Fire in the Ashes (17 page)

I was traveling again that year and didn’t have a chance to get into New York as frequently as I would have liked. But Alice and I kept in touch by phone and I saw her several times when she was at home.

By early winter—it was the end of 1996—bottles of pills, assembled like a military force, occupied almost one quarter of her kitchen counter. More bottles, related to her HIV infection, were inside her refrigerator door. Once, at her request, I copied down the names of all her medications. The list of medicines, with jagged-sounding names including many consonants in awkward combinations and other nearly unpronounceable discordant sounds, took up more than half a page. I’m not certain why I kept this list, or why she asked me if I would. Maybe, for my own part, writing out the list and then updating it from time to time helped me to distract myself from thinking of the reason why those pills were there. But no distraction could suppress my recognition, or her own, that time was getting short.

She was in the hospital again in March, and a second time in May. The second time was longer than the first. When she was home, she sometimes had an appetite. I brought her a broiled chicken once, and smoked salmon and some other treats and good desserts, from a delicatessen on Third Avenue near 42nd Street, and we had a cheerful evening with each other like the ones we’d had before. But there were also times when she had no appetite at all except perhaps for something sweet—a slice of cheesecake, for example, or a piece of honeydew cut up into chunks—“icy cold, the only way that I can eat it now.…”

One afternoon near the end of June we went outside, because it was pleasant weather and she said she’d been cooped up in the apartment for too long. We sat in
a playground opposite her building and watched the children playing on the swings and slides. She didn’t ask about my mother this time. She lit up a cigarette and exhaled it slowly. Whatever damage it might do to smoke a few more cigarettes seemed unimportant to her now.

The time came four weeks after that, when her doctor called from the hospital and urged me to get on a plane. He said that Alice was in very poor condition. He didn’t know how long she would survive. I flew to New York the following morning and got to the hospital a little after noon. When I walked into her room, oxygen was being fed to her through plastic tubes inserted in her nostrils. Electronic monitors next to her bed were measuring her vital signs. Her arms and cheeks were very thin. Her nightgown only partially concealed the portion of her chest where her breast had been removed.

As sick as she was, she still was eating solid food. She said she’d eaten a little of her lunch but didn’t have dessert “because it had no flavor.” She told me that she had a taste for something like a piece of cake, something sweet, if I knew of any place around there where they sold it.

There was an Italian neighborhood not far from the hospital. I went downstairs and out to the street and walked around to see if I could find a pastry shop. A few blocks from the hospital, I came upon an old Italian bakery. Two young women were working at the counter and were joking with the customers and with one another.

When I asked them to pick out some pastries for me, since I didn’t know what any of these cakes and pastries were called, they joked with me a little too. Then they
asked if this was for a patient at the hospital. I said, “Yes. It’s for someone who’s been very sick.” One of the women filled an extra box with cookies decorated with round faces made of colored sugar and she said, “No charge for this,” and smacked her fingers to her lips like someone tossing off a kiss in an Italian movie, and then wrapped both boxes in red ribbons.

When Alice opened the first box, then the second, and found cream-filled pastries in one of them and cookies in the other, she tried one of the cookies first and asked me where I got them. I told her about the bakery and the women who had waited on me and the one who gave me all the cookies.

She said, “I bet you liked it when they joked with you.”

“What do you mean?”

“I think it flattered you,” she said. “A man your age—tell the truth. I bet those girls were pretty.”

“It’s true,” I said.

She laughed, although she was in pain, and took my hand and gave it a slight squeeze. “If they looked as tasty as these cookies I don’t blame you in the least!”

She tried one of the pastries and asked me if I knew what it was called. I said I hadn’t asked.

“It’s got some rum in it, I think,” she said, eating a little more.

“Is it good?”

“Delicious.”

Conversations about food, or friendly girls, or casual attractions, or all three, remained a pattern for us right up to the end. The last conversation that I had with her did not have to do with life or death, or love or hate, or God or faith, or any of the pain that she was going through. It was about hamburgers.

I was with her in the hospital again that night, about two weeks before she died. She mentioned that McDonald’s
was engaged in “war”—“a price war,” she explained—against its rival, Burger King. She said she thought that it was funny that a word like “war” would be employed in speaking of hamburgers. I thought it was funny too and made a foolish joke about two armies made up of hamburgers holding little swords and stabbing at each others’ rolls.

“Don’t make me laugh! It hurts too much,” she said, holding her hand against her chest; but she kept on laughing. That was nearly the last thing Alice ever said to me. I flew back to Boston the next day to be with my mother. The next time I came to New York, it was for the funeral.

The funeral was in the Bronx. The burial was in New Jersey. At the graveside, Martha spoke the final prayers. Alice’s son and her daughters and a number of her oldest friends were present at the end.

I have not spoken of her children in this story. I never knew her daughters well. They were nearly adults when they left the Martinique and had subsequently married and were seldom present when I visited her home. I was closer to her son, who was nearly sixteen when they moved into the Bronx. He completed high school and had an opportunity to go to college but, despite his mother’s urging and my own, decided not to do so. For a while it appeared that he was drifting. But, within a year or two, he pulled himself together, found a decent job, and stuck with it through a series of promotions. He went on to lead a relatively stable life. He’s a gentle person, and he seems to be at peace within himself.

But it is Alice herself, not her children, not her friends or any other people who’d been kind to her and cared for her, and would deeply mourn for her, whom I want to celebrate. It is the qualities of character and personality that she had revealed to me from the first time that we met, and
much more so as we became closer—the courage that she took from small encounters with the odd particularities of life, the vitality of anger and the outrage at injustice that afforded her an outlet for the strong emotions other people in her situation tended to turn in upon themselves in ways that damaged them tremendously—it is these qualities, as well as the generosity of spirit she displayed to me when I was going through some hard times of my own, that render her unique among the men and women I had come to know during their years of homelessness.

When I
remember Alice Washington today, I do not think about her as a victim of societal unkindness or as one of many women I encountered in those years who were stricken down by illnesses like HIV and cancer well before their time. Victimhood is not the word that comes to mind. A taste for bagels and smoked salmon, and for garlic bread with butter, and for melons that are ripe (not the “sick” and “shriveled” kind) and the price of fresh tomatoes come to mind. The flavor of cream soda comes to mind.

She empathized with those who were true victims but, in her own case, she rejected victimhood. The details of life and the amusement that she took in dwelling on those details, toying with those details, were her weaponry of choice against the many difficulties that she had to face. New York was a bitter place for women of her class and color in those days, but she did not reciprocate that bitterness. She rose above the meanness that surrounded her. She punched holes in that meanness with her cleverness and wit and with her eye for the preposterous. She laughed a lot. She loved her lamb chops and her baked potato. In the details, she transcended.

These are the children of hope.

These are the survivors.

There are many of them.

For some of the sweetest children that I knew, who found themselves drawn into trouble by the age of ten or twelve and fell into “the life of the streets,” as Ariella spoke of it, while in their teenage years, their victories consisted in the fortitude with which they turned their backs upon that life and the dangers that it held. As limited as this victory may seem to some, it was not a small one to their families and the other people in the neighborhood who loved them.

For others, who steered clear of trouble but were drifting for a time in apparent aimlessness after leaving high school, whether they’d completed their degrees or not, victory and vindication, even of a modest sort at first, depended on that moment, never easy to pin down in time, when the
hunger for a sense of purpose and direction coincided with the gradual
emergence of what theologians often term “a sense of calling,” whether it’s a call to service or the strong appeal of a particular vocation.

Some of the kids whose lives have been most difficult are struggling still and have yet to find that place of inner peace in which they can start to shape a vision of contributive maturity. But the fact that they are searching for that vision and meanwhile have retained much of the earnestness and elemental kindness I saw in them as children—and do not put up a slick veneer of toughness to disguise their vulnerable feelings—lends them a quality of honesty and innocence that leaves me optimistic for the future.

There are others, an impressively large number of the children who were active in the programs at St. Ann’s, who, almost from the time they entered adolescence, had started to perceive themselves as virtually unbounded in their academic goals and were looking to a future that encompassed colleges or universities. In some cases, they’d already set their sights upon professional careers. More than a few have fulfilled those aspirations. I will be speaking of these students too, at great length, and joyfully.

But, even in the case of those who were most successful in their schooling, who went on to colleges and universities and completed their degrees, or will shortly do so, and who tell me that they have their eyes set firmly on vocations, even on specific jobs, I suspect that several will strike out in new directions that they can’t anticipate at the present time. That is one of many reasons why these stories will remain unfinished. There will be no hyperbolic endings of the kind we find in unconvincing movies about instantaneous success for someone who climbed out of destitution to dazzle the commercial world before the age of twenty-five or thirty. Success within the lives of those I’ve known for all
these years is as much a matter of their inward growth—in decency, in character—as of their outward victories. And, at the end, uncertainties remain. How could it be otherwise? They still have, as I dearly hope, the best part of their lives ahead of them.

He liked cookies. He was not quite seven. His name was Leonardo. I met him on the first day I visited St. Ann’s.

His mother had a meeting scheduled with the pastor at the time when I arrived, so Leonardo volunteered to take me for a walk to see the streets around the church.

It was a warm day at the start of summer in 1993. He was wearing red sneakers, blue shorts, and a jersey with a picture of three gerbils on the front. He had a bag of cookies with him—very big, chocolate chip—and he kept on munching them and asking if I wanted one the whole time that we walked.

At one point we passed a vacant lot and he looked up at the branches of a tree to which a number of stuffed animals had been attached.

“Bears,” he said.

But when I asked him why the bears were in the tree, he smiled at the animals but gave me no response.

“Okay,” he said after we had walked a while. “I think we need to go up here.” We crossed the avenue and went up a long street, with the grimy buildings of Diego-Beekman on both sides, until we got to P.S. 65.

Leonardo was a small boy, with soft brown hair and dark brown eyes. When he got scared at night, he said, “I go in my mommy’s bed and crawl under the covers.” He was one of hundreds of young children in the area who had chronic asthma. So he stopped for a moment at the top of the hill and took out a small inhaler from his pocket, gave himself a few puffs, then seemed to be okay.

As we turned right on Cypress, he pointed to a small black dog. “Hi, Princess!” Then, to me: “That’s Princess.” Then: “You see? We’re almost there.”

After we had walked a block on Cypress, he asked me, “Do you want to go on Jackson Avenue?” I said it would be fine. When we got to Jackson he pointed to another street. “Do you want to go down there?”

I said, “Okay.”

He hesitated for a moment. “They’re burning bodies there.…”

His mother had warned me before we left the church, “He does tell fibs,” so I asked if he was telling me the truth. He pretended that he didn’t hear. Instead, he munched another cookie and began to hum.

“Come on. I’ll take you there. We have to go around this block.”

As we approached the place where he insisted people had been “burning bodies”—it was on a street by the name of Locust Avenue—a sour, rancid-smelling odor, drifting from the partly open metal door of a peculiar-looking building with a blue gunmetal top, did become perceptible. When we stood outside the door, the odor became stronger.