Fire in the Ashes (9 page)

During this time, Pietro kept in contact with me, mostly in long letters written from the room that he was sharing with his mother. His letters began, typically, on a long and crowded page, would continue on another page if he had another piece of paper, and then on smaller scraps of paper or the backs of envelopes or whatever other bits of paper he might have around.

What came across consistently was the comfort he received from knowing that Miranda never let too many days go by without checking up on him and that her sister’s situation with her husband and his family seemed secure and, of course, the happiness he took in seeing his new grandson when Miranda brought him there to visit him.

His greatest worry had to do with Grandma, who was over eighty-five years old by now and had started to display the symptoms of Alzheimer’s. He came back to their room one night and found she wasn’t there and had to go into the streets and look around for several blocks until he found her sitting on a corner, looking lost and scared. He recognized that he might need to put her in a nursing home before too long and, because he’d never lived without her since his wife had died, I think he felt a sense of dread, perhaps the kind of panic that a child might have felt—as if his mother’s
presence in his life gave him his only sense of continuity and safety.

A few months later: “The time I feared the most has come. God knows how hard it is to be apart from her. The days are not the same.” But, he wrote, “it’s safe to say it was the right decision. I know she’s getting the right diet, healthy meals. People there making sure she gets her medicines on time.”

He reminisced about an afternoon when he was in the Martinique and Grandma had invited me to join them for Thanksgiving. “My mother was so proud that she could make a real Thanksgiving dinner for us on a hot plate, which was all we had. I know you will remember this, because you wrote about it in your book.” He made a reference to one of the guards at the hotel who refused to let me go upstairs at first and made me wait there in the lobby for an hour without telling them that I was there. “But we did it! Grandma kept the dinner warm. And she was so happy. Thank God for those memories!”

A year later: “As you can see, I got some paper I can write on.” After telling me he’d seen his mother “at the home,” he reverted to his thoughts about the time we’d met and he told me something that he’d never said before. “In all honesty,” he wrote, “I didn’t trust you at the start.
So many people coming there at Christmas—feeling good about themselves. Looking at the horror show. Land of the Living Dead.…” He said he didn’t start to trust me until I kept coming back. “I’m glad you did, because you got to know us good. And you got to know the girls.” That, he said, “is something that I’m thankful for.”

He also reminisced about a pleasant kind of teasing, a good-natured to-and-fro, that had evolved between us, after we had gotten to be friends, because of the baseball rivalry between New York and Boston. He was, of course,
a Yankees fan. When I told him I had lived most of my life in Boston, he could not resist the opportunity to convey his sympathies to me every time Boston came to play there in the Bronx. In his letters, he continued teasing me. It was something trivial, but light-hearted and familiar, that he was holding on to even when the other items in a letter were not light at all.

In three of his letters he went into detail about Christopher. In the first letter, which had followed shortly after Christopher came home from prison but before he started breaking his parole, Pietro sounded somewhat optimistic. “My son just got a job about a week ago. He’s doing well, Jonathan, and with the job I think that he feels good about himself.… Good news there. He’s acting more responsibly.”

Another letter: “I seen my son today. Miranda brought him here to visit me. He says he’s going to apply to college.” I didn’t want to second-guess Pietro, but I wondered whether Christopher might have had in mind one of those job-related institutes that many people in the poorest neighborhoods who have only meager education, and little understanding of distinctions between different kinds of higher education, speak of interchangeably as “colleges.” It didn’t seem believable to me that, after all the years of schooling he had missed, he would have the rudimentary skills that would be prerequisites for college.

But there were two lines in the letter that I wanted very much to find believable. “Christopher,” Pietro said, “told me, ‘You look good, Pop.’ He hugged me, Jonathan! He said he wanted to see more of me.”

The comfort he derived from this one moment of affection did not, however, last for long. In a subsequent letter he appeared crestfallen because of a painful confrontation that his son provoked by what amounted to an act of thievery from Grandma.

Grandma, as I’ve mentioned, had a blind spot when it came to Christopher, and her inability to gauge his sense of judgment, as well as his ethical reliability, had worsened with the onset of dementia. At some date I’ve been unable to pin down, she had given Christopher the legal right to oversee financial matters for her, such as a small widow’s pension she received and which she’d been using through the years to help Pietro and the children—all three children, and not solely Christopher.

It turned out there was an accumulation of a fair amount of money in her pension fund of which, apparently, she’d been unaware. Christopher, according to Miranda, “decided that he had the right to take this money for himself” and not share it with his sisters. “Daddy was opposed to this. He knew that Grandma still might have expenses that we’d need to pay for while she was still living.” Whatever was left upon her death, Pietro said, should be divided equally.

In his letter, Pietro did not go into these details. He simply said, “My son has disappointed me. He’s trying to get hold of money that does not belong to him. When I told him I would not permit this, he was very rude to me. I told him, ‘I’m your father. You’re my son. I want you to obey me.’ ” But Christopher, he said, had suddenly grown cold again. “My son has turned away from me.”

Miranda said that it was worse than that. “When Daddy said it wasn’t right for him to take the money, my brother really slammed him—‘I’m the one in charge of things.’ He could be a monster.”

Starting in the winter of 2005, about a year after Grandma went into the nursing home, there were references in Pietro’s letters to difficulties he was having with a
growing weakness in his arms and legs, which, according to the doctors he had seen, was the consequence of a debilitation of bone structure.

The factors that had led to this debilitation were something of a mystery to me, and they would remain so. It may be that he was leaving something out. It may be that he did not entirely understand whatever explanation or whatever diagnostic possibilities a doctor had conveyed to him. He did say it was growing hard for him to keep on with the work he had been doing. Apart from packing bags and bringing them to the homes of older people who did not have strength enough to carry them, he also had a part-time job for a man who owned a furniture and dry-goods store. He would pay Pietro as much as forty dollars in a day for moving heavy pieces out onto the sidewalk for display and moving them inside again when the store was closing.

“Jonathan,” he said, “I’m only fifty-five years old, but my legs are giving up on me.”

Within another year he had to give up both these jobs as his body had progressively grown weaker. In one of the last letters that he sent me, he indicated that his health had gone into a steep decline. In the same letter he also said that he had moved into another rented room, which he thought might be the reason why the letters I was writing were not reaching him or, if he got them, only after long delays.

“Jonathan, my friend,” he wrote, “I got two letters from you in one day and I have so much to say. My health is broken but my hands aren’t broken, so I still can write to you.…

“These are trying times for me. Some days there is nothing left except my will. I know that God in His ways has some reason for what has befallen me, but I can’t surrender for my children’s sake. I need a lot of doctor care and I’m keeping my appointments but I feel I’m fighting without weapons.”

He spoke of “God’s intentions” for him in this time of weakness, and later in the letter he made a reference to God’s “plan,” which he said he did not know but that he knew he had no other choice but to accept.

Pietro rarely spoke to me about religion in the years I’d known him, but Miranda said he’d been religious as a child and had gone to church each Sunday with his mother until he was twelve years old. It seemed that in his sickness he was reaching back for this. He also spoke again about how much he’d counted on his mother and how much he missed her. God and Grandma seemed to come together at this moment in his memory.

In the only other letter he had strength to write, he said that he was “counting up my blessings.… Both my daughters grew up into healthy women. In the days in the hotel I never thought we’d get this far. I didn’t dare to think ahead. So that’s one thing I’m thankful for. Ellie has her children and Miranda has her little boy. And she’s been so good to me and kind to me and patient with me, Jonathan! I guess you know she’s always been my angel and I know she’s strong of heart and she’s out there kicking. God knows she took a licking. Won’t say more about that now.…

“Hope my writing’s not too bad. Please excuse. Out of paper.

“Goodbye Friend. Until next time, Pietro.”

It was not long after that before Miranda had to move him to a place that she first referred to as “a rehabilitation center” but which, as she clarified this later, was actually a hospice for chronically ill people. He was in a wheelchair now, she told me. On occasion, if a friend who had a car would help her, she would bring him to her home to visit and have dinner, and her sister and her children would come over. I noticed that she didn’t say whether Christopher was there, and I didn’t ask her.

Pietro had a stroke that winter and, although he
partially recovered, the damage to his heart and pulmonary function, according to the doctor that Miranda spoke to, left him with a very poor prognosis. It was, the doctor said, unlikely that he would survive for long.

At the end, Miranda said, “he was going back and forth into the hospital. He went in a final time a couple weeks before he died. He had the nerve to ask me for a cigarette! He cursed me out when I said they wouldn’t let him smoke there. And, besides, I told him that I didn’t have one anyway. So then I said, ‘Okay, Daddy, I’ll go out and buy you some.’ He cursed me out some more, but it was all in fun.… Two days later, he was dead. I’d signed the DNR six months ahead.”

Pietro’s death preceded that of Grandma by only a few months. He never did achieve the reconciliation with his son that he had prayed for. Of all the disappointments he had undergone, it was this, Miranda said, that she believed had been most painful for him.

Pietro’s long-enduring anguish over Christopher was, of course, a very different matter from the kind of long, lamenting sorrow Vicky underwent as Eric slipped away from her. And Miranda’s often torturous relationship with Christopher, for as long as she could keep him in her home, was obviously very different from the bond between Lisette and Eric, who had not subjected her to the financial exploitation that Miranda underwent. Still, there are similarities. The survival and the stamina of the younger sister and the growing hardness and the loss of stable bearings in the older brother are what I had in mind in saying, as I did, that I did not look for “patterns” but could not escape the sense that there were parallels.

Christopher and Eric were not the only boys I knew who received their first induction into cynical behavior, distancing, dishonesty, and patterns of evasiveness in the
homeless shelters and in the years that followed when they were resettled in impoverished neighborhoods that had the fewest services of social intervention on the part of public institutions. Christopher’s story stands apart for me, however, because I was present, physically, repeatedly, at the point of incubation. I saw that look of hunger in his eyes. I saw him wolfing down that cereal and milk. I saw him running out into the traffic when the cars slowed down on Broadway, hoping for a couple dollars to be handed through a window. I also knew he’d seen the needle-users buying what they needed in the hallways and the stairways of the Martinique Hotel. He probably saw them shooting up as well. I could not forget this.

One afternoon three years ago, Christopher called Miranda while I was with her and her son, and when she told him I was there, he asked to say hello to me. He sounded elated on the phone and said he’d like to get together with me sometime soon. For Miranda’s sake, I said I’d like that too. I gave him my phone number. He said he had no number of his own but would send a message to me through Miranda.

I asked what he was doing and he told me things were “going great” but, when I pressed him just a little, he replied that he was “late” and had to rush and offered me no further information.

The spirited tone within his voice struck me, after I hung up, as just a bit
too
spirited. Miranda had already told me he was dealing drugs again after having quit his job at Equinox. She had also made it clear that he had long since gone beyond the relatively lowly stage of selling at street level. He was “into something big”—that’s the way Miranda put it. Whatever “something big” implied, it reawakened
the concern I’d had more than ten years before, when he wrote to me from prison asking for my help with the parole board in reduction of his sentence. As I’ve said, I complied with his request, but not enthusiastically, because I did not know what he might do upon release. He’d attempted once to take a person’s life. Might he succeed the next time?

Even now, as he was moving back into the zone of danger, there were people who did not give up on Christopher. A charitable agency that worked with former inmates not only kept on reaching out to him but gave him a part-time job, which Miranda said that he held on to for a while. An outreach worker from the agency, who lived in the neighborhood—“close to Cypress Ave,” she said, “right next to the Bruckner”—gave Christopher a place to stay. “He had his own bedroom there.”