When I arrived, I was already exhausted. The small waiting room of our office was so choked with people that I could get the door open only wide enough to slither in. I stepped over two little girls in Pocahontas pajamas huddled together over a tattered copy of Green Eggs and Ham. Usually the clients don’t wait patiently. They’re complaining loudly about the chairs, which are hard molded plastic in the fashion of seating for the poor everywhere, hospitals, welfare offices, prison waiting rooms. Or their kids are taking the crayons we leave around and making a beeline for the walls, figuring the walls are already so scuffed and marked that no one will complain.
But these people looked stunned and drugged, and no wonder. In the police car uptown, Irving had told me the story: Nine families in a small apartment building had felt a rumbling, heard a sound like gravel in a bag, and watched from their beds as the outside wall of their building fell to rubble into the maw of the vacant lot next door, which the city had been excavating because of complaints about an ancient leaking fuel oil tank.
I saw the pictures in the tabs the next day, and it looked like some architectural cross-section drawing. All the scanty and cheap possessions were laid bare for any passersby to see. The flimsy furniture rented from the thieves who made twenty-nine dollars a month sound like a steal until you realized you’d paid five hundred dollars over time for a set of bunk beds you didn’t even own and you could have bought for a hundred dollars less. The vinyl floor on top of old linoleum on top of the wood that the original builders had installed. The kitchens that had been left untidy the night before, or maybe were never tidy. Slices of life, like having a camera crew come unexpectedly into your apartment on a day when you were promising yourself you’d get around to straightening up. There were nine families because three of them were already homeless and had moved in with relatives or friends. Or people who had once been friends, before being a friend meant sharing a bathroom, a refrigerator, a closet that was already too small.
Tequila and Alison were both in the back room making lists. “We were already full before this,” Alison said, shaking her head.
“We got to come up with something,” Tequila said. “They go now, they go to emergency services, they’re up all night in chairs, scrounging around all day looking for another place.”
A sporting goods magnate from Long Island had once let us go through his damaged merchandise, and we had thirty sleeping bags. Ten were in use. Tequila called up the street to the manager of the shelter building and asked her to pull out the others. The living room in the transitional housing building had two couches and some floor space.
“Lopez?” I called out in the waiting room. “Delgado? Hurston?” The mothers had picked through our boxes in a back room and found sweatshirts and even a few jackets for the kids, who were in their pajamas. I carried a little girl with bare feet on my hip up the street to the shelter building. It was late April, but the wind was blowing down the block, and she hunched her birdlike shoulders and buried her face in my neck. Her mother had a baby wrapped in a towel over her shoulder and a boy held by one hand. The boy was wearing the snow boots I stowed under my desk, shuffling along the pavement with the tops digging into his groin. Somewhere I had a list of places that gave us free shoes. I’d have to call as soon as one was open. Cheap sneakers in every size.
“Yo, Annette,” I said when I got back to the office. The woman who rose to her feet had been in our shelter a year before with a baby and a toddler. Now she had a toddler and a kid.
“Annette, where you been?” I asked.
“All over, Miz Fitz,” she said softly. “I went to my sister in Brooklyn, but she got evicted and went to Jersey. I got into a nice place by the nuns on Lefferts, but then my husband said come back and I came back up here and then he started again, you know.” I did know. Annette had had three broken ribs the last time she’d been with us. “So then I go with my girlfriend and we sleeping with her kids in their room and whoosh—the whole thing just goes. And Delon was sleeping right up against the edge.”
Delon looked at me. At least he had a coat on, and socks. I had a feeling he’d been sleeping in them. “Boom,” he said. I figured he was about three.
“You know Mercedes from before?” Tequila said. “She moved up from the shelter to transition, she’s got a nice room there. Maybe you can double with her and her kids.”
“She’s got nice kids,” Annette said, pulling at her top lip. She had two deep scars on one cheek, and her nose leaned to one side. She was a pretty woman advertising to the world what she was willing to put up with.
“You got a girl in your office,” Tequila said to me. “Had a baby in the crib by the one wall of the house. Baby in the crib went down with the wall.”
I could hear her wailing before I even opened the office door, a heavyset black girl, maybe sixteen, maybe thirty. She’d already found my box of tissues and my box of butterscotches. The floor around her was almost decorative, a glittering plastic wrapper here, a white rosebud puff of tissue paper there, a paper circle of grief. She was either quite fat or heavily pregnant. I reached toward the candy jar and took a butterscotch drop myself.
“Take your time,” I said as she blew her nose. I wonder why they don’t teach that in social work school. It’s the best all-purpose tragedy sentence I’ve found yet, because God help you if you should say “What’s wrong?” or the even more egregious “Are you all right?” Irving said he’d once been at a scene at which a young officer, just a year on the street, had knelt down by a man whose left leg had been severed below the knee by a hit-and-run driver and said, “Are you all right?” Irving had been ready to give the kid a good clout on the back of the head, but even as he considered it the rookie had fainted, falling forward, knocking his head on a parked van. They’d had to call for a second ambulance.
“And today that cop is the commissioner,” Irving always finished triumphantly, arms thrown wide. And everyone roared with laughter. Only a few people had ever tumbled to the fact that the story was true. Meghan had, of course, and when the commissioner was on the show to talk about recruiting more young people to the force, she had asked him about it.
“God damn her to hell,” roared Irving, whose profanity was as old-fashioned as his lust.
“Take your time,” I said to the young woman again, patting her on the shoulder.
“My baby,” she finally wailed. “My baby gone.”
“Take your time,” I said again.
IT IS AN occupational hazard in my line of work, that in facing great tragedy we quickly come to see the tragic as heroic. In this we are constantly abetted by the news media, who like nothing more than the story progression in which a bereaved mother transforms in the space of a week or so from an anonymous nobody to the central figure of a poverty pietà. Of course, they prefer it if later it turns out that she is neither. This is precisely what happened with our young mother, whose name was DeBra. According to Tequila, she had been a bad actor for a long time, and the days in which she was photographed, holding a pink Care Bear (snagged from our donations box) and wailing extravagantly over the white particleboard casket that the Romero funeral home donated to us whenever a child died just showed the corruption of human conduct and local television. “She crying over that child now, I hear she used to smack that child silly,” Tequila said with her huffiest affect. “So why is she crying now?” Within a week we had to ask DeBra to leave because she was smoking crack and drinking Forties in the shelter. She complained to a local TV reporter, but the smell of Colt 45 had a chilling effect on her on-camera role of grieving mom.
“What’s she doing drinking anyhow?” Tequila said. “She gonna lose this baby to Child Services, you wait and see.”
“She’s pregnant? I thought she was just fat. Sorry, heavyset.”
“You can say fat to me, baby. I call a spade a spade, and you know it’s true. I am big, black, and beautiful. She’s fat and pregnant both. I’ll be calling the caseworker on her in about three months because I w
on’t have that poor baby on my conscience, I tell you true.”
“Wow. I really thought she was all right. I felt so bad for her.”
“She played you, honey,” Tequila said. “We all got real good at figuring out what you white folks want and then playing the role. You should hear what all the girls who work as nannies say when they come home at night. Whoooooo. Curl your hair.”
“Keep that to yourself.”
“Always.”
We were turning people away every day because of the building collapse, and I was working twelve-hour days, trying to find apartments, benefits, and school placements. I was calling all the mothers Mom. There just wasn’t time to learn everyone’s names. The kids were Honey, Sweetie, Handsome, Big Boy, and Pretty Girl. One-size-fits-all endearments are the last refuge of the overworked social welfare worker.
“Mom, should we keep her in the school she was in before or get her enrolled in the one closer by?” I said to one with a third-grader curled into her side sucking loudly on her thumb. The mother had unpacked her purse looking for some of her welfare paperwork, unloading so many meds that my desk looked like the will-call counter at the Walgreens store. She left the inhaler out just in case. In neighborhoods like ours, the inhaler is the icon. All the kids have asthma. Some doctor did a study that showed it’s because of the cockroaches, but it could as easily be the crumbling plaster, the lead paint, the emissions from the Cross Bronx traffic, or the lousy nutrition.
“She wasn’t going to school last week,” the mother said. I looked down at the file. This one was named Jackie. “We were over by the park and she was going to school there, then they had a water-main break and we moved in with my sister and she went to school there, then I was trying to bring her back to the old place but they couldn’t find the papers. She might need special ed. She’s not reading so good.”
No wonder. It turned out she’d been in six schools in three years. “Tequila,” I yelled.
“You don’t need to be shouting.”
“Sorry. Is there any chance we can get this sweetie pie here into the charter school?”
Tequila made a clicking noise with her tongue, the one that means “You are always driving me crazy with your unreasonable demands.” Then she made a huffing sound, which means, “But I, Tequila Johnson, will somehow rise to the challenge.” This is the Kabuki dance of our office. At the end I grin, tilt my head, and shrug. I am the straight man.
“You come up with me,” Tequila said to Jackie, walking into my office. “Miss Fitzmaurice got a call anyhow. Some person named Joseph Murphy wants to talk with you, but he’s such a big man he got some woman on the phone to say so. ‘Is Ms. Fitzmaurice available to talk to Joseph Murphy?’ ‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘Is Mr. Murphy there, ’cause this don’t sound like him.’ ”
“Wait,” I said. I picked up the phone. A woman’s voice asked if it was me, then said, “Please hold for Mr. Murphy.” I handed Tequila the phone. “When he comes on, you say, ‘Please hold for Ms. Fitzmaurice.’ ” Tequila loves putting people in their place. She sounded so snippy that her accent was almost English.
Joseph Murphy is the president of Meghan’s network. Before that he was the president of a company that makes and sells cars, and before that the president of a company that makes and sells major appliances. At his first meeting with the staff, he had made the mistake of describing his strategy for the network as similar to his strategies for the other two. “Don’t think of it as programming,” he’d said. “Think of it as product.”
Meghan had named him Joe-Joe the Dog-Faced Boy. The name stuck. Sometimes when he was leaving the newsroom, which he liked to visit to show that he knew, as he said, “where the heart of the network lies,” people would bark. He thought it was a newsroom tradition, like insisting on going to the actual site of a big story when it would make just as much sense to him to take the feed from a local affiliate.
“Miss Fitzmaurice,” he said. “I don’t believe we’ve met. How are you?”
“Fine thanks, Mr. Murphy. Actually we did meet at the fifth anniversary party for Rise and Shine. I had a long talk with your wife.” Apparently Joe and Rita were having a hard time cracking the code of New York City after the halcyon days of Detroit and Indianapolis. Media types thought they were too corporate, and corporate types were always enraged at the pieces the news side had done about their business practices. Rita was spectacularly indiscreet. She drank white wine like it was water and we were chatting in Death Valley at noon. I had liked her immediately. And she loved Meghan, could quote from her greatest hits on Rise and Shine the way I liked to think our parents would have done had our parents been in any way those kinds of parents. But that was before Meghan said “Fucking asshole” so that America could hear. I doubted that Rita was among those women who believed Meghan had done the right thing by calling Ben Greenstreet by his proper name. When Joe was named network chief, the first thing she’d asked him to do was arrange an audience with the pope.
There was silence on Joseph Murphy’s end of the phone. I had breached the firewall of New York propriety: if someone believes you have never met, you must go with that belief if you are the less powerful of the two. How had I forgotten, given the number of anchormen, diplomats, writers, and hedge fund managers to whom I had been introduced three, four, five times?
“Mr. Murphy?”
“Call me Joe. And you are Bridget, is that right? I have a sister by that name.” Along with Colleen, Maureen, and Mary Pat, I’d be betting. I heard adenoidal breathing on the line but thought it would be unwise to shout “Tequila!” Few Murphy clans think of Tequila as a name.
“The thing is, Bridget, I’m trying to reach your sister, and I’m having a dickens of a time. I’ve left a number of messages with her assistant and at her home, and I’ve even called her agent and her husband at his office. And I just can’t seem to track her down.”
“She’s on vacation, Joe. She doesn’t go often, but when she does she really likes to relax. Drop out of sight. Go off the reservation.” I’d run out of clichés.
“Of course she does. So do I, although Mrs. Murphy complains that I’m still on the phone to the office too much. But I get out there and golf, play a little tennis. Your sister plays tennis, if I recall.”
He recalled. She’d beaten the crap out of him at a mixed doubles match for charity. The poor guy had gotten so red in the sun at the tennis center that the EMTs in one corner of the court had been in a half crouch during most of the match. He recalled, and now he was going to rush the net, old Joe Bow-Wow Murphy.
“I’m sure she will be in touch as soon as she gets back, Joe.”
“Well, there’s the problem, Bridget. I need to be in touch with her now. Things are a little hot around here, and there are some issues that need to be ironed out with Meghan right now. And I know that she was at Grosvenor’s Cove for the week. In fact, our old old friends the Braithwaites—do you know them, he’s on the museum board?—they saw her there. Susan Braithwaite told Rita that Meghan was looking marvelous.”
“Joe, I would bet you the concierge at Grosvenor’s Cove would put you right through.”
“Oh, he was happy to. He’s a good man. Cecil, his name is, but the British way, you know. Ce-cil. Beautiful voice, too. The trouble is, she’s checked out.”
“Ah,” I said. The breathing had stopped. Tequila was either thinking hard or calling Cecil on the other line.
“She stayed the week and then she left. And now it’s been almost a month since we’ve heard from her. And someone said to me, Well, if there’s anyone who knows how to track her down, it’s her sister, they’re as thick as thieves.” It seemed an apt metaphor: the Fitzmaurice sisters, who had snatched quite a life out of not much of one. Or at least the elder had, and the younger had come along for the ride. “So here I am, calling you before I call the ambassador. Can you imagine being ambassador to Jamaica? Heck of a cushy job.”
I was doing the mental scramble. “Gee, I assumed she’
d left the number with the people at the Cove,” I said. “I don’t have it right here. Let me call you with it from home, Joe.”
“I would appreciate that, Bridget. And when you talk to Meghan, tell her that she’s in all our thoughts.” And those of the FCC.
“Jesus Lord!” cried Tequila from the next room.
She and Alison both came into my office and closed the door. With three people in my office, it feels like the subway at rush hour. Tequila sat down and knocked a pile of files off my desk.
“She’s gone,” Tequila said.
“Don’t be ridiculous,” I said. “It’s just that this Murphy guy can’t find her. If you were his secretary, he’d be on the phone to her right now.”
“Saying what?” said Alison.
“I went missing once,” said Tequila.
“When?”
“Whenever. Sometimes you just don’t want to mess with people. You don’t want no questions, no ooooh-oooooh worrying-about-you nonsense, no looking at you like, Oh, no, Tequila, times are bad. You just want to keep yourself to yourself.”
“One of the papers today said that Meghan is exploring other opportunities,” Alison said.
For someone who has been indicted, it’s a bad fact pattern. For a patient, it’s a poor prognosis. But in TV, it’s exploring other opportunities. That’s the kiss of death. “It would be better if they said she was in rehab,” I said, picking up the old, misshapen pot in which I kept my pencils. It was the first pot I’d ever fired. That’s the kiss of death for a childless forty-three-year-old woman. The lumpy clay thing on her desk she’d made herself.
“One of the papers today said she was in rehab.”