In the Shadow of the Bridge

by Joseph Caldwell

  Further, on its leveled site a number of buildings devoted to condominiums for the wealthy were constructed and now provide habitation for their affluent occupants.

  At one time a large share of my bitterness was heaped on the blameless head of New York’s billionaire Michael Bloomberg, who was the mayor when Saint Vincent’s closed. I went so far as to note that he had at one time rallied the troops—the City Council and the taxpayers—and, from the public coffers, exacted sums sufficient to build a playpen for the enthusiastically revered/reviled New York Yankees in the Bronx, but nothing for a hospital for the poor.

  These thoughts, of course, are invalid. St. Vincent’s was a Catholic institution. The mayor could no more have rescued it with public funds than he could have rescued the Catholic parishes and schools now being shuttered by the Archdiocese. The one wall to which I heartily subscribe to is the constitutional wall between church and state. It must remain forever impregnable.

  So what about the Archdiocese of New York? St. Vincent’s was its flagship hospital. My efforts to research the Archdiocese’s involvement or noninvolvement have proved futile. It’s my surmise that it was already reeling in response to the legal actions being taken against it by victims of sexual abuse and had no resources left for a foundering hospital.

  My last sad thought is that the condominiums and the history of the site upon which they have risen give an accurate measure of what the city I once so deeply loved and where I could live paying a twenty-four-dollar-per-month rent, has now become. And it is my uncharitable and, in all likelihood, futile hope that the occupants of these condos never be allowed to forget that the land on which they have staked their privileged claim will forever be holy ground and that they remain aware of their own part in its desecration.

  But I can’t end this digression on so negative a note. Consider Bellevue Hospital on Manhattan’s First Avenue. It’s still standing, a lasting and thriving monument to New York’s insistent resolve that no needy person will ever be turned away for want of funds to cover the cost. I should meditate on this more often.

  During the mid-eighties, an old acquaintance, Bill Hoffman, had his AIDS play, As Is, produced by Circle Rep on Sheridan Square; it then moved to Broadway. It was an effective play, especially since it dealt knowingly with the epidemic and had a fearless (for the time) compassion for those caught up in its devastation.

  However—and note the emphatic italics—the play’s narrator/commentator is an ex-nun, a woman who, consistent with her calling, initiates a useful and compassionate response to the epidemic. Laudable to say the least. I repeat my however. The play makes a significant point of the nun’s expulsion from her convent and from her order. She is, by inference if not by outright association, involving herself with gays. What could be a more legitimate reason for banishment?

  The simple truth is that at St. Vincent’s, not more than four blocks north of Sheridan Square, where the play was being performed to considerable acclaim, a real, live nun, Sister Patrice Murphy, had already put in place a hospice program for those with AIDS—with the full cooperation of her Order and her hospital. It provided each person taken into the program with a nurse to assure that inpatient or outpatient medical care was available and a professional social worker to provide guidance through the tangle of social services and offer counseling if needed. Then, finally, it offered a nonprofessional volunteer whose attentions, it was hoped, would to some degree diminish the experience of abandonment suffered by most of the patients, the repudiation by family, the avoidance of longtime friends, and the general isolation the illness exacted.

  These rejections were not always in response to the illness itself. A diagnosis in most instances revealed the patient to be either gay or a drug abuser or both—social categories that justified at that time immediate scorn and lasting repudiation. These people were only getting what they deserved: blindness, dementia, a disfiguring cancer, cystic lungs—all leading to an inevitable and lonely death. To counter this, the volunteer would offer friendly companionship and, if needed, physical and emotional help. The training for this consisted of a series of evening sessions and some Saturday mornings. It covered a wide range of orientation, knowledge, and instruction, much-needed preparation for what the volunteer would be doing after being assigned to a patient with whom he or she would be involved until the patient’s death. (After a respectful interval, a new assignment would be made.)

  A guiding principle of the volunteer’s relationship to the patient was consolidated into four words: “no demands, no expectations.” Likability was not an issue, whether it be the patient for the volunteer or the volunteer for the patient. Gratitude was beside the point. Service, defined by the patient’s needs, whatever they might be, was the one and only guide. Whatever evolved, whatever developed, would be what it would be—but the “no demands, no expectations” rule was ever applicable.

  This I know because, by 1985, the epidemic had continued to grow, decimating the gay community. I wanted to do more than just wring my hands and weep or even pray. The Sunday newsletter at my parish church, now St. Joseph in Greenwich Village, included one Sunday a notice regarding the volunteer organization at St. Vincent’s. (Soon the hospice program was required to change its name because “hospice” legally applied only to those whose life expectancy did not exceed six months. Some patients were living longer. It became the Supportive Care Program.)

  It is amazing what it does to a relationship when you enter into it with “no demands, no expectations.” You’re not passive; you’re just less intrusive. It’s all about the patient. You respond rather than initiate. For me, there would be ten of them, each one unfailingly interesting; some more complicated than others. Caring was never a difficulty. And I found that I had a knack for it and remained committed to the cause, with an unwavering focus on each patient that prevented me from wondering about who the next one might be.

  In one of the training sessions, an authority on the subject of grief lectured us at length on the ways to deal with it. I was not unacquainted with loss. He told us to trace on a piece of paper he’d provided a comparative measure of our sorrows going back to our earliest years, rather like a graph showing the fluctuations of the stock market.

  While my father, my mother, my sister Franny, and my nephew Tommy had all died, I began with a childhood sorrow so pervasive and so unrelenting that I was, at the time, both surprised and quietly amazed that I could feel so deeply. No previous or subsequent loss or disappointment had reached down to such a depth into the heretofore unknown recesses of my being and placed there a grief so great that it forced me to know myself in a completely different way. Life could no longer be the same after that. It was like a loss of innocence.

  I was in sixth grade and about eleven years old. Until then I had been protected from this new knowledge about myself and from the ferocity of what I was capable of feeling. Shameful as it may seem, of all the peaks on the graph recording subsequent losses, none surpassed this first height.

  Our dog, Hookey, had been run over and killed by a car. My mother made the announcement when I came home from serving as altar boy for the early Mass. That I immediately burst into tears surprised my mother. After all, I was not only eleven, I was a boy. She told me the details. Hookey had been out front chasing alongside a car on Twentieth Street in front of our house and had been caught beneath a back wheel. The driver had stopped and moved her close to the curbstone in front of the Carrigans’ house farther down the block, nearer to Kilbourn Avenue. My mother had covered her with a small throw rug so that my older sisters, Rosebud and Helen Margaret, would not see her when they went to school. Later the Humane Society, our ASPCA in Milwaukee at the time, would come and take her away.

  I went to school. I joined my class, still in church for the daily Mass from which I was exempt because of my earlier service. I began to cry. My classmates were confused. After we left the church, Sister Annette questioned me and I
told her, sobbing, what had happened. She was not exactly indifferent, but she was less than impressed. Later, at recess, I cried again. She was now sympathetic, but still puzzled by what she obviously considered peculiar behavior. To Sister Annette, as to my mother, I was eleven years old and a boy. I shouldn’t cry.

  How long did my grieving last? I feel it even now as I write these words.

  This was the first time in my life that a devastation that might assault me could not be corrected or assuaged by my mother. I was introduced to the limits of what her love could do. No consolation was possible. The loss of innocence comes in many forms.

  About some of my patients.

  My first patient, Jeff, an African-American, age twenty-nine, stuck in St. Vincent’s because he couldn’t be discharged without some place where he could stay. There was a chance he could be admitted to Bailey House, a residence for people with AIDS in the renovated Christopher Hotel on the corner of West Street and Christopher, right on the Hudson River, but first he would have to go there for an interview. He refused to go. He didn’t have a decent overcoat. It was January and he was too proud to wear the tattered garment he’d been wearing when he came into the hospital.

  Jeff had a degree in business administration from Baruch College and, for a time, had worked in some administrative capacity for Macy’s. But he had become a drug abuser. Someone had turned him on to drugs at a friend’s Christmas party more than a year ago. I managed to get him an overcoat from Don, the head writer from Love of Life. It fit. He got into Bailey House.

  I’d visit him three or four times a week. He told me about how his mother had thrown him out of their apartment because of the drugs. He stole. From his brother, from his sisters, from his mother. He had a girlfriend he hadn’t seen for a while. He had bought her a skirt and went to see her. Her mother informed him that she had died. Of AIDS. (Had he infected her?)

  One day I got a call from Bailey House. Jeff was acting strangely. I rushed down just as he was running out the door onto the street. He moved quickly up the block. I had to run to catch up and to keep up. He was in a rage. He was crying. “I’m back on drugs!” he shouted. “I went back! Go away! Leave me be! Go away!” He picked up speed and I thought it best for now to let him go. What could I have done? As was the case so many times, I was helpless.

  He went into detox in a locked ward at Beth Israel Hospital. I was the only person allowed to visit him: not even a family member would be admitted. When I went to see him, I brought him his favorite food: Chinese egg rolls with hot mustard. He seemed to be doing well and we chatted a bit before he asked me to sneak him some cigarettes, which were forbidden by the detox program. It was a desperate plea. I said nothing.

  I had noticed, however, that when I went to the desk before being admitted to the locked ward, they paid no attention to the paper bag I was carrying with the egg rolls. I could sneak in the cigarettes.

  I talked to no one in Supportive Care about the request. I’d have to make this decision by myself. What I finally realized was that if I were to bring him the cigarettes, his respect for me would diminish. He would know that I could be manipulated.

  I went to see him. I didn’t tell him that truth. I told him another: that the cigarettes might threaten his health and I would never forgive myself for that. He told me he understood. I was not to feel bad. He then spent the entire visit making me feel bad.

  Then there was my patient Bruce, who insisted he be called Montana. I complied as did everyone else, including his family. He, too, was living in Bailey House. He liked to shop. I’d get him the necessary wheelchair and we’d head out to the nearest supermarket, where he’d spend most of the food stamps he’d been allotted on specialties like chopped chicken liver, thinly sliced prosciutto di Parma, and smoked salmon. Several times I did supermarket shopping for him: fresh fruit (especially strawberries and melon), quilted toilet paper—superior to the Bailey House brand—and Very Berry fruit drink, paying with food stamps. At first I was embarrassed, but I soon convinced myself that food stamps were nothing to apologize for or to be ashamed of. (I’m a writer. I may be in need of them myself someday.)

  On other wheelchair excursions, we’d go to the St. Luke’s Thrift Shop on Hudson Street and he’d buy brightly colored neckties, not to wear, but to bring some cheer to his somewhat Spartan room. To do what I could to improve the décor, I gave him my large beach towel with broad stripes of yellow and purple. He tacked it onto the wall as if it were a medieval tapestry. Our most extended wheelchair journey was to a shop on Eighth Street near Fifth Avenue, the one place in the world where, he claimed, he could buy with money from a cash fund he said was his burial money, a special imported coffeemaker.

  He must have spent all of his burial money at one time or another because, at his death, I had to go to some municipal office in Brooklyn to arrange for a payment to be made to Reddin’s Funeral Home on West Fourteenth Street—which, by the way, was, during the epidemic, one of the few—or possibly the only—mortuary to provide services to those who died of AIDS.

  I can’t tell you how much I enjoyed Montana’s insistences. My all-time favorite was a request he made when I told him I’d be gone for a week or so for a family reunion in Wisconsin and I asked him if he’d like another volunteer while I was away. He did. It should be, he insisted, a white gay male.

  When I reported this to Carole, the head of the volunteer program, she said, very much in character, “We’re not in the habit of asking our volunteers if they’re white.”

  Finally, I’ll tell you two of his most characteristic questions: “Why can’t I do it?” and “Why can’t I have it?” And I myself had better have an adequate answer.

  One patient proved to be different from all the others. Not long after I was introduced to Tom I realized that he and his friend and caregiver, Michael, were both unfailingly interesting, each in his own particular way. Tom’s defining characteristic, besides being amiable and intelligent, was a strong sense of entitlement, whereas Michael’s defining characteristic, besides being amiable and intelligent, was an uncomplaining response to his friend’s near-limitless requests.

  During the time I was involved with them, they were living together on the comfortable second floor of a house in the Bronx owned by Michael’s agreeable mother, who lived downstairs. Tom, of course, no longer had a job but had inherited a certain amount of money after the death of his lover John. He therefore spent a great deal of time going through catalogues from which he would order whole inventories of supplies—food, drink, toiletries, kitchen accessories, including two ice cream-making machines, the second more sophisticated than the first.

  Michael worked the night shift at a nearby hospital. Often, when he’d come home, Tom would present him with his requests for the day—usually starting with a visit to a supermarket.

  The sizable freezer compartment of their refrigerator was stocked literally to overflowing. The door, to be secured, had to have strips of duct tape stretched across it and onto the sides of the refrigerator.

  This made sense to me. Consciously or subconsciously, Tom was providing himself with needs for an extended future—an understandable rejection of his present situation.

  Then there was Tom’s insistence that part of the backyard be transformed into a patio, the space defined by some red bricks carefully placed into the dug earth. A small pool was also required—with running water, yet! I helped, but Michael did most of the work.

  It was a given that I would join them when they came into Manhattan for doctor’s appointments and outpatient medical procedures. I would also spend Sunday afternoons with them, most often visiting in the living room, I with a cup of Earl Grey tea. On several occasions Michael would drive us to a quaint town in the countryside for lunch. On the way home, Tom would want to stop in a supermarket. Other times we’d bask in the backyard patio in the shade of a convenient tree. Our conversation was easy and usually cheerful—sin
ce our first purpose was to amuse rather than inform.

  But when did Michael sleep? I never asked and he never approached the subject.

  Tom’s most extravagant act of entitlement came toward the end. He tried to steal a very expensive Hermès scarf from Bloomingdale’s department store. He simply exchanged the scarf he was wearing for the one he preferred. He never made it to the door.

  It was, of course, Michael who took charge. (I wasn’t involved and only heard about this later.) He pleaded for clemency, noting that Tom was dying. Whether the judge was compassionate or decided not to burden the prison system with the care of an inmate with AIDS, I do not know. But it can’t be too difficult to guess which of the two was operative.

  Tom died at home.

  Michael was relieved of all responsibilities and his reward was an inconsolable grief that, I am sure, still resides somewhere in the deepest reaches of his unconditional heart.

  At some point during our time together I mentioned to Michael that his name in Hebrew asks the question “Who is like God?” With a wicked smile stretched across his handsome face, Michael lifted his arms away from his sides and held out his open hands, presenting himself to me. “Now we know,” he said.

  If, as has been proclaimed, “God is Love,” Michael wasn’t far off the mark.

  Of all the varying experiences I had with my patients, my time with Bobby was the saddest. I’d been aware that each patient seemed to have an inner resource that might help sustain him through the days and nights. Jeff had his pride. Tom and Montana had their sense of entitlement. Bobby had his mother.

  Bobby was the youngest in the family, with three older sisters. When I was assigned to him, he was still living with his mother and one of his sisters, Cookie. In his twenties, he was very much his mother’s favorite. In truth, it would be more accurate than insulting to say he was still his mother’s baby. Short in stature, Bobby was slightly pudgy, with a sometimes elfin disposition that found its expression in teasing people. (In the hospital: “I seen you sneaking into your bathroom to hide and smoke a cigarette!”) Not a great wit, but he did make us smile.