Rachel and Her Children (8 page)

Terry is pregnant, in her ninth month. She’s afraid that, when she gives birth, she may not be able to bring home her baby from the hospital because she is not legally residing here.

Wanda, curled up like a newborn in a room no larger than a closet, is three months pregnant, planning an abortion.

Would doctors say these women are emotionally unwell? They might have no choice. Were these women sick before they came here? I don’t see how we could possibly find out. What startles me is not that they have difficulty coping but that neither yet has given up entirely.

Terry: twenty-eight years old. She has three kids. She graduated from a school in Flushing and has worked for eight years as a lab assistant. Burnt out of her home, she stayed for two years with her sister’s family: three adults, eight children, crowded into four unheated rooms. Evicted by her sister when the pressure on her sister’s husband and their kids began to damage their own marriage, she had to take her children to the EAU at Church Street in Manhattan. Refusing to accept a placement at a barracks shelter, she’s been sleeping here illegally for several nights in a small room rented to her cousin.

When we meet, she’s in the corridor outside the crisis center, crying and perspiring heavily. She sits on a broken chair to talk to me. She’s not on Medicaid and has been removed from AFDC. “My card’s being reprocessed,” she explains, although this explanation explains nothing. She’s not on WIC. “I’ve got to file an application.” Her back is aching. She is due to have her child any day.

This is the reason for her panic: “If I can’t be placed before the baby’s born, the hospital won’t let me take the
baby. They don’t let you take a newborn if you haven’t got a home.” As we will see, this is not always so; but the possibility of this occurrence is quite real. Where are her kids? “They’re here. I’ve got them hidden in the room.”

She takes me to her cousin Wanda’s room. I measure it: nine feet by twelve, a little smaller than the room in which I store my files on the homeless. Wanda’s been here fifteen months, has four kids, no hot plate, and no food in the refrigerator. She’s had no food stamps and no restaurant allowance for two months. I ask her why. (You ask these questions even though you know the answer will be vague, confused, because so many of these women have no possible idea of why they do or don’t receive the benefits they do or don’t deserve.) She’s curled up in a tattered slip and a torn sweater on a mattress with no sheet. Her case was closed, she says. Faintly, I hear something about “an application.” Her words are hard to understand. I ask her whether she was here for Christmas. The very few words she speaks come out in small reluctant phrases: “Where else would I go?” She says her children got some presents from the fire department. There’s a painting of Jesus and Mary on the wall above the bed. “My mother gave it to me.”

A week later I stop by to visit. She’s in the same position: drowsy and withdrawn. I ask her if she celebrated New Year’s Eve. “Stayed by my lonesome” is all that I understand. She rouses herself enough to ask me if I have a cigarette. In the vacuum of emotion I ask if she ever gets to do something for fun. “Go to a movie …” But when I ask the last time she’s been to a movie she says: “1984.” What was the movie?
“Dawn of the Living Dead.”

When she says she’s pregnant and is planning an abortion I don’t care to ask her why, but she sits up halfway, props herself against a pillow, looks at Terry, shrugs, and
mumbles this: “What you want to bring another baby into this place for? There ain’t nothin’ waitin’ for them here but dirty rooms and dyin’.”

Her children, scattered like wilted weeds around her on the floor, don’t talk or play or move around or interrupt. Outside in the corridor I ask her cousin if the kids are sick. Terry says: “They’re okay. They just didn’t have no food to eat today.” So I ask: “Did you?” She shakes her head. I go down to Herald Square, buy french fries and chicken at a fast-food store, milk and cookies at a delicatessen, and return. The minute I walk in Wanda sits up, clearheaded and alert. Her kids wake from their stupor. Fifteen minutes later, every bit of chicken, all the french fries, cookies, milk have been consumed. There is a rush of energy and talking in the room. The kids are pestering the adults, as they ought to.

“I have a problem,” Wanda says. “My blood sugar goes down. It is called [pronounced very precisely] hypoglycemia.”

I meet Terry one year later by sheer chance outside Grand Central Station. She’s in a food line for the sandwiches distributed by a charitable group at 10:00 p.m. Her kids are with her. She’s holding a baby in her arms. She tells me she’s in another hotel near the Martinique. “Don’t have no refrigerators there …”

I lose her in the crowd of people waiting for a meal.

In the subway station under Herald Square a woman who has seen me coming from the Martinique follows me and stops me by the stairs. Her hair is disheveled. Words spill from her mouth. She says that she was thrown out of the Martinique. Her children were sick with diarrhea. Someone “reported” her; for what I do not ask. After the Martinique she says that she was in a place I’ve never heard of called the Brooklyn Arms. Her youngest child, one year old, became much sicker there. City workers
finally persuaded her to give up all three kids to foster care. She’s living now in a crowded women’s shelter where, she says, there are twelve women in a room. She shrieks this information at me on the platform not far from the shrieking trains.

“There’s no soap, no hygiene. You go to the desk and ask for toilet paper. You get a single sheet. If you need another sheet you go back down and ask them for some more. I sleep on an army cot. The bathroom’s flooded.”

Is she telling me the truth? Is she on drugs? Is she unwell? Why did she elect to tell me this? Why do the words come out so fast? I feel unkind to cut her off, but I am frightened by her desperation. I leave her there, pouring out her words into the night.

The nurse in the Martinique says this: “A mother gave birth last week to a baby that weighed just over a pound. She was in her seventh month. Her children rubbed her belly while she cried. I called an ambulance.”

The nurse is kind, compassionate, and overwhelmed. “People are fractured by this system. I’m responsible for 500 families, here and in another building. Custody cases. Pregnant women. Newborn children. I can get them into WIC. I’m snowed …” She’s on the telephone, buried in papers, talking with women, hearing their questions, trying to come up with answers. There are others like her in the crisis center who create a tiny zone of safety in the larger zone of fear. But twenty-five hardworking nurses like this woman would be scarcely equal to the miseries that flood across her desk out of this factory of pain and tears.

Far from any zone of safety lives a man named Mr. Allesandro. He’s six feet tall and weighs 120 pounds—down 20 pounds from late September. When he came to the hotel a year ago he weighed 165. I first met him in the
ballroom before Christmas when I handed him an apple. One bright apple. One week later he does not forget and, when he sees me in the lobby, asks me if I have some time to talk.

His two daughters are asleep. Christopher, his nine-year-old, is lying on the top bunk, fully dressed and wrapped beneath a pile of blankets, but he is awake and vigilant and almost belligerently alert. It’s a cold night and the room appears to be unheated. Mr. Allesandro shows me a cracked pane of glass that he has covered over with a sheet of garbage plastic and Scotch tape. The two coils of the hot plate offer a symbolic reassurance (“heat exists”) but they do not provide much warmth. He’s wearing a coat and woolen hat. His mother, who is seventy-three, lives with them; for some reason, she’s not here.

There aren’t many men as heads of households in this building; this fact, I think, adds to his feeling of humiliation. His story, quickly told, remains less vivid for me later on than certain details like his trembling hands, the freezing room, the strange sight of his watchful boy, unsleeping on the bed. The boy reminds me of a rabbit staring from a thicket or caught in the headlights of a car.

These, as Mr. Allesandro tells me, are the facts: He was one of several maintenance workers in a high-rise building in Manhattan owned by one of the well-known developers. It was early autumn and his wife, for reasons I don’t learn until much later, just picked up one day and disappeared. He tried to keep his job and home by rising early, feeding the children, bringing them to school, then rushing to his job. But his shift required him to be on duty very early. He was reprimanded and, when he explained his problem, was permitted to stay on but cut back to a half-time job. Half-time work was not enough to pay the rent. He was evicted. In the subsequent emergency he had to take leave from his job.

“My mother went with me to the EAU. We asked them if we could be placed together. That way, she could get the kids to school and I could keep my job.” Instead, they put him in a barracks shelter with the children but would not allow his mother to go with them. As best he understands, this is because she drew a Social Security check and was on a different budget from his own. Eligibility rules are difficult to fathom; but, even where the consequences are calamitous and costly, they are faithfully observed.

“So I’m alone there in this place with about 200 cots packed side by side. Men and women, children,” he says, “all together. No dividers. There’s no curtains and no screens. I have to dress my kids with people watching. When my girls go to the toilet I can’t take them and they’re scared to go alone. A lot of women there are frantic. So I stand and wait outside the door.”

He went back to the EAU and begged once more. “In my line of work,” he says, “you don’t earn much of your money from the salary. The people in the building get to know you and you do them favors and they give you money in return. Christmas is the time you get your tips. They’ll hand you an envelope. Twenty dollars. Fifty dollars. Some give you a hundred. These are very wealthy people …” So his disappointment was intensified by recognition of the fact that he could not get back his job in time to benefit from the expected generosity of people whom he’d known: “Some of those people knew me well. They liked me.” He seems desperate to be assured that he was liked, remembered, missed, by people who had frequently befriended him.

The use of barracks shelters as deterrence to the homeless is not absolute. Assignments are made “on an ad hoc basis,” as one social worker states it. But nothing that Mr. Allesandro said could bring the EAU to place his mother with him. His former boss, he says, had told him he would
take him back if he could start the day at 5:00 a.m. “There’s no way that I could do it. Would you leave your kids alone within a place like that at 5:00 a.m.? I couldn’t do it.”

The upshot is this: He loses the chance to go back to his job a few weeks before Christmas. Although he’s worked for many years, he hasn’t been on
this
job long enough to have accumulated pension benefits. Dispossession from his home has left him unemployed; unemployment now will render permanent his homelessness.

Having finally lost everything he had, he returns a few weeks later to the EAU. This time, having undergone “deterrence” and still being homeless, he is granted “temporary” placement at the Martinique. His mother can join him now. But he is no longer a wage earner; he’s an AFDC father, broken in spirit, mourning for those lost tips which he will obsessively recall each time we talk. His job has been assigned to someone else. He loses self-control. He thanks God for his mother. This strikes me as a gruesome and enormously expensive instance of municipal assault upon a man’s work ethic and familial integrity at the same time.

How does he feel not working?

“It’s a nightmare. I’m Italian. You know—I don’t mean this to sound prejudiced”—all of the white people here, I notice, are extremely careful and apologetic on this score—“my people work. My father and grandfather worked. My mother worked. I can do construction, carpentry. I can repair things. I’m somebody who’s mechanically inclined. I would make beds, would clean toilets. I’d do anything if I could have a decent job.”

He searches the ads, walks the pavement, rides the subway; but he cannot find a job that pays enough to rent a home and feed three children. His rent allowance is $281. He’s seen apartments for $350 and $400. If he takes an apartment over his rent limit he will have to make the
difference up by cutting back on food and clothes. His mother’s pension is too small to offer them a safety margin. “I wouldn’t risk it. I’m afraid to take a chance. Even if I got a job, what if I lost it? I’d be back there with the children in the barracks.”

So, like everybody else, he’s drowning in the squalor of the Martinique Hotel but dreads the thought of being forced to leave.

“My mother helps to make it like a home. She tries. We got the kids a kitten, which is something that is not allowed. I don’t like to break the rules, but you have got to give them something to remember that they’re children.”

Thinking of his hunger, I ask how he feeds the cat.

“We don’t need to. We have never bought one can. She eats better than we do—on the mice and rats.”

Around midnight I notice that Christopher is wide awake and watching from the bed: blue eyes, pale skin, blondish hair. Mrs. Allesandro cuts the children’s hair.

Where is Mrs. Allesandro?

Mr. Allesandro calls her “grandma” and he speaks of her as if she were
his
grandmother as well. Grandma fell in the stairwell Friday afternoon. There had been a fire and the stairs were still slick from the water left there by the fire hoses. She’s in the hospital for an examination of her hip. He tells me that she has a heart condition. “If anything happens to her [pauses] … I’d be dead. She’s the one that’s holding us together.”

Other people in this building speak of Mrs. Allesandro in almost identical words. They count on her perhaps even a little more than on the nurse or on the other people in the crisis center. Unlike the crisis workers she is here around the clock. As short of food and money as the Allesandros are, I am told that she is often in the hallways bringing food to neighbors, to a pregnant woman, a sick child living somewhere on the floor. A man who knows
her but does not live on this floor speaks of Mrs. Allesandro in these words: “Here she is, an old Italian lady. Here are all these women. Most of them are Puerto Rican, black … You will see them holding on to her, crying to her as if she was their mother.”