Fire in the Ashes (7 page)

On the day before Christmas 1985, one of the social workers I have mentioned who enabled me to get into the building introduced me to Pietro when I was in his office. The social worker told him, as he felt obliged to do, that I was a writer and that I would like to do some interviews with families in the building. Pietro seemed to hesitate at first, then asked if I would like to come upstairs and see where he was living. He gave me his room number and I told him I’d be back there in the evening.

The children—Christopher, ten years old, Ellie, who was five, and Miranda, four—were in their beds by the time that I had gotten past the guards and climbed the stairway to their room. The girls were asleep. Christopher was still awake and fully dressed, sitting on the top bunk of the three-bunk bed with a blanket wrapped around his shoulders. A tall boy for his age, vigilant and tense in his expression, and unnaturally pale, he had an emaciated look. So, too, did his father. Pietro, who was over six feet tall and whose weight had dropped from 165 to 120 in the two years he’d been living here, had a skeletal appearance.

His mother—“Grandma,” as he and the children called her—was not there when I arrived. She had fallen in the stairwell on the night before and was at the hospital, Pietro said, for a check-up to make certain that she had no major injuries.

The room appeared at first to be unheated. Then Pietro pointed out to me that in the window opposite the beds there was a broken pane of glass that he had covered over with a sheet of garbage plastic but which still admitted cold air from outside.

That night, and on later nights when I returned, Christopher said very little. As with other children I would meet that winter, it was obvious to me that he was often hungry and perhaps was wondering if I had some food with me. Seeing that look, I’d sometimes give Pietro ten or twenty dollars so he could go across the street and stock up on food supplies. Or else, if I was sure that I could get in past the guards again, I’d go out and buy some milk and cereal and other items on my own. Christopher would climb down from the bed and eat the cereal in silence. He made it clear that he had no special wish to talk with me. I had the sense that he regarded me distrustfully.

Like other boys about his age, he would go out in the afternoons and evenings to panhandle in the traffic on Sixth Avenue or Broadway or else, on the opposite side of Herald Square, on the sidewalk out in front of Macy’s. His father did not want to let him do this but, he told me, “At his age, I simply cannot keep him in a cage within this room. It feels like a prison to him. All his friends are out there in the streets. He wants to be there with them.”

Christopher had apparently become adept at extracting money from the tourists and commuters, and now and then he brought some of the money home or used it to buy presents for his sisters. Mostly, however, he was using it to pay for meals while he was out, his father said, or else
to pay for cheap and gaudy-looking trinkets (phony gold chains and the like) that were popular among his friends, many of whom were older than he was.

Pietro worried that a boy as young as Christopher might attract the notice of police, although there were so many boys doing the same thing that this may have been unlikely. But he had another reason for concern. Christopher was a handsome boy. His white-blond hair, unkempt as it was, pale blue eyes, and sharp-featured jaw made him a target, as his father feared, for older men he might encounter in the streets.

The following year, a man who came into the Martinique with one of the groups that organized activities for children in the shelter began to buy him presents—“Frisbee things that lighted up,” his father said, “inexpensive things at first”—but then he bought him an expensive coat and took him off one weekend to a country house somewhere on Long Island without Pietro knowing where he was.

When Christopher returned on Sunday night, he acted rather secretive to Grandma and his father and, in his conversations with Pietro in the months to come, I noticed that he spoke to him in tones of thinly veiled contempt, as if he felt that, by Pietro’s inability to give him things that other people could afford to buy him, he had lost the right to exercise authority and no longer held the status of a father in his eyes.

His sisters, meanwhile, being the young children that they were, had not lost the sweetness and the trusting qualities of childhood. The girls were thin and had pale complexions, like their brother, but they were playful and affectionate to me when I was there and would chatter gaily with each other and with me and Grandma. And, to their father, they never showed a hint of the hostility that Christopher displayed when he was in the room—although, increasingly (he was nearly eleven now) he was seldom in
the room on the evenings I was there. There were times when I would stay as late as midnight talking with Pietro and, when I left, the boy had not returned.

I had no reason, at this stage of things, to recognize a pattern in the way that Christopher behaved, in distinction from the way the little girls behaved and the trust that they invested in their father and grandmother. I did not know Vicky yet, or Eric, or Lisette. It was a long time after that before I met them at St. Ann’s. And, even then, although I could not fail to notice parallels between the boys’ behavior, I was not inclined to put things into patterns. I thought about the kids and families I was meeting exactly as I saw them: different families, different kids, with the sole exception that all of them had undergone a time of destitution and all had lived for periods of years in places as unwholesome as the Martinique Hotel. Whether or not the consequence of that experience, in each and every case, would be enduring, or injuriously so—or what form that injury might take in kids of different ages and different dispositions—still remained unclear to me, as it does to some degree even today.

Three years after I had met him in the Martinique, Pietro and his family were resettled by the city in a section of the Bronx, known as the East Tremont area, that was only slightly less impoverished and drug-ridden than the area around St. Ann’s.

The first time I went to see them was a warm and sunny August afternoon in 1990. Pietro was at the local grocery, where he was packing bags. He did this in the afternoons to make a little money which, like many people in the poorest sections of the Bronx, he did not report for fear of being
cut from food stamps and the other welfare benefits that he depended on. Christopher was not at home. Ellie was out visiting a friend. Grandma and Miranda were sitting in the living room with a little boy, a five-year-old, whose mother lived nearby.

The boy, whose name was Bruno, had white scars around his eyes. He’d been burned in a household fire, one of many that had leveled buildings in the area. Headlines about fires in the South Bronx were familiar in those days: “
FIERY TOMB FOR TWO BRONX KIDS,
” “
TRAPPED TOT KILLED IN APARTMENT BLAZE,
” “
APARTMENT FIRE KILLS BRONX BOY
.” Bruno had been fortunate to get away with nothing worse than two white scars.

Miranda was sitting on the sofa, holding a black kitten on her lap, one of three stray kittens they had found on the landing just outside the door. Bruno, meanwhile, was sitting on the floor playing with a big white duck—not a toy duck, but a real one—that began to quack at me when I came in the door. The kittens didn’t chase the duck, Miranda said, because his quacking frightened them. The duck, she told me, had been given to her by a man who lived downstairs. She had named him Oscar.

Pietro wouldn’t be returning from his job for at least another hour. So, when Miranda asked me, I agreed to go out for a walk with her and Bruno to a nearby park. Once we got out on the street I took them by their hands, but Bruno fairly flew along East Tremont Avenue, tugging us both after him. We passed a block where heaps of trash—refrigerators with their doors torn off, tattered sofas, pieces of linoleum, and green plastic bags of garbage—had been piled high. But, at the park, the flowers were in bloom: tulips, hyacinths, and daffodils, and white and yellow daisies. The children knelt down on the grass and Miranda spelled the flowers’ names except for one, “hyacinth,” which
she said she couldn’t spell because she’d never heard the word before.

At a food stand in the park we bought a box of popcorn, which we ate on the way home. Walking back along a street we didn’t take before, we passed another vacant lot, surrounded by a wire fence, in which another patch of flowers was in bloom. The children tried in vain to reach them through the spaces in the fence. Bruno settled for a dandelion, which he said he’d bring home to his mother.

Pietro had come back from work by the time that we returned. He scooped up the smallest of the kittens and held it on his lap while we sat down to talk. Miranda and the little boy took the duck into the bedroom with them while her father talked to me about a problem he was having with his welfare worker, who had told him that she thought it was extravagant for them to keep so many cats.

“ ‘You haven’t got enough to feed yourself,’ she said. ‘That’s why we give you food stamps. Do you think your food stamps are supposed to feed your cats?’ ”

He said that they had put the duck into a closet in the bedroom when the welfare worker came. “What would she have said if Oscar had got out and walked into the living room?

“I know,” he said, “it seems a little crazy for us to keep a duck in the apartment. But the children love him, and the neighborhood is so depressing and they have so little. I just want them to remember that they’re children.…

“We feed the cats a little milk. I bought some cornmeal for the duck. It only cost three dollars and it lasts about two months. We don’t have a TV. So it’s something to distract them.”

A month later, he told me on the phone: “The welfare worker came by without notice. She saw the duck. He went right up and quacked at her.”

“What did she say?”

“She says we ought to put him in a pot and cook him.”

“Were the kids there?”

“Yes,” he said. “She said it right in front of them. She says she won’t report me if we want to keep the cats. But she says that Oscar has to be evicted.”

The girls, he said, were crying when she left.

“From a certain point of view, I guess it’s understandable. She figures that we have so little money and we’re asking them for something—for the food stamps, for the rent. So I guess she’s thinking, ‘This is something they can do without.’ And that’s correct. But my children have to do without so much. Having animals to play with is a little thing, I guess. It’s a little ‘extra.’ I guess they figure it’s too much. It’s hard to know the answer: What’s too much? What’s enough? Kids need clothing. They need food. They need a roof above their heads. Do they also need to have a pet?”

I asked him what he planned to do with Oscar.

“He’s still here. No eviction papers yet!”

Pietro was arrested once while he was in the Martinique. He stole an Easter basket for the children from a Woolworth’s store. He had to make a court appearance but the judge, it seems, was understanding of the situation. He let him off with a token punishment, something like a couple months’ probation, or maybe just a warning. His sins, such as I knew of them, struck me as pretty trivial. He loved his kids. He did the very best he could to make up for the poverty in which they had to live and whatever they remembered from the time within the Martinique, which was not, after all, a matter of an Easter basket or three kittens and a duck but was a
real
offense, and one for which nobody had to pay a punishment except for those who were its victims. This brings us back to Christopher.

* * *

In the background of the children’s lives, beyond the quacking of the duck and the battle that Pietro waged (and which I thought that he enjoyed to some degree) against the wishes of a somewhat uptight social worker who was doing only what she had been trained to do, there was a cloud forming. Christopher was absent from his home every time I went there. He was close to fifteen now and Pietro told me that he had no power to control him. Grandma, he said, was the one that Christopher confided in. But Grandma’s bond to Christopher did not strike me as a wholly healthy one. She made up lies in his defense when I asked her where he was at night or if she knew what he was doing. There was something worrisome and puzzling, I thought, about the blindness of her loyalty to Christopher.

Miranda later told me he had pretty much dropped out of school, if he’d ever shown up at his school at all since the time they’d been resettled in the neighborhood. It appeared the public school, whichever one it was to which he’d been assigned, made only the most cursory attempts to find him.

He was already several years below the level of an average student of his age, because he’d lost so many years of education when the family had been homeless. Although the children in the Martinique, officially at least, had been assigned to public schools, many never got there, or, because of bureaucratic chaos or the failure of the schools to communicate with parents, there would be a long delay before they were enrolled. It often took four months or more before the city noticed that some of these kids were sitting in their rooms at the hotel all day without a school to go to.

By the time the family got out of the Martinique, in any case, Christopher’s rebellious attitude and defiance of adult authority would have posed a challenge for attendance
officers at almost any middle school, even if they gave it a real try. It would have required an inordinate degree of compassionate attention, not only in the schools but in a broad array of public institutions, to have had the slightest chance of turning back this very angry adolescent from the way that he was heading.

By his fifteenth birthday, he had been in juvenile detention twice for stealing cars and stripping them. From that point on, he was in and out of court and, within another three years, he would serve the first of several sentences at New York City’s sprawling prison out at Rikers Island.