Fire in the Ashes (8 page)

Miranda was nearly twelve years old at the time when Christopher first went to
Rikers Island. She and her sister were going to a Catholic school, which they had attended since they moved into the Bronx. The small foundation I’d established, which was supported by readers of my books, was indirectly paying for tuition. My assistant sent the money to Pietro, rather than the school, because I thought that it was better for the children to enable him to make these payments on his own.

The children went to school in clean clothes every day. When Pietro didn’t have the money for the laundromat, he or Grandma washed their clothes at home. He couldn’t afford to buy the kind of clothing for the girls I know he would have liked, but what he did buy was in proper taste—no short skirts or tight revealing blouses, which many of the adolescent girls they knew were wearing.

“The other teenage girls we knew were hanging out with boys,” Miranda said when we talked about her childhood ten or twelve years later. “A lot of them got pregnant and had children by the time they were fifteen. But Ellie and I did not turn out that way. I was playing with dolls still when I was in junior high. Daddy and Grandma wouldn’t let us out at night. If they did, they’d call us in by eight.
People in the neighborhood treated us as if they knew we were protected, that we were a close family.”

Those who knew the family well enough to be aware of what was going on with Christopher, or had observed his rough behavior for themselves, did their best not to give Pietro the impression that they thought he was responsible. They knew he had a sense of guilt, which also came across in letters that he wrote to me. They tried not to compound it.

Pietro hoped that Christopher’s experience at Rikers Island might have left him scared enough to stay away from dangerous activities. He hoped that it had chastened him. But Christopher’s trajectory over the next years continued on its downward slide, and, far from being sobered by the time he spent in jail, he seemed to have become more hardened, more emboldened.

The culmination came in 1995 before he was twenty, when he and three other young men grabbed a boy they did not know in the subway in the Bronx and threw him on the train tracks. The boy would very likely have been crushed beneath the train that was approaching if bystanders had not climbed into the pit beside the tracks to rescue him. Christopher was convicted of attempted homicide, and served the next seven years in prison—“upstate,” as most families that I knew euphemistically described the penitentiaries where inmates served long sentences.

The prison where he served the longest portion of his sentence was seven hours from New York City. The girls went once a month to visit him with Grandma and Pietro—fourteen hours on the bus, leaving the Bronx at 2:00 a.m. on Saturday nights, returning home at 10:00 p.m. on Sundays. “There was something that I couldn’t figure out about his attitude,” Miranda said. “He didn’t act the way you’d think someone would act in prison. It was like ‘no big deal.’
Like he didn’t want to think that he was up there in that prison for a reason.”

After I had had no contact with him for so many years, he now began to write me letters that were postmarked in the town of Alden, which, I found by looking at a map, was roughly equidistant between Buffalo and Attica, the latter of which was the site of yet another penitentiary, historically notorious because of a prisoner revolt and resultant massacre of prisoners that had taken place there thirty years before. Both prisons, like most of the large state prisons in New York, were sited in white areas—and highly valued by the local residents and politicians for the jobs that they supplied—while the vast majority of inmates in these institutions were black or Hispanic. Thousands of incarcerated men of color from the streets of the South Bronx and other poor and segregated sections of New York underpinned the economic life of these upstate communities. Christopher, with his clear blue eyes and pale white skin and white-blond hair, inevitably attracted the attention of his fellow inmates.

His letters began in a polite and friendly tone, telling me for instance that he hoped that I was in “The Very Best of Health” and sending his best wishes to my research aide who, however, did not know him other than from having forwarded a message now and then that his father, for some reason, asked her to convey to him. I wanted to believe that the good-natured feelings in these letters were sincere; but since I hadn’t seen him or spoken even briefly with him since the years in which he used to glare distrustfully at me while he was in the Martinique, the familiarity with which he addressed me now had an unconvincing sound. He spoke of his father with no softening of feelings and said that it was Grandma who had always taken care of him.

Sooner or later, he would come around to asking me
to send him money, or, in two instances—attributing to me more power than I had—asking me to intervene in efforts he was making to obtain a hearing to reduce his sentence. I agreed to do this once, at his father’s pleading, and wrote a letter that alluded to the damage Christopher had undergone from his association with the older adolescent boys who had been his mentors in deception and some minor forms of criminality while he was in the Martinique. I cited Mario Cuomo, the former New York governor, who came away with horror from a visit to the Martinique and likened it to “
a scene out of Dickens.”

But, as hard as I tried, I knew that there was something unpersuasive in my letter. The truth is that I’d written it reluctantly because there was nothing in his correspondence with me, or in the things his father and Miranda had passed on to me after having visited the prison, that even hinted at a feeling of repentance for the crime that he’d committed.

A year later, he thanked me for that letter but asked me for another. Again, there was no indication that he felt remorseful or responsible for what he’d done. And he remained belittling in reference to his father, although Pietro was the only person who consistently attempted to assist him while he was in prison, sending money orders, for example, so Christopher could purchase clothes for winter.

“This Jail thing is Real Rough,” he said in that second letter. “A lot of cutting’s, a lot of stabbing’s. I want to get out.” He enclosed a photo of himself. His hair was gone. His head was shaven to the skull. He looked very muscular.

He told me he was known as “White Boy” to the men with whom he was imprisoned, and gave me the impression that he felt he was at greater risk of danger for this reason. But I worried more about the harm that he might do if he
were released with no apparent alteration in his values or his temperament. This time, despite the pressure that his letter placed on me, I did not reply to him.

Meanwhile, on East Tremont Avenue, the efforts that Pietro had been making for so long to provide the children with as much stability as possible were thwarted unexpectedly when they were evicted from their home. The federal housing subsidy, known as Section 8, which he, like other homeless people, had been given when he moved out of the Martinique, had been withheld for no apparent reason other than the bureaucratic workings of a system that was famous for its arbitrary and erratic operation and its seeming lack of rationality. As a result, his landlord was not getting rental payments other than the small subsidiary funds that tenants had to pay and which Pietro scraped together on his own.

Miranda was seventeen, her sister eighteen, when they were evicted. All at once, the household in which they’d been living in the decade since they left the Martinique, and where they had known at least a fair degree of continuity and safety, was ripped apart by forces that Pietro never really understood and could not control.

“Daddy and Grandma moved into a single room in somebody’s apartment near where we’d been living,” said Miranda. She and her sister moved in for a while with a friend who lived in the same neighborhood. Ellie, who was married a year later when she was nineteen—she had a baby by that time—would be taken in and treated kindly by her husband’s family before they saved enough to rent their own apartment.

Young as she was, and shy and understated as she’d always been, Miranda had to cope with the reality that, at least in economic terms, she was suddenly, as she put it, “out there
on my own.” She had to find a job, and find a place she could afford to live, and this, in turn, compelled her to drop out of school before she could complete her senior year.

After a number of fits and starts, she pulled herself together and was able to obtain a job, then a series of different jobs, none of which paid very well but gave her nonetheless her first experience of even partial self-reliance. One of the earliest jobs she got, which had been assigned to her under New York’s workfare regulations, was, she said, “a short-term thing, clean-up work, raking leaves and stuff like that” in the public parks, “but only for six months,” after which she found her way into longer-lasting jobs.

“One of them was over there at Yankee Stadium,” she said, “doing counter work.” Another job was “at a bakery on 82nd Street near Madison,” where she was on a part-time basis, what she termed “on-call,” but she said, “they called a lot.” When she wasn’t working at the bakery, she braided hair for women on the sidewalk of East Tremont Avenue. “I’d set up a chair outside. I might make a hundred dollars in an afternoon if I had three customers.”

At one point, she also said, “I took a course in home care,” and soon was getting long-term jobs taking care of people who were ill and needed a companion to look after them. She told me she enjoyed this work. “It was mostly older women. They reminded me of Grandma.”

At this time, while Christopher was still away in prison and Grandma and Pietro were living in their rented room, Miranda, who was almost twenty and had led a very careful life in terms of her relationships with men, became, she said, a bit less careful “with a guy I’d always known and thought of as a friend, not in the romantic way. Then one night, you can guess. First time in my life. And, presto! I was pregnant.…”

While she was pregnant, she continued working for one of the women, who, she told me, “lived up there in
Riverdale”—a mostly white and affluent community. But, as her pregnancy advanced and she began to have some spells of dizziness and weakness, she said that she passed out one night in the lady’s living room. She was permitted to come back to work. “But, only two weeks after that, I passed out again.” At the hospital, she was diagnosed with dehydration and anxiety and was told it was not wise for her to work for the remainder of her pregnancy.

This time, it seems, the welfare system worked the way it ought to work for women in her situation. As an expectant mother, she was placed on rent assistance and provided with the welfare benefits, including food stamps, she would need to take care of her baby. By the time her son was born, she had found a small apartment in the St. Ann’s neighborhood. After another year had passed, she took on a part-time job. Her little boy was cared for by a neighbor in the afternoons while she was at work.

This, then, was her situation at the time when Christopher, after having served nearly the full length of his sentence, with the reduction of a single year that had been commuted to parole, returned to the South Bronx.

“When Christopher came out of prison,” said Miranda, “I was the only one who had a home that he could come to. He was my brother. I had my hands full with my baby and my job, so I didn’t know what I should do, but he had no other place. I was his ‘security,’ he told me. You can see how little space I have”—she gestured to her bedroom and a smaller room that held the baby’s bed, and the very tiny living room in which she had no furniture other than the sofa we were sitting on—“but I took him in.…

“I gave him my bed and I slept on the couch, because you know how tall he is. I washed his clothes. I cooked his meals. He used to tell me he was ‘getting things together,’ but he was out late almost every night. Sometimes he’d be out until the morning.”

I was not surprised when she said he broke the terms of his parole within a year after he got out of prison. “He went back twice, each time for about six months. The second time was in 2004, I think—or maybe in 2005.” When he was out, he was back in her apartment. “He managed to get little jobs. He was a good talker. But he couldn’t hold them. He was late too many times and people got fed up with him.” Even when he had a job, “there was always something else going on that he wouldn’t talk about.…

“Finally,” she said, “he got a really good job in Manhattan at an exercise salon called Equinox. He told me how much money he was making and the people he was meeting. He had been bulked-up in prison,” where, he told her, he’d been lifting weights and doing other body-building exercises. “He was in terrific shape.… But even then, when he was making money, he wouldn’t help me with the food. He spent his money on himself. Stupid things. He bought himself expensive clothes. He bought a car, an old red Honda, from a friend, but he would get angry with me when I asked if he would drive me to my job or help me with the rent, the part of it that I was s’posed to pay.

“I was overworking myself, rushing off to do my job, doing everything I could to take care of my baby, filling out the forms I had to do to keep my rent assistance. Lots of forms for different things. Plus, also checking up on Daddy, going there to make sure he and Grandma were okay. Christopher, when he came back from work, just layin’ there.… I was only twenty-four. Christopher was thirty. But he wouldn’t help me.”

Christopher finally quit his job at Equinox, she said.
“By this time, I knew that he was doing stuff he shouldn’t do because he had a lot of cash. It seemed like he was making more than he had made at Equinox.

“At last I told him he would have to leave.” She spoke about this with a sense of sorrow at her inability to keep him there and, as I suspect she may have wistfully believed, to function as a counterforce, by her availability and physical proximity, against his seemingly compulsive inclination to do almost anything that would get him into trouble once again. But, she said, “I had no choice. I was afraid of breaking down. The tension was too much for me.”