Miracle In Brooklyn

By PRISCILLA PAINTON

Good girls go to school every day, as everyone knows who reads storybooks. Pigtails bobbing as they skip along clean sidewalks to gather with friends at the big front door, laughing.

Though her life in a New York City ghetto was an ugly parody of that storybook vision, a certain 12-year-old girl last week clung fiercely to the ritual. After giving birth in the early hours of the morning in her bedroom, after cradling the 6-lb. 10-oz. boy until dawn, after carrying him into the hallway, stuffing him inside a plastic bag and throwing him down a garbage chute, the little girl did the only thing that made sense in her life. She went to school.

"She was staggering, holding her stomach, when she went to school," a neighbor told the New York Times. "She looked terrible. She could barely walk." But she showed up, and she slumped forward on her desk. When the teacher asked what was wrong, she said, "I'm sick."

The story of this little girl is about an illness, but of a different kind. At a time when the nation is still drunk with glee over its dashing victory in the gulf, New York had produced a parable that points up all the tragedies that can befall a little girl living on America's fraying urban front. With the fatalism of big-city survivors, her neighbors have already declared that this 12-year-old never had, and never will have, a chance. "She had it bad for 12 years," said one. Said another: "Most of us don't expect her to recover from this. She has gone through too much too young."

At four, the girl lost her parents in a fire. She moved in with her aunt, Gladys Perry, in the Brownsville section of Brooklyn, a moonscape of brick towers, security fences, dusty playgrounds, scrawny trees and empty lots. The housing project was the turf of local gangs with names like the Co-ops and the Young Guns, who settle their drug disputes with automatic weapons. When Muslim security guards were hired three years ago, the tribal warfare did not go away. It just changed, pitting the Muslims against the gangs. After a major drug dealer was killed a year ago, many of the remaining gangsters retreated from the complex.

But if the world outside improved a bit, the one inside her adoptive family's home was a quiet nightmare. Drugs and alcohol infiltrated the fourth- floor apartment. Neighbors say her aunt works nights in a nearby factory and recently has been ill. On at least two occasions, according to the police, her 21-year-old cousin Clarence Perry had sex with the girl when they were alone. On Thursday last week, neighbors woke up to discover the young Perry threatening to jump off the rooftop. "It was my baby!" Perry yelled. "Let me take care of this. Leave me alone." The police pulled him down, arrested him and charged him with statutory rape.

For the girl, what mattered after delivering the baby was cloaking her latest humiliation in a thin veil of dignity. On the way to school, she reportedly told a friend, "There's been a rumor that I'm pregnant, but I'm not," and invited the girl to feel her tender stomach. "She refused to admit that she had given birth once she lost the baby," a friend of the family said. "It was as if she could not comprehend it." Her teachers didn't help: though she had faithfully attended classes, they say they never realized she was pregnant.

Her neighborhood and the newborn's rescuers, meanwhile, have turned the infant into a symbol of life's sweet contingencies -- proof that happy endings can befall the meekest even in the meanest of places. Neighbors are calling him the "miracle baby." Those who found him are marveling at their luck.

"The trash compactor was running, and when I heard the baby crying, I turned it off," says McArthur Williams, a porter at the housing project. "If it hadn't cried, the baby would have been gone for sure." Patrol sergeant | Philip Insardi, who was summoned to the scene, said he crawled through the compactor's small metal doors and shined a flashlight onto the mount of garbage that was about to be squeezed between the machine's walls. "His feet were sticking out from under some newspapers," he said. "He wasn't making a peep when I got there." Insardi whipped off his shirt, swaddled the baby in it and rode with the child to the hospital. His own first child, a girl, was born four weeks ago. His strange encounter with the abandoned infant left him so shaken that he brought a receiving blanket knitted by his mother to the hospital.

The baby, after suffering from hypothermia, is now in stable condition. When news of his health reached the mother's neighbors, several of them clasped their chests and gave thanks to God. "The baby will never want for someone to look out for him," one of the women told New York Newsday. "He is blessed." It was as though surviving the maw of a trash chute would forever protect him from his own neighborhood.

With reporting by Mary Cronin and Alex Prud''homme/New York