Rachel and Her Children (21 page)

Elizabeth closes her eyes and she says this: “I was hungry and you gave me not to eat. I was thirsty and you gave me not to drink. I was naked and you did not clothe me. I was a stranger. You did not take me in.

“Jonathan, you write this down. When a child is allowed to die because he has no place to live, what is it? It is murder. Write it down.”

I get my pen out of my pocket and do as she says.

“Why do people pray? I’m going to tell you for a natural fact. We talkin’ about me. If you’re not born rich and you are my complexion, you know that it’s going to be hard and it ain’t going to get better. If you have a dream,
then you have something you can hold. You may be low. You may be beaten down. But you say, ‘Maybe, someday—’ So this dream don’t let you die.

“The lady ask you is she dying? She be right: We dying all the time. She dying. So are you. Everybody, rich and poor, we all be scared to die.”

I put on my coat. She wraps the teapot with blue daisies in newspapers and she puts it in a cardboard box. “When you are in New York you bring her this. I can get another one in time.” Then I go down the stairs. Elizabeth goes with me. At the door she kisses me. It’s hard to say good-bye.

H
omeless people and their advocates notice with frustration that the press appears to focus on the issue of the homeless only, or particularly, in the weeks preceding and just after Christmas. There is some truth in this, although it may be less true now than during 1985 when I first visited the Martinique Hotel.

The ebb and flow of seasonal concern applies not only to the press but to much of the population. I am sure that it was not by accident that I was initially attracted to the Martinique not on a fine spring day but in the week preceding Christmas. After that first visit, and a longer visit the next week, I remained in Boston, thought about the families I had met, and then returned to spend a number of nights in further conversations in late January and, again, on four occasions between February and the start of May. After that, I visited only once, in mid-July, before cold weather drew
me back the following November. It may be that there is something seasonal in the attraction that these stories hold.

Autumn 1986: The building that houses the city’s central EAU is on Church Street in lower Manhattan. At about eleven-thirty on a night in late November, I watch a woman walk into this building.

Dark-eyed, pregnant, carrying some paper bags of clothing, Susan comes into the room with a good deal of hesitation. Her husband, a tall man with reddish hair, walks beside her. Seated in one of the molded plastic chairs, she holds a crumpled tissue in her hands. When she isn’t weeping, she leans back and shuts her eyes and twists the Kleenex in her hands. She and her husband, both of whom appear to be in their late twenties, do not speak to each other but stare at a TV set fixed to the wall before them.

I later learn that she is eight months pregnant. They have been staying in the home of friends. Their friends, already overcrowded, have been threatened with eviction if they stay. They were finally asked to leave. They have been here before. They have been in other shelters. They haven’t had a real home for six months.

She sits patiently, crying some and coughing a great deal. On the wall above her head there are these printed words: “If you are eligible for emergency housing you will receive a referral to shelter and transportation to get there. If you do not accept the shelter and transportation you are offered, you will have to leave ….”

Near this sign there is another, somewhat more alarming. It advises families who have formerly been placed in one of the city’s largest family shelters that their children (“six years or younger”) should be tested for lead poisoning. The shelter, nearby on Catherine Street, has been in the news a great deal recently. Opened in December 1985,
it was found in February 1986 by the Legal Aid Society to be hazardous to children and to pregnant women. The New York City Health Department noted that the water heater leaked carbon monoxide. The kitchen was strewn with garbage. Heating facilities for food were found to be inadequate. An outbreak of infant diarrhea, twenty-five cases in one week, had been noted by residents and provoked the city’s health inspection. The city at first declined to close the shelter because, officials said, the problems weren’t “life threatening.”

In March, a pediatrician from Montefiore Hospital had studied the shelter. Terming conditions there “abominable,” he reported that the walls were covered with lead paint. Paint was also flaking off around the windowsills and radiators within reach of children. Worse, large chips of paint removed by painters doing renovation had been left in open piles and plastic bags where children and adults could breathe the lead. The paint on the walls, examined by an independent testing agency hired by Legal Aid, contained “ten times the amount of lead permitted by law,” according to a Legal Aid attorney. Contamination from exposed asbestos had also been present. Children and adults, the doctor said, had been endangered since the shelter opened.

The city refused to close the shelter until April, when it was so ordered by the courts. It reopened the shelter in September, but instead of getting rid of the lead poison, it had simply covered it with lead-free paint. This cannot prevent the further flaking off of chips which may expose a child to the poison that remains beneath.

The chairman of pediatrics at the State University Health Science Center in Brooklyn supplied some added information. Medical treatment of lead-poisoned children, he observed, is “generally disappointing because it occurs after the fact of brain damage….” Damage “to intellectual function,” he added, is often irreversible. “Using children
to discover bad housing is analogous,” he said, to the use of a canary by coal miners to discover noxious fumes. “We can afford to lose some canaries in a good cause.” Subjecting children to such risks, he said, was “not appropriate.”

The city, however, continued to send families to the shelter. Almost 500 people, over half of whom were children, were still housed at Catherine Street in late November. The HRA agreed that pregnant women and children under seven would not be placed there.

Susan tells me she is a high school graduate and had a clerical job before becoming pregnant. Her husband, who held a low-paid job, lived with her and their daughter in an apartment that her father helped to pay for. Evicted after her father’s death, she has been homeless since. Ten days with friends. Two weeks in one homeless shelter. Two weeks in another. She’s been on her feet for half a year, riding at night on subways to the EAU, going at two or three o’clock to a hotel. Her rent allowance when her child is born will be $244. Because of dislocation she has lost her Medicaid. She hasn’t been housed in any one location long enough to get herself enrolled in WIC. She expects her child in three weeks. She has not received prenatal care. Last week, she says, she came here twice. Her child, who is six, was with her.

“I slept here two nights on that bench. They let my daughter use the crib. They gave her tuna fish and juice.”

The first night, after having waited until 5:00 a.m., she and her daughter had been sent to Catherine Street.

“At Catherine Street, they wouldn’t let me stay. They don’t take pregnant women. They let me sleep there in some kind of office, on a cot. We had to leave after about an hour.” The next night, when they told her they were sending her to Catherine Street again, she grew alarmed. “I wouldn’t go. They put me in handcuffs—over there. They said I was upset.”

Handcuffs for a pregnant woman who refuses to be sent into a shelter where the city has already promised not to send a pregnant woman seems a bit extreme. When she tells me, almost with embarrassment, “They said I was upset,” I think of certain women who are close to me—my mother, sister, friends. I try to picture what they’d do or say in such a situation.

She points to a corner of the room: “I threw up—right over there.”

At 1:00 a.m., a man dressed in a suit and tie, a handsome overcoat and hat, opens an office door and comes to speak with her. He asks her why her daughter isn’t here. She answers that she left her child with her mother. For some reason this disturbs him. He tells her this was irresponsible. She explains that she was here last week for two nights with her daughter.

“They sent me to Catherine Street. They wouldn’t let me stay. My daughter couldn’t sleep.” She says she thought that it was more responsible to leave her daughter with her mother, who agreed to keep the child for the night. Once they find a place for her to live she’ll bring her daughter.

The man’s response is puzzling. Is there something here that I don’t understand? “This is irresponsible,” he says again. “I’ll bet that you won’t show up at your welfare office in the morning. You’ll get there late. Tomorrow night I’ll see you sitting here again.” He shakes his finger inches from her eyes. “There’s something lacking in you. You have to be up at 7:00 a.m. You have to get into your welfare office.”

Over his head there is the printed warning about Catherine Street. “Here you are—it’s after midnight. How much sleep do you expect to get?”

Intimidated by his words, weary with six months of sleeplessness, recurrent nausea, aching limbs, she looks down at the floor. He lectures her again about her irresponsible behavior. She looks up at the sign above his head.

The man’s demeanor, self-assured, impeccable, bewilders me. He seems convinced that he is doing something good for Susan by reducing her to tears. “Destructive forms of conscientiousness,” wrote Erik Erikson: “the most deadly of all possible sins.”

At one-twenty another man emerges from an office. “We’re sending you to Catherine Street,” he says. “Do you accept?” She shakes her head. “Then you refuse?” Again, she shakes her head. He disappears into the office.

At 2:00 a.m. the second man returns. It seems they have relented. They are sending her instead to a hotel in Queens. He drops into her hand four subway tokens. She is admonished to be at her welfare office, with her child, in seven hours.

With the help of her husband she gets up from the plastic chair. Her husband hands her one of their paper bags. An elderly policeman who has been observing this steps forward to assist her as she straightens up her back. She thanks him, and in doing so, her face relaxes for the first time in two hours into a real smile.

When I recount this story later to an academic friend in Boston, he looks at first bewildered. Then, in a bemused way, speaking very slowly, he asks me what appears to be an unrelated question: “Have you ever heard of a venturi?”

I tell him I don’t know the word. He says it is a term in physics. A venturi, he explains, is a constricted passage in a tube or tunnel through which air or fluid moves. The flow of air or fluid may be smooth and unimpeded both before and after the venturi; but, in the region of constriction, turbulence develops. Anything—a fleck of dust, a bit of paper—will be swirled about and torn apart. He says the word comes from the name of the Italian physicist who first devised it.

“This place—this EAU,” he says, “it seems to have the same effect on human beings.”

The metaphor is somewhat esoteric (it is for me, at least, since I have never heard the word before) but it may be useful nonetheless. It may help explain the turbulent behavior, often with a lapse in customary shrewdness and strategic skills, that many of the people I’ve described seem to display. Even the most rational men or women may well lose their bearings, or good judgment, once they have been introduced into a virtually closed system from which almost any exit seems implausible or when they are asked to answer questions to which any possible reply will be irrational. This applies not only to the EAU but to the shelter system as a whole.

Homeless families in the Martinique Hotel, as we have seen, are told they must not cook within their rooms. They are then assigned a “restaurant allowance” which, however, they are told, it would be unwise to use in restaurants. In time, they realize that the restaurant allowance is intended to buy groceries they cannot cook in kitchens they don’t have and must therefore try somehow to cook on hot plates they are not officially permitted to possess. If they use the restaurant allowance in a restaurant, their children will soon starve. If they cook within their rooms, they break a rule to which they have agreed. If they are discovered in infraction of a rule, they are at the mercy of the guard who has discovered their offense.

Another example of immersion in irrationality: A mother of three children, living on the twelfth floor of the Martinique Hotel, is told that she must demonstrate her capability for self-reliance by doing all she can to find a permanent apartment. If she fails to do so, she may learn her “case” is closed, her room given to someone else, her children cut from sustenance or taken from her custody. She must therefore clip advertisements from the newspapers,
use one of the telephones twelve floors below her in the lobby, travel to a realtor’s office, fill out forms, look at apartments, and return to the hotel with evidence that she has carried out what is, effectively, the “job” of homeless people.

The social worker who assigns this task also tells her that her rent allowance is $270. Realtors tell her that apartments at that rent do not exist. Her welfare worker tells her this is probably correct. She is told to get enrolled for public housing. Her neighbor across the hall tells her about the waiting list for public housing.

A person given an absurd task, but obliged to go about it with a pretense of persistent diligence, is drawn into a kingdom of futility that would merely seem surreal if she were not simultaneously surrounded by 400 rapidly deteriorating adults who are falling into drugs, depression, prostitution, and disease before her eyes. Soon enough, futility grows into panic, aimlessness, disintegration of her sense that she can understand and grapple with the world. The venturi of the physics lab shreds bits of paper. A social venturi shreds the souls of human beings.