Rachel and Her Children (23 page)

After forty-five days of homelessness, the Andrewses are sent at 6:00 a.m., on a day in late September 1984, to a small room without a closet but with four beds in the Martinique Hotel. Seven months later they are moved into a slightly larger room two floors below. It is in this room that we first meet in 1986.

The room has the smell of fresh paint on the day I visit. Also, a new door has been installed. These changes, she believes, were made throughout the building and were prompted by some pressure from the Office of the Mayor. Unfortunately, the keys distributed to residents to match the locks on the new doors were incorrectly made. They are interchangeable in many cases. Mrs. Andrews has been robbed four times.

When we meet, she talks for hours of her fears. Fear is plainly written in her eyes. Forty-five days of destitution, sickness, subway travel, waiting lines, followed by two years of residence in the Martinique, have worn away much of her confidence.

“My mother and father are deceased. Except for the children I have only my grandparents. My grandmother is in a wheelchair. My grandfather is ninety-four years old. I pray for them. When they are gone I have nobody but the kids. I was not religious when I came here. People become religious here,” she says, “because each day that you survive seems like a miracle.”

Mrs. Andrews’ husband has been in and out of psychiatric wards throughout the past two years. Her former boss has told her that he wants her back. She’s reluctant to accept the job until she saves some money. If she returns to work she loses welfare and can’t stay in the hotel. But welfare rules forbid her to save money. Any significant savings pose the risk of being cut from all support. So she cannot start a bank account in order to prepare for the unlikely chance of moving into an apartment. Even if she had her old job back, she couldn’t pay a month’s rent and deposit and security, buy furniture, or pay for health insurance. The city is said to have a program that sometimes assists with some of these expenses; few families have been given this assistance. Mrs. Andrews has not heard of such a program.

“I don’t eat. I’d stopped smoking back in 1983. Now I smoke three packs a day.”

Only in state prisons have I seen so many people craving cigarettes. She lights one cigarette after another, presses it out, looks for a match, hunts for another pack.

“Food is very scarce right now, worse than any time since I’ve been here.” She had received $185 a month in food stamps on June 1. That was cut to $63 in August. It will be cut again to $44 in January. “I have trouble sleeping when we’re short of food. I cannot sleep if I don’t know that I can feed them breakfast.”

Food-stamp cuts have forced her for the first time to accept free bags of food from local charities. “On Saturdays I go to St. Francis Church on Thirty-first Street. Tuesdays, I go to St. John’s.” In compensation for her loss of food stamps—a net loss of $122 each month—she receives an increase of $8.75 in restaurant allowance every two weeks from the city. Her room rent at the Martinique is about $2,000. Her rent allowance for a permanent apartment, if she were to find one, is $270.

She forces herself to eat one meal a day. Her children, knowing of her cancer history, have tried to get her to stop smoking. She wants to know: “How will I get them out of this?” I want to know: Why do we do this to her?

Her phone call brings me back to talk with her when cancer is again suspected, this time on her skin, just under her left eye. At the hospital, the spot in question has been tested. The results are positive. The doctor, she says, is also concerned about a lump that has developed on her throat. She has to go into the hospital but puts it off two weeks.

On New Year’s Eve she phones again. She’s going to go into the hospital. She’ll have to leave her kids alone. She needs some cash so they can buy necessities until she’s home. I send a postal money order for $250. The post
office tells me: “It’s as good as cash. Any postal clerk will honor it.”

The money order is not honored. Even with identification, she is told that she needs someone else to “vouch” for her.

A friend in Manhattan helps me. He calls someone he knows at the post office and she finally gets the cash. She is embarrassed by the trouble she believes she’s caused me. On the telephone she tells me that conditions in the building have grown worse. “There’s been no light in the elevator for a month. People use cigarette lighters. Or you ride up in the dark. I can’t face it. I walk up ten floors.”

When she gets out of the hospital, she has good news. The spot on her face and lump on her throat turned out to be benign. By now, however, sleeplessness and fear have left her drained. She’s also feeling the results of the last round of food-stamp cuts. Everyone in the hotel, she says, is short of food. The president this month requests a billion-dollar cut in food stamps and in child-nutrition funds for 1987.

The city, meanwhile, has run into shortages of shelter space. The shortage has been so acute that twenty-nine families have been sent to a hotel in Newark. The
Times
reports, however, that an HRA spokesperson “said the situation is by no means critical….”

Government is not to blame for Mrs. Andrews’ illnesses, her cancer surgery, her panic, her compulsive smoking. Government is certainly to blame for leaving a sick woman homeless more than forty days. It is to blame for sending her at 1:00 a.m. to a hotel from which she will be turned away. It is to blame for making any human being in New York City carry buckets from the fourteenth floor of an unsafe hotel in order to fetch water at a tavern.

The president, too, is certainly to blame for terrorizing women with the fear of hunger. He is no less to blame for the complacent ignorance that he displays when asked to comment on these matters. “If even one American child is forced to go to bed hungry at night …,” he says, “that is a national tragedy. We are too generous a people to allow this….”

We are not too generous. The president is wrong. We have been willing to see hundreds of thousands of children go to bed, if they have any beds at all, too hungry to sleep and sometimes too weak to rise on the next morning to await the bus for school.

“Now you’re hearing all kinds of horror stories,” the president said on an earlier occasion, this time in Minnesota “about the people that are going to be thrown out in the snow to hunger and [to] die of cold and so forth…. We haven’t cut a single budget….”

Hunger, cold and snow apart, what of this presidential reference to the budget? Dorothy Wickenden, in a
New Republic
article published in 1985, summarizes administration cuts affecting children of poor families in the previous four years: housing assistance ($1.8 billion); AFDC ($4.8 billion); child nutrition ($5.2 billion); food stamps ($6.8 billion); low-income energy assistance ($700 million). In housing, she writes, the Reagan administration “appears to have decided to renounce once and for all any meaningful federal support.” HUD’s budget authority to help additional low-income families “was cut from $30 billion to $11 billion” in the first Reagan term. “In his fiscal 1986 budget, he proposes to chop that by an additional 95 percent, to $499 million.”

The president’s first budget director, David Stockman, was noted for his straightforward speech: “I don’t think people are entitled to services. I don’t believe that there is any entitlement, any basic right to legal services or any
other kind of services…. I don’t accept that equality is a moral principle.”

Will future generations read these words with pride?

“When men confront each other as men, as abstract universals,” writes Ignatieff, “one with power, the other with none, then man is certain to behave as a wolf to his own kind.” The claim of the less powerful—that because they are human they deserve to live—“is the weakest claim that people can make to each other: It is the claim addressed to anyone, and therefore to no one. When there is no family, no tribe, no state, no city to hear…, only the storm hears it.”

For thousands of homeless people in New York, as in most cities of America during this era of acceptable abstraction, it is probably not true that only the storm can hear their pleas, but it is frequently the case that only the storm answers.

Stockman’s theme—no rights, no services—finds application on the grand scale in withholding of essential funds for life support by government; but the idea, once established, finds expression in a multitude of small indignities that homeless people undergo day after day in places where one person exercises power over hundreds who have none.

The guards assigned to offer shelter residents some safety, for example, are frequently only a trifle better off than they; but, as in a prison where a favored inmate often brutalizes those from whom he can dissociate himself only by an overzealous application of the regulations set by his superiors, these are often the most vicious faces of authority that homeless people must confront.

November 27, 1986: On holidays like Thanksgiving, people in a homeless shelter face unusual depression. Those who are most fortunate may be invited elsewhere—some to
have dinner with their family, if they have a family with the means to share a meal. Others may eat in one of those huge armories in which a charitable group, under the eyes of TV cameras, offers them a dinner with something the press invariably describes in a November formula as “all the fixings.”

Many, however, never get the “fixings”—neither from their families nor from charitable groups. They spend the day alone within their rooms. Sometimes a mother or grandmother who could not provide a meal at home brings something she has cooked and packaged carefully. Sometimes a friend appears.

Waiting here with about a dozen other people, most of them family members, I watch the guards hunched over at their guard post with their squawking intercoms hooked to their belts. I wonder why they seem so much more threatening today than usual. Generally their distaste for the job, or for the residents, is conveyed with lassitude; today it’s energized. Is it because there are so few officials, volunteers, or crisis workers to observe them? Do they, who have to work on holidays, regret the fact that others might enjoy an hour’s respite from the colorless routine?

A woman sitting next to me has come from Brooklyn with a dinner wrapped in foil for her daughter and grandchildren. She arrived at 2:00 p.m. At three, she is still waiting.

“We’re short of men,” a guard remarks to no one in particular. “Holidays, we send up messages once every hour.”

As the minutes tick away and people wait for recognition from the guards, she presses the comers of the foil together in a futile effort to preserve the warmth.

A well-dressed woman—middle-aged, soft-spoken—enters the lobby from the street and asks one of the guards to tell her sister that she’s here.

“Fifteen-seven gets no visitors,” the guard replies.

The woman begins a complicated explanation. She’s here to take her sister to their mother’s bed. Their mother is in the hospital. Her sister doesn’t know. Their mother was taken ill last night.

“Fifteen-seven’s on restriction,” says the guard. Fixed in his meager station of authority, he seems reluctant to give up an opportunity to heighten panic, to create a needless little patch of pain.

She tells the guard she doesn’t need to visit, only to send up a message. But the guard appears unmoved. “You cause us trouble,” he says, “you got no rights.”

“Would you tell her that her mother’s ill?”

The guard replies: “She don’t get no messages. Not until she gets her check.”

I’m not sure those are the rules; but how is she to know and, even if she does, what can be done? She is about to speak again but he anticipates her words: “Don’t block the desk. The waiting area is over there.”

She looks confused. Does this mean he’s relented? Will he send up the message? Why does he direct her to the waiting area? She’s a black woman wearing an old-fashioned net around her hair. The guards are here presumably to keep out prostitutes and people who sell drugs. She doesn’t look like either.

Another woman, white and elderly, comes in, makes her request, and is instructed to sit down. A Puerto Rican man gets up and offers her his chair. It has a jagged plastic edge; the back has been torn off. There are, in all, six chairs, one broken stool.

Across the lobby on the wall beside the elevator alcove is a poster about crack. Next to it, a crudely penciled sign I saw a year ago:
“ABSOLUTELY NO GRAFFITI WILL BE TOLERATED.”
A young woman, heavily made up, walks past the desk on red stiletto heels. When she doesn’t answer an
obscene joke from a guard who seems to know her, he runs after her, pulls out his nightstick, and jams it between her legs. She pushes him away and heads off to the stairway in the rear.

All around me: tired, tired faces. The silence drips like water from a rainspout on the back porch of a house that someone left ten years before. Time stops. A damp and dreary afternoon.

“You cause us trouble, you got no rights.” But even if you cause no trouble, you do not have many rights. The right to talk to a reporter is effectively denied. The publication of essential legal information, even in a casual newsletter, is prevented. I write in my notebook: “If we want to be sadistic, if we want to do it right, why not also take away their citizenship—withhold their right to vote?” Then I recall that this too was attempted but did not succeed. Court action finally restored the franchise for the homeless families of New York. But the idea remains attractive and is still proposed by policy advisors as another means of rendering dependent status undesirable.

“For adults, the stigma would be institutionalized,” in Charles Murray’s words, “by taking away the right to vote from anyone who had no source of income except welfare….” Denial of the franchise, Murray has proposed, “would be an official stamp” of second-class status. While recognizing that “the balance” of this and other suggestions he has made to stigmatize poor single mothers “would probably be negative,” Murray argues nonetheless that denial of the right to vote makes sense in that recipients of public funds should have no role in their disbursement. Notions like these, no matter how whimsically or speculatively offered, don’t remain inert. Uncivilized contemplation is contagious.