A Song in the Night (16 page)

Every day I witnessed more human pain. I could not stop
thinking about a particular woman who sought refuge every day at the church. She used to sit, curled up in a ball, in an alcove just to the left of the front steps. The smell of urine and the clouds of flies were overpowering. Even when the temperature reached ninety degrees, she crouched down in a filthy overcoat. She never touched the small cups of water and juice I would take to her. At night or in a rainstorm she would disappear, but she always returned in the morning.

I tried to speak to her, but she never responded to anyone. Eventually I called social services and a New York City medical team arrived. Then her mouth opened. She cursed them violently and insisted she was fine and just wanted to be left alone. Later I saw her mumbling to herself and banging her fist lightly on the ground. For the next few days she sat there, and I continued to take her water, and one day she disappeared, never to be seen again.

During this period one of the readings in our cycle was the story of the rich man and Lazarus, from the Gospel of Luke:

The rich man, who is never given a name, discovers that he has been sent to a place of suffering where he can see Lazarus far in the distance, sitting at ease next to the patriarch Abraham. The rich man calls out, asking for help.

As the words rang out, I kept thinking about the people huddled outside our church. Everyone in the building was concerned about them. But none of us knew what to do.

The church grounds contained several buildings, including a brownstone on Eleventh Street, and it occurred to me one day that perhaps the congregation would be willing to establish a small homeless shelter somewhere on the property. I raised this idea tentatively with the rector of the church and he showed no interest. I talked to Ken Swanson, and he responded with a mixture of openness and caution. I dropped the idea into conversations with the members of the vestry—the board of directors of the church—and they were largely indifferent. I quickly realized that to create a shelter I would have to back up a few steps. Members of the congregation would need to think about the problem, and then decide that they needed to find a solution, and then identify the solution
as a shelter at the church, and finally implement it successfully.

To begin this process, I approached the younger members of the congregation and asked for their opinions. When they expressed the same frustration and sadness, we talked about what to do. Eventually several members of the congregation decided that this was important, and they began to meet and formulate a proposal. Ken decided to champion the idea with the rector and the vestry, who continued to express reservations. The biggest objection came from the parents of the schoolchildren, who worried that having homeless men in a building near the school might represent a threat to the children as they came and left. There were many other questions: Who would welcome the homeless men every evening? Who would remain with them overnight? What legal or medical responsibilities might we have? What training would volunteers need? All of these problems had to be voiced and addressed. I kept an informal list of important decision-makers and kept tabs on their evolving views. Slowly, through the leadership of a growing number of people, the mood of the church tipped from resistance to acceptance. During my second year there, we finally opened the shelter for twelve men, whom we always referred to as “guests.” People throughout the congregation signed up as volunteers for different nights of the week. The nights that I spent there were long and sometimes less than pleasant—light came through the storefront window, the men snored and grumbled in their sleep, their odors could be disturbing, and the actual work of setting up beds, pillows, and blankets night after night proved taxing. But as I lay there listening to them breathing,
I thought, For this one night they are here, and they are warm, and they have found shelter. For a few moments at least, Lazarus had been brought inside the safety of the gate.

In early 1984 I was nearing the end of my two-year tenure at Grace Church. On a beautiful spring day I traveled uptown for my annual visit to New York Hospital to review my blood tests and general health. For nearly three years people around the country had been dying of a terrible new illness, Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome, or AIDS, and doctors had recently developed the first test to see whether people had been exposed to the virus, known as HIV, that caused it. My concern about this had been tempered by the reality that I had already been exposed to many illnesses, including hepatitis A and B, through blood transfusions and I still seemed to be in strong health.

I entered the same building on the East River where I had been born and made my way to the sunlit offices of Dr. Margaret Hilgartner, the director of the hemophilia and medical oncology program. She was a tall, stately woman who had been my physician since I was five. Even though she was sometimes gruff, I liked her because she always answered my questions seriously. Once, while riding in a car with her, I inquired about her life. “Why did you become a doctor?” I asked. “In order to help people like you,” she said quietly, and then looked out the window.

I was now sitting in her office. She carefully reviewed my test results and clinic notes.

“Your liver functions are slightly elevated, but that has been true for a long time,” she said. “In general your joints are doing well.” Then she paused. “Bob, as I think you know, we now have the capacity to test for the HIV antibody,” she said quietly, “and we have your results. Would you like to know what they are? ”

“Yes,” I said.

She turned around and picked one great ledger book from a shelf behind her and dropped it on her desk. She then reached for a second massive book and put it beside the first. I had the feeling that I was looking across at the Book of Life and the Book of Death.

She opened the first book and ran her finger down a list of names until she found my coded number. She then opened the second, looking to match my number with my test results. She peered at it carefully. Then she looked up at me.

“The results show that you are positive,” she said.

“What does that mean?” I asked.

“We don’t know yet. It is worrisome. We will be watching your T-cell count and other blood numbers very closely to see if they drop.”

“And if they do?” I asked.

“If they drop below a certain level, your immune system will be severely compromised and you will be considered to have AIDS. That would be very serious. We have no treatment right now. Until then, we will just watch and wait.”

And then Margaret wished me well and I walked out. Later such a diagnosis was considered so frightening that it
was delivered only in a highly controlled setting, with offers of support and counseling. But it was still early in the epidemic, and I was by myself, on a busy sidewalk in Manhattan, tentatively probing my feelings.

Thinking back on the thousands of transfusions and injections that had never led to any clinical impact, I decided that I would accept her advice. We would watch it carefully. I remember exactly where I was standing on First Avenue when I made a decision. I would not start acting as though I were terminally ill until the numbers started to show that I was terminally ill. Until then, I would live my life as fully as I had up until that point. I returned to our apartment and spoke to Dana. She did not seem to react, though I realized much later that the news set off a depth charge far below the surface.

In the months ahead, America plunged into a panic about the disease. I stood in a supermarket and spotted a magazine thirty feet away whose headline, in huge red letters, read “AIDS: NOW NO ONE IS SAFE.” Frightened people demanded that the government quarantine everyone with HIV on an island off the coast of the United States. Violence flared against gay men. A family with hemophilia had their house in Florida burned down. The conservative writer William F. Buckley, Jr., proposed, half seriously, that everyone with HIV should be tattooed, prompting a furious public rebuttal from my father, a friend of his, who threatened to tattoo Buckley himself.

I watched as the debate swept across the country; as thousands of gay men struggled with the exhausting care and tragic
deaths of those they loved; as families touched by hemophilia lost their beautiful sons, brothers, wives, and husbands; and as medical professionals showed what is best about our nation by committing everything they had to treating those with HIV.

During this period and in the years afterward I also asked myself a thousand times what would have happened if we had succeeded in holding hearings in the U.S. Senate about the viral contamination of blood products five years before anyone had heard of HIV. The hearings inevitably would have focused on the vulnerability of the system to widespread contamination with hepatitis and other viruses. Senator Jackson would have asked whether known viral inactivation techniques such as heat treatment could reduce the problem. Instead, because nothing happened, the products continued to be made and shipped without any antiviral treatment, so that when HIV appeared, it shot through the blood supply, and eight thousand mostly young men with hemophilia in the United States died.

I watched and I wondered, and late at night I worried. My time spent in the sanctuary of the church helped me gain perspective. I slowly began to accept that life, no matter how long we live, is achingly short. Every moment and every emotion is marked by fragility and meaning and grace. As we struggle together against all the currents that are carrying us relentlessly downstream, in the end our only real compass is love.

In my very last months at Grace the finances of the church captured my attention. As a junior member of the clergy I was
allowed to sit in on the monthly meetings of the vestry. They gathered in the ornately carved office of the rector, a miniature Gothic library with soaring rib-vault ceilings and a magnificent row of mahogany bookcases. Every meeting included a report from the treasurer, which mapped out the monies spent and the monies received. To my surprise I learned that the church had a vast endowment—more than $9 million—which created a continuous cash flow vital to the physical upkeep of the historic building. I marveled that the church kept its basic financial information private from the rest of the congregation, from whom most of the revenues came.

As I thought about the endowment, I began wondering where the money was actually invested, and I approached the members of the finance committee. Their normally friendly smiles disappeared and they looked troubled. It really wasn’t a question they could talk about, they said. The clear implication was that this was not a question for the clergy to consider, especially the
junior
clergy.

Yet I persisted. Eventually I obtained a list of the investments from one of the committee members, and as I studied it I was shocked. I don’t remember everything that was on it, but it was clear that no one had ever asked whether the investments of the church aligned in any way with its mission. Red flags fluttered on every page. The church had large amounts of money in military contractors, including manufacturers of nuclear and other weapons. They owned shares of price-fixing pharmaceuticals, casinos, tobacco products, and alcohol. They held stock in companies that had substantial investments in
South Africa and other dictatorial countries. As I analyzed the information and the committee more carefully, it became clear what had happened. Most people on the vestry, including the rector, had no interest or expertise in investment, so they selected a few talented members of the group—bankers, trust officers, attorneys—to create a finance committee. The finance committee then placed the endowment with a conventional firm without restrictions. The justification was, of course, a version of fiduciary responsibility: the church, as a nonprofit, needed whatever revenues it could generate for its upkeep and its programs. The purpose of the fund was to maximize the amount of money it would receive. And if, to do so, the church ended up becoming part owners of and thus participants in enterprises that went against its own principles, that was not relevant. As long as the company’s actions were legal, they were morally and financially acceptable.