Composing a Life

of particularity in this impersonal space.
    Homeless women are lodged in a separate and smaller part of the building, which is entered through a different door. Even the professional visitors are asked to move quickly and discreetly through this lobby. Ellen commented that many of the women, unlike most of the men, are upset if they feel they are being observed. There are fewer women than men, a sharper sense of dislocation. We saw no women who looked simply ordinary or ordinarily drunk. “It’s a more disturbed group of women here than Rosie’s Place or some of the other shelters that take women,” Ellen pointed out. “Pine Street is a pretty daunting shelter for a woman to come to because it’s a wet shelter and there are so many men.” The women’s section upstairs acknowledges the women’s greater need for privacy; there are waist-high partitions around clusters of beds, curtains in the shower entries, and a multicolored supply of donated bathrobes.
    Pine Street has had a tradition of never turning anyone away in bad weather. If all the beds are taken, latecomers are allowed to stay in the lobby and sleep on the floors and benches. Men who are unwilling to shower can also sleep downstairs. Recently, the Inn has acquired additional space so that in the future it may not be necessary to admit guests without providing beds, but anything is better than the street in a New England blizzard.
    It is as if the goal of Pine Street were to make sure that these men and women are no worse off tomorrow than they are today; indeed, they start the next day clean of body and approximately free of vermin, having had dinner and breakfast and perhaps had sores or wounds treated or acquired a needed garment from donated supplies. The same night spent in the street might have meant illness or death by freezing or predatory human attack; women who sleep in the streets are raped again and again. But Pine Street (although it will direct guests to places where they can be treated for drug abuse or alcoholism) applies no pressure for reform. There are no pledges to take, no moral agenda to impose.
    Caring for others, and even caring for oneself, always involves commitment and always has a time dimension. Usually commitment goes in two directions. At Pine Street, the commitment of care is very brief and very primitive, hardly more than custodial, but it is still based on a notion of the value of persons and their freedom. The return commitment involves no more than observing a few simple rules of the house. Ellen referred to the Pine Street Inn as a “hi-tech shelter,” emphasizing the hot rooms and ultraviolet lights and the techniques to prevent the transmission of infections among so many ill-cared-for bodies. But Pine Street is more accurately a mass-production shelter, efficiently providing a minimum for those who would otherwise have nothing. At Project Hope, the relationship is more complicated and longer lasting and is built around a concern for the children shared by the nuns and the homeless mothers. Project Hope has a complicated ethical agenda that suggests a way of being in the world—responsible and self-supporting, able to give care as well as to receive it.
    The sisters divide the labor, but they live directly with their responsibilities, as parents do. “One of the things that internship teaches you,” Ellen commented, “though it’s funny that I would ever say anything that sides with being an intern, is what it means to take care of a patient. And what it means is that they need to be taken care of twenty-four hours a day. You learn that they are your patients and you are responsible. And, in some way, I think you really learn about illness, inside out and backwards and forwards, about what it means to the person, the family, the impact of all of it. Now, could you be confronted with that responsibility any other way? Probably. But I know one of the things that used to really rankle me was dealing with people taking care of patients who didn’t understand that they were in it for the duration, twenty-four hours a day. Nursing training is based on this model too. Oh, you go off and on shift, but nurses know how to take care of patients. They know that they are absolutely responsible. Occasionally, you get social workers who are trained somewhat differently and think that care is only needed from nine to five. I used to have trouble with that.” For Ellen, the conflict between motherhood and career came