Rachel and Her Children (16 page)

“Some of the rooms high up—they got a view. You see the Empire State.”

I’ve noticed this, seen it from a window. It towers high above the Martinique.

“I talk to this plant. I tell him: ‘Grow! Give me one flower!’ He don’t do it.” Then, in an afterthought: “No pets. Goldfish. No. You don’t got. Animals. They don’t allow.”

It occurs to me that this is one of the few places I have been, except a hospital or a reform school, where there are 1,400 children and no pets. A few people like the Allesandros keep illegal cats.

“I wish I had a dog,” she says. “Brown dog … Something to hug.”

“It is utterly part of our nature,” writes Robert Coles, “to want roots, to need roots, to struggle for roots, for a sense of belonging, for some place that is recognized … as
ours.”
It is bad enough, he says, “that thousands of us, thousands of American children, still go hungry and sick and
are ignored and spurned—every day and constantly and just about from birth to death. It is quite another thing, another order, as it were, of human degradation, that we also have thousands of boys and girls who live utterly uprooted lives, who wander the American earth … but who never, never think of any place as home, of themselves as anything but homeless. There are moments, and I believe this is one of them, when even doctors or social scientists … have to throw up their hands in heaviness of heart … and say, in desperation: God save them, those children; and for allowing such a state of affairs to continue, God save us too.”

Coles wrote those words in 1969. He was speaking of the children of the migrant workers in the Appalachian states. What might he say today, were he to visit in the Martinique Hotel?

Mobility is common in America. Families change homes frequently, the move occasioned often by career demands. Their children may be briefly traumatized; most manage the transition in good stride. When a child is torn from his home, when he sees his family’s belongings piled on the sidewalk by a landlord or the agent of a bank, when he is left to wait and wither for long months within a series of unhealthy places like the Martinique Hotel, he may not literally die, but his survival is endangered and his childhood has, to a large degree, been taken from him. He either regresses or is forced to grow up very, very fast. Average length of stay in New York’s family shelters, we have seen, is thirteen months: sixteen months within the Martinique. This is a long time to exist in arid soil.

There’s little in Laura’s life of joy, nothing of indulgence. Anything like luxury or fun is not simply absent from this bleak existence. It’s as far away as daisies—or a brown dog—on a hillside in New Hampshire. Her longings
are so dreadfully austere. She wishes she had a room where she could see the symbol of New York that mocks her pitiful existence. She’d like to see that plant do what a plant is supposed to do—give her one flower. She wants to read. She feels ashamed to go out to the store. “I would like to know what’s going on,” she said. She doesn’t have the least idea.

A night in March. I wait in the lobby for Kim to sign me in. As soon as we’re in the stairs, she tells me: “Something terrible has happened. Laura’s gone.”

Once in her room, she lights a cigarette and tells me this: “Everyone sees her as a simple person, plain and dull, nobody of interest, even to a man. Well, I could have told you what would happen. Somebody finally told her she was pretty. He bought her some clothes and took her out. She put on makeup. I had never thought of her as glamorous. Neither did she. She saw herself as someone colorless and drab. Now a man likes her, buys her a dress. He gives the kids a TV and some toys. Two days later Laura’s gone. Things happen fast. He was a pimp. He gave her drugs. Nobody’s seen her since. Her mother came to the hotel. She’s staying with the kids.”

I go down to visit with her mother. Her father’s there too—a man in his fifties. Her mother tells me that she’s forty-five.

“When I was called, they told me she was taking men to a hotel. I asked what was she wearing. They said she was wearing a red coat. I went out to look for her. I went to the bars. I went in the hotels. I spent the night on Forty-second Street. Times Square. All over. I can’t find her. Then somebody says he saw her on Fifth Avenue—a place where women take the men to a hotel. I went to the hotel. The man in the hotel, he asked me who she was. I said that she’s
the one in the red jacket and he said: ‘Oh yeah! She’s here.’ She was upstairs.

“She came downstairs to speak with me. I told her I had come to bring her home. She said: ‘I have a better life here now. I have these things. This jacket. See?’ I couldn’t get her to come home.”

So Laura’s mother is staying here to take care of the kids until she figures out a way to find a home. Her own mother has a place in Flushing but is near the point of death and cannot take them in. Laura’s father walks with a cane; he’s permanently disabled. They’ve applied for custody of Laura’s children.

“The baby’s sick. She has a fever. Matthew has an ear infection. I’ll take them to the hospital tomorrow. I’m responsible. It’s in my hands.”

March 21: I’m visiting with Kim. A woman I have never seen bangs at the door. She’s come upstairs from Laura’s room to ask for help. When Kim and I arrive the mother’s kneeling on the floor. She’s in a state of near-hysteria. As she explains it, this is what took place: She had noticed that the crib was swaying and was worried that it might collapse. She had therefore lifted the baby out and placed her on the bed. A moment later, as she turned to warm some milk, the baby somehow toppled over, striking her head against the metal frame.

“I put her here. I told her: ‘Do you want some milk?’ I went to warm the milk. I turned around and she was bleeding. Her head was swelling up, like this. Her eyes are getting big. She’s changing colors. I said: ‘She is dying.’”

The child was taken to the hospital. Her grandfather is with her, waiting there for the report. The other children sit nearby, not understanding. On a shelf above the crib there is a lion, a stuffed panda, and a bear. A small pink
elephant lies with his four feet in the air beside the metal bed. There is a color photo of the baby on the door.

The child survives the night. Her future is unclear. A few days later, Laura’s mother is served papers—charged with child neglect. No charges, to my knowledge, have been brought against the Martinique Hotel.

T
ragedies like that of Laura’s baby rarely cause much public controversy. When they do, it is often the result of a particularly vivid news report. One such story drew attention at the time that I first visited the Martinique. Although the mother was no longer living in the building, her story was known to several residents because she had been living here when she was pregnant and she had gone into labor here. Her child’s weight at birth was dangerously low and, because he had grown very ill soon after birth, he had been kept in the hospital for several months. He had been discharged on Christmas Eve of 1984. Subsequent events within his life led to a threat of legal action.

With the help of members of the Coalition for the Homeless who had come to know the child and his mother, I was able to meet her and to learn firsthand what she had undergone. Finding her was, in itself, a challenge. It
required many phone calls and a long and complicated search that does not call for recapitulation here. It is enough to say that, when we finally spoke, she wanted very much to meet and talk. She told me she was living in a shelter, in a section of Manhattan that I did not know. On a day in the late winter, following directions she had given me, I found her temporary home.

If the reader has not visited New York City, or if you have visited but never been as far downtown as Houston Street, you need to imagine a wide-open, unprotected stretch of road with very few stores or houses and with little else on either side other than a number of high-rise housing projects spotted here and there, not far from the East River.

On a very cold afternoon the wind that sweeps in from the river numbs your face and brings tears to your eyes. Silent men hunch over in the doorways of deserted stores. A group of homeless men and women stand around a barrel with their hands extended to the flames that rise out of a mass of burning trash.

Wiping my glasses with my sleeve, I enter the side door of the building. There’s no elevator. I walk up to the fifth floor.

Holly Peters lives in the Henry Street Settlement House for now—a homeless shelter, but a better one than she has ever known since she was pregnant in the Martinique Hotel. She introduces me to her two children and her husband, David, and invites me to sit down. She’s thin and small and rather nervous at the start. While we talk she braids her hair.

I’ve already been informed that she is twenty-four and that she was taken from her mother as a child and put into foster care. She tells me that she spent most of her childhood in state-run institutions and in several foster homes
throughout New York. Despite the many interruptions in her education caused by frequent transfers from one home or institution to another, she stayed in school until twelfth grade. She became pregnant that year and quit school.

By this time, she had been reunited with her mother and was living with her. After her child was born she entered a program of job training. It appears she had a good employment record for the next few years. “I worked for Stouffer’s. Now that was an interesting job. You got these carts: sandwiches and coffee, even a cash register, it’s right here on this wagon. You’re in an office building. So you go to every floor. You got a little bell. You ring your bell. If anybody on the floor wants something, they come to the wagon. Order a chef’s salad, that’s $2.60. Add the coffee, fifty cents. So that’s $3.10. Give you five, you give them back their change. That’s how it was.”

Early on, however, she encountered a problem faced by many young and pretty women with their male employers. “One job I had—you got to wonder if it’s you or if it’s just the way some people are. I had been there as a waitress for some time. The owner told me that he had an opening for a cashier. He had restaurants all over. Every borough of New York. He said he was goin’ to take me to the one in Queens so the girl could show me how to do it. Maybe I’d start workin’ there. I said okay.

“It was in the summertime. I wanted to go dressed appropriate. He told me: ‘You can wear your regular clothes.’ So he come there in the van and we go drivin’ out to Queens. All of a sudden he pull up in front of this hotel. He offered me a hundred dollars if I go inside. I told him no. I wasn’t goin’ for it.

“Ever since that day he had me workin’ like a slave. Never once in this here job did I receive more than a hundred dollars. He was gonna pay me that much just to go inside of the hotel.”

Her daughter was nearly two by now. Another child was born one year later. She says she had returned to school to get her G.E.D. (high school equivalency), but that she was forced to interrupt her studies when her mother was evicted. Holly was obliged to turn to welfare for emergency assistance. She lived for eight months in two homeless shelters in Manhattan, only to be transferred to the Holland—viewed by many people as the worst of all hotels for homeless families in New York. While living there, she learned that she was pregnant for a third time.

It was winter. The hotel was poorly heated and, as she reports, the place was rat infested. “Just about this hour—you see how it is outside?—they startin’ to come out. Evening sun be goin’ down, they playin’ on the floor. We sit on the bed. We didn’t move. They right there on the floor. Go [stamp!] like this! They race around. They
right
there on the floor.”

After the Holland, Holly’s wanderings become unclear. At various points in the subsequent year she lived in at least seven hotels and, for certain nights at least, she slept in EAUs. “They tried to send me once to the Clemente shelter, but they wouldn’t take me in. I got as far as the front door. They told me: ‘Go back to the EAU and tell them not to send you here.’”

Holly moved into the Martinique in early 1984 and was living there until the day that her third child, Benjamin, was born in late September. Mothers at the Martinique had no refrigerators at that time. Information given me by other women living there that year indicates that conditions in the Martinique were even worse than at the time of my first visit.

“Yes, I believe that it affected him,” she says without assertiveness but with a quiet note of acquiescence in accomplished fact. “How do I know? You do
not
know. I only know that life in that hotel was hell. I can’t say that
living in the Martinique Hotel is why this happened. But I do believe a woman ought to have a better place to stay when she is carrying a child. If I would have had a little more, the proper medical care, the proper housing—if I had a place like this, I believe he would have had a better chance than what he did.”

She finds a cigarette, talks to her children in the bedroom, says something to her husband in the kitchen, and returns to find a match to light the cigarette.

“He was born on Saturday. He weighed four pounds, eight ounces. When I came downstairs to see him Sunday, he was in the incubator. When I came on Monday, they was giving him I.V. When I came the next day, he had oxygen. Then they had to start giving him blood. I had to go around to people gettin’ blood …

“Then from there he stayed, you know, inside the incubator. I used to cry. Sometimes I’d pray. Something I’ve always done is pray. If I meet somebody—they start talkin’ that there ain’t no God, you know, I don’t be bothered. Anyway, I used to go to see him and he laid there for three months. He didn’t move.”

Why was she forced to leave the Martinique? Holly says at first that she was robbed repeatedly while she was there. From her later conversation it appears that the real reason had to do with David. She was afraid to be alone, especially while Benjamin’s condition remained so uncertain. David was also scared to be without her. I believe it was his presence in her room that finally led to her eviction or departure.