Rachel and Her Children (7 page)

“A home to me would be like this: You have your dinner at the same time all together. You go out together—yeah, you go out to play bingo. Go to the ice cream, to the movies. Then you all go home together. You sit down in peace together. You read together. You say your prayers together. You go to sleep together and you don’t have to be scared there’ll be a fire. Here in this building, I don’t sleep. What’s on my mind? I’m thinking: There’s so many people, trash piled around. What if there’s a fire on my floor? There’s no fire escape outside this window. I’m on
the fourteenth floor. To me it feels like prison. Only thing is I can walk out when I’m ready. But my children can’t. So I lie up awake at night. I read. I’ll read a book. I read my Bible mostly—start from front to back. Sometimes I read the psalms. When morning comes the radio goes off, it’s 6:00 a.m., I have to get them set for school. I get up. I get them up. I make them hot farina. A hot cup of tea. Doby puts his homework in his briefcase and I wrap his scarf around him, button up his coat. Once there’s something hot inside of him I know he’ll be okay until he gets to school.”

I ask about her asthma.

“What I got right now is not so bad. It’s just a little tightness in my chest. It weakens me but it’s not something that I fear. What I fear is when I cannot breathe at all.

“A month ago I had it bad. Started with me walking up the stairs. I got in my room and there was something smelling strong. It’s ammonia, I think, but very, very strong. They use it in the stairs. I’m lying here. That stuff is in the air. I use my pump”—she takes it out and shows me; it’s an inhalator—“but it doesn’t work. I use it three times and it makes me shaky, but it doesn’t always work. My husband’s here. He runs downstairs. The ambulance comes. They take my pulse. They go down to use the phone and call the doctor and he says to give me something—‘three cc.’s’—they give me an injection and they strap me in the chair. Then they have to wait to get an elevator. One of them is working. When it comes they wheel me in and put me in the ambulance downstairs. Soon as we get there, to the hospital, they put me in Emergency. The doctor came in. He gives me two injections. First he put a shot up in my back, then in my arm. He told me to sit up and gave me oxygen. He told me to inhale it. I inhaled it—from a mask he held. I’ve been through it before …

“When I left he gave me a prescription. My husband was back here with the children and I couldn’t get a cab. No cab would stop. The doctor said I wasn’t s’posed to walk. I had no choice. The walking starts me feeling tightened up and scared. When I get back, the same thing: There’s no elevator working. So I take it slow. I stop at every floor. By the time I’m in the room I feel almost the way I was before. I just made some hot tea and put on a heavy sweater and I took the medicine they gave me. And the next day I was feeling kind of weak when I got up. I rested and I used my pump. I took my medicine. That’s happened three times since I’m here. I ask them will they move me some day to a lower floor. I have the doctor’s letter. I’m still here.”

She said the asthma makes her scared. I ask her what she fears.

“I fear death. I feel like I’m falling in a wishing well, like falling in a deep dark place. All I see is darkness.”

Her daughter, she tells me, had a bad attack of asthma just three nights before. “Same thing. No cabs. Leave the hospital at four, walk back home, get here at five. Make her a cup of tea. Put her to bed. Outside the window, sky is turning: black to blue. It’s daybreak. One day before Christmas.”

On Christmas, she said, they made the children dinner but were interrupted when a little boy who lives next door had a bad accident. “The little boy was playing and he split his head. His mother was so scared I volunteered to go with her. They took us to the Roosevelt Hospital. That’s where I spent my Christmas.”

In the days since my last visit I have read a book that has been given much attention in the past few years. The book is titled
Wealth and Poverty
. Its author is a scholar named George Gilder.
Newsweek
says the book is something
of a bible now in Washington. The book refers to the “more primitive rhythms” of unmarried men and speaks of a “young stud” in its reference to a black man who disdains the obligations of paternity. Unmarried parenthood and the decline of the work ethic are two of the themes of Gilder’s book. “But even an analysis of work and family,” he says, “would miss what is perhaps the most important of the principles of upward mobility under capitalism—namely faith.” Exploring the sources of difference “between entrepreneurial Orientals” and what he refers to as “less venturesome blacks,” Gilder sees faith—its presence or its absence—as the key determinant: “faith in man, faith in the future, faith in the rising returns of giving, faith in the mutual benefits of trade, faith in the providence of God….”

When I read this first, I thought of Gwen. If Gilder is correct, Gwen ought to be a very wealthy woman. Listening to Annie’s final words I think of Gilder’s faith again.

“Do you pray?”

“Every day.”

“Where do you pray?” I ask.

“St. Francis church.”

“Why there?”

“They let you pray. And they have social workers there.”

“When do you have time to go there?”

“In the afternoons. I go at four o’clock.”

“What do you pray?”

“Pray God to make me strong. If it’s a bad day I think of heaven.”

“How do you think of heaven?”

“Like Jerusalem in Bible times. Peaceful. Quiet. People there are civilized and kind.”

Suddenly she laughs and points to Doby. “A TV reporter
asked what he would do if he had an apartment. Doby said: ‘If I had an apartment I would make cheeseburgers!’ The reporter laughed.” Annie laughs. Her husband laughs. Doby stares at them, inscrutable behind those funny glasses. It is the first time I have seen this woman smile in four hours. But her cheerfulness departs her quickly. “When I came here summer was beginning. Summer passed and autumn passed and winter’s almost past and—[cries] I don’t want to be here for another summer. Please, if you could do something to help us to get out of here …” She cries. Her husband sits beside her but she cannot be consoled. Doby climbs up on the bed and pats his mother’s shoulder with his hand.

One year later they are still here in the same room—and are still together.

How does a family stay together under these conditions?

There is a wealth of literature about the loss of certain values that provide cohesion for the family in American society. Less is written of the role played by society itself in the undoing of those decent family ties that do somehow prevail in even the most damaging conditions of existence. How do bureaucratic regulations in themselves conspire to annihilate a family?

Annie says her husband has to live with her illegally. Because of her asthma she cannot go down each night to sign him in. He has to sneak in past the guards, unless a guard who knows him will allow him to sign in. Employees of the HRA tell me that the rules about cohabitation are erratically applied. Their implementation depends to some degree on the caprice of social workers. If a man is already on a woman’s welfare budget when she first applies for
shelter, and if they have children, he may be allowed to live with her. If he isn’t on her budget but can prove he is her husband or the father of her child, he may be included in her budget at the time of placement in a shelter. “However,” according to one social worker, “it is always
very
hard to get a husband on a woman’s budget. In any case, if he is working, she will forfeit benefits and, if his earnings are concealed and then discovered, she will find her case is closed.” Because the jobs available to men like Annie’s husband are unlikely to be permanent, rarely offer health insurance, and could not support a family in New York, the forfeiture of benefits (or, worse, removal from the welfare rolls entirely) poses unacceptable risks. Thus, loyal fatherhood becomes a fiscal liability. The father becomes extinct within his family. If he wants to see his children he must sign in as a stranger.

In some cases, husbands are obliged to pay to visit with their children. In the Hotel Carter, for example, a woman I have interviewed tells me that husbands have to pay $12.40 for the right to spend an evening with their families. Other relatives or friends, she says, have to pay even more. If grandparents, for example, want to spend an evening with their daughter and grandchildren they pay $16.70. This policy, no matter how distasteful, is consistent with an ethos honored citywide.

Other fiscal disincentives to family integrity are even more severe: New York will spend a great deal less to support an AFDC child in the home of her real mother than to subsidize that child in a foster home. A twelve-year-old child living at home in New York City is allocated a maximum of $262 a month for all food, clothes, and rent expenses (1986). If this child were taken from her mother for “abuse or neglect,” the child would then be allocated $631 monthly. If the placement were routine—not for abuse,
neglect, or any other failure of the parent—the child would be assigned about $410. Either way, she would be financially much better off without her mother.

In this book we will meet a very poor woman who has considered giving up her children to the state so that they may be better fed. Unnatural as such behavior may appear, mothers faced with bare refrigerators and with hungry children often are compelled to contemplate this option.

A welfare mother who has no home and has yet to locate shelter runs another risk of being separated from her child. A lawyer in Los Angeles describes a scenario repeated daily in America: A homeless family applies for AFDC. The social worker comes to the decision that the children are endangered by their lack of shelter. The children are taken away and placed in foster care. The parents are no longer eligible for AFDC now because they don’t have children. So the family
as a family
receives nothing. The children have been institutionalized. The family, as such, exists no longer. Measures as severe as these are rarely taken in New York, but the values that permit this to be done in any state are present everywhere.

Crowded living spaces have their own disintegrating force. With two or three children sleeping in the same room as their mother, sexual activity is never more than six or seven feet from their own beds. So either sexual activity must cease (it does in many cases) or it must take place under conditions that appear degrading. An intolerable choice is forced on those for whom existence is almost intolerable already.

The latter point, however, is a small part of a larger issue. This is the question of what constitutes “a home” in terms that foster and preserve a family’s ties. A place in which a parent cannot cook a meal is, to begin with, something different from a home as most of us would understand that word. Sharing food has been traditionally
regarded as the essence of a home or hearth in most societies. Cooking a meal within the Martinique can be a complicated task, calling for strategic skills that few of us can easily imagine. With only a hot plate in a crowded room, every item (meat, potato, vegetable) must be prepared in sequence. So the children have to eat each item separately and must pass back their plates to be refilled. From start to finish, a single meal like this may take two hours.

In most rooms, moreover, there is not enough space for a mother, father, and their children to sit down and eat at the same time. I have yet to see a room in this hotel that has a dinner table. I have never visited a room that had as many chairs as occupants. At best, the occupants may sit together on a bed or, if the bed’s too crowded, on the floor to share their food. It may be a tribute to the stubborn dignity of many people that they do exactly that. Some even say grace and thank God for their blessings before dining off the carpet or linoleum.

Drawing a distinction between home and shelter is, I hope, more than an academic exercise. Shelter, if it’s warm and safe, may keep a family from dying. Only a home allows a family to flourish and to breathe. When breath comes hard, when privacy is scarce, when chaos and crisis are on every side, it is difficult to live at peace, even with someone whom we love.

In the months in which I’ve visited the Martinique, I’ve seen several previously close couples torn apart by quarrels that evolve out of sheer human density within a single room. Children, of course, cannot be sent outside to play when parents are distraught. Where would they go? “Outside” is a hallway or an elevator landing strewn with garbage or a stairway frequented by guards and by narcotics dealers. Holding a family together in the face of these conditions is an act of nerve.

It would not be accurate to say that Annie’s family is a
happy family. No one living in the Martinique Hotel has ever hinted to me that he or she was happy. It is a genuine family nonetheless. It is affectionate and strong and warm. But how much battering they have to undergo—how many alarms and illnesses and tensions. I’ve been back to visit many times. I have never been within this room when somebody did not have trouble breathing.

T
here are families in this building whose existence, difficult though it may be, still represents an island of serenity and peace. Annie Harrington’s family has a kind of pained serenity. Gwen and her children live with the peace of resignation. I think of these families like refugees who, in the midst of war, cling to each other and establish a small zone of safety. Most people here do not have resources to create a zone of safety. Terrorized already on arrival, they are quickly caught up in a vortex of accelerating threats and are tossed about like bits of wood and broken furniture and shattered houses in an Arkansas tornado. Chaos and disorder alternate with lethargy and nearly absolute bewilderment in face of regulations they cannot observe or do not understand.

Two women whom I meet in the same evening after Christmas, Wanda and Terry, frighten me by their entire
inability to fathom or to govern what is going on inside and all around them.