say they couldn’t after all. Weeks had passed. Finally, Sharon had called to say she’d found a place for
Deo—in a halfway house for recovering drug addicts and alcoholics. Deo could stay there so long as he
went to group therapy, for problems that he didn’t have. “That was too much for us,” Charlie
remembered. He had told Sharon, “Bring him down.”
“Sharon was very, very persistent,” said Nancy. “She’s a very persistent woman.”
When I first went to see Sharon at St. Thomas More, she told me she’d recently spoken to Nancy and
Charlie. “They said that they had realized that Deo was the best thing that ever happened to them. They
had realized this together, that this is the best thing that ever happened to them. Without children, you
know, to have a real focus, I guess.”
The phrasing interested me. Maybe taking Deo in hadn’t been entirely an act of volition. Maybe part of
the truth was that Deo had happened to Nancy and Charlie. If so, what happened to them first was
Sharon.
It was raining the day I first went to see her, at the rectory. Sharon arrived draped in a plastic raincoat,
her shoulders bent forward under a backpack that was lodged under the raincoat. This image of her stuck
with me—the raincoat especially, the cheapest kind one can buy. She was still a beautiful-looking
woman, as she had been when Deo first met her, but now at a different stage of beauty, her skin still
porcelain, her blond hair gone more decidedly white. A beautiful, spiritual-looking woman, utterly
without pretense.
She showed me around the rectory: the kitchen where Deo had deposited the groceries the first day
they’d met, the mail slot where she’d found his letter asking for help, the basement room where she had
sometimes shared her lunch with him and helped him find the clothes he hadn’t wanted to wear to the
party that he hadn’t wanted to attend. When we went into the church proper, a voice called out, “You’re
the best!”
Sharon turned. A man was sitting in the shadows, in a pew at the back of the church. “I’m fine, thanks,”
Sharon called to him. “Good to see you.”
“She’s the best!” called the man—to me, I guessed.
“He’s a drunk, kind of homeless, but he doesn’t want to talk about it,” Sharon whispered to me. We
turned toward the altar. Sharon bought and arranged the flowers for St. Thomas More. Her latest
arrangements reposed in giant vases on either side of the steps leading up toward the altar.
I stared at the arrangements. I told her they were beautiful, and I meant it. “And you’re self-taught,” I
said.
“Well, actually as a child I started arranging flowers,” she said. “I would pick wildflowers. We had a list
of chores. My brother would get to choose first because he was the elder. But I always wanted to go get
some flowers for the kitchen table. And color, I used to see people as color, a person’s personality.”
“You did?” I was struck by a thought. “What color is Deo?”
“I don’t do it anymore,” said Sharon. When she was a teenager, a psychiatrist heard about her gift of
color transference and arranged for an interview. “And I just clammed up,” she said.
“I think it’s wonderful that you associate people with colors,” I said.
“I used to.”
“You don’t anymore. Okay.”
“Maybe it’s subconscious now. I don’t know.”
“Well,” I said, “if you still did it, what color would Deo be?”
Sharon didn’t answer for a while. She gazed toward the altar. She gave a long exhalation. “I think a kind
of magenta,” she said.
Sharon grew up in Norwich, Vermont, in an Irish Catholic family, a little strapped for cash, and frugal.
Her parents managed to send her to Wellesley College, where she would have been in the class of 1960,
but once she discovered her vocation, she transferred to the Catholic school Manhattanville. She traveled
some, in Europe and the Middle East. In late 1960, she entered a Benedictine convent in Connecticut.
Speaking of that convent, she told me, “I always say that, just for me, that was not the right place.” She
said this without a trace of irony, I noticed, even though it had taken her thirty years of cloistered life to
decide the place wasn’t right.
Sharon began to think of leaving the convent when the abbess launched the construction of an elegant
building to replace their rather makeshift quarters. She remembered thinking, “Gee, I thought we were
supposed to be living simply, the way we all should. Let’s share with people who have nothing.”
Her parents had subscribed to The Catholic Worker, a dangerous organ of left-wing Catholicism to
some, and to others an extension of the ideas in the Sermon on the Mount. Sharon grew up reading it.
She didn’t regret her years at the convent. She had learned a great deal. Among other things, she seemed
to say, she’d found that she yearned to play a little part in the affairs of the world. She had received
dispensation to resign as a nun, but still wore her ring from consecration. She had come to New York
without a job or even many clothes and had found her way to St. Thomas More. She was paid a small
salary to do various jobs at the church—taking care of flowers for the sanctuary, helping at wedding
rehearsals. She also taught Sunday school to the four-and five-year-olds.
Sharon believed her job in life was to discover the abilities she had received and to use them “in a deep,
giving spirit,” for the glory of God. She threw herself into all her jobs, but she spent at least as much
time in her self-appointed role, which was receiving people who came to the church in distress. The
supply was abundant even on the Upper East Side. “I feel this is just being a Benedictine in another
situation,” she said. The prescriptions for receiving guests were laid out in chapter 66 of the sixth-
century Rule of St. Benedict. The basic instruction was simple: “Receive all as Christ.” The porter, the
doorkeeper, should respond to visitors with “all the gentleness of the fear of God.” I took it that, at least
in part, Sharon had left her Benedictine convent in order to become a Benedictine doorkeeper.
The job entailed a certain amount of potential embarrassment, and I had the feeling that, for her,
embarrassment was sometimes a temptation. She told me that not long ago a well-to-do friend, a
parishioner, had seen her pushing a shopping cart full of used clothes for the needy toward the church,
and had told her that this just wasn’t done. Respectable people just didn’t push shopping carts down the
sidewalks of Fifth or Madison Avenue. “Well, maybe they don’t,” Sharon told me she had replied. “But I
do. I don’t care.” Not long ago, she told me, a man had staggered into the sanctuary in the pangs of drug
withdrawal and collapsed writhing on the floor, and as she knelt over him, first kneading his shoulders
and legs, then pounding on them to try to loosen his cramps, she was thinking, “If someone comes into
the church right now and sees this, they’ll wonder, ‘What the heck is going on?’ But I don’t care.”
She didn’t discriminate among the needy people who arrived at the door, she said. Whatever troubles
they brought, she took them on, if she could, and none of the people bored her. Not, for instance, the
retarded lady with whom she lived for several years after the pastor at St. Thomas More decided he no
longer wanted women living in the rectory. The retarded woman didn’t bathe, her apartment was
crammed with garbage and junk, and it took about six months for Sharon to get the woman and her place
cleaned up, but she didn’t mind any of it, she insisted. She’d tell herself, “Hey, this is some adventure
here. What kind of headway can we make here?” She thought of what she did as offering
“undifferentiated help to anybody.” “It boils down to whoever walks into my life.” There were the
“druggies,” who were afraid to come into the rectory. And the woman who hadn’t been in a church for
twenty years but told Sharon she was aching now to go to confession. And the homeless lady, a paranoid
schizophrenic, who would lie down on a pew as if on a park bench—the church authorities had finally
decided they had to throw her out.
Sharon still befriended her and all the others, and felt glad to see them when they arrived. But not glad,
she allowed, in quite the same way she felt on seeing a select few. She had her favorites. Deo was one,
of course, and had been, she thought, right from their first meeting.
I asked her why. She said maybe it was the remark he’d made about being “very interested” when she
had told him that, yes, this was a church. This had made him seem like “someone who could see beyond
his own nose.” But beyond that, she didn’t have an explanation. Her description of Deo back then was in
itself more convincing.
She remembered that he was very skinny and that he had buck teeth (later straightened at the NYU
dental school). Also that his breath smelled dreadful—so she wasn’t surprised when she received his
letter asking for help in finding a doctor. She had been in New York for several years when Deo arrived
in her life. In the places where she’d lived before, up in Vermont and in the convent, one gathered
asparagus and picked cherries early, but one had to wait for potatoes. Here in the city, though, every
imaginable foodstuff came in from all over the world every day. It was easy here to forget how to
“appreciate the moment,” how to “wait for the right time.” And this applied to the development of
people. One shouldn’t expect anyone to be complete at any given moment. Everyone was “on a
pilgrimage.” She had wanted to understand Deo’s and to help him on his way.
“He was grateful for everything,” she told me. Of course she had been aware of times when he seemed
withdrawn, and of periods when he didn’t come to see her. But she knew from experience that people
often resent the help they’ve asked for, often in direct proportion to their neediness. She had imagined it
must be hard for Deo to be a man both physically and mentally and yet need so much. She was having
some heart problems when Deo entered her life, but she felt Deo’s case was far more urgent than her
own. “It’s hard to generalize,” she told me. “But the few Africans that I know have such great openness
to other people and a warmth and a desire to connect, and I just felt that had been shattered for Deo, and
somehow there wasn’t much I could do except just try to let him know I really cared in whatever way.”
She remembered that first dinner at the Wolfs’ loft. She remembered trying to interpret Deo’s French for
Nancy and Charlie, but having a hard time because she was paying less attention to the conversation
than to her hopes for it—her notion that the answer to Deo’s material and spiritual needs might well be
sitting right across the dining table from her, in the persons of Nancy and Charlie. She remembered
worrying over every lapse in the talk, issuing silent instructions to the others, “cheering them on
silently.” She remembered looking at Nancy and Charlie and thinking, “You have to love him right
away!”
In a phone call soon afterward, Charlie asked her, “What do you think he needs?”
“Well, he needs a family,” Sharon said. “That’s what he needs.”
And of course she remembered the phone call in which Nancy and Charlie at last informed her that they
would take Deo in. She said she was delighted, overjoyed. I had the feeling, though, that it would be too
much to say she was surprised. What surprised and disappointed her, I thought, were the many failures.
Deo never knew the half of Sharon’s attempts to find him a home. She later gave me documents and
notes she’d saved from that time. On many slips of paper and old envelopes and on the backs of old
bookmarks and church announcements, I found the names of dozens of agencies and programs that
she’d contacted, among them “the Manhattan Valley St. John the Divine Youth Project,” “Grenadier
Realty Corp. Milagrosa Houses,” “Oxfam,” “Red Cross homeless services,” “Travelers Aid NY,” “World
Council of Churches,” “Emmaus House,” “Family and Children’s Services Catholic Charities,” “St.
Vincent de Paul,” “St. John the Divine Crisis Center,” “City Shelters,” “UN Quaker mission,” “Hope
House,” “Trinity Retreat House in Larchmont.” There were notes with the names of priests and nuns for
her to call, some with the notation “Very caring.” One note read, “A doctor from Zaire will lend books.”
One note was the name of a woman, beside which Sharon had written “widowed.” A prospect, evidently.
Beside the name of another woman, Sharon had written “divorced.”
She was an unusual person, obviously, and for Deo to have run into her on his grocery delivery rounds
was a great piece of luck, maybe even—in Sharon’s presence, I was tempted into thinking this—
providential.
In Survival in Auschwitz, Primo Levi writes, “Today I think that if for no other reason than that an
Auschwitz existed, no one in our age should speak of Providence.” But for all the horror visited on Deo,
the list of strangers who had saved him seemed remarkable: the Hutu woman in the banana grove,
Muhammad the baggage handler, Chukwu and James O’Malley and above all Nancy and Charlie and
Sharon. It wasn’t as though there was some sort of outreach program in place for people like Deo. I
thought of the door he had left open in Mutaho. No doubt because I was in Sharon’s presence, I found
myself thinking, “Something must have been looking out for Deo.” And I disliked hearing the words in
my mind.
I said to Sharon, “One of the things I’ve noticed about some of the genocide narratives I’ve read, people
will say, ‘God spared me.’ The problem I have with that is then you think, ‘Well, what about all the
people who got their heads chopped off? Did God not like them?’” I added, “So I’m not quite sure that’s
the way to look at it.”
“I have a theory,” she replied. “I remember thinking long ago, ‘We’re loved infinitely for however little
bit of time we have.’ And it’s not ultimately tragic to die at any age. Whether we’re talking about being
blown into little pieces or what is ultimate tragedy, I just think there isn’t ultimate tragedy except for
evil, and God doesn’t will any evil. And we’re surrounded by—I tell the little kids about the Good
Shepherd, I think it’s a great image for them, but the vine and the branches is great, too—but whether we
feel it or not, we are surrounded by this tremendously loving presence, and that covers every second of
