Jean C. was locked in her apartment when a judge sent Tomás, the 52-year-old Nicaraguan émigré and self-proclaimed Sandinista, to the Harris County psychiatric ward.
Before he was committed, Tomás had taken to lunging at sidewalkers, not saying much, but nodding his head emphatically like a demonic llama. A voter drive led him to this trouble. It was just one idea among a gaggle of household activities Jean had proposed to the residents of Assumption House in her first days as the new house mother.
In general, Jean was indifferent to politics, but she thought it as good a time as any to practice enfranchisement. To her way of thinking, everyone in the house needed something to practice. She was newly returned to the halfway house, and Jean had emerged from her confinement in the brutal state mental hospital with gusto.
The first time she cooked for the house, Jean prepared French onion soup topped with bubbling hot cheese. One of the residents, a wraith of a man named James, complained he had burnt his tongue. Others nodded, they were all in the habit of complaining.
“Better too hot than lukewarm, James,” Jean said, and returned to the kitchen for the boiled artichokes and dipping sauce. The rest of the residents took the opportunity to leave the table.
“Well, Jeanie, that was interesting,” said Ruthie, mother of three, holding the tender heart of an artichoke by its stem, “But I can’t eat this. It looks like a brain.”
Ruthie had lived in the city for years, most of that time on the streets. She came from the country and never lost her Big Thicket way of speaking and thinking. Her two older children had license to cuss and spit almost anywhere, but if she caught them idling when there was work to be done, she’d clamp her stubby fingers around their wrists and pinch them hard enough to leave blue marks for days. It wasn’t natural being jammed up in a house full of strangers, with none of them caring to keep their bad blood to themselves. She had approached Jean in a cautious way, but they became fast friends.
Often, the sight of Jean’s big patchwork bag preceding her as she entered a room was enough to soften the effect of her way of speaking, which was, some said, a little full of herself.
That day when the bus from the state mental hospital stopped at the front gate, delivering her to Assumption House, Jean entered with long steps, like she was ready to buy the place. The state trooper on security detail followed, carrying her tiny blue suitcase into the foyer of the house, where he stood until she dismissed him with a wave.
She didn’t have her big bag with her then. That came later, with her disability checks and the cigarettes by the carton.
Even before she had been named house mother, people came to Jean in that capacity. She wore authority like a thick perfume. She was taller than most of the other residents of the house, men and women both, and she dressed in her own way, at once elegant and flamboyant. Her blouses and pants and her shoes spoke of austere taste, but her bright, parti-colored jacket and enormous handbag had a bohemian pizazz. In a short time she had come by a reputation for being kind and mostly fair. Jean didn’t give away her cigarettes too easily, but she gave them with a certain noblesse oblige, when she felt that she saw true need.
Sandy and White Paul hadn’t thought much about Jean’s ideas at first. One thing they suspected, she wasn’t going to be good for business.
Sandy was 22, one of the youngest long-term residents. She’d come up wild, zooming in and out of rehabs and sober houses much of her life. When she was a little girl, her father had been deported. Her mother walked out soon after that. These days, Sandy was all about getting that money and holding it down. So she said to White Paul.
Hot checks and theft of service charges followed White Paul from Milwaukee to a short stint in a Harris County jail, before his case worker sent him to Assumption House. Most of these street people hadn’t been anywhere. They couldn’t even manage to get locked up, but nothing was going to stop them from lying about it. They blustered and carried on, their burnt lips popping and sticking together, and every one of them came prepared to give up anything they had for next to nothing.
The constant stream of people coming in and out of Assumption House attracted a lot of street action. White Paul and Sandy had an ongoing interest in buying things from the street people. Smart phones, computers, fitbits, jewelry, and watches. White Paul and Sandy raked it all in.
White Paul had a hard face and tattoos on his neck. He had the muscle, but Sandy had the drive. A meanness overtook her when they got down to business. It didn’t matter who came to her, a big man or a weepy woman, she put them all up on the ropes. To White Paul, watching her watching them, she seemed compelled to drag out every deal until she saw the look of fear rear up in their eyes, and then some.
He’d jump into a bayou, if Sandy told him to do it.
There had been a Black Paul, before, the de facto intellectual of the house, but he had since moved back with an ex-wife. He’d been popular in the house. Gregory was quick to say, by way of supporting Jean’s new mandates, that Black Paul would have been in favor of them all.
One day, Jean took Sandy aside. “Now, Sandy,” she said, “I can’t help but notice you and Paul out there on the sidewalk every day.” Sandy braced herself, as Jean continued, “I worry that it might be dangerous for a young lady. What if we found you a really nice job somewhere?”
Sandy bit her tongue, but Jean didn’t notice this. “How would you like to work at the makeup counter in one of the big stores in the mall?” Jean smiled. Sandy was mortified. Jean went on, “I think you would be good at that. You have such an outgoing spirit. I’ll ask around.”
In the end, Sandy played along. Days later, Jean found her outside whapping a sad looking man in the head with her sweatshirt. There was going to be a job interview.
Sandy hid her surprise. It was as the older woman had promised. At the fanciest store in the mall. Thereafter, Sandy exercised great care in ducking Jean’s invitations. Invitations to go shopping. Invitations to practice putting on cosmetics. Sandy wasn’t about to encourage her. Jean lived in the halfway house, same as her. When the day came, Sandy wore her usual sweatshirt and leggings to the interview. It didn’t go well.
The house had once been full of women like Jean, with all their proprietary ambitions. Mary Knibb Guidry founded the Our Lady of the Assumption House for Men and Women in the late 70s on a gift of property to Catholic Charities. Under their aegis she had managed it since then.
It tickled Mary Knibb when people assumed, as they often did, that she had a vocation. In fact, she’d married a bit of a dud. At his early death in middle age, he left her almost nothing by way of a legacy beyond the few idle properties on this one piece of land.
Mary Knibb was a born widow. After her husband’s death, she moved into the tiny bungalow duplex that stood between what would soon become the big house, the 19th century plantation-style mansion that served as a residence for women and their children, and the men’s house. There she had remained, all these years, a tireless presence. She kept the doors open and the houses as clean as the constant foot traffic allowed.
Most of these years had been good to Mary Knibb. She was a natural collector of people, but lately people seemed harder hit. They traveled less. They suffered more. In place of life stories, they offered only long sequences of pain.
Tomás had a shyness that no one could ignore. It was embarrassing, the way it wrapped around him and got caught on things like a long scarf. He stationed himself at a post just outside the tall front gate where he stood, much of the day, his body frozen up to his long, bobbing neck. One day, Gregory came upon him there and asked him if he ever got hot standing outside all day. He wasn’t wrong. The summer heat was fit for welding. Tomás surprised him with an answer, “Better hot than warm.”
The afternoon they named her house mother, Jean hugged her roommate Dolores and moved her big, colorful purse, her little bag, and a fondue set she’d picked up at the Lady’s Guild into her new lodgings in the duplex next door. Before she’d even unpacked her things, she petitioned Mary Knibb for permission to keep her two school-aged daughters with her on weekends. Jean had only seen them a few brief times since her release from the hospital.
Mary Knibb said that she’d run it by the rest of the house, seeing that Jean’s daughters had a home, after all, while so many people did not. Mary Knibb could not appear to give anyone preferential treatment.
Jean was optimistic. No one would object to a mother seeing her daughters. She began to make plans for when her girls arrived. What decorations she would buy for the little apartment. What she would need for extra bedding. The special dinners she would cook. All the places she would take them.
On his bullish days, Tomás began to act as a lookout for Sandy and White Paul, in return for trinkets. Most of the time, though, he leaned against a lamppost, lifting his eyes only to nod at passing buses.
Before Jean’s arrival, Ruthie had been known to disappear from the halfway house for a few months at a time. She would set up camp with her three children beneath an underpass. It was a hard life, with a different kind of boredom, but she often heard it calling her. Her youngest daughter, not yet two, was much funnier than her older sister and brother. Ruthie couldn’t help but wonder if they had turned out somewhat stupid. Jean assured her that it wasn’t her fault, but Ruthie felt repentant. She vowed to keep them there, under a roof, as long as she could stand it. Maybe the stupid could be reversed.
A few of the long-term residents remembered Jean from her previous stay at Assumption House. She had had little to say then. She’d spent most of her time shut inside her room, avoiding the other residents.
In a push to rally the house behind the voter drive, Jean had taken the trouble to print out literature. On a few occasions she had devoted house meetings to discussions of the basic points of democratic process. Nonetheless, it didn’t take off. She let it go. Her mind moved on to sunnier projects. She had a long stretch of lawn in mind to convert into a vegetable garden. She’d fill the house with lavender and tomatoes and azalea blooms.
It flummoxed Mary Knibb when a resident first spoke against Jean and her request to keep her daughters with her on weekends. She pleaded Jean’s case after that. But there were more objections. While Jean was well-near unassailable, in the minds of many of her fellow residents, her ideas proved divisive. People in the house had a way of doing things. They did their chores, they smoked their cigarettes, they watched television. They didn’t want to go with her on the walking tours of the city that she proposed. They didn’t want to learn French. They had no interest in trying new foods. There wasn’t time in the day for endless meetings and projects.
Drugs were forbidden at Assumption House, as was alcohol, but some days wanted prodding. Many of the residents were known to bend the rules. James, a washed-out former high school teacher, bore all the signs of advanced cirrhosis. His creaky voice was seldom heard. His hands creaked too, but he kept them busy, from morning til curfew, smoking outside. Even Jean had nothing bad to say about a little drink now and then.
Mary Knibb wondered if she was getting light-headed around Jean. She found herself wanting to go along with almost everything the woman suggested.
She wanted to fill the house with Jean’s daughters. With Jean’s nieces. With as many Jeans as she could find, instead of these broken shells the case workers brought to her doorstep, hour after hour. Some of them, it seemed to her, lacked faces. Of course they possessed eyes, ears, and noses, but there was less of an individual principle holding these parts together. You could still get some of them to open up, but it was getting to the point where it was like cracking open a pecan shell and finding it missing a lobe.
The first time the police remanded Tomás into Jean’s care, they were nice about it. In fact, they were laughing as they told her how they’d picked him up. A pastor ratted him out. Tomás had been accosting churchgoers while they assembled for donuts after service. Jean thanked the police officers for their understanding, and waved Tomás inside. Jean didn’t think it necessary to inform Mary Knibb about this minor contretemps. After all, as it was her idea that had inspired him to act, it was up to her to reprove his overzealousness.
Jean didn’t think much of Tomás before his arrest. His communist sympathies crackled in the muddle of his head the way NBA draft picks and gas prices worried most men his age. He was small and fair-skinned, with an enduring glow of mild brain-damage that belied his age. That slight appearance of his, and the fact of his being here in the United States, when Nicaragua was in tatters, gave her reason to suppose he came from money. Not that she preferred moneyed people over the poor, but Jean tried to be careful in her dealings with people whom she took to be fragile.
“Tomás,” she said, “we don’t harangue people. We may address them, when the time is right, but never harangue them. However,” she said, “You showed verve, and verve is its own reward.” As an additional reward, she gave him an entire pack of cigarettes from her carton.
The day came too soon for Mary Knibb when she had to tell Jean she was sorry, but Jean’s daughters wouldn’t be allowed to stay overnight. Mary Knibb wished she had just said yes in the first place. ‘If there was anything I could do,’ she wanted to say to Jean, but of course she couldn’t say that or anything else. Jean’s daughters could visit her whenever she liked, she repeated, they just couldn’t stay there entire weekends.
Jean didn’t argue. After Mary Knibb left, Jean spent the rest of the day locked inside her apartment. She didn’t join the rest of the house for dinner. She smoked one cigarette after another indoors, which was against the rules. The next morning, though, she appeared again, around midday. She exited the front gate, and made her way around the corner to where business was being done. There she found Sandy and White Paul.
“Fuck you, Sandy, and fuck your pimp boyfriend.”
Neither of them offered a reply. Jean returned the way she’d come. Once the door closed behind her, it stayed closed. She didn’t open it to Ruthie, or Mary Knibb. Jean returned to the big house for breakfast two days later. She didn’t say anything out of sorts. She went outside to smoke. She did what she could to help Ruthie’s older children with their attempts to learn how to read. And that was it. The extra activities and house programs came to a standstill.
The residents found other reasons to complain. Dolores said she was tired of being hassled on her little walks, especially as the worst of it happened on their block. Gregory noticed the cigarette burns that appeared on his laundry. James insisted that someone was tampering with the thermostat in the men’s house every night. Who could sleep in such heat?
White Paul was not a monster. Sandy was not a monster. Maybe they were worried they had stirred up an anthill. They each spoke to Mary Knibb, privately. Although they hadn’t been the only ones to speak against Jean, it was enough to Mary Knibb to hear they’d changed their minds.
She had no designs on presiding over a houseful of informants. She brought the happy news to Jean with the addendum that the people who lived in this house were not nasty people. Jean’s daughters were welcome to stay on any weekend.
Jean didn’t ask for any explanation. The outcome was enough. She made plans to go grocery shopping. When her daughters’ spent their first weekend here with her, in her little apartment, she would feed them filet mignon.
In its first few decades, the halfway house bustled with volunteers. The carriage house had doubled as a classroom for adult literacy classes, macrame, and jazzercise. Year after year the state cut its budget for social spending. The church wasn’t doing well lately, either. Mary Knibb did what she could. The office in the carriage house contained a few older computers, a fax machine, and a bumper pool table, but no one used the room much anymore. Jean suggested they put together a house newsletter. Mary Knibb suggested a compromise. It occurred to her that she still had some resources. She acquired a television for the carriage house. Now, perhaps, the residents would spend less time arguing with one another over programs. The carriage house had purpose again.
Sandy and White Paul did all right. It didn’t hurt their business that the house sat midway between the bus station and a methadone clinic. Used to be, they pooled their money with Gregory, but he had lost their trust. He shared a room with Tomás, to whom he couldn’t help but show off a laptop he’d just acquired, the prize of all his loot. Tomás, being a commie, told Sandy that he was going to claim the contraband for the house. It made no difference, Gregory didn’t have enough sense. They shut him out of their concern.
After this, Gregory was at a loss for things to do. He was one of the few residents who didn’t smoke. He took to locking himself in the bathroom for long periods of time. There he’d stay, sitting on the toilet, staring out the window, or washing his face and hands, until someone knocked.
What Ruthie noticed first about Gregory was his skin. His face and hands were a smooth, creamy caramel. Her own face, her own hands were blotched and reddened from exposure. Her children were starting to share in her rough, sun-boiled complexion.
“Look at you, Gregory,” she’d say whenever she saw him in the courtyard, “Don’t you look nice?” Gregory wasn’t much of a talker, but he began to show his face outside more, little by little.
Jean liked to invite her friends to join her at a Vietnamese cafe a short walk over. She had it in mind to start up an informal salon. To start, its members all came from the house. Later, perhaps, she might bring in outside people. From the start, she had James in mind to join their party. He seemed like a natural philosopher, pensive and emphysemic, and she was excited to hear what sort of pensées he might contribute to the conversation.
One morning, she found James in the corner he preferred in the courtyard. Cinching up his arm in her own, she led him to her cafe, rewarding his acquiescence with her warm recollections of reading Descartes, Rousseau, and, of course, Blaise Pascal.
It was a bust with James. He just sat there with his shoulders slumped, doing his best to ignore Jean’s attempts to include him in their conversation. When he spoke it was worse. His thin skull, which looked so intelligent, shiny and strewn as it was with wisps of long white hair, housed nothing but complaints. Complaints against the roughness of his bed sheets and comforter. Complaints against his roommate. Complaints against Jean. Complaints against the house in general. Once James left, she shrugged and she and Ruthie returned to their idea of entering the residents of the house in a walk for charity.
The afternoon that she was mugged, Gregory found Jean seated in the middle of a sidewalk not far from the house. Her mugger had pushed her down from behind and run off with her big bag. Her glasses were smashed by the fall. She said nothing more as Gregory walked her back, but she held on to his hand until they arrived at her door. She didn’t join them in the big house for dinner that evening, or the next, but the dinner table was buzzing with sympathy.
She locked herself into her apartment once again. She didn’t open it to Gregory, who had since retrieved her big bag, now empty, not far from where he had found her. She didn’t open it to the police, when she heard them knocking this time.
The gears really got hold of Tomás, the second time the police picked him up. This time he had been screaming at the patrons of a Brazilian steakhouse. It wasn’t much of a crime, and they would not have been averse to releasing him once more into the care of Jean, but she hadn’t answered the door.
Tomás wasn’t long in jail; his sporadic raving soon got him before a judge. This judge committed him to a stay in the county psych ward for observation. That wasn’t enough to stabilize him. It was a long time before the chemicals sat right within Tomás.
Ruthie counted herself first among Jean’s supporters, and she stood up for her friend against loose talk, in particular the whisper campaign making its way around the house, that Jean had not been mugged at all, but had fallen on her face drunk, and made up the story afterward. No one could state it for certain, how it went down, and no one, of course, wanted to see Jean expelled from the house for drunkenness. But perhaps this would help to remind her that it was about time she handled her own affairs, and left the rest of them alone.
It surprised Mary Knibb when Jean approached her for an early advance on her stipend. It surprised her even more when she found out that Jean had not yet filed a police report, days after the mugging. To Mary Knibb, Jean seemed like she was stuck between channels.
Ruthie noticed a change in Jean She seemed subdued. Ruthie had spent countless hours with the woman, but they had never sat together, without words, as they were now, at the table in Jean’s kitchen nook. The room was decorated sparingly, with a few colorful things. She’d taped up several pictures of her daughters on the wall. A plate of cheese and crackers sat on the table. She had begun to work out something on a yellow legal notepad, but she hadn’t bothered to hide the box of wine on the counter, by a set of striped cups and a religious statue that had been repaired with glue several times over. The automatic coffee maker had been left on all night; the coffee in the carafe had burned down to a dark tar. A few small paintings hung on the walls.
She had never really looked at Jean’s face for any length of time before this. It was clear that the woman had been crying. Not recently. Her eyes were dry, but puffed out from exertion. Without its usual animation, her mouth looked loose. Her bright brown hair was showing strips of gray. Jean looked to have seen more trouble than Ruthie would have ever guessed. Energy was a camouflage. Jean’s apartment had been invisible to her, hidden by conversation, just as the pictures of fishing boats and European streets that hung on the walls of her apartment were disguised by busy paint strokes.
Jean would have offered Ruthie a glass of wine, but she knew the woman wouldn’t take it. She was serious about her sobriety. Out of respect for her friend, she abstained from filling a glass for herself, though she felt like it.
Ruthie felt a nearly imperceptible psychic pop. She could sense Jean’s eyes training on her own. She let her eyes wander to the many pictures of Jean’s daughters, taped up on the wall above the kitchen table.
“Are your girls coming here this weekend?” Ruthie asked.
“I don’t know,” Jean said, “I don’t think so. I haven’t called them.”
“Tomás is gone,” Ruthie said, “And the new guy, Andre. He’s a piece of work. He doesn’t speak English good. He doesn’t even speak Spanish. He ain’t never gonna catch a break speaking French.”
“French?” Jean asked.
“Well, I think it’s French,” Ruth said, “I think that he’s from Africa. Pretty sad, some of them Africans. They have it pretty hard over there.”
Jean nodded, and smiled, and apologized to Ruthie. She would call her daughters after all. Tomorrow, perhaps, they could mull over the idea of starting up language classes in the carriage house.