Fire in the Ashes (13 page)

“He swore to me he’d never be away again for another of his children’s birthdays. I don’t know what it was. The look on her face, a child’s face? A sense of shame that he had let her down again? I think that something changed in him from that day on.”

It would not be accurate to say that, since Armando came home to the South Bronx after his last stay in prison, he has made an easy and untroubled readjustment to life on the outside. As a former convict and with the limitations of his education, he has found it difficult to obtain the kinds of jobs that can support his family. He and his wife have been evicted twice. One of those times, the family landed in a homeless shelter. The second time, Ariella moved them into her apartment for a year until they could afford a new apartment.

During that year, Ariella said, she had some lengthy conversations with Armando’s wife, who had been on welfare since the children had been born. “I told her, ‘Get off welfare. You don’t need it. You can get a decent job. Let Armando be the one who takes care of the children. Let him be the household parent for a while. Let him learn to be a father.’ ” She said that she was hoping this would be a way for him to learn responsibility and that his wife, meanwhile, could break out of the welfare trap and find out what it’s like to have some economic independence of her own.

“She went out and got a job at Staples. Then she went to Whole Foods. She’s been working there five years.…

“I’d like to see Armando get into a good job of his own. For now, he does some part-time work, but his real job is his family. He’s always home before the kids come back from school. He doesn’t drink. He doesn’t put himself into positions that are going to cause problems. Inocencia is nine years old. She has a little laptop and she’s teaching him the way to use computers. She teases him because, you know, she’s very smart and little kids don’t find it hard to pick up on computers. It’s not quite as easy for her father.…

“Armando,” she said, “survived somehow. He lives for his wife and children now. He tells me that he feels a sense of peace at last. That’s something I don’t think he’s ever felt since he was a young boy.”

There’s one further chapter to this story.

Ariella has two younger boys. I’ve known them both for many years—one of them, the older of the two, whose name is Stephen, more closely than the other. He was in the second grade when I met him at the afterschool at St. Ann’s Church, where I used to tutor him whenever I was there for an extended time, and often saw him also at his public school. Ariella had learned a great deal more by now about the local schools. So, instead of sending Stephen to P.S. 65, the elementary school to which the older boys had gone, she was able to enroll him in a better elementary school a couple blocks away, known as P.S. 30.

One of his teachers told me that, at first, he was “a lot to handle,” because his moods tended to be highly changeable. He was easily distracted, and distracting to the other children, at some moments in the day. At other times, he’d withdraw into himself and would have a look of sadness in his eyes.

One afternoon, when I was with him at St. Ann’s, we went into the sanctuary with a slightly younger boy who was also at the afterschool. Stephen looked up at the stained-glass windows that portrayed the Stations of the Cross and his eyes filled up with tears.

“I know someone up there,” he said softly.

The other boy asked him, “Who?”

“My brother Silvio,” Stephen replied.

The younger child patted Stephen on the arm until he had stopped crying.

This was at a time when Stephen was going on the weekends with his mother to the prison where Armando was incarcerated. “He did go through some times of deep
depression,” Ariella told me. “There was a good psychiatric center for young children at Mount Sinai Hospital. So I made him an appointment there”—which was an act of more aggressive intervention on her part than she had taken with the older boys, because Mount Sinai was not in the Bronx and it was believed by people in her neighborhood to be a place that served primarily the white and middle class, which may perhaps have been an accurate impression. But Stephen received good treatment there, and his depression dissipated greatly over the next years.

When he finished elementary school, Ariella took no chances on the middle school Armando had attended. Instead, she got him into a less violent and more successful school at some distance from their home where he wouldn’t be subjected to the same peer pressures as his older brothers were. He went on to high school, where he became more social and outgoing than before. He didn’t study as much as he should but managed to get reasonable grades, although she added that she thought the teachers there were “fudging grades to make the school look better than it was.” In any event, he buckled down enough to graduate on time and went to a two-year college, but broke off his studies for a while and worked as a tutor at St. Ann’s. He’s planning now to return to college because he has a more specific sense of motivation than before. He’s developed a compelling interest in the field of criminology with a focus upon counseling and mentoring young people before they get in trouble with the law.

Ariella’s youngest son, a serious boy, is in his final year at high school now. Ariella brought him up to Cambridge to visit me last winter. He’s very bright and studies hard. His grades are good. He wanted to see Harvard University. He doesn’t open up to me as easily as Stephen does. He keeps his feelings to himself, but I know that he has high ambitions.

After Ariella’s bad experience with the church that wouldn’t bury Silvio, she’s become an active and committed member of St. Ann’s. Reverend Overall provides her with an office there from which she does outreach work to other parents in the Bronx. Three years ago she was given grant-support by an Episcopal foundation in New York to organize an anti-gun and anti-violence campaign. Working with a number of existing groups of activists and parents in the area, she helped produce a stirring piece of video in which mothers speak about the losses of the children whom they could not save.

Projects of this nature, and efforts to reach out to influential and supportive sectors in the mainstream of society, have come to be her dedication. She speaks from time to time at universities and colleges. “I spoke at New York University,” she told me recently. “The students wanted to find out how anybody could survive on $16,000 in New York, even twenty years ago!”—which she said “was not the subject I had planned to speak about.”

She holds her own effectively with people in the world of academia. “I don’t need a Ph.D. to talk about the things I know. I’m not intimidated by professors when they question me. I can handle their linguistics and gymnastics.” When they ask her “how to stop the violence” but, she says, “don’t want to hear about the way they put our kids in neighborhoods that are most violent already—you know, ‘put them in the fire, then tell them to stop burning’—I don’t let them throw that at me. I know what an oxymoron is. I’m not afraid to answer.”

Still, for all her reestablished confidence, Ariella lives with memories that no mother who has lost a son, and nearly lost another, can ever put out of her mind. She was not as nearly indestructible as I had initially imagined. She was broken by the death of Silvio. It took her many years to regain her equilibrium and, even then, she could not save
Armando from the troubles that he underwent. But she’s done a good job with the younger children and she tries to be of service to her neighbors.

I find I like to talk with her as often as I can. It feels to me as if I’m standing with her on a very solid piece of ground after a tornado’s passed. Strength, it seems, in somebody who had a lot of courage to begin with, can at last renew itself.

This will be a different kind of story.

Alice Washington was forty-two years old when I got to know her in the Martinique Hotel. Like most others who were in the Martinique, she had been projected into homelessness, not by a single crisis (as, in Ariella’s case, a fire in her home), but by a combination of intertwined events that she had to cope with almost simultaneously.

First, she learned that she had cancer in her large intestine and needed to have surgery. She had, in all, three operations, and they were successful. But in the months before she had regained her strength, her husband, who, she said, had always been a drinker, began to drink more heavily. He soon became abusive to her, verbally at first, then physically.

Unlike many women in these situations, Alice was not willing to tolerate this treatment in the hope that things might change. One night after he had raised his hand to her
and struck her—only once, but that was enough for her—she made up her mind to leave him to his drinking and get out of the house in which they had been living since their children had been born.

She had three children, two of whom were teenage girls. The other was a boy of twelve. Unable to continue working while she was recovering from surgery—she had been a secretary for most of the twenty years since she completed high school and a two-year business course—she had no option but to turn to welfare and to look for shelter via the same chaotic agencies that others in her situation needed to depend upon.

She and her children ended up at one of the EAUs that Ariella had described and which I later visited. For several nights the city was unable to assign her to a shelter. When a place was finally found, it was in a small hotel, but she never got beyond the door. When she arrived at 1:00 a.m., she was told the hotel had no space for her. At 2:00 a.m., back at the EAU, she was forced to sign a paper formally refusing placement at the hotel that had just refused her.

They spent another seven nights at the EAU, after which they were sent to one of the more notorious shelters in the city, a hotel called the Holland, which was on 42nd Street, a few blocks from Times Square.

At the time when they were sent there, only certain floors of the hotel, those in greatest disrepair, were used to house the homeless. The floor where Alice and her children stayed had no running water. “Even the toilet had no water,” Alice said. “We had to carry buckets to a bar across the street,” where someone from the bar came out on the sidewalk with a hose and filled the buckets for them, because homeless people weren’t allowed inside.

“I couldn’t let my children live like that,” she said.

Two days later, returning to the EAU, she had to sign another document in which she rejected the shelter they
had found for her and was given a “referral slip” that she was told she must deliver to a welfare center in another part of town. She spent the next day waiting at the welfare center before they shut the doors on her and told her that they couldn’t help her. It was a long while after that before the people at the EAU figured out what they would do with her.

Finally, after forty-five days of homelessness, Alice and her children were provided with a small room—four beds, two chairs, and a tabletop refrigerator—in the Martinique Hotel. They would live there for the next four years.

It was in the Martinique, in the second week of January, 1986, that she and I first met. She was standing near the elevator on the seventh floor, talking with a man, another resident of the hotel, whom I had met a couple nights before. We chatted only briefly and she made a few sardonic cracks about the garbage piled up and spilling out of barrels all around us on the landing. When I happened to remark that I had seen the manager, Mr. Tuccelli, downstairs in the lobby, she told me to be careful when he was around but, before she could continue, the elevator opened. Two unfriendly-looking guards came out. She cut the conversation off abruptly and went down the stairs.

The following day, however, when she saw me near the social workers’ office in a hallway on the second floor, she walked right up to me and picked up on our interrupted conversation and invited me to come and visit in her room. In the next few months we came to be good friends.

What attracted me to Alice from the very start was her irreverent sense of humor and her absolute refusal to succumb to the passivity that was induced in many of the others who were living in the Martinique. A natural leader among women in the building, she had an acerbic wit and a sophisticated sense of well-directed anger that enlivened her perceptions and opinions. When I ventured an opinion of my own that she believed to be naïve, she didn’t hesitate to
tell me so directly. I sensed that she enjoyed these opportunities to take me down a peg or two because it soon enabled us to move beyond the usual banalities that dominate an “interview relationship” and to get to know each other on a far more equal basis than is common in these situations.

She was a politically sophisticated woman. When she came upon a story in one of the papers that offended her intelligence, she would cut it out and write her often pungent comments in the margins. Understatements and omissions in the daily press in stories on the homeless and places like the Martinique stirred up her indignation. The organized abuse of women in the building, she believed, would have made front-page headlines in the press if those who were the victims were not overwhelmingly black and Latino. When I was initially reluctant to agree with her, she grew impatient and she said, “Come on! You know they wouldn’t tolerate disgusting things like this for women like your mother or your sister!”

Alice was a good “decoder” of the words and subtle biases and innuendoes in news stories. It was she who pointed out to me, for instance, that the papers were referring to the presence of so many homeless people in this section of Manhattan as essentially a sanitation problem. Plumbing imagery was being used in speaking of “a back-up” in the homeless population, which had caused “the overflow” to spill into the old hotels around Times Square.

“They already know the place to put their sewage,” Alice noted cuttingly. “They haven’t yet decided where to put their homeless people. But I promise you it won’t be anyplace where they will have to see us every morning.”