An encounter with Lady Poverty
CANZIO, WILLIAM DI
AN ENCOUNTER WITH LADY POVERTY REAL LIFE AT THE DRAMA SCHOOL WILLIAM DICANZIO started to write an essay about the soup kitchens of New Haven. Writing Creative Nonfiction was the name of the...
...She was turning this into a matter of my convenience...
...But where did they hide a soup kitchen in its petite Gothic grandeur...
...She said she would pray for me...
...I CANNOT REACH MY TOES TO TEND PERSONAL HYGIENE...
...How about if we tell her to get fitted and have them bill the chapel...
...And, though it seemed to me that she had every right to be preoccupied with herself, she wanted to find out about me: "You go to Yale...
...Then I'd like to move in," I said that quickly, before I could stop myself...
...I'm scared to take it off...
...While she struggled to subdue the dog, which was barking savagely, I thanked her and left...
...That's embarrassing for an older person...
...Instead of a cane, she leaned on one of those two-wheeled pushcarts, which she maneuvered like a walker...
...It's a church...
...Still in school...
...The old woman...
...I have an ice pack I use to cool me down...
...How do you spell it...
...Thanks," she said, "but it's pretty far, and I don't want to take you out of your way...
...When I get up and move around I forget the pain at the soup kitchen, I'm so busy I don't feel it...
...The emotion of its architecture feels deliberately restrained, as if it were self-conscious about being Catholic in such a setting...
...I'm a volunteer," she said quickly, "I cook there Saturday mornings...
...But the winter had indeed been cruel to her...
...A boy accompanied him, about ten years old, his son...
...I explained my purpose and asked that he have her call me next time she came in which she did...
...I don't know what lawyers charge," I said...
...Meantime, if I went to the library, maybe I could write, so I left my building in a chilly September rain...
...there, with her mantle of midnight stars and her brown Aztec beauty, our Lady of Guadalupe presides over an antique Spanish altar of variegated painted marble, and votive ships sail down from the ceiling in homage, like delightful toys...
...She looked at me defensively...
...A portrait of the chapel's founder (classmate of Cole Porter's...
...The traffic was splashing great fans of water onto the deserted sidewalks about 1-95.1 was clocking the distance, going on two miles now, the last leg of it up a steep grade...
...I marveled at how little it had cost me to do something worthwhile...
...Sometimes the contrast shouted violently, but day to day it moved me mostly by its silence the sight of scavengers, for instance, pulling empties from the dumpsters on Library Walk...
...Okay," she said, and we started off three steps at a time, at which rate I figured half an hour to walk to the car...
...The page had just become opaque again, having been for a while a window on an imaginary stage, where the heroine working-class, wretchedly married, neurotic who needed money to replace her storm windows, was playing a slot machine at Caesar's in Atlantic City...
...I crossed to her...
...This building...
...The old woman told it all without self-pity and gave me a dose of what it might be like to live with her: "They never should have built that house, I always told them...
...At home I called the soup kitchen...
...It had always struck me as cruel to include her, whom some would call a virtue, in such company...
...I was on the sidewalk...
...My vision was dilating...
...It was not the first time that object had embarrassed me...
...Instead she triggered a Pavlovian response, a gush of sentimentality, by which I imagined she must have an appointment at some bleak clinic or other...
...I knew the building, little more than a block from where I lived...
...No, I never had the guts to yell into the brick canyon...
...Were we all like her, trying to defend ourselves with worthless acquisitions when we really wanted something else...
...Glad to hear it," he said...
...I did not ask her who these thieves might be, but glanced into the bathroom, where I heard a steady flow of water in the sink...
...Okay...
...I invited her to call me from the soup kitchen if she ever wanted a ride...
...Thanks," she said, "I'll let you know...
...The saw was grinding louder in the corridor...
...she said...
...The apartment itself would have been a large and pleasant studio, except that wall to wall, to a height of five or six feet, were cardboard boxes packed and closed, a spare refrigerator, bundles of newspapers like the contents of a basement or attic stored in this room...
...I had all my bedclothes in a chest, and they stole that too...
...Why ? I kept asking myself those questions with which I would plague my students: What is this really about...
...Look," I said, "I've got a car around the corner...
...This time when she dropped herself into the bucket seat, she wept with pain...
...I'll walk...
...What...
...It makes all the difference when somebody's nice," she said, "I don't know how to thank you...
...No, not for her, but for me, for what we shared: this place was empty, empty as her cluttered studio, and I was no less alone than she, and no less vulnerable...
...But maybe Saturdays...," I said...
...Look, let me open a window for you...
...I imagined her trying to accommodate her body to her "bed" and shook my head as if to shake away the picture, but saw her walking fitfully at two, at four, her radio going static by her head...
...I just bought a jar of very expensive shoe cream two dollars for a little jar and they stole it...
...Sounds reasonable," he said and puffed on his pipe...
...Terrific...
...What's the address let me get a pencil zip code...
...A passing volunteer knocked me from behind with a tray...
...Then she said to Ferry all of a sudden, "He wants to work here...
...One Saturday I found her on the steps of Christ Church...
...A man your age is usually settled...
...It's always serious," I said, still trying to smile...
...She firmly refused a ride...
...I opened my mouth to protest...
...The sunlight imparted a certain luster to her silver ringlets, styled, she told me once, by Joanne Woodward's hairdresser...
...Inside, the kitchen was long and narrow as a subway car, and almost as noisy, with twenty people pressed around the island counter, cooking, washing up, chatting with the clients who had to pass through the kitchen on their way to the dining room...
...know, she sounds a little like my mother," said Liz mischievously at brunch one Sunday by the pool of her pre-Revolutionary house in Darien...
...It spelled out in hand-printed Roman capitals what it felt like to be her: I CANNOT BEND TO REACH TO TIE MY SHOELACES...
...I asked her...
...Writing Creative Nonfiction was the name of the course, and since my Yale students were struggling to do just that, it seemed right that I should too...
...meantime what could I do...
...Would she ever get down...
...Where are you coming from...
...I asked...
...Looks clean," I said...
...The blades wiped the cold rain from the windshield...
...I saw a stack of them, empty, by the door on my way out...
...heard the services were full of bells and incense and prayers of Jacobean cadence...
...I found her walking west on Broadway not far from the soup kitchen...
...WILLIAM DI CANZIO is a lecturer in English and dean of Trumbull College at Yale University...
...I expected to find the construction completed, my apartment ready for me to work in it, but nothing had changed since I left...
...Across Park Street, near the path before the Cabaret, I saw an old woman walking south...
...Save the container we can use it again...
...the pot-washer was dancing as he washed...
...How about if I bring it around...
...Cash...
...she said, hoping to discourage me with the distance...
...The Chapel of Saint Thomas More at Yale is a tall, pleasant, anglophilic building about thirty yards from Christ Church on Park...
...The Doctors' Building, it turned out, was not her destination, but a landmark she hoped I would recognize near Lafayette Street, a half-block of rowhouses, the remnant of a neighborhood long since sacrificed to urban planning...
...Look," she said, pointing to a figure at the bottom of her list, "that's what they want to charge me...
...Why would anybody do that...
...I carried her bundles up the steps to the front door...
...Cut it out," I said, and slapped my face, then recoiled at the corniness of the gesture...
...She sized me up from behind a pair of bifocals with harlequin frames, circa 1963...
...I lowered my eyes as she studied me...
...What things...
...Too personal...
...I also received word that the university would be "improving" my building with a sprinkler system and new wiring, which would require about a week in each apartment, beginning on the first floor...
...They would be back, and meantime I would live with the mess for as long as it took them to finish...
...The sum represented about a third of the total settlement...
...I saw what my second husband did to my son...
...See that sign...
...She had spent several weeks with them in Kentucky after the funeral...
...How do you know nobody stole them...
...I dialed the phone...
...Since it took both hands to push, she did without an umbrella in the misty rain...
...What was it then...
...Frankly, I'm more interested in how all this affects you...
...They're clothes," she said, puffing along behind me, "from the soup kitchen...
...Leave it," she said, "it's nice...
...I found myself checking a passage in Chaucer, some lines haunting me from the Romance of the Rose: And alderlast of everychon, Was peyneted Povert all aloon That not a peny hadde in wolde...
...Maybe I can find out...
...Now I was scared: what had I given up...
...Why...
...No, I'm a friend of hers," I said...
...All this struck me as improper to someone in her condition, not that I knew anyone to compare her with...
...Her eyes were merry, her face untroubled...
...As she faced me across this roomful of junk, her figure all shadowy before the rainstreaked windows, she grew in stature until she seemed representative to me of what...
...Maybe I had said something to her once about how I might like to volunteer if I had the time, but that was months ago and I was teaching now...
...Years...
...Not my lack of furniture, but absence made it empty, the absence of another, of others...
...Why would they want to help me...
...I completed the MFA program in May...
...I can't sit down in that tub," she said, "I have to give myself a sponge bath...
...she used up all his money, and the foundation leaks...
...That was the smell...
...Maybe now she '11 get the orthopedic shoes...
...She meant it...
...Yes...
...And I found the questions leading me past the soup kitchens to an issue more intimate: How did I come to be there, mopping up after two hundred people in the parish hall of Christ Church on Saturday afternoon, when across Broadway at the Co-op I had just narrowly escaped charging a pair of faddish overpriced sunglasses...
...Penniless," I said, "believe me...
...I felt stalled...
...And there was the old woman, serenely packing her cart with food...
...My birthday fell during the first week of class...
...Then I walked across the Green to Wooster Square, so I wouldn't have to stay alone during the storm...
...I CANNOT CROSS THE STREET W/IN TIME OF THE TRAFFIC LIGHT...
...His wife was making more than him...
...It took me two full days to excavate washing each dish, vacuuming each book until with some satisfaction I was finally able to plug in my typewriter again, via extension cord, to the only functional outlet...
...You shouldn't lug so much stuff," I called over my shoulder, "I don't know how you would have made it, walking...
...People want to help you," I offered...
...She had been a seamstress once, but seven years before had been struck by a car and had been unable to work since...
...I wrote a forty-page first draft and began to revise...
...Who are these people...
...Is it worse for you in this kind of weather...
...This was all none of her business...
...I shook hands with the director of the soup kitchen and reminded him that we had talked once on the phone...
...No," she finally said, "It's no good now...
...It's close in here...
...It's easier for me to walk than sit down in that car...
...She tapped her temple with her index finger: "She's crazy, that one you should see her place a pack rat, saves everything...
...You know the Doctors' Building over by the hospital...
...Helpless...
...WILL YOU SHUT UP...
...It still swells up...
...Pots, plates, anything on the kitchen shelves had been dumped into the sink...
...she asked...
...I had met her, a psychiatrist tall, attentively groomed, "older," easy to look at in a playwriting class...
...This was no coy plea for sympathy...
...That's why they want me to settle out of court, so they can get their money...
...Hello," I called...
...She would take a few steps and stop, take a few more and stop, not, it seemed, because she was confused, but rather because it hurt to walk...
...Why would we not let go...
...To be stripped naked and loved with no regard to what we do or what we own...
...He had offered me a place in his household, which he shared with a statistician and a political scientist, but I had turned them down to stay where I was...
...Thirty-five last Sunday...
...To be touched and healed...
...A saw was buzzing in the corridor...
...They stole my sheets," she said...
...I get up with the pain and go to bed with the pain...
...Then she put her hands under her thighs and lifted her legs into the car...
...I said too quickly, and repented the sarcasm...
...When I opened the door for her, she eyed the bucket seat skeptically, but managed to sit down by turning her back to it, leaning hard on her cane, and lowering herself slowly...
...Her job was indeed done...
...She lives up there, but she don't answer the door...
...I can't make you drive me all over the city and give you nothing...
...If I knew I'd die next year I wouldn't bother with an operation, but my mother lived till she was eighty-five...
...she cried...
...She might get mugged...
...Did my heart finally decide to crack for her...
...The second-floor corridor smelted of ammonia...
...So I complained about my misery, and her spirits brightened as she listened to me gripe, and so did mine...
...I CANNOT HOLD MY UMBRELLA AND CANE WHEN IT RAINS, SNOWS, AND CARRY PACKAGES, GROCERIES, ETC.: I AM THE PERSON WHO STILL SUFFERS THE TRAUMA, THE EXCRUCIATING PAIN IN THE EIGHTH YEAR INCLUDING ALL THAT IS WRITTEN HERE AND I AM STILL BEING PERSECUTED...
...Now she sided with the professionals: "Can you imagine the scene she must have caused in that office...
...Nothing serious...
...No problem," he said, "we can take it out of the Poverty Fund...
...the woman drying plates bumped hips with him and sang...
...the contents of the bathroom were thrown into the tub where they were mingled with fallen chunks of ceiling...
...A rack on the bathtub was filled with drying clothes...
...The Hi old woman had become my preoccupation...
...But I don't want to settle out of court...
...Expecting reproach, I turned to face her, but she was flushed with gratitude...
...I was living in the nation's seventh-poorest city, dominated by perhaps its second-richest private school...
...I would not let her win so easily...
...It was indeed a rejection...
...In the waiting room adjoining, a woman sat alone and unoccupied on a row of plastic sheets bolted to the floor, like those in a bus terminal...
...Who'd want them...
...the windows, clear glass, where etched saintly figures defer to the light rather than transform it, as stained glass would, into mystery...
...the director said...
...Yeah," she said, "but it's got bugs...
...Somebody had brought her a copy of the National Enquirer...
...I lingered in New Haven took a job in English in the summer programs, watched my classmates, the actors and designers, move to New York, while I worked on a commission from Actors Theatre of Louisville and worried about how I was ever going to teach argumentative writing...
...Passers-by were eyeing us strangely...
...My son was taller and heavy-set...
...I looked up from my work: it was raining lightly against the leaded windows...
...The electric bill is simply astronomical...
...So I said good-by and, glad not to have to drive her home, put my feet up on my desk...
...I stayed with friends, went to the beach, grew a beard, ate ice cream, played football none of which I would have done in my undisturbed routine...
...I came home from teaching as fired up as an actor after a good show, hypocritically greeted the workers on their break on the front steps, and found a letter in my mailbox from Actors Theatre of Louisville...
...the bronze putty in the fountain in the court was glistening and wistful...
...Turn left...
...I noticed no social line of demarcation between clients and workers, some of whom may have been clients themselves once, or still were...
...She's obviously a paranoid schizophrenic," she said, "but she seems to function in her little world...
...New fuse boxes," the carpenters said, and in fifty seconds with an electric hacksaw they reduced a section of wall to rubble and resaturated the air with plaster dust...
...Can't talk now okay...
...So I went at it myself...
...I ran upstairs and opened it...
...I must have given her a look of pity...
...Something had changed her aspect in the eight weeks since I had last seen her...
...This is howl got there...
...I took you for nineteen...
...had wasted the morning overslept, talked on the phone and now I couldn't even do my laundry: somebody had beaten me to both machines...
...You get started on these stories," she said, "and half an hour goes by before you know it...
...Do you know Skip Ferry...
...the apartment was flooded with southern sunlight...
...I had done the footwork, had met some remarkable people but the result was dead...
...But when the summer session ended, I wanted to escape...
...On the stool by the bed were a pair of men's unpolished oxfords hers...
...I felt I knew this woman, the child of immigrants, raised in the Depression, like the heroine of my play...
...she said, "what about the people upstairs...
...from each arm hung a bundle wrapped in a garbage bag and tied with neckties...
...he said, "we can really use the help till the students settle back in...
...The ape next door was quiet...
...I had it right here, and now it's gone...
...Don't you take anything for it...
...WILL YOU SHUT UP...
...Sshh...
...She confided in me that the voices in her head let her alone when she started writing plays...
...Because I don't know it's a church...
...Our laughter resounded profanely down the geriatric corridor...
...I said, blind to the irony of offering to carry a bag lady's bags...
...We drove past Lafayette Street to where the city had moved her in February, subsidized housing for the elderly, over by the train station, an area notorious for muggings...
...Writing that play had cost me plenty, but when I sent it out I knew it was nothing they would produce...
...The cherries were sweet...
...Okay, okay," I said, "but it's there whenever you want it...
...I offered her a ride...
...And there, out the window to the west, I could see a blackbird preening all alone at the top of that tall misshapen fir, my "Zen tree," I called it...
...I don't know if New Haven's bag ladies and panhandlers disappeared for commencement, but they were invisible on Library Walk that day among the crowds of well-dressed families and professors in their gaudy splendor...
...That's nice," she said...
...Now one leg's shorter than the other," she said...
...Hi, John still room for me...
...I wish I hadn't heard it, but I had...
...The view from the chaplain's office, however, shows more of the parking lot than of the chapel or the adjacent garden, a parking lot where barbed wire had been recently affixed to the fence at the rear, to discourage thieves...
...I like it spare: visitors admired it...
...Dehumidifier...
...The rejection...
...Where is the passion...
...I admired the splendid celebrated architecture of the university, but my admiration often tripped over those who wandered past the beautiful buildings, yet had no keys...
...I answered her questions as best I could, but could neither quell nor understand her suspicions...
...With some inches yet to go and no strength left for support, she gave up and dropped her backside, wincing, while I watched incompetently...
...Her dog, at the sight of me, had commenced racing back and forth behind the cyclone fence...
...Was she to be a talisman, to ward off what she represented from the Garden of Love itself, which was reserved (like the university) for the young, the unblemished, the affluent...
...In the alleyway behind the houses I found a neighbor hanging wash...
...My schedule's kind of tight these days," I said, glimpsing through the swinging doors long tables of very poor people eating macaroni casserole: my companions were obviously disappointed...
...I asked...
...Could she negotiate it...
...You don't mean that...
...It would be some time before they reached me...
...She pointed to a window on the second floor...
...She stopped me...
...Stored, but not lived with, for I saw no furniture among it all, not even a bed...
...To reach my apartment these days I had to climb past two floors of work in progress, the halls a chaos of plasterboards and sawhorses and snaky wires but the construction had not yet touched me...
...she asked...
...my belongings, including my very unportable typewriter, were piled in the middle of the floor and loosely covered with sheets that did not protect them...
...I talked about her with my friends...
...I give them to people I know that need them...
...What did the poet have in mind...
...Yes, I had to laugh...
...As for the old woman, I puzzled awhile over what might have happened to change things for her during those weeks I had stayed away...
...But I regretted my impatience, so I added something that I also regretted because it sounded phony in my mouth: "Would you pray for me...
...Better believe it," I said, "but we'd show her no mercy, so she'd hide them...
...When's your day off...
...She handed me a glass of orange juice, freshly squeezed...
...I want to hear that woman lie I want to hear her commit perjury on the witness stand...
...A dehumidifier thank you down the cellar day and night...
...Then I have to shut them...
...I got behind the wheel...
...Gloria proved tame, but I never once regretted the move...
...He's right...
...The lobby door slammed metallically behind me...
...By the door of her room was a new pushcart, already packed with the take-homes of a hospital stay, the slippers they give you and such...
...A jam-box was broadcasting "rap...
...On the stool by the bed were a pair of men's unpolished oxfords hers...
...I have to ask somebody...
...Yes, the Drama School...
...gave me a copy of the page of grievances which she had trudged across town, pushcart and all, to present to her lawyers a few days before...
...I gave her my number...
...He leaned over and whispered, "Or maybe you're supposed to write a play about her," and the lights rose on stage...
...Where are you going...
...I can't reach my feet that's the worst part with this hip...
...I knew it was a rejection good news would have come on the phone but the adrenalin was flowing anyway: maybe they had tried to call...
...his family's bank supplied the cash to pay for Alaska) gazed at me from above the mantle as I asked the chaplain for two hundred dollars for orthopedic shoes...
...You're such a good cook," she said...
...Don't you ever fall in love...
...She did not acknowledge us...
...Somebody got out of his car and put ten dollars in my hand and drove away...
...She had to jump the curb...
...and the work dragged on for weeks...
...The idea had been brewing awhile...
...She laughed out loud...
...When they get that way they need somebody with them all the time, but he was far away...
...I tried to take his license...
...Thanks...
...Maybe you misplaced it," I said...
...They have to run a what do you call it...
...Her daughter had died in an auto crash, leaving a husband and two teen-agers...
...Happy birthday...
...Twice a week," I said, and grinned, though the question made me squirm...
...I was on the sidewalk...
...They had decided not to produce the play I sent them...
...The scarred walls and the gutted panel where a fuse box had yet to be installed...
...I yelled, and heard myself laughing out loud...
...It turned out to be fun, and the audiences liked it, but I was disappointed when I saw it "up" on stage...
...She laughed...
...Hey," I said, "you've got to cheer me up today...
...I knew I'd take a detour...
...What...
...Besides, they usually turn up...
...Do you usually walk...
...So I could tell him thank you...
...Most Saturdays went by without a thought of her...
...I'd let that German lady on the first floor put him in his place...
...I'm saving up for orthopedic shoes, but they want two hundred dollars...
...I found the manager, complained with vibrato...
...My mother used to buy them on the sly," I said...
...He hired that woman who ran me over...
...The air was hazy with plaster dust...
...But hasn't it been years...
...I parked the car...
...I couldn 't help but think of Fortune's Wheel, as I had seen it once in a medieval drawing, with people clinging to it, top and bottom, crowned and crushed, while the blithe goddess, smiling at the viewer, ignored them and turned her dainty gear indifferently...
...What could I do for her...
...But Christ Church...
...She urged me to take a little carton of cherries, which she must have brought home from the soup kitchen...
...She had walked half a block from the kitchen and was resting, one protective hand on her cart, in the shadow of a pointed arch...
...My last act in the old apartment was to tape big Xs across the windows to keep them from shattering in the wind...
...I found her words as soothing as the setting...
...How spacious," they would say, even though the place was small...
...There, last among the Vices and Deadly Sins whose portraits decorated the outer walls of the Garden of Love, was Poverty a woman, alone, naked, homeless...
...Yeah, maybe...
...You...
...Could they trace it...
...You kids probably read them yourselves...
...What had I surrendered...
...My day only rich men could afford to send their sons to Yale...
...I took it...
...she said...
...As usual, I had neglected to make plans, so I would eat dinner tonight with Peter Jennings and read for Thursday's class...
...I had accepted a lectureship in the English Department and returned late in August, determined to slug it out as part-time teacher, part-time writer...
...My hip...
...I don't get into opening the windows...
...I do not have time for this, I thought...
...He got very depressed...
...The walls are grey...
...Reverend Ferry taught me the procedure for mopping the dining room floor...
...Does that seem right to you...
...One time my college roommate was visiting, a real prig, and he sat in the wrong spot on the couch the cushion slipped out from under him, and he landed on his butt on the floor with a dozen tabloids...
...That must be leaking half a gallon a minute," I said...
...She checked her mailbox, from which the lock had been broken, and greeted two fellow tenants, a large man in a wheelchair, who looked too young for this building, and a stubble-faced little man, who seemed unable to speak...
...I could give them to her or offer...
...The house lights dimmed...
...Do you need some help...
...I CANNOT PUT MY STOCKINGS ON...
...I'll have to confirm with the others, but I'm sure there's no problem...
...I never know where I'm going to see you," she said...
...Tenants talked of suing...
...She was five-feet-two or so, quite hunched over, with a pleasant face, fair skin, hazel eyes about sixty-eight, I guessed...
...I joined my family at the Jersey shore, where, quickly bored with the boardwalk and the beach, I realized I missed my struggle in New Haven...
...Congratulations...
...Her limp was worse...
...She looked at me wryly, then past me toward her destination...
...With her right hand she leaned on a cane, with her left she held overhead a useless umbrella, its nylon skin covering only half the spokes...
...She looked rested and well cared-for in the hospital, and made me a little squeamish by showing me her scar, long and neat as the zipper on a suitcase...
...I believe she must have finally settled out of court for the accident, because a month ago she had the hip surgery which she could not have otherwise afforded...
...In my push to write a show and please the Drama School, I felt I had neglected to write a play...
...She had to jump the curb...
...I can't get fitted till the swelling goes down...
...You the sheriff...
...So it was settled: an hour, cleaning up, Saturday afternoons, when I could...
...For naked as a worm was she...
...Come on," I said, "let's go...
...Check...
...I won't even have enough left for my operation...
...The workers were back from break...
...you'd be throwing your money away...
...I'll check her lawyers out for you," she said, "maybe they chase ambulances, but that's a standard fee they're charging...
...A physicist, the first person I had met in New Haven, he was being kind enough to let me sleep in his spare room while the construction was going on in my apartment...
...Great...
...Soup, canned vegetable soup...
...What about my cart...
...she said...
...Yes," he said...
...It fit into the hatch of my car...
...She had finished the morning's cooking and was preparing to go...
...How could a young man like you have any troubles...
...It's seldom that it works out, a stepmother or stepfather...
...But scenes from her present and past life kept intruding on her game, until she grew disgusted with it and sought the Wheel of Fortune to play for higher stakes...
...As we pulled up, she touched the little crucifix by the gear shift...
...Would I miss them...
...I don't know if they could trace it...
...My brother disowned me so he wouldn't have to share...
...Well, I told my students to expect twenty rejections before an acceptance, and the line always got a laugh...
...Taking her cane, she started for the kitchen...
...Maybe now she '11 get the orthopedic shoes.ospital stay, the slippers they give you and such...
...As I turned the corner onto Park I could not see her, and hoped that she was gone, but there she was where I had left her, having given up on her umbrella and folded it away...
...She was asking for more than I cared to give...
...Lovely day...
...I buried the notice on my desk...
...Inappropriate...
...She wanted me to meet her granddaughter who worked for the airlines in Florida...
...My schedule's kind of tight, these days," I said, still with my back to her...
...I had to hang up quickly: I was weeping...
...I hoped she would think I was joking...
...Time for lunch...
...I said and rushed off, after a moment's indecision over whether to leave her my umbrella or take it myself...
...She covered her hair with a scarf, and the scarf with a smaller garbage bag, knotted under the chin...
...Once home, I stood by the kitchen sink, rinsed the cherries, ate them, and surveyed the clean uncluttered space...
...I asked...
...I'd say hello, if she saw me, and even stop to chat, if I had the time, but I had gotten busy with a musical I'd written, with revisions and rehearsals and rushing back and forth to Philadelphia, where my composer lived...
...The old woman departed...
...There was nothing here but me, and I was sick to death of me...
...The soup kitchen," she said, "At Christ Church, the soup kitchen...
...I don't know papers, things, on my desk...
...Why don't you let me drop you off...
...I moved in with my new friends during the weekend of hurricane Gloria...
...I liked what I had done with it: I had not brought much furniture from home, but what I had was handsome...
...That ape in the next building was bellowing over what, some "Pro" wrestling match...
...Some days, when spring came, I'd see her sitting in the sun on York Street, by the gates of Pierson or Davenport...
...she said...
...What good is it?' I told my son-in-law, 'It won't even last till you remarry.' But he says he has no intention, not until the kids are grown...
...What with warming the engine and New Haven's one-way streets, it must have taken me ten minutes to get back...
...She had arranged a bench of milk crates against a wall, padded it with blankets and old coats, and on this she slept...
...Maybe that's the idea," he said, "maybe you're supposed to feel helpless...
...My mother was a very domineering woman, but she left us money...
...The walls had been stabbed and channeled, exposing laths, studs, wires, and in one spot my neighbor's bedroom...
...She steered her cart into its niche among the boxes by the door...
...But it was my birthday...
...But how could I work...
...I took her for homeless...
...How old are you...
...The croupier had chained her to the Wheel...
...Then I asked her cautiously if she wanted a ride home today...
...It was raining...
...But color and fancy, held secret from the nave, assert themselves in the side chapel...
...Are you sure...
...He shot himself...
...Usually I waited outside for her, but today I walked past the row of men with formidable eyes who sat on the curb by the door...
...That Saturday I returned to the soup kitchen...
...I often misplace things," I added cautiously...
...Listlessly she greeted me...
...Sure it hurt I never cried over rejections, though...
...How do you want it...
...Here don't let it get to you...
...Twelve-thirty, the time of day when I first had seen the old woman...
...She had reached the landing...
...I sniffled back the tears...
...You must be rich...
...or the face of one man in particular, who made his rounds diligently with a shopping cart in the quiet of Sunday mornings, when the bins overflowed with the trash of last night's parties and few people would intrude with their gaze...
...Considering the weather, she was practically dressed, but all that plastic had caused her to perspire, and when she loosened the outer wrappings, the car smelled of something not at all disagreeable, but familiar and yet hard to place: a grade-school smell, like rainy days in grade school...
...So I drafted my syllabus for English 120 and ignored my memory of the old woman...
...Is she in some kind of trouble...
...Jake and I think you should move in and let us take care of you...
...Yes...
...AN ENCOUNTER WITH LADY POVERTY REAL LIFE AT THE DRAMA SCHOOL WILLIAM DICANZIO started to write an essay about the soup kitchens of New Haven...
...Then the Drama School adjourned to the University Theatre for diplomas and to the Cabaret for lunch...
...He apologized and made a gesture at having it cleaned up, but so what...
...The girl at the lawyers' was nice to me," she said, "she walked me down to the street...
...Relax...
...I caught myself thus composing "lit crit" with my nose in a book, grew disgusted, and shoved poor Chaucer back between Blake and Dante...
...It's not bad," she said, "but it's all one room...
...I was living out of my gym bag, carrying the course I was teaching in my briefcase, and when I visited my apartment, I wished I'd stayed away...
...Really...
...They say they are going to fix it, but they don't...
...I figured it was safe, since she had no phone...
...Oh sometimes I' d remember, but it was always afternoon already, and what could I do, cruise the streets of New Haven chasing an old woman...
...Just as I did so, someone knocked...
...Those pills they give you, they don't help...
...What was it...
...But I had just changed that...
...One Saturday in July I was working in the library on that play for Louisville...
...She tied her scarf...
...I drove back to Lafayette Street and tried the unlabeled buzzers on her door...
...the ape next door was bellowing...
...With a phone call, a question, an acceptance, I had changed something...
...She wore men's "desert boots," loosely tied, and an old raincoat of a faded leopard pattern with a garbage bag over her shoulders, tied in front like a shawl...
...But I did not know what to do for her, so I kept returning to the soup kitchen on Saturday afternoons to offer her a ride, even though she claimed, "I'd be better off walking," every time her backside smacked the bucket seat...
...It came with the car," I said, "it used to be my mother's...
...In the corner, my geodesic sphere, which I'd recently repaired, was rotating gently...
...I started to open the door...
...As we drove, she surprised me with her vocabulary, which told me that she read, and with the precision of her directions...
...I had some new sheets on the bathroom shelf, still unopened...
...Nothing...
...I lived on the third floor...
...It's nice...
...Some things you have to hide...
...And that is how I got there...
...I don't know what to do for her," I said to John one night at the Summer Cabaret...
...she said...
...The weather cooperated, the carillon played Gaudeamus igitur, and when the undergraduates received their degrees, they released a thousand blue and white balloons...
...What kind of fruit do you like...
Vol. 117 • July 1990 • No. 13
