The screams began just before 8:30 A.M. at 28 Lamartine Terrace, on the southwest side of Yonkers, in a neighborhood tottering between fairly safe and somewhat frightening. “Help me, he’s killing me. Help me, I’m dying,” shrieked Helen Sarno, a seventy-year-old woman who lived on the seventh floor. She had thick white hair and a proud bearing. Her neighbors, and she knew many of them, called her “Miss Helen.”
“Help me, he’s killing me.”
The couple downstairs were only half awake when they heard her. They pulled on their clothes, grabbed their baby, and ran up one flight to find the reason for the cries.
“Help me, I’m dying.”
The man across the hall from Miss Helen was about to walk his dog when he heard her. He shooed the pet back into his apartment, yelled to his stepdaughter to call the police, and headed toward Miss Helen’s door.
“Help me, he’s killing me, help me, I’m dying.”
Another neighbor on the hallway was shaving when the screams began, and he raced out wearing only his undershorts, with the Magic Shave lather still on his face and a baseball bat in his hand.
Together they banged on the locked door, and yelled, “Leave her alone,” and “Open up.” In time, a male voice from inside said, “It’s okay. It’s her son, we’re having an argument.”
“Help me,” Miss Helen screamed again. Those were the last words from the apartment. Soon, the cries turned to moans. Minutes later, even the moaning stopped. The only sound the neighbors heard was the pounding of their own fists against the door.
More time passed. Five minutes, maybe ten, and then, suddenly, the door burst open and a man bolted into the hall. He was young and Hispanic, about twenty years old, with a slight build, about 5′4′ and 120 pounds. He was wearing a jacket, green denim jeans, a red sweater, and Timberland boots, all of which were covered with blood. There was a white fuzzy winter hat pulled over his head—an attempt at disguise, perhaps? With a quick motion he yanked the door shut behind him, so it locked, keeping the neighbors from racing into the apartment.
He started to run around the men in the hallway, but there was not enough room, and his only option was to barrel through them. They tackled him, but he tried to escape, so they pounded him with their fists and with the baseball bat. He crawled a few inches, losing the hat in the process, and they tackled him again. Then he slithered out of his coat and out of their grasp, and ran down the emergency stairwell.
As he left through the front door of the building, a police cruiser, responding to a neighbor’s call, pulled up and the officers saw an Hispanic man, in green jeans, a red sweater, Timberland boots, and no coat, walking onto the sidewalk. It was too cold to be without a coat on a January morning, three days into the new year. A young woman leaned out a window on an upper floor, pointed to that man, and yelled, “That’s the guy, that is him. Stop him.” The man dashed around the back of the building, and the officers followed. He was cornered, and, after a struggle, he was handcuffed.
“I was just trying to help the lady,” he said. “They say I tried to hurt her.” As the officers placed him in the cruiser, the woman at the window gave them a thumbs-up sign.
By this time, a third officer had gone upstairs, learned what had happened from the neighbors, and tried to open the locked front door. Then he climbed onto the fire escape of an adjacent apartment, in order to try the kitchen window. That, too, was locked from the inside, but he could see through the curtains into the kitchen, and what he saw was a room awash in blood. The floor was all but covered by a spreading circle of deep burgundy, looking sticky and sickening. In the center of the circle was an ice pick.
The officer asked for a blanket, which he held over the window with one hand while he smashed the glass pane inward with the other. Then he climbed onto the kitchen table and jumped down over the pool of blood, following two sets of bloody footprints through a small entryway and into the bedroom. It was there that he saw the elderly woman, Helen Sarno, slumped on the floor, against the side of the bed. She was dressed in a blood-saturated housecoat. There was a pocketbook open on her bed, containing a cafeteria club card from St. Joseph’s Medical Center, a bus schedule, a senior citizen discount card, some grocery coupons, and thirteen dollars and sixteen cents. In her lifeless hand, she clutched a small black change purse. Later, detectives would find a single string of rosary beads inside.
The officer went to the door, unlocked it, and let the paramedics in. There was nothing they could do. Helen Sarno had died from one of five separate puncture wounds—to her face, her neck, her upper chest, her lower chest, and her back. The wound to her neck penetrated her jugular and her trachea. The wound to her back went through her lung and into her heart. That wound was four and a half inches deep, meaning the ice pick had been plunged practically to the hilt of the blade.
Detectives brought some of the neighbors out to look at the handcuffed suspect in the backseat of the police car. One at a time, they stared through the window and said, “That’s him.” A short while later, the prisoner was brought to the police station, where his bloody clothes were taken away as evidence, and he was given a prison-issue jumpsuit. The cuts on his head and hands were photographed, then bandaged. His fingerprints were taken, and he was questioned.
When he was asked his name, he answered, “John Mateo Santos.”
When asked his address, he said, “115 Gaffney Place.”
The heroics of Helen Sarno’s neighbors were reported in the newspaper the next day, and John’s address was soon the talk of the east side. John Santos. Now the abstract fears of the homeowners had a name. He stood for all the murderers and drug dealers that were, quite certainly, being imported from across town. That the slaying of Helen Sarno took place on the west side, near the high-rises, not on the east side, near the townhouses, was nothing but a stray, pesky fact, lost in the outrage.
The anger was aimed everywhere, at places that made sense and ones that did not. There were calls for a death sentence against John Santos, even though, at the time, New York State had no death penalty. There were calls for Peter Smith’s resignation. More than one politician suggested that monitors be assigned to each of the sites, to keep tabs on who came to visit, and how long they stayed. There were demands that the townhouses be shut down and the entire exercise be declared a failure.
Mary Dorman felt the full force of the outrage. Days after John’s arrest, there was a meeting of the Lincoln Park Taxpayers Association, Mary’s association, but she was pointedly not invited. “Mary Dorman lied to us,” a former friend of hers shouted. And, in fact, Mary had. Not knowingly, but significantly. For six months, she had been assuring her neighbors that Municipal Housing was scrupulously policing the new sites, and that anyone who caused trouble was swiftly removed. Municipal Housing leases, she had been telling critics, were only for thirty days at a time, meaning that troublemakers could be taken care of quickly and easily. But the news stories about John Santos included the fact that, to date, not a single person had been told to leave the townhouses.
Billie Rowan, of course, felt the heat, too. Two weeks after John was arrested, she was faced with eviction from Gaffney Place. Her future in the townhouses was threatened not because of what John had done—not even the dense regulations of the Housing Department hold one adult responsible for the actions of another—but because what he did brought to light the fact that he lived there in the first place. John was not on Billie’s lease, but he told the arresting officers that he lived in her townhouse. If he did live there, it was grounds for her eviction.
Billie Rowan was accused of doing what people everywhere in public housing were doing and what a high percentage of her neighbors in the townhouses were doing—living with the men in their lives without benefit of marriage license or lease. Officially, there were three men listed on three separate leases at Trenchard Street and Gaffney Place, but, unofficially and unabashedly, there were men everywhere, at every hour. They kept their clothes in the undersized townhouse closets, slept in the bedrooms, which could barely contain their double beds, ate their meals in the beige-on-beige kitchens, received their phone calls on the phones that were not in their names, and, depending how careful they were being, often received their mail in the communal turn-key mailbox at the curb, to which they were not entitled to have a key.
They were there because the women they were with did not care about the rule. Just as Doreen James had asked her sister to stay in the early months of the housing, and then never asked her to leave, her neighbors more often than not decided that who they shared their lives with was their business, not the tenant supervisor’s. It was an attitude that troubled Peter Smith, not because he couldn’t change it, but because he completely understood it, making the rules far more painful to enforce.
Housing regulations require allpermanent members of a household to be listed on a lease, meaning people who truly live there and can be expected to live there in the foreseeable future. But for too many women in the projects, permanence is a matter of definition. Was John a permanent part of Billie’s life? Stopping in between stays in the penitentiary? Leaving for several nights at a time without telling her where he went? She knew she could wake up any morning to find him gone, and she would not be the only woman she knew to be suddenly and sporadically alone. Why tell Municipal Housing that something is permanent, when you aren’t at all sure yourself?
But rules are rules, and despite Peter Smith’s feelings of empathy, his department hired an investigator to track suspected cheaters. There was no shortage of tips for the investigator to follow, since people on the wait list for public housing in Yonkers—a list that is fifteen hundred names and five years long—often snitch on people who are already occupants of the housing. The completion of the townhouses had only increased that tendency.
Despite a healthy supply of leads, however, the allegations were usually impossible to prove. The department would call the alleged offender in for an “informal conference” on the charges, and that offender would almost always come with proof that her “paramour”—the term favored by the department’s lawyers—really, truly lived someplace else. Every year, the housing authority would hold about 180 informal hearings on charges other than nonpayment of rent. Of those, only twelve to fifteen would ever be evicted.
One of those, Smith suspected, would be Billie Rowan. He had no choice but to begin proceedings against her. Too many people were watching this case, demanding that an example be made of someone.
On January 15, Smith signed a letter to Billie Rowan informing her that she was entitled to a hearing on the charges before a council of tenant representatives. She stood accused, the letter said, of violating “Paragraph No. 6 Clause B of the Resident Monthly Lease Agreement which in part states the following: The tenant agrees not to assign this lease, nor to sublet or transfer possession of the premises; nor to give accommodations to boarders or lodgers without the written consent of the management. Upon information and belief that on January 3, 1993, John M. Santos was arrested and charged with 2nd degree murder and gave his address as 115 Gaffney Place. Mr. Santos is not listed on your lease as a member of your household.”
Smith knew when he signed the letter that he would not attend the hearing. Billie had two young children, and he expected that this case would break his heart. He would leave this to the agency’s lawyers.
“What’s the matter with Municipal Housing?” Doreen James asked in outrage as she struggled to settle her wide self into Mary Dorman’s compact car. She didn’t wait for an answer. “What’s the city doing this for? Punishing her for something that her guy did? She said he didn’t live there. They should leave her alone. She’s a fine person, she has two kids. She didn’t cause the trouble. Why are they wasting their time bothering her?”
The meeting Mary and Doreen were driving toward was not, officially, about the housing. It was the first in a series of by-invitation-only meetings that Mayor Zaleski was holding, one in each quadrant of the city, to hear what neighborhood leaders had on their minds. A few days earlier, an assistant to the mayor asked Mary to contact the tenant representative of the southeast town-house sites, and Mary had called Doreen and offered her a ride.
“He’s an asshole in my book for using her address,” Doreen was saying, abruptly switching the focus of her anger from the housing authority to the alleged murderer. “Our men know better than that, than to risk their women and families. So many people get busted, and they use the men’s shelter as an address.”
In other words, the way a man in this world protects his loved ones is to deny they are his.
“They make rules like we’re children,” Doreen said. “They say she broke a rule, ’cause it says in the lease, no boarders, nothing like that. But I read the lease today. The lease states that heat and hot water is included, and, for us, it isn’t. Why give me a lease stating heat and hot water is included, and as soon as I fuck up something in my lease, I’m out, but they can break their part?”
The community room at the Scotti Community Center was filled with a dozen round tables, with six to eight chairs at each. Mary and Doreen sat at an empty one, near the back, and watched as the room filled. Confronting authority is harder in the flesh than in the abstract, and Doreen was far quieter than she had been in the car. Mary did almost all the talking.
“That’s the mayor, at that table up there, and the people sitting with him are his commissioners—police, fire, public works, things like that,” she said, giving a verbal tour of the room, not at all surprised that she recognized almost everyone and was not speaking to many of them. At Mary’s own table, there was no one but Mary,Doreen, and Carolyn Dunkley, the tenant from Clark Street who had been brave enough to host Mary’s first indoor meeting. “Just me and these two very black women,” she thought, growing increasingly self-conscious at the glaringly empty seats around them. She talked and pointed and recited lists of names, as if she could somehow fill the chairs by filling the silence.
Finally, Sister Mary Alice from the St. John the Baptist Church walked over and joined the small, uncomfortable group. Mary gratefully jumped up, introduced the sister to Carolyn and Doreen, then headed off to the refreshment table at the back of the room to find a plate of cookies for her now respectably sized group.
She had walked only a few feet from her table when she met Tony DiPopolo, there representing the Cross County Homeowners Association. “Peter Smith has to get that lady out of Trenchard Street,” he said, without pausing for small talk. “We can’t have that going on.”
“We have to wait and find out what happened,” Mary said. “It’s not fair, Tony, to just throw her out because of some bad publicity. The poor lady, she’s got two kids. You don’t just do that.”
The meeting began forty minutes late because the representatives of the Lincoln Park Taxpayers Association, the group that had so recently spurned Mary, were not yet there. They still had not arrived by the time Zaleski finally stood up at his table near the front, described the purpose of the gathering as “finding ways to make this city even better,” and asked each of his commissioners to describe who they were and what they did. When they were through, the mayor stood up again and asked everyone in the room to introduce themselves and say what organization they were from. It was like Career Day in Yonkers.
Mary coached Doreen. “When it comes to you, just get up and say what your name is and that you’re the tenant representative for Trenchard,” she whispered. And Doreen did get up, but introduced herself, instead, as the representative of the Andrew Smith Townhouses, which, Mary had forgotten, was the site’s formal name.
Then it was Mary’s turn. As she stood, she felt a shimmer of panic. Who should she say she was with? Her official role with the HERE program had ended six months earlier. Could she still say she was a representative of HERE? Her relationship with the Lincoln Park Taxpayers Association was strained, at best, but since no one from the group was there to contradict her, should she say she was with them?
“I’m Mary Dorman,” she found herself saying. “I’m from Lincoln Park, but I’m not here representing Lincoln Park. I’m part of the HERE team, the housing relocation team, and I’m here representing the tenants in the low-income housing on the east side.”
The mayor next opened the floor to a general discussion of ideas and concerns. First there was a lot of talk about graffiti. Then there was an even longer conversation about school crossing guards. Zaleski patiently explained the funding and manpower shortages that kept the city from solving both those problems. As he was speaking, several members of Save Yonkers walked in and took seats near the door. Although the mayor did not pause, Mary thought he looked momentarily alarmed.
She was alarmed, too. She knew these people, and worried that they were there to “bring up the incident with the murder.”
She was feeling tough and protective on the heels of her public declaration that she stood with the tenants. “Don’t you cause trouble,” she thought, glaring at the group from Save Yonkers. “Because I’ll get up and punch you if you do.”
The murder did come up, but not because of anyone from Save Yonkers.
Tired of hearing about graffiti and such, Doreen James raised her hand, remained seated in her chair, and said what she had come to say. As soon as she started speaking, the room became silent, and it stayed that way until she was done.
“I would like to talk about the comments of the two gentlemen on the City Council,” she said, referring to a report she had seen on the news the night before about the calls for action in response to the murder.
“The tenants who live in the new sites are very upset about what they are saying. We do not like their comments about screening people, and checking on who we have as company and things like that. How would they like it if that type of thing were said about them? I’m sure they would be upset. The tenants are decent people, and the tenant who may be evicted because of this is, too. That man, Santos, did not live at Gaffney Place, and it shouldn’t be assumed that he did just because he said so.”
Mary listened, proud and relieved. “She was magnificent” was how Mary would describe the speech to Buddy later. “Eloquent. And her English was great. I don’t think she made any mistakes as far as that goes, and I was glad because I didn’t want her to mess up her English at all, the way they can do sometimes.”
When Doreen had finished speaking, the police commissioner stood up to say, yes, Doreen was correct, the man in question had just been released from prison, and it was likely he was not really living anywhere. The Second Precinct officers spoke, too, and said there were no unusual problems at any of the sites.
Then Doreen raised her hand again, and asked if there were regular police patrols at the new housing sites, and the commissioner said, yes, there were patrols all the time. Why, he said, did she want to know?
“Because I never see you unless there’s a problem,” Doreen answered. “No one just comes around just to check how we’re doing.”
Speaking of graffiti, she said, as the commissioner looked uncomfortable, did the officers know that “at the park across from Trenchard, the kids hang out and do graffiti, and probably do drugs, and it’s not the kids from the housing, because our kids aren’t that old, it’s the kids from the neighborhood”?
The commissioner and the officers consulted among themselves, then said, no, they had not known about that, but “someone would look into it.” Doreen shrugged, a gesture more eloquent than her speech, her usual silent flip of the shoulders that said, “I’ll believe it when you show me.”
The conversation moved on to other people and other topics, but Mary heard none of it. She was too busy watching the buzz of movement around her table. First the chief officer from the Second Precinct came to Doreen, handed her his card, and said, “If you have a problem, please call us. We’re really interested in what goes on. It doesn’t have to be trouble before you call us.”
Then a man Mary knew from her protest days, and who snubbed her in public in the months since she had joined the housing program, came over to talk to Doreen. He complimented her on her words, and then suggested she take pictures of the graffiti in her playground as evidence of the problem. Mary was dumb-struck. “This was one of the bigots,” she said during her kitchen postmortem with Buddy. “I have no idea how she won him over.”
Finally, Tony DiPopolo appeared at Doreen’s elbow. He was standing just two or three feet from Mary, and he had to realize that she could hear every word. Without looking at Mary, he, too, complimented Doreen. “What you said about that poor lady was very good,” he said. “Well, if he didn’t live there, I hope they don’t throw her out.”
The day after the mayor’s meeting, someone shattered Nick’s fourth-floor office window from the outside.
“Probably a prank,” the officers told him, and he tried hard to believe them.
The next morning, the telephone woke Nick and Nay at 7:30. It was not the private line, but the one listed in the telephone book and paid for by the City of Yonkers, a perk granted to all elected officials so they might seem more accessible. From their bed, the Wasicskos could hear the muffled tape of the answering machine, and any thoughts of more sleep ended as soon as the frantic caller left her message.
Something about a dead cat—their cat?—and a car. They pulled on sweats, laced up winter boots, added hats, gloves, and scarves, and went outside.
Their car was parked at the bottom of their long driveway, as it had been all winter, a precaution against possible snowstorms. They had to trudge nearly all the way to the sidewalk, therefore, before they saw what someone clearly wanted them to see: lying on the windshield was an orange tabby, one of a group of strays Nick had adopted during this particularly cold winter.
The cats never came into the house, because the dog tortured them and they made Nay sneeze. But every night after dinner, Nick brought out a piece of aluminum foil piled with leftovers and placed it by the front door. He also covered the floor of the outside shed with blankets, so the animals would have some place relatively warm to sleep.
Now one of those cats—the one who looked like Morris in the Nine Lives television commercials—was dead, staring at them blankly with still opened eyes. They did not want to touch the animal, but from where they stood they could see a wound in its throat and another in its left leg—two round, bloody circles. Neither Nick nor Nay had ever seen a bullet wound before. They had no doubt that they were seeing two now.
Lying next to the frozen creature was a well-used leather glove—a work glove of Nick’s that he kept in the garage next to the house. The glove scared them more than the grisly cat. Had it not been there, they could have dismissed the incident as an odd happening not directed specifically at them. But the glove snatched away any such hope. The glove made it clear that someone had been up their hill, next to their house. More important, it made it clear that someone wanted them to know he had been there.
“You go in the house, I’ll take care of this,” Nick said, and Nay practically ran back indoors.
The police came a few minutes later. They took some pictures, asked some questions, then carried off the cat.
“They think it’s a prank,” Nick reported, after they had left.
“They took that glove from our garage,” Nay said, frightened in spite of the window alarms and motion detectors they had installed years ago, during the first round of renovations. “If they can get into the garage, they can get into the house.”
“They killed what they thought was my cat,” Nick said. “I’ve gotten bullets in the mail, but…”
The sentence hung unfinished in the air for a while, because neither of them wanted to complete that thought out loud.
Billie Rowan took the number 20 bus up Central Avenue on the morning of her eviction hearing. She had persuaded her mother to take care of Shanda for a few hours, but two children were more than the woman was willing to handle, so Johnny came along with Billie.
He fell asleep on the bus, and did not wake up as Billie carried him into the squat, mustard brick headquarters of Municipal Housing. He slept through the ride on the elevator, too, and the walk down the shabby corridor to the conference room, and he stayed asleep as she moved him from one arm to the other, while she shrugged out of her winter coat. She didn’t dare try to remove his coat, for fear that he would not sleep through that. So she took her seat, settling her bundled, dreaming son on her lap.
As those who would judge her arrived, they cooed their concerns for the little boy. “Why don’t you lay him on the floor? Wouldn’t he be more comfortable?” they asked, but Billie said no. She wanted to point out that this same child was the one whose house they were trying to snatch away, but she sensed that the less she said, the better. During the questioning that followed, she held Johnny against her, a shield wrapped in a parka and mittens.
The two of them were seated at one end of the table, near the door. “It’s like it’s dinnertime at Central Avenue,” she thought, “and they’re all here to eat me.” At the head of this feast were two white men who looked like lawyers. They introduced themselves, but Billie saw no reason to try to remember their names. Along the sides of the table were five women, most of whom looked like her. Same skin color, about the same age, probably all mothers, too. They were the members of the Tenants Committee, the ones who would decide her future.
Billie was relieved that she already had some acquaintance with two of them. She fully expected she could talk her way out of this mess, if she could just speak to people who would understand. Sadie Young Jefferson, who seemed to be acting like the boss of the group, had been Billie’s actual boss when she worked, years ago, as a trainee during a county employment program, answering telephones in a government office. Next to Sadie was Caliope James, also a member of READY, and Doreen’s great-aunt. When John was first arrested, Doreen had told Billie, “Call if you need anything.” Maybe Doreen could help after all.
The man who seemed to be the head lawyer opened the meeting by explaining that Billie was being “evicted for violating Paragraph 1, Paragraph 6B, Paragraph 11, and Paragraph 21 of her lease. The essence is that she has living with her a person that she did not report to her tenant supervisor and under federal regulations that should be reported in order to determine the accuracy of her rent.”
Under the housing authority’s rules governing eviction hearings, he explained, Billie was to speak first and “present her evidence to refute the finding of the Housing Authority that she be evicted.” Then he asked that Billie be sworn in, like in the movies, and she was told it was her turn to speak.
“They told me I would be getting evicted because John Santos was residing with me, which was not true,” she said, holding Johnny tight with one hand, and taking a folded sheet of paper from her pocket with the other. “He was released and his place of residence was 132 Bruce Avenue. I have a paper here stating that. And I feel I shouldn’t get evicted because he was not residing with me. With whatever proof you have, he was not residing with me.”
She handed the letter to the lawyer, who unfolded it, read it, and did not look very impressed. For the first time Billie wondered if she should have brought her own lawyer or, at least, a friend.
“This only indicates that as of August 12 he indicated to the State of New York Executive Department Division of Parole in his Certificate of Release to parole supervision that he would reside with his mother, Carolina Santos, at 132 Bruce Street,” the lawyer said. “Do you intend to produce Carolina Santos as a witness?”
“Yes,” Billie said. “She’ll make it here.” She said it with as much confidence as she could fake, since she had not even thought of asking Carolina to come. Then she paused for a moment, and decided she should lie as little as possible. “Maybe if I can get her to come in or maybe write a statement and get it notarized or whatever and bring it in, then I would do that,” she said.
Sadie started to speak. She sounded warmer toward Billie than the lawyer, but not nearly as sympathetic as Billie had hoped. “Do you know this gentleman, by the way?” Sadie asked. “Do you know that man that they’re talking about in that letter there?”
It was a tone that seemed to say, Tell us you never met the man, Billie, and this will all be over. But Billie knew she could never get away with that.
“Yes,” she said.
“How do you know him?”
“He’s my boyfriend. He’s the father of my two children.” This was promising, Billie thought. Maybe if she could explain how she was trying to make a life with John, trying to make them into a family, maybe that would seem more important than the details of the lease. But another tenant interrupted Sadie, and brought the questioning back to the letter Billie had introduced as her only piece of evidence.
“Just because it states on that piece of paper that he said he was going to reside there doesn’t mean anything,” she said. “I could say I live in Washington, D.C.”
“I understand,” Billie said. “But I’m here now because he said he accidentally put my address and they want to evict me for that.”
Caliope James asked, “If he was living at 132 Bruce Avenue, why would he give you address?”
“Probably under shock or whatever,” Billie said. “I spoke with him and he just answered right away, he said.”
“Why,” the lawyer asked, “would he give that address when he indicated in writing to the parole board he was going to live at 132 Bruce Ave?”
“Like I said, he was being arrested for murder.”
Sadie broke in, trying, it seemed to Billie, to provide a way out. “Has he ever stayed on your premises?” she asked.
Billie certainly couldn’t tell them the truth.
“Well, no. He came to visit frequently. He was there constantly because of the kids and because of me.”
“But he never lived there?”
“No, he never lived there.”
The lawyer looked as if he knew better. “Did you tell anybody that Mr. Santos lived with you?” he asked.
“No.”
“Did you tell your caseworker?”
Billie thought of the glass-walled cubicle at the Social Services office, of sitting there with John and signing form after form, declaring him an “essential person” in her household. Signature after signature, hers and then his, saying that they live together, and pool their money together, and prepare meals together. She had gone with him to make the changes soon after her abortion. It wasn’t a baby, but she thought it might prove that she still loved him. And the extra eighty-four dollars a month his presence would bring wouldn’t hurt. It would pay the bills, and make John feel like he was the man around the house.
Of course, she should have realized that this lawyer would find out about that.
“Yes or no,” the lawyer said, while she hesitated. “Did you tell your caseworker?”
“No. I did not.”
“Did you tell Mr. Santos’ parole officer?”
All those visits to the townhouse to check on John. Naturally he would know about that, too.
“No.”
“You didn’t tell any of these people that he lived with you?”
“No.”
“When you went for your grant, did you indicate to the Department of Social Services that Mr. Santos was living with you?”
“Well, no.”
“Are you, in fact, receiving an additional grant because Mr. Santos is allegedly living with you?”
“When he was home I was receiving, yes, a grant for him.”
“So you did report to the Department of Social Services that he was living with you, did you not? You’re under oath.”
“Yes,” Billie said, softly. “Yes.”
She tried to make the argument that John wasn’t really living at 115 Gaffney, but that the money was coming to her house instead of his house, for personal reasons that she couldn’t explain. Why then, the lawyer asked, was the monthly check made out to Billie? Why didn’t John receive a separate check, instead of Billie’s receiving her regular monthly check, with an increase of eighty-four dollars after John’s name was added?
She had no answer to that because there was only one possible answer, but she could not say it. John’s money was a part of her grant because John was a part of her household. Instead, she said weakly, “If I knew it was something under false pretenses or whatever, I wouldn’t have done it that way.”
The lawyer would not let that rest, either. “How long have you been under a grant?” he asked.
“Maybe two or three years.”
“In that period of time you’ve visited the Department of Social Services several times to give information regarding how much you’re going to receive in the form of a grant, right?”
“Yes.”
“And they’ve advised you as to how you’re entitled to a grant, did they not?”
“Yes.”
“Did they not tell you the only way you can get a grant is for the people residing with you?”
“Well, not that I remember. It’s been a while.”
“Are you trying to tell me I can get a grant for someone who doesn’t live with me? How can your grant go up if you’re just telling them that ‘he doesn’t live with me’? You know better. You’ve been on social services for two years. You know you can’t get an increase in a grant unless you tell them, ‘I have another child who resides with me’ or ‘Someone else has moved in with me and I need additional moneys to support them.’ You know that.”
Billie said nothing.
Sadie spoke next, and any trace of sympathy was gone. Her look was the one a stern teacher gives a troublemaker. READY’s latest project was the formation of a screening committee to make sure only the most responsible applicants would be allowed the privilege of living in public housing, and Sadie’s tone made it clear that Billie was to be an example to others.
“Let me say this to you,” she said. “These people that you see here are residents of public housing. So we know what we put on an application. It is not like we come out of the sky and don’t know Housing. We are familiar with Housing, their rules and regulations.” In other words: We know he would not have been put on your grant unless he lived with you, and we know that you know that that is against the rules.
From there the conversation became ever more hostile. Little Johnny felt hot against Billie’s chest. She couldn’t believe the sound of her pounding heart did not wake him.
“Since, I take it, he is incarcerated,” Sadie asked, “has D.S.S. been in touch with you and pulled that money out of your grant, or are you still getting it?”
“No,” Billie answered, she had not stopped the money yet. “I’ve been going through emotional changes. I haven’t even gotten to them yet.”
“In other words,” said Sadie, “you’re still receiving money for him?”
“Yes.”
“Is that legal?” asked the lawyer, clearly quite interested.
“No,” Sadie said.
“No,” Billie agreed. “I have to get in touch with them.”
Sadie nodded curtly. “I have no more questions,” she said.
“Do you have any more evidence to give?” Billie was asked, and she said she did not.
The lawyer then called a number of witnesses, all of whom worked for the Housing Authority and all of whom testified that the rules were explained to every tenant. Next, the lawyer brought out the sheets from the Department of Social Services, showing four people listed as members of Billie’s household: Billie herself, John Santos, Shanda Santos, and John Billlie Santos Jr. He brought in John’s parole officer, Thomas Downer, who described how, at John’s first meeting, “he informed me that he was moving in with Ms. Rowan at 115 Gaffney.”
“Were you satisfied that he was living at 115 Gaffney?” the lawyer asked, after the parole officer described his visits to the townhouse to check on John.
“Completely,” the officer said.
“Did you tell Mr. Downer that he was living there and that you agreed for him to live there?” the lawyer asked Billie.
“Yes,” Billie said, having given up completely. “I told him that. Yes. The answer is yes.”
As each witness testified, someone reminded Billie that she could ask questions, and, each time, she answered that she had no questions. When all the witnesses had finished, Sadie turned to her and said, with a mixture of curiosity and concern, “Ms. Rowan, because of the seriousness of this, and you have two children, and it is a possibility you might be evicted, did you ever consider bringing someone to represent you? I’m talking about Legal Services or something?”
“Well, no,” Billie said, certain now that that would have been a good idea. “I didn’t know of no one to contact.”
The lawyer started to gather his papers together. “I have no further evidence to introduce,” he said, “and I have no further witnesses. Ms. Rowan is free to make whatever statements she wants to the hearing panel.”
Billie shrugged. “I have nothing to say.”
The lawyer did. “Briefly,” he said, addressing the committee, “I can state that she’s offered no concrete evidence to substantiate the fact that Mr. Santos was living with his mother and not living with her. You have the uncontroverted evidence of these witnesses and the documentary evidence that substantially proves that he was, in fact, living with her. I, therefore, would hope this panel would move for her eviction.
“Okay,” the lawyer said. “That’s it. You have thirty days to make your decision.”
One of the municipal tasks that appears to strain the abilities of the City of Yonkers is plowing snow. Despite the fact that Westchester County usually sees at least one major snowfall a year, the plows and salt spreaders of Yonkers still struggle with the task. Days after streets in neighboring villages have been cleared down to blacktop, cars in Yonkers are still driving on gray-brown carpets, packed to ice by time and traffic.
It’s not that the plows don’t come by. They just don’t have much effect. Instead of clearing the snow, they seem to push it around or flatten it down, and the streets are often as slick when they leave as when they arrive. The inconvenience and mess result in a blizzard of letters to the local editorial page, followed by explanations from Parks Department officials (cars parked illegally on narrow side-streets are mentioned frequently) and promises from city leaders that the situation will be studied.
So when more than a foot of snow fell on Yonkers in March 1993, it was entirely predictable that the road through the center of the Andrew Smith townhouses was not properly plowed. What was striking was how completely it was not plowed. Two days after the storm, when the surrounding side streets had at least had a snowy path of sorts carved down their centers, the drifts were still thigh-high on Gaffney Place. The plows zigged and zagged throughout the neighborhood, but never turned into the townhouses. Those in charge of such things had not added the new extension of the street to the plowing schedule. It was as if the townhouses simply weren’t there.
Billie Rowan trudged through the snow to reach her mailbox that March morning. She hadn’t bothered with a coat, and by the time she slogged to the sidewalk and back, she was shivering and the few envelopes were wet.
The first one she opened was her welfare check from Social Services, reduced to $479 a month now because the lawyer at Municipal Housing had sent a letter saying John was no longer entitled to his $84 allotment.
Next in the pile was a long, handwritten letter from John, addressed to Billie Santos. Like the others he had sent from the county jail over the months, this letter was upbeat. “He’s okay, because his fingerprints is not on the ice pick” was how she described them. “They still want to hold him, though, being that he was there when it happened, so I don’t know, maybe he’ll be released soon.” She was almost certain that she believed him when he said he didn’t kill the woman, but she was also angry with him. If she had chosen to have a third baby, rather than an abortion, he would have been in prison for the birth of that child, too.
The last letter in the stack was from Municipal Housing, and Billie thought about throwing that one directly into the trash, pretending it never existed. Instead, she ripped it open at the side, then waded through two pages of dense legalese, titled “Recommendations of Hearing Committee.” The information she was looking for was in the last paragraph: “After hearing all the testimony and reviewing the exhibits introduced into evidence, the Resident Hearing Committee… recommended for the eviction of Billie Rowan, 115 Gaffney Place.” She was told to be out by the end of the month.
She knew she could fight back if she wanted to. Public largesse in all forms comes with an elaborate, cumbersome appeals process, and Billie knew the odds were she would lose in the end—every one she knew of seemed to—but the fight could last a long time, and she would be allowed to stay in the townhouse until it was over. She just didn’t have the stomach for that route. John would be home soon, she figured, and she would probably forgive him. Her plan was not to fight, but to flee. Away from Yonkers. Maybe South Carolina, where she had distant, rarely seen family.
Several days after the snowstorm, Billie searched through the classifieds for a new apartment, a temporary stopping place on the way to her new life. She was not at all surprised to find that there were very few places she could afford. She was paying—or, more accurately, Social Services was paying—$271 a month for her townhouse. John’s sister, Yolanda, had agreed to share the new place with her, so they would need something large enough for the two women and their four children. A two-bedroom would do, if some of the children slept in the living room. They could afford about $600 a month. In Yonkers, which has the lowest average rents in southern Westchester, the average rent for a two-bedroom at the time was $889, and even a one-bedroom, at an average rent of $682, was more than she could afford.
Most of the ads in the real estate listings hinted at a world that had nothing to do with Billie’s life. Duplexes with gardens; six rooms with a balcony; two bedrooms with an on-site gym and a pool. All for more than $1,200 a month. Those that were the right price—“1 BR apt, freshly painted $659/mo”; “1 BR good area. Elev. $520 mo”—were too small. Those that were the right size—“Charming 4 rooms (2 bedrms), eat-in kitchen, elevator building, $750”—were too expensive. And some, even if she could somehow afford them, did not want her: “3 rms. Nice apt in private house. Nr RR Sta. Working couple pref. Ref. req.”
A few ads, on the other hand, were clearly seeking her business and that of others receiving DSS checks from the Department of Social Services:
“YONKERS, DSS OK, Studio, 1,2,3 & 4 BR apts, $500 & up. IMMEDIATE. Natuzzi.”
“YONKERS 1,2,3 & 4 Bdrm apts, DSS OK, Gd area. Lv msg.”
“YONKERS 1,2 & 3 BR, A1 Condition, $500 & up. Immediate occup. Ridgeview Realty.”
She called the last of these numbers, the one that sounded the most like a real ad, and the only one that listed the number of an agency, rather than someone’s last name or some anonymous instructions to leave a message. A broker named Elias Rabady answered her call and told her he specialized in apartments on the southwest side of town. Not that he lived there—he lived several miles away, in the far more affluent village of Ardsley (average two-bedroom rent: $1,083). But he represented several landlords in southwest Yonkers, on the “tree streets”—Elm, Maple, Chestnut, Poplar, Ash. Billie knew the area well. It was where people lived until they were lucky enough to qualify for a shabby, noisy, depressing apartment in Schlobohm.
As a rule, Mr. Rabady sternly explained, Ridgeview Realty did not like renting to single-women-with-children-who-want-to-share, because “you have a fight, someone moves out, and then you call and say you can’t pay the rent anymore.” But this was a rule that was regularly broken, because single sharers with children were often the only apartment seekers willing to live on many of the tree streets. So Billie and Yolanda were shown a four-room apartment at 63 Oak Street, a seedy, redbrick walk-up that even Mr. Rabady described as “a little crummy.”
There was trash piled up out front, and a smell that seemed equal parts cooking grease and stagnation, even on a frigid day. The apartment, one of nine in the building, was dark and cramped, but reasonably clean. There was no refrigerator, but the heat seemed to work and was included in the rent, which was $650 a month. A one-month security deposit was required, as well as a broker’s fee of 15 percent of the yearly rent, or $1,170.
Billie and Yolanda said they would take it. Mr. Rabady filled out the Shelter Verification forms, sections A, B, and C, as required by Social Services to approve payment. He spelled Billie’s name wrong on the application—instead of Rowan, he wrote Rowanne—and indicated that monthly checks be sent to the landlord at a P.O. box, even though he had said the landlord and his family lived “right down the block from this building.”
Billie dragged herself home, defeated. She sat in the kitchen, in the dark, for what seemed like an hour. The children had not eaten dinner, but she didn’t have the energy to fix a meal. She didn’t even have the energy to move. When she had lived in Schlobohm, she had always guessed that there was a better life. Now she knew that there was. It had been easier before, when she could only guess what she was missing. How could she bear to live with the certainty of what she did not have?
The next morning, at the mailbox, Billie crossed paths with Doreen James.
“You’re going backward,” Doreen lectured when Billie told her about the apartment. “You can’t let them push you backward. Your man screwed you. It happens. Don’t screw yourself double by not fighting back.”
Billie did not move to Oak Street. She simply stayed where she was, past the March 31 deadline, in spite of the notice that arrived in her mailbox to inform her that Municipal Housing had asked the city court of Yonkers to enforce her eviction. A court hearing, the letter said, was scheduled for May 1. Two days before that hearing, on April 29, Billie called Westchester/Putnam Legal Services, whose number she had got from Doreen James. In surprisingly little time, papers were filed on her behalf challenging the city court’s jurisdiction over the case, and her future was put on indefinite hold while the Supreme Court of Westchester County considered that challenge.
She never contacted Mr. Rabady to say she would not be moving to Oak Street. She simply did not send him her money, and he soon figured out that she and Yolanda would not be coming. A short while later, he threw her file out.
Norma O’Neal had never met Billie Rowan before the afternoon that Billie arrived at Norma’s door, carrying a petition and a pen. Norma had certainly heard of Billie a lot in recent weeks, however, ever since her boyfriend’s arrest had made her the talk of Gaffney Place.
“I know about your troubles,” Norma said after Billie hesitantly introduced herself. Norma has always had a soft spot for people with troubles, and she asked Billie to “come on inside and sit down.”
Seated on the couch, Billie explained to Norma that her Legal Services lawyer thought a petition signed by the neighbors, saying that they wanted her to stay, might help her case. Billie had written out the message herself, at the top of the page, in round, artistic letters. Because Norma could not read the words, Billie read them to her:
“We the undersigned,” it said, “see’s Billie Rowan as posing no threat to our community. She is a very loving and kind neighbor & should remain a tenant of the Andrew Smith Townhouses. She has had no complaints & shows compassion towards other. We think she deserves another shot for her and her children’s sake for they to may suffer for anothers man misfortune.”
As she read, Norma rocked the basket of her month-old grandson, Shaquille, born to Tasha in May after a difficult labor and an emergency cesarean section. He was a fussy baby, and sometimes he cried from midnight to dawn. Norma walked the floor with him those nights, grateful to being doing so on Gaffney Place instead of back in Schlobohm. It felt so much more hopeful to have a baby here, where it did not feel like tempting fate to plan for the future.
“If they make you leave, that’s not fair to your children,” Norma told Billie. She reached over to take the petition, and Billie placed it in her hands. “It’s not fair for children to be paying for something that older folks did.
“You can’t say, because he left your house and did this someplace else that it’s your fault,” she continued. “That’s just like, say, Tasha, if she goes across town and kills somebody, you gonna throw me out of my house because of her?”
“He didn’t live with me,” Billie said. The lie came more easily now. “He was around all the time because of the children and everything, but he lived at his mother’s. His address was his mother’s.”
“And maybe he sleeps over once in a while,” Norma said, with a friendly, conspiratorial wink. “Is that anyone’s nevermind?”
She took the pen that Billie offered. In shaky, oversized handwriting, she signed her name.
Nick began the summer as he had begun so many other summers—deciding whether he wanted to run in the next election, and, if so, what office he wanted to run for. A citywide redistricting plan was to take effect during the election of 1993, and the way the lines had been redrawn, Nick’s house was in a heavily Hispanic district. A local activist named Fernando Fuentes had made it clear he would run for that seat, and Nick was not eager to challenge him.
The only other options, as he saw them, were to move across town or to run for city judge. The first was out of the question. He had already poured too much money into his house. The second was appealing, but when he approached the executive committee of the Democratic party and told them of his plans, the response was frosty. The committee, comprised almost completely of people loyal to Terry Zaleski, said they were sorry, but there was already a strong Democrat running for that position. Given Nick’s combative relationship with Zaleski, the mayor’s refusal of support only made Nick more determined.
Hoping to make an end run around the mayor, Nick approached Vinni Restiano for help. He asked her to “carry his petitions,” a common practice in local elections, in which the supporters of one candidate gather signatures for their candidate as well as a second candidate. In effect, he was asking for her endorsement, her partnership, and he was stunned when he did not get it. Not knowing of his plans, she had already promised her support to another candidate for city judge and she intended to keep her word.
What happened next would be the subject of much debate after the election. The way Nick described it, he was approached by Jim Surdoval, on behalf of Terry Zaleski, with a suggestion. There was an office perfect for Nick’s experience and talents, Nick would remember being told by Surdoval—City Council president. If he challenged Vinni Restiano for that position, the mayor would support him.
Surdoval, in turn, would remember that the suggestion of such a scenario “definitely came from Nick,” but that “we embraced it quickly.” Zaleski’s office had polling data that showed Nick was much better known than Restiano, and would probably win a primary. In the general election, however, Nick was much weaker. A primary between Restiano and Wasicsko could well benefit Zaleski, by eliminating both hostile council members at the same time, Surdoval said.
The fact that the party had already given its support to Restiano did not seem to bother either Jim Surdoval or Terry Zaleski. That support had been given earlier in the year, before the budget process had gotten under way, and before Restiano had voted to override the mayor’s veto of the budget, something Zaleski refused to forgive.
The fact that Restiano was a friend, and that Nay worked closely with her at City Hall, did bother Nick, but he didn’t feel he had a choice. He needed to run for office in 1993, and this seemed to be the only office available. He felt he had to hold his nose and do it. The council president’s salary of $46,507 was twice what he earned right now. Zaleski’s offer of assistance was a calculated one, he knew, but he had turned low expectations to his advantage before, and he liked the idea of shocking the Zaleski camp with a victory. In the meantime, he would try not to dwell on the image of his petitions being carried by Zaleski’s supporters.
He took the deal.
Telling Nay turned uglier than he had expected. She was kneeling on the ground outside the house when he came home, pulling weeds in the scruffy square of dirt that she stubbornly insisted would one day be a garden.
“I’m going to primary Vinni,” he said.
She jumped to her feet. “Stay the hell away from me,” she said, pitching her spade and her gloves to the ground, then running toward the house. “I don’t think I know you anymore.”
When she reached the doorway, she turned and glared. “You know what?” she shouted. “I’m going to work for Vinni. What the hell are you doing this for?”
Nick could not rally the strength to tell Restiano himself. He knew the news would reach her, and he was not surprised when the phone rang several hours later. She was calling from her car and Nick couldn’t tell if they had a bad connection or if she had been crying.
“So, you made your decision,” she said. “What a coward. You couldn’t pick up the phone and tell me yourself? After all we were to each other, the friendship we had.”
Nick noticed that she spoke of their friendship in the past tense.
“Don’t think this is going to be easy,” she warned. “I know you’ve gotta do what you’ve gotta do. But I’m gonna do what I’m gonna do.”
Nick did not make his plans public for several weeks, and when he did, he did not hold a formal news conference. He announced his candidacy by calling the newspaper and saying “I plan to run for council president.”
In the interview that followed that announcement, he sounded lukewarm about his own candidacy. He was running, he said, because he was “disillusioned about how this new form of government is working.” Restiano, he said, had made “what I consider to be some bad judgments,” and Yonkers government is “at a standstill.” He concluded by saying that “one of the improvements that could be made” would be to have “an experienced person in the council president’s office, who would be able to work with all the parties and use some leadership to make the government work in spite of personalities.”
He hoped it sounded more rousing than it felt.
Alma Febles followed the news about Billie Rowan closely, watching Yonkers Cable nightly for updates, listening to gossip on the bus or at the market, then trying to place what she learned on the matrix of what was good and bad for her own life. In the days after John Santos was arrested, when politicians and homeowners were screaming with a rage that had not been seen in Yonkers since 1988, Alma was distraught. She knew 58 more townhouses were scheduled to be built—eventually. But the furor over the murder, she feared, might mean that “eventually” would never come.
She lost her appetite worrying about the townhouses. She tossed for hours at bedtime, then awoke with a start in the middle of the night and could not get back to sleep. She cried whenever she thought the children weren’t listening. She paced and fretted and all but fell apart.
Over time, her anguish deepened. If Billie Rowan was found guilty by Municipal Housing, the news reports said, she would be the first east side tenant to be forced to leave. One vacated apartment in one year, and it took a murder to bring that one about. So there would be no new townhouses, she was certain, and there would be no vacancies in the existing townhouses. She had no way out.
Tentatively, fearfully, she began to search for an apartment outside the projects. Unlike Billie, who looked at places she could afford and was unsettled by what her money could buy, Alma looked at places where she would actually want to live—three-bedroom apartments in safe neighborhoods—and was chastened by what they cost.
A friend at work told her about an apartment for rent across the street from Fitzgerald & Fitzgerald. It had two bedrooms, but they were very big, so she and Leyda could share. The building was clean and safe, with an intercom system and new carpeting in the lobby. For days, Alma stood outside her office and stared at that building, imagining what it would be like to take a key from her pocket and open its lock, to ride in its elevator, to invite people over for parties, to call it home. One morning, with a burst of resolve, she dialed the number given to her by the friend, and learned that the rent was $825.
With a recent raise, Alma earned $360 a week at Fitzgerald & Fitzgerald, or $18,720 a year, plus some Social Security payments for the children. Hers was a real job, like the ones that politicians are always suggesting welfare mothers get, and she was no longer on the public dole. Her rent was 30 percent of her gross income, or $532 a month. After deductions for health insurance and taxes, however, she took home $256 a week, or $1,109 a month, meaning her rent was nearly half of her disposable income. She had no savings, because the philosophy behind a sliding rent scale—charge as much as the tenant can pay—does not allow for savings. So she certainly was not able to spend $300 extra dollars each month for a new apartment.
Briefly, she thought of renting one of these palaces anyway, because her children were asking her almost nightly when they were going to move. Frankie, barred from the Schlobohm playground by Alma’s rules, was becoming increasingly pale, pudgy, and withdrawn. But at least he still listened when she told him to stay inside. Virgilio, a freshman in high school, had begun to come home long after school ended, saying only that he had been out with “friends.” Alma had never met any of his “friends.” He would not invite them over, because he would not tell them where he lived. She could find a second job, she thought, or beg the children’s fathers for some help. Maybe that would allow her to live where she thought she should live, at least for a while. She knew that things would probably come crashing down around her eventually, and she would likely end up back in public housing, but she would have had a shot, somewhat like a prisoner who knows he will be caught, but attempts to escape nonetheless, for the brief pleasure of freedom.
Alma eventually gave up on that plan, however, not because of the money, but because of the rules. If she moved out of Schlobohm, she would lose her place on the waiting list for the townhouses. She had been entered in the lottery as a public-housing tenant, and if she was no longer receiving public-housing assistance, she learned, she would lose any chance, however slim, of moving to the one place she both wanted to live in and could afford.
When school ended, she sent Frankie and Virgilio to Santo Domingo for most of the summer, where each one stayed with his own father, each of whom paid for one ticket. She worried constantly, particularly about Frankie, but she didn’t see that she had any choice but to let him go.
In early August, feeling baked by the concrete and brick of Schlobohm, she spent $300 she did not have to fly herself and Leyda to Florida, the cheapest summer destination she could find. They stayed with friends—Alma slept on the couch and Leyda on the floor—and they swam in the ocean, but the change of scene did not lift the depression that had enveloped her since John Santos was arrested. When her sons arrived back home, they were tanned and rested. Frankie had lost a lot of weight and looked more like a lean teen and less like a chubby boy. He had spent all his days outside, he said, riding bikes, playing ball, and “doing stuff kids do.”
It was during the brutal heat waves of summer that Pam Johnson loved her townhouse the most. The thermometer would swear it was as hot on the west side as it was here on the east side, but it felt worlds cooler. The difference certainly had nothing to do with air conditioning, because that was as unaffordable a luxury to her here as it had been on the other side of town. Each townhouse was built with pre-cut aluminum sleeves where air conditioners might be placed, but only one or two of those slots were actually used in all the townhouses of Clark Street. In the homes that faced the townhouses, the houses that had been here first, beige metal casings jutted out of countless windows and walls, humming the heat away. So, when the weather was hot, the people on Pam’s side of the street went outside to cool off, while the people on the other side of the street went inside.
One August day, when it was 100 degrees before lunch, Pam dragged her daughters’ plastic pool onto the front lawn and filled it with water. She didn’t put the pool in the backyard, where she knew it probably belonged, because the engineers who built the townhouses had not thought that drains were necessary in every backyard, and an afternoon of water play there would leave the grass so flooded it would take weeks to dry. But the front yard sloped down, toward the drains in the street, and there were ample spigots out front, so out front was where Anita and Valentina played.
As always happened when Pam filled the pool, children materialized from the other townhouses, wearing bathing suits if they had them, shorts if they did not. And, as also always happened when Pam filled the pool, the neighbors across the street peered from their windows, and sometimes from their front stoops, not saying anything, just staring.
There was still hostility from those neighbors. The Man in the Brown House, for instance, who often yelled at the children, “Go home, go home, I don’t want you on this side of the street.” But there were also signs—perhaps it was the weather—of a possible thaw. There was the Poodle Lady, who had followed her Christmas presents with Easter baskets, and then started to bring treats for no reason—headbands, coloring books, hair barrettes. And there was the Man with the Rottweiler, who had stopped letting his dog stand and growl behind the Plexiglas storm door, where it had petrified the children. One day, Pam passed him while he was walking the dog, and he nodded hello. More recently, when a few children from the townhouses were playing a radio while standing on a corner, leading some anonymous homeowner to call the police, the Man with the Rottweiler came out to tell the officers that the music wasn’t really too loud.
Watching the townhouse children play, Pam saw pure happiness. She wondered what the neighbors across the street saw when they watched the same scene. She suspected they thought it was too noisy, or too public, or too something, and she half expected the Man in the Brown House to step out and tell her so. The splashing had been under way for about a half hour, when Valentina went running into the house, then came racing back, her arms filled with plastic buckets. She and Anita filled them from the spigot and hurled arcs of water at their friends. Soon everyone was armed with buckets, and cups, and hastily emptied trash cans, and everyone, children and adults, was soaked and gleeful.
The water fight went on for nearly an hour. Pam paused for a moment during that time and happened to glance across the street. The neighbors were out on their sidewalks and stoops, dozens of them, standing and staring, despite the pounding heat. But the looks on their faces were not what Pam expected. They were smiling. They were even laughing. They looked as if they wished they could join the ruckus.
“This is my neighborhood,” Pam found herself thinking. “This is where I live.” Then she doused Anita with a bucket of water.
Doreen James was worried about her sister. Barbara was clearly sick, although she would not admit that to Doreen. She stayed in bed late, went back to bed early, ate little, talked less, and winced with pain even when she was sitting still.
As summer ended, Barbara began having violent seizures, sometimes one every day. In the middle of a conversation, she would start shivering, then shaking, then her eyes would roll back and she would look, Doreen thought, as if she was in an evil trance. Minutes later, when she was conscious again, Doreen would try to persuade her to go to the hospital, but she always refused.
One afternoon, Barbara came along to keep Doreen company at a routine checkup. Doctors’ offices always made her anxious; it was in such an office, after all, that she learned her fiancé had died. This time, the sisters were sitting together in a waiting room, when Barbara’s seizure began. Doreen ran for a nurse, and Barbara was admitted to the hospital for several days, but was discharged without a solid diagnosis. When Doreen asked her sister what the doctors found, Barbara would not say.
In early September, Doreen invited the whole family over for a barbecue, but Barbara never left her room. She had terrible pains in her leg, and she felt too weak to walk. This time she agreed to go to the hospital, where Doreen learned that Barbara’s blood pressure was dangerously low and, more important, the circulation in her leg was nearly completely blocked. The leg would require surgery.
Doreen stayed with Barbara at the hospital for the rest of the day, and did not leave until close to eleven that night, when the nurses all but ordered her to go.
“I’ll see you later,” Barbara said, as Doreen turned and waved good-bye at the door.
The operation was scheduled for early the next morning, and Doreen could not be there. Her mother had promised to call when it was over, to tell her that Barbara was safely back in her room. At lunchtime, there was a knock on Doreen’s front door, and when she opened it she found her mother standing on the threshold, frail and confused. “I have something to tell you,” she said. “She didn’t make it. She died during the surgery. She was too weak.” Barbara James was thirty-four years old.
When Doreen came home from the funeral she found a notice from Con Ed in her mailbox, warning that her power would be cut off because her bill was past due.
Furious, she crumpled the letter into a ball and hurled it across the room. Then she sank to the floor and cried, tears of grief and frustration, tears for her sister but also for so many other things—things she did not understand she’d lost until this moment.
“I don’t want to live here anymore,” she said aloud. “This isn’t home.”
Over the next few days the raw emotion ebbed, but the realization remained. She did not want to be here. Doreen had left Schlobohm not because she was tired of fighting to make things better there, but because she was tired of fighting alone. She moved to the townhouses hoping things might be different, that her neighbors would stick together and solve all the problems that had followed them from the other side of town.
Contentment is relative to expectation, and Doreen’s expectations were the highest at Gaffney Place. Norma O’Neal came looking for someplace a little better than the place she had left. She found it and, despite its flaws, she was content. Pam Johnson wanted someplace safe, where her children could have waterfights and other types of fun. She was content, too. Doreen wanted much more—solidarity, a feeling of community, a chance to put all Sadie Jefferson’s lessons into practice, a sense that she was making a difference.
“I thought that people could stick together here,” she said, by way of apology, to Sadie. “But people don’t stick together. They’re doing the same thing they did on the other side of town. Their own thing.”
She didn’t understand how others could isolate themselves so easily. She had tried to be an island, just Doreen and Jaron, when she first moved to Gaffney Place. Despite her best efforts, she was soon holding meetings and writing letters, fighting as hard as she knew how. Sometimes the fighting worked, and Peter Smith okayed small improvements like the new screen doors that had arrived during the summer. But most of the time, nothing changed, and the Con Ed bill was mocking evidence of that. During her last months, Barbara had gently scolded Doreen, saying she was looking for something that didn’t exist. Most white people ignore their neighbors, too, she said.
Maybe Barbara was right. Doreen alone could not transform this collection of townhouses into a neighborhood. This wasn’t home, and she would stop trying to make it home. But she would not stop looking for someplace that was.
Several days later, when enough time had passed that she was certain she was not acting on impulse, Doreen called Municipal Housing. As she dialed, she felt the calm that only a firm decision can bring. Valerie Carroll, the tenant supervisor, came on the line. “I want to move out of here,” Doreen said.
Valerie was surprised. She had never processed a request to leave the east side, she said. Hundreds of people were waiting for a chance to move in.
“You don’t understand,” Doreen said, “I’m not asking to leave the east side.”
Valerie was confused.
“I want Dunbar Houses,” Doreen said, of the small enclave in Runyon Heights, where Sheila lived, where Sadie lived, where Jaron would see black faces that lived in houses, not housing. Maybe there she would feel like she belonged.
“There’s a long list ahead of you,” Valerie said.
Doreen said she was willing to wait.
Once Nick launched his campaign against Vinni Restiano, council meetings became ordeals for him. They reminded him of the worst days of the housing standoff, except now there was cold silence in place of heated shouting. Then, as now, he was isolated and on his own. This was still Restiano’s council, and his last-minute decision to try to change that did not sit well with most of the people who worked for her or with her. Rather than face the chill in the back offices during breaks in council meetings, he would stand out in the hall alone.
Mary Dorman found him there one evening near the end of the primary campaign. He was leaning against a wall, hands in his pockets, staring at the worn tiles on the floor.
“How do you stand it,” Mary asked, “when nobody’s talking to you?
“I don’t mind, I’m used to it,” he said, and actually sounded as if he meant it. “But,” he said, “I feel sorry for my wife, because these are her friends.”
It had become an ugly campaign. The two former friends had nearly identical voting records, and that, coupled with Restiano’s feelings of betrayal, left the candidates nothing to attack but each other. Restiano accused Nick of nepotism—putting Nay in a City Council job—even though Restiano herself had lobbied the council to make that happen. Nick accused Restiano of being more of a Republican than a Democrat, even though he had helped her craft many of her political positions. When Vinni received the support of nearly all the unions in Yonkers, Nick charged that she was a puppet of special interests, despite the fact that he had received the same endorsements from the same groups in his previous campaigns.
Restiano did not miss a chance to remind Nick that she had the official support of the party, while he was a pawn in Terry Zaleski’s latest chess game. “I’m the candidate of the party by acclamation,” she told audiences. “My opponent is the mayor’s candidate by desperation.”
In their few joint appearances, she seemed hurt and he seemed defensive. During a televised debate a week before the vote, she spoke bitterly of the new, nakedly political Nick, someone she did not recognize and did not like. “You only think of the next election,” she said. “It’s time to start thinking of the next generation. Get over it, Nick. The people are on to you.”
Nay was caught in the crossfire. Each day a few more pieces of her job were taken from her and given to others in the office. First she was asked to stop preparing the council minutes, then the council agenda. Then she was told there was no reason for her to come to council meetings. Next she was “discouraged” from working overtime. Meetings were held that she was not told of, and memos that should have routinely come over her desk no longer bore her name. If she was five minutes late from lunch, someone was sure to notice. Eventually, the only job left her was handing out forms to couples needing a marriage license.
After spending each day launching other people’s marriages, she would come home and widen the cracks in her own.
“I’m sick and tired of being a part of this whole ugly disgusting mess,” she would vent at Nick. “I paid for your politics when they fired me from the Parking Authority. Now I get to pay again? Maybe I’m being selfish, or a baby, but I am not the politician, you are.”
“It sucks,” she would yell at him, “this great thing you did, deciding to run against Vinni Restiano. I have to work with these people. They’re gonna make me pay big time. And if you lose and she wins, that’s it for me, for my job, for everything. Did you think about that?”
Nay did not go to work on the day of the primary. The city clerk’s office is responsible for administering elections, and it would not look right if the wife of one of the candidates seemed to be in charge of the vote.
Vinni Restiano called early on primary day morning, after the polls had opened. Nick was in the shower, but he was not the Wasicsko Vinni was looking for.
“Your husband screwed me over,” she hissed at Nay. “If he can do it to me, he can do it to you. What exactly does he care about anymore, anyway?”
Restiano hung up. When Nick walked in he found his wife clutching the receiver, looking stricken. She repeated the conversation.
“What do you care about?” she asked him.
He didn’t have an answer.
After the polls had closed, Nick and Nay went to wait for the returns at Mannion’s restaurant, a political hangout where the walls are lined with glad-handing photos. It was supposed to be a victory party, but it quickly became clear there was very little to celebrate. Three of the four candidates backed by Terry Zaleski lost their races, including Nick, who trailed Restiano by 363 votes out of a total of 7,836.
He won all the districts on the west side. She won all the districts on the east side.
The only race won by a party designee was in Nick’s old district, where Fernando Fuentes squeezed to victory with a twenty-two-vote lead, 553 to 531.
Hank Spallone, who was trying to return to the council, won his Republican nomination fairly easily, 647 to 589. “I think it was me, my personality and what I stand for,” Spallone said, analyzing his win. “The people want me back because I always did what I told them I’d do.”
At ten o’clock, Nick conceded the race. From the pay phone at Mannion’s he called Restiano’s home, where she was awaiting the returns with supporters, since she had not been invited to join her own party’s party. She was polite, but icy, and Nick left the restaurant immediately after the call. Neither Nick nor Nay said one word as they drove back home.
Billie didn’t think she was throwing Shanda into the crib with unusual force. But the little girl hit the mattress with such a jolt that the supporting hooks ripped from the frame and the mattress collapsed to the dusty wooden floor. Billie sank to the floor, too, shrieking hysterically. Hers were shrill, piercing shrieks that sent Shanda cowering to the corner and brought Johnny running from the other room. He stood in the doorway staring at his wailing mother and cringing sister, until Billie ordered: “Just get away from me. Leave Mommy alone.” She was afraid of what she was angry enough to do.
Shanda’s whining had triggered the moment. She had spent most of the day whining—a high-pitched, repetitive tone, like a keening bird—and no amount of hollering, punishing, or spanking had made her stop. Billie was trying to exile the child to the crib when it collapsed. As the pieces of manmade wood clattered around her, something else collapsed as well—Billie’s carefully constructed fiction that all was okay. She was not okay. She was fuming, frightened, and falling apart. Her hair was coming out in clumps. Her blood pressure was higher than its usual worrisome levels, and she had stopped taking her medicine because the side effects made her miserable.
Until the day she smashed the crib, Billie had been proud of the fact that, in all the months since John was arrested, she had never cried; proud that she had accepted each successive piece of humiliating news with a deep breath and a cigarette. “Crying is a waste,” she told her mother, who, it seemed to Billie, would urge her to cry whenever they were together. “Crying don’t fix things, it just makes them wet.”
Instead, she had found—or thought she’d found—ways of dealing with John’s absence. When the children asked for their father, she did not tell them where he was, answering Shanda’s demands for “my Daddy” with silence or a quick change of subject. When pushed, she told them that the “Bad Boys” had taken their father away, a concept they knew from a television show they often watched in the late afternoons. She would rather they believed that John had been snatched into the TV screen than try to explain what prison was.
Once, and only once, Johnny angrily challenged her explanation, with information Billie assumed he got from the other children on the street.
“He’s locked up,” he taunted, eyes narrowing.
“No,” Billie said, “he’s not locked up, the Bad Boys got him.” Johnny looked confused, but dropped the subject.
Johnny, who had always liked pretend gunplay, immersed himself in imaginary violence, running around the house yelling, “I’ll kill you. I’ll shoot you.” Billie thought she had to do something, but she wasn’t sure what it should be. First, she took Johnny’s toy gun from him, but he fashioned replacements from his sandwich, or his finger, or whatever else was in his hand at the moment. So Billie went to the toy store and found a battery-operated learning center, where children picked an answer, then pressed a button, and were rewarded by bells and beeps. The recommended age on the box was “6 to 10 years.” Shanda was two. Johnny was three. Billie bought the toy anyway, spending more money than she had planned in the belief that something expensive would best teach her children.
When she opened the machine, she realized that the cards required reading, and since neither Johnny nor Shanda could read, she had to sit with them while they played. They were excited about it the first day, but Billie put the machine away after fifteen minutes, because All My Children was about to begin. Shortly after that, Billie’s mother bought Johnny a toy car, which he liked as much as the learning center, and Billie was pleased to have him play away from her.
Billie knew she was not the kind of mother she wanted to be. “Patience, patience. Patience and patience” was how she described what she did not have. “And understanding what a child don’t know, and what they do know. And just patience.”
She also knew she did not have the life she wanted, a life where her man was around more than once every few years. She couldn’t think of any real person who actually had a life like that, but she believed in it nonetheless.
Now, however, with her daughter’s crib in a heap in front of her, Billie saw that she wasn’t handling the gap between what she wanted and what she had. In the months since John’s arrest, several people, all trying to be helpful, had suggested that her problems were more than she could solve on her own. “I don’t need no therapist,” she said, not defiantly, but sadly. “This is something I will have to solve myself. They could tell me, ‘You need to calm down,’ but they don’t live here. They don’t see what I go through, they don’t actually feel what I feel inside. Nobody can help me.”
For nearly an hour, Norma had held her tongue while five-month-old Shaq fussed, cried, and refused all of Tasha’s best efforts to coax him to sleep. Then, over the sound of Shaq’s screaming, she heard Tasha screaming back, and Norma stood at the bottom of the stairs and ordered Tasha to come down.
“Give me the baby,” Norma said.
“No,” answered Tasha, with a rasp in her throat, a hint that she had been crying herself.
“Give me the baby,” Norma said, and Tasha did as she was told.
Norma took Shaq, who was still fussing, into her own bedroom, and placed him in the center of her bed. Then she had a talk with him. “What’s wrong with you?” she demanded. “Grandma don’t take that. Who do you think you is?” She said the words over and over, a gruff yet kindly lullaby, and eventually the baby fell asleep.
He slept in Norma’s bed all night, and the next morning Norma used much the same tone on the mother that she had used on the son.
“Tasha,” she said. “I’m your mother. I’m here for you. I’m here with you. Some girls do not have a mother, or do not have nobody to care. That’s why you find a lot of young girls killing their young babies. They can’t take it. That’s why I’m here for you. Anytime Shaq gets too much for you, you give him to me. When I had you all, when I had Dwayne and Bruce, I didn’t have a mother. She was dead. I had nobody to help me. But you got me. Anytime it gets too hard for you, bring him in my room.”
On the last day of September, Alma saw a photo in the paper, showing a townhouse shell being lifted onto its foundation by a crane. Fourteen new units of court-ordered public housing were under construction at Midland and Teresa avenues, the accompanying article said; they had all been prefabricated in Pennsylvania and were now being bolted to steel beams that had been cemented into the ground in Yonkers.
Alma crossed her fingers.
On the first day of October, Alma saw an article in the paper about a shooting in a lobby at Schlobohm. A sixteen-year-old boy had been shot in the foot at 4:45 in the afternoon by another boy whom he knew from the project’s basketball courts. There appeared to be no motive, the article said. The shooter simply pulled out a revolver, inserted one bullet, spun the chamber, and shot into the victim’s right foot.
Alma opened her hall closet, now overflowing with kitchen appliances she might never use, and mourned.
If she could do it over again, she thought, she would not have children. Children only brought heartache, she had learned, and constant reminders of the life she could not give them. If it was only her, by herself, she would have enough to live safely and simply. Why have them, she asked, only to apologize silently to them each day for everything they are missing?
Nay was not fired the morning after the primary, a fact that provided the Wasicskos a little financial relief, but no peace of mind. The last time Nay had been fired, it had made headlines, and the couple respected Vinni’s political savvy enough to assume that she was waiting until her reelection was final before carrying through on her threat. It would not help her to have that sort of publicity at this time. And there was probably some bonus satisfaction in watching Nick and Nay sweat.
The kitchen renovation was well under way, and now the conversations on Wasicsko Lane were not about how to decorate it, but how to pay for it. On the nights when they managed to fall asleep, they would find themselves awake again at 4:00 A.M., worrying aloud in the dark.
“What are we going to do when you get fired?”
“What can we do?”
“We’ll lose the house. How are we going to pay for this?”
“Maybe we can ask my parents to help us out again until we get jobs.”
“I’ve made a mess of everything, haven’t I?”
Nick had started his job search cautious yet optimistic, as befits a politician. He believed he would get a job. A good job. He had talent, he reminded himself. He was nationally known. Promises had been made. He had connections.
What he wanted was simple—to stay in the Yonkers area in a position with visibility and prestige. His motives were also simple—he hoped, eventually, to run for mayor again, or maybe for city judge, with the Senate or the governor’s mansion still beckoning in the distance. And his plan, at first, seemed simple, too. He contacted Terry Zaleski, who directed him to Jim Surdoval.
He knew that politics was about never looking desperate, so he approached Jim with studied nonchalance.
“Well, I guess if I’d worked harder I could have won this thing,” he said. Then he added: “So, what’s next for me.”
“There are no positions in the Zaleski administration for you at this time,” Surdoval said.
Nick tried to maintain his team player poker face. “Make me commissioner of whatever,” he said, hoping he sounded relaxed and in control. To himself he thought: Invent something. I have a home. I have a mortgage. I have bills to pay.
“It would look like a payoff for running against Vinni,” Surdoval said. “It wouldn’t look good.” He paused, and softened. “I’ll work on something,” he said, before showing Nick the door.
Nick offered his hand, and as they shook he said, “If there’s anything I can do to help with anything, just let me know. If you want me to pick up someone’s campaign fliers from the printer…”
He stopped midsentence. How had he gotten here, a former mayor offering to run errands?
Anger often fuels action, and Nick, furious mostly because he had thought he was so savvy when he was being so naive, came home and scrawled his résumé in longhand for Nay to type later. He had been a finalist for the Profile in Courage Award, he wrote of himself, in the third person, “for his courageous stand against angry crowds and voters opposed to court ordered desegregation,” and he “was elected the youngest mayor of any major US city in an upset election over a six term Republican.”
Then he wrote letters to accompany the résumé. They were proud, confident letters, because he still remembered what it was like to feel that way.
“Dear Mr. Secretary,” he wrote to Henry Cisneros, President Clinton’s secretary of housing and urban development,
I applaud your efforts in Vidor, Texas. It is gratifying to see the Federal government shouldering some of the burden of fairness that is all too often politically difficult for elected officials.
I was the Mayor of Yonkers in 1988 and 1989 when Federal District Judge Leonard B. Sand ordered construction of 200 units of public housing in predominantly white east Yonkers. With international attention focused on the lengths the Yonkers City Council was willing to go to pander to their political bases, I at the age of 28, led the effort to obey the Court mandates and maintain order in Yonkers. The voters showed their disapproval in 1989 by denying my re-election bid.
However, the New York Times and the Daily News editorially supported me and my position. Senator Moynihan nominated me in 1991 for the John F. Kennedy Profile in Courage Award. I was named one of the three finalists that year.
Encouraged by this support, I successfully ran for City Council from my west side district. I narrowly lost a bid for the City Council Presidency last week, winning the west side but losing the east. In spite of my successful efforts, along with HUD, to implement much of the court ordered construction, east side residents are resentful. My elective prospects are not good due to my principled stands on housing, but my commitment to public service is undeterred.
I am enclosing my resume with the hope that a role for me may exist at HUD that will under your stewardship reinforce the message that quality desegregated housing is a national priority. As an attorney with a national reputation for political courage and a commitment to fair housing, I believe I can contribute to your mission. Thank you.
It was signed, Nicholas C. Wasicsko, Esq.
Though the specifics were different, he wrote much the same message in his letter to Judge Sand, who was looking to appoint a federal master to oversee the final stage of the housing plan.
“My record of support for the more controversial public housing portion of your order, I believe, contributed to the successful implementation of that phase,” his letter said, in part.
My steadfast courage in the face of vehement opposition earned national recognition as well as the respect of Yonkers residents most in need of fair housing. I fought hard to insure that the public housing built pursuant to the court order would be accepted by the host communities by being low density, scattered site, and attractive in appearance. While these efforts were successful, my high profile position cost me re-election.
At the end of this year, I will be leaving public office. I am looking for a position that will allow me to continue in public service to further the goals I have spent my entire professional career fighting for, equal opportunity and fairness, in housing, and the law. I believe that I could use my unique assets to insure the success of this consent decree.
Affordable housing, albeit court ordered, should not engender the blind resistance it has in Yonkers. The goal is to provide housing opportunities for members of the plaintiff class and others in need in Yonkers. I believe I am uniquely qualified to successfully continue the Court’s work.
Then, he added: “I respectfully request that this letter be kept confidential if you decide further exploration of this matter is not appropriate. Thank you. Nicholas C. Wasicsko, Esq.”
These letters and others were sent on September 20, 1993, less than a week after Nick lost the primary. By the second week in October, when he had received no response from anyone, he went back to Jim Surdoval, who had, as promised, “done something,” though hardly all that Nick had hoped. The mayor had passed Nick’s name to Assemblyman Oliver Koppell, who was the nominee to be New York’s attorney general, recommending Nick for a job as an assistant attorney general. He had also recommended him to a number of New York City law firms.
Rather than being heartened by the help, Nick was frightened and depressed. He did not want a job as a lawyer. He had never actually practiced law and he was petrified that he would fail. The depth of that fear became clear when his uncle, probably as a favor to a nephew in need of money, asked Nick to draft his will, and the project came to consume Nick. He spent an entire Saturday in the Barnes & Noble bookstore, flipping through trade paperbacks on how to write a will, and he left with one hundred dollars’ worth of books. “I don’t remember anything about this,” he said when Nay asked why he was turning a small project into a life crisis. “I want to do it right.”
Each day, the righteous, motivating anger he had felt turned more fully into self-pitying, paralyzing fear. He still attended political events, but he stayed on the sidelines, asking acquaintances “Why is it that people who do the right thing seem to get squashed?” and “Do you think my political career is over?”
He sent out more job letters, but where his earlier ones had been self-assured and eloquent (if a bit starched and earnest), these clanked with a false bravado. He did not even bother to proofread. “I am writing with interest about the position of lawyer lobbyist,” said his three-paragraph note to the general counsel of a company whose ad he found in the classified section of the New York Times.
As a former Mayor with high recognition among state officials, I believe I can be a strong asset to your organization. I know the chairmen of Senate Mental Hygiene and the Assembly Health Committees. Many state officials are also acquaintances.
Although my background does not include experience in the health care area, I am astute and a fast learner; I had to be to be elected Mayor at 28!
I am available for an interview at your convenience. Thank you.
He never received an answer.
On the morning of Friday, October 29, 1993, Nick tried to get Nay to take the day off. He lay in bed at eight and watched her as she dressed for work: blue skirt, white blouse, blue-and-white blazer.
“Make it a three-day weekend,” he said. “Go for a walk and look at the leaves.”
“The leaves are all dead, and I don’t have any vacation days left,” she answered. “Vinni wants me out. Let’s not give her ammunition.”
So Nick got out of bed, dressed quickly—green Dockers pants, white sneakers, and the green sweater Nay had given him, to cheer him up, the week before—and he drove Nay to work at City Hall. They talked of the things husbands and wives talk about when they catch a few minutes together during a hectic day. The kitchen cabinets had arrived, and were lying, in their cartons, all over the kitchen floor. They had to shop for a refrigerator on Friday night. They had to meet the tile man at the house on Saturday morning. It looked as if Vinni Restiano would easily win reelection.
On the way home, Nick picked up the New York Times and the Herald Statesman, and read the second one first, scanning it frantically for any news of the investigation into embezzlement at the city’s Industrial Development Agency. As mayor, he had chaired the agency, and, more recently, he had been a member of its board, appointed by Terry Zaleski in 1992, before their relationship went sour. The investigation had already uncovered the apparent embezzlement of hundreds of thousands of dollars over several years, and a low-level employee at the agency had admitted to taking some of that. Now the mayor’s investigators were looking at the expense accounts of others at the agency. Nick knew he had not done anything wrong while a member of the IDA board and that he was not among those being accused of wrongdoing. But lately he had been overwhelmed by a fear that in the uncontrollable arena of politics, innocence is no defense.
One morning, a few days earlier, he had read an article about the investigation—one that made no mention at all of his name—and called Nay at work, so agitated he could barely speak. “They’re making allegations and they’re ruining people’s lives,” he said, blaring into the phone. “This is not funny. I hope when it’s their turn, let’s see how funny they think it is.”
Nick’s rage made no sense to Nay, and his raw fear alarmed her. “Nick, stop screaming, what’s the matter with you? I know it’s upsetting, but you have to calm down.”
That night, he told her he was being followed, but he did not say by whom. He spent hours at the library, searching through microfilms of past newspaper stories, constructing a chronology he could use to make his case. In the space on his timeline for August, when news of the alleged embezzlement had begun to make headlines, he wrote “Post mortem reveals scandal.” In the space for November, all he wrote was “?”
On the morning of the October 29, however, there was no news of the investigation, and he spent a few hours making telephone calls, including one to his secretary, during which he asked her to reserve some tickets for him—two for a Human Rights dinner that same night and two for the Democratic City Committee Annual Dinner to be held on Halloween. Shortly before 11:00 A.M., he changed out of his Dockers and into a suit and tie, to do his councilman’s duty at a ceremony to open a new county welfare office. He stood near the back of the room with a former aide, Kathy Spring, and they talked about the IDA. “We all get tainted by it one way or another,” he told her. During the ceremony, Mayor Zaleski called Nick’s name from the podium and introduced him to the audience. Nick waved to the crowd and smiled.
The ceremony lasted no more than half an hour, and Nick returned home, changed back into his more comfortable clothes, and worked in the kitchen for a while with Michael, unpacking the cabinets and talking about the IDA. He told Michael that he was sure he was being followed. Michael was concerned, not about the investigation, but about Nick. Why was this man, who had endured death threats for supporting the housing order, losing his composure over something so trivial?
At one o’clock, Nick drove to City Hall to pick up Nay for lunch. During their hour at the Broadway Diner, he complained that he was tired of being followed, and, because he was certain a tracking transmitter had been placed under both his cars, he planned to switch vehicles with Michael. Shortly before two, he dropped Nay back at City Hall.
Early that afternoon, Michael walked into the living room to ask for help lifting some cabinets. There he saw his brother, holding a gun and looking terrified. Nick raced out the door, saying only that he had to run an “errand.” He would not tell Michael where he was going.
Minutes later, Nay paged Nick on his beeper. He called her back and told her he was at a pay phone a block away from the house. He said he was going directly home to help Michael. Forty-five minutes later, he drove up to the house, left the car engine running, ran up the stairs, then down them again. He took the cash out of his wallet, but left the wallet behind. He took the keys to his Chevy Geo and his Ford Taurus off the key chain, and left the key chain behind, too.
All afternoon, Nay tried to page him, because she was frightened at his stories of transmitters and tails. Unsure whether she should be worried about his safety or his sanity, she dialed his beeper at least ten times, periodically pressing the numbers “9-1-1,” their code for an emergency. He did not answer. At 4:30, when her work was done, she stood in her customary spot at the front door to City Hall and waited for Nick to pick her up. Half an hour later, when he had not arrived, she walked to the end of the City Hall driveway, and a half hour after that, when he still wasn’t there, she called her sister’s husband and asked him to drive her home.
While Nay was waiting for Nick, he was sitting on a hill at the Oakland Cemetery, about two blocks from his house and a mile from City Hall. He was leaning against a tree and looking out over the cemetery, where his father and grandfather were buried. Beyond their graves he could see the Palisades rising up from the Hudson, the twin spires of St. Casimir’s Church, the gables of City Hall.
It was closing time at the cemetery, and the caretaker, Teodor Feciaszko, walked over and asked him to leave. Nick said he would, and started walking down the hill, toward his red Geo, with the license plate that read WASICSKO. But when the caretaker came by again, a few minutes later, Nick was back by the tree, staring down on Yonkers. The caretaker opted to leave and give the former mayor, whom he recognized from television, a little more time. He waited until 5:15 to approach Nick again, and, as before, Nick stood up immediately and walked toward his car.
At 5:20, Feciaszko made one last trip up the hill, where, he would later tell one of the dozens of police officers who soon swarmed the scene, “I saw he was lying over here. I saw the gun in his hand, and the blood.”
Nick Wasicsko had shot himself once through the head with the .38 revolver he almost always carried. Nay could not believe he did not leave her a note, but none was ever found.
Within hours, the stream of praise began.
Said Mayor Zaleski: “It’s an extraordinary tragedy. All of the people of Yonkers send their heartfelt love and sympathy to the family. It’s just a tragedy. A loss beyond words.”
Vinni Restiano: “I feel like I’ve been in a car crash and the other driver died. Even though we’ve been political adversaries in this last primary, Nick Wasicsko was a friend, and I’m shocked and hurt for his family. Nick was a real intelligent individual and he had a life ahead of him. He must have really been hurting inside for him to have done this to himself. There was nobody smarter.”
Hank Spallone: “Terrible. Tragedy. A real tragedy. We were on opposite sides of the political spectrum, but we were always very friendly. I’m just shocked. Such a fine man is gone. The result of somebody trying to do the very, very best he knew how.”
Nicholas Longo: “He took the tough times with a lot of character and a lot of strength. He stood tall. I have to wonder what’s happened in five years. The fellow who withstood what was taking place in 1988 was not the fellow who walked into the Oakland Cemetery tonight.”
Nicholas Wasicsko had been baptized in St. Casimir’s Church. He and Nay were married there, too, beneath the kaleidoscope of stained glass. And, on a gray and frigid election day morning, St. Casimir’s was where he was mourned. It was the first election day in almost a decade when his name did not appear on the Yonkers ballot.
More than a thousand people packed the church, filling the polished oak pews and spilling out into the entryway, where they stood, coats still on, tears flowing freely, through the hourlong farewell mass. Nearly every candidate for every local office was present, and all the traditional last-minute campaign events were canceled. Henry Spallone, who defeated Nick for mayor in 1989, was there, as was Angelo Martinelli, whom Nick defeated in 1987. Vinni Restiano cried. Nicholas Longo cried. Neil DeLuca cried.
From her pew in the middle of the crowd, Mary Dorman was astonished to see Oscar Newman slip into a nearby row, then bow his head in what looked like true sadness. He sat there, by himself, for the entire service, never making his way to the front, where the dignitaries were clustered, and not saying anything to anyone. “He’s here because he wants to be here,” Mary said, impressed by a man she thought could not impress her, “not because he wants people to see him here.”
Nay sat in the front pew, stunned, numb, and in a haze of grief. From the time the police commissioner and deputy chief of police had arrived at her door and taken her to the cemetery, where she and Anne were horrified to find themselves identifying Nick’s body, she had coped by refusing to think. It took all her energy merely to walk and talk. She was so overwhelmed, so drained and leaden, there were moments she felt, for fleeting and frightening seconds, that she might die, too, if she didn’t remind herself to breathe. Thinking was more than she could handle. She didn’t dare to think, she barely functioned.
Nay stayed wrapped in her protective fog through the calls from the reporters, the questions from the police officers, the decisions and minutiae that come with death. Nick’s wake was a blur. After a candidate for judge approached her there and offered his condolences, she thanked him and wished him well on election day. “Good luck on Tuesday,” she said, standing in front of her husband’s gleaming casket, and Michael overheard and was horrified. “What are you doing?” he asked. And she answered, honestly, “I don’t know.”
Mayor Zaleski also came to the wake. First Nick’s mother, and then Nick’s brother, refused to shake the mayor’s hand. But Nay walked up and thanked him for coming. “Stop being a politician,” Michael said. But Nay did not know how. “I guess I’m losing my mind,” she said. “Nick hated him, but he is here, and he is the mayor.…”
Now, at the funeral, she was still willing herself not to think. It worked for most of the morning—she did not dissolve in tears, or scream, or faint. But then, near the end of the service, The Reverend John Duffell took the pulpit to begin his eulogy, and the weight of the moment all but crushed her.
It was Father Duffell who had found Nay her first job at City Hall, and who insisted on driving her to the interview so she would not turn and run. During her early years with Nick, they would run into Duffell at events around the city, and he would warn Nick to take care of her, because “she’s my favorite girl.” From this same pulpit, Duffell had married them. And at this latest central moment in her life, he stood in front of her again, and said the things that she would have been thinking had she not been so afraid to allow herself to think.
Nick was “a man full of promise, a man full of suffering,” Duffell said, and his death “makes us realize what’s important: not the politics, but the human beings. If only all the things that were said about him these past few days could have been again and again and again and again said to him.”
But he did not stop with soothing generalities. He went on and assigned blame. He spoke of the “McCarthyism of Yonkers,” and described the city as a place filled with politics, hate, rumor, investigation, and fear. The kind of place where a man who had done the right thing, as Nick had done with the housing, could be destroyed because he was right. And where a man who had done nothing wrong, as Nick had done with the IDA, could take no solace from, and find no safety in, his innocence.
“Why did he do what he did? We’ll never know,” Duffell said. “But perhaps, some of the fear and darkness that seems to be overshadowing the city had a part to play, where reputations are destroyed on the front page of the local newspaper, by investigations, perhaps valid investigations, revealed prematurely before their completion, before charges are filed.”
Nay stopped feeling numb and began to feel angry. She was angry at Yonkers, and at the mourning politicians who surrounded her. As she followed her husband’s casket out the front door of St. Casimir’s, she was angry at herself, for being one of those politicians, playing by the rules that Nick had taught her, wishing all these people well in their elections, thanking them for dropping by.
As the four-block-long funeral procession snaked its way past City Hall, she was also angry at the screaming crowds who hounded her husband in 1988. So many of those people were watching now, she knew, as the motorcade passed by. People who had quieted their voices, but who had never shed their hate, and who made it clear with their votes that they could not forgive him. They would never let him be City Council president, and they certainly would not let him be mayor again, or senator, or governor, or judge, or any of the other things that had seemed so possible when he was the country’s youngest mayor.
Then, as Nick Wasicsko was buried on the same hill where he had died, she was angry mostly at her husband, for caring that he would never be any of those things. For leaving her to rebuild her dreams from scratch, because he could not bear to pick up the fractured pieces of his own.