Schwartz takes a small apartment after separating from her husband, Milton Schwartz. The corner, which she initially struggles to think of as home, becomes the staging ground for her reinvention. It is a place of contradictions: a residence she describes as having so little furniture that it hardly feels like a home, yet a space where she orchestrates a fake burglary, conducts a secret affair, and ultimately begins the journey that turns her into a newspaper columnist. The intersection is both a refuge and a trap, a place where she is free from her old life but not yet free to live openly as herself.

A New Address and a Staged Crime

Maddie moves to the corner of Mulberry and Cathedral Street after leaving her husband, and the apartment quickly becomes the site of a carefully constructed deception. Shortly after settling in, she stages a false burglary, shoving her engagement ring deep into the dirt of a potted African violet she keeps on a rickety table near the patio door. She methodically creates the appearance of chaos, opening drawers in the kitchen and bedroom and tossing clothes to the floor, then runs into the street screaming for help. A Negro patrolman rushes toward her within a block, and she tells him she has been robbed, her breathlessness making it easy to sound frightened. The ruse works: two detectives take a report and promise to check with pawnshops, but Maddie knows there is no ring to be found and puts the matter out of her head. The apartment, with its sliding door to a little patio off the bedroom and its landlord who is usually stingy with heat, becomes the stage for this performance, and the African violet becomes the silent keeper of her secret.

The false burglary draws the attention of Ferdie Platt, a Black police officer who drops by the apartment two days later, ostensibly to check on her. His visit unsettles Maddie, who wonders whether his all-seeing eyes stop on the African violet as he scans the apartment, whether he knows its secret, and whether it is racist to suspect a Negro cop when she had not worried about the white detectives who took the official report. The intersection thus becomes the place where her lie and her desire begin to intertwine, and where the man who will become her lover first appears at her door.

The Secret Affair

Mulberry and Cathedral becomes the setting for Maddie's clandestine relationship with Ferdie Platt. He calls before he comes so she can sneak down and leave the lower door unlocked, arriving after dark and disappearing in the early morning hours, always wearing his uniform. Inevitably, people see him, and her next-door neighbor does more than see him, Maddie knows. She finds herself wanting someone to hear, to know that she is having sex two or three times a night, even if it is just her motley assortment of neighbors. Sometimes Ferdie bends her over the sink in her bathroom, and while he keeps his eyes tightly shut, she is mesmerized by their images in the mirror, struck by how pale and tiny she looks. Before Ferdie, she had thought of herself as dark. The apartment on the corner of Mulberry and Cathedral is thus not merely a residence but a theater of transgression, where a white woman and a Black policeman conduct a relationship that must remain hidden from the world.

The affair is marked by small domestic rituals that give the intersection its particular texture. Ferdie brings Chinese takeout or pizza, and they eat the food cold, often in bed, between slugs of foamy beer. He likes Ballantine's Ale, so she keeps that on hand and drinks it with him, although she prefers wine or vermouth. He suggests she "arn" her hair, the word coming out as one syllable, and this leads her to a stranger's home not far from the apartment, where she presses her cheek against the gingham cover of an ironing board, waiting for a kitchen magician to straighten her hair. The intersection is thus the hub from which her new life radiates, connecting her to a world of Black Baltimore that she had never known, and to the ironing board where she will hear about a woman named Cleo Sherwood.

A Lonely Corner

Despite the affair, the corner of Mulberry and Cathedral is often a place of isolation. Maddie's mother, Tattie Morgenstern, shudders reflexively at the mere mention of "Cathedral," as if the street name is an affront, and would be more horrified if she realized that Maddie's apartment, while on the Mulberry side of the building, actually overlooks the cathedral. The neighbors snub her, as if she were the undesirable one in this neighborhood of maids and laundresses, milkmen and streetcar conductors. The loneliness comes to a head on Halloween, when a Halloween with no trick-or-treaters breaks her. At the corner of Mulberry and Cathedral, it could have been just another Monday night. The only bright spot is Ferdie, tired from the day's petty assaults on law and order, but also fired up, having talked to the new police commissioner, Pomerleau, who visited the district. Maddie, who once would not have recognized the commissioner's name, now reads the paper front to back, her mind stuffed with the news of the day. The intersection, once a place of concealment, is becoming a place of awakening.

The apartment also becomes the site of violence. On one occasion, Mrs. Corwin, the mother of Stephen Corwin, arrives with a white cardboard bakery box tied with red-and-white string, insisting that Maddie take it. When Maddie protests, Mrs. Corwin thrusts the box toward her, and Maddie notices that the box is red, that paint has gotten on it. Then she sees the steak knife in Mrs. Corwin's tiny fist. The woman makes a second ineffectual pass at Maddie's chest, but Maddie blocks her hand, grabs her wrist, and twists it, so the knife clatters to the floor. Mrs. Corwin screams in pain, and beneath the screams are words: "Stupid, stupid, stupid. I was being kind, helping him put that girl out of her misery. I'm trying to be kind to you." Maddie experiences a sensation wholly new to her, a supercharged energy, a clarity of thought, aware that she should be in pain but feeling none. The corner of Mulberry and Cathedral, which began as a place of staged deception, has become a place where real violence intrudes, and where Maddie discovers a strength she did not know she had.

The Corner as a Point of Departure

Mulberry and Cathedral is ultimately a threshold, a place Maddie passes through on her way to becoming someone else. It is where she learns that her relationship with Ferdie is impossible, not only because he is Black and she is Madeline Morgenstern Schwartz, but because he is younger, because he is a cop, and because she is not going to be a newspaper clerk forever. She can imagine going out in public with a Black man of stature, Sidney Poitier, Andrew Young, Harry Belafonte Jr., but Ferdinand Platt is impossible on many levels, and race is only one of them. The intersection is where she confronts the limits of her own freedom even as she pursues it.

Years later, Maddie is a grandmother, about to turn fifty-seven, and she still looks good. Wallace Wright, recently out of marriage number two, has asked her for a date, and she has turned him down, saying she is seeing someone. She is, a man of forty who is a gardener, and what they do is very much like the arrangement she had with Ferdie, but with different drinks and snacks. She has a daytime arrangement as well, with a pompous old judge, almost certainly gay, who requires a presentable companion. When she is given a column at the Beacon, she becomes one of its first female columnists with license to write about the world at large. Her column may be in the features section, but no topic is off-limits. The corner of Mulberry and Cathedral, where she once staged a burglary and hid her ring in an African violet, is the place from which she launched herself into that life, a life she could not have imagined when she first moved there, a life that began with a lie and a secret love, and that carried her all the way to the newsroom and beyond.