Rachel and Her Children (17 page)

“So I was in the Hotel Mayfair, near Times Square.” She tells me of walking from Forty-ninth Street to Beth Israel, standing by the baby’s bed for hours. “I would stand there by his bed and pray. I have a Bible but I didn’t need it. I prayed from my own.

“I had him baptized in the hospital. They asked me
would I like a priest to bless him. I said yes ’cause he was critical. The doctor said: ‘Point-blank, I’m gonna tell you. I’ll be honest with you—.’ She said Benjamin was not s’posed to live.

“I was not on WIC. Each time for my appointment, each time I got ready, he was in the hospital. Medicaid, he wasn’t on my card. I don’t know why. Maybe, if a baby’s in the hospital, they believe that he’s provided for. He wasn’t on my budget.”

Some of her suppositions seem at first to be implausible. It does not make sense to me that Benjamin was not on Medicaid and not on Holly’s budget. When she tells me this, I mark her statement in my notes with a large question mark. An HRA report later confirms her words: “Infant not on IM [welfare] budget or Medicaid…. Social worker working on this.”

The facts, as best I understand, are these: Some days after Benjamin was born he contracted a viral infection. The virus left him partially blind, brain-damaged, deaf, hydrocephalic. He is also said to have developed a “seizure disorder.” Three months after birth he was released by hospital officials and was taken to the Mayfair. Holly says that he was having seizures at the time. She had been told to give him phenobarbital, but she says she had to pay for it out of her other children’s food allowance since he wasn’t yet included on her budget. His weight was seven pounds.

I ask her if they had refrigerators at the Mayfair.

“Not in the Martinique. Not in the Mayfair. Nope.”

She was evicted from the Mayfair five weeks later. The reason again, she says, was her request that David stay with her and the refusal of the hotel to permit this. So it was winter, four months since the child’s birth, a year since his conception. They were homeless.

“After that, they couldn’t find no place for me to live.
I was a little everywhere.” She lists a number of hotels: the Madison, the Prospect, and (again) the Holland. “So we have been all over. I would carry all his things—disposable bottles, Pampers and his clothes, his phenobarbital, his toys, pregested milk. I carried it in bags each place we went. By that time he was completely blind.”

The city reports that Benjamin did not have phenobarbital from January 4 to January 8 and that he had twenty seizures in those days. On January 15, Benjamin had not been given Medicaid. A temporary card was issued on that date.

“All this time I had been looking for apartments. I saw lots of places that I didn’t have the money for. Two hundred seventy dollars was my budget limit. I used to tell them: ‘All the money you will pay for me to stay in a hotel? You can’t give me half that money
once
to pay the rent and rent deposit? I could get me an apartment. You won’t ever see me anymore!’

“Even at the project the committee turned me down. They ask me if I ever been evicted. If you ever been evicted they hold that against you. I said no. I have never been evicted ’cause I never had my own. I had only had my mother’s home. Then because I had the kids, they say: ‘We don’t want them writin’ on the walls.’ I said: ‘Look. My daughter’s five. My son is three. Benjamin is four months old. Do you think this baby will be writin’ on your walls?’ They turned me down.”

Benjamin was readmitted to Beth Israel twice during this time. Four nights before his second admission, the HRA reports: “Baby stays overnight at EAU.” On his release from the hospital on March 13, Holly was at the Holland Hotel for a second time. On March 20 she was told she had to leave the Holland, according to the HRA, “because of a City policy that only allows families to stay 28 days.”
Two days later, after she had left the Holland, the HRA temporarily lost track of her: “case to be closed due to circumstances.” Five days later, Benjamin was readmitted to Beth Israel.

Holly: “It was near the end of March. The baby had to go back to the hospital again. His skull was widening. The fluid, I believe, was putting pressure on his brain. I stayed there with him in the hospital. EAU can’t find me nothin’ so I slept there with him in his room. David came to visit but he stayed out with his mother and the other children on Long Island. David’s mother has a heart condition. She can’t do but so much—I mean, takin’ care of children, puttin’ up with noise and the confusion. But this was a crisis so we had no choice. She done the best she can …

“So I was alone now with my baby. Apart from having no place else to stay, I wanted to be with him at this time. I would get up each mornin’ and I’d bathe him. I would wash his clothes. I preferred to care for him myself than anybody else. The people in the hospital can care for him but just so much. I wanted to be
with
him. Period!

“Even though I was afraid, it is the truth to say that I was happy. I was happy to be with him in a place where he was safe and where we could not be evicted. Only place he had a home in all those months was in the hospital. That be one place where they don’t evict you.

“David came to be with me while Benjamin was in the surgery. We waited for him to come out—in recovery. They brought him up. They said: ‘Well, we will see how he will be.’ They wouldn’t know if it was a success until a couple days.”

Medical records indicate the hospital had put a “shunt” into the baby’s skull on April 22 to drain off fluid. Holly describes it to me vividly: “The shunt is a tube that goes into the brain. It goes under the skin, under one layer of
the skin, and it goes down to the stomach. It was like a plastic tube, a fat tube, you could see under the skin. Goes to the stomach. You could see it, you could see the print of it under the skin.”

On May 1, the hospital told her they were going to release him. This information startled her and it would later startle many people in the press. A spokesperson for Beth Israel Hospital later said the hospital would never have released the baby had it known he had no proper shelter. The hospital, however, had provided Holly with a note to be submitted to her welfare worker. The letter asked that she be given shelter.

Holly tells me: “I was worried if it was too soon. ‘Well, Mrs. Peters, he will be all right.’ But I was feelin’ scared. First, because the shunt was in his head. Second, even with him bein’ like he was, they couldn’t find no place for me to be.”

Because of the controversial nature of this story, I will add one observation here. I do not believe the probity of health officials should be called in question. Holly speaks with obvious affection of her doctor. It is unimaginable that any of those who came in contact with the child wished him ill or that officials consciously released him to the street. Hospitals all over the United States, faced with hundreds of thousands of unsheltered people and with millions of the very, very poor, do the best they can, and sometimes do so quite heroically. The issue is not medical or bureaucratic mishap in Manhattan. It is destitution.

“I told my social worker: ‘I don’t have no place to take him.’ So she said that, if I had no home, then I could leave him and they’d put him in an institution. I said: ‘You are tellin’ me that you can’t help me in no kind of way? You know that I have no place to stay. Are you tellin’ me ain’t nobody can help me? I been tellin’ you for weeks that
I don’t have no place to take him. Now you say that you are takin’ him away? I am leavin’ with my baby and you
know
that I ain’t got no place to live.’

“So there was the two of us, Benjamin and me, we was discharged, and it was evenin’, like about four-thirty, five o’clock, and we was walkin’ in the street.

“It was rainin’, as a matter of fact. Not a warm night, kind of cool. I had to go straight to the EAU. When I got there I went in and I explained: ‘My son has had an operation.’ I had brought the letter from the doctor. I had had that letter from day one. It didn’t help me. I was on the street. For seven days, a whole week, I was on the street. That was in May. He come out from havin’ surgery, shunt was in him, I was pretty weak. The EAU, to me, is in the street.

“I would sit from nine to five, the welfare center. They’d come out and give me a referral: ‘Here, go to the EAU. We couldn’t find no place for you tonight.’ Benjamin was in his carriage and I had the letter with me and we sat from nine to five there in the center and from five to eight o’clock at EAU. I lay him down. I was sleepin’ in the chair. He was in his carriage. They say in the paper that he died there on the floor. That isn’t true. I lay him in his carriage.

“All the time that we was on the street we carried all his things. Carryin’ everything, his milk, his phenobarbital. In the mornin’ I would wake up in the chair. By that time I had the other children. David’s mother couldn’t keep them anymore. She was a sick woman. So David was with me—and the children. We were at the EAU. Get up in the mornin’, wash ’em in the bathroom, comb their hair … I be scared he have another seizure.

“Only time they placed us was for two nights at a nice hotel in Queens. This hotel is not for welfare and they let you know that right away. Tell you that you’re there one night and you cannot come back. We stayed for two …

“You can say we got two nights, but it is not like
nights
because we didn’t get there until 3:00 a.m. How much sleep, then, is a child gettin’? Two children and a baby that has had an operation? Is that gettin’ any sleep? So we get up and get the train. The rest of the time we stayed there in the center.”

The city reports that, on the day of Benjamin’s release after his surgery, Holly brought him to the EAU in early evening. She was sent to the Turf, a Queens hotel, at one-thirty in the morning. Two nights later she was sent back to the Martinique but was turned away, she said, because there was no vacancy. She returned to the EAU at four-thirty in the afternoon on May 4 and waited there with Benjamin for
about ten hours
. At two-forty-five in the morning, they were assigned to a hotel. Benjamin and Holly spent the entire next night at the EAU.

“So he was goin’ in the cold and rain. I was givin’ him all that I could. They wasn’t givin’ me a stable place for him to be. The place the shunt went in, his wound had gotten bad. It was sunk in and you could see his skull. His eyes was sinkin’ too. And I said: ‘David, look at him.’ He looked at him. His father looked. And there was dark around his eyes. His eyes was dark and sinkin’ in.

“Nothin’ that I tell you, when it comes down to that baby, is untrue. You could look at him and tell. One lady at the welfare that I didn’t know her name, when I said that he was sick would she come over she would not come there to look. She would
not
come over there to see my son was sick. So I begged her: ‘Please, my baby’s dyin’.’ I had brought the letter I was s’posed to. I said: ‘David, look at Benjamin’s eyes is sinkin’ in.’ ’Cause you could look at him and tell.

“That was the seventh of May. Then the lady in the welfare said: ‘The baby looks like it is dyin’.’ So we raised him up. We lifted him again and looked and you could see
it. You could
see
. He had these scars from the I.V. He had a scar up here. There was a hole like where the needle was put in. We was sittin’ in the EAU, in Brooklyn, on the right-hand side.

“I said: ‘David, take him to the hospital. I’ll sit here and wait and see in case they find a place for us to stay.’ He asked someone if they have the money for a cab. Takin’ the train meant switchin’ trains. I didn’t think we had the time. But they said no. They did not pay money for no cab. They did offer us to call an ambulance. That was no good. The ambulance would take you to the nearest hospital. Brooklyn Hospital’s the nearest hospital to EAU. We had to get him to Beth Israel. That’s where all his records was. If we took him to another hospital, by the time they find out what is wrong he would be dead. I said we was gonna take him to the hospital that know him from the day that he was born. The hospital that
knows
his situation.”

David, who has interrupted only once or twice up to this point, fills in the rest: “I got ten dollars from a friend who knows me and I took a taxi to Beth Israel. I brought him in. As soon as I come in they ask me what had happened, where he was? I said: ‘We’ve been out there at the welfare.’ The doctor said: ‘Are there sick children there?’ And I said yes. At welfare there is nothin’ but sick children. Little kids with coughs and runnin’ noses runnin’ up and down. They’re runnin’ everywhere. You know? So he said: ‘The baby caught a stomach virus.’ That explains why he had diarrhea. He was sick to start with. When you add the stomach virus … He had been dehydrated so bad. The skin on him was dry, like this. That was seven days since he come home. So he was in the hospital again. He stayed there after that.”

After a silence, he goes on: “I came back to Brooklyn, to the EAU. Holly says: ‘They found a place for me to stay.’
I was thinkin’ they have pity for her now—and ever since. She don’t need no sympathy no more. She needed it back then. Now he dyin’, now you offer her a place to live.”

After Benjamin’s death, the city seemed to place much of the blame upon his parents. Holly, said the city, had been beaten by the father of her other children. As a consequence, the
New York Times
reported, “the baby was not fed for several hours.” Holly denies both accusations. But, assuming that these things are true, it remains incomprehensible that a disaster fostered, countenanced, ignored for over half a year should retroactively be blamed upon parental failure—an alleged delay of “several hours” in the feeding of a child—at a point at which his health had been already damaged past repair.

The city also maintained it gave the family shelter, transportation, food. In fact, according to the Legal Aid Society, the city galvanized itself to action only on the night before her baby was brought back into the hospital to die and only after Legal Aid, having been alerted to the child’s plight, had telephoned the HRA, demanding that the child be afforded suitable shelter.

HRA officials placed a special emphasis upon the fact that Holly was repeatedly evicted from hotels because of David’s presence or that she rejected placements in hotels where he would not have been allowed to stay. Holly places far more emphasis upon the dangerous conditions in the various hotels and on the fact that she was forced to sit and wait so many hours on so many evenings at the EAU while Benjamin was gravely ill. But, granting that the statements of the HRA are true, we may wonder at an agency of government that, even unwittingly, punishes a mother in a time of crisis for her desperation to remain close to the one adult in the entire world who seems to love her. Why would a society alarmed by the decline in family values try
to separate a mother from her child’s father at the time she needs him most and when he displays that willingness to share responsibility whose absence we repeatedly deplore?