Telltale Hearts, page 25
“Seems like that’s all I do. Cough and cry, cough and cry.”
“Hmmm. That is worrisome. Okay, look, you were honest with me. Can I be honest with you?”
“Doctor, after seventy years, I can’t stand any beatin’ around the bush.”
I say to her reflection in the mirror, “I am worried that you have a cancer in that right upper lung. And I am worried that this lung cancer has grown through to this shoulder bone next to that lung and that this cancer is now pushing its way through your bone to your skin. And it’s really painful when it does this.”
She turns to try to look at me directly. I put down the mirror and roll my chair across from hers.
“And so, what do we do now?” she asks, her chin jutting forward in a show of courage.
“Well, now I wheel you over to x-ray to see if there is a spot or two or three in your right lung. And get x-rays of that shoulder too and of a whole bunch of your bones. In other words, we need to find out if my guess as to what is going on is right. As you know, I’ve been wrong before, so maybe I’ll be wrong again.”
“And what if you’re not wrong? Then what?”
“Well, either way, we’d need to get a piece of this lump and take a look at it under the microscope. If it shows you have lung cancer, then I think we would need to treat it with radiation. Radiation can shrink the tumor and reduce your pain. You’d take those treatments every day or so for a number of weeks. And sometimes we can add chemotherapy too. But that’s getting a bit ahead of ourselves.”
“I see.”
“Like I said, I’m here. And you’re here. So, let me take you down to x-ray to take some pictures of this beautiful lady. And let’s take this thing one step at a time, okay? Together. Let me just call my wife to let her know I’ll be getting home a bit later than usual, and then off we go.”
A MIDSUMMER NIGHT’S PROJECT
Summer 1969. Buffalo, New York. The Ferry Grider housing project. I am almost four years old. It’s hot. I’m wearing a wet, white tank top, unhappily sporting the fresh crew cut my father forced us boys to get each summer to avoid the louse-borne diseases that killed so many in his concentration camp.
“Typhus!” my father would spit out at us whenever I tearfully questioned him as to why he had to shave off our hair.
I am splashing with my older brother in the little blue, plastic swimming pool my parents had placed in the small, chained-in communal front yard. I am still wearing my cheap, but oh-so-special, Pro-Ked lookalike high-top sneakers, because I never take them off. Sometimes I stand on one foot atop the chains between the poles, trying to balance myself like a surfer riding a wave.
I was born and spent my early years in these housing projects. My parents, highly educated but newly immigrated, spoke five languages between them but could only afford federally subsidized public housing. My mother was scared of mentioning to others that she originally was from Chile. She had cried when, in 1963, as a young couple, they had moved here from Jerusalem. From the “Joyful City” of the promised land to the capital city of the Rust Belt. From her sunny apartment overlooking the Judean Hills—made from the glowing, off-white Jerusalem stone—to a sterile and garbage-ridden compound composed of red blocks of brick surrounded by other blocks of brick amid a sea of urban decay. For what? To pursue the American dream?
My father, ever since his liberation at the hands of US soldiers and his recovery from tuberculosis and hepatitis at the hands of US physicians, had vowed someday to move to America and become a doctor. A survivor of a world war in Europe in 1945 and an anti-Soviet revolution in Hungary in 1956, he had emigrated to the only country that would accept him: the young nation of Israel. But this was just a placeholder for him: just another war-torn country getting in the way of his reaching his ultimate destination—the land of freedom, peace, self-determination, and prosperity—at least for some.
So now we are in Buffalo. He is doing his residency training in urologic surgery and is rarely home. His take-home pay is $250 a month. My mother tries to fill the gaps teaching Hebrew part-time at the local Jewish day school, but they pay a pittance. So, we are stuck here for now. But she knows it is only temporary.
My brother and I jump into the little blue pool under the watchful eye of my Hungarian-only-speaking grandfather, a benign, silent presence in my early childhood. The sounds of televisions spill out from the windows above us, accompanied by the ever-present cigarette smoke. The night before, our parents had let us stay up very late to watch Neil Armstrong descend the staircase of Apollo 11 and step onto the lunar surface. My father had rejoiced, “This country can do anything!” Like many, I will never forget witnessing that moment in human history.
The other TV image I can recall—my earliest—is of the five overlapping rings of the Olympics accompanied by the majestic Olympics theme song. Mexico City. Black athletes standing with raised fists on the medal podium below American flags, the US national anthem playing. What was everyone so upset about?
A man and a woman yell at each other from our neighbors’ apartment, and I stop splashing.
“It’s Mr. and Mrs. Mills.… Just ignore them,” my newly buzz-cut older brother says, surprise-splashing me in the face.
“Not fair! Time-out!” I splash back hard and fast.
About once or twice a month, my parents would go out for the evening, leaving us boys under the tender loving care of our next-door neighbor, Mrs. Mills. The moment they left, she would plant her oversize body in the only soft armchair we had, just in front of the open kitchen of our small apartment. Always wearing her see-through nightgown and once-fluffy slippers, and crowned with curlers, she’d immediately light up in one hand and open a can of beer with the other. And do it again. And again. All this while balancing a big bag of orange Cheetos in her lap. That was her official babysitting posture. While I don’t remember her ever raising a finger to help us, I still can remember watching in awe as her pendulous skin would waddle each time that she lifted her right arm to take a chug of her beer.
But most of all, I was amazed by the void of her mouth, by its absence of any teeth, a dark and gaping hole encircled by an orange halo of Cheeto-dusted lips.
“Can you actually chew food with no teeth, Mrs. Mills?” I would ask, as only an almost-four-year-old can.
What she lacked in dentition was more than matched by the vocalizations that came out of that mouth.
She’d first take a puckered suck on the orange-dusted cigarette end and then growl, “I’d have no problem chewing you up, little boy!”
She terrified me.
And then there was Mr. Mills. He would make only rare appearances during our babysitting sessions, pounding on our door until his wife was able to rock herself back and forth enough times to gain the momentum needed to catapult herself from the armchair. Nearly falling forward off the chair, she’d just manage to right herself while somehow deftly placing her can of beer on the floor on her way up. Then she’d slip and slide over the linoleum floor to open the banging door. She’d stand at the threshold, blocking her husband from entering with one blubbery arm cast against the side of the doorjamb, the other on her hip. She’d just stand there and get an earful from him. His face red and full of pockmarks, his hair slicked straight back, his big shoulders and biceps bulging from his white T-shirt, his voice booming, he’d spew forth a jumble of slurred words from another edentulous mouth. All I could discern was that he was yelling at her. Had we been bad? Was she not supposed to be here with us? She’d yell right back, using words I couldn’t always understand. She’d slam the door on him, bolt it shut, and slip and slide toward the kitchen, stopping to pivot in her slippers before slowly backing into her armchair, muttering to herself in that incomprehensible language. We knew we were not supposed to talk to her after one of those screaming matches.
We were poor, for now. My older brother, jealous of the toys his school friends had, had begged my mother to buy him a Big Wheel, a low-riding plastic tricycle with an oversize front wheel and a hand brake on the right that would make you do a 360 if you yanked on it at top speed. On the frequent occasions during which we accompanied my mother on her shopping errands, he’d spend his time just staring at the Big Wheels in the discount department store.
After putting him off for days and trying to mollify him with indirect answers, she finally admitted, “Donny, I am sorry. We just don’t have enough money to buy you a Big Wheel. Maybe next year, for your birthday.”
Undeterred, he naïvely countered, “But why don’t you just go to Kmart and buy some money?”
I can’t imagine what my mother paid Mrs. Mills to watch over us, if that’s what you call it. A few hours here, a few hours there, perhaps a dollar each time, at most. Mrs. Mills was my mother’s go-to coverage, including during the day when she had to leave us to work her part-time job. As a result, our apartment—my bedsheets, my towels, my shirts, everything—always bore the unmistakable smell of Mrs. Mills. What I now recognize to be the stale stench of deep-seated tobacco residue and spilled beer, mixed with the sour odor of lifelong poverty, combined with a hopeless sense of entrapment. Those two people would never leave the projects.
WHAT ARE THE ODDS?
With some primary care heroics, I manage to schedule Mrs. Johnson to receive daily radiation therapy for stage IV lung cancer over the course of the subsequent weeks. But now I need to find a way to get her there and back with consistency. I gradually discover that many medical transport companies are averse to daily routes to and from the Sunnydale projects, because of both its isolation and—they tell me—the risk it exposes to their drivers and vehicles. I scoff. I go down the list my social worker gave me and speak to a representative that is movable on the issue, and after a personal appeal to her humanity related to reducing the horrible cancer pain that a kind little old lady is in, I get her to agree to supply Mrs. Johnson with the daily transport service she requires.
Two weeks later, I receive a call from the Radiation Oncology Department technician telling me that Mrs. Johnson has made it to only about half of her radiation treatments.
“She missed hers today. And since she doesn’t have a phone, I can’t ask her what happened,” she tells me. “I think the radiation’s been helping her with the pain, but not as much as it could. After the two-week mark, we tend to discontinue radiation treatment with this kind of noncompliance. It’s not benefiting her that much, and it’s a slot that we aren’t offering to another patient who could take full advantage.”
“Don’t go there, please,” I plead. “When’s her next appointment?”
She shuffles some papers. “Tomorrow at 2:00 p.m.”
“Okay. What do you think the chance is that she’ll make it tomorrow?”
“What is this? Are we rolling dice in Vegas?”
“C’mon, I’m just trying to figure out what to do here. I’m not gonna hold you to it.”
“I’d say two out of three.”
“That’s not bad. Please page me at 2:30 tomorrow. Either way. If she comes, I’ll come up and speak to her. If not, I’ll figure this out some other way.”
I search through her chart and confirm that she has no phone number listed. Instead, I find the phone number of the transport company, hoping to find out what’s happening from their perspective, but I can only leave a message.
At 2:30 the next day, the transport tech pages me. Mrs. Johnson is a no-show. I ask her to give me Mrs. Johnson’s home address, and I scratch it onto a piece of paper. I leave the hospital around 5:30, walk to the parking garage, and get into my sparkling new red Honda Civic hatchback. Instead of going straight home, I meander through the city streets in rush hour and slowly merge onto Highway 101 South toward the airport. I’m going to make an unannounced home visit in the Sunnydale projects.
RETURN OF THE GREATEST GENERATION
Over the years, I had gotten to know Frank Johnson and his war stories fairly well. And a bit about what happened after. When the twenty-five-year-old Frank returned from World War II as a victorious soldier, one of many in “the Greatest Generation,” he looked first for a job, then for a woman to spend his life with, and finally for a place to live in with her and their future family. He quickly scored on all three, first finding work as a barber in a local shop and then meeting a lovely girl, eight years his junior, in the same building he lived in. While he had found a small, low-rent, one-bedroom apartment in the Fillmore District, it was not the kind of place one brings a new wife to. So, he asked some of his war buddies and found out that Daly City, a small coastal city bordering San Francisco to its south, was a place where many returning veterans were making a fresh start, a place where new homes were popping up at very low cost for people just like Frank. And he was turned on to the newly formed Veterans Administration (VA), established under the GI Bill. He had heard that as a returning veteran, you could get a mortgage with help from the VA.
With two exceptions. First, the Federal Housing Administration, which helped to finance the development of Daly City, had enforced deeds with restrictive language that forbade the resale of property to Blacks. This 1950 covenant on property in Daly City is quite clear on the matter:
The property… shall never be occupied, used or resided on by any person not of the white or Caucasian race, except in the capacity of a servant or domestic employed thereon by a white Caucasian owner, tenant or occupant.
So, Frank looked to the east a bit—to South San Francisco. Not a new development, South San Francisco, known as the Industrial City, offered lower-cost houses that might be within their reach. Especially with the VA behind him to help returning soldiers with their mortgages. But the VA had also adopted racial exclusion programs enacted by the Federal Housing Administration and previously determined to be constitutional by our Supreme Court. Specifically, he discovered that government funds could only be used to insure mortgages for individuals who were not African American, including for returning veterans, irrespective of income, wealth, or assets. Without mortgage insurance, no bank would lend to a future homeowner. This represented a particularly insidious form of redlining, one sponsored by the state.
In essence, no African American could buy a home. And owning a home is the essence of the American dream. The consequences of these exclusionary housing laws and practices were not only felt in the short term but have had long-term effects. A house purchased in 1950 in a Daly City development cost around $15,000. In 2022, the average sale price of such homes is over $1.1 million. That kind of money and that kind of wealth can dramatically change the trajectory of a family. And when aggregated across families, it can transform the destiny of an entire community.
So—back to Frank and Beatrice. The couple had no choice but to stay in the Fillmore District, splitting their time between Beatrice’s family’s larger two-bedroom apartment and, when privacy was needed, Frank’s one-bedroom apartment. After holding off for nearly a decade so they could save up a little money, they had two children. Space was cramped and was a challenge, but they were happy. They were part of a vibrant community located in one hub of the city’s multifaceted cultural and social life.
But then, with the urban redevelopment of the Fillmore District, they found themselves one of the unlucky ones. They were displaced, along with Beatrice’s family. They had nowhere else to go but the Sunnydale projects, a development created at the beginning of World War II to house the influx of shipyard workers. That much I knew. But at that time, that was all that I knew.
PASSAGE INTO A FOREIGN LAND
I slowly crawl down Highway 101, leaving the city behind me, exiting the highway to my right just as Candlestick Park and the Bay appear over my left shoulder. The sun is setting behind the mountain range to my right, and the pastel-colored homes of South San Francisco appear in the distance. Dusk is settling in as I slowly wind my way up the long road to an open area filled with windswept, high, dry, and yellow grass. As I drive on through this eerie wilderness, I enter what can only be described as a large institutional compound. One dotted with rectangular, gray and yellow two-story structures made of concrete. Too many to count. Cell blocks almost. A corner store appears—the Little Village Market—what I later learn is the only store for miles. I see a woman exit the store, holding the hand of a boy who looks about five years old, his free hand trying to pour a bag of Red Hot Cheetos into his mouth as she drags him along. In the woman’s other hand is an open twenty-ounce bottle of beer and a lit cigarette. She glares at me as I drift past in my shiny red car, presumably a defiant response to my glaring at her.
I drive by cell block after cell block, repeatedly stopping to try to see the building numbers to orient myself so I can locate Mrs. Johnson’s building. There are no streetlights anywhere. Each time I get out of my car, a different man appears, stepping out from behind one of the cell blocks. They each wear a flat-billed baseball cap (is it the same cap each time?) atop a shaved head, and each is dressed in black and smoking a cigarette. They each look at me as if I need something, projecting a strange combination of threat and offering. I see two little girls on tricycles bumping their way down a garbage-strewn hill. Other than these two and the men that haunt the shadows of each block—these Sunnydale guardians in uniform—the streets are empty of people. Only a few beat-up cars dot the curbs.
A young man in a cap approaches me just as I am bending down to get back into my car. An unlit cigarette dangling from his lips, he gives me an upward head flinch.
“Whassup?”
I abort my entrance into my car and stand back up to face him.
“Yes, hello. I am looking for Mrs. Beatrice Johnson. I need to see her. I am her doctor. I work at San Francisco General Hospital.”
I flip him my hospital badge and open my bag to show him my stethoscope, as if somehow this will safely pave the way to the destination I am in search of.
“Yeah, Mrs. Bea. I know her. Nice lady. Keep goin’ and take a right at the end here. She in the second building on the left.”
