Rachel and Her Children Read Online Free PDF

the cuisine can be given than that the restaurants are filled daily with a patronage of the very highest order. The food is invariably good, the wines of exceptional excellence, and the attendance unobtrusive.”
    The building is said to tower over all adjacent structures, “furnishing views and a degree of light seldom secured in a city hotel. The sanitary precautions, plumbing, etc., are the most complete.” Prices for rooms, according to the brochure, were $3.50 a day for room and bath, $6.00 and up for bedroom, bath, and parlor.
    Prices are higher now. The patronage has changed. The Louis XVI dining room with its Circassian walnut and silk tapestry is gone. The Italian marble, however, is still there. The attendance remains unobtrusive.
    December 20, 1985: Heavy chains secure the doorway of the former ballroom. They are removed to let a dozen people enter at a time. The line of people waiting for their lunch goes back about 200 feet. In the semi-darkness I see adults trying to keep children at their sides. Some of the kids are acting up, yelling, racing back and forth. A few are sitting on the floor.
    This is the lunch program of the Coalition for the Homeless. Meals are served to residents five days a week.The program is organized by a young man named Tom Styron. He has enlisted the help of several women living in the building. Because I have come with him today, he has enlisted my help too.
    One of the women sits by the door and checks the names of those who enter. Another woman helps to serve the food. The room is so cold that both keep on their coats. One has a heavy coat. The other has an unlined army jacket. She is very thin, a Puerto Rican woman, and is trembling.
    I watch the people coming to the table. The children don’t avert their eyes; nor do the women. It is the men who seem most scared: grown men in shabby clothes with nervous hands. They keep their eyes fixed on the floor.
    The meal is good: turkey, potatoes, raisins, milk, an orange. It would be enough if it were one of three meals to be eaten in one day. For many, however, this will be the only meal. For an adult who has had no breakfast, this is at best a pacifier to fend off the hunger pangs until late afternoon.
    Many of the children have on coats and sweaters. After they eat, some of them come back to the table, timidly. They ask if there are seconds.
    There are no seconds. Several families at the back of the line have to be turned away. In my pocket I have one enormous apple that I bought in Herald Square for fifty cents. I give it to a tall Italian man. He doesn’t eat the apple. He polishes it against his shirt. He turns it in his hand, rubs it some more. I watch him bring it back to where he’s sitting with his children: one boy, two little girls.
    The coalition buys the lunches from the New York Board of Education. The program therefore does not operate when school is not in session. Christmas, for this and other reasons, may be one of the most perilous and isolatedtimes for families in the Martinique Hotel. Christmas is a difficult time for homeless families everywhere in the United States.
    It will be 1986 before these people are assembled here again. As they get up to drift into the corridors and cubicles in which they will remain during the last week of the year, some of them stop to thank the people at the table.
    The Martinique is not the worst of the hotels for homeless families in New York. Because its tenants have refrigerators (a very precious item for the mother of a newborn), it is considered by some residents to be one of the better shelters in the city. In visiting the Martinique, one tries to keep this point in mind; but it is, at first, not easy to imagine something worse.
    Members of the New York City Council who visited the building in July of 1986 were clearly shaken: “People passing by the hotel have no sense of the tragic dimensions of life inside. Upon entering the hotel, one is greeted by a rush of noise, made in