Fordham: A History and Memoir, Revised Edition

15 The Bronx Is Burning

15. The Bronx Is Burning Dawn Cardi, TMC, ’73, is a Manhattan criminal lawyer. When we spoke in November 1999, she had just finished setting up a witnessprotection program not just for a witness but for his whole family. She lives happily with her second husband and their two sons and daughter in Riverdale, a few miles and thirty years—though emotionally a split second—from the Fordham campus, where, as a graduate of Mary Louis Academy in Queens, she arrived at Thomas More College in 1969. Dawn’s parents were seventeen and fifteen when they were married , and her father was one of those fathers who did not believe girls should be educated. So from the beginning, Dawn was on her own, working three jobs to put herself through. She was also part of a “wild” generation of women, including some who went to Fordham, who were just starting to throw off all the rules. The fifty girls in Spellman Hall, a former Jesuit house of studies designated as a woman’s dorm, had just voted out all restrictions , and about a dozen of them, including Dawn, moved their boyfriends in to live with them. Dawn and Greg, who was two years ahead of her, married in her sophomore year, and they moved off campus to an apartment on Bainbridge Avenue, between 194th and 195th Streets. Dawn’s was not the ordinary Fordham experience. 309 16950-08_Fordham_309-359 6/4/08 11:46 AM Page 309 But the extraordinary part was not so much her marriage, which like the marriages of many of her contemporaries, ended within a few years, but that several faculty, such as Jesuit classicists Richard Doyle and William Grimaldi, knowing that she was poor, gave her money for food and books. Most memorable was her English teacher, Claire Hahn, a brilliant, beautiful, exuberant Dominican nun in secular clothes, who carried herself so erect that students thought she was six foot two and who talked of the poet Yeats with such familiar authority that they were convinced she knew him personally. Hahn, who referred to her students affectionately as “kids,” never sat down in class but strode back and forth reciting from memory and acting out parts in Chaucer’s poems or reciting Yeats in a melodious voice that evoked the music in the verse. One sophomore, Joe Ross, who did not take naturally to Middle English, cringed on the first day when Hahn urged them to read Chaucer “in the original,” but he resisted the instinctive urge to drop the course. He never quite met Hahn’s standards—“Joooooooe,” she would coo, “don’t tell me the story . . . analyze the text”—but he took her again the next semester for The Canterbury Tales. One day, their noses in the text probing for “hidden meanings” in “some lady in black character,” no one in Joe’s class seemed to notice that Hahn was “all decked out in black.” Later that day, a student came upon her sitting despondently in the cafeteria. “No one noticed,” she said. She had come to class dressed as the character, and no one noticed. Through and with Claire Hahn, Dawn came to notice a world much bigger than either her home or her classroom. Both taught at the new experimental college, Malcolm-King, sponsored by Fordham, Marymount Manhattan, and Mount St. Vincent’s. It was a free (up to thirty credits) feeder college for adult Harlemites who might otherwise never have finished high school or dreamed of a college education. Hahn was one of those who helped Dawn financially, and Dawn was tutoring as a way of “giving back.” On a fall afternoon in 1970, Claire stopped by my room in A house, ecstatic with some news. She was in love. She was to leave the Dominicans and be married at Thanksgiving to Jack Becker, a Jesuit from Kansas City, who was leaving the Society. I did not learn until later the years of emotional and spiritual turmoil that had preceded this moment. 310 F O R D H A M 16950-08_Fordham_309-359 6/4/08 11:46 AM Page 310 They had met when he was a Ph.D. student at Yale, living in a small Jesuit community across from the Dominican Albertus Magnus College in New Haven, where she, a Fordham Ph.D., was teaching in 1963. He said Mass at their convent, making quite an...