What Sister Geraldine would have visitors understand is that it is not a matter of how much she gives to the people of Sunset Park but how much she gets back. The gift is their lives, she says: they trust us with their lives, and we offer them in return practical things like food and clothing, spiritual things like comfort and encouragement, hope, perhaps; sometimes we give them hope. But oh, what they give to us. Sister Mary Paul actually cried last night to realize how lucky the two of us are to be here. Don't think for a moment that these people are characterized by their poverty. They are wonderful people, wonderful. Maria. Tony and Ingrid. Rose and her six kids living in a car. Even Mallory. Yes, Mallory too, though I know you won't think so. Sure I love them. I'm supposed to love them as part of my vocation. But you can't love someone into life. They do it themselves. The process is slow but continuous. Sunset Park goes on and on. The work we do, it's not like your kind of work, not like most kinds of work, with beginnings, endings and neat hard lines. It's not like a story.
I MALLORY
The darkness has two colors: purple and gray. They float toward each other like ghosts in the hallway of Mallory's basement apartment. The darkness is absolute. Not even the walls are visible, until the door to the kitchen is pushed open and the apartment is cast in a cold silver, late afternoon light admitted through a single kitchen window. Three chairs surround a formica $ table standing flush against a wall. The seats of the chairs are torn open, exposing a brown stuffing. Beside one of the kitchen chairs a gas pipe juts straight up three feet where an oven used to be. Mallory explains he has no use for an oven; the hot plate on the sink is more than adequate for Michael and him. Beneath the sink all the drawers of the kitchen cabinet have been pulled out, leaving holes. In an aluminum pie plate on the table, cigarette ashes mix with the remains of a crust. The ceiling is water-stained around a circular fluorescent bulb. The walls are yellow, sallow in the darkening room.
"Why don't you turn on the lights, Mr. Mallory?"
"Saves money." He touches a finger to his forehead to indicate shrewdness. His small dark eyes look both cold and imploring.
"Where does Michael do his homework?"
"Here, at the kitchen table. I turn on the lights at night. Don't need 'em in the day. Don't need heat, either. You feel warm enough, don't you?"
Mallory's apartment has four rooms, but he rents out the front room to a Puerto Rican mother and two children. If that family wants to use the kitchen, or the bathroom at the far end of the kitchen, they must ask Mallory's permission. On the bathroom door Mallory has posted a sign: DO NOT USE UNLESS YOU CLEAN UP AFTER YOURSELF. Of the two other rooms, one belongs to Michael and Michael's mother Eileen. The other is Mallory's bedroom, nearly filled by a low queen-size bed with an upholstered maroon headboard into which a clock radio has been fitted. Above the headboard on a yellow wall hangs a huge novelty $1,000 bill, with Mallory's face where Grover Cleveland's would be. Beside the bed is a phone with a lock on the dial. "They want to use it," says Mallory, "they have to pay."