Rachel and Her Children (22 page)

After evenings like the one I spent talking with Susan at the EAU, I try to anesthetize myself. One way of doing this is by denial. At a distance, it is easy to distrust my memory. Perhaps a morbid disposition has exaggerated something or has willfully misunderstood the details. Maybe I got it wrong. Did I read the sign correctly? If I didn’t get it wrong, I tell myself, then the situation probably has been corrected since.

I’m writing this in January 1987. In the
New York Times
I read these words: “The Legal Aid Society charged yesterday that a city shelter for the homeless had violated a pledge made in court that it [would] not admit pregnant
women and young children because of the threat posed by the presence of lead paint…. One of the lawyers … said the society had learned of the situation last week from a pregnant woman who complained she had been allowed to stay at the shelter without being notified of any possible health threat….

“The shelter, at 78 Catherine Street, near the Manhattan Bridge on the Lower East Side, has been the focus of a ten-month dispute between the city and the Legal Aid Society…. The society contended in a suit that asbestos and lead levels in the shelter were 10 to 100 times [the] legal limits.” The HRA responded to the suit “by covering lead-painted surfaces with several coats of lead-free paint….” The city also said it had removed asbestos and it promised the continuous removal of the lead-paint chips. Medical experts for the city testified, however, that even with these measures, residents were still at risk. “The city agreed in court not to send pregnant women or small children to the shelter.”

Last March, the
Times
reports, “a child was found to be suffering from lead poisoning. Other residents suffered from high blood levels of the toxic metal…. Complaints of diarrhea among residents were traced by experts to asbestos contamination.”

A Legal Aid attorney later tells me that, despite the city’s promise not to send a pregnant woman or small child to this shelter, there was a loophole in the prohibition: The city had set aside one part of Catherine Street (perhaps what Susan calls “some kind of office”) as an “overflow” facility for families that came to an EAU as late as midnight. The area was lead free, so the law allowed its use in an emergency—but not more than once for any family. “Assigning her there at all was questionable,” he says. “Assigning her a second time was patently illegal.”

Susan, of course, would have no way to know that there
might be a lead-free section in the building. The sign on the wall was ominous enough to frighten anyone. Nor would legal technicalities of which she could not be aware have been of any help in lessening her sense of fear. If we extricate ourselves from the legalities and place ourselves in the position of a woman fighting nausea in the eighth month of her pregnancy, homeless at midnight, bewildered by the regulations, and already frightened by her previous experiences here, we may gain some faint idea of what innumerable homeless women undergo routinely in New York.

Treating any person this way is intolerable. Treating a pregnant woman this way is unspeakable.

I
n time of war, civilians sometimes are obliged to join a forced march with invading or retreating armies. Many people die along the way. Children and women are often the first victims.

The forced march undertaken by unsheltered children and their parents in New York is not often made on foot, more often by the public-transit system. Most survive: few without incurring an incalculable damage. At journey’s end lies little comfort but a modernized internment.

At every step along the road they face the eyes of an impatient populace. Their transit papers will be subway tokens. Their rations will be food stamps, restaurant allowances, meal tickets to soup kitchens. Instead of visas they will be provided with referral slips that indicate to an anonymous and overburdened welfare system whether or not they meet requirements for sanctuary. Not orchestrated human love but punishment for having failed to navigate
the economic mine field of America will be awarded to them as they pass the gates of every relocation center. Like displaced persons, each will be assigned a number.

References to prisons and to camps for displaced persons appear repeatedly in language used by homeless people. The theme is one of being under siege. “There is a sense of terror,” says a man whose family has lived at the Martinique for several years. “But the physical fears are not the worst. There is this sense of darkness and foreboding. Doors are always banging late at night. They’re made of metal and it echoes through the halls. It’s hard to sleep. You feel like you’re in jail.”

The feeling of internment may be reinforced by rituals of lining up, of having one’s room number written down, of receiving one serving—and one serving only—of a desperately needed meal. People who, one month before, may have been strong and full of pride are humbled rapidly. You see it in the corridor outside the ballroom of the Martinique at noon, when adults with their children wait to file past a table to receive a plate of food. “You can always tell the family … that’s new,” observes a priest who works with homeless families in Wisconsin. “Their heads are always down…. They’re very grateful for everything. They eat very quickly, and then they quickly disappear.”

A mother of three children in the Hotel Carter tells me this: She was a teacher’s aide, had worked for three years with retarded children, and was living doubled up with relatives when the death of one and marriage of another forced her to the streets. She’s been living in the Carter for two years.

“My rent allowance is $270. Places that I see start at $350. Even if you could pay it, landlords do not want you if you’re homeless. ‘Where do you live?’ I say the Carter.
That’s the end of it. It’s hard to do it. You psyche yourself. They want to check you out. You feel ashamed.

“It’s the same with public school. The teacher asks: ‘Where do you live?’ You say the Carter. Right away they put you in a slot. Jennifer is in the fourth grade. She has had four teachers in one year. Teachers keep quitting. Too many kids for them to handle. They can’t teach. So I have to see my kids losing their years. Do they put the homeless children into categories? ’Course they do! They know which ones they are.”

Food is short: “By the eighteenth of the month I’m running out. I have to borrow. They have got to eat. When we’re low we live on macaroni and french fries. I can make a lot from two potatoes. When you’re running low you learn to stretch. I don’t have the money to buy meat. Even if I did, there’s no refrigerator. It won’t keep.

“Christmas last year, we stayed in our room. Christmas this year, we’ll be here again. It’s a lonely time for everybody. I do what I can to keep the other women up. There are adults here who come to me. They think I’m stronger than I am. They’re under stress. I’ll talk them down. Do you know what scares them most? It’s when the rent is due. You go to your welfare office. You’re afraid there’s a mistake. It happens for no reason. I can write but I cannot write all the things that come out of my heart.”

The city pays the Hotel Carter $63 a night to keep her family in this room. Tourists who stay in newly renovated rooms on higher floors of the hotel pay $35 for a room of comparable size. The renovated rooms are clean and neat, with color television sets and air conditioners and new quilts and linens. The rooms for homeless families have roaches, water seeping through the ceilings, missing windowpanes, holes in the floor. The homeless families are restricted to three floors where they will not be seen by tourists.

“In the morning I’m up at six. The children go to
school at eight. Some mornings there’s no food. I give them a quarter if I have a quarter. They can buy a bag of chips. After school I give them soup—or bread with peanut butter. Cooking does pose certain dangers in a place like this. You’re careful with a fry pan in this room. If you’re using oil and it catches fire, it will go right up the wall.”

These are the routine concerns of homeless families. Children in this building face an added injury. The management does not want them to be seen in front of the hotel. But they have to be outside to meet their school bus in the morning. They also have to be dropped off when they return. This is the solution: There is a rear exit, used primarily for trash collection. The exit can be reached through a back corridor. It opens on Forty-second Street next to a shop that sells drug paraphernalia in a block of pornographic movie theaters. This is the place the children wait to meet their bus.

“They told my kids: ‘You have to use the back. You’re not allowed to use the front.’ They herd them down that corridor to the rear door. It doesn’t hurt so much that they would want
me
to be hidden. It does hurt that they would want my children to be hid.”

Do children know that they are viewed as undesirables? Using the same exit that is used by the hotel to throw away the trash is pretty vivid. They leave with the trash. Perhaps they carry some of its stench with them into school. “We aren’t going to get away with this,” said Daniel Moynihan. “We are
not
going to get away with this.” The twenty-first century, he said, “is going to punish us….” Perhaps he’s right. The time of punishment may not be deferred so long.

A woman living on the tenth floor of the Martinique is told that she has cancer. She calls me late at night in
Boston. It is, of course, the kind of news that terrifies all people, even in the best of economic situations. Most of us at least have systems of support. We live near neighbors. Some of us have family members near at hand; sometimes they are close enough to drive to our homes, sit up and talk with us, pack our clothes, our children’s clothes, and take us back with them into their safer world. They can bring us to the hospital. If the information is unclear, they can bring us to another doctor to confirm the diagnosis, to be sure.

When you are homeless there are no supports.

Mrs. Andrews is forty-two. The first time that we met, before Thanksgiving, she told me she had worked for seventeen years as a secretary and bookkeeper—nine of those years for one firm. She’d lived in the same house for seven years.

How did she end up in the Martinique?

Like many people in this situation, she had been hit with two catastrophes in sequence. First, she had learned that she had cancer in her large intestine. Hospitalized for removal of a part of her intestine, she had to have a hysterectomy as well. Three successive operations coincided with a time in which the man to whom she had been married thirteen years fell into depression, caused by difficulties of his own. He had had a prior drinking problem and it now became much worse. Debilitated by her medical concerns, she had no strength to offer him support. He, in turn, became destructive and disorganized. She had to leave their home.

She had three children: two daughters and one son. With the breakup of her household and her inability to work for several months, she found her economic status dropping very fast. She turned to welfare. One night, six months after her third and final operation, she was sitting with her children in the office of the Church Street EAU.

For several nights the city is unable to assign her to a shelter. When a place is found, it is the Hotel Carter. Bad as it is, she never gets beyond the door. When she arrives at 1:00 a.m., the manager says he can’t accommodate a family of four. Why was she sent here? She is too dazed to ask. At 2:00 a.m., she gets back on the subway and returns to the same EAU she has just left. On her return, a social worker seems annoyed. He asks: “Then you refuse this placement?” Although she explains what has transpired, she is forced to sign a paper formally refusing placement at the hotel which has just refused her.

I have asked her about this several times. “I had to
sign
the paper.”

Mrs. Andrews is articulate, well organized, and neatly dressed. If this woman could be savaged with so little hesitation, how much more savage is the treatment meted out to women who don’t have her middle-class appearance and do not display the style and articulation with which social workers might identify?

“We spent another seven days sitting in the welfare center, 9:00 to 5:00, and every evening 6:00 to 8:00 a.m., trying to sleep there at the EAU. All we had to eat that week was peanut butter, jelly, and cheese sandwiches.” Not wanting to exaggerate, she adds: “They gave my children juice and little packages of milk.”

After seven days she’s given a week’s placement at the Holland Hotel on West Forty-second Street, a few blocks from the Carter. This hotel, which has been likened by the
New York Times
to “a kiddie park designed by Hogarth and the Marquis de Sade,” was cited in 1985 for nearly 1,000 health and building violations. The owner was later found to have been taking in $6 million yearly, half of which was profit.

At the time that Mrs. Andrews was sent by the city to the Holland, part of the building housed nonhomeless tenants.
Only certain deteriorated floors were used to house the homeless. The fourteenth floor, to which the Andrewses were assigned for their first night of sleep in thirteen days, had no running water. “Even the toilet had no water,” Mrs. Andrews says. “We had to carry buckets to a bar across the street. There was a line of homeless families waiting to bring water back to the hotel. Only one elevator worked. You had to wait an hour.”

Two days later, unable to face this any longer, she goes with her children to the EAU. There she is asked to sign another form refusing placement. “‘We gave you a room. You turned it down,’ they said.” She’s given a referral slip and told that she must bring this to her welfare center. At the welfare center she presents the paper to her welfare worker, sits in a chair and waits until the office closes, then is sent back to the EAU to sit up in another chair until the morning. In this way, she and her children pass the next twenty-seven days.

During this time, Mrs. Andrews’ fourteen-year-old daughter, Carol, becomes ill. She develops pain and swelling in her abdomen. Examination leads to the discovery of a tumor on her kidney. The kidney has to be removed. Also removed in the same operation are the ovary and fallopian tube on her right side. Carol’s doctor tells her mother that she must not be allowed to sit up in a welfare office. Armed with a letter to this effect signed by the physician, the family goes back to the welfare center, then—after another day of waiting—to the EAU, only to repeat this ritual for three more days.