ABSTRACT
The time for discharge was drawing near. Being a woman alone, I had to plan for the handling of my house by others. Like the captain of a small vessel who has to promote the second mate to officer in charge, I had to hire someone for a while to help me with the chores I would not be able to do until full recovery. Thus I entered another unknown universe, that of agencies for household help. I learned in a brief period of time that good home care and good home helpers are as rare as diamonds. One agency after the other promised help but failed —at the last minute —to provide it. I learned that those who do come and help are women on the edges of society. They move from state to state with their fatherless children on their own pilgrimage to scratch out a living with temporary work. They come from marginal immigrant groups and have a private network of connections, a subterranean tunnel of communication, to get jobs. They stay for a while and then disappear, pulled by some private tragedy, some restless need to change, some hope for betterment elsewhere, or perhaps attracted by a new hope for love and a loving man. Five of them (all of them black) came and went, impressing me with their intelligence, their good will, their eagerness to earn money, and their great secrecy about themselves and their lives. Each in turn disappeared into nowhere. Disap-
pointed as I was, because I had begun to like each woman and her work, I felt a tremendous compassion for this flock of women besieged by poverty and instability, unable in their complex circumstances to grow roots in their environment. I discovered in each woman one of my neighbors whom I had not yet met, as the Gospels say. It was a paradox. I, who should have been the Samaritan, needed the help of those who had been left on the wayside of life. I noticed that I was learning too many paradoxes in too brief a time. "Well," I thought, "such is the school of life and death."
