Love Saves the Day

by Gwen Cooper

  “What can you tell me about Mitchell-Lama statutes and regulations?” she’d asked Perry, after pleasantries had been exchanged.

  Perry’s bushy eyebrows rose. “Are you working on an opinion letter for a client?”

  Laura hated lying, knew she wasn’t any good at it. “Something like that,” she hedged, and felt her cheeks grow warm.

  Perry nodded, then leaned back in his leather chair. “Well …” The tips of his fingers steepled across his stomach in the professorial air many of the younger associates found irritating, although Laura had always secretly loved it. “Mitchell-Lama is a type of subsidized housing program that was proposed by state senator MacNeil Mitchell and assemblyman Alfred Lama, and signed into law in 1955 as the Limited-Profit Housing Companies Act. There was a large working-class population in New York who needed places to live. Manhattan was pretty crowded back then”—Perry’s brief smile contained a hint of irony—“and there was a shortage of affordable housing for people who were teachers, for example, or transit workers, or store clerks. City and government officials all the way up the line wanted to find some way to make affordable housing available to these people. The thinking was that it wasn’t in the City’s best interests to have a population of only the very rich and the very poor. They wanted a stable middle class who were invested in their neighborhoods in order to generate additional tax revenues, bring crime rates down, et cetera.”

  “Sounds logical,” said Laura.

  “It was logical,” Perry replied. “The problem was that developers would say, I’m not going to build a building and then have the rent frozen afterward with rent control. Why should I invest money in a losing proposition? So Mitchell-Lama was created as a solution. The basis was that the city would put up ninety-five percent of the money to erect the buildings. Somebody from the private sector would come up with the additional five percent of the project cost at a ridiculously low interest rate on a thirty-five to fifty-year mortgage, and that would include the cost of the property, building a tenable building on it, and so forth. In exchange for this great deal the City was giving them, the developers would calculate rent by figuring out how much the building would need for maintenance, how much for debt service, and then they would build in a limited annual return for the investors. I forget the exact number, but something like seven percent. There would be some profit for the developers, but that profit would be limited so rents for the tenants could remain affordable. The developers knew this going in—it was why they got such favorable terms in the first place. It was a win for everybody at the time.”

  “At the time,” Laura interjected when Perry paused to sip from his coffee mug. “But not anymore?”

  “As you know, things change.” (Was the look he gave her then meaningful? Or was he merely looking at her? For the life of her, Laura couldn’t decide.) “There haven’t been many new Mitchell-Lama properties built in the past fifteen years or so. A lot of the buildings that already existed, especially the ones that went up in the earlier days of the program, have long since paid off their mortgages. Property values and market-rate rents have skyrocketed. So now there’s a wave of owners and development corporations that want to opt out of the program and flip the buildings, or at least raise the rents substantially. It’s not quite as simple as all that, of course. You have to get permission from the DHCR before you can privatize.” At Laura’s quizzical look, he clarified, “The Division of Housing and Community Renewal. Typically, though, that’s just a formality. There’s a mandatory process by which the building’s tenants have to be notified of a potential privatization and given a chance to protest the opt-out, and to submit any problems with building maintenance and repair that would need to be addressed before the building could be sold. Then there are several different agencies that regulate Mitchell-Lama housing. Not all buildings are regulated by the same agencies, and some buildings are regulated by multiple agencies that have conflicting regulations. Wading through all the bureaucracy can represent hundreds of billable hours and tens of thousands of dollars to a developer’s law firm. There are a number of court cases and proposed amendments to the original statutes working their way through the system right now, any one of which could change the game significantly. We’ve been keeping an eye on them for some of our clients.”

  “Usually, though, the owners are able to sell the buildings.” Laura phrased this as a statement, not a question.

  “Almost always, in the end,” Perry replied, nodding. “There was one situation back in 2007 with a Mitchell-Lama building up in the Bronx, where the tenants organized and were able to bring enough political pressure to bear that the DHCR ended up denying the request to opt out. That was the only time I’ve seen it happen, though, in the twenty-five years or so since the buildings started privatizing.”

  “Thanks, Perry.” Laura prepared to rise and leave his office.

  “I’m assuming this client you’re preparing the opinion letter for is interested in privatizing the property?” Laura nodded, feeling the color rise in her cheeks for a second time. Perry gestured her back down in her chair. “You should know that sometimes, if the tenants’ organization is very well organized, and if they can generate enough negative publicity for the building’s owner, and if they have an attorney who’s an ace—someone who can ferret out every problem in the building, every contradiction in the statutes, and who can bury the owners and developers in paperwork and make the whole process even more painful and expensive—assuming a scenario where the tenants’ association has the intellectual and financial resources to mount a large-scale resistance like that, then it might be in the owner’s best interests to find a way to compromise with them. People don’t always like to see their neighborhoods change too quickly, and they’ll fight hard to keep it from happening. As the Talmud says, Customs are more powerful than laws.”

  Laura thanked Perry again and rose. She had been hoping for something—a word, a gesture—that would let her know things between Perry and her were what they’d always been. She’d gotten nothing from this conversation to confirm that wish, but then nothing to contradict it, either. Her hand was on the doorknob when Perry said musingly, “Yes … there’d be a lot of potential billable hours for an attorney on either side in something like this.” The look he leveled at Laura was inscrutable. For a fleeting moment, it reminded her of Prudence.

  Perry had a way of knowing things that nobody had ever told him. Laura wondered if this last statement was meant to urge her on to wring more hours out of this possibly lucrative client she’d hinted at, or if some instinct had whispered that her motivations for asking weren’t what she’d led him to believe. Perhaps he was warning her against letting her priorities drift in unprofitable directions.

  Not that Laura needed to be reminded where her priorities lay. At least the tenants have a process, she thought. At least they have a chance.

  A chance was more than she and Sarah had ever had.

  Laura had spent the past sixteen years of her life worrying about money. The day she and Sarah had been thrown out of their apartment—along with Mr. Mandelbaum and her best friend Maria Elena and everybody else who’d lived there—she’d heard people say how something like this would never have been done to people with money, how it wouldn’t have happened if they’d all lived on Park Avenue instead of Stanton Street.

  In high school, she’d gone one day with a friend to visit the friend’s father, who was a partner in a large law firm much like the one Laura worked for now. Laura would never forget the first time she’d been inside one of those huge, prosperous Midtown skyscrapers. There had been an atrium in the lobby with trees over twenty feet tall, and Laura had been astounded. That there could be trees that big growing indoors! A building so enormous, so obviously wealthy, so confident in its own permanence that it could afford the time and money to plant trees within its walls and wait for them to grow—surely the people who worked in such a building could go to and from their offices every day in complete confiden
ce that they would still have homes when they returned to them in the evening. And from that day, Laura had wanted nothing more than to be one of the chosen, happy few who could take such permanence for granted. She imagined opening her eyes one fine morning without even a flicker of memory of what it had felt like to worry about the things that might happen to her if she didn’t have enough money.

  Laura’s philosophy of life was simple. It was that money, money safely in the bank, money enough to pay all your bills, was the most important thing in the world. It was better and more important than youth or fame or having fun or being pretty or anything other than (Laura would grudgingly concede) one’s health. Maybe it wasn’t more important than love, but even love would crumble in the face of true poverty. When poverty comes in the door, love flies out the window, Laura had heard Perry say once, quoting his grandmother. And Laura, remembering the catastrophic days after she and Sarah had lost their home, had known he was right.

  Then again, there were the Mandelbaums, who’d always struggled over money, especially after failing eyesight had forced Mr. Mandelbaum to retire from driving his cab. We’ll get by, Mrs. Mandelbaum would say. Remember, we’re supposed to thank God for our misfortunes as much as our good fortune. And Mr. Mandelbaum would reply, Ida, if I stopped to thank God every time I had problems, I wouldn’t have time to scratch my own head. But there would be affectionate good humor mingled with the exasperation in his voice.

  People who worried about accumulating a lot of expensive “stuff,” or who felt a need to be “fulfilled” by what they did for a living, were people who had gotten used to luxuries that Laura had never been able to afford. Stuff was nice and feeling fulfilled was probably even nicer, but money was more important than either. Without money you ended up the way Mr. Mandelbaum had. Without money you would rot in the streets or in one of those wretched SROs and nobody would care. Laura had no desire to live extravagantly. By living on less than half her take-home, she’d managed to finish paying off her student loans the month before she and Josh were married. Now all she asked was not to have to worry about having enough money to live decently and pay her bills on time.

  But these days all she did was worry about money. She’d pace around her office with the door closed, during all of that “extra” time that had once been given over to accumulating billable hours, calculating what she was likely to earn this year with her smaller bonuses, trying to think up a budget that would allow her and Josh to meet their current expenses and leave something to carry over into next year in case Josh still couldn’t find a job.

  At a certain point, Laura had acknowledged that worrying about these things as much as she did could only be counterproductive and distract her from her work. But even that made her worry more rather than less, until she began to wonder if worrying about worrying was some kind of diagnosable mental disorder.

  She thought about her mother, who’d also tended toward obsessive thoughts, although Sarah’s obsessions had been of a pleasanter kind. Sarah had sometimes spent whole days listening to a single song—like “Baba Jinde” by Babatunde Olatunji, or Double Exposure’s “Ten Percent” on a twelve-inch album—if she was in the right kind of mood. When she was small, Laura had marveled at the intensity and focus something like this required. Now, as an adult, she understood.

  The apartment was silent when Laura let herself in after her sweaty slog home from the subway, empty except for Prudence, who was curled up asleep in a box that had once held a ream of paper and was now waiting by the front door for someone (Me, Laura thought, a touch resentfully) to carry it to the trash room. Josh was out somewhere, perhaps at some meeting of the tenants’ association in the Avenue A building, or at one of the networking events he attended with less frequency as the months went by and they failed to yield any job leads. Possibly he’d even told her about it that morning and she’d forgotten. It wouldn’t surprise her at all, considering how snarled her mind was these days.

  She went upstairs to her bedroom to remove her watch and earrings and place them in the wooden jewelry box Josh had surprised her with in the early days of their courtship. She’d admired it in an antiques store they’d ducked into during one of their walks. It had reminded her of Mrs. Mandelbaum’s jewelry box, which had rested on her bedroom dresser amid framed photos of Mr. and Mrs. Mandelbaum’s wedding, their honeymoon in Miami Beach, the two of them with their son, Joseph, as a towheaded toddler in a Thanksgiving Pilgrim’s costume and later as a laughing young man dressed for his high school prom, and pictures of Mr. Mandelbaum in his World War II fighter pilot’s uniform. The box itself had been filled with pieces in the art nouveau style that Mr. Mandelbaum had bought for Mrs. Mandelbaum over the years, none of it terribly expensive yet all of it beautiful to Laura’s young eyes.

  One afternoon, when Laura was ten, Mrs. Mandelbaum had pressed a heavy brooch of silver and onyx into her hand. Laura had tried to give it back, thinking it would be bad manners to accept such a gift, but Mrs. Mandelbaum had said, Max and I love you as if you were our own granddaughter. This is so you’ll always have something to remember us by. Then she’d fixed the brooch onto Laura’s dress and combed her hair before the murky glass of the old mirror in their bedroom. See how pretty it looks on you? The two of them had walked hand in hand back into the living room where Mr. Mandelbaum waited with cake and tea things, Honey lying behind him on the back of the couch with one small paw resting on his shoulder. Hoo-ha! he’d said. I had no idea two elegant ladies were joining me for tea. Laura had blushed with shy pleasure at his praise. The brooch was long gone but Laura hadn’t needed it to remember the Mandelbaums, not even all these years later. Not even though she had failed them, in the end.

  Of all the childhood places she had loved, the Mandelbaums’ apartment had been second only to her own bedroom downstairs from them. She’d loved its sheer lace curtains that Mrs. Mandelbaum had sewn when Laura was still too young to remember such things, and the lovely watercolor wallpaper in deep blues and creams and purples that Sarah had picked out—pretty but not cloying. Perfect for a young girl’s room. Laura had been far less tidy in those days than she was now. She’d let dolls and books and clothing accumulate in large heaps until, finally, Sarah would be provoked into one of her rare displays of impatience. If you don’t clean this room soon, I’ll … But Laura had liked to let the mess build until even she couldn’t stand it anymore, because then she would have the intense joy of cleaning it up. Once she had everything perfectly arranged, the amber of late-afternoon sunlight slanting in through the delicate white curtains (it was important to time the cleaning so that it never started so early or so late as to miss this time of day), she’d walk around touching things and think, How lucky I am! I’m the girl who gets to live here.

  On her way back downstairs, Laura passed the room she and Josh had intended for a nursery, now filled with Sarah’s boxes. Prudence, for reasons Laura couldn’t quite figure out aside from a general Well that’s cats for you, had recently developed the habit of throwing things from the boxes onto the floor. Last night, Prudence had unearthed part of the collection of funny little musical instruments—a harmonica, a Jew’s harp, a miniature drum on a stick with tiny wooden knobs attached to it by strings that would hit the drum if you spun the stick around—that Sarah had kept behind the counter of her record store for Laura’s amusement.

  The harmonica had been Laura’s favorite, although she’d never really learned to play it. Sarah, discerning as her ear was, had smiled and never once winced whenever Laura had banged around the store blowing chaotic, discordant “music” through it. Laura had blown a few notes experimentally through the harmonica yesterday while Prudence observed her with grave attention. The noise had startled Prudence away at first, although moments later she’d returned to raise one paw up to it, as if to feel the air Laura blew through its holes or to push the noise back into the instrument.

  Today Prudence had somehow uncovered Sarah’s old address book, the one Laura had told herself s
he’d never find among all Sarah’s odds and ends after Sarah had died and the question of how to contact Anise, currently touring in Asia, came up. She’d settled for sending a letter through Anise’s management agency. In truth, Laura had no desire to talk to Anise. It was Anise who’d first lured Sarah into her Lower East Side existence. And it was Anise who’d abandoned Sarah (and Laura) when that life fell apart.

  Lately, though, looking through Sarah’s old things with Prudence, Laura had found herself recalling earlier days, when Sarah’s owning a record store and living with her in an old tenement had seemed like its own kind of charmed life. Even knowing that Prudence didn’t really understand her, speaking aloud about Sarah while Prudence regarded her solemnly had given those memories a substance they hadn’t had in years.

  Prudence had followed Laura up the stairs and now sat in the spare bedroom next to Sarah’s address book, waiting for Laura to put it back in a box so the game of throwing things out could begin again. But Laura’s newfound discovery of happy memories was a fragile thing, and thinking about Anise threatened to ruin it. “Not now,” Laura said, on her way past the room and back downstairs. Prudence continued to wait with an air of martyred patience that made Laura smile despite herself. “Come on,” she said in a softer tone. “Don’t you want your dinner?”

  Prudence seemed to consider this for a few seconds. Then she stood and, after arching her back in a luxurious stretch (so as not to appear too eager, Laura supposed), she trotted into the hallway in front of Laura. The merry tinkling of the tag on her red collar grew fainter as she rounded the corner toward the staircase.

  Josh had sounded apologetic a few weeks ago, when he’d moved some of his own things from his office to join Sarah’s boxes in their spare room. “I can’t even think anymore with all that clutter,” he’d said. “And we can always move this stuff into storage if …”