Her first sight of the five houses on Boerum Street which held all of her family units was shattering, almost too overwhelming for her to take: to this day she can only recall a dim impression of moldering filth, heat, noise, disintegration, the tenements seeming to engorge her as she walked in and to carry her up like bile from one level to the other, rats and children scurrying in the halls, piles of dog filth … but as bad as that had been, her encounter with the landlord, Mandleman, on that same day had been worse. Mandleman had come up beaming to the fifth floor apartment in which she was trying to interview Callie Simmons and four of her six dependent children and had taken her down. “I just wanted to welcome the new investigator,” he had said as he led her, groping, lighting matches on the stairwells, laughing as the screams of the Simmons children floated down the well. “I thought on the first day — ”
“Disgusting,” she said when they finally got to the first floor and into the light; up until that point she had been wordless and appalled, shaking with the rage of it, “disgusting, how can you do this to people? Are these your buildings? Are you the landlord? How can people live this way? How can you do this to people?” and Mandleman had laughed, laughed and chuckled, held her elbow in a friendly way and escorted her to his office next door, a small real-estate and tax accounting office occupying a storefront and had sat her in a straight chair and brought her a drink of water. “Here,” he said, giving it to her. “You’re a lovely young girl, you’re a new investigator. It’s always a bit of a shock to come into these neighborhoods for the first time.”
“Are these your buildings?” Elizabeth said, thrusting the water from her and trying to get back a sense of orientation. “You are the owner of these? You have people living — ”
“I am the owner,” Mandleman said and shrugged. Standing above her he looked wizened, kindly, small shards and puffs of grey hair streaming from an otherwise bald scalp, his large eyebrows also white to say nothing of the stubble on his plump cheeks. He put his hands informally in the pockets of his oversize suit and said, “I have a sense of compassion and therefore I own these buildings. Anyone else would have sold them or run away from them three years ago. But I care. And so I see do you.”
“I’ll report you,” Elizabeth said. She had learned about building violations in the training institute. “You have insecure stairwells, filth in the halls, a fire hazard through the lobbies and stairways of all those buildings, cracks in the floor, signs of rodent infestation, complaints of no heat or hot water, torn linoleum — ”
“Ah Miss Moore,” Mandleman said, still shrugging and going for a straight chair to bring over to sit beside her, “you see, I like to meet every new investigator in these buildings. That is how much I care. Not just to take, to take money from the department which is not enough even to cover my bills, but also having some kind of relationship. That is why I went upstairs to greet you. It’s a bit of a shock — ”
“This is disgusting!”
“Salant was a good man,” Mandleman said, shaking his head. “He was a little bit stupid, Mr. Salant but essentially he was very sound. He had a good sense of situation and he was a realist. I was sorry to see him go but, of course, time moves on and nothing can remain forever. He became a parole officer, do you know that? That’s a very good job.”
“I don’t care what he became,” Elizabeth says. Surprisingly, she finds herself near crying. “Whatever he was doesn’t interest me. I’m the investigator and it’s my responsibility to help these people and I won’t, I won’t have my clients living in filth like this.”
“You see, Miss Moore,” Mandleman says, “let me, if I may, explain to you a few basic facts and so on and then your mind will be set at ease and there will be no difficulty. It is impossible to maintain these buildings properly. These people are pigs; the way they live is indescribable. They are not like you and me but are rather totally undisciplined and on a level of savagery. This is not a situation I caused but merely one which exists. I do not want it this way.” With curious formality, Mandleman lit a cigarette and put the match neatly on the floor underneath his foot, pressed his foot against it a few times. “I would far rather it would be otherwise. But this is the situation. Now, who wants to house these people?”
“They deserve decent — ”
“They deserve everything, Miss Moore, like you and me and all people everywhere they deserve only the best but unfortunately we do not get in this world exactly what we deserve. I spent three years in a concentration camp of which I will not speak. No one cares for these people, Miss Moore. The Fifth Avenue management company does not care for them. The Mayor’s office is not populated with people who would take them into their homes for bed and board. The liberal politicians are for relief only because giving them relief will keep them at a distance and keep the society from crumbling. I have thought of this often, I am a deep-thinking man. So it is left for people like Irving Mandleman to care for them. It is Irving Mandleman who gives them a place to live, who collects their rents from the Department of Welfare, who allows them to exist. Is this so reprehensible? Who else would want to look at them? No one in the entire city of New York except the welfare investigators and Mandleman ever have to deal with these people. Actually we are on the same side of the fence, Miss Moore. You and I are two of the last people left who will deal with them. So that is my explanation,” Mandleman said, putting out the cigarette with a flourish and pulling the chair, groaning, back from the desk. “Sometimes it is good to have a talk with an investigator when he or she begins. It makes things much easier. And there are a few orthodox Jews in these tenements which, I agree, somewhat lifts the level of tenancy. So all in all things are not so bad, eh?”
“You’ve got to do something,” Elizabeth said. “This can’t be permitted to exist. You have violations — ”
“Ah, Miss Moore,” Mandleman said with a chuckle, “you are so industrious and so dedicated but the fact is that you are only reacting to your own disgust. You have no more feeling for these people than the office of the Mayor, believe me. They mean nothing to you and very soon, when you become less frightened and less tolerant of your sensitivity you will understand that too.” He leaned toward her, suddenly a twenty-dollar bill appeared in his hands. He eased it toward her like a blessing. “Here,” Mandleman said. “I give this to you as a gift, not a bribe, merely as a little gift of greeting because you are a very lovely young girl, a girl who reminds me in certain ways of my daughter. With it you can go to the hairdresser, perhaps buy something to wear or a little perfume. Consider it as a gift. Mandleman’s gift, given freely and without strings. You will not be with this department long. Soon, perhaps even now, you will meet or are going with a fine young man and he will take you out of all of this and you will go to Queens Village or the Island and you will never see any of this again. In one year it will be unbelievable, in five years, you will not even remember it. You will live your life and enjoy it. Here. Take. It means nothing.”
“I won’t,” Elizabeth said standing, bolting from the chair, backing into the wall clutching her fieldbook, “I won’t take it. I won’t take your bribe! That’s graft. That’s — ”
“Ah Miss Moore — ”
“I do care,” she found herself saying rather hysterically. “I don’t know what you are or how you feel but I know about myself. I care about these people and I won’t let them live this way! I’ll help them! I’ll help them get out of this! If you don’t put that money away I’ll report you to the central office; they have a form to report bribe attempts, don’t you know that?” she said and before Mandleman could say anything further or she could even get a look at his expression (she never wanted to see his face again) she had turned: now she was running, running from his office and up the four steps and onto Boerum Street; on Boerum Street people were sitting on the stoops drinking, throwing garbage against the walls, setting up card tables for a midday game and looking at her with strange, taunting looks but it did not matter, nothing that these people could say to her would matter because they were hers, unlike Mandleman they were already a part of her and she would, somehow, stand between his corruption and their own miserable lives to change the direction of their history.
“I do care,” she said, grasping her fieldbook, “I do, I do,” and as Mandleman came up the stairs to look at her, she turned from him and went quickly down the street but she could not get out of her mind the feeling (and she still has it to this moment) that Mandleman was not looking at her with sadness or remonstrance, Mandleman was not trying, somehow, to reason her back to him: no, Mandleman was laughing, he was filling the street with cries of hysteria and if she were ever to turn and confront him wholly she would see this and somehow she would not be able to take it, she could take everything that Boerum Street could give but there was no way in which she could accept that.
“I do care,” she said, “I do, I do,” and went off to make her visits and it must have been that very afternoon (she is pretty sure that it was that afternoon) that she had inaugurated her policy; fucked Washington Williams, unemployed father of three in his kitchen in the empty spaces of the apartment, drawing Washington Williams into her, easing his tortured cries, stroking his agonized head and knowing, knowing, that whatever Mandleman would say, she was doing the right thing.