Love Saves the Day

We had been told that the building could collapse at any second, but two hours later not so much as a single brick had fallen, not one visible crack had appeared in the structure. They had told us we would be allowed back in “soon,” but by noon not one of us had been allowed back in. Police officers and representatives from the Office of Emergency Management roamed freely in and out of the building, seeming unconcerned about the dangers we’d been warned of. Many didn’t bother to wear hard hats. In hushed voices people asked one another, Doesn’t that seem odd to you?

Whispers ran among us as we all stood there in the rain, waiting to see what would happen. People talked about SROs whose occupants had been dragged from their beds in the middle of the night and scattered into the streets like cockroaches. The buildings would be demolished the very next morning to make room for expensive new condos and restaurants. There were the squatters who took over apartment buildings nominally owned by the City because the landlords had been unable to afford repairs or taxes. Buildings the City abandoned and neglected until they became crack houses. The squatters would chase out the dealers and addicts, bring in wiring, fix walls and roofs, plant gardens, make the building and sometimes whole blocks livable again. You would see children playing stickball on streets that only a few months earlier no child could have safely walked past. And then one day police would come to chase the squatters out, not letting them take any personal belongings with them. The City would “reclaim” the building and sell it for a profit.

But those people were different from us. The people who stayed in SROs had no formal contracts; they paid on a nightly or perhaps weekly basis. Technically, the squatters had no legal claim to be where they were. We held signed leases in our own names. We paid our rent every month, as formally and contractually as any millionaire with a Park Avenue pied-à-terre. What had happened to those other people could never happen to us.

Maybe it was when Mayor Giuliani pulled up in a Town Car. By then the crowd was enormous. At first people were cheered by the sight of the mayor striding confidently into that building. He didn’t wear a hard hat, either. How dangerous could the building be, if the mayor himself was entering it?

But then the murmurs went around again: Why was the mayor here? Why should he concern himself with us, with our one little building? Maybe it was a goodwill gesture, an attempt to garner votes in a neighborhood that hadn’t supported him in the last election?

But, then … why didn’t he make eye contact with anybody, or give us even a parting wave, as he exited the building and disappeared back into his car?

One of our local community board members, an architect, was circulating. “Don’t worry,” he told people. “I went around back and saw the damage they’re talking about. Two, maybe three bricks, and that rear wall’s at least six bricks deep. There’s no way this building is going to collapse.”

Few people seemed comforted at hearing this. I noted that. Noted, too, that at some point the crowd had started to lose faith in the idea that whatever was happening here today was a rescue mission. A breeze blew up and I shivered, drawing Laura closer to me.

I don’t remember all the events of that day as clearly as I should. Maybe I just don’t want to. Or maybe, perversely, too much of my memory got used up in the wrong places. Because the parts I remember most clearly are the ones I would give anything—all the remaining years of my life—to forget. The rest of it comes to me in fragments.

The crowd sighed and surged and swelled and collapsed inward upon itself, only to expand again. Rain fell harder, and people huddled under umbrellas or simply stood motionless and got wet, and then the rain subsided. Faces blurred and shifted around me, as if I were standing still in front of a merry-go-round. The Bengali couple from the fourth floor threaded through the crowd, their three children following them like ducklings in a row. The Polish woman who lived across the hall from us and took in laundry muttered something, to nobody in particular, about the clothing she still had piled up in her living room.

“Five thousand dollars I have in that apartment,” Consuela Verde, Maria Elena’s mother, said to me. The two youngest of her five children clung to her beneath an enormous flowered umbrella, still wearing their pajamas. Anger and anguish competed for toeholds on the rounded contours of her face. “All our lives, my husband and me worked for that money. All the money we ever have. We no trust the banks. And now these hijos de la gran puta”—she spat on the sidewalk—“now they will take it from us. You watch and see.”