Fire in the Ashes (15 page)

“I’d been wonderin’ a couple years before if I ought to get a gun. Then I thought it over and I thought it was too dangerous and I decided not to do it. Then these bastards beat me up and stole my wallet from my bag. So then I changed my mind again.

“I went down and talked about it with a cop. I asked him, ‘Should I get a gun?’ ”

“He said, ‘You should.’ ”

“What cop?” I asked.

“A New York cop. A sergeant at the precinct that I know. He took me in the back room at the station so no one else would hear. ‘Mrs. Washington,’ he said, ‘if I was you I’d go and get myself a gun and go out to a firing range and take some lessons and learn how to use it. Learn how to defend yourself.’ ”

“I don’t think a cop is s’posed to tell you things like that. He told me, ‘This is off the record. I’m just telling you what I would do for you if you was my own mother.’ ”

I asked her if the officer was black. “No,” she answered. “He was Irish. I used to see him on the street. I knew he liked me and he meant it for my good. Still, it frightened me. I thought, ‘Hello?! This man ain’t no criminal. He’s a cop here at my precinct and he’s telling me I ought to get a gun!’ ”

“What did you say?”

“I told him I would think it over—and I did. But then I changed my mind a second time.”

She looked down at her hands and shook her head and laughed.

“So that’s the end of it. I didn’t do it.” But she grabbed her key-chain from a corner of the kitchen table and showed me that she had a pocketknife attached. And she made a point of saying, “I know how to use it if I have to.…”

Much of her humor, not surprisingly, was at the cost of people far more powerful than she. Over the course of years she would regale me with light-hearted commentaries about stories she had read that described the peccadilloes of the very rich and privileged.

“This one made me laugh,” she said one night, pointing to a story she had marked with exclamation points. The
story was about the Harvard Club on 44th Street in Manhattan. One of the obligations of employees there, according to their contract terms, the story said, was to clean up “vomit,” “blood,” or “excrement” when members drank too much and lost their self-control. Whenever this unpleasant chore was called for, workers got ten dollars extra. The story was in the news that day because the workers were on strike to protest several matters, one of which was the decision of the club not to give them extra pay for dirty jobs like this.

“If people who went to Harvard can’t control themselves and drink too much,” she said, “I think they ought to be grown up enough to clean up their own vomit.”

She often spoke as if she was convinced that a persistent self-indulgent immaturity was accepted in New York as one of the entitlements of privilege. She noted, for example, when erotic misbehavior by the very rich was granted absolution by the press that would not be given to the men and women in her neighborhood.

“Another millionaire who didn’t bother to get married had another baby,” she reported to me once in speaking of a well-known real estate tycoon. “I notice that they never say rich children are born ‘out of wedlock.’ They never say these babies are ‘one-parent children.’ If you’re rich, you don’t get judged the way poor people do.”

Her most acidic commentaries were reserved, as in the past, for stories in the press that she believed misrepresented the realities of her existence and those of the other people in her neighborhood. The giddiness of fashion stories,
for example, that had no connection with the lives of ordinary people tended to elicit some of her most cutting and sarcastic observations. “Whenever they say, ‘Women in New York are wearing such and such these days,’ I always wonder who they mean, because I know for certain that they don’t mean anyone like me. They do it in this ignorant and excited way as if they didn’t know that there are people in New York who have to wear the clothes they bought ten years ago.

“They live within a made-up world. ‘Everyone is doing this.…’ But who is ‘everyone’?”

Once, on a steamy Sunday afternoon, she showed me a story in the New York Times that said the heat had been especially uncomfortable for the carriage horses, which are popular with tourists in the midtown area. “
It wasn’t much of a week to be a horse …,” the paper said. “People, at least, have air-conditioning and friends with pools.”

Her reaction to the glibness of this sentence was less bitter than resigned. “I guess that puts me with the horses,” she said quietly.

Alice, however, was even-handed in the anger and impatience she displayed. She could be very harsh on people in her own community, for instance, when she was convinced that some of them deserved it. Once when she had read a story in the Daily News about a man who’d terrorized his girlfriend and then killed her fifteen-month-old child, she wrote in the margin, “Kill the bastard! Bring back the electric chair!” Another time, when a group of teenage boys raped a woman in her neighborhood, she told me, even before they’d been convicted, “Lock them up and keep them there until the day they die!”

On some occasions, she would later qualify her first response. “Some are arrested who are innocent,” she conceded once after there had been a mass arrest of something like two dozen men up on Cypress Ave—one of several mass
arrests that took place in that area, three blocks from St. Ann’s. “You can’t arrest that many men without making mistakes.”

She told me of a man she knew, because she used to tutor him in reading, who, she said, was doing time in prison for a crime that she believed, or wanted to believe, he did not do.

“It happens,” she said. “Some never go to jail who should, and some who do should not have gone there in the first place.”

The man she’d tutored was arrested in a roundup, she explained, after a group of men had murdered someone in the course of an armed robbery. “The murderers,” she said, “were friends of his. They were wearing leather coats and leather caps. He dressed the same way they did, and he was always with them. The cops, I think, had had him under observation. So they took him off and booked him.”

His mother, she said, was in the hospital the night he was arrested. A friend of hers for many years, “she was the first woman that I knew who died of AIDS.…

“When he was a boy, he had a learning problem and his mother tried to help him, but she wasn’t educated well and, in fact, could barely read. He used to come to my apartment after school and I would try to help him with his homework.

“He was with his mother at the hospital the night the crime took place. That’s what he says at least. His mother told me it was true. She died while he was in the lockup, so he couldn’t be there for the funeral. I guess they thought he was too dangerous to let him out.

“He did look dangerous. He had that way of walking, looking at you.… Anyway, he got ten years to life.

“I visited him the first year while he was at Rikers Island, in pretrial. I hated goin’ out there, but he didn’t have nobody else to count on. He used to call me ‘Auntie.’ He
would ask me to explain things. He had a hard time understanding what had happened to him. I sometimes wondered if he was retarded.

“Now he’s somewheres up near Buffalo. His birthday’s in December, same as mine. I send him birthday cards and write him notes, which I print in big square letters because he can’t read cursive writing.”

“Can he write enough to answer you?”

“He tries. He writes a few lines but they’re hard to understand. He never got the stuff a student’s supposed to know in second or third grade. A lot of boys they send upstate never got much further.”

It was one of the few times she’d spoken of a man in prison with a feeling of real sympathy.

“He could have lied to me. He could have done the murder. He could have been there and not done it. He could have been with his mother in the hospital, just like he says.”

“I get the feeling that you think he may be guilty.”

“Some days I do. I go both ways on that.” But, she said, “It can’t be easy for the cops to know when somebody is telling them the truth. If these boys are goin’ to dress like gangsters, walk like gangsters, talk like gangsters, and behave like gangsters, and their friends are gangsters, then they
got
to know that they’ll attract attention.”

She showed me a photo of the boy before he went to prison. In the photo, he did not look tough at all. He still had a childish look. Alice said she kept it on her bureau.

One summer evening when we were sitting in her kitchen, Alice talked with me at greater length than usual about her state of health. I haven’t spoken of this matter
up to now, except to mention that she’d gone through periods when she felt extremely weak, or feverish, or sometimes had no appetite for several days and couldn’t bring herself to eat.

There’s a reason why I haven’t given further information about her medical condition and the likely cause of her susceptibility to episodes like these. I didn’t want to give the incorrect impression that Alice, in the fullness of her character—a woman with so strong a spirit and so many interesting and affirming qualities of personality and character—could be faithfully portrayed as if she were, above all else, a person who was weighted down by medical dilemmas.

The fact of the matter, nonetheless, is that, shortly after Alice left the Martinique Hotel, she had had a medical examination and had tested positive for HIV. She told me this at the time, but we didn’t talk about it often. She wanted it that way. The only reason it came up again that summer night was that she had seen her doctor about a chest congestion and he had kept her in the hospital in order to observe her for a couple days and give her a new round of tests. He had concluded that her HIV was considerably more advanced than when he’d seen her just six months before.

Alice was, of course, somewhat shaken by this news, but she was too steady on her feet, too stable in her temperament, to be shattered by the information. She’d already known that a progression in her illness was to be expected. She simply wanted me to know what she had learned from her physician. It was, as I’ve said, part of our unspoken understanding that we would share our worries about things that were important with each other. She didn’t like to speak about her health, but she wanted me to know her doctor’s name—she wrote it out for me—and said that she would not object if I spoke with him from time to time.

HIV, as I was well aware, had swept across the South
Bronx in the preceding years, ravaging entire families, including many women who had, unknowingly, contracted the disease several years before. Quite a few had been infected in the homeless shelters. Alice’s doctor, with whom I spoke shortly after she had given me permission, told me that one fourth of the admissions at the hospital where he was treating her were carrying the virus.

Men and women using drugs had frequently been sharing needles with each other at a time when many were not yet informed about the ways the virus was transmitted. Suddenly now, volunteers were setting up “
needle exchanges” on the sidewalks of the Bronx—there was one on the sidewalk right outside of St. Ann’s Church—where they were giving out clean needles and disposing of the dirty ones that addicts had been using.
Nearly 4,000 people in the Mott Haven area—the neighborhood around St. Ann’s—were known to be intravenous users at the time.

When she was in the Martinique, Alice told me, she had been recruited by the nurse to work with people who had AIDS and to counsel women on precautions they should take to avoid exposure to the virus through relationships with men who were injecting drugs. Because she was so well informed, it appeared improbable to me that she herself contracted the disease while she was living there.

Still, I knew that she’d had times of loneliness while in the Martinique, and even the most careful and most knowledgeable woman in that situation might have found it difficult in the course of four long years to maintain a wholly celibate existence. The other possibility—one that she believed to be most likely—was that it had been her husband who infected her.

I had little knowledge of the length of time it takes before the consequence of HIV becomes apparent once a person’s been infected. Her doctor told me that, unless a person had some reason to be tested, there could be an
extended period before the indications of the virus were detected. In any event, he said that he’d been treating her with antiviral medications and that the intermittent sense of weakness and the loss of appetite she sometimes underwent were, in part, the side-effects that commonly accompanied these medications.

The real concern, he said, was not the presence of the HIV infection in itself but that her body now had fewer weapons of defense against other and potentially life-taking forms of illness. He did not want to over-emphasize this point in his talks with Alice because, he said, “Anxiety does no one any good and can be debilitating to the body too.” He simply wanted me to understand “the realistic aspects of the situation” and the full dimensions of the danger she was facing.

The next time she and I had dinner at her home, Alice made no reference to our previous conversation or to the information she’d been given by her doctor. It was “there”—a fact that would not go away, a test result, a new reminder of a piece of inescapable reality. But, for Alice, life went on and, that evening, when I came into her kitchen, there was not a hint of grimness or foreboding in her eyes, or in her voice, or in the things she said to me.

She had gone out to the store and picked up some rib-eye steaks and she broiled them and served them, as she liked to do, with vegetables and baked potatoes, cooked, of course, exactly as her mother had instructed her. She made some kind of caramel pudding for dessert, and topped it off with ice cream. Then she brewed a cup of coffee, as she always did, and as she sipped her coffee she asked me what was going on around St. Ann’s, and whether I’d seen Martha.

She told me she’d been trying to reach her at her home the night before. “I called and called and all that I could
get was that damn whistle on her fax machine. I hate that sound. It’s like a train about to leave the station.