Strength in What Remains

by Tracy Kidder

  As he looked around, he was laughing one moment, pensive the next. I wondered whether he was feeling a touch of perverse nostalgia for a place where he’d known so much pain and confusion. He pointed at the staircase for the 125th Street subway station. “This is where I tried to bargain for a token, for less.”

  “Oh, you tried to bargain for tokens?” I said. “You didn’t succeed.”

  “No.”

  I laughed. “You actually tried to bargain for tokens?”

  “Yes,” he said, rather stiffly.

  It hadn’t occurred to me that he might be annoyed by my laughing over what an innocent he’d been a decade ago. Hoping that I would seem to be laughing at someone else, I told him I was thinking of my grandmother, who once managed to pay a New York City bus driver with postage stamps. He chuckled politely. I had the feeling that to Deo my grandmother’s behavior wasn’t all that peculiar either.

  We descended to the subway station, the same from which Deo had departed on his long, long ride of years ago. We went to the end of the line in the Bronx, then all the way to the other end in Brooklyn. One round trip took about two hours, and he had made several round trips on that day twelve years ago. As we rode along, Deo remembered how, worry overcoming pride, he had attempted to ask other riders for help, in French. “Some people would walk away, some would curse at me.” After he’d stopped asking, he had begun to sense, in the background of his loneliness, changes in the human landscape of the cars. When the trains had passed through what he now knew to be Midtown, he had been struck by the whiteness and the purposeful haste of the riders, their fancy dress, the perfume of the women. Then everything had changed. After a couple of round trips, he told me, he had begun to understand: “The farther you go uptown, the blacker and poorer the people, and also when you go downtown. And I realized I didn’t fit anywhere.”

  I thought I could picture him as he was then, a skinny, worried-looking youth, moving from panic to exhaustion and finally giving up all hope of escaping the subway. He remembered the moment when he had told himself, “No one is in control of his own life,” as he’d dozed off on the screeching, roaring trains. For a moment when we came above ground, I found it hard to reconcile that picture of Deo with Deo as he had become.

  I had two images of him in New York’s SoHo district. In the first it was evening twelve years back and he was being led by Sharon—led by the hand, so to speak—out of the subway station on Prince Street, past the lighted windows of chain stores, art galleries, and boutiques, toward the Wolfs’ apartment. In the second, the apartment was his home, and he was lounging on the sofa, laughing uproariously as Charlie, for my benefit, reminisced about those contentious dinner-table lessons in American idioms. What lay between those two images was an extraordinary act. A perfectly sane, reasonable couple had taken in a needy stranger from Africa who didn’t speak their language, who had no means of support, who might become their dependent for the rest of their lives. What sort of people would do that? Who were Nancy and Charlie?

  I went to see them alone. I rode up to their loft, as Deo and Sharon had done on the night when they had first come for dinner, in the small old-fashioned elevator, with unpainted wooden walls and a metal gate. You rang for a ride and Nancy or Charlie would bring the machine down. It was Charlie who came for me. I remarked on the apparent age of the elevator, and Charlie began—in a deep and measured voice, which wasn’t a drawl but carried traces of the South, like phrases of an old song: “The original passenger elevator was installed across the street. In the Haughwout Building. Built by old man Elisha Otis, in 1857. Without which, of course, the high-rise would not be possible. That and structural steel. Cast iron was the last-generation technology….”

  The elevator opened right into the living area, itself open to the kitchen. The furniture was plain. Everything in the tidy kitchen seemed to have been there for years. I didn’t see a single gleaming culinary gadget. There was no TV in the living room. Books covered most of the walls. I noticed some small African objects—carvings, bowls—on a shelf and a table, but most of all I noticed the wall that faced the street. It was all windows, large, old-fashioned double-hung windows that looked out on a grand geometric collage of rooftops and round wooden rooftop water towers and restored, imitation-Renaissance façades across the street. From Nancy and Charlie’s windows on a summer day, it was possible to imagine a Venetian canal.

  At the rear of the loft, in Nancy’s studio, the floor was rough unfinished wood. Several works in progress stood on the easels and hung on the walls, large and meticulous drawings that made me think of dreams, familiar as if I’d just remembered them—troubling dreams of cityscapes, where human beings had shrunk beneath monolithic architecture or been consigned to old, abandoned buildings. I thought of the building PEN, of course.

  Between the living room and studio lay the Black Hole, still intact, as if awaiting Deo’s return, as it always did await him. The photograph of his uncle still hung above the bed. The threatening email from the self-proclaimed member of PALIPEHUTU was still taped to the wall above the desk.

  Nancy and Charlie had moved into their loft back in the 1970s, when the building still reeked of printer’s ink from the factory below and SoHo was still block after block of derelict buildings and machine shops. A friend of theirs had told me that, unlike the neighborhood, their apartment hadn’t really changed at all: “It’s a time capsule, a mid-seventies SoHo artist’s time capsule.” Not that there was anything outlandish about them, but out on the streets in their evening clothes they seemed to me a little like time capsules themselves: blond, long-legged Nancy dressed like an art student, in sandals and worn corduroys, interesting earrings (with Russian constructivist designs on them), and a floppy Renaissance beret; and Charlie with a trimmed beard, and a plain Parisian beret perched on his gray hair. Convention, of course, has everything to do with children. For a married American couple of their era, not to have children was in itself a rather unconventional act, yielding ample freedom for other unconventional acts. And the lives they had led before Deo arrived had been unusual, even adventurous.

  Deo had told me Charlie was modest about his accomplishments. “You ask him, ‘What do you do?’ And he will say, ‘I wish I could know.’” Charlie got his Ph.D. in sociology at Princeton. He had taught at Brown University, Dalhousie University, the City University of New York Graduate Center, the University of Wisconsin, the University of Illinois, Carleton College, the Polytechnic University of New York University, and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, his alma mater. He had been the president or organizer, and on occasion the reorganizer, of various sociological associations. He specialized in what is called “social impact assessment,” the side of environmental impact assessment that worries about the effects of technology on human beings. Among many other things, he was a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and had directed research or consulted on various projects for the states of Mississippi and Washington, for the United Nations, for the Army Corps of Engineers, for Congress’s Office of Technology Assessment, and for the presidential commission that investigated the accident at Three Mile Island.

  Nowadays, Charlie worked mainly as a consultant, quite often in African countries. He called himself “a reformed academic.” I think by way of trying to tell me something about his adoptive father, Deo had given me an article Charlie wrote many years before. The paper was about Athens, Ohio, where Charlie had attended a conference called “Engineering and Society.” Charlie found events in Athens more interesting once he discovered that the town was in the process of diverting its river. He tried to interest his fellow conferees in the matter, with limited success. Undeterred, he conducted his own sociological investigation, reading documents, interviewing officials and citizens. He concluded his paper as follows:

  Did I, as instructed, “get the whole story”? There is no “the whole story.” What is the story in Athens, anyway? The short detour of a sorry river? Not at
all. It is the college and the town, the river and the road, man and nature, truth and beauty. Palpable though writ small, the story in Athens is the story everywhere, always: the human condition. If that is pretentious I do not apologize.

  When he and Nancy had first moved to New York, in 1977, Charlie had volunteered to take care of pruning all the publicly owned trees south of Forty-second Street. “I’m a country boy in my heart, and a country boy in my soul,” he explained. A bad bicycle accident had put him out of commission for a time, but he’d given up tree work only after Deo had arrived and had insisted that it wasn’t good for Charlie’s injured arm.

  The Wolfs had traveled. While at Brown, Charlie had taught a course called “Technology and the Moral Order.” His favorite student had been Ethelbert Chukwu, Sharon’s old family friend from Nigeria, now a professor of applied mathematics. Chukwu had invited Nancy and Charlie to help him get a new technological university started in Nigeria. They had accepted at once. They had lived in Nigeria, in the town of Yola, for two years in the early 1980s, and the experience had affected both of them strongly. Nancy remembered being driven for the first time into the remote northern part of the country. She had gazed out the car windows at the passing towns: open sewers, houses and stores with cinderblock walls and corrugated-zinc roofs, old tires and innards of automobiles scattered everywhere. She was reminded of the landscape she had known as a child when walking beside Route 1 in New Jersey. Off in the distance, though, she’d caught glimpses of traditional villages—round houses, smoke rising through the holes in thatched roofs. These seemed beautiful to her. Her first impression, of a society torn between tradition and modernity, lingered and grew over the next two years.

  In Yola, Charlie helped Chukwu get the new university organized and taught Nigerian students his “Technology and the Moral Order.” And Nancy taught art, feeling as though she learned more than she taught. “It struck me very forcefully in Nigeria that art wasn’t just something out there, a commodity that people bought. It was a part of everyday life, it was a basic necessity,” she later said. She got to know a lot of Nigerians. Their traditional crafts, it seemed to her, were providing the people with “a sense of order in times of chaos.” She told an art critic some years later, “I believe it is human to hope to find order and a connection between one’s soul and the world outside.”

  Clearly, they were a couple disposed to take chances and to look kindly on a young African. Deo’s neediness had been obvious. Nancy remembered, from that first time they’d met him, at dinner here in the loft, suffering through Deo’s attempts to speak English, suffering the way one suffers inwardly for a person afflicted with a stutter. On that occasion, she and Charlie hadn’t tried to tell him about their own experiences in Africa. Deo’s story was more interesting to them; besides, communication was difficult and, for Nancy, nerve-racking. She said that during the whole meal she kept thinking, “This man is so skinny! This man needs to eat!”

  At that dinner, Charlie said, he had sized Deo up as a “serious” person. From the way Deo had talked about his tortured country, Charlie had concluded that he had “depth.”

  Charlie had been in his sixties then, Nancy in her fifties. They weren’t young, and their loft, which wasn’t large, served as both Charlie’s office and Nancy’s studio. Years before, when Charlie was away teaching for six months, Nancy had shared the apartment with Lelia, later James O’Malley’s wife. Lelia had planned to look for another place once Charlie returned, but they all got along so well there seemed no point in this. “Stay on!” Charlie had declared. Lelia, helping out with expenses, had ended up staying parts of four years in the loft. So when it came to sharing their lives, the Wolfs had a precedent.

  Then again, Charlie told me, speaking of Nancy, “Worry is her natural state.” And when he said this, Nancy replied, “But it’s true!” Every argument for sheltering a stranger would have come with at least two worries about the consequences. One thing at least seemed clear, though: the Wolfs didn’t regret what they’d done.

  In their living room, we sat and talked about the time just before they’d first met Deo, when the genocide in Rwanda had been all over the newspapers and TV. The news had struck Nancy all the more forcefully because of the time they had spent in Nigeria. She thought of those years as the most important of her life. The troubled thoughts and feelings about the modern world that she’d been striving to express in her American pictures had all been magnified in Nigeria. For about a month, she and Charlie had been obliged to stay in safe houses, because of eruptions of factional violence near the university in Yola: some two thousand people had been killed. That memory had made the news of the Rwandan genocide seem near.

  “You had paid attention to what was happening in Rwanda,” I said.

  “Oh my God!” said Nancy.

  “Paid attention?” said Charlie. “After the fact, like everybody else.”

  “There was this footage on television,” said Nancy. “I’ll never forget seeing that.”

  “I was in Zambia, Tanzania, and Kenya in April 1994,” said Charlie. “And we didn’t hear the first thing. I never heard anything until I got back to New York.”

  By that time, Nancy said, she’d had her fill of hearing about slaughter on the radio and staring at footage of bodies floating down Rwandan rivers. “I had been watching it and listening to it, and I couldn’t even talk about it, I was so upset. I couldn’t even read about it. And so anyway, when Sharon called us about Deo, and then it turned out he was from Burundi, I of course didn’t know that Rwanda and Burundi had anything to do with each other.”

  Nancy hadn’t known that this young man had escaped a civil war and a genocide, until Sharon brought him to dinner: “She explained for Deo that it was the same process, that he’d been caught in all that. And then the other thing that was so interesting was that he said, or Sharon translated, that he was a third-year medical student in Burundi, but his father ran cows. And we knew cows from Nigeria, from the Fulani. We would watch the cows and the young boys and the shepherds go up and down the hills. So we knew that scene, and that seemed like a long way from medical school.”

  “But to look at the boys at the back end of a cow, directing traffic, and one of them could have been Deo,” said Charlie. “In Burundi instead of Nigeria. Just like on the street in New York today. I look at the delivery people, at the people working in the supermarkets. Almost all of them seem to be Africans.”

  “And you think, ‘Where did this person come from?’” I suggested.

  “And what kind of human potential does he have?” Charlie said. “Potential that is not going to be discovered, is not going to be expressed, is not going to be shared. So I think it really was … Well, we wouldn’t have stopped just anyone, or even Deo, on the street and said, ‘You look like a bright young chap, a likely fellow, why don’t you come around for dinner.’ No. No.”

  After meeting Deo, Nancy and Charlie had kept track of Sharon’s quest to find a place for him. On one occasion, the failures mounting up, they had told Sharon they would take Deo in, then called her back to say they couldn’t after all. Weeks had passed. Finally, Sharon had called to say she’d found a place for Deo—in a halfway house for recovering drug addicts and alcoholics. Deo could stay there so long as he went to group therapy, for problems that he didn’t have. “That was too much for us,” Charlie remembered. He had told Sharon, “Bring him down.”

  “Sharon was very, very persistent,” said Nancy. “She’s a very persistent woman.”

  When I first went to see Sharon at St. Thomas More, she told me she’d recently spoken to Nancy and Charlie. “They said that they had realized that Deo was the best thing that ever happened to them. They had realized this together, that this is the best thing that ever happened to them. Without children, you know, to have a real focus, I guess.”

  The phrasing interested me. Maybe taking Deo in hadn’t been entirely an act of volition. Maybe part of the truth was that Deo had happened to Nancy and C
harlie. If so, what happened to them first was Sharon.

  It was raining the day I first went to see her, at the rectory. Sharon arrived draped in a plastic raincoat, her shoulders bent forward under a backpack that was lodged under the raincoat. This image of her stuck with me—the raincoat especially, the cheapest kind one can buy. She was still a beautiful-looking woman, as she had been when Deo first met her, but now at a different stage of beauty, her skin still porcelain, her blond hair gone more decidedly white. A beautiful, spiritual-looking woman, utterly without pretense.

  She showed me around the rectory: the kitchen where Deo had deposited the groceries the first day they’d met, the mail slot where she’d found his letter asking for help, the basement room where she had sometimes shared her lunch with him and helped him find the clothes he hadn’t wanted to wear to the party that he hadn’t wanted to attend. When we went into the church proper, a voice called out, “You’re the best!”

  Sharon turned. A man was sitting in the shadows, in a pew at the back of the church. “I’m fine, thanks,” Sharon called to him. “Good to see you.”

  “She’s the best!” called the man—to me, I guessed.

  “He’s a drunk, kind of homeless, but he doesn’t want to talk about it,” Sharon whispered to me. We turned toward the altar. Sharon bought and arranged the flowers for St. Thomas More. Her latest arrangements reposed in giant vases on either side of the steps leading up toward the altar.

  I stared at the arrangements. I told her they were beautiful, and I meant it. “And you’re self-taught,” I said.

  “Well, actually as a child I started arranging flowers,” she said. “I would pick wildflowers. We had a list of chores. My brother would get to choose first because he was the elder. But I always wanted to go get some flowers for the kitchen table. And color, I used to see people as color, a person’s personality.”