IS THIS ANY WAY TO HELP HOMELESS FAMILIES?

Stick them in a $50-a-night motel room with a TV and maid service but no place for kids to play. Shuttle them across town three times a day to eat for another $50 a day. Move them from one grim place to another without warning or reason . . .

AFTER A LONG DAY OF SITTING AND WAITING, THE homeless mothers were exhausted. Those lucky enough to have seats in the narrow front hallway of the Pitts Hotel were slumped low in their chairs, weighed down by bundles and babies. The others sat on the stairway or leaned against the walls, staring at nothing. Infants dozed on laps or on the floor, oblivious to the constant cacophony of crying and shouting. The older kids, twitching with unspent energy, bounced around, wrestling, playing tag, throwing mittens and chasing one another out the double glass doors, which caused blasts of frigid February air to whip down the hallway, provoking more crying and shouting.

It had been this way all day, all week, all winter. These people -- about three dozen of them -- were homeless.

The District's Department of Human Services was paying to put them up at three motels scattered around the city. But there was no food service at those places, so the homeless were rounded up in DHS buses and carted to breakfast every morning at the Pitts, a shelter hotel that does serve food, and then bused back every night after dinner. In between, they camped out in this cramped hallway, killing time and catching one another's colds.

Suddenly, around 7, they moved out. Weary mothers hoisted sleepy infants to their shoulders while toddlers with runny noses clung to their coats and the older kids sprinted ahead. They crossed the hotel driveway, past a vacant lot where kids from the Pitts use two rotting mattresses as trampolines. On the wall there, some graffiti poet had spray-painted a single word: "DESTRUCTION." Off in the distance, illuminated by spotlights, stood the Washington Monument and the dome of the Capitol.

The exodus continued down the hill, past an alley frequently littered with rat carcasses and used syringes, to the corner of Belmont and 14th streets NW. There, these American refugees stood shivering in the bitter wind, waiting for buses.

Kavin Brown, 26, carried Sharon, his sleeping 4-month-old daughter, into the bus shelter. Carefully, gingerly, he set her cradle down on the bench, just below a poster advertising the movie "Action Jackson." His wife, Dee, 29, stood outside, eager to tell me about the rooming house where the family had lived until a couple of weeks earlier. "The pipes were bad, we had big rats in the kitchen, and the fuse box blew and sparkled and burned up half the electric." Dee is thin, all angles and intensity, and she hurled her words out as if she were addressing a crowd. "Then they sold the building to a new guy, and this guy started boarding up the place and telling us we had to leave."

But they didn't leave, although their rooms had no heat or light, because they had no place to go and not much money. Dee had quit her job as a mail clerk when the baby was born, and Kavin hadn't worked since he was hit by a car while roller skating on Rhode Island Avenue one night last year. So they stayed, running an extension cord up from the first floor, where the electricity was still functioning. "The extension cord was hooked up to an electric blanket to keep my baby warm. The room was cold, but my baby was warm. Then the inspector from downtown unplugged the extension cord and told us to forget it. He said it was a fire hazard. But the baby needed heat. The place was so cold we had to go to an emergency shelter."

Now, after two weeks and three different shelters, the Browns stood in the cold waiting for the DHS bus to carry them from the motel where they ate to the motel where they slept. Twenty minutes later, it arrived. The homeless families trudged aboard and sat down in total darkness. From outside, all I could see in the glow of cigarettes was the face of a baby sleeping with his head propped against the cold window. ' A d e q u a t e S h e l t e r ' "ALL PERSONS IN THE DISTRICT OF COLUMBIA SHALL HAVE the right of adequate overnight shelter," read the proposed law, called Initiative 17. "Adequate shelter is that which to a reasonable degree maintains, protects and supports human health, is accessible, safe and sanitary and has an atmosphere of reasonable dignity."

On Election Day 1984, voters in Washington passed Initiative 17 in a landslide. It was a generous gesture: a law mandating that the District shelter every homeless person who requested it, with no strings attached and no time limit. The voters probably had visions of housing forlorn street people in mass shelters. They certainly had no way of predicting that the new law would combine with a chronic shortage of livable low-income housing to produce a situation in which hundreds of homeless families lived in hotels for months at enormous expense to the city.

Initiative 17 didn't cause that problem, of course. For years, the city had paid hotel bills for local families who had fled fires or been evicted or forced to desert condemned buildings. In 1982, as the problem expanded, the District contracted for the exclusive use of the 51-room Pitts Hotel for the emergency shelter of homeless families with minor children. The cost was $1.3 million that year. The average length of stay was 40 days.

Then, in 1986, came the flood. In January, the District was housing about 80 families at the Pitts and several other hotels. By December, it was sheltering nearly 300. The per capita cost was the highest of any city in the country: Nearly $100 a day -- $3,000 a month -- to house and feed a family of four in the shelter motels.

And the numbers keep growing. On March 30, 1988, the District was housing 525 families -- 610 adults and 1,338 children -- in shelter hotels, temporary apartments and a school gymnasium. The average length of stay was well over six months. The annual cost was $21 million.

"People are coming in faster than they're moving out," said Earnest Taylor, head of DHS's Office of Emergency Shelter and Support Services. "It is almost as if we're a substitute for public housing units."

In early February, a time when everybody at the Pitts seemed to have the flu, I began spending time in the shelter hotels. I hung around until April, when the Capitol City Inn was reeling from the mysterious deaths of two babies there. I wanted to see what kind of life the homeless were getting for $100 a day. I found a lot of people marooned in a uniquely American version of purgatory -- urban squalor with maid service. I n t a k e DEE BROWN SAW ME SQUEEZING THROUGH THE CROWD IN the front hallway of the Pitts one Saturday morning, and she followed me into the DHS intake office on the ground floor of the hotel. She told me a story, one she'd told me earlier and would tell me again. Ten years ago, long before she met and married Kavin, she was living in a wretched basement apartment with her 13-month-old daughter. One day, she left the baby with a friend and went out looking for food -- looking to steal food, she admits, because she had no money. While she was gone, the baby threw a tantrum, wiggled out of the friend's arms, fell on the open door of the oven used to heat the place, bounced off and landed headfirst on the cold concrete floor. She died the next day. Dee vowed, as she did every time she told the story, that she wouldn't let bad housing kill Sharon, her 4-month-old.

The security guard listened to this story and then asked Dee if she had any official business in the office. She didn't, so he asked her to leave. Then he flicked the channels on the office television until he found a professional wrestling exhibition. For the next two hours, I sat with half a dozen homeless people, watching huge humans in weird costumes stomp on one another's heads.

The intake office is the first stop for every family entering the system, social worker Sandra Mason told me when she finally had a few minutes to spare. She is 52, with nine years' experience in the system and a majestic head of gray and black hair. "On an average night," she said, "we have at least 20 families come through our door."

When they arrive, Mason tries to verify that they are truly a family and are indeed homeless -- but how can anyone prove such a thing? Then she calls relatives to see if they can take the family in. "If they cannot, then the family comes into our system. There is no time limit. It used to be 30 days, but that's no longer realistic. They more or less stay six months to a year."

Some of the people she interviews have fled from fires or abusive relatives, and some, she says, come from outside the District, lured by the knowledge that the law ensures they'll be sheltered. For most, though, the problem is simple economics. "The main reason is unemployment and not enough low-income housing," she said. "These people live on fixed incomes or they're at the minimum wage level if they're employed. So they can't help but come into the shelter. Rents have skyrocketed here in the District. I have been out checking. Somebody called and said, 'I have a place to rent for $380 a month, all utilities included.' I went out. It was deplorable. Deplorable! There were holes in the walls, there were wires hanging out, there were housing code violations all over the place."

The District's Tenant Assistance Program, which provides rent subsidies to low-income tenants, was supposed to ease the housing crunch, but it was hopelessly bogged down, Mason said. "There's a waiting list now of four months. That's not helping us to get people in and out."

But part of the tremendous influx into the hotel shelters, she admitted, was caused by a DHS rule: Residents of the shelters don't have to pay rent. Obviously, it's easier to raise a family on a minimum-wage job or a public assistance check if you're getting free room and board. "We provide three meals a day and a room, and they're still getting a check," Mason said. "That's the first thing a lot of them will ask: 'Do I lose my PA check?' I think we need to make them set aside so much money and put it in a savings account, and when they find housing they can use it for the housing. This would relieve us of the responsibility of providing the money for the security deposit and the first month's rent and the furniture."

She sighed, reminded of another of her job's frustrations. "Until we can reach the ones who are suffering from addictions, they're never gonna use that money right. I have done this: found a place for the person, sent them over to see the place, paid the first month's rent and the security deposit and bought the family furniture. And they were back in three months. Drugs. And the children suffer. I feel sorry for the children."

A woman entered the intake office, wearing a heavy coat and carrying a baby. "Just sign in and sit down," Mason said, sounding very weary. N a t h a n a n d M i c h e l e NATHAN RICHARDSON HAD A LITTLE DISPUTE with the intake office at the Pitts, a dispute that left him living in his Nissan pickup truck while his pregnant wife and their daughter lived in a shelter motel.

Nathan, a tall, slender man, is 22 but looks even younger because he always wears a blue baseball cap turned backward on his head. He came to Washington in January with his wife, Michele Rease, 20, and their 2-year-old daughter, Lauren. He was searching, he says, for construction work that wasn't available in his home town, Atlantic City, N.J. They stayed with a friend for a couple of weeks while Nathan worked as a day laborer and scouted around for a more permanent job. Then came the first of a flurry of blows from Fate: The superintendent of the friend's apartment building discovered their presence and ordered them to leave. So they went to the Pitts, where the second blow fell. Although Michele and Lauren were immediately accepted into the system, Nathan was rejected because he wasn't formally married to Michele and couldn't prove he was Lauren's father. It was not an unusual act: DHS intake workers, fearful that instant families were being created simply to qualify for motel shelter, frequently demand more documentation than many fathers can provide.

When Michele and Lauren were assigned to a room at the Budget Inn, Nathan moved into the parking lot. For more than a week, they lived an existence as absurd as anything conjured up in Catch-22. By night, their accommodations were separate and unequal: Michele and Lauren snuggled in the warmth of the room while Nathan shivered in the cold and squirmed to avoid the stick-shift knob. By day, however, they were all equally miserable because the Budget management insisted that the homeless families vacate their rooms during the day. Although the District was paying $50 a night for each room, it permitted the Budget to force families to leave every morning -- lugging all their belongings with them -- and stay away until nightfall. "I like these arrangements," Budget manager Jerry Holbrook told Washington Post reporter Marcia Slacum Greene. "Pick them up at 7:30 a.m. and bring them back at 7:30 p.m. I don't even want them here if they're sick."

Most of the 60 families that slept in the Budget spent their days sitting in the front hallway of the Pitts. The Richardsons spent theirs sitting in the pickup. It was cold and cramped, hardly ideal accommodations for a 2-year-old girl or a woman who was five months pregnant.

Nathan and Michele were parked outside the Pitts one night when they met Richard Gladstein, a lawyer who was asking homeless people to swear out affidavits in support of a civil suit he had filed on behalf of the 60 families housed in the Budget. The lawsuit charged that the District perpetrated an illegally "arbitrary practice" by providing hundreds of families with 24-hour shelter at the Pitts and the Capitol City Inn while sheltering the Budget families only at night. That inequity violated several laws, including Initiative 17, the lawsuit charged, and was "unhealthy, unsafe, unsanitary and demeaning."

Many Budget residents, fearful that they might lose what accommodations they had, declined to swear out an affidavit. But Nathan and Michele were only too eager to tell their story to a judge.

"During the day there is no place to go and rest," Michele wrote. "I am five months pregnant. I have a mild case of toxemia. My feet and hands are swollen and my feet must be elevated as much as possible. We have a two-year-old daughter whom we are trying to potty train. But being as unstable as we are, she is not responding. Her father is unable to work because he must stay in the car with me during the day to help take care of her. She has bronchitis and she is getting worse from the cold . . ." L i v i n g i n a G y m WHEN THE LAWSUIT WAS HEARD IN D.C. SUPERIOR COURT ON February 16, Richard Gladstein asked Judge Robert S. Tignor to issue a temporary restraining order that would force the District to provide all homeless families with 24-hour shelter. Instead, the judge gave Gladstein and the city two days to negotiate a settlement on their own.

The next day, Marjorie Hall Ellis, who was then DHS's commissioner of social services, announced that the homeless families at the Budget would no longer have to vacate the motel every day. Instead, they would be bused to the Pitts before breakfast, bused back to the Budget after lunch, bused back to the Pitts before dinner and back to the Budget at night. They could not, however, simply walk a few hundred yards down New York Avenue to eat with the 199 homeless families housed at the Capitol City Inn.

Ellis' announcement did not end the lawsuit. On March 1, Gladstein went back to court to tell the judge that homeless families housed in the Hayes Motel were also being denied access to their rooms during the day. Those families now included Dee and Kavin Brown -- the couple who had fled an unheated building with their 4-month-old daughter Sharon -- as well as Nathan Richardson and Michele Rease, who had been transferred, as a couple this time, to the Hayes. Again, Judge Tignor instructed the two sides to try to negotiate a settlement.

That evening after dinner, Dee Brown was in the Pitts with her baby when Sandra Mason informed the Hayes families that they were being transferred to a place called the Randall School. What was that? Dee wondered. Some old, abandoned school building? And how would she get word to Kavin, who had gone off to visit friends?

A couple of hours later, a bus picked up Dee and Sharon and the other families and carted them back to the Hayes Motel. There, the bus picked up Nathan and Lauren Richardson, who had just returned from visiting Michele in Providence Hospital, where she'd been admitted for problems related to her toxemia. It was almost 11 when they arrived at the Randall School, an old junior high now serving as a city office building. They stepped into the glaring light of the gymnasium and stared at their new home. The gym, a shelter for homeless men, was filled from end to end with more than 100 grubby green army cots, many of them already occupied by drunken, dirty men. There were no sheets, no blankets, no pillows, no washcloths and no towels, and there was no place for Dee to sterilize Sharon's bottle. A blackboard bore a cheery message: "FOCUS ON FITNESS."

Nathan laid his daughter down on his towel and covered her with his coat. Then he lay down himself, keeping a wary eye on the transvestite who was sleeping eight cots away.

Dee stayed awake all night. Her mind kept churning up memories of how her first baby had died by falling on the floor. Remembering, she clutched Sharon tight to her chest.

At 5:30 the guards woke everybody up. Two hours later, a bus came to ferry the families to the Pitts, because, ironically, the Randall, like the Hayes, was not a 24-hour facility.

Kavin Brown's night was even worse. When he returned to the Hayes after 10, he found his wife and daughter gone. The desk clerk said they'd been transferred, but he didn't know where. Kavin walked to the Capitol City Inn to see if they were there. They weren't. He went to the Budget, but they weren't there either. He walked to the Pitts, a trek of several miles, but nobody there could tell him where they were. So he wandered the cold streets all night long, finally locating his family at breakfast at the Pitts. L o c k e d O u t NATHAN RICHARDSON PULLED AT THE DOOR, BUT IT WAS locked. He stood on tiptoe and peered through the little barred window and into the Randall School gym. He saw the rows of Army cots and the command to "Focus on Fitness" but no sign of human life.

That morning, when his family was transferred from the Randall to the Capitol City Inn, Nathan had been informed that he could return to the Randall at any time to retrieve his family's clothes. His pickup had broken down, so photographer Jim Hubbard and I gave him a ride to the Randall. And now he found the wretched place sealed as tight as the Pentagon War Room. In another section of the building, he found a security guard who promised that the gym would be open at 5.

At quarter after 5, Nathan tried the gym door again. It was still locked. He peered into the window: still no life.

A security guard stepped out another door. "It don't open till 7," he said.

"They told us 5."

"Seven," the guard said. Then he climbed into a car and drove off.

Nathan seethed as he rode back to the Capitol City without a change of clothes for Michele, who had just been released from the hospital. He confessed that the system sometimes drove him to a murderous rage. "I think about killing. Then I think about my daughter. That's what stops me. I gotta think about her."

When I confessed that I'd spent weeks poking around the system and still couldn't figure out how it worked, he volunteered an explanation: "The people who already got theirs sit down on their asses and do nothing and tell you they're gonna do something. And the people who don't got theirs sit and do nothing and don't act like they want anything -- with a few exceptions."

"And where do you fit in there?"

"I'm one of the few exceptions." Nine out of 10 people in the motel shelters were perfectly content, he said bitterly. "Hey, you're talking about a nice little room, three hot meals a day, you know what I'm saying? They ain't got to clean their rooms, and they're gettin' their get-high money at the beginning of the month. The first of the month is the only time the Pitts is deserted. Everybody disappears. Then they come back the next day when they're broke. They're rich as kings for that one day. They forget about those other 30 days. You know what it is? Most of them have just given up. They're tired of fighting."

Why are you different?

" 'Cause I don't give up. 'Cause I got brains and they don't. I want what I want when I want it and they don't."

What do you want?

"Happiness, that's all. I want to see my family happy, and I'm going to get it. If it means fighting the Pitts down to the last breath, I'll do that. If it means blowing the Pitts up, I'll do that." Y o u C a n ' t G o H o m e A g a i n HOLDING A HAMMER AND THREE COOKIES IN HIS RIGHT hand, Kavin Brown scaled a fence, climbed a tree and hopped onto the second-floor porch off the rooms where he'd lived with Dee and Sharon before they fled to the shelter system. He ate the cookies, then started prying boards off the porch door.

When they'd moved out a month earlier, leaving behind almost everything they owned, Kavin had boarded up the place, hoping to seal it from thieves. Now, after they'd been transferred from the Randall School gym to the Budget Inn, where they had some storage space, he and Dee had returned to reclaim their clothes.

Kavin pulled back the boards and stepped inside, only to find that somebody had been there first. Beer cans, still wet, lay on the floor. The place reeked of urine. Their clothes and personal papers, which had been stored in boxes, were strewn around the room. Next door, in the common bathroom, huge chunks of the walls had collapsed to the floor.

Kavin moved the refrigerator that he had used to barricade the door to the hallway, and Dee entered, carrying Sharon in her cradle. She set the cradle down in the middle of the floor and pondered the devastation.

"Mommy, don't get mad," Dee said in a squeaky voice, pretending to be Sharon. "It could be worse."

Then, in her own voice, she answered: "How much worse could it be?"

Kavin walked into the bedroom to pack clothes while Dee sat on a couch and began gathering their scattered papers. "All your baby cards from your baby shower all over the place," she said to Sharon. She picked up a faded photograph of a smiling girl in

Sunday dress. "Look at this," she said. "It's the only picture I have of me when I was a little girl."

Kavin carried a basket of shoes into the living room and shook his head at the mess. "We didn't live like this," he kept saying. "All this stuff was packed up."

When Dee found her sewing machine under a pile of clothes, she rejoiced, until she realized it was no longer in one piece. "They took it apart, I guess to see if they could sell it," she said, cradling the broken machine in her arms. She was silent a moment, then she whispered, "My mother gave it to me."

Behind her was a poem she'd gotten in a carton of Similac infant formula and taped to the wall. It was called "Children Learn What They Live."

If children live with criticism,

They learn to condemn.

If children live with hostility,

They learn to fight . . .

The poem did not reveal what children would learn living in a place like this. T h e B e h e m o t h o f t h e S y s t e m WHEN THE BROWNS RETURNED TO THE BUDGET INN, lugging several bulky bags of clothes, they found the place buzzing with rumors. The rumors came in several versions, but when you stripped away the obvious embellishments, the core was always the same: All the homeless familes were going to be moved out of the Budget. And nobody seemed to know where they would be sent. Dee, who was usually nervous anyway, was obviously shaken. She had permitted herself the luxury of believing that collecting her belongings might be the first step toward a new stability, and now her fragile optimism was shattered. "We may as well go back to that apartment," she said, bitterly. "We may as well throw our whole life away that we struggled for for two years."

Desperate for real information, she called the intake office at the Pitts. Sandra Mason said she'd heard the rumors but had no official knowledge. Relieved, Dee began unpacking her things. A few hours later, Mason called back. The Budget was indeed going to be emptied, she said, and the Browns would be transferred to the Capitol City Inn at noon the next day.

The Capitol City is the behemoth of the system. The biggest and bleakest of the shelter motels, it is home for 199 homeless families. Squeezed between the warehouses and fast-food joints of New York Avenue NE and the railroad tracks, it is a place that seems designed for depression: The hallways are painted the color of charcoal, giving them the aura of midnight even at high noon. The place swarms with kids -- more than 600 at last count -- but there is no recreational equipment, not even a single basketball hoop. The kids amuse themselves by playing chicken on the railroad tracks, dancing on abandoned cars and shooting basketballs into a rectangular, red plastic milk box that they've hung on the Amtrak fence. Adults pass the long hours with the aid of the Capitol City's two favorite drugs -- television and crack, which is called "Scotty," as in "Beam me up, Scotty."

The Browns were assigned a room almost indistinguishable from every other room in the Capitol City -- the same two double beds, the same color television set, the same ugly orange and brown abstract print, the same black glue spots dappling the wall where a mirror once hung. Kavin was standing on a chair fiddling with the TV antenna when I arrived. Sharon was sleeping. Dee was leafing through the pictures she'd rescued from the rooming house. And a cockroach was slowly climbing the wall behind the beds.

Kavin wiggled the antenna, and the ghosts on the television screen became two affluent blond Americans clutched in a passionate embrace. Dee showed me a picture of Kavin wearing a white dinner jacket at their wedding reception last August. The cockroach kept climbing. The rich blonds kept smooching. Dee showed me a picture of herself staring at her daughter's coffin. The lovers, still locked in embrace, leaned over and over until they plopped into a plush divan. The cockroach approached the ceiling, antennae testing the path like a blind man's cane. Suddenly, the lovers disappeared, replaced by the logo of the television show. It was called, appropriately enough, "Another World." ' S o m e b o d y H a s t o L o v e T h e s e P e o p l e ' "THIS IS ALMOST LIKE A SUBCULTURE; IT'S ALMOST LIKE A town," said Ella McCall-Haygan, the chief social worker at the Capitol City Inn. "And I have to respond to everything."

In the past year, McCall-Haygan has been forced to respond to just about every imaginable emergency -- kids hit by cars, drug overdoses, murders and, more frequently, those quiet crises that can make a homeless mother snap. "Sometimes they come in very quietly and they want to use the phone, and you turn around and they're crying hysterically," she said. She wore black leather pants, a black turtleneck, a red leather jacket and a button that said, "I'm a friend of the homeless." "Some of them have cussed me out, saying, 'You're not doing anything for me.' "

McCall-Haygan greets her clients with hugs, sympathy and a ready laugh. She knows what they're going through because she's been there herself. "I've been homeless, I've been on welfare, I've had seven children, I've been head of my household. I remember a time I went into the welfare building in New York City and cussed the social worker out and had the lady in tears. Well, what goes around comes around, so I'm getting it now. When they do it to me, I smile and say, 'Did you get it all out?' "

McCall-Haygan is on her second tour of duty at the Capitol City. "We shut this place down four years ago," she says. "We had maybe 100 families, and we moved everybody out of here. We closed this place down forever, we thought. That was 1983."

In 1986, when a tidal wave of homeless families flooded the system, the city again began placing families at the Capitol City. In early 1987, McCall-Haygan was summoned back to Capitol City. "The mission was to move families out and close this place down. Again."

And she is moving people out, she quickly adds. "But when we move people out, they move people in. They're coming into intake seven, eight, nine families a day."

McCall-Haygan bristles at the notion, advanced by Nathan Richardson, among others, that most people in the shelter don't want to get out. "I think it's a small minority that is complacent, that says, 'You do everything for me,' " she says. "I have working people in here. They get up and go to work and they send their kids to school. They just can't get a place."

Given the situation, about all she can do, McCall-Haygan says, is be there when she's needed. "You have to be a mother, father, sister, brother, whatever the clients want you to be. Somebody has to care. Somebody has to love these people." T h e H o m e l e s s S h u f f l e AS IT TURNED OUT, THE BROWNS WERE LUCKY TO BE TRANS- ferred to the Capitol City Inn when they were. A few days later, the other 62 families at the Budget became pawns in a bizarre bureaucratic shuffle that moved homeless people from shelter to shelter around the city.

It began when the management of the Budget demanded that the city either rent all its rooms or move the homeless out. The District -- not wanting to get into "another whole motel situation," as Marjorie Hall Ellis put it -- opted to move them out. About 40 of the families were placed at 611 N St. NW, a building, still under renovation, that had been designated as a shelter for single women. The rest were sent to the Randall School gym. That meant that the single men housed at the Randall had to be moved somewhere else. First, the city sent them to a building at 16th and Q streets NW. But the neighbors objected, and so did Mayor Marion Barry. Two days later, the men were shuffled again, this time to RFK Stadium, where they were housed in an underground room where the Redskinettes change into their uniforms before games.

Richard Gladstein, the attorney who had sued the city over the daily ouster of families at the Budget, returned to court to argue against housing families in the Randall gym. On March 21, D.C. Superior Court Judge Donald Smith ordered the city to house no more than eight families in the gym. Two days later, DHS officials told the judge that they had no other place to put the homeless families and asked permission to house 25 families in the gym. Smith granted the permission, provided that the city submit a plan to "phase out" the Randall gym.

The city dutifully submitted its plan but failed to phase out the gym. Today, the gym still houses up to 25 families, each living in a plywood cubicle with a white sheet for a door. The place is run like an Army barracks. At 10 every night, the lights are turned out, and at 5:30 every morning, a security guard wakes everyone up with the shriek of a whistle. Then they're bused to the Pitts, where they can eat breakfast and spend the day loitering in the front hallway. T h e C o n g r e s s m a n C o m e t h TONY COELHO, A DEMOCRATIC CONGRESSMAN FROM CALIFORNIA and the House majority whip, raised his camera to his eye and focused on a little boy who was rolling on a big metal barrel in the mud outside the Capitol City Inn's cafeteria. It was a great image, a perfect picture of homelessness: a kid playing on a garbage can in front of a line of people waiting in the cold for dinner.

An avid amateur photographer, Coelho has shot pictures of his House colleagues and, on a trip to Russia, took pictures of Gorbachev that were good enough to sell to Newsweek. When he decided he would like to photograph the homeless, he traveled with his bodyguard to the Capitol City Inn. Nathan Richardson, clad as always in his backwards blue baseball cap, agreed to give him a guided tour.

After Coelho got a few shots of the boy on the garbage can, Nathan led him to the place where the kids shoot basketballs into a plastic milk box mounted on a fence. But the milk box had fallen down, and the kids were reduced to shooting the ball into a metal garbage can. The congressman never got that picture because an official appeared and sternly demanded that Coelho follow him to the office immediately. It was tense for a minute, and then the magic word "congressman" was uttered, and suddenly another official appeared, put his arm around Coelho's shoulders and welcomed him to the place.

Nathan Richardson, an avid student of bureaucracy, was impressed by the display. "That's called fear," he said, smiling. "That's called protecting your ass."

Pretty soon, Coelho had drawn a crowd. Kids on skateboards mugged for his camera. Dee Brown asked if he could help her get an apartment. Ella McCall-Haygan came out to see what was going on. Kavin Brown appeared, smiling, and announced that he had just been hired at McDonald's. McCall-Haygan rewarded him with a warm hug. And then someone heaved a half-pint milk carton from a second-floor balcony, and it splattered all over everybody.

Meanwhile, Nathan Richardson was getting Coelho's name and phone number from the congressman's bodyguard. "As long as they see me with the congressman, they won't mess with me," he said. "It's called having an ace in the hole." ' S h e 's P a n i c k i n g , M a n ' ON THE FIRST DAY OF SPRING, THE SUN CAME OUT, BRIGHTENING even the dismal courtyard of the Capitol City Inn. Kavin Brown opened up his windbreaker -- he wasn't wearing a shirt -- and soaked up a few rays. He was cleanshaven now, having sacrificed his goatee and five nights a week for a job flipping burgers at McDonald's for "three-something an hour." With a few hours to kill before work, he was lounging in the sun, watching kids climb one of the few trees at the shelter.

"What if you fall?" he yelled to them.

They ignored him.

"What if you fall?" he repeated, more urgently this time. "What if you fall? You wanna break your back? Get down from there."

Perhaps it was the news that caused Kavin's concern. That morning, a 2-month-old baby, Eraina Kante Clark, had died at the Capitol City, where she had lived the entirety of her short life. Kavin said he felt bad for the little girl's mother. "A woman never gets over that, man. My wife lost a baby, and she wouldn't have another for 10 years. Man, she still puts me through changes about it."

He stared across the parking lot, where the kids he'd chased out of the tree were doing some kind of war dance atop an abandoned car. "The kids out here act like adults," he said, disgusted. "The other day, one says to his mother, 'You shut up!' They get on my nerves. I gotta get out of here for a while, go downtown."

But he didn't go downtown. Instead, he walked over and coaxed the kids off the car. He noticed that one kid had a football. It wasn't much of a ball -- made of styrofoam, it looked like a big dog had gnawed a hunk out of it -- but it would do. Kavin organized a couple of teams and started a game. He was fading back to pass when Dee appeared across the courtyard, gesturing frantically and yelling something about the baby. He took off in a sprint.

A half hour later, I found him in his room, cradling Sharon in his arms. "Dee heard the baby that died had a 103 fever," he explained. "And Sharon got a 101 fever. So she ran over to call the clinic for an appointment. She's all upset. She's panicking, man, she's panicking." S u d d e n I n f a n t D e a t h JUANITA WADDELL KNOCKED SOFTLY ON ELLA MCCALL-HAYGAN'S office door. McCall-Haygan opened it and immediately cradled Waddell's hands in her own. "You all right?" she asked.

Waddell nodded slightly but said nothing. The previous night, her 6-month-old son George had died suddenly, inexplicably, in the room he shared with six siblings, the room where he had lived his entire life. Now she was on her way to make funeral arrangements.

"You need anything?" McCall-Haygan asked, still holding Waddell's hands. "You got everything?"

"I got my ID . . ."

"Okay," McCall-Haygan said. "And the kids are with your mother?"

Waddell nodded.

"Call me," McCall-Haygan said. "Come back as soon as you get in."

Suddenly, Waddell squeezed McCall-Haygan's hand tight, as if that motion could cut off the flow of tears that spilled out of her eyes.

"You all right?" McCall-Haygan asked.

"Not really," she whispered. D e e ' s N i g h t m a r e ERAINA KANTE CLARK DIED ON MONDAY, MARCH 21. THE NEXT day, George Waddell died. The day after that, a team of doctors toured the Capitol City Inn, checking to see if there was something in the environment that was killing babies. They found nothing. "It appears to be a terrible coincidence," said DHS spokesman Charles Seigel.

But coincidence was not a widely accepted explanation at the Capitol City, which is fertile soil for conspiracy theories. Rumors, each one more gruesome than the previous, fueled a panic among parents. Terrified, Dee Brown could not stop her mind from churning up horrible thoughts. When she wasn't recalling her first baby's death, she worried about losing her second to some unknown poison lurking somewhere in the place. "Is the water bad?" she thought. "Is the milk bad? Are the sheets dirty? Is the gas in the radiators bad?"

Her fears were not relieved by the results of autopsies on the infants. Eraina Kante Clark had died of a common and contagious strain of pneumonia. Worse, George Waddell had died of a form of meningitis that is, officials said, often spread in nurseries, day-care centers and other places where many infants are confined to a small area. Reed V. Tuckson, the District's health commissioner, urged Capitol City parents to immediately see a doctor if their children had fevers or colds.

Dee's usual nervousness escalated into terror. She could not sit still. Day and night, she kept jumping up to feel Sharon's forehead or take her temperature. Once, when the thermometer read 101, she panicked and summoned an ambulance.

At the hospital, it turned out that all Sharon had was an ear infection.

That diagnosis calmed Dee down somewhat, but it did not stop her nightmares. In one dream, she left Sharon with a babysitter and returned to find her in the custody of a hideously ugly stranger. Sharon's face was mashed as if somebody had stomped on it. Dee attacked the ugly stranger, throwing a Bible, then a glass. "What happened to my baby?" she screamed. "What happened to my baby? Why'd you end up with my baby? I didn't leave my baby with you."

Then she woke up. A Y e a r i n t h e B e h e m o t h "I'LL BE HERE A YEAR ON THE 14TH OF THIS MONTH." VANESSA Johnson said, sitting in her room at the Capitol City Inn one afternoon in early April. She was surrounded by a mountain range of freshly washed clothing, which she was meticulously folding and sorting into piles for each of her four children. Her youngest, Kimberly, 21 months old, was asleep on the floor at Vanessa's feet. Her oldest, Robert, 15, was giving his brother Brandon, 3, a bath. Dion, 10, was watching "The Flintstones." "I call this home until I can do better," Vanessa said. "I try to make it as comfortable as possible."

Living five to a motel room isn't easy -- for one thing, everybody has to take turns sleeping on the floor -- but Vanessa Johnson is determined to make the room a real home. She can't bake cookies or make popcorn for her kids like she did when they had their own apartment, but she can decorate the walls with drawings by her children and herself. "I been doing a lot of drawing with the children and making a lot of dolls and pillows with them," she said. "The key thing is we do everything together. When we clean up, everybody does something."

She wasn't always this way. When the Johnsons first came to the motel -- after living in a series of wretched apartments -- Vanessa succumbed to the powerful pull of inertia, a disease that is epidemic at the Capitol City. "I didn't know what to do," she recalled. "You get into the state of mind where you think there's nothing you can do."

Frightened and depressed, she took out her anger on her eldest son. "I would get too upset with him," she said, "and he would get so upset with me that he would leave home. We were at each other's throats." She also started drinking a lot -- beer and brandy, mostly -- and for the first time in her life, she found herself hitting her kids. "My 10-year-old, he sat down and told me, 'I don't like what you're doing. You're drinking too much. You're hollering at us and hitting us.' "

Those words hit her like a sobering slap. She asked the DHS social workers for help, and they arranged for weekly family counseling sessions. "It didn't take but two sessions for us to realize that we need each other and we got to do right by each other." Vanessa also enrolled in a carpentry program at the Arch Training Center in Southeast Washington. "That place really made me realize a lot," she said. "I was able to come home and tell the children things that I did at school. And they could tell me things they did at school. I also learned that if I didn't get off my duff and do things for myself, nobody was gonna help me."

Unlike most residents in this factory of cynicism, Vanessa eagerly expresses her gratitude to the shelter system. "I just feel good that there's someplace for me and my children," she said. "I know where they are, I know what they're doing. We been so close-knit here. If you're not a family when you come out of here, you never will be."

As she spoke, she kept folding and sorting, folding and sorting, trying to make a home out of a hellhole. ' I ' m O u t o f H e r e ' SOMETHING ABOUT NATHAN RICHARDSON HAD changed, but it took me a few minutes to figure out what it was: He wasn't wearing his blue baseball cap backward. In fact, he wasn't wearing it at all.

He laughed when I mentioned it, and then he showed me his new baseball cap. This one was maroon with gold letters that spelled "McDonald's." Nathan had joined Kavin Brown on the night shift, flipping burgers. Last night, in fact, he had worked past 2 in the morning, then slept until 4, when his daughter Lauren woke him up. She likes to start her days early, too early for a man working nights.

Tired, Nathan sat on his bed, then sprawled backward across it. He lay there, his back on the mattress, his feet still on the floor, and he talked about what a circus the Capitol City becomes on the first of the month, when the public assistance checks arrive, followed closely by the dope dealers in their fancy cars. "This is more of a hot spot than New York City," he said, laughing. "If we charged admission, we'd be out of here in a day."

I reminded him of the day when we had failed to get his clothes from the Randall School. In his anger and bitterness he'd condemned most homeless families as deadbeats with no desire to better themselves. Six weeks later, I wondered if he still felt that way.

"Most people are happy to be here," he said, still lying supine on the bed. "They get three meals a day and a roof over their heads and they get their public assistance check . . ." Then he stopped. His heart wasn't in it. Maybe he was just tired, or maybe he'd learned that it wasn't so easy to escape. "There are people in here who are workers. They want to get out of here, so they're working. My two-week gross is close to $300. In a month I can save $400 or $500. Two months, and I'm out of here."

He lay there for a while, silent, his breathing getting slower and heavier. His wife, due in July and looking very pregnant, grinned at him: The weary workingman had fallen asleep.

"I figure if we really scrimp and save," Michele said, "we could be out of here by a month after the baby is born. Maybe not, but if we really scrimp and save we may be able to do it. Even a one-bedroom, I don't care. Anything with a kitchen. I really miss having a stove." She looked at Lauren, who was playing with Legos on the bed. "I'd like her to have a home life. It's time. It's time."

There was a knock at the door. Startled, Nathan sprang off the bed. He rubbed his sleepy eyes and peeked through the curtain. Then he opened the door and told the maid that they didn't need any vacuuming today.

He lay back down on the bed. He was asleep within a minute. M i s s P i g g y ' s N e w S h o e s DEE BROWN CLOSED THE DOOR OF HER ROOM in the Capitol City Inn and strolled sprightly down the sidewalk. She was dressed up and looking good, and she knew it. The worried frown she'd worn all winter had metamorphosed into a lipsticked smile. "I've been eatin' and sleepin'," she explained. "Not like when I was in the Pitts hallway."

She headed for the social worker's office, passing the new medical van that had been set up after the babies died in March. Her own baby was doing fine. Sharon's appetite was so good that Dee had taken to calling her Miss Piggy. Six months old, the kid had yet to meet a french fry she didn't like. She had no teeth, of course, so she gummed them into submission.

Inside the office, Dee checked her mail. Her Tenant Assistance Program certificate -- the piece of paper entitling her to a city rent subsidy -- hadn't arrived yet, but there were three Social Security cards waiting for her: Kavin's, Sharon's and her own. "I always knew my number," she said. "But I never had a card."

She stuck the cards into her purse and headed for the IRS office downtown to get some help with her income tax return. She had worked most of 1987 -- right up until the very day the baby was born, she said -- and with three deductions, she figured she was due for a big refund. If it were big enough, they could escape the Capitol City Inn, TAP certificate or no TAP certificate.

But it was something else that had inspired Dee's new disposition, a development that seemed to promise better days. "Kavin got his first paycheck, and he gave me the money," she said. "I gave it back to him, and he went out and bought Miss Piggy her first pair of shoes." Her smile was bright enough to illuminate even the grim hallways of the Capitol City Inn. "We're like a regular family now," she said. :: a Sunday dress. "Look at this," she said. "It's the only picture I have of me when I was a little girl."

Kavin carried a basket of shoes into the living room and shook his head at the mess. "We didn't live like this," he kept saying. "All this stuff was packed up."

When Dee found her sewing machine under a pile of clothes, she rejoiced, until she realized it was no longer in one piece. "They took it apart, I guess to see if they could sell it," she said, cradling the broken machine in her arms. She was silent a moment, then she whispered, "My mother gave it to me."

Behind her was a poem she'd gotten in a carton of Similac infant formula and taped to the wall. It was called "Children Learn What They Live."

If children live with criticism,

They learn to condemn.

If children live with hostility,

They learn to fight . . .

The poem did not reveal what children would learn living in a place like this. T h e B e h e m o t h o f t h e S y s t e m WHEN THE BROWNS RETURNED TO THE BUDGET INN, lugging several bulky bags of clothes, they found the place buzzing with rumors. The rumors came in several versions, but when you stripped away the obvious embellishments, the core was always the same: All the homeless familes were going to be moved out of the Budget. And nobody seemed to know where they would be sent. Dee, who was usually nervous anyway, was obviously shaken. She had permitted herself the luxury of believing that collecting her belongings might be the first step toward a new stability, and now her fragile optimism was shattered. "We may as well go back to that apartment," she said, bitterly. "We may as well throw our whole life away that we struggled for for two years."

Desperate for real information, she called the intake office at the Pitts. Sandra Mason said she'd heard the rumors but had no official knowledge. Relieved, Dee began unpacking her things. A few hours later, Mason called back. The Budget was indeed going to be emptied, she said, and the Browns would be transferred to the Capitol City Inn at noon the next day.

The Capitol City is the behemoth of the system. The biggest and bleakest of the shelter motels, it is home for 199 homeless families. Squeezed between the warehouses and fast-food joints of New York Avenue NE and the railroad tracks, it is a place that seems designed for depression: The hallways are painted the color of charcoal, giving them the aura of midnight even at high noon. The place swarms with kids -- more than 600 at last count -- but there is no recreational equipment, not even a single basketball hoop. The kids amuse themselves by playing chicken on the railroad tracks, dancing on abandoned cars and shooting basketballs into a rectangular, red plastic milk box that they've hung on the Amtrak fence. Adults pass the long hours with the aid of the Capitol City's two favorite drugs -- television and crack, which is called "Scotty," as in "Beam me up, Scotty."

The Browns were assigned a room almost indistinguishable from every other room in the Capitol City -- the same two double beds, the same color television set, the same ugly orange and brown abstract print, the same black glue spots dappling the wall where a mirror once hung. Kavin was standing on a chair fiddling with the TV antenna when I arrived. Sharon was sleeping. Dee was leafing through the pictures she'd rescued from the rooming house. And a cockroach was slowly climbing the wall behind the beds.

Kavin wiggled the antenna, and the ghosts on the television screen became two affluent blond Americans clutched in a passionate embrace. Dee showed me a picture of Kavin wearing a white dinner jacket at their wedding reception last August. The cockroach kept climbing. The rich blonds kept smooching. Dee showed me a picture of herself staring at her daughter's coffin. The lovers, still locked in embrace, leaned over and over until they plopped into a plush divan. The cockroach approached the ceiling, antennae testing the path like a blind man's cane. Suddenly, the lovers disappeared, replaced by the logo of the television show. It was called, appropriately enough, "Another World." ' S o m e b o d y H a s t o L o v e T h e s e P e o p l e ' "THIS IS ALMOST LIKE A SUBCULTURE; IT'S ALMOST LIKE A town," said Ella McCall-Haygan, the chief social worker at the Capitol City Inn. "And I have to respond to everything."

In the past year, McCall-Haygan has been forced to respond to just about every imaginable emergency -- kids hit by cars, drug overdoses, murders and, more frequently, those quiet crises that can make a homeless mother snap. "Sometimes they come in very quietly and they want to use the phone, and you turn around and they're crying hysterically," she said. She wore black leather pants, a black turtleneck, a red leather jacket and a button that said, "I'm a friend of the homeless." "Some of them have cussed me out, saying, 'You're not doing anything for me.' "

McCall-Haygan greets her clients with hugs, sympathy and a ready laugh. She knows what they're going through because she's been there herself. "I've been homeless, I've been on welfare, I've had seven children, I've been head of my household. I remember a time I went into the welfare building in New York City and cussed the social worker out and had the lady in tears. Well, what goes around comes around, so I'm getting it now. When they do it to me, I smile and say, 'Did you get it all out?' "

McCall-Haygan is on her second tour of duty at the Capitol City. "We shut this place down four years ago," she says. "We had maybe 100 families, and we moved everybody out of here. We closed this place down forever, we thought. That was 1983."

In 1986, when a tidal wave of homeless families flooded the system, the city again began placing families at the Capitol City. In early 1987, McCall-Haygan was summoned back to Capitol City. "The mission was to move families out and close this place down. Again."

And she is moving people out, she quickly adds. "But when we move people out, they move people in. They're coming into intake seven, eight, nine families a day."

McCall-Haygan bristles at the notion, advanced by Nathan Richardson, among others, that most people in the shelter don't want to get out. "I think it's a small minority that is complacent, that says, 'You do everything for me,' " she says. "I have working people in here. They get up and go to work and they send their kids to school. They just can't get a place."

Given the situation, about all she can do, McCall-Haygan says, is be there when she's needed. "You have to be a mother, father, sister, brother, whatever the clients want you to be. Somebody has to care. Somebody has to love these people." T h e H o m e l e s s S h u f f l e AS IT TURNED OUT, THE BROWNS WERE LUCKY TO BE TRANS- ferred to the Capitol City Inn when they were. A few days later, the other 62 families at the Budget became pawns in a bizarre bureaucratic shuffle that moved homeless people from shelter to shelter around the city.

It began when the management of the Budget demanded that the city either rent all its rooms or move the homeless out. The District -- not wanting to get into "another whole motel situation," as Marjorie Hall Ellis put it -- opted to move them out. About 40 of the families were placed at 611 N St. NW, a building, still under renovation, that had been designated as a shelter for single women. The rest were sent to the Randall School gym. That meant that the single men housed at the Randall had to be moved somewhere else. First, the city sent them to a building at 16th and Q streets NW. But the neighbors objected, and so did Mayor Marion Barry. Two days later, the men were shuffled again, this time to RFK Stadium, where they were housed in an underground room where the Redskinettes change into their uniforms before games.

Richard Gladstein, the attorney who had sued the city over the daily ouster of families at the Budget, returned to court to argue against housing families in the Randall gym. On March 21, D.C. Superior Court Judge Donald Smith ordered the city to house no more than eight families in the gym. Two days later, DHS officials told the judge that they had no other place to put the homeless families and asked permission to house 25 families in the gym. Smith granted the permission, provided that the city submit a plan to "phase out" the Randall gym.

The city dutifully submitted its plan but failed to phase out the gym. Today, the gym still houses up to 25 families, each living in a plywood cubicle with a white sheet for a door. The place is run like an Army barracks. At 10 every night, the lights are turned out, and at 5:30 every morning, a security guard wakes everyone up with the shriek of a whistle. Then they're bused to the Pitts, where they can eat breakfast and spend the day loitering in the front hallway. T h e C o n g r e s s m a n C o m e t h TONY COELHO, A DEMOCRATIC CONGRESSMAN FROM CALI- fornia and the House majority whip, raised his camera to his eye and focused on a little boy who was rolling on a big metal barrel in the mud outside the Capitol City Inn's cafeteria. It was a great image, a perfect picture of homelessness: a kid playing on a garbage can in front of a line of people waiting in the cold for dinner.

An avid amateur photographer, Coelho has shot pictures of his House colleagues and, on a trip to Russia, took pictures of Gorbachev that were good enough to sell to Newsweek. When he decided he would like to photograph the homeless, he traveled with his bodyguard to the Capitol City Inn. Nathan Richardson, clad as always in his backwards blue baseball cap, agreed to give him a guided tour.

After Coelho got a few shots of the boy on the garbage can, Nathan led him to the place where the kids shoot basketballs into a plastic milk box mounted on a fence. But the milk box had fallen down, and the kids were reduced to shooting the ball into a metal garbage can. The congressman never got that picture because an official appeared and sternly demanded that Coelho follow him to the office immediately. It was tense for a minute, and then the magic word "congressman" was uttered, and suddenly another official appeared, put his arm around Coelho's shoulders and welcomed him to the place.

Nathan Richardson, an avid student of bureaucracy, was impressed by the display. "That's called fear," he said, smiling. "That's called protecting your ass."

Pretty soon, Coelho had drawn a crowd. Kids on skateboards mugged for his camera. Dee Brown asked if he could help her get an apartment. Ella McCall-Haygan came out to see what was going on. Kavin Brown appeared, smiling, and announced that he had just been hired at McDonald's. McCall-Haygan rewarded him with a warm hug. And then someone heaved a half-pint milk carton from a second-floor balcony, and it splattered all over everybody.

Meanwhile, Nathan Richardson was getting Coelho's name and phone number from the congressman's bodyguard. "As long as they see me with the congressman, they won't mess with me," he said. "It's called having an ace in the hole." ' S h e 's P a n i c k i n g , M a n ' ON THE FIRST DAY OF SPRING, THE SUN CAME out, brightening even the dismal courtyard of the Capitol City Inn. Kavin Brown opened up his windbreaker -- he wasn't wearing a shirt -- and soaked up a few rays. He was cleanshaven now, having sacrificed his goatee and five nights a week for a job flipping burgers at McDonald's for "three-something an hour." With a few hours to kill before work, he was lounging in the sun, watching kids climb one of the few trees at the shelter.

"What if you fall?" he yelled to them.

They ignored him.

"What if you fall?" he repeated, more urgently this time. "What if you fall? You wanna break your back? Get down from there."

Perhaps it was the news that caused Kavin's concern. That morning, a 2-month-old baby, Eraina Kante Clark, had died at the Capitol City, where she had lived the entirety of her short life. Kavin said he felt bad for the little girl's mother. "A woman never gets over that, man. My wife lost a baby, and she wouldn't have another for 10 years. Man, she still puts me through changes about it."

He stared across the parking lot, where the kids he'd chased out of the tree were doing some kind of war dance atop an abandoned car. "The kids out here act like adults," he said, disgusted. "The other day, one says to his mother, 'You shut up!' They get on my nerves. I gotta get out of here for a while, go downtown."

But he didn't go downtown. Instead, he walked over and coaxed the kids off the car. He noticed that one kid had a football. It wasn't much of a ball -- made of styrofoam, it looked like a big dog had gnawed a hunk out of it -- but it would do. Kavin organized a couple of teams and started a game. He was fading back to pass when Dee appeared across the courtyard, gesturing frantically and yelling something about the baby. He took off in a sprint.

A half hour later, I found him in his room, cradling Sharon in his arms. "Dee heard the baby that died had a 103 fever," he explained. "And Sharon got a 101 fever. So she ran over to call the clinic for an appointment. She's all upset. She's panicking, man, she's panicking." S u d d e n I n f a n t D e a t h JUANITA WADDELL KNOCKED SOFTLY ON ELLA MCCALL- Haygan's office door. McCall-Haygan opened it and immediately cradled Waddell's hands in her own. "You all right?" she asked.

Waddell nodded slightly but said nothing. The previous night, her 6-month-old son George had died suddenly, inexplicably, in the room he shared with six siblings, the room where he had lived his entire life. Now she was on her way to make funeral arrangements.

"You need anything?" McCall-Haygan asked, still holding Waddell's hands. "You got everything?"

"I got my ID . . ."

"Okay," McCall-Haygan said. "And the kids are with your mother?"

Waddell nodded.

"Call me," McCall-Haygan said. "Come back as soon as you get in."

Suddenly, Waddell squeezed McCall-Haygan's hand tight, as if that motion could cut off the flow of tears that spilled out of her eyes.

"You all right?" McCall-Haygan asked.

"Not really," she whispered. D e e ' s N i g h t m a r e ERAINA KANTE CLARK DIED ON MONDAY, March 21. The next day, George Waddell died. The day after that, a team of doctors toured the Capitol City Inn, checking to see if there was something in the environment that was killing babies. They found nothing. "It appears to be a terrible coincidence," said DHS spokesman Charles Seigel.

But coincidence was not a widely accepted explanation at the Capitol City, which is fertile soil for conspiracy theories. Rumors, each one more gruesome than the previous, fueled a panic among parents. Terrified, Dee Brown could not stop her mind from churning up horrible thoughts. When she wasn't recalling her first baby's death, she worried about losing her second to some unknown poison lurking somewhere in the place. "Is the water bad?" she thought. "Is the milk bad? Are the sheets dirty? Is the gas in the radiators bad?"

Her fears were not relieved by the results of autopsies on the infants. Eraina Kante Clark had died of a common and contagious strain of pneumonia. Worse, George Waddell had died of a form of meningitis that is, officials said, often spread in nurseries, day-care centers and other places where many infants are confined to a small area. Reed V. Tuckson, the District's health commissioner, urged Capitol City parents to immediately see a doctor if their children had fevers or colds.

Dee's usual nervousness escalated into terror. She could not sit still. Day and night, she kept jumping up to feel Sharon's forehead or take her temperature. Once, when the thermometer read 101, she panicked and summoned an ambulance.

At the hospital, it turned out that all Sharon had was an ear infection.

That diagnosis calmed Dee down somewhat, but it did not stop her nightmares. In one dream, she left Sharon with a babysitter and returned to find her in the custody of a hideously ugly stranger. Sharon's face was mashed as if somebody had stomped on it. Dee attacked the ugly stranger, throwing a Bible, then a glass. "What happened to my baby?" she screamed. "What happened to my baby? Why'd you end up with my baby? I didn't leave my baby with you."

Then she woke up. continued on page 42 continued from page 24 A Y e a r i n t h e B e h e m o t h "I'LL BE HERE A YEAR ON THE 14TH OF this month." Vanessa Johnson said, sitting in her room at the Capitol City Inn one afternoon in early April. She was surrounded by a mountain range of freshly washed clothing, which she was meticulously folding and sorting into piles for each of her four children. Her youngest, Kimberly, 21 months old, was asleep on the floor at Vanessa's feet. Her oldest, Robert, 15, was giving his brother Brandon, 3, a bath. Dion, 10, was watching "The Flintstones." "I call this home until I can do better," Vanessa said. "I try to make it as comfortable as possible."

Living five to a motel room isn't easy -- for one thing, everybody has to take turns sleeping on the floor -- but Vanessa Johnson is determined to make the room a real home. She can't bake cookies or make popcorn for her kids like she did when they had their own apartment, but she can decorate the walls with drawings by her children and herself. "I been doing a lot of drawing with the children and making a lot of dolls and pillows with them," she said. "The key thing is we do everything together. When we clean up, everybody does something."

She wasn't always this way. When the Johnsons first came to the motel -- after living in a series of wretched apartments -- Vanessa succumbed to the powerful pull of inertia, a disease that is epidemic at the Capitol City. "I didn't know what to do," she recalled. "You get into the state of mind where you think there's nothing you can do."

Frightened and depressed, she took out her anger on her eldest son. "I would get too upset with him," she said, "and he would get so upset with me that he would leave home. We were at each other's throats." She also started drinking a lot -- beer and brandy, mostly -- and for the first time in her life, she found herself hitting her kids. "My 10-year-old, he sat down and told me, 'I don't like what you're doing. You're drinking too much. You're hollering at us and hitting us.' "

Those words hit her like a sobering slap. She asked the DHS social workers for help, and they arranged for weekly family counseling sessions. "It didn't take but two sessions for us to realize that we need each other and we got to do right by each other." Vanessa also enrolled in a carpentry program at the Arch Training Center in Southeast Washington. "That place really made me realize a lot," she said. "I was able to come home and tell the children things that I did at school. And they could tell me things they did at school. I also learned that if I didn't get off my duff and do things for myself, nobody was gonna help me."

Unlike most residents in this factory of cynicism, Vanessa eagerly expresses her gratitude to the shelter system. "I just feel good that there's someplace for me and my children," she said. "I know where they are, I know what they're doing. We been so close-knit here. If you're not a family when you come out of here, you never will be."

As she spoke, she kept folding and sorting, folding and sorting, trying to make a home out of a hellhole. ' I ' m O u t o f H e r e ' SOMETHING ABOUT NATHAN RICHARD- son had changed, but it took me a few minutes to figure out what it was: He wasn't wearing his blue baseball cap backward. In fact, he wasn't wearing it at all.

He laughed when I mentioned it, and then he showed me his new baseball cap. This one was maroon with gold letters that spelled "McDonald's." Nathan had joined Kavin Brown on the night shift, flipping burgers. Last night, in fact, he had worked past 2 in the morning, then slept until 4, when his daughter Lauren woke him up. She likes to start her days early, too early for a man working nights.

Tired, Nathan sat on his bed, then sprawled backward across it. He lay there, his back on the mattress, his feet still on the floor, and he talked about what a circus the Capitol City becomes on the first of the month, when the public assistance checks arrive, followed closely by the dope dealers in their fancy cars. "This is more of a hot spot than New York City," he said, laughing. "If we charged admission, we'd be out of here in a day."

I reminded him of the day when we had failed to get his clothes from the Randall School. In his anger and bitterness he'd condemned most homeless families as deadbeats with no desire to better themselves. Six weeks later, I wondered if he still felt that way.

"Most people are happy to be here," he said, still lying supine on the bed. "They get three meals a day and a roof over their heads and they get their public assistance check . . ." Then he stopped. His heart wasn't in it. Maybe he was just tired, or maybe he'd learned that it wasn't so easy to escape. "There are people in here who are workers. They want to get out of here, so they're working. My two-week gross is close to $300. In a month I can save $400 or $500. Two months, and I'm out of here."

He lay there for a while, silent, his breathing getting slower and heavier. His wife, due in July and looking very pregnant, grinned at him: The weary workingman had fallen asleep.

"I figure if we really scrimp and save," Michele said, "we could be out of here by a month after the baby is born. Maybe not, but if we really scrimp and save we may be able to do it. Even a one-bedroom, I don't care. Anything with a kitchen. I really miss having a stove." She looked at Lauren, who was playing with Legos on the bed. "I'd like her to have a home life. It's time. It's time."

There was a knock at the door. Startled, Nathan sprang off the bed. He rubbed his sleepy eyes and peeked through the curtain. Then he opened the door and told the maid that they didn't need any vacuuming today.

He lay back down on the bed. He was asleep within a minute. M i s s P i g g y ' s N e w S h o e s DEE BROWN CLOSED THE DOOR OF HER room in the Capitol City Inn and strolled sprightly down the sidewalk. She was dressed up and looking good, and she knew it. The worried frown she'd worn all winter had metamorphosed into a lipsticked smile. "I've been eatin' and sleepin'," she explained. "Not like when I was in the Pitts hallway."

She headed for the social worker's office, passing the new medical van that had been set up after the babies died in March. Her own baby was doing fine. Sharon's appetite was so good that Dee had taken to calling her Miss Piggy. Six months old, the kid had yet to meet a french fry she didn't like. She had no teeth, of course, so she gummed them into submission.

Inside the office, Dee checked her mail. Her Tenant Assistance Program certificate -- the piece of paper entitling her to a city rent subsidy -- hadn't arrived yet, but there were three Social Security cards waiting for her: Kavin's, Sharon's and her own. "I always knew my number," she said. "But I never had a card."

She stuck the cards into her purse and headed for the IRS office downtown to get some help with her income tax return. She had worked most of 1987 -- right up until the very day the baby was born, she said -- and with three deductions, she figured she was due for a big refund. If it were big enough, they could escape the Capitol City Inn, TAP certificate or no TAP certificate.

But it was something else that had inspired Dee's new disposition, a development that seemed to promise better days. "Kavin got his first paycheck and gave me the money," she said. "I gave it back to him, and he went out and bought Miss Piggy her first pair of shoes." Her smile was bright enough to illuminate even the grim hallways of the Capitol City. "We're like a regular family now," she said. ::

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