Strength in What Remains

  “You did?” I was struck by a thought. “What color is Deo?”

  “I don’t do it anymore,” said Sharon. When she was a teenager, a psychiatrist heard about her gift of color transference and arranged for an interview. “And I just clammed up,” she said.

  “I think it’s wonderful that you associate people with colors,” I said.

  “I used to.”

  “You don’t anymore. Okay.”

  “Maybe it’s subconscious now. I don’t know.”

  “Well,” I said, “if you still did it, what color would Deo be?”

  Sharon didn’t answer for a while. She gazed toward the altar. She gave a long exhalation. “I think a kind of magenta,” she said.

  Sharon grew up in Norwich, Vermont, in an Irish Catholic family, a little strapped for cash, and frugal. Her parents managed to send her to Wellesley College, where she would have been in the class of 1960, but once she discovered her vocation, she transferred to the Catholic school Manhattanville. She traveled some, in Europe and the Middle East. In late 1960, she entered a Benedictine convent in Connecticut. Speaking of that convent, she told me, “I always say that, just for me, that was not the right place.” She said this without a trace of irony, I noticed, even though it had taken her thirty years of cloistered life to decide the place wasn’t right.

  Sharon began to think of leaving the convent when the abbess launched the construction of an elegant building to replace their rather makeshift quarters. She remembered thinking, “Gee, I thought we were supposed to be living simply, the way we all should. Let’s share with people who have nothing.”

  Her parents had subscribed to The Catholic Worker, a dangerous organ of left-wing Catholicism to some, and to others an extension of the ideas in the Sermon on the Mount. Sharon grew up reading it. She didn’t regret her years at the convent. She had learned a great deal. Among other things, she seemed to say, she’d found that she yearned to play a little part in the affairs of the world. She had received dispensation to resign as a nun, but still wore her ring from consecration. She had come to New York without a job or even many clothes and had found her way to St. Thomas More. She was paid a small salary to do various jobs at the church—taking care of flowers for the sanctuary, helping at wedding rehearsals. She also taught Sunday school to the four-and five-year-olds.

  Sharon believed her job in life was to discover the abilities she had received and to use them “in a deep, giving spirit,” for the glory of God. She threw herself into all her jobs, but she spent at least as much time in her self-appointed role, which was receiving people who came to the church in distress. The supply was abundant even on the Upper East Side. “I feel this is just being a Benedictine in another situation,” she said. The prescriptions for receiving guests were laid out in chapter 66 of the sixth-century Rule of St. Benedict. The basic instruction was simple: “Receive all as Christ.” The porter, the doorkeeper, should respond to visitors with “all the gentleness of the fear of God.” I took it that, at least in part, Sharon had left her Benedictine convent in order to become a Benedictine doorkeeper.

  The job entailed a certain amount of potential embarrassment, and I had the feeling that, for her, embarrassment was sometimes a temptation. She told me that not long ago a well-to-do friend, a parishioner, had seen her pushing a shopping cart full of used clothes for the needy toward the church, and had told her that this just wasn’t done. Respectable people just didn’t push shopping carts down the sidewalks of Fifth or Madison Avenue. “Well, maybe they don’t,” Sharon told me she had replied. “But I do. I don’t care.” Not long ago, she told me, a man had staggered into the sanctuary in the pangs of drug withdrawal and collapsed writhing on the floor, and as she knelt over him, first kneading his shoulders and legs, then pounding on them to try to loosen his cramps, she was thinking, “If someone comes into the church right now and sees this, they’ll wonder, ‘What the heck is going on?’ But I don’t care.”

  She didn’t discriminate among the needy people who arrived at the door, she said. Whatever troubles they brought, she took them on, if she could, and none of the people bored her. Not, for instance, the retarded lady with whom she lived for several years after the pastor at St. Thomas More decided he no longer wanted women living in the rectory. The retarded woman didn’t bathe, her apartment was crammed with garbage and junk, and it took about six months for Sharon to get the woman and her place cleaned up, but she didn’t mind any of it, she insisted. She’d tell herself, “Hey, this is some adventure here. What kind of headway can we make here?” She thought of what she did as offering “undifferentiated help to anybody.” “It boils down to whoever walks into my life.” There were the “druggies,” who were afraid to come into the rectory. And the woman who hadn’t been in a church for twenty years but told Sharon she was aching now to go to confession. And the homeless lady, a paranoid schizophrenic, who would lie down on a pew as if on a park bench—the church authorities had finally decided they had to throw her out.

  Sharon still befriended her and all the others, and felt glad to see them when they arrived. But not glad, she allowed, in quite the same way she felt on seeing a select few. She had her favorites. Deo was one, of course, and had been, she thought, right from their first meeting.

  I asked her why. She said maybe it was the remark he’d made about being “very interested” when she had told him that, yes, this was a church. This had made him seem like “someone who could see beyond his own nose.” But beyond that, she didn’t have an explanation. Her description of Deo back then was in itself more convincing.

  She remembered that he was very skinny and that he had buck teeth (later straightened at the NYU dental school). Also that his breath smelled dreadful—so she wasn’t surprised when she received his letter asking for help in finding a doctor. She had been in New York for several years when Deo arrived in her life. In the places where she’d lived before, up in Vermont and in the convent, one gathered asparagus and picked cherries early, but one had to wait for potatoes. Here in the city, though, every imaginable foodstuff came in from all over the world every day. It was easy here to forget how to “appreciate the moment,” how to “wait for the right time.” And this applied to the development of people. One shouldn’t expect anyone to be complete at any given moment. Everyone was “on a pilgrimage.” She had wanted to understand Deo’s and to help him on his way.

  “He was grateful for everything,” she told me. Of course she had been aware of times when he seemed withdrawn, and of periods when he didn’t come to see her. But she knew from experience that people often resent the help they’ve asked for, often in direct proportion to their neediness. She had imagined it must be hard for Deo to be a man both physically and mentally and yet need so much. She was having some heart problems when Deo entered her life, but she felt Deo’s case was far more urgent than her own. “It’s hard to generalize,” she told me. “But the few Africans that I know have such great openness to other people and a warmth and a desire to connect, and I just felt that had been shattered for Deo, and somehow there wasn’t much I could do except just try to let him know I really cared in whatever way.”

  She remembered that first dinner at the Wolfs’ loft. She remembered trying to interpret Deo’s French for Nancy and Charlie, but having a hard time because she was paying less attention to the conversation than to her hopes for it—her notion that the answer to Deo’s material and spiritual needs might well be sitting right across the dining table from her, in the persons of Nancy and Charlie. She remembered worrying over every lapse in the talk, issuing silent instructions to the others, “cheering them on silently.” She remembered looking at Nancy and Charlie and thinking, “You have to love him right away!”

  In a phone call soon afterward, Charlie asked her, “What do you think he needs?”

  “Well, he needs a family,” Sharon said. “That’s what he needs.”

  And of course she remembered the phone call in which Nancy and Charlie at last infor
med her that they would take Deo in. She said she was delighted, overjoyed. I had the feeling, though, that it would be too much to say she was surprised. What surprised and disappointed her, I thought, were the many failures.

  Deo never knew the half of Sharon’s attempts to find him a home. She later gave me documents and notes she’d saved from that time. On many slips of paper and old envelopes and on the backs of old bookmarks and church announcements, I found the names of dozens of agencies and programs that she’d contacted, among them “the Manhattan Valley St. John the Divine Youth Project,” “Grenadier Realty Corp. Milagrosa Houses,” “Oxfam,” “Red Cross homeless services,” “Travelers Aid NY,” “World Council of Churches,” “Emmaus House,” “Family and Children’s Services Catholic Charities,” “St. Vincent de Paul,” “St. John the Divine Crisis Center,” “City Shelters,” “UN Quaker mission,” “Hope House,” “Trinity Retreat House in Larchmont.” There were notes with the names of priests and nuns for her to call, some with the notation “Very caring.” One note read, “A doctor from Zaire will lend books.” One note was the name of a woman, beside which Sharon had written “widowed.” A prospect, evidently. Beside the name of another woman, Sharon had written “divorced.”

  She was an unusual person, obviously, and for Deo to have run into her on his grocery delivery rounds was a great piece of luck, maybe even—in Sharon’s presence, I was tempted into thinking this—providential.

  In Survival in Auschwitz, Primo Levi writes, “Today I think that if for no other reason than that an Auschwitz existed, no one in our age should speak of Providence.” But for all the horror visited on Deo, the list of strangers who had saved him seemed remarkable: the Hutu woman in the banana grove, Muhammad the baggage handler, Chukwu and James O’Malley and above all Nancy and Charlie and Sharon. It wasn’t as though there was some sort of outreach program in place for people like Deo. I thought of the door he had left open in Mutaho. No doubt because I was in Sharon’s presence, I found myself thinking, “Something must have been looking out for Deo.” And I disliked hearing the words in my mind.

  I said to Sharon, “One of the things I’ve noticed about some of the genocide narratives I’ve read, people will say, ‘God spared me.’ The problem I have with that is then you think, ‘Well, what about all the people who got their heads chopped off? Did God not like them?’” I added, “So I’m not quite sure that’s the way to look at it.”

  “I have a theory,” she replied. “I remember thinking long ago, ‘We’re loved infinitely for however little bit of time we have.’ And it’s not ultimately tragic to die at any age. Whether we’re talking about being blown into little pieces or what is ultimate tragedy, I just think there isn’t ultimate tragedy except for evil, and God doesn’t will any evil. And we’re surrounded by—I tell the little kids about the Good Shepherd, I think it’s a great image for them, but the vine and the branches is great, too—but whether we feel it or not, we are surrounded by this tremendously loving presence, and that covers every second of every day. Of everybody.”

  TWELVE

  New York City,

  2006

  On Central Park South, as usual, limousines were idling on one side of the street while on the other side, adjacent to the park—on what Deo called “the other shore”—a homeless man was sleeping on a bench with a cardboard box over his head. The homeless man was what Deo noticed. He laughed about the box on the man’s head, after we’d passed by. He said, “It’s sad.” He told me, “It’s hard when you don’t have any hope. You just hope to get to the next meal. Bread and milk and cookies.” But then he laughed again, and as if to explain, recited a Burundian saying: “When too much is too much or too bad is too bad, we laugh as if it was too good. You just laugh instead of crying. Accidents of birth.”

  At my request, Deo was taking me on a tour of his former homelessness. An unusual sort of tour, devoted to what would have been hidden, or at least far in the background, for most people walking through that landscape. It was those things, the things meant to be unnoticed, that jumped out at Deo. Not the awninged and carpeted entrances to the buildings, but the little signs that read “Service Entrance” and the wrought-iron gates and the stairs leading down to basements. This building wasn’t a nice example of early-twentieth-century architecture; rather, it was a building with a bad service entrance, and that building next to it had a doorman who claimed the tips that by rights should have gone to deliverymen. Deo took me on the routes he has traveled with his grocery cart and past the grocery stores where he had labored. One of the stores had vanished, to his consternation. I thought I could read his feelings. This had been a part of his painful little world. How could it have vanished? How could it be so insubstantial?

  We walked into the park, to look at the various bedrooms he’d found there for himself twelve years before.

  It was impossible, at least for me, to know the story of Deo’s lost year, of his long escape and his sojourn in crack houses and Central Park, and not imagine lingering costs. He had told me that he felt he was overly sensitive: “When someone says something really bad, or I realize I said something ridiculous or did something bad to someone, it really takes me days to recover, and I just don’t know why I’m such a weak guy.” Once, when I told him he was still young, only in his thirties, he replied, “But I feel I am a hundred and thirty.” He still had bouts of insomnia and dreams that involved immobility and appalling quantities of blood. But the most obvious effect of his ordeal—or what I took to be an effect—was the ungovernable quality of his memories.

  For now, as we walked through the park, it was clear that he was merely repossessing memories. He was not possessed by them, for the moment. “I will show you how I made progress,” he said, smiling, as he led the way to what had been his last campsite in the park. It was a cozy-looking spot, like a niche in a cathedral, a group of benches surrounding the monumental statue of a sculptor named Albert Bertel Thorvaldsen, all under the canopy of grand old trees, and shielded from the roadways by smaller trees and bushes. There was a little garden off to one side. Deo looked up at the bronze image of the once famous Danish sculptor; he was clad in a belted tunic, a mallet in one hand, a chisel in the other. “He has a hammer,” Deo said. “Too bad he was not around. He could have built a shelter for me.” Deo smiled, surveying the spot. “This was big progress. I’m telling you, it really was great.” He pointed to a grassy space shielded by bushes. “This is where I got my mattress stolen. Right here. This was my biggest progress. I preferred sleeping in the park. Because I could see stars, and …” He didn’t finish the sentence.

  “It was like being in Butanza?”

  “Yah. And then that was cool, but it was trouble at the same time. To bring back all those memories. Come back to be intimate with nature, and the sky.” His voice growing soft, he talked about seeing the shape of the rabbit on the face of the moon and being reminded by this of his grandfather.

  “You didn’t know he was dead then, but you assumed he was?” I asked. It was the perfectly wrong thing to say.

  “Yah, I assumed,” he answered, and he turned and walked on. I walked with him. He murmured that his stomach was bothering him. He didn’t speak again for a while.

  I thought that he wasn’t walking through Central Park recalling a bad memory now; he was really back in that time. Even the stomachache was probably the same, I imagined.

  I apologized for mentioning his grandfather’s death. He didn’t respond. I didn’t think he was ignoring me. He just didn’t seem to know I was there. He walked on, toward the Reservoir. He stood at the fence gazing out at the water, squads of joggers passing behind us. Gradually, he seemed to return. “This was …” He paused. “Very relaxing to me.”

  He had found a better place to recover, of course. I wanted to visit it with him. We took the subway uptown to Columbia. As we walked through the gates, Deo’s mood changed utterly. He might have been a student again, conducting a campus tour. “The gym is right here. It’
s huge! It is a-mazing…. Every student here after freshman year, you have your own mailbox. It’s really cool…. You see this building here, this is physics. You go down, there are nine floors down. It blows my mind. This one here is astronomy…. Oh, this is the math department. Oh my God, I made a lot of money from that department. Teaching children. And this is chemistry. The chemistry department is quite famous, it competes with Berkeley…. I loved it here.”

  Deo stopped on the steps of Low Library and pointed across the quadrangle at another monumental building, a product of the Italian Renaissance Revival, one of many all around us. This one advertised itself with names carved in the granite frieze above its broad front: HOMER, HERODOTUS, SOPHOCLES, PLATO, ARISTOTLE, DEMOSTHENES, CICERO, VERGIL. “That is the Butler Library. It’s such a beautiful library. I love it. It’s the library in my heart.” He was laughing softly. “I loved that library. I like to be back here, actually.”

  “This was a happy place,” I suggested.

  “Oh my God yes!” He was smiling. “Gosh, I really miss being here.” He added, “The sad thing was I didn’t make many friends with students my age. It’s such a lost opportunity, you know. These are people, they intellectually grow up with you.”

  He remembered a classmate, a woman, who had seemed to take a great interest in him, even giving him presents.

  “Was she pretty?” I asked.

  “Very pretty girl,” he said.

  I laughed. “What’s the matter with you?”

  “She said, ‘Always when I study with you I do so well.’ She was always, you know, saying, ‘When we go to medical school we can apply together.’”

  “Where did she go?”

  “I have no idea. I never kept in touch, I never … I’m terrible.”