PRIVATE FACES, PUBLIC PLACES : Tending Girls Who Fell From Grace

On a small street in Lincoln Heights, among the wooden houses with their fences leaning this way and that, the weeds untended in the yard, a brick building stands out. It is solid, sensible, strangely unafraid--there are so few bars on its windows, no locks or chains on the open door, no steel fence holding the street at bay. It is an announcement that those within are sure of themselves and brook no nonsense. The Salvation Army is at work.

The Booth Memorial Maternity Center is nearly 100 years old. Children of 11, 12, a few years older, unmarried, pregnant, homeless--once they were called “girls who fell from grace”--victims all. Some were in foster care, others are on probation, some beaten, others abandoned, the sad contradiction of young people with old eyes.

Capt. James Hood has his office by the back door. He is an engineer by training who once built cruise missiles and then tended the poor of southern India. White, kind, a good soldier, a strong heart. “We weep over the ones we fail.”

He is new here. He came from a village where women drew water at the well; he deals here with poverty amid plenty--and it comes hard. The girls are not comfortable with him yet. They have called him “racist.” They taunt him so because they know it will upset him and because his calm, good nature upsets them.

This is but a stopping place: What comforts now will be taken away later.

Along the corridor, babies sleep in the nursery while mothers are in the center’s schoolroom. There are pretty crib sheets, stuffed toys, gentle arms, a community of innocence. Visiting “grandmothers,” the lonely old who have found a place here, sit on deep armchairs, patting their thinning hair, chatting, humming, cuddling. A tiny girl in white, about 14 or 15, curls her body around her daughter’s, sleeping on the floor--something all her own, something to love.

Each mother and child has a room upstairs. School books lie by the crib, bottles, diapers, radios left on regardless, stuffed toys from unseen donors. And on each dressing table, on each night stand, the same arrangement of photographs--of mothers in heart-shaped frames that read “together forever,” of aunts, grandparents, sisters and brothers, of family gatherings.

Mothers who are still young women themselves, others dragged down with tiredness and life’s unremitting harshness. Mothers who threw them out, who stood by as they were beaten or abused, some who turned away from the knowledge. As if these children would be here if each dressing table fairy tale were true.

Which is the more cruel: to let them fend for themselves or to give them this impersonation of a family, a home, of caring, rules, limits, support, and then to take it away again by some state law with a numerical handle to it? Listen to them in the cafeteria over lunch, gleefully complaining about the food, teasing those who come in at 7 to wake them up, threatening to be “home” late, angling for a treat--as children coax a mother they can count on. And who will wake them in the grim reality of life alone? Who to put an arm around their slight shoulders?

And they know it all the time--deep down, and every day, they know that this is only a moment’s kindness. There are only three such homes in the city. They have already won the lottery, used up life’s softness in this spin. The older, wiser ones who work here see that terrible, implacable contradiction, and it tears at them.

In an office upstairs, Evelyn Ferrand--tired, endlessly knowing--thinks of her 12 years here. “I saw so much that laid so heavy on my heart,” she says. “Christmas Day and Thanksgiving, we offer to take them out to restaurants. They come back devastated. All they see are families.”

There’s the girl whose mother brought her up from Mexico and vanished back there as soon as she was pregnant. She will leave here with a baby, no family, no home, no money, little English. How will she manage? Another girl is here with her second baby; the first, said the official report, was a “crib death.”

“It’s just like your own kids,” says Evelyn, “you hope some of it sticks there. A 14-year-old child still with a finger in her mouth nursing a baby. And all the things that caused that. I don’t see a lot of times how they’re handling it all. I don’t know that I would have the strength.”

Somewhere north of Chinatown, beyond the flat tangle of roads and railroad tracks, the Salvation Army looks after the lucky ones, all 34 of them. And hopes the Lord will take care of the rest.