The Social Climber of Davenport Heights (8 page)

“I’d like that,” I said, surprising myself with the truth of the statement. “And maybe I could bring you…a fruit basket or gourmet cookies.”

A strange look came into his eyes, one that I couldn’t quite interpret. A moment passed, then he smiled.

“You know what you could bring me,” he said. “I haven’t had one of those Snickers bars in…Lord, I don’t know how long. They were always my favorite. If every time you come visit me you could bring me a Snickers bar, that would be real good. That would be doing real good.”

It seemed like a very small thing to ask.

T
HE NEXT FEW
days were not any easier than those that had gone before. I thought often of my afternoon with Chester. He had said I should wait for opportunities to do good. He’d assured me that they would come my way. I didn’t see anything like that on my horizon. But I kept my eye out anyway.

I was in the mall when a mother and daughter squeezed by me on the escalator. The woman sideswiped me with her shopping bag and then raised a disapproving eyebrow at me, as if the collision were my fault. I probably wouldn’t even have noticed the two, but the mom was half dragging the little girl along. The child was pouty and reluctant, digging her heels in at every opportunity. I remembered a million shopping trips with Brynn that were just that way.

About ten or fifteen minutes later I was looking through some blouses and I saw the little girl. She was wandering through the clothes racks, crying and calling for her mother.

I looked around, and being a lot taller, I could see her mother across the room rifling through some Anne Klein sportswear. Apparently, she hadn’t even noticed that her daughter was missing.

“Are you lost?” I asked the child.

She wiped her tears and sniveled out, “Yes.”

I took her hand and told her that I’d take her to her mother. Ordinarily, I would never get involved in anything with strangers, but as I
was
trying to turn over this new leaf, it seemed like a perfect opportunity to help. And the girl did remind me of Brynn when she was that age.

We wove our way through the maze of clothes racks and counters, and were just within sight of the mother, when the woman finally realized her daughter wasn’t with her.

She looked around frantically, and spotted us.

I don’t know what I expected. I suppose I thought there would be a polite thank-you and a happy reunion between the two of them. Nothing could have been further from the truth.

At the sight of us, her expression changed from anxious parent to rage-crazed she-wolf.

“Get your hands off my daughter!” she screamed.

Every person in the store went immediately still and then turned to look accusingly at me.

“I was just bringing her back to you,” I stammered stupidly.

The mother paid no attention. She raced over to us and grabbed the girl by the arm.

Instead of hugging her, she shook her by the shoulders and yelled, “What have I told you about talking to strangers!”

Feeling inexplicably guilty, I slunk away as inconspicuously as possible.

Days later when I repeated the story to Chester, he laughed out loud.

“I was thinking I was such a hero, saving the day,” I admitted derisively. “And then a whole store full of strangers assume I’m a kidnapper or a pedophile.”

“I’m so sorry,” Chester said.

“I guess it’s like they say. ‘No good deed goes unpunished,’” I quoted.

“Now, don’t start thinking that way,” he told me. “It’s important to try to do the right thing, even if it turns out differently than you thought it would.”

“So motive is more important than outcome?” I asked.

He was thoughtful for a moment and then shook his head. “Motive is not more important than outcome. But the truth is, you don’t know the outcome. You only see what happens today. A month from now maybe that mother and daughter are in another store and there is a real predator there. Because of what happened with you, the mother keeps a better eye on the little girl, or the child is less receptive to a person she doesn’t know. Or maybe nothing like that happens, but somewhere deep in the mind of that child is a vague memory of a person who helped her when she needed it. And so she helps someone herself. We can’t know the kind of effect we have tomorrow or next week or next year or ten years from now.”

“So,” I said, “we’re supposed to keep doing what we think are the right things and just assume that life somehow works out better because of it.”

Chester smiled, his eyes bright with humor. “I believe we call that faith.”

I wasn’t sure that Chester had the right of it, but I felt better after going to see him. Just talking with him made me feel less crazy about what I was trying to do. Chester had been there. Just like me, he knew what it felt like to make a promise. And he knew how important it was for me to keep it.

“Oh, I almost forgot,” I said, pulling a Snickers out of my purse. “As per your request, sir.”

Chester held the candy bar in his hands almost reverently. Then he got up and shuffled to the chest next to his bed. I
watched him carefully hide his treasure under a pile of papers, like a kid who feared that his treat would be stolen.

“I’ll save this for later,” he told me.

A couple of days later I got an e-mail from the Metro Realtors Alliance about a special low-income housing seminar that was being held downtown. They needed real estate professionals to offer individualized counseling to potential first-time home buyers. I checked my Day-Timer, rearranged a couple of things and replied that I was interested. Five minutes later my phone rang.

“This is a joke, right?”

The question came from Ann Rhoder Hines, chair of the Metro Realtors Outreach Commission. I had shared a passing acquaintance with Ann over the years, but we certainly moved in different circles. She was exactly the kind of woman I had worked very hard not to be. Like me, she’d grown up working-class; smart, motivated and ambitious. But she’d married young and wrong. Her husband drank cheap beer and puttered around at low-paying jobs, her children were hopelessly mediocre. No matter how much real estate the woman sold, no matter how many committees she served on, it was doubtful she could ever overcome those handicaps.

“It’s no joke,” I assured her in my most egalitarian-colleague voice. “I’ve cleared my calendar and I’m available to help that Saturday.”

There was a long pause at the end of the line. So long, in fact, that I became a little bit desperate to fill it.

“I’ve always intended to help, Ann,” I lied. “But I just couldn’t work it into my schedule before.”

I don’t think she believed me. But she was hardly in a position to turn me down.

“Do you even know anything about affordable housing?”

“Well, no, not specifically,” I admitted, then added on an optimistic note, “but it’s an area of the market that I’m very interested in learning about.”

Ann clearly didn’t believe that either, but she did say I could help.

I showed up promptly on Saturday morning at the Downtown Motor Lodge. It was an old and now infrequently utilized conference hotel on the interstate end of the business district. Graffiti-laden and grimy, it had all the decor ambience of a bus station. I was hesitant to even put my ungloved hand on the dirty doorknob. But I whispered a pep talk under my breath, promised myself a half hour of bath beads with whirlpool bubbles and ventured inside.

It wasn’t quite as bad as the exterior led me to believe. There was an old, musty smell about the place, the furnishings were out of date and faded, but the lobby appeared to be relatively clean.

A misspelled letter-board sign directed me to the appropriate room, where a dozen rows of straight-back chairs in the middle of the room faced a podium. Tables were set up around the perimeter bearing literature, some of it government issue, but mostly just advertising material from the various local Realtors. No one was bothering to look at any of it. The only area that seemed to have attracted any people was the refreshment table, which bore a coffeemaker, stacks of disposable cups, a big box of doughnuts and a pile of institutional paper towels in lieu of napkins.

Ann Rhoder Hines spotted me and immediately hurried in my direction. With every frosted-blond hair in place, she was dressed in a very nice-looking Dior that had been the height of fashion a couple of years earlier. Undoubtedly, she was buying her designers at the outlet mall. They carry all the
leftover merchandise at bargain prices. A lot of women in real estate feel as if they can get away with pretending that yesterday’s fashions are merely old favorites. Besides, in her end of the business, the clients didn’t know a Dana from a dog biscuit.

I, on the other hand, was wearing an outrageously expensive young designer called Q.T. The suit was gray and functional enough to be sold at Restoration Hardware. I picked it because I thought it might be best to look a little dowdy among the poor people.

“Good morning!” I called out cheerfully.

“You’re late,” was her rather cranky response.

I glanced down at my watch. It was barely fifteen minutes past the time I was supposed to be there. It hardly seemed worth mentioning, but I gave an explanation anyway.

“I had trouble finding a place to park,” I told her.

Ann’s expression was still disgruntled. “Didn’t you get my e-mail? I told you to park here in the back.”

Her suggestion was laughable. And I admit I did come out with a little chuckle as I shook my head. “Surely you don’t think that I should leave my new BMW in an open lot in this neighborhood.”

Apparently, she didn’t appreciate my humor. She certainly didn’t crack a smile.

“Did you at least read the material that I faxed to you?”

“Oh yes, of course,” I assured her, and it was absolutely true. I didn’t sell five million dollars’ worth of real estate the previous year by ignoring my homework. I would never attempt to do business being unprepared. I think Ann wanted to believe that I was an airhead who was successful because of my connections. Admittedly, I married for money and position, but I worked at my career. And everything that I had achieved, I had reason to be proud of.

“Are you clear on how the government programs operate?” she asked. “Most of your clients don’t even employ gardeners who could qualify.”

That was stretching it.

“I guess I don’t see much of Fannie Mae at the club,” I joked, referring to the nickname of the well-known affordable-housing foundation. “But I have a passing acquaintance with the old gal.”

My attempt at humor failed to lighten Ms. Hines’s mood, and I decided that she was simply the same cranky, dour, frustrated person I always believed her to be. A characterization that seemed to ring absolutely true as I met the other Realtor/volunteers and we were given our orders and assigned our tables.

Once the participants had taken their seats, Ann stepped up to the podium. Immediately, the persona presented was entirely different.

Ann Rhoder Hines had probably been a benchwarmer on the girls’ field hockey team at her high school. But in front of the audience seeking affordable housing, she became a cheerleader. I watched and listened with growing fascination as she made her presentation. She was a true believer. She spoke of the value and opportunity of owning a home with all the certainty and zeal of a faith healer in a revival tent.

Even I, who had been a joint owner of several homes in the twenty years of my marriage, found my heart pounding, my blood racing, my thoughts soaring with expectation.

I glanced around the room at the people assembled, feeling hopeful and optimistic that they would feel exactly the same. They were not regulars at the juice bar, but they were not panhandlers either. It was a room full of working-class citizens, much like those I’d grown up with in Sunnyside. I took some
comfort in that. They were basically just like me, I supposed. They put in their days, drew their pay and raised their children. My mother might have called them clean and well-mended. The men were in shirtsleeves. The women were wearing discount. They were mostly white, but people of color made up a third of the numbers.

These folks, according to Ann Rhoder Hines, were the salt of the earth, rock of the community, the foundation of American society. They deserved to live their lives and raise their children in a single-family, three-bedroom, one-bath that they could call their own.

I suddenly saw with great clarity what an opportunity for doing good this was. I should give up selling real estate to the people in my neighborhood and see that each and every person in this room, and all their friends and neighbors, had their own little pieces of the American dream.

When Ann finished speaking, there was a spattering of applause. I clapped louder than anyone, rising to my feet. I was so excited. I was amazed that I had avoided these seminars for so many years. I couldn’t wait to be a helping hand to the downtrodden in this honorable undertaking.

I sat eager and anxious at the table Ann had assigned to me, ready to sort through intake papers, tax records and qualifying sheets to determine lending possibilities.

To my dismay, most of the people who sat down at my table were very hard to help.

A very attractive thirty-four-year-old single mother certainly looked the part of the deserving home owner. But she’d had eleven different jobs in the last five years. She was twice divorced and had credit problems under three different names. Armed with a brand-new MasterCard, her plan was to get a big cash advance to use as a down payment.

An even more problematic situation was the four able-bodied adults, none of whom were related to each other by blood or marriage. Their thinking was that it would be cheaper to pool their rent money and buy a house in common. The legal complexities of such an arrangement had not even occurred to them.

Over and over I told people that they needed to get jobs or get out of debt or accumulate some savings. Sometimes I had to suggest they do all three!

Most listened to what I said, took an information packet and left, disappointed. I was beginning to lose heart.

Finally, Mr. and Mrs. Guerra and Mr. Guerra’s mother took seats at my table. I greeted them with as much warmth and enthusiasm as any potential client I’d ever dealt with. In truth, it was probably more. I often kept myself at an intensely polite but cool distance that gave me a psychological advantage, an advantage much needed in selling. Giving, I realized, didn’t require any such power.

“Good morning, I’m so glad to meet you,” I told them.

Mr. Guerra was short and stocky, in his mid-forties, with a full head of black hair, just beginning to gray around the edges of his face. Both he and his mother bore the distinctive semblance of locally indigenous people. The wife was more European in both facial features and manner. It was she who handed me their papers.