Fire in the Ashes (34 page)

“He’d often come to church on Sunday mornings in the winter without a pair of socks, so we’d have to look into the boxes of donated clothes to find a pair of socks to keep him warm.” Sometimes he would come “in clothes that were still damp, because he’d put them in the washer but didn’t have the money to put them through the dryer.…

“After I met his mother at the church, I began to visit her at home. When she went into the hospital, I would go with Benjamin every day to be with her.

“In the last weeks of her life, she asked me several times if I would take him in and be a mother to him after she was gone. But I hesitated. He was a boy, twelve years old, and he was maturing quickly. My apartment’s small. I didn’t know if I could do it. I could not decide.

“Then, as she was dying, Benjamin’s father showed up at the hospital. He said he wanted custody so that he could get the right to live in the apartment, even though
he’d never been there at the times when he was needed and had never shown a bit of love for Benjamin. He appeared to be inebriated. ‘I’m not stupid. I want that apartment.’ That’s when I made up my mind.”

Before Benjamin’s mother died, Martha promised her that she would take custody of Benjamin. In the fulfillment of that promise, Benjamin’s life and that of the soon-to-be-selected priest of St. Ann’s Church would be transformed forever.

Martha’s apartment in Manhattan was not in an expensive building, but it was a safe one and was in a neighborhood where Benjamin could go outside without the risk of danger and without exposure to the street life of Mott Haven that had led his two surviving siblings (his brother Edward did not die for several years) into lifetimes of addiction. But bringing a boy approaching adolescence to share so small a space with her was not an easy matter.

It may have been a trifle easier for Martha, because of her patient and adaptive personality, than it was for Benjamin. He’d never lived in any place like that before, where residents, although modest in their means by the standards of the East Side of Manhattan, and certainly not among the highly affluent, might have seemed as if they were to a boy who’d lived for his entire life in the Diego-Beekmans.

Simply adapting to the habits of another person—a priest, moreover, and a woman he revered—was, he said when we talked about this later, “a really big personal thing that I had to figure out and learn how to live with.” Then, too, “there were times when I had this fear that it all could end somehow. It was too good to be true. Why me? Not my sister? Not my brother, still there in the street? He was so far outside of the world he barely seemed to know I was his brother when I saw him on the corner. He was out there
from the time my mother died until he died in 1998. I was safe in Martha’s home, but there was no way for me to pull him into safety.

“When he died, Martha heard before me. Some people in the neighborhood who would bring him in sometimes for a shower or a meal told Martha he had died in jail. The medical examiner said that he had had a kidney failure. That was what had caused the fluid back-up that had choked him. Martha and Miss Katrice took me to the morgue. I didn’t have to see the body. I was shown a photo to identify.

“The sun came out while I was looking at the photo. The light from the sun passed across his face. I remember hoping that he was in peace, but I also felt relief that I wouldn’t have to see him on that corner anymore.”

Meanwhile, his sister was calling him from prison, “asking me to send her things. She’d call me four times, five times, in a day. She’d already been in prison seven years when my mother died. They brought her to the wake in handcuffs. They would not allow her to attend the funeral.…

“When she was out, it was worse. She wanted to have money in her pocket. She always wanted to buy clothes. ‘Fly’ clothes—you know what that means? So this would lead her back to stealing and, sometimes, drug-dealing. And I was grateful to her in one way, because she did try to protect me from my brother when he had molested me, and from other threats as well. Every time she called me now, I would get down on my knees and pray. I was afraid she’d kill herself, which she used to threaten she would do if I didn’t give her something that she asked for.”

When Martha saw the guilt that he was feeling she found a therapist for Benjamin, but he told me that he “didn’t find it easy to connect with him” because he was, in Benjamin’s words, “a downtown psychiatrist who couldn’t
put himself into my situation.” And he started stealing things again, including a few precious things that belonged to Martha, in order to get money for his sister.

But he told me that he stole for other reasons, too, not all of which were wholly altruistic. He told me this, I think, because he did not want to make excuses for himself that would oversimplify a pattern of behavior that had started, as we’ve seen, when he tried to help his mother but, in the years that followed, took on a momentum of its own.

“I also think,” he said, “that, at one level, I was testing Martha, trying to see how far I could go before she would give up on me and send me back. It was like I wanted to provoke her. I still did not believe that I deserved what she had done for me.”

But, in that one respect at least, he did not know Martha yet. She had more sticking power, more tenacity and loyalty, than all his provocations would be able to break down. Besides, she loved him deeply by this time, as deeply as she would have loved a child of her own—“even more,” she told me, “if that’s possible.” And there was that promise to his mother.

Benjamin’s life, since his mother passed away, was so closely linked to Martha’s that it seems important here to say a little more than I’ve said before about the obligations she was undertaking at St. Ann’s while also doing everything she could to relieve the anguish Benjamin was going through and to keep him out of danger.

Before Martha had become the pastor of St. Ann’s, the church was in a state of instability—poor financial management,
questionable use of funds, an afterschool that was in its doldrums, poorly run, amateurish in its offerings, and meagerly attended.

The priest who was the temporary pastor at the time was a person of Hispanic origin who seemed to use ethnicity in a divisive manner that left black people—who were roughly half the congregation—with the feeling that they were not wholly welcome at St. Ann’s. He was a passionate man in the defense of his identity and culture but may have lacked the will, or else the capability, to reach out to people whose ethnicity was different from his own, even though they all were living in the same community. The diocese was desperate to find someone to heal the wounds and keep the church from being shut down altogether.

When
Martha was appointed, her predecessor organized a campaign of resistance, based upon his confidence that he was entitled to be the pastor of St. Ann’s and that the failure of the diocese to keep him in that role was unrelated to the question of his own effectiveness. He was supported by a small but highly vocal group of people whose hostility to Martha, as it was conveyed in signs and posters they were waving in her face, had no apparent basis other than the fact that she was a woman who happened to be white and, for this reason, ought to be rejected by a parish in the heart of the South Bronx.

People in the neighborhood came to her defense and rapidly accepted her, not in a pro forma way but with affection and tremendous confidence. Many knew her well by then because of the work she had been doing there since she was a lawyer and a seminarian. They’d seen the warm attachment she’d developed to families that were going through the throes of illness or were simply trying to survive amidst the many crises and periods of instability that accompanied their poverty. Once she was appointed to be
pastor of St. Ann’s, they were thankful and relieved when she made it clear that her first priority would be the education of their children.

But the turmoil she had undergone at the time of her appointment—the hostility of those who were offended by her race and, perhaps, even more so by her gender—was one of the added burdens that she had to bear at the time when Benjamin came into her home and as she was setting out, with all the strength she had, to address the many urgent problems he was facing now.

Benjamin had gone to P.S. 65, two blocks from his mother’s home. Between the well-known problems of that school and the sense of constant crisis he’d been going through at home, he graduated P.S. 65—the school “just pushed me through,” he said—not knowing how to read. At the time his mother died, he was starting middle school at the place that called itself a “school for medical careers.”

“Martha made me go to school, but I hated it,” he said. Like many other kids who were channeled to that school, Benjamin learned almost nothing there. But, unlike those who, at least, could read and write by the time they left fifth grade, Benjamin had nothing to sustain him, nothing to hold on to from his elementary years. The “killing” years had nothing to kill off in him. He was illiterate when he started middle school and illiterate when he left there two years later.

Martha pulled him out of school in the South Bronx and enrolled him in a school in Harlem, called The Children’s Storefront, an innovative school with a good reputation, run by a poet with whom I was acquainted by the name of Ned O’Gorman. The school had been successful with other children who had grown up in poor neighborhoods, especially with those who had started there in preschool or in the early grades of elementary school. But Benjamin was an adolescent now and the gulf between his literacy level
and that of the other students of his age presented an intimidating challenge for himself and for his teachers.

He stayed at the Storefront a year and a half but made no academic gains that Martha could perceive. After that, she put him into an expensive private school on the West Side of Manhattan, which specialized in serving kids who were disabled academically. He remained there “a year or two,” as he remembers this, but his learning gap was now so great that it confounded every effort that his teachers made to bring him up to competence beyond a third-grade level.

“P.S. 65 had been my ruin—then those years at middle school,” he said. “I was scared that there was something wrong with me. I didn’t think that I could ever learn. I
did
try. Martha helped me every night. But I’d freeze up when I went to class. And, even when I thought that I was learning, it’s like it slipped away from me. It didn’t stay. And I was always back where I began.”

He reminded me that he had started stealing when his mother became ill, and that he continued stealing and had stolen things from Martha, even though he was getting an allowance from her and had no need to steal. This remained a problem at the school he was attending. He was also slipping back to his old neighborhood at night to be with friends, some of whom were using drugs and some of whom were selling them. Sooner or later, he’d return to Martha’s home. But he could not fail to realize that he was tormenting her when he came home much later than he’d promised.

Finally, Martha came to the decision that the only way to break the pattern he had fallen into was to send him to a boarding school—not the kind that Jeremy and Pineapple attended, but a school that placed at least as great an emphasis on discipline as it did on academics. There’s little point in speaking of this school, because he didn’t last there long. He was expelled for stealing.

Martha quickly found another school, this one in the Berkshires, in the western part of Massachusetts close to the border of New York, that had a reputation for coping well with students who behaved defiantly or self-destructively. A therapeutic system of behavioral conditioning was at the center of the ethos of the school. Although he stayed for two years and was not expelled this time, he told me he learned very little there and that the Skinnerian agenda had no enduring consequence in changing his behavior.

“I’d run away,” he said. “Then I’d go back. I’d be penalized by being taken down a level”—levels of advancement or demotion were part of the incentive system at the school—“and then I’d run away again.”

I asked him where he went when he would run away.

“I’d go to people in New York I knew.”

I asked him who these people were.

“Different people. Usually I went to the family of a friend. He had been my closest friend.…” He hesitated briefly, and he sounded guarded. Then he said, “His parents were drug dealers. They still are. My friend is dead.…

“Too many deaths,” he added.

But Benjamin continued to place himself in danger. He soon began hanging out with a group of people, most of them teenagers or in their early twenties, who had formed a kind of club that met in the evenings in the home of an older man who, as Benjamin described him, was “sort of the club leader.” The man was old enough, he said, to be the father of most of the kids who came to his apartment. But, in a scenario reminiscent of a novel of Charles Dickens, it seems that he was something of an artist at manipulating younger people and, said Benjamin, encouraged them in acts of criminality.

“Drugs were part of the scene,” he said. “and I got involved in that. But mostly, it was ‘boosting.’ Stealing
clothes and other stuff from expensive stores. Fashionable labels like Gucci and Armani.…”

When Martha learned of this, she knew what she had to do. She went directly to the house and confronted “the club leader.” I don’t know how many people would have wished to walk into that house at night with no one at their side. But Martha is a fearless woman and, when it came to someone whom she loved, there was nothing that could stop her.

“Martha brought me home with her,” he told me. “By the grace of God, she hadn’t given up on me.”

But his troubles were not over. He continued stealing. His use of drugs continued too, and this soon intensified. He didn’t tell me until recently that he’d grown dependent upon marijuana—but, as he explained this, not just any common kind of marijuana. “It was sprayed or mixed with something else to increase its potency,” and “I found it overwhelmingly addictive. It threw me for a loop. I needed it when I woke up. I needed it right through the day. I needed it at night. I couldn’t cope without it.”