Conscience

by Alice Mattison

  “When you’re home in your house, you’re alone in the building,” Jason says.

  “That’s different.”

  I go with him to talk to the woman. I give her a ten-dollar bill—my own money—so she can buy food or bribe someone to give her a place to stay, or buy booze, I suppose. Then we both escort her out. I watch her back as she walks away. The wind blows into her face, and she bends her head, or she pretends it’s blowing in her face because she knows we’re watching. I don’t like sending someone sick out into the night, whether it’s windy or not.

  Jason looks at me, and I lay my arm across his shoulders. “I know,” I say. “Me, too.”

  During the setup, members of Paulette’s neighborhood improvement group worked for us—hauling, painting, arranging. Now, only Arturo still puts in a few hours a week. Then Paulette says she needs one more person, to keep the third floor staffed all the time. “Somebody smarter than Arturo but dumber than me.”

  “Cheaper than you,” I say, “but worth more than we can pay.” There’s a useful category in my business: people who can do things but have trouble getting hired, so they’ll take a job for less money than they’d get if they used proper grammar or had been to school or hadn’t been to prison. We need someone tough but with good judgment, someone who will throw out dangerous people but know when to do nothing.

  I talk to the board about hiring someone, and Joshua says, “Are you doing this so you can keep people overnight?”

  “No,” I say fast.

  He taps the table with a pen, a gesture I’ve seen before and don’t like. “Then why isn’t your present staff sufficient?”

  That makes me mad enough that I slow way down. “Well, let’s see,” I begin, and describe every damn thing that I do, then every damn thing that Jason does—or the first twenty damn things. They all begin saying, “Okay, okay.” They know that no nonprofit that isn’t stealing the grant money has staff with free time.

  Paulette hires someone, and she brings him to meet me: a tall, skinny black man whose legs are too long for the rest of him. When I look at his face, I almost recognize him.

  “Dunbar,” he says. I remember now. He always says his name with some irony, as if he finds it hard to live up to it. He’s the man I met all those months ago, outside on that windy day with the sandwich.

  We shake hands, and I ask him about himself. “I used to work for the schools,” he says.

  “What did you do?”

  “Cooked. Until I got busted. I did time.”

  “You’re clean?”

  He nods. “I’m clean,” he says. He’s a little more of a street person than I want, but Paulette—as usual—has gone ahead and promised him the job without consulting me. Not that I have anything against people with complicated pasts. Still, they might go back to whatever they have done before, and they might be just a little too creative. I want my employees to take risks but to worry a little about it. People who’ve taken big risks in the past may be a little too used to the sensation.

  Still, I figure someone who cooked for the schools has skills I can use. He’ll know how to follow directions. He’ll know there are such things as directions.

  “Years,” Dunbar says.

  “Years?”

  “Clean for years.”

  “Oh, right.”

  Paulette turns back when they’ve left, waits until Dunbar is out of earshot, and comes back into the office. She spreads her long fingers and brings her open, arched hand down on my desk. I am sitting again, and I blink across the desktop at Paulette’s hand. It’s the gesture you might use to grab something small that was scuttling away. “Trust me,” she says.

  “You are a great woman,” I say. “I don’t totally trust you, but I am in awe of you.”

  She leaves laughing. Paulette is too creative. But I decide Dunbar will work out, because Paulette is tough on former volunteers who now get paid, as if they’re parking meters and she has to take handfuls of quarters from her own pockets and feed them into a slot in their necks. “I’m paying you!” I hear, her voice rising with paying.

  Dunbar works about half time, and she quickly trains him not to play favorites with the clients and not to waste time. He keeps records of who’s upstairs and whether anything happens. He helps the outreach team.

  Sometime in October, I run into the cop on our beat, and he tells me he’s pretty sure people are sleeping in our building again. “You get a feel,” he says. He shrugs.

  I say, “Whoever it is, he hasn’t made a mess so far.”

  He shrugs again, but he says, “It’s not a good idea.”

  “Yeah,” I say. I thank him and continue on my way. He’s an old-fashioned cop: Irish, middle-aged, burly. Usually they’re more boyish—or girlish—and skinnier, darker-skinned, less sure. I’m thinking about cops, almost receiving his permission not to think about what he’s told me.

  I don’t even think about it when I see Jason, not until the next day. Then I find the old back door lock in my desk drawer. We never throw anything out. It’s a snap lock that could be opened easily with a credit card or any thin plastic, and as I turn it over, I decide to take a look at our back hall—a small room off the laundry room, which is a small room off the kitchen. There’s nothing in the back hall, just a dark old cement floor and dark walls, probably unchanged since the old factory was built.

  When I get there, I realize that it has changed after all. The door from the laundry room to the back hall has a lock on it—not the modern deadbolt we have on the front door but an old snap lock like the one I just found in my desk. That doesn’t matter, because it isn’t the door to the building anymore, as it clearly once was. But somebody (Jason? Paulette? One of the community service workers?) is supposed to lock that door, between the laundry room and the back hall, every night.

  I’ve been here, of course, but I’ve never looked closely. The back hall itself, I see now, was originally not an indoor space—probably a loading dock. At some point, it was enclosed, maybe to keep merchandise secure and out of the rain. The hall is now a windowless wooden shed built onto the brick building, and the door there leading to the outside has a good lock and a deadbolt after all: Jason’s new replacement. But it’s standing open. So the old snap lock is all that’s keeping anyone out, at least at the moment—not just out of the laundry room but the whole building. The offices have locks, the door to the staircase up to the third floor has a lock, but everything else is open. An intruder could do laundry, eat from our cupboards and refrigerator, sleep on the ratty sofas in the computer room, even steal the decrepit computers used by our clients. Nothing has been reported missing, which means he or she is more interested in just being indoors than in walking off with a refurbished computer, but people change their minds or invite along their greedier friends.

  I go looking for Jason, whom I find in Paulette’s office. “I should have asked you about this sooner,” I say to him. “Somebody’s still sleeping downstairs.” I explain about the cop and the open door to the outdoors.

  Jason rubs his hand slowly over his hairless head. “I’ll make sure it’s all right down there,” he says then. “Don’t worry.”

  Behind me, I’m aware of Paulette in some way. Maybe her breathing changes.

  “Listen,” he says, “will you be in your office? There’s something else I need to ask you about. Be right there.”

  “Okay.” I go back to whatever I was doing when I found the old lock, or avoiding whatever I’d been avoiding when I started rummaging in a drawer.

  Jason comes in a moment later. “I thought we should talk about this without Paulette.” He sits down and says, “It’s Arturo. I promised her I wouldn’t tell you—so you can’t say anything to her.” He’s laughing a little, as if he’s deciding whether or not to be embarrassed at this small deception.

  “You told me he found a place.”

  “He does have a place. He’s not here all the time. Look, Paulette let this happen, but I know why she did it—I’ve bee
n pretending not to know, but honestly, Jean, it’s not a big deal.”

  “If he has a place . . .”

  “Something about a girlfriend’s kids. He’s here when somebody else is there.”

  “Is Paulette the girlfriend?”

  “No.”

  I’m angry with Jason. Angry with myself for never checking the back doors before too, but primarily angry with Jason. I talk for quite a while about what it means to have rules rather than just a bunch of case-by-case decisions. If Arturo is allowed to sleep in our building, the whole homeless community knows it, and anything can happen. Paulette has taught Dunbar not to play favorites, but he must know she’s playing favorites herself—breaking rules for another part-time employee—and he may be learning from her example, not from what she said.

  “You told me the cop didn’t think it was a big deal,” Jason says.

  “But it can turn into a big deal.”

  “Winter’s coming,” he says. “Arturo is someone we know. He needs a place. Only some of the time.”

  All true. Even so, I tell him to tell Paulette to stop letting Arturo sleep in the building. Then I phone a locksmith and have a proper lock with a deadbolt installed on the door between the back hall and the laundry room.

  Zak is delighted to hear all about this, delighted with everyone’s quirks and foibles. He wants to drive over to Barker Street and look at the doors. He scolds me for not going down to look in the first place. “So it’s not in your fucking job description,” he says. “So what?”

  “It was Jason’s responsibility, and I trusted Jason to do it,” I say.

  He mumbles something and goes to the bathroom—we’re in bed at my house—which is often when he reconsiders what I’ve just said. I hear him talking to himself while he pees. As he gets back into bed, he says, “Micromanage, all that.”

  “Right. I don’t want to micromanage.”

  “Makes sense,” he says. “But you know Jason’s going to find a way to let Arturo in—because he can’t stand up to Paulette.”

  “He’s not,” I say, “because now I am taking charge.”

  Soon everyone at Barker knows the story of the back door and the locks. I suppose the clients hear it from Arturo. And by a sequence of ideas I don’t entirely follow, the improved locks on the back doors lead to the renewed demand that we keep the respite center open overnight. I guess the story somehow demonstrates how New Haven’s complicated shelter system doesn’t meet everyone’s needs.

  Paulette starts urging me to apply for money so we can open the respite center overnight, but government money is getting even scarcer, so foundation money is more in demand. I’m feeling like I’ll never see substantial money again. A proposal to extend a program I was surprised to be able to run in the first place seems silly.

  “Sure,” I say, “and while we’re at it, let’s apply for ten billion dollars and buy houses for homeless people. Then we can close down.”

  It isn’t just that I think we can’t have overnights. I don’t want overnights. Paulette—and now Jason—keep telling me they are the obvious extension of what we have, but, like Joshua, I think other organizations do the work of providing overnight shelter better and more cheaply than we can. Also, all the talk among advocates for the homeless nowadays is about finding permanent housing, not increasing shelter beds. Still, conversations with Jason, Paulette, and the outreach workers regularly circle back around to the issue of whether the third floor should be open all night. “What is the point of a bed if nobody can spend the night in it?” Tommy asks at one meeting, looking left and right as if someone might finally tell him. “We have beds!”

  “They’re narrow cots,” I say.

  “I can introduce you to several guys who are sleeping under bridges because they’re afraid of the shelters—and they would be happy to sleep on our narrow cots,” Tommy says.

  “It’s not that simple,” I say, and keep saying. And because it amazes me to have a boyfriend who wants to know in detail what I’m doing, I tell Zak all about it. Half the time he argues with me about what I think or what I’ve done, making the same arguments I’ve been refuting all day, but now he can’t make up his mind. Sometimes I’m right, sometimes Paulette and Jason are. He comes up with new arguments every few days. He even thinks about my stuff when we’re not together.

  He’s much less willing to talk about his work. The requirement of confidentiality baffles Zak, who doesn’t understand anyone’s need for either privacy or secrecy, but his incomprehension makes him studiously careful about it, especially after his experience with Martha and a few mistakes he made as a medical student and a resident. His instincts don’t help him follow the rules, so just in case, he’s usually too scrupulous. He wouldn’t say, “I saw a kid with the flu,” any more than, “Hector Diaz has the flu.”

  So we talk—after bed, or before bed, or on the way to eat, or while eating—about my life, my work. We don’t have many other subjects, except the state of the world and the country, restaurants, books, and bike routes—impersonal topics, that is. No kids, pets, or rooms in common. We do have Olive and Joshua, and we often talk about them. Olive and I have met for lunch a couple of times, but the four of us haven’t gone out since the Indian meal at which Zak got angry—because he hadn’t had enough sleep, he told me later. I didn’t believe him but was glad he felt bad enough to come up with an excuse.

  “Let’s set up another dinner,” he says more than once. “We’re natural friends.” I do not think this is a good idea for about ten reasons, and I’m sure they’ll say no, but I like Olive and am always curious about Joshua, so after Zak brings it up for the third time, I say, “If you want to try, you do it.”

  He kisses my shoulder as he gets out of bed that morning, as a child might kiss the nearest part of someone rather than the customary one. “Send them an email,” I say. “Both of them together. Copy me.”

  “I’d rather phone,” Zak says. A few days later, to my surprise, he tells me that he and Joshua have had a friendly conversation, and they do want to go out to dinner. Then Olive writes to all of us, and we make a plan.

  Before the date of our dinner, there’s a board meeting, which I expect will be short and easy. I will report on the success of the respite program and on Paulette’s improvement. And some members who work on fundraising want a go-ahead for an event. For some reason, the meeting is held in our small computer and sofa room instead of in the dining room. When I come downstairs, Joshua is already sitting in one of our shabby armchairs, which Darlene has drawn up to the table. His arms stretch along the armrests like Abraham Lincoln’s on the memorial.

  “How are you?” I ask.

  “We have a dinner date.”

  “That’s right.”

  I pull up a straight chair and arrange papers, and by the time I finish, a few more people have come. Then, looking straight at me, Joshua says, “I hear you want to stay open overnight.”

  “What?” I say. “It’s something my staff wants—but no.”

  “What’s that?” somebody asks cheerfully.

  “No?” Joshua says.

  “No.”

  More people come in, and the meeting begins. Joshua looks restless. He follows the agenda Darlene has prepared, but at the end, instead of adjourning, he turns to me and says, “I see you didn’t put all that down—but don’t we have a right to discuss this enormous change you seem to have in mind?”

  To say, “How do you know about it?” would admit there’s an “it.” At some point in the tangled discussion—in which board members try to explain to other members what I mean or what Joshua means, while other board members say, “Wait, maybe that’s not what she meant, but isn’t that a good idea?”—I realize that Zak must have told Joshua that we’ve had conversations about third-floor overnights, and I am so distracted by this thought that I can’t pay attention. I keep trying to prove to myself that Zak wouldn’t have done it, deciding again that he has, trying to understand what this now means for him and m
e. I am angry—and astonished, which, in retrospect, is stupid. Meanwhile, the more we talk, the more overnights become a real question: Yes or no?

  “Could that fellow you hired to work up there run such a thing?” somebody asks—meaning Dunbar—putting that issue ahead of the question of what such a thing might be.

  “This is Paulette Strong’s protégé, correct?” Joshua says. “I’ve had doubts about her for a long time.”

  “No, Paulette is doing fine,” I say. I’ve said so in a perfunctory way during the meeting, and now I wish I said more. Paulette still drives me crazy, and she can be wrongheaded, but she thinks shrewdly out loud and in practical steps. I know she still doesn’t quite believe I’m in charge of her and not the other way around, but I can deal with that. I try to explain some of this, admitting she isn’t perfect—but of course Joshua won’t let go of the imperfections. That makes me defend Paulette more energetically, and soon I find myself repeating Tommy’s argument about the scared people under bridges and what it would mean to them to have a place that’s simpler and less overwhelming than the shelters.

  “She’s not reliable,” Joshua says. “I understand she’s been leaving the back door open for some homeless friend of hers, in addition.”

  “Wait a minute,” I say. Zak said that, too? I’m now so angry that nothing can stop me. “I think that shows her compassion,” I say. “We’re all so afraid to take chances, we risk having people freeze to death. Winter’s coming. There’s no good reason not to let a few people stay on the third floor overnight, and I’m going to try it before the year ends.” I explain that we have a little unallocated money (which is true, but I had something else in mind) and can hire Dunbar for the extra hours. If the program works, I continue, we’ll apply for money to do it long-term. Paulette, I say, has already risen to meet responsibility and will do even better with more responsibility. And there’s now a strong lock on the back door; Joshua needn’t worry about that.

  In the end, we decide to try it: if we can get permission from the city, we’ll let twelve people sign up to spend a night—no food, no frills, no laundry privileges, just a cot and a bathroom in a heated building—during the last weeks of the year, and if nothing goes wrong, maybe we can get funding to stay open through the coldest months. Joshua, who surely was always conflicted about this issue—he’s more compassionate than any of us—resumes the Abraham Lincoln pose and says he never opposed overnights absolutely, just opposed deciding hastily. The rest of the board, led by Lorna, is now excited about waifs from under bridges coming in out of the snow. Probably I’m the only one who’s still against the idea when we finally end the meeting, and I’ve just made it happen.