She was a petite and attractive woman in her early forties, with delicate bones, blue eyes, and short curly blonde hair; and although it was the coldest autumn afternoon in New York so far, she wore a light cotton frock and sandals, and her face retained the glow of a deep summer tan. I stood waiting next to her on a crowded corner at Lexington Avenue and Fifty-ninth Street, dividing my attention between her fine features and the fact that she was carrying over her shoulders two bulky bags, one plastic and one cloth, containing blankets and other items associated with people who sleep and beg in the streets.
The light changed. I crossed the street and continued on my way uptown. Bag ladies with appealing faces are not uncommon sights in New York. I have seen one such woman, an angular brunette in her late twenties, who, with the aid of a hairstylist and a change of wardrobe, could have blended in with those advertising scenarios by Ralph Lauren. I have seen many men, too, whose polite manner of solicitation and unshabby appearance have led me to wonder why they are where they are—panhandling in subways, curled up at night near subway gratings or within the doorways of boutiques and department stores.
By focusing on the outward appearance of such people, I do not mean to divert attention from their genuine plight, or to establish any distinction between them and the other unfortunate men and women who dwell, perhaps more convincingly, in the shadows of street life. On the contrary, I am suggesting that urban destitution and despair are now spreading to the degree that identifying their victims visually is often impossible. Increasingly, the victims in our streets are looking like the rest of us.
Still, a formidable language barrier separates us—along with some skepticism on our part as to who are the truly needy, and who are merely masqueraders pandering to our sympathies. And what of the small blonde woman with whom I had stood moments before at the corner of Fifty-ninth Street and Lexington Avenue?
Now on Sixty-second Street, I turned around. I spotted her in the crowd a half-block behind me. I had never approached a destitute person so directly, but at this moment I did not hesitate.
“Can I help you?” I asked, prompting her to stop and look up. Her inquiring blue eyes examined me, but whatever conclusion she came to she kept to herself.
“Are you a homeless person?” I continued, hoping this awkward question conveyed more compassion than curiosity.
She shifted the weight of the bags on her shoulders and waited for the noisy bus to pass the curb toward its stop near the southwest corner.
“Yes,” she said in a cultivated voice barely audible above the street sounds.
“How long have you been homeless?”
“Five months, or more,” she said.
“And where do you sleep and eat?”
“There’s a women’s shelter downtown, but I usually sleep in the park or the streets.”
“Aren’t you worried about the danger?”
She did not reply.
“Don’t you have any family or friends?”
“Yes,” she said, after a pause. Then after a longer pause, she added, “I also have three children.”
There was another bus now, and the commotion of pedestrians passing between us and around us, for we were blocking the narrow sidewalk that extended from the Korean market to the yellow-leafed tree rising out of a patch of curbside dirt littered with candy wrappings and bottle caps.
“How old are your children?”
“Eleven, ten, and eight.”
“Who takes care of them?”
“My mother,” she said. “And also my husband. He has a back problem from his job and is home a lot.” She explained that her husband, a mechanic on oil trucks who usually earns more than $50,000 a year, and her mother (employed as an accountant in Manhattan) share the domestic chores within a “high-rancher” house in Queens. The homeless woman said that she and her husband bought the Queens residence for $85,000 when they married twelve years ago, but that it is worth an estimated four times that now. She and her husband also own a weekend house in the Pocono Mountains with six acres and a pond.
I stood listening without changing my expression. My experience as a young New York reporter decades ago prepared me to be astonished by virtually nothing. This woman before me was articulate and convincing. In her manner and appearance there was no hint of drug or alcohol abuse (she said she used neither); nor did her healthy, smooth complexion, bronzed from the months outdoors, suggest that she was a battered wife. “We argued in the last few years” was all that she would concede about her husband, and when I asked why she had left him, her response was, “I left because I didn’t want to live that life anymore.”
“Is what you have any better?” I interrupted. She did not reply.
“Look,” I said, “I can give you money, but that’s not going to help. How about a job? Did you ever hold a job?”
“Yes,” she said. “I worked as a hairdresser. In Queens, until the second child was born, I even had my own salon.”
“I know people in that business,” I said. “If I get appointments, will you show up?”
“Yes.”
I guided her toward a nearby telephone booth, but both phones were out of order. It was after five P.M. I was eager to reach my acquaintances before they left for the day. Taking a piece of paper out of my pocket and also some change, I jotted down my home number and told her to contact me from another booth within the hour, by which time I hoped to have arranged for the interviews. Before I left her on Lexington Avenue, I also asked for, and received without delay, the phone number of the home in Queens where she had lived as a wife and mother.
The managers of both Manhattan salons I called agreed to see her the following morning, and both were disposed to hiring her on trial. As I waited at home for the woman’s call, I typed letters of introduction for her to give to them, together with their business locations. These I intended to place in her hands after she called to tell me where to meet her. But she did not call that night. Nor the next day.
Two days later, a Sunday afternoon, I telephoned the number in Queens. After a male voice identified himself as her husband, I told him how I had met her, and of the appointments awaiting her.
“She’ll never keep those appointments,” the husband assured me. “She doesn’t want to work. She doesn’t want to stay home with the children. All she wants is to be free and wander around.”
“I’m dropping these letters off at your place today,” I said, not seeking his permission. His wife had given me the address of the house.
What she had not given me was any insight into why she had left it.
. . .
It was a two-story building on a quiet tree-lined street in a residential neighborhood of tidy but fading lawns, and of new-model automobiles parked along curbs or driveways. The door was opened by a polite man in his late forties, who, after extending his hand, led me into a spacious living room and introduced me to his three children and the mother of his missing wife. The mother occupies the lower level of the house, which has a private entrance, kitchen, living room, bedroom, and bath; the children—two of whom wore braces that their father seemed proud to say he could afford—share the upper portion of the residence, which has three bedrooms, a large kitchen, and a living room and dining area in the rear. On the condition that the family name would not be published—the children claim their schoolmates do not know that their mother has left home—the husband and mother agreed to talk with candor.
“She called us from a phone booth,” volunteered the eleven-year-old, “and we all cried and told her we wanted her to come home. She said she could come someday, but …”
“She disappeared a few times last year,” the husband said, “but just for a few days at a time then. I asked her if she wanted a divorce, and she said no. We took her to psychiatrists, but they said there’s nothing really wrong with her. They gave her some pills, which she took for a while, then stopped.”
“Did you force her to stop working as a hairdresser?” I asked.
“At first, after the second baby, I said I wanted her home. But later I said for her to go back to work. We have enough money for someone to come in and help out. But the kids are almost old enough now and don’t even need it.”
The husband doubted that another man was a factor in her absence, adding that her choosing to live in the streets seemed to confirm this.
He would take her back, he said, but since he has little faith in her capacity to reconcile herself with him permanently, he has recently begun proceeding toward a divorce.
Her mother, whose blue eyes and features the missing woman carries with her, spoke sadly about the situation, but she seemed reluctant to unburden herself in the presence of the children and their father. A day later, however, at a table in the cafeteria of the building where she works, she was both forthcoming and tearful as she related her own biographical background and the formative years of her only child.
The mother is now sixty-two. She was born in 1926 in the German town of Delmenhorst, on the Weser River near Bremen. Her father, a factory worker, returned home injured from the Battle of Verdun of 1916, and the harsh penalties imposed upon the German nation for its part in the war seemed to linger in the grimness and penury of her girlhood surroundings from the thirties through the aftermath of the second German defeat, in World War II. Allied bombers hit the Bremen area, and although her home was not hit, she associates that period of her life with rubble, grief, and bitterness. In the final year of the war, 1945, she was sent with other young women to work in the countryside as a farm laborer, replacing the men at the front. During this time, she met a young German soldier and fell in love. Neither ever believed that they would have the funds or opportunity to settle down in marriage, and by 1946, he had drifted out of her life. And she was pregnant.
Her infant girl, born in the spring of 1946, was raised in the home of the child’s grandparents, whose scornful attitude toward their unmarried daughter’s having a child out of wedlock improved to, at most, resignation in the years to come. They were even relieved when, in 1953, their husbandless daughter met and married a heavy-drinking American merchant seaman, who subsequently provided the money that brought his bride and her seven-year-old daughter to the United States.
Except for the funds, he provided little else. He was in and out of seaports, and drunk when he returned home to their apartment in the Bronx. His wife finally divorced him after nearly seven years of marriage.
By holding two jobs—as a cleaning lady at night, a bookkeeper during the day—she supported herself and her daughter, and she eventually left the Bronx for a garden apartment in Astoria. Her daughter attended school there, and at seventeen she registered at a Manhattan training school for beauticians. A year later she was working in a salon in Woodside, and four years later, when the owner retired, she became the proprietor, with a down payment of three thousand dollars.
Still living with her mother, the daughter bought a new car, hired extra help for the thriving salon, and on two occasions confided to her mother that she was in love. But both relationships ended unhappily. One of her lovers borrowed her car one night, left it parked outside a tavern in Yorkville, and was not heard from again. Her mother seemed to be even more distressed by this than she was, and, in 1977, thinking that she was doing her daughter a good turn, the mother answered an ad placed in the Staats Zeitung (a German-language daily) by a man who wished to meet a respectable young woman.
“My daughter has a broken heart,” the mother told him on the telephone.
“I also have a broken heart,” he replied.
Without telling her daughter, she invited the man to dinner, but much to her relief and delight, the couple appeared to like each other at once. Though a mechanic, the man had clean fingernails, and in addition to earning between one thousand dollars and fifteen hundred dollars a week with overtime, he owned a sizable apartment house in Bensonhurst that was filled with Italian tenants who paid their rent on time.
The daughter’s marriage in 1978 was followed by the purchase of the eighty-five-thousand-dollar two-family home (for which the daughter contributed fifty thousand dollars from her savings from the salon). With the birth of the second child, she sold the salon, but until two years ago, when she first began to disappear for days at a time, she did not seem to be disenchanted by her duties as a homemaker and mother.
. . .
During my one and only talk with her, a fortnight ago, the homeless woman indicated that she spends much of her time in the area of the South Street Seaport. It later occurred to me that this might remind her of the river that ran close to her girlhood home in Germany, and that the rubble that she doubtless passes during her excursions through the deteriorating sections of New York might evoke memories of postwar Bremen. It might even be inferred that her wayward course, if that is what it is, is following the path of the wandering soldier who sired her. But such are merely musings.
The reality is that her children, her mother, and her husband—those most intimately connected with her life—appear to be unable to help her. If they cannot, what can we expect of our government? And what is expected of us?
Being a homeless woman with two homes certainly marks her as unique in New York; but how truly unique is she among New Yorkers impelled to withdraw from their inherited place, or wishing to escape institutionalism—be it the institution of marriage or the institutions that we look to for detecting symptoms and providing solutions?
These mysterious people live among us each day, sleep at our doors, walk shoulder-to-shoulder with us in the streets. Yet, regrettably, we do not know them, and too many New Yorkers, with the donation of a few quarters daily, are able to buy their way out of whatever momentary concern or discomfort is caused by the presence of the homeless.