Tweet
The New York Times
December 12, 2004 Sunday
Late Edition - Final
Bowed by Age, Battered by an Addicted Nephew And Forced Into Begging
and Despair
By N. R. KLEINFIELD
They went out late. It was ugly weather. Six below zero in the
Brooklyn night. Wind took garbage into the air. A blizzard was in the
forecast. It was Lincoln's Birthday, 2003, in Brighton Beach. Not a
night for humankind, but the sisters, one 73 and the other 70, didn't
get holidays off, didn't get snow days.
In years of miserable low points, it was one of the lowest. As they
had done the day before and the day before that, Lillian and Julia
hobbled out to Coney Island Avenue, a lineup of chromatic
storefronts, to beg from strangers in their cars. They were known out
there, regulars among the mendicants. The money was for their bilious
nephew and his crack habit, their own blood who was smoking up their
lives. He had already cost them their house, their savings, their
dignity. ''I need one more,'' he would tell them when he desired a
hit, ''one more.''
Not comply and he would fly into crazed tirades, blacken an eye,
bruise their ribs. It had been this way for years, since their lives
stopped being comprehensible.
It was always a dice-toss what they got when they panhandled, but
what odds did they have on a brutal night like this? They had just
started their grueling shift when the police herded them home. Now
what? He was rambling around, that glazed look in his eyes. No money
in the house. No food. Despondent, Lillian told Julia she was going
over to the hospital, to sit all night in the waiting room. She had
gone there before, a temporary sanctuary during her black hours.
It had gotten to be 3 in the morning. She craved a coffee, so she
re-entered the cold, tried one car and heard the whoop-whoop of the
police again. She pushed on home, back to her sister, to that dour
apartment, with all that was wrong. And they slept without dreams or
any notion of a tomorrow. Soon would come the frosted Brooklyn dawn.
Then he would send them out again to the cars and the strangers.
It is called elder abuse, the polite rubric for crimes against the
aged, the neglected stepchild of domestic violence and child abuse in
the triangle of human violence. It is one of the more brutal yet
poorly understood plagues -- its prevalence vague, its precise
definition elusive. Even the National Center on Elder Abuse, a
nonprofit Washington clearinghouse, feels studies are too
indeterminate to hazard a sound guess at its actual, quantifiable
toll.
No one doubts, though, that the abuse is real and intensifying. It
comes in many guises -- the elderly aunt routinely roped to her bed
by her caregiver while game shows run on the TV, the wealthy
grandfather systematically plundered by his sharp-mouthed grandson,
the old woman pounded by her son because they can't agree on whether
to keep the window open. It cuts across class and neighborhood. It
can last one traumatizing afternoon or persist for decades. It is
driven by demographics and the human capacity for malice.
There are indisputable hints of its chilling dimensions in an aging
population of more potential victims. In 1998, the city's Department
for the Aging undertook a subway campaign for a month, all that it
could afford, alerting people to the problem. There was a 300 percent
increase in calls, overwhelming its ability to investigate them. The
campaign was not repeated.
Criminal cases are occasionally made, attaching some real names to
the horror. In Manhattan, the 69-year-old woman, hospitalized with
kidney failure, whose younger sister gambled away her $45,000 in life
savings in two days. In Brooklyn, the 79-year-old woman killed when
her deranged grandson planted a knife in her neck, his only
explanation being that she spoke some words he didn't much like.
When the abuses happen, there is little to stop them. An Elder
Justice Act to funnel federal support to combat the problem and
heighten consciousness has been lingering, unacted upon in Congress.
The city has an agency, Adult Protective Services, but it is limited
by law and capacity in what it can do. Senior citizen centers and
nursing homes have their numbers to call. Specialized units formed by
prosecutors take stabs at it, but they are usually understaffed.
In Brooklyn, Arlene Markarian heads the elder abuse unit of the Kings
County district attorney's office, and she points out that it is a
success story when she even hears of an incident. She dealt with 200
cases in the most recent year. There are 400,000 elderly people in
Brooklyn. ''I'm not an idiot,'' she said. ''I know there are a lot
more.''
The police and family members and neighbors and social workers and
doormen -- all of these might act as a prevention force. But they are
confounded by the contours of the problem. A beaten child reports to
school and advertises his torture. The elderly are often not seen. So
many wallow in dementia and can't be heard. They fall a lot, and so
their lumps are explained away.
And it is a crime where victims don't tell, a messy crime with a
potent psychological undertow, for it involves shame. Many older
people endure the abuse and accept its rules, because they feel
devalued enough in a youth-worshiping society. Why volunteer that
they are powerless to run their affairs, that their own flesh and
blood is stealing their money and slapping them around? Elder abuse
locates its targets among the isolated and marginalized, and it
twists love into a tool of manipulation and secrecy.
''There have been 16 murders in Brooklyn since 1999, when I began
doing this,'' Ms. Markarian said of elder-abuse killings, 14 of them
by younger relatives. ''In only one case did anyone call the police,
for anything.''
Elder abuse, then, is a crime speeding well ahead of its solution.
Lillian and Julia lived elder abuse in one of its more virulent
strains. There are multiple vantage points on their story. There are
those of Lillian, now 75, and Julia, 71, as well as those of police
officers, social workers, relatives, caseworkers, prosecutors and
Frank, the abuser himself. All of them cooperated in recounting the
case. The sisters did not want their last name used, for they are too
ashamed of what their nephew did to them. As Lillian put it, ''I
don't want everybody knowing our business.''
But they want their story told. They want others to understand how
easily it can happen to them.
>From the outset, they did not ask for much. Not even before it
started, back when there were still other possible outcomes. All they
wanted was a calm life in Brooklyn, a life that would start there and
end there, and maybe see a dash of dazzle in between. As Julia said,
''We're not big dream people.''
Their mother was a homemaker and their father a bottler at the
Schaefer brewery, and there was a younger brother named Joseph. They
lived in a plain three-bedroom home in Flatbush, a working-class
family, house-proud and content.
After high school, the sisters drifted into their careers. Lillian
worked as an assistant manager in the personnel department of a law
firm; Julia was a filing clerk at an accounting company.
They were different people; everyone saw that. Lillian was airy and
spunky, quick to speak her mind. ''I'm a big girl and I've got a
mouth to match,'' she liked to say. Julia was bashful and quiet, but
with a flicker of dry humor.
They lived with their parents and then kept the house as theirs after
their parents died. Early on, they figured out the particular
calculus of their lives, that they were fated to travel through the
years together, see the joys and heartbreaks as one, and hope there
were more joys.
Julia imagined getting married and having five children, but when she
saw friends' children who strayed, she was thankful for her freedom.
Lillian attracted her share of suitors, but they were temporaries, no
Mr. Perfect. ''We both had our chances,'' Lillian said. ''I kept
saying I'm still young, I've got time. Time had a way of running
out.''
They became active in the Catholic War Veterans, and it served as the
linchpin of their social life. Every Tuesday, they went bowling. One
year Lillian got handed the worst-bowler award, then picked up her
game. Neither bothered to learn to drive. Lillian took a few plane
trips out West, but Julia refused to fly, didn't want to risk it.
They found enough in mundane pleasures.
They split up the labor. Lillian did the cooking. Julia wrestled with
the cleaning and the wash. Their money was pooled, both names on the
accounts. There was this lunar pull between them. ''We'd have our
differences,'' Lillian said, ''but never anything that a half-hour
later we wouldn't be talking to each other.'' In many ways, they were
more one person than two.
For their old age, they resolved to save their pennies and stay put
in Brooklyn, dine out nicely now and then and see some movies, live a
predictable, quiet existence. It was a small future, perhaps, but big
enough for them.
It Begins to Unravel
It was in 1979 when Frank's story became their story. He was 17, his
own life empty, and they took him in. Frank, their nephew, Joseph's
son. Here was when everything began to unravel.
His pathology was not unfamiliar. He came from a broken-down
childhood in Staten Island. There were claims of relentless abuse by
his unstable mother -- hit, pepper thrown in his face, tossed out in
his underwear to sleep in the stairwell. His father, a drug user, let
it happen, Frank said. When he was 11, he began smoking marijuana,
shoplifting meat and stealing bicycles to buy the weed. There was an
interlude in West Virginia with a man from the neighborhood who
befriended him. The man dropped dead of a heart attack. Frank's
father had fled. Frank despised his mother. His aunts gladly opened
their arms.
His mother tells it differently. Disputing multiple family witnesses,
she said Frank had had a good childhood. She said Frank hit her. She
said her husband, long divorced from her and his whereabouts unknown,
was rotten, told Frank to beat her. His mother had not another word
to say.
Frank found a job pumping gas. He bought a cheap boat and fished for
bluefish. He chased women. For a long time, it was just three people
living.
The accident was a point in time, and it was a point that they would
always come back to. He was 31 and had become a Roto-Rooter man,
unclogging drains. One day, he said, he stumbled on some basement
steps and wound up with a crushed disk. He got hooked on prescription
pain pills, ''taking the pills like the Mad Hatter,'' as he put it.
This made him nasty. He demanded money to feed his addiction. He
would ask for a twenty, just this once. In that way, it started. It
started small, as abuse usually does, a snowflake that becomes an
avalanche.
Soon he kicked the pills and switched to cocaine. Soon a twenty
wasn't enough.
He squandered a $50,000 insurance settlement. He found work driving
for a car service -- sometimes high -- but it never paid enough for
his needs.
The sisters had swept him in out of pity, doted on him to excess, not
knowing then what they were beginning to know now. As Lillian put it
much later, ''We should have left him on the street.''
The mathematics were not good.
In the mid-1990's, Lillian and Julia retired from their jobs. They
began living off modest pensions and Social Security, some money
Lillian picked up working as a companion at a nursing home, enough
for their life, but not enough for a drug life.
Frank graduated to smoking crack, sometimes calling it by its slang
name, the devil's dandruff. He was trying this drug business on,
getting used to it.
''One more,'' he badgered them when he needed money. ''One more.''
He was a burly man, thinning hair, a long face, a coiled spring
inside him.
His demands led, as they so often do, to violence. He would push
Julia around, slap her across the face. Give him the money!
Lillian, with her tougher crust, he did not hit, not yet. Many times,
she would bark at him, ''Get out,'' and he would shout at her, ''When
I'm ready.''
There were enough good moments, too. He would purr sweet things to
them and win them over. Lillian admitted, ''He had the gift of the
mouth.''
The sisters took out a mortgage, plowing some of it into repairs,
keeping the rest in reserve. Quickly, he consumed it, then their
savings. They began missing payments.
Lillian said: ''It got to where we couldn't pay this bill, that bill.
It got to the point where we didn't care anymore.''
By the fall of 2000, they warned Frank that the house was in
jeopardy, but he dismissed the possibility.
And back here, the outside world, the system, was put on notice.
Neighbors heard shouting, spotted bruises. An anonymous call alerted
the city's Department for the Aging that two sisters were being
abused. The matter was farmed out to a well-intentioned social worker
named Diane Baumgarten, who oversaw a new elder abuse program in
Brooklyn for the Jewish Association for Services for the Aged.
She called the house. Lillian picked up and told her that her nephew
hounded them and was causing them to lose their house. But she said:
''Don't come over. Please do not come over. I don't know how he will
react.''
Ms. Baumgarten had come to understand the peculiar paralysis of elder
abuse, about how daunting it was to get victims to complain. ''You're
dealing with embarrassment and shame on so many levels -- the
embarrassment of the police coming to the home, of the neighbors
seeing this, of people thinking we didn't raise this person right,''
she said. ''Instead of their feeling like the victim, they feel like
the perpetrator. Instead of their seeing what he did to them, they
think, look at what I'm doing to him.''
Ms. Baumgarten had more cases than she could possibly handle. She and
one other person made up her unit.
In a couple of weeks, she tried again. The phone had been
disconnected. They were gone.
An Ache in Their Hearts
The sisters relished order, convention, sameness. Now -- poof -- the
house had been taken. It left an awful ache in their hearts, and they
wept over it. The house, one of the best things in their small lives,
held the ghosts of their parents and their quiet longings for a
future, and now all of it belonged to strangers and they had to move
on. ''I never imagined such a thing, that my life would turn out this
way,'' Julia said.
Their finances a shambles, they squeezed into a two-bedroom apartment
in Canarsie. The new place was bleak. He needed his hits more often.
Pockets empty, embarrassment crawling up their necks, they borrowed
from friends and from a cousin, a successful doctor in Oklahoma who
would send them thousands of dollars over the years.
They argued with Frank, insults whizzing through the air. Stop it
already, or they'll call the police. And he bellowed that if they
tried, he would kill them.
One day, with him pestering her and Lillian for money, Julia reached
a fathomless point. There was no money and there was that obstinate
chant -- one more. Where else did someone at her age get money? She
impulsively went out to Foster Avenue, one of the main roads, with
its steady swish of traffic. She shuffled up to the cars, swallowed
what was left of her pride and began to beg.
This was a pivot point in the sisters' decline, a surrender of
identity and a step into a dark place without a floor. ''I learned
something,'' Julia said. ''I learned the things a person will do when
she's desperate.''
People gave. She was a pitiful sight. Drivers passed over change, a
dollar, $5. Lillian was mortified, seeing her kid sister's
submergence, out there with the riffraff. And Frank, well, Frank
loved the proceeds. He counted them out on the kitchen table.
It was clear now. Every morning abuse got up with them and spent the
day.
They were his captives, and he bullied them to his will. His favored
breakfast was Nestle chocolate milk and Suzy-Q cakes. When he woke up
and there were none in the house, he lashed out at them and they
would skulk out to get them.
And how he went after them. On more than one occasion, he punched
Julia in the face. ''The things you let happen,'' she said. ''If I
said I wasn't going out to beg, he would really go off the wall. He'd
hit me. I'd get a black eye. Then I would go out. It was so
demeaning. He'd say, if you give me $20 more, that would be it. How
we believed this stupid stuff, I don't know.''
Again, the system heard some things.
After falling and breaking her hip, Julia had to recuperate in a
nursing home. The home, suspicious of the injury, notified the
police. Ms. Baumgarten was alerted. She went with an officer to the
apartment. Only Frank was home and he wouldn't let them in. They
visited the nursing home and Julia denied that anything was amiss (as
it happened, Frank had not caused her fall).
Later, they returned to the Canarsie apartment. Once again, they were
gone.
Frank, of course, had his view of things. His aunts mothered him too
much, ''put a leash around me and treated me like a cocker spaniel.''
Lillian, with her sharp tongue, would get on his jumpy nerves,
hectoring him to do this, do that, pick up your clothes.
The house was lost, yes, but not his fault. It was actually a scheme
of Lillian's so he wouldn't inherit it. Go out and beg? Not his idea.
He had always been the fall guy.
That is what he says.
And also this: ''When you're on crack you don't consciously know what
you're doing. You can't remember all the sleazy things you did on
that drug. You don't want to remember. You can't pay attention to
whether your shoelaces are tied. What I remember is wanting it,
wanting it, wanting it, walking around and wanting it, wanting it,
wanting it.''
The Police Are Notified
The building they lived in was sold, and they had to leave. In early
2002, they found a painfully ordinary place in Sheepshead Bay, but
quickly fell behind on the rent, Frank smoking away their pensions.
Julia continued to beg, going out to the Knapp Street exit off the
Belt Parkway, a bustling intersection yielding good results.
One day, Lillian slipped and broke her hip and had to go into a
nursing home to heal. While she was there, Frank stopped by to force
her to sign over a check and got into a verbal tussle with a worker.
The woman called the city, and the police were notified, as well as
Diane Baumgarten again. The nursing home worker, in fact, obtained an
order of protection against Frank.
Ms. Baumgarten visited and was given a runaround. A police officer
named Dawn Deen, in the domestic violence unit of the 61st Precinct,
stopped by and found Julia with bruises on her lip, wrist and eye.
She said she fell a lot. Officer Deen had her doubts and referred the
case to Adult Protective Services, the agency that intercedes when
people might not be competent.
A caseworker accompanied Officer Deen to the apartment. Julia was
asleep on the floor at 3 in the afternoon. The apartment was filthy.
Julia insisted that nothing was going on. Officer Deen urged the
caseworker to dig deeper. The caseworker, she said, saw no need. Look
at the squalid condition in which they were living, Officer Deen
said. The caseworker told her she had seen worse. She announced that
she was done for the day, could the officer drop her off at the
subway station? Adult Protective Services would not discuss the case.
Soon after, in April, Officer Deen tried to follow up. They weren't
there. They had vanished.
The rent in arrears, they had been evicted. They were panicked and
confused, and needed a new idea. Every possible road pointed to
nowhere. Without money for a new apartment, they put their belongings
in storage, family pictures of growing up, memorabilia, their
furniture, all of it. Their beloved dog, King, was given away.
''This went, that went, our lives were falling apart and we couldn't
stop it,'' Lillian said.
A friend offered her couch to Lillian and invited Julia to stay, too,
but not Frank; she knew his business and didn't want him anywhere
near her. That left him with a final option, and that was on the
streets with the deadbeats and lost souls.
Julia intended to remain with Lillian, her eternal companion. But
Frank begged her not to abandon him. He told her she was his true
mother, called her ''Mama.''
Why listen to his maunderings? He beat her, took her money, made her
beg. He had brought her life to a standstill. Why listen? Why care?
No good reason at all, but blood is impossibly thick. And he was not
one person, but two. He hit her. But just the other day he drove her
down to the bay to look at the boats. He screamed at her. But didn't
he get her that bag of clams?
She couldn't cut the cord.
Fast-Food Bathrooms
The night hours were his. His shift at the car service was 6 p.m. to
6 a.m. She sat beside him, and he explained to his curious fares, Oh,
this is my mom, she hasn't been feeling well, I'm just giving her a
ride so she can get out of the house.
The passengers told Julia what a considerate son she had. Many of
them handed Frank a big tip, urging him to please treat his mom to a
little something.
When work ended, they would straggle down to Plum Beach, a scrubby
strip of sand in Sheepshead Bay, and he'd sleep there and she'd sit,
watching the waves, or meander up and down the sandy wasteland, ways
to use up the day. In nasty weather, they would ride the B train back
and forth from the end of Brooklyn to the tip of the Bronx.
To bathe, they would duck into a fast-food bathroom and extinguish
the odors as best they could, try to feel fresh. Every now and then,
they'd grab a room at a hotel. It was $80 a night, too steep for
them, but there was a four-hour rate -- a tryst rate, of course. They
got to soak in a proper bath and momentarily feel the sweetness of a
bed.
They saw Lillian now and then; she gave them sandwiches when she had
them.
His accursed habit consumed everything, and so Julia continued to
trawl for handouts, fettered to something that wouldn't let go. She
found him better behaved, though. He struck her less often. ''And I
didn't beg so much, maybe every other day.''
This improvised life went on for a week, a month, two months, three.
Time lost its meaning. Until, finally, a new roof. Enough money was
rustled together in the summer of 2002 for them to reunite in a boxy
two-bedroom in a tumbledown affair in Brighton Beach. They brought no
furnishings, because they no longer had any. When they couldn't
manage the fee for the storage container, their belongings had been
disposed of, their material past erased.
It crushed Lillian and Julia, losing their mother's china, their
trove of family pictures, their jewelry. First the house and now its
contents, everything slipping away.
''It wasn't great stuff, we knew that,'' Lillian said. ''But it was
our stuff.''
Frank was hot over the loss of his guitars, his Beatles and Stones
records, the TV's. How was he going to watch the Yankees?
The apartment was in poor shape. The first three nights they slept on
the bare floor, until the landlord gave them a couple of mattresses.
The previous tenant had left behind a small kitchen table. They each
had a couple of changes of clothing. They washed them in the kitchen
sink.
So this was their new beginning.
Their frayed life, though, continued just as before -- only worse.
Frank said his crack habit had worked its way up to $200 a day. Often
there was little money for food, and they skipped meals and the
pounds melted off their skeletal frames.
''He had to have his 25 bucks, 30 bucks,'' Lillian said. ''He had to
have it. It was $30 every 20 minutes.''
They stepped up the begging. They approached it as a business; that
was what it had become. Begging was their profession.
''You'd go to a certain corner, and if you weren't having any luck,
you'd go to another corner,'' Julia said. ''When you found a good
corner, you stayed with it and went back there the next day.''
Julia focused on Coney Island Avenue, a wide commercial strip strung
with delis and restaurants and gas stations, City Carpet and Meena
Travel and Raya's Linen Shop, and cars, always cars containing people
with money jangling in their pockets.
Frequently, she would begin in the creeping dawn, during the morning
commuting, take a break, then return to catch the evening rush, eight
or nine hours out there over two shifts, and maybe bring home $20 or
$30 or sometimes a haul of $100. It was sales work, selling a story
of woe, and the merchandise didn't always move.
Rain drumming down. Teeth-rattling cold. Whipping winds. Snow dusting
her coat. Julia begged. It was on the most oppressive nights that
Lillian couldn't stand to see her sister trolling out there and so
she would tell Frank, ''I'll go out; let her stay here.'' And so she
entered the business.
When they refused to go, or the take was slim, he raged and pummeled
them. He would bang his fist on the table, slam the door, throw
things. He hit both of them now, but he mostly hit Julia, because he
knew that was the way to intimidate Lillian, the stronger-willed, the
one he figured might some day turn him in.
Frank never begged. ''Oh, no, you kidding? He would never lower
himself to do that,'' Lillian said. At times, he would accompany
them, hanging back on the curb while they performed their jobs. He
did this when they went out in the middle of the night, when there
were dangers, protecting his work force. ''He was very good about
that,'' Julia said.
People who had been grocery shopping handed them food. Sometimes they
got cigarettes, a bonus if they were Newports, Frank's brand. A woman
gave Julia a pair of boots. They were a little tight, but she
squeezed into them.
The intersection of Coney Island Avenue and Neptune worked
particularly well, a gantlet of retail shops intermixed with gas
stations, thick traffic. One evening there, Julia encountered an
important facet for a prosperous business, the repeat customer.
He was a chipper man who gave her $40, calling her Tootsie, and said
if Tootsie returned the next night, he would have the same for her. A
fine man with a big heart, and yet his chronic generosity tore at her
insides. The man thought he was helping a down-and-out old woman,
someone trying to salvage a vestige of a life in a city full of
pathology. And yet all he was doing was feeding a crack habit.
He was a man in a car who went to a home where everything was
different. She went back to a mattress on the floor and Frank and his
volcanic temper in the next room.
By now, Frank would awaken frequently at 2 or 3 in the morning,
craving a hit. No money in the house, of course, and he would get
them up with his chant. In their sleep-dazed state, they would trudge
out. It happened so often that they did what seemed practical. They
began wearing their clothes to bed. Then when he came in to rouse
them, snarling in their ears, they only had to slip on their ratty
shoes, shrug into coats and plow into the Brooklyn darkness. They
were firemen, ready to slide down the pole.
It is something to wonder: How many people knew of the sisters'
broken lives?
Possibly a dozen, possibly two, even three. The short answer to the
question of how many knew is, enough.
Relatives knew, including a squadron of scattered cousins, an
insurance man in Connecticut, the doctor in Oklahoma, a police
officer in New Mexico, a nun in Massachusetts. Neighbors and friends
knew. Police officers and caseworkers knew. As Lillian would later
say, ''All of my friends knew what was going on. I told them.''
This, then, was not elder abuse played out in the shadows, one of
those that after you hear about it you think, ''If only I had some
idea.'' No, this unspooled on a reasonably well-lighted stage.
But none of the onlookers knew everything because what Lillian and
Julia told them was always selective -- they rarely admitted they
were hit or, worse, that they were begging -- and there always seemed
to be some sugar-coating, allusions to his benevolent side.
It is also true that, with numbing regularity, the outsiders pleaded
with the sisters to kick out Frank, change the locks, call the
police. Some phoned the police themselves. Their cousin, the doctor,
who gave them so much money, spoke several times to the police, but
was told that the sisters, the only witnesses, had to speak the truth
about Frank. ''I had a lot of resources and I couldn't stop this,''
he said. ''Not just my money but my connections. This is a problem of
society, of America. The system doesn't cope with people who don't
want to act.''
Most of their relatives and friends eventually distanced themselves
from the sisters, exasperated. They would look at them and no longer
know them, for Lillian and Julia had entered a world where they could
not be reached.
Why didn't they act?
The doctor has his theory: ''They couldn't accept that they had
nurtured him for so long and he had turned on them. You have to
understand, they were knitting booties for Frank before he was
born.''
To their friends, they gave their own cascade of explanations. They
were scared, they didn't want him in jail, just helped, they didn't
trust the system or even comprehend it. No one else understood,
because no one else was in their house, living with him, walking in
their shoes.
There was truth there.
'Maybe Tomorrow'
They did talk it over. Of course they did.
Lillian would say: ''Julia, we've got to do something; we can't go on
like this. We're going to get sick over it.''
Julia would say: ''You're right, you're right, what are we going to
do?''
Lillian would say: ''The only thing we can do is report him.''
But their despondency corroded their will. They moved beyond
self-scrutiny.
Lillian would say to Julia, ''Well maybe tomorrow he'll be better.''
And Julia would say, ''Yes, Lillian, maybe tomorrow.''
They came up with a trick. When he was sleeping or out buying hits,
Julia and Lillian would slip out and camp at McDonald's -- the place
didn't push you out, not two old ladies -- and they would roost there
for five, six hours, nursing coffees. Then they'd go sleep at a
friend's, stay away from Frank an entire night, and occasionally two.
One purpose of these rendezvous was temporary tranquillity. Another
purpose was to rattle him. An employees' strike. It did work. They'd
return home and he'd have his arms open, so glad to see them, where
had they been?
It worked, each time it worked -- for a few hours.
''We didn't turn on him sooner, which we should have,'' Lillian said.
''God knows we should have. He did run our lives. We had no guts to
do something. What we should have done is turned him in.''
''We were stupid,'' Julia said. ''We had no courage.''
'A Piece of Paper'
The upstairs neighbor was the one who called. It was a Saturday
night, Sept. 14, 2002. Hearing Julia screaming, the sound scissoring
through the building, he dialed the police.
The officers found her with her face battered, two huge black eyes.
Yes, she admitted, he had smacked her, a bitter argument over, what
else, money, and she too bone-weary to venture out there again.
They took Frank down to the station. He said quizzically that he
didn't do anything, what was going on? A police officer stayed behind
and snapped pictures of Julia's savagely beaten face. Both her eyes
were discolored, her cheeks puffed up. Her expression was drawn, the
look of a woman who had missed too many meals. A woman approaching
70, but she might be 90.
Frank was arraigned, charged with assault, menacing and harassment,
and a full order of protection was issued, forbidding him from any
contact with his aunts.
With no rap sheet, he was released. He went straight back to the
apartment, genially greeted his aunts by saying, ''They didn't do
anything to me,'' and went to bed.
Ms. Markarian, the prosecutor, said: ''That happens just about all
the time. You get a piece of paper. You don't get a guard.''
Neither Julia nor Lillian would push the case. ''I didn't want him
thrown into a snake pit and left there,'' Julia said. He was offered
a plea bargain. He pleaded guilty to an assault misdemeanor and was
required to attend an anger control program. In this development
Lillian and Julia injected possibility. They foresaw a reckoning, his
finally shaking free of drugs and becoming the person he was when
they first took him into their home and their hopes.
He never went to the program, not once. He didn't want to be told to
do something, didn't like things set up that way.
With an arrest, elderly people involved, some visits took place.
Detective Cheryl Melchionna of the domestic violence unit in the 60th
Precinct accompanied Diane Baumgarten to the Brighton Beach
apartment. Lillian and Julia were tight-lipped, hovering near one
another, listening to what the other said, denying anything
abhorrent, just people doing the daily struggle.
Detective Melchionna casually rummaged around the place, sifting for
telltale signals. With elderly people, she knew it was a good idea to
make sure that the stove and refrigerator worked, that there was
ample food. People gripped by dementia, she knew, would forget to
eat, or do bizarre things like that woman she knew who kept nothing
in her freezer but bowls filled with ice.
The appliances functioned, but the detective was dumbstruck when she
opened the refrigerator. Nothing. Not one thing was inside. The
cupboards, too. Empty. In fact, there were hardly any dishes or pots.
And look at them -- the sisters were ghostly thin.
How do you eat? she asked them.
Oh, they said, they ate out all the time.
Well, it was possible. Detective Melchionna's mother, who was totally
together, had moved to that stage, what the detective referred to as
her diva thing, where she stopped cooking and either ate out or
ordered food delivered. There was a Dunkin' Donuts near her, and even
it delivered.
So, she let that go, accepted it as a plausible explanation.
She spotted little things: ''I noticed no jewelry. Most old women
don't like makeup. But they usually wear a bracelet or earrings,
especially if, like them, they have pierced ears.''
What struck her most of all, though, was that the apartment looked
nothing like a place where two spinsters lived. It looked like a
low-rent bachelor pad. Her suspicions were that this Frank character
was a controlling individual and that he had his aunts thoroughly
under his authority.
But was continuing crime involved here? She didn't know.
Adult Protective Services showed up soon after, returning to a case
it had felt was no case. The appearance of its caseworker dislodged
Ms. Baumgarten, for that would be duplicating services.
A psychiatrist gave Julia a test. Who's the president? What's the
year? Draw a clock with the hands showing 3 o'clock. She did that,
though she messed up on the year, for some reason saying 202, not
2002. The agency tried to put her in a financial management program,
but she opposed it. The sisters didn't hear too much more.
To do more, Detective Melchionna needed a complainant. She had a
sense of foreboding. Other than that, she had nothing.
Dreadful Days
It was another matter now. An arrest, well, that might rattle him. It
made sense, but his life wasn't about sense.
Christmas came, but few good tidings in Brighton Beach, and it
saddened them. They had so little. In the past, they would put up a
big tree, but not now, just a sparse one a friend gave them.
The new year rang in, 2003, and it resembled the old. The days were
truly dreadful. In biting cold, on snow-swept streets, he sent them
daily to beg. The beatings intensified.
''Mostly he punched me in the back,'' Julia said. ''I figure it was
because it wouldn't show.''
Often, the sisters went to bed famished. In many senses, they were
running on empty.
Both of them were observant Catholics, going to church, doing daily
prayers morning and night by their bedside. In their prayers, Lillian
and Julia spoke to the heavens, bathing themselves in hope,
whispering to the Lord, asking that he get Frank help, asking that he
help them, deliver them from evil. Wasn't that his job?
Time, maybe even he needed time. They very much believed in the
adage, ''If God closes a door, he opens a window.'' Nothing in that
proverb, they recognized, suggested a timetable. Clarity was what
they needed.
They were two wrecks, waiting on a miracle.
The Food Ploy
The end began because she was seeing the ragged sisters in her mind,
at work, at home. She wept inside for them.
Detective Melchionna kept hearing it from her fellow officers, that
the sisters were out there panhandling again, looking horrid, spotted
them last night, saw them yesterday afternoon, shooed them away and
they came right back. She heard this from her own husband, a sergeant
in the precinct.
''They were filthy,'' Detective Melchionna said. ''Their clothes
looked like they came off a pile of trash. The smell was awful. And
their eyes. There was a look in their eyes. It was a look that they
had given up on life.''
It was true that some of the police officers felt pity for them,
buying them coffee and even digging into their own pockets for a few
dollars. Two officers wrote Lillian summonses. Detective Melchionna
was thankful that they did. She thought it might be the only way to
keep them safe and inside.
But the drill did not stop. On the evening of Feb. 12, 2003, she made
up her mind. The next day, she was going to intervene. She spoke with
Ms. Markarian, who advised her to split up the sisters, divide and
conquer, go with the one who seemed most likely to talk.
Whenever she went to the district attorney's office, Detective
Melchionna noticed that victims always got food. Nothing for the
police officers, but always for the victims. Food, she reasoned,
might be the truth serum she needed.
Both sisters had been begging the night before, out to the thumping
roll of cars in unforgiving cold, and had not produced enough even
for a meal.
Detective Melchionna drove over to the apartment. Lillian answered
the door. The detective told her they were going to have breakfast.
Nothing fancy, though; this was the police. At a gas station
convenience store, Detective Melchionna bought Lillian some cake and
a coffee, fixed herself a tea, and they went to the precinct station.
They settled down in her office and ate.
The detective coaxed her: ''Do it before it's too late. Get your life
back.''
Lillian had hit a limit in pain. She had paid every price there was
to pay. The detective was so sweet. Was this the window opening?
Slowly as the minutes crawled past, it spilled out, not everything,
but enough to make an arrest stick.
Over cake, Lillian gave him up.
The detective rounded up the biggest officer she could find, and they
went to the apartment and took Frank away. He had been asleep. As
they shoved him out the door, he looked at Julia and said, ''Mama,
why are they arresting me? I didn't do anything.''
It was one arrest in a city of many arrests, nothing worthy of even a
splash in the papers, but for two sisters in a threadbare apartment
in Brighton Beach, something monumental had happened on a quiet
Thursday morning.
The charges were multiple counts of menacing and reckless
endangerment for forcing them to beg, as well as contempt of court
for violating his order to attend anger control therapy. He could
easily get several years in jail.
His aunts would not put him on trial. They would not send him to
prison. Get him help, nothing more. That remained their own peculiar
logic, the embedded logic of family.
As Lillian explained it, ''We felt if he went to jail, he'd come out
rotten.''
This boggled Ms. Markarian's mind. Come out rotten? What was he now?
But, yes, she saw this all the time, victims backtracking, either the
humiliation or fear or the powerful glue that binds relatives
undermining what she believed justice demanded.
People come to a particular place for a reason, and with Ms.
Markarian one has to understand that when she was growing up in the
New York suburbs, it was a two-bedroom house and she had to share her
room. Not with a sibling -- she was an only child -- but with her
Armenian grandmother. She spoke no English, but taught Ms. Markarian
her native tongue and taught her about life and about God. And she
never complained about the posters Ms. Markarian coated the walls
with. No, she was cool. And so when the adult Ms. Markarian heard
about the elderly being abused, well, that touched her somewhere in
the soul.
Even in a short span, she had seen all its rawness. The 16 murders.
That abuser who put an elderly woman's puppy in a pot of water, set
it on the stove, started cooking it.
And so she wanted him in jail, with an order of protection severing
him from their lives for good. And she saw it wasn't going to happen.
So she told the sisters that they had to play cards: ''This is a
poker game. I know testifying is not on your top 10 list of things
you want to do. But don't let him know that or he'll never accept a
plea.''
They played their bluff. On April 9, 2003, he took a plea. He would
be remanded to a residential program for roughly 18 months, his
progress to be watched by the court. He could not leave, could not
see his aunts, could not harm them.
Dolls Don't Talk Back
Shattered lives are rebuilt slowly, starting with the essentials.
This case hit her worse than others, and Detective Melchionna
couldn't just let it go. She rooted around her basement. There was a
dining table set and a living room table, pots and pans. There were
those flowery sheets that her husband had ordered removed, back in
their wrapping, unslept on. Her grandmother had always told her to
keep spare toothbrushes. Her husband was Italian, and the kitchen
overflowed with pasta. With help from fellow officers, she carted
these provisions over to the sisters.
The apartment became a place of life. In a once-vacant living room
appeared couches, an armchair, a rug. On a glass table a family of
dolls grew. Lillian won one at a raffle, then they added more,
something to do.
''They're nice to have around,'' Julia said. ''They don't talk back.
They don't ask you for the car keys.''
Adult Protective Services dispatched a caseworker to make monthly
visits, annoying Lillian because he habitually appeared when she was
preparing dinner. As Lillian put it, ''He'd open our cupboards and
just about drop dead. They were exploding with food.'' After a while,
he stopped coming.
Frank was assigned to a rehabilitation center in Brooklyn. He was
given a diagnosis of anxiety disorder, and put on pills to still his
anger. Enrolled in a culinary program, he got to cook meals at a
senior center, feeding the old. His teeth had rotted out, and he was
fitted with replacements. Progress reports filed by his caseworker
were good. After six months, he earned passes to go out, and he said
he used them to patronize prostitutes, take in a Yankees game and see
his aunts. They were hard pressed to explain why they let him, but
they did. They spoke of second chances and of redemption.
In early October, the court released him. He moved into subsidized
housing in Brownsville and began going over to his aunts' a lot. They
told him, not so much, but he kept showing up. Watched the TV.
Occasionally cooked a meal, his chicken cutlet parmigiano, his
macaroni and cheese.
The sisters have an order of protection in place until April 2007,
though they regard it cynically. ''You read about people with orders
of protection all the time that get murdered,'' Lillian said. ''My
feeling is they're for the birds. They give those things out in the
courts like candy.''
In elder abuse, you don't know what will happen. Sometimes the cycle
repeats itself, feeds on the residual nutrients of its own past. Time
soothes but it also obscures. Diane Baumgarten said: ''Time passes.
Things improve. You look back and say, 'You know what, things weren't
really that bad.' You see the positive side of the person. You
rationalize it. There's a sense of false security. It starts all over
again.''
Friends have cautioned Lillian and Julia that he'll never change and
they're foolish to let him back into their lives. Some relatives of
the sisters have placed bets -- in two months, he'll be back on
drugs, in three.
You never know.
He has not apologized to them. As far as they can see, he has not
gathered the essence of what he did. Lillian knows he is still mad at
her: ''He figures I'm the one that put him in the cooler.''
Julia said, ''Yeah, but he seems better now that's he's off that
poison.''
Lillian said: ''Look, I'm not pinning medals on him. He was rotten to
us. But do you think we could throw him in the gutter? I know
everybody thinks we're nuts because we bother with him. But he's
lonely. I want him to be happy. It's all we ever wanted for him.''
Fall inching toward winter, the days getting shorter and crisper. Was
justice done in Brighton Beach?
Arlene Markarian in her office on a sun-splattered afternoon, floppy
stacks of paper strewn around, files upon files documenting affronts
against the old.
''You don't know how hard it is to do this job,'' she said softly.
''There are days I close the door and I just cry.''
Was justice done?
''Yes,'' she said. ''Given what he did and what the victims wanted,
yes.''
She knew many things, of course, but not the whole story. The
accounts of beatings not alleged in the two cases. Their losing not
just their home but also their most intimate possessions, their
family pictures and memorabilia. Julia washing up in a Burger King
bathroom. Sleeping in their clothes so they could always be ready to
beg. The refrigerator with nothing in it, not one thing.
Ms. Markarian was quiet. She took this in, ran it through her mind.
Then she had her answer.
''No, justice wasn't done,'' she said. ''He didn't get what he
deserved. Not even close.''
Hungry at an early hour, he was eating dinner out, Chinese food,
going with the pepper steak and a Coke. Dreading returning to his
dingy apartment. He called it a ''caveman's place.''
''I'm a very scared man now,'' Frank said. ''I'm really scared,
because here I am alone again. I don't know what's in front of me. At
42, even a dog has a warm spot on the curb.''
He spoke too loud, unselfconsciously. He had always talked too loud.
He wondered. He wondered if he would get a job cooking and if it
would work out. He wondered how he would handle adversity in the
future, because he had never handled it well in the past.
During his idle hours, he rode the subway to Coney Island, got a
coffee and strolled up and down the Boardwalk. When the arcades were
open, he would play the game where you squirted the water at the
clown's mouth, expanding a balloon until it burst.
Swigging down his Coke, a glance over his shoulder. He was fidgety.
Two packs a day of Newports to silence his nerves. He wanted to go
outside, light up.
''They make me out to be a monster,'' he said. ''I hate this. You
know, a monster? I am 42 years old and I've been through it. I'm a
monster? I'm just a man.''
The cellphone chirped. It was a quasi-girlfriend of the moment.
Speaking much too loud, nearly bellowing, he wondered where she had
been for the last week. She said she had been locked up. He didn't
ask why, didn't feel curious.
''I don't need this,'' he said. ''I don't need this. She's a
sweetheart, but I do not need this.''
A Bitter Paradox
There is a ground-floor apartment in Brighton Beach, and two sisters
live there, one who is 75 and one who is 71. Tap-tap on the door and
Lillian swept it open; Julia was back in the living room.
Chilly today, winter in the wings. Rain drilled against the
windowpanes.
Lillian and Julia look vastly different than they did two long years
ago. Both have broadened now that they're eating meals regularly.
They try to look nice. They wear jewelry, and Julia has been dyeing
her hair. But their health is faltering. Julia has had trouble with
her lungs and can't walk very far before she is wheezing. It's
strenuous for her to move, and she has a spatula at her side if she
needs to scratch something beyond easy reach. She doesn't go out
much.
Lillian is more mobile, but she has a nasty case of arthritis and has
been in and out of the hospital for kidney problems. Mostly they
rattle around the apartment.
They get the bitter paradox here. They remained robust all those
harrowing months when they begged for a tomorrow. Now that the burden
is gone and there is possibility again, their health has betrayed
them.
The past is in concrete and irreclaimable and it is only the present
that they have to work with. They do all they can to will themselves
into forgetfulness, to blot out the swarm of memories of what once
was, the years Frank had stolen from them. It is hard ground to
visit. ''I can't think about it,'' Lillian said. ''You don't know how
difficult it is to think about it.''
Julia settled on the couch. She used the spatula on her itchy lower
leg, tucked it back beside her. Lillian was crumpled into the soft
armchair, the family of dolls beside her in their frozen poses.
''Coffee, Julia? There's some on the stove?''
''No, Lillian, I'm fine for now.''
They were comfortable with each other. They always had been.
''We don't do much, do we, Julia?'' Lillian said. ''Go to the doctor,
sit in the chair, what do we do, we do nothing.''
Julia: ''It's true. We don't kill ourselves.''
On the end table was a jar of pennies that the lady from the church
would pick up, the sisters' modest contribution to feed the homeless.
The television was running, Court TV. Their feeling was, the legal
shows were the best, never the soaps. ''Judge Judy.'' ''Law and
Order.'' You couldn't beat them. Julia got a kick out of ''Family
Feud.'' They both thought ''Golden Girls'' was a hoot.
The day was gathering itself in. Frank planned to stop by later,
maybe cook his macaroni.
You never know.
December 12, 2004 Sunday
Late Edition - Final
Bowed by Age, Battered by an Addicted Nephew And Forced Into Begging
and Despair
By N. R. KLEINFIELD
They went out late. It was ugly weather. Six below zero in the
Brooklyn night. Wind took garbage into the air. A blizzard was in the
forecast. It was Lincoln's Birthday, 2003, in Brighton Beach. Not a
night for humankind, but the sisters, one 73 and the other 70, didn't
get holidays off, didn't get snow days.
In years of miserable low points, it was one of the lowest. As they
had done the day before and the day before that, Lillian and Julia
hobbled out to Coney Island Avenue, a lineup of chromatic
storefronts, to beg from strangers in their cars. They were known out
there, regulars among the mendicants. The money was for their bilious
nephew and his crack habit, their own blood who was smoking up their
lives. He had already cost them their house, their savings, their
dignity. ''I need one more,'' he would tell them when he desired a
hit, ''one more.''
Not comply and he would fly into crazed tirades, blacken an eye,
bruise their ribs. It had been this way for years, since their lives
stopped being comprehensible.
It was always a dice-toss what they got when they panhandled, but
what odds did they have on a brutal night like this? They had just
started their grueling shift when the police herded them home. Now
what? He was rambling around, that glazed look in his eyes. No money
in the house. No food. Despondent, Lillian told Julia she was going
over to the hospital, to sit all night in the waiting room. She had
gone there before, a temporary sanctuary during her black hours.
It had gotten to be 3 in the morning. She craved a coffee, so she
re-entered the cold, tried one car and heard the whoop-whoop of the
police again. She pushed on home, back to her sister, to that dour
apartment, with all that was wrong. And they slept without dreams or
any notion of a tomorrow. Soon would come the frosted Brooklyn dawn.
Then he would send them out again to the cars and the strangers.
It is called elder abuse, the polite rubric for crimes against the
aged, the neglected stepchild of domestic violence and child abuse in
the triangle of human violence. It is one of the more brutal yet
poorly understood plagues -- its prevalence vague, its precise
definition elusive. Even the National Center on Elder Abuse, a
nonprofit Washington clearinghouse, feels studies are too
indeterminate to hazard a sound guess at its actual, quantifiable
toll.
No one doubts, though, that the abuse is real and intensifying. It
comes in many guises -- the elderly aunt routinely roped to her bed
by her caregiver while game shows run on the TV, the wealthy
grandfather systematically plundered by his sharp-mouthed grandson,
the old woman pounded by her son because they can't agree on whether
to keep the window open. It cuts across class and neighborhood. It
can last one traumatizing afternoon or persist for decades. It is
driven by demographics and the human capacity for malice.
There are indisputable hints of its chilling dimensions in an aging
population of more potential victims. In 1998, the city's Department
for the Aging undertook a subway campaign for a month, all that it
could afford, alerting people to the problem. There was a 300 percent
increase in calls, overwhelming its ability to investigate them. The
campaign was not repeated.
Criminal cases are occasionally made, attaching some real names to
the horror. In Manhattan, the 69-year-old woman, hospitalized with
kidney failure, whose younger sister gambled away her $45,000 in life
savings in two days. In Brooklyn, the 79-year-old woman killed when
her deranged grandson planted a knife in her neck, his only
explanation being that she spoke some words he didn't much like.
When the abuses happen, there is little to stop them. An Elder
Justice Act to funnel federal support to combat the problem and
heighten consciousness has been lingering, unacted upon in Congress.
The city has an agency, Adult Protective Services, but it is limited
by law and capacity in what it can do. Senior citizen centers and
nursing homes have their numbers to call. Specialized units formed by
prosecutors take stabs at it, but they are usually understaffed.
In Brooklyn, Arlene Markarian heads the elder abuse unit of the Kings
County district attorney's office, and she points out that it is a
success story when she even hears of an incident. She dealt with 200
cases in the most recent year. There are 400,000 elderly people in
Brooklyn. ''I'm not an idiot,'' she said. ''I know there are a lot
more.''
The police and family members and neighbors and social workers and
doormen -- all of these might act as a prevention force. But they are
confounded by the contours of the problem. A beaten child reports to
school and advertises his torture. The elderly are often not seen. So
many wallow in dementia and can't be heard. They fall a lot, and so
their lumps are explained away.
And it is a crime where victims don't tell, a messy crime with a
potent psychological undertow, for it involves shame. Many older
people endure the abuse and accept its rules, because they feel
devalued enough in a youth-worshiping society. Why volunteer that
they are powerless to run their affairs, that their own flesh and
blood is stealing their money and slapping them around? Elder abuse
locates its targets among the isolated and marginalized, and it
twists love into a tool of manipulation and secrecy.
''There have been 16 murders in Brooklyn since 1999, when I began
doing this,'' Ms. Markarian said of elder-abuse killings, 14 of them
by younger relatives. ''In only one case did anyone call the police,
for anything.''
Elder abuse, then, is a crime speeding well ahead of its solution.
Lillian and Julia lived elder abuse in one of its more virulent
strains. There are multiple vantage points on their story. There are
those of Lillian, now 75, and Julia, 71, as well as those of police
officers, social workers, relatives, caseworkers, prosecutors and
Frank, the abuser himself. All of them cooperated in recounting the
case. The sisters did not want their last name used, for they are too
ashamed of what their nephew did to them. As Lillian put it, ''I
don't want everybody knowing our business.''
But they want their story told. They want others to understand how
easily it can happen to them.
>From the outset, they did not ask for much. Not even before it
started, back when there were still other possible outcomes. All they
wanted was a calm life in Brooklyn, a life that would start there and
end there, and maybe see a dash of dazzle in between. As Julia said,
''We're not big dream people.''
Their mother was a homemaker and their father a bottler at the
Schaefer brewery, and there was a younger brother named Joseph. They
lived in a plain three-bedroom home in Flatbush, a working-class
family, house-proud and content.
After high school, the sisters drifted into their careers. Lillian
worked as an assistant manager in the personnel department of a law
firm; Julia was a filing clerk at an accounting company.
They were different people; everyone saw that. Lillian was airy and
spunky, quick to speak her mind. ''I'm a big girl and I've got a
mouth to match,'' she liked to say. Julia was bashful and quiet, but
with a flicker of dry humor.
They lived with their parents and then kept the house as theirs after
their parents died. Early on, they figured out the particular
calculus of their lives, that they were fated to travel through the
years together, see the joys and heartbreaks as one, and hope there
were more joys.
Julia imagined getting married and having five children, but when she
saw friends' children who strayed, she was thankful for her freedom.
Lillian attracted her share of suitors, but they were temporaries, no
Mr. Perfect. ''We both had our chances,'' Lillian said. ''I kept
saying I'm still young, I've got time. Time had a way of running
out.''
They became active in the Catholic War Veterans, and it served as the
linchpin of their social life. Every Tuesday, they went bowling. One
year Lillian got handed the worst-bowler award, then picked up her
game. Neither bothered to learn to drive. Lillian took a few plane
trips out West, but Julia refused to fly, didn't want to risk it.
They found enough in mundane pleasures.
They split up the labor. Lillian did the cooking. Julia wrestled with
the cleaning and the wash. Their money was pooled, both names on the
accounts. There was this lunar pull between them. ''We'd have our
differences,'' Lillian said, ''but never anything that a half-hour
later we wouldn't be talking to each other.'' In many ways, they were
more one person than two.
For their old age, they resolved to save their pennies and stay put
in Brooklyn, dine out nicely now and then and see some movies, live a
predictable, quiet existence. It was a small future, perhaps, but big
enough for them.
It Begins to Unravel
It was in 1979 when Frank's story became their story. He was 17, his
own life empty, and they took him in. Frank, their nephew, Joseph's
son. Here was when everything began to unravel.
His pathology was not unfamiliar. He came from a broken-down
childhood in Staten Island. There were claims of relentless abuse by
his unstable mother -- hit, pepper thrown in his face, tossed out in
his underwear to sleep in the stairwell. His father, a drug user, let
it happen, Frank said. When he was 11, he began smoking marijuana,
shoplifting meat and stealing bicycles to buy the weed. There was an
interlude in West Virginia with a man from the neighborhood who
befriended him. The man dropped dead of a heart attack. Frank's
father had fled. Frank despised his mother. His aunts gladly opened
their arms.
His mother tells it differently. Disputing multiple family witnesses,
she said Frank had had a good childhood. She said Frank hit her. She
said her husband, long divorced from her and his whereabouts unknown,
was rotten, told Frank to beat her. His mother had not another word
to say.
Frank found a job pumping gas. He bought a cheap boat and fished for
bluefish. He chased women. For a long time, it was just three people
living.
The accident was a point in time, and it was a point that they would
always come back to. He was 31 and had become a Roto-Rooter man,
unclogging drains. One day, he said, he stumbled on some basement
steps and wound up with a crushed disk. He got hooked on prescription
pain pills, ''taking the pills like the Mad Hatter,'' as he put it.
This made him nasty. He demanded money to feed his addiction. He
would ask for a twenty, just this once. In that way, it started. It
started small, as abuse usually does, a snowflake that becomes an
avalanche.
Soon he kicked the pills and switched to cocaine. Soon a twenty
wasn't enough.
He squandered a $50,000 insurance settlement. He found work driving
for a car service -- sometimes high -- but it never paid enough for
his needs.
The sisters had swept him in out of pity, doted on him to excess, not
knowing then what they were beginning to know now. As Lillian put it
much later, ''We should have left him on the street.''
The mathematics were not good.
In the mid-1990's, Lillian and Julia retired from their jobs. They
began living off modest pensions and Social Security, some money
Lillian picked up working as a companion at a nursing home, enough
for their life, but not enough for a drug life.
Frank graduated to smoking crack, sometimes calling it by its slang
name, the devil's dandruff. He was trying this drug business on,
getting used to it.
''One more,'' he badgered them when he needed money. ''One more.''
He was a burly man, thinning hair, a long face, a coiled spring
inside him.
His demands led, as they so often do, to violence. He would push
Julia around, slap her across the face. Give him the money!
Lillian, with her tougher crust, he did not hit, not yet. Many times,
she would bark at him, ''Get out,'' and he would shout at her, ''When
I'm ready.''
There were enough good moments, too. He would purr sweet things to
them and win them over. Lillian admitted, ''He had the gift of the
mouth.''
The sisters took out a mortgage, plowing some of it into repairs,
keeping the rest in reserve. Quickly, he consumed it, then their
savings. They began missing payments.
Lillian said: ''It got to where we couldn't pay this bill, that bill.
It got to the point where we didn't care anymore.''
By the fall of 2000, they warned Frank that the house was in
jeopardy, but he dismissed the possibility.
And back here, the outside world, the system, was put on notice.
Neighbors heard shouting, spotted bruises. An anonymous call alerted
the city's Department for the Aging that two sisters were being
abused. The matter was farmed out to a well-intentioned social worker
named Diane Baumgarten, who oversaw a new elder abuse program in
Brooklyn for the Jewish Association for Services for the Aged.
She called the house. Lillian picked up and told her that her nephew
hounded them and was causing them to lose their house. But she said:
''Don't come over. Please do not come over. I don't know how he will
react.''
Ms. Baumgarten had come to understand the peculiar paralysis of elder
abuse, about how daunting it was to get victims to complain. ''You're
dealing with embarrassment and shame on so many levels -- the
embarrassment of the police coming to the home, of the neighbors
seeing this, of people thinking we didn't raise this person right,''
she said. ''Instead of their feeling like the victim, they feel like
the perpetrator. Instead of their seeing what he did to them, they
think, look at what I'm doing to him.''
Ms. Baumgarten had more cases than she could possibly handle. She and
one other person made up her unit.
In a couple of weeks, she tried again. The phone had been
disconnected. They were gone.
An Ache in Their Hearts
The sisters relished order, convention, sameness. Now -- poof -- the
house had been taken. It left an awful ache in their hearts, and they
wept over it. The house, one of the best things in their small lives,
held the ghosts of their parents and their quiet longings for a
future, and now all of it belonged to strangers and they had to move
on. ''I never imagined such a thing, that my life would turn out this
way,'' Julia said.
Their finances a shambles, they squeezed into a two-bedroom apartment
in Canarsie. The new place was bleak. He needed his hits more often.
Pockets empty, embarrassment crawling up their necks, they borrowed
from friends and from a cousin, a successful doctor in Oklahoma who
would send them thousands of dollars over the years.
They argued with Frank, insults whizzing through the air. Stop it
already, or they'll call the police. And he bellowed that if they
tried, he would kill them.
One day, with him pestering her and Lillian for money, Julia reached
a fathomless point. There was no money and there was that obstinate
chant -- one more. Where else did someone at her age get money? She
impulsively went out to Foster Avenue, one of the main roads, with
its steady swish of traffic. She shuffled up to the cars, swallowed
what was left of her pride and began to beg.
This was a pivot point in the sisters' decline, a surrender of
identity and a step into a dark place without a floor. ''I learned
something,'' Julia said. ''I learned the things a person will do when
she's desperate.''
People gave. She was a pitiful sight. Drivers passed over change, a
dollar, $5. Lillian was mortified, seeing her kid sister's
submergence, out there with the riffraff. And Frank, well, Frank
loved the proceeds. He counted them out on the kitchen table.
It was clear now. Every morning abuse got up with them and spent the
day.
They were his captives, and he bullied them to his will. His favored
breakfast was Nestle chocolate milk and Suzy-Q cakes. When he woke up
and there were none in the house, he lashed out at them and they
would skulk out to get them.
And how he went after them. On more than one occasion, he punched
Julia in the face. ''The things you let happen,'' she said. ''If I
said I wasn't going out to beg, he would really go off the wall. He'd
hit me. I'd get a black eye. Then I would go out. It was so
demeaning. He'd say, if you give me $20 more, that would be it. How
we believed this stupid stuff, I don't know.''
Again, the system heard some things.
After falling and breaking her hip, Julia had to recuperate in a
nursing home. The home, suspicious of the injury, notified the
police. Ms. Baumgarten was alerted. She went with an officer to the
apartment. Only Frank was home and he wouldn't let them in. They
visited the nursing home and Julia denied that anything was amiss (as
it happened, Frank had not caused her fall).
Later, they returned to the Canarsie apartment. Once again, they were
gone.
Frank, of course, had his view of things. His aunts mothered him too
much, ''put a leash around me and treated me like a cocker spaniel.''
Lillian, with her sharp tongue, would get on his jumpy nerves,
hectoring him to do this, do that, pick up your clothes.
The house was lost, yes, but not his fault. It was actually a scheme
of Lillian's so he wouldn't inherit it. Go out and beg? Not his idea.
He had always been the fall guy.
That is what he says.
And also this: ''When you're on crack you don't consciously know what
you're doing. You can't remember all the sleazy things you did on
that drug. You don't want to remember. You can't pay attention to
whether your shoelaces are tied. What I remember is wanting it,
wanting it, wanting it, walking around and wanting it, wanting it,
wanting it.''
The Police Are Notified
The building they lived in was sold, and they had to leave. In early
2002, they found a painfully ordinary place in Sheepshead Bay, but
quickly fell behind on the rent, Frank smoking away their pensions.
Julia continued to beg, going out to the Knapp Street exit off the
Belt Parkway, a bustling intersection yielding good results.
One day, Lillian slipped and broke her hip and had to go into a
nursing home to heal. While she was there, Frank stopped by to force
her to sign over a check and got into a verbal tussle with a worker.
The woman called the city, and the police were notified, as well as
Diane Baumgarten again. The nursing home worker, in fact, obtained an
order of protection against Frank.
Ms. Baumgarten visited and was given a runaround. A police officer
named Dawn Deen, in the domestic violence unit of the 61st Precinct,
stopped by and found Julia with bruises on her lip, wrist and eye.
She said she fell a lot. Officer Deen had her doubts and referred the
case to Adult Protective Services, the agency that intercedes when
people might not be competent.
A caseworker accompanied Officer Deen to the apartment. Julia was
asleep on the floor at 3 in the afternoon. The apartment was filthy.
Julia insisted that nothing was going on. Officer Deen urged the
caseworker to dig deeper. The caseworker, she said, saw no need. Look
at the squalid condition in which they were living, Officer Deen
said. The caseworker told her she had seen worse. She announced that
she was done for the day, could the officer drop her off at the
subway station? Adult Protective Services would not discuss the case.
Soon after, in April, Officer Deen tried to follow up. They weren't
there. They had vanished.
The rent in arrears, they had been evicted. They were panicked and
confused, and needed a new idea. Every possible road pointed to
nowhere. Without money for a new apartment, they put their belongings
in storage, family pictures of growing up, memorabilia, their
furniture, all of it. Their beloved dog, King, was given away.
''This went, that went, our lives were falling apart and we couldn't
stop it,'' Lillian said.
A friend offered her couch to Lillian and invited Julia to stay, too,
but not Frank; she knew his business and didn't want him anywhere
near her. That left him with a final option, and that was on the
streets with the deadbeats and lost souls.
Julia intended to remain with Lillian, her eternal companion. But
Frank begged her not to abandon him. He told her she was his true
mother, called her ''Mama.''
Why listen to his maunderings? He beat her, took her money, made her
beg. He had brought her life to a standstill. Why listen? Why care?
No good reason at all, but blood is impossibly thick. And he was not
one person, but two. He hit her. But just the other day he drove her
down to the bay to look at the boats. He screamed at her. But didn't
he get her that bag of clams?
She couldn't cut the cord.
Fast-Food Bathrooms
The night hours were his. His shift at the car service was 6 p.m. to
6 a.m. She sat beside him, and he explained to his curious fares, Oh,
this is my mom, she hasn't been feeling well, I'm just giving her a
ride so she can get out of the house.
The passengers told Julia what a considerate son she had. Many of
them handed Frank a big tip, urging him to please treat his mom to a
little something.
When work ended, they would straggle down to Plum Beach, a scrubby
strip of sand in Sheepshead Bay, and he'd sleep there and she'd sit,
watching the waves, or meander up and down the sandy wasteland, ways
to use up the day. In nasty weather, they would ride the B train back
and forth from the end of Brooklyn to the tip of the Bronx.
To bathe, they would duck into a fast-food bathroom and extinguish
the odors as best they could, try to feel fresh. Every now and then,
they'd grab a room at a hotel. It was $80 a night, too steep for
them, but there was a four-hour rate -- a tryst rate, of course. They
got to soak in a proper bath and momentarily feel the sweetness of a
bed.
They saw Lillian now and then; she gave them sandwiches when she had
them.
His accursed habit consumed everything, and so Julia continued to
trawl for handouts, fettered to something that wouldn't let go. She
found him better behaved, though. He struck her less often. ''And I
didn't beg so much, maybe every other day.''
This improvised life went on for a week, a month, two months, three.
Time lost its meaning. Until, finally, a new roof. Enough money was
rustled together in the summer of 2002 for them to reunite in a boxy
two-bedroom in a tumbledown affair in Brighton Beach. They brought no
furnishings, because they no longer had any. When they couldn't
manage the fee for the storage container, their belongings had been
disposed of, their material past erased.
It crushed Lillian and Julia, losing their mother's china, their
trove of family pictures, their jewelry. First the house and now its
contents, everything slipping away.
''It wasn't great stuff, we knew that,'' Lillian said. ''But it was
our stuff.''
Frank was hot over the loss of his guitars, his Beatles and Stones
records, the TV's. How was he going to watch the Yankees?
The apartment was in poor shape. The first three nights they slept on
the bare floor, until the landlord gave them a couple of mattresses.
The previous tenant had left behind a small kitchen table. They each
had a couple of changes of clothing. They washed them in the kitchen
sink.
So this was their new beginning.
Their frayed life, though, continued just as before -- only worse.
Frank said his crack habit had worked its way up to $200 a day. Often
there was little money for food, and they skipped meals and the
pounds melted off their skeletal frames.
''He had to have his 25 bucks, 30 bucks,'' Lillian said. ''He had to
have it. It was $30 every 20 minutes.''
They stepped up the begging. They approached it as a business; that
was what it had become. Begging was their profession.
''You'd go to a certain corner, and if you weren't having any luck,
you'd go to another corner,'' Julia said. ''When you found a good
corner, you stayed with it and went back there the next day.''
Julia focused on Coney Island Avenue, a wide commercial strip strung
with delis and restaurants and gas stations, City Carpet and Meena
Travel and Raya's Linen Shop, and cars, always cars containing people
with money jangling in their pockets.
Frequently, she would begin in the creeping dawn, during the morning
commuting, take a break, then return to catch the evening rush, eight
or nine hours out there over two shifts, and maybe bring home $20 or
$30 or sometimes a haul of $100. It was sales work, selling a story
of woe, and the merchandise didn't always move.
Rain drumming down. Teeth-rattling cold. Whipping winds. Snow dusting
her coat. Julia begged. It was on the most oppressive nights that
Lillian couldn't stand to see her sister trolling out there and so
she would tell Frank, ''I'll go out; let her stay here.'' And so she
entered the business.
When they refused to go, or the take was slim, he raged and pummeled
them. He would bang his fist on the table, slam the door, throw
things. He hit both of them now, but he mostly hit Julia, because he
knew that was the way to intimidate Lillian, the stronger-willed, the
one he figured might some day turn him in.
Frank never begged. ''Oh, no, you kidding? He would never lower
himself to do that,'' Lillian said. At times, he would accompany
them, hanging back on the curb while they performed their jobs. He
did this when they went out in the middle of the night, when there
were dangers, protecting his work force. ''He was very good about
that,'' Julia said.
People who had been grocery shopping handed them food. Sometimes they
got cigarettes, a bonus if they were Newports, Frank's brand. A woman
gave Julia a pair of boots. They were a little tight, but she
squeezed into them.
The intersection of Coney Island Avenue and Neptune worked
particularly well, a gantlet of retail shops intermixed with gas
stations, thick traffic. One evening there, Julia encountered an
important facet for a prosperous business, the repeat customer.
He was a chipper man who gave her $40, calling her Tootsie, and said
if Tootsie returned the next night, he would have the same for her. A
fine man with a big heart, and yet his chronic generosity tore at her
insides. The man thought he was helping a down-and-out old woman,
someone trying to salvage a vestige of a life in a city full of
pathology. And yet all he was doing was feeding a crack habit.
He was a man in a car who went to a home where everything was
different. She went back to a mattress on the floor and Frank and his
volcanic temper in the next room.
By now, Frank would awaken frequently at 2 or 3 in the morning,
craving a hit. No money in the house, of course, and he would get
them up with his chant. In their sleep-dazed state, they would trudge
out. It happened so often that they did what seemed practical. They
began wearing their clothes to bed. Then when he came in to rouse
them, snarling in their ears, they only had to slip on their ratty
shoes, shrug into coats and plow into the Brooklyn darkness. They
were firemen, ready to slide down the pole.
It is something to wonder: How many people knew of the sisters'
broken lives?
Possibly a dozen, possibly two, even three. The short answer to the
question of how many knew is, enough.
Relatives knew, including a squadron of scattered cousins, an
insurance man in Connecticut, the doctor in Oklahoma, a police
officer in New Mexico, a nun in Massachusetts. Neighbors and friends
knew. Police officers and caseworkers knew. As Lillian would later
say, ''All of my friends knew what was going on. I told them.''
This, then, was not elder abuse played out in the shadows, one of
those that after you hear about it you think, ''If only I had some
idea.'' No, this unspooled on a reasonably well-lighted stage.
But none of the onlookers knew everything because what Lillian and
Julia told them was always selective -- they rarely admitted they
were hit or, worse, that they were begging -- and there always seemed
to be some sugar-coating, allusions to his benevolent side.
It is also true that, with numbing regularity, the outsiders pleaded
with the sisters to kick out Frank, change the locks, call the
police. Some phoned the police themselves. Their cousin, the doctor,
who gave them so much money, spoke several times to the police, but
was told that the sisters, the only witnesses, had to speak the truth
about Frank. ''I had a lot of resources and I couldn't stop this,''
he said. ''Not just my money but my connections. This is a problem of
society, of America. The system doesn't cope with people who don't
want to act.''
Most of their relatives and friends eventually distanced themselves
from the sisters, exasperated. They would look at them and no longer
know them, for Lillian and Julia had entered a world where they could
not be reached.
Why didn't they act?
The doctor has his theory: ''They couldn't accept that they had
nurtured him for so long and he had turned on them. You have to
understand, they were knitting booties for Frank before he was
born.''
To their friends, they gave their own cascade of explanations. They
were scared, they didn't want him in jail, just helped, they didn't
trust the system or even comprehend it. No one else understood,
because no one else was in their house, living with him, walking in
their shoes.
There was truth there.
'Maybe Tomorrow'
They did talk it over. Of course they did.
Lillian would say: ''Julia, we've got to do something; we can't go on
like this. We're going to get sick over it.''
Julia would say: ''You're right, you're right, what are we going to
do?''
Lillian would say: ''The only thing we can do is report him.''
But their despondency corroded their will. They moved beyond
self-scrutiny.
Lillian would say to Julia, ''Well maybe tomorrow he'll be better.''
And Julia would say, ''Yes, Lillian, maybe tomorrow.''
They came up with a trick. When he was sleeping or out buying hits,
Julia and Lillian would slip out and camp at McDonald's -- the place
didn't push you out, not two old ladies -- and they would roost there
for five, six hours, nursing coffees. Then they'd go sleep at a
friend's, stay away from Frank an entire night, and occasionally two.
One purpose of these rendezvous was temporary tranquillity. Another
purpose was to rattle him. An employees' strike. It did work. They'd
return home and he'd have his arms open, so glad to see them, where
had they been?
It worked, each time it worked -- for a few hours.
''We didn't turn on him sooner, which we should have,'' Lillian said.
''God knows we should have. He did run our lives. We had no guts to
do something. What we should have done is turned him in.''
''We were stupid,'' Julia said. ''We had no courage.''
'A Piece of Paper'
The upstairs neighbor was the one who called. It was a Saturday
night, Sept. 14, 2002. Hearing Julia screaming, the sound scissoring
through the building, he dialed the police.
The officers found her with her face battered, two huge black eyes.
Yes, she admitted, he had smacked her, a bitter argument over, what
else, money, and she too bone-weary to venture out there again.
They took Frank down to the station. He said quizzically that he
didn't do anything, what was going on? A police officer stayed behind
and snapped pictures of Julia's savagely beaten face. Both her eyes
were discolored, her cheeks puffed up. Her expression was drawn, the
look of a woman who had missed too many meals. A woman approaching
70, but she might be 90.
Frank was arraigned, charged with assault, menacing and harassment,
and a full order of protection was issued, forbidding him from any
contact with his aunts.
With no rap sheet, he was released. He went straight back to the
apartment, genially greeted his aunts by saying, ''They didn't do
anything to me,'' and went to bed.
Ms. Markarian, the prosecutor, said: ''That happens just about all
the time. You get a piece of paper. You don't get a guard.''
Neither Julia nor Lillian would push the case. ''I didn't want him
thrown into a snake pit and left there,'' Julia said. He was offered
a plea bargain. He pleaded guilty to an assault misdemeanor and was
required to attend an anger control program. In this development
Lillian and Julia injected possibility. They foresaw a reckoning, his
finally shaking free of drugs and becoming the person he was when
they first took him into their home and their hopes.
He never went to the program, not once. He didn't want to be told to
do something, didn't like things set up that way.
With an arrest, elderly people involved, some visits took place.
Detective Cheryl Melchionna of the domestic violence unit in the 60th
Precinct accompanied Diane Baumgarten to the Brighton Beach
apartment. Lillian and Julia were tight-lipped, hovering near one
another, listening to what the other said, denying anything
abhorrent, just people doing the daily struggle.
Detective Melchionna casually rummaged around the place, sifting for
telltale signals. With elderly people, she knew it was a good idea to
make sure that the stove and refrigerator worked, that there was
ample food. People gripped by dementia, she knew, would forget to
eat, or do bizarre things like that woman she knew who kept nothing
in her freezer but bowls filled with ice.
The appliances functioned, but the detective was dumbstruck when she
opened the refrigerator. Nothing. Not one thing was inside. The
cupboards, too. Empty. In fact, there were hardly any dishes or pots.
And look at them -- the sisters were ghostly thin.
How do you eat? she asked them.
Oh, they said, they ate out all the time.
Well, it was possible. Detective Melchionna's mother, who was totally
together, had moved to that stage, what the detective referred to as
her diva thing, where she stopped cooking and either ate out or
ordered food delivered. There was a Dunkin' Donuts near her, and even
it delivered.
So, she let that go, accepted it as a plausible explanation.
She spotted little things: ''I noticed no jewelry. Most old women
don't like makeup. But they usually wear a bracelet or earrings,
especially if, like them, they have pierced ears.''
What struck her most of all, though, was that the apartment looked
nothing like a place where two spinsters lived. It looked like a
low-rent bachelor pad. Her suspicions were that this Frank character
was a controlling individual and that he had his aunts thoroughly
under his authority.
But was continuing crime involved here? She didn't know.
Adult Protective Services showed up soon after, returning to a case
it had felt was no case. The appearance of its caseworker dislodged
Ms. Baumgarten, for that would be duplicating services.
A psychiatrist gave Julia a test. Who's the president? What's the
year? Draw a clock with the hands showing 3 o'clock. She did that,
though she messed up on the year, for some reason saying 202, not
2002. The agency tried to put her in a financial management program,
but she opposed it. The sisters didn't hear too much more.
To do more, Detective Melchionna needed a complainant. She had a
sense of foreboding. Other than that, she had nothing.
Dreadful Days
It was another matter now. An arrest, well, that might rattle him. It
made sense, but his life wasn't about sense.
Christmas came, but few good tidings in Brighton Beach, and it
saddened them. They had so little. In the past, they would put up a
big tree, but not now, just a sparse one a friend gave them.
The new year rang in, 2003, and it resembled the old. The days were
truly dreadful. In biting cold, on snow-swept streets, he sent them
daily to beg. The beatings intensified.
''Mostly he punched me in the back,'' Julia said. ''I figure it was
because it wouldn't show.''
Often, the sisters went to bed famished. In many senses, they were
running on empty.
Both of them were observant Catholics, going to church, doing daily
prayers morning and night by their bedside. In their prayers, Lillian
and Julia spoke to the heavens, bathing themselves in hope,
whispering to the Lord, asking that he get Frank help, asking that he
help them, deliver them from evil. Wasn't that his job?
Time, maybe even he needed time. They very much believed in the
adage, ''If God closes a door, he opens a window.'' Nothing in that
proverb, they recognized, suggested a timetable. Clarity was what
they needed.
They were two wrecks, waiting on a miracle.
The Food Ploy
The end began because she was seeing the ragged sisters in her mind,
at work, at home. She wept inside for them.
Detective Melchionna kept hearing it from her fellow officers, that
the sisters were out there panhandling again, looking horrid, spotted
them last night, saw them yesterday afternoon, shooed them away and
they came right back. She heard this from her own husband, a sergeant
in the precinct.
''They were filthy,'' Detective Melchionna said. ''Their clothes
looked like they came off a pile of trash. The smell was awful. And
their eyes. There was a look in their eyes. It was a look that they
had given up on life.''
It was true that some of the police officers felt pity for them,
buying them coffee and even digging into their own pockets for a few
dollars. Two officers wrote Lillian summonses. Detective Melchionna
was thankful that they did. She thought it might be the only way to
keep them safe and inside.
But the drill did not stop. On the evening of Feb. 12, 2003, she made
up her mind. The next day, she was going to intervene. She spoke with
Ms. Markarian, who advised her to split up the sisters, divide and
conquer, go with the one who seemed most likely to talk.
Whenever she went to the district attorney's office, Detective
Melchionna noticed that victims always got food. Nothing for the
police officers, but always for the victims. Food, she reasoned,
might be the truth serum she needed.
Both sisters had been begging the night before, out to the thumping
roll of cars in unforgiving cold, and had not produced enough even
for a meal.
Detective Melchionna drove over to the apartment. Lillian answered
the door. The detective told her they were going to have breakfast.
Nothing fancy, though; this was the police. At a gas station
convenience store, Detective Melchionna bought Lillian some cake and
a coffee, fixed herself a tea, and they went to the precinct station.
They settled down in her office and ate.
The detective coaxed her: ''Do it before it's too late. Get your life
back.''
Lillian had hit a limit in pain. She had paid every price there was
to pay. The detective was so sweet. Was this the window opening?
Slowly as the minutes crawled past, it spilled out, not everything,
but enough to make an arrest stick.
Over cake, Lillian gave him up.
The detective rounded up the biggest officer she could find, and they
went to the apartment and took Frank away. He had been asleep. As
they shoved him out the door, he looked at Julia and said, ''Mama,
why are they arresting me? I didn't do anything.''
It was one arrest in a city of many arrests, nothing worthy of even a
splash in the papers, but for two sisters in a threadbare apartment
in Brighton Beach, something monumental had happened on a quiet
Thursday morning.
The charges were multiple counts of menacing and reckless
endangerment for forcing them to beg, as well as contempt of court
for violating his order to attend anger control therapy. He could
easily get several years in jail.
His aunts would not put him on trial. They would not send him to
prison. Get him help, nothing more. That remained their own peculiar
logic, the embedded logic of family.
As Lillian explained it, ''We felt if he went to jail, he'd come out
rotten.''
This boggled Ms. Markarian's mind. Come out rotten? What was he now?
But, yes, she saw this all the time, victims backtracking, either the
humiliation or fear or the powerful glue that binds relatives
undermining what she believed justice demanded.
People come to a particular place for a reason, and with Ms.
Markarian one has to understand that when she was growing up in the
New York suburbs, it was a two-bedroom house and she had to share her
room. Not with a sibling -- she was an only child -- but with her
Armenian grandmother. She spoke no English, but taught Ms. Markarian
her native tongue and taught her about life and about God. And she
never complained about the posters Ms. Markarian coated the walls
with. No, she was cool. And so when the adult Ms. Markarian heard
about the elderly being abused, well, that touched her somewhere in
the soul.
Even in a short span, she had seen all its rawness. The 16 murders.
That abuser who put an elderly woman's puppy in a pot of water, set
it on the stove, started cooking it.
And so she wanted him in jail, with an order of protection severing
him from their lives for good. And she saw it wasn't going to happen.
So she told the sisters that they had to play cards: ''This is a
poker game. I know testifying is not on your top 10 list of things
you want to do. But don't let him know that or he'll never accept a
plea.''
They played their bluff. On April 9, 2003, he took a plea. He would
be remanded to a residential program for roughly 18 months, his
progress to be watched by the court. He could not leave, could not
see his aunts, could not harm them.
Dolls Don't Talk Back
Shattered lives are rebuilt slowly, starting with the essentials.
This case hit her worse than others, and Detective Melchionna
couldn't just let it go. She rooted around her basement. There was a
dining table set and a living room table, pots and pans. There were
those flowery sheets that her husband had ordered removed, back in
their wrapping, unslept on. Her grandmother had always told her to
keep spare toothbrushes. Her husband was Italian, and the kitchen
overflowed with pasta. With help from fellow officers, she carted
these provisions over to the sisters.
The apartment became a place of life. In a once-vacant living room
appeared couches, an armchair, a rug. On a glass table a family of
dolls grew. Lillian won one at a raffle, then they added more,
something to do.
''They're nice to have around,'' Julia said. ''They don't talk back.
They don't ask you for the car keys.''
Adult Protective Services dispatched a caseworker to make monthly
visits, annoying Lillian because he habitually appeared when she was
preparing dinner. As Lillian put it, ''He'd open our cupboards and
just about drop dead. They were exploding with food.'' After a while,
he stopped coming.
Frank was assigned to a rehabilitation center in Brooklyn. He was
given a diagnosis of anxiety disorder, and put on pills to still his
anger. Enrolled in a culinary program, he got to cook meals at a
senior center, feeding the old. His teeth had rotted out, and he was
fitted with replacements. Progress reports filed by his caseworker
were good. After six months, he earned passes to go out, and he said
he used them to patronize prostitutes, take in a Yankees game and see
his aunts. They were hard pressed to explain why they let him, but
they did. They spoke of second chances and of redemption.
In early October, the court released him. He moved into subsidized
housing in Brownsville and began going over to his aunts' a lot. They
told him, not so much, but he kept showing up. Watched the TV.
Occasionally cooked a meal, his chicken cutlet parmigiano, his
macaroni and cheese.
The sisters have an order of protection in place until April 2007,
though they regard it cynically. ''You read about people with orders
of protection all the time that get murdered,'' Lillian said. ''My
feeling is they're for the birds. They give those things out in the
courts like candy.''
In elder abuse, you don't know what will happen. Sometimes the cycle
repeats itself, feeds on the residual nutrients of its own past. Time
soothes but it also obscures. Diane Baumgarten said: ''Time passes.
Things improve. You look back and say, 'You know what, things weren't
really that bad.' You see the positive side of the person. You
rationalize it. There's a sense of false security. It starts all over
again.''
Friends have cautioned Lillian and Julia that he'll never change and
they're foolish to let him back into their lives. Some relatives of
the sisters have placed bets -- in two months, he'll be back on
drugs, in three.
You never know.
He has not apologized to them. As far as they can see, he has not
gathered the essence of what he did. Lillian knows he is still mad at
her: ''He figures I'm the one that put him in the cooler.''
Julia said, ''Yeah, but he seems better now that's he's off that
poison.''
Lillian said: ''Look, I'm not pinning medals on him. He was rotten to
us. But do you think we could throw him in the gutter? I know
everybody thinks we're nuts because we bother with him. But he's
lonely. I want him to be happy. It's all we ever wanted for him.''
Fall inching toward winter, the days getting shorter and crisper. Was
justice done in Brighton Beach?
Arlene Markarian in her office on a sun-splattered afternoon, floppy
stacks of paper strewn around, files upon files documenting affronts
against the old.
''You don't know how hard it is to do this job,'' she said softly.
''There are days I close the door and I just cry.''
Was justice done?
''Yes,'' she said. ''Given what he did and what the victims wanted,
yes.''
She knew many things, of course, but not the whole story. The
accounts of beatings not alleged in the two cases. Their losing not
just their home but also their most intimate possessions, their
family pictures and memorabilia. Julia washing up in a Burger King
bathroom. Sleeping in their clothes so they could always be ready to
beg. The refrigerator with nothing in it, not one thing.
Ms. Markarian was quiet. She took this in, ran it through her mind.
Then she had her answer.
''No, justice wasn't done,'' she said. ''He didn't get what he
deserved. Not even close.''
Hungry at an early hour, he was eating dinner out, Chinese food,
going with the pepper steak and a Coke. Dreading returning to his
dingy apartment. He called it a ''caveman's place.''
''I'm a very scared man now,'' Frank said. ''I'm really scared,
because here I am alone again. I don't know what's in front of me. At
42, even a dog has a warm spot on the curb.''
He spoke too loud, unselfconsciously. He had always talked too loud.
He wondered. He wondered if he would get a job cooking and if it
would work out. He wondered how he would handle adversity in the
future, because he had never handled it well in the past.
During his idle hours, he rode the subway to Coney Island, got a
coffee and strolled up and down the Boardwalk. When the arcades were
open, he would play the game where you squirted the water at the
clown's mouth, expanding a balloon until it burst.
Swigging down his Coke, a glance over his shoulder. He was fidgety.
Two packs a day of Newports to silence his nerves. He wanted to go
outside, light up.
''They make me out to be a monster,'' he said. ''I hate this. You
know, a monster? I am 42 years old and I've been through it. I'm a
monster? I'm just a man.''
The cellphone chirped. It was a quasi-girlfriend of the moment.
Speaking much too loud, nearly bellowing, he wondered where she had
been for the last week. She said she had been locked up. He didn't
ask why, didn't feel curious.
''I don't need this,'' he said. ''I don't need this. She's a
sweetheart, but I do not need this.''
A Bitter Paradox
There is a ground-floor apartment in Brighton Beach, and two sisters
live there, one who is 75 and one who is 71. Tap-tap on the door and
Lillian swept it open; Julia was back in the living room.
Chilly today, winter in the wings. Rain drilled against the
windowpanes.
Lillian and Julia look vastly different than they did two long years
ago. Both have broadened now that they're eating meals regularly.
They try to look nice. They wear jewelry, and Julia has been dyeing
her hair. But their health is faltering. Julia has had trouble with
her lungs and can't walk very far before she is wheezing. It's
strenuous for her to move, and she has a spatula at her side if she
needs to scratch something beyond easy reach. She doesn't go out
much.
Lillian is more mobile, but she has a nasty case of arthritis and has
been in and out of the hospital for kidney problems. Mostly they
rattle around the apartment.
They get the bitter paradox here. They remained robust all those
harrowing months when they begged for a tomorrow. Now that the burden
is gone and there is possibility again, their health has betrayed
them.
The past is in concrete and irreclaimable and it is only the present
that they have to work with. They do all they can to will themselves
into forgetfulness, to blot out the swarm of memories of what once
was, the years Frank had stolen from them. It is hard ground to
visit. ''I can't think about it,'' Lillian said. ''You don't know how
difficult it is to think about it.''
Julia settled on the couch. She used the spatula on her itchy lower
leg, tucked it back beside her. Lillian was crumpled into the soft
armchair, the family of dolls beside her in their frozen poses.
''Coffee, Julia? There's some on the stove?''
''No, Lillian, I'm fine for now.''
They were comfortable with each other. They always had been.
''We don't do much, do we, Julia?'' Lillian said. ''Go to the doctor,
sit in the chair, what do we do, we do nothing.''
Julia: ''It's true. We don't kill ourselves.''
On the end table was a jar of pennies that the lady from the church
would pick up, the sisters' modest contribution to feed the homeless.
The television was running, Court TV. Their feeling was, the legal
shows were the best, never the soaps. ''Judge Judy.'' ''Law and
Order.'' You couldn't beat them. Julia got a kick out of ''Family
Feud.'' They both thought ''Golden Girls'' was a hoot.
The day was gathering itself in. Frank planned to stop by later,
maybe cook his macaroni.
You never know.