June nodded.
Tears welled up in Roberta’s eyes, but she kept them in check this time. Roberta swallowed hard and motioned us to follow her, her face a mask of misery. We walked past a roomful of people who stood in small groups, people who were chatting amiably until the kid had started howling. We were watched with curious eyes, but no one approached us as we made our way to a staircase.
That common room was the warmest-looking of the ones we passed through. The shelter had been converted from an abandoned military warehouse and office building. The living quarters had been divided into roughly two sections, one for women and children, the other for men. A food bank, job training, and other services were carried out in common areas. There were Alcoholics Anonymous and groups for dealing with other addictions and problems meeting several times a day-you couldn’t stay at the shelter unless you were clean and sober.
The shelter had the look of most institutional buildings: cinder block painted over with thick coats of bargain colors, concrete floors occasionally covered with gray carpet that was not much softer, harsh lighting sporadically relieved by skylights and high windows, metal doors with shiny round doorknobs and scuffed kickplates.
And yet, here and there, someone had tried to make this fortress yield a little. Painted a mural on a wall. Put an artificial ficus tree in a corner. Taped up posters, some of which bore images of faraway vistas, though most were commercial reproductions of inspirational messages in pastel scrawls.
We turned down a hallway. Two men at the far end of it nodded and smiled at Roberta. “Tree planting tomorrow, Robbie,” one called out. “Guy from the nursery came through.”
“Great,” Roberta said. “We have some people working on improving the playground for the family center,” she explained to us.
As we passed a couple of open offices, I noticed the carpeting in them was thicker and less worn, but the furniture had the mix-and-match look of donated goods. A secretary looked up from a computer that sat on a battered wooden desk, saw Roberta, said “No messages,” and went back to her keyboard.
Roberta unlocked one of the metal doors and let us into her office. Neat but crowded, it had won the struggle against starkness. Fresh-cut flowers, four big chairs, a bright blue file cabinet, and a bookcase-all helped to draw my attention from the orange sherbet walls. But not much of the walls showed anyway; they were covered with drawings by children.
A range of ages and skills were represented, in colors dark and bright-as were the subjects depicted. I was first struck by the drawings of houses. Roberta saw me studying one and said, “Yes, children without homes draw houses.” Some of the houses were drawn with bars on the windows-safety or a prison? I wondered. There was a picture of a boy being stretched between a woman and a man, another of a tiny girl surrounded by four huge adults; there were pictures of Godzilla, of sharks with teeth, of boats on the water, of gravestones, of trees with big holes in them. Some depicted small figures crying big tears. Others were of hearts, flowers, smiling faces. More than one said “I love Robbie,”
In one corner, an easel and paints stood next to a set of shelves full of toys.
“Sit down, please,” Roberta said. She seemed to have regained her composure. “Mrs. Monroe, we were all very sad to hear of Lucas’s death. It there any way in which I can be of help?”
“I just wanted to see where he lived.”
“Of course. I’d be happy to show you around the shelter. It’s come a long way from what we started with, but there’s still a lot of work to be done.” She looked down at her hands folded in her lap, then said, “I will miss Lucas. I admired him.”
You’ve changed your tune, I thought, then became angry at myself for being so critical of her. She had actually helped Lucas, while I had only run from him.
“Admired him? Why?” June asked.
Roberta looked taken aback.
“I mean,” June said, “what made him any different from any other drunk that came walking in here looking for a handout? He was just another man that couldn’t make it out there, right?”
While I sat wondering why June Monroe had decided to lower the temperature in the room, Roberta said, “He was not a failure. He spent six weeks sober before he died. Maybe that doesn’t mean much to anybody who can pass up a drink, but to people like your son, Mrs. Monroe, that was a life-” Roberta stopped, color rising to her cheeks.
“A lifetime,” June finished for her.
“Yes.”
“Roberta,” I said, “Lucas told you he was working on something, right?”
“I’m sorry, Irene, everything he told me remains confidential.”
“But now that he’s dead-” I said.
“It doesn’t matter,” she insisted.
“My son talked to you?” June asked.
“Yes. But I’m afraid whatever Lucas said to me in counseling sessions is privileged.”
“Whose privilege?” June asked. “Yours?”
“No, Lucas’s. He never told me anything intending that others would know of it. Except in cases where I believe someone may be in physical danger from a client, I have to respect confidentiality. Lucas’s death doesn’t change the fact that he trusted me. It’s not up to me to judge what he would want others to know now that he’s no longer living.”
The silence which followed stretched out until I could hear the marching click of the second hand on Roberta’s quartz wall clock.
“When Roberta told me that Lucas had been missing,” I said, “I went looking for him. If not for her concern, I don’t know how long it would have been before anyone thought of searching for him.”
June Monroe nodded. “Thank you for taking care of my son,” she said to Roberta. “I would like to see where he stayed.”
WE MADE A BRIEF TOURof the shelter. It offered spartan but clean accommodations. A simple bed or cot- perhaps nothing more than a floor space on a cold night. But to someone living on the street, I suppose its hot showers and flush toilets made it look like the Ritz. It seemed it would almost be like living at one’s high school gym. There was no real privacy, and yet I could not help feeling that we were intruding in someone’s home, and was glad when we walked on to the dining area.
One of the men in the kitchen had been a friend of Lucas, and as he told June Monroe how much he would miss her son, Roberta pulled me aside.
“Thank you for sticking up for me, but I didn’t really search for him or even take very good care of him,” she said. “And I wasn’t very encouraging when you talked to me at Ben’s funeral. Of all the people who asked me about Lucas after that SOS meeting, I think you were the only one who really cared about him.”
“Who asked about him?”
“Oh, let’s see. Ivy, Marcy, Becky, and even Jerry and Andre.”
“Jerry and Andre? They weren’t at the meeting. How-?”
“The morning before Andre’s heart attack, Andre called and asked if Lucas was living here. I guess Lisa must have mentioned it,” she said. “She’s staying with Jerry, you know.”
“Shit. I didn’t realize that many people overheard us that night. And if word spread beyond-What did they want to know about Lucas?”
“How he was doing, why he was at the shelter, what had become of him, and so on.”
“What did you tell them?”
“Nothing. No one seems to understand my position-”
“No, you’re wrong,” I said. “I understand it. There’s a version of that in my business, too.”
“Of course. Your sources.”
“Right. It just makes it a little irritating when I want to know something and somebody
“It dies with him,” she said. “At least as far as I’m concerned.”
