For Goodness' Sake

Kenny spent his first two Christmases in the Harlem hospital where his mother abandoned him, in a roomful of babies with AIDS. His third Christmas he spent in an Albany children's home. There he had the luck to meet his first angel.

Gertrude Lewis spent her days driving a city bus and, every other Saturday, volunteering at the Albany home. "I saw this boy with these beautiful eyes," she recalls, "just looking up and smiling." She was 47 years old, had never married, never had a family of her own. She decided then and there she would become a foster mother.

Now Kenny lies in his crib upstairs in her home, in a house she shares on a tree-lined street, where her heart prepared him room. This nursery is merry with orange walls and pictures and 27 watchful stuffed animals. "It's going to be hard to lose him," says Gertrude.

What are we to make of a woman willing to take to heart a baby she knows is likely to die? Surely, she confounds all descriptions of the roaring '80s as a morally chintzy stretch of history, where such problems as Kenny's are greeted with more petulance than pity. In an age of toxic cynicism, Gertrude is a Samaritan: a woman who, in the spacious privacy of her life, went out of her way to help a child who needed her. She is not running for office, not running charity balls and not running away. Perhaps she seems a rare heroine at an end of a decade when the rich got greedier, the poor got needier, and everyone else tended to his own shiny self-interest.

But the redeeming truth, to our own surprise, is that Gertrude is in vast company. Last March, Independent Sector, a Washington research and lobbying group, commissioned a Gallup poll to plumb the depths of our charity: What do we give, and why, and who does the giving, and how much? It turns out that almost half of all American adults offer their time to a cause, an astounding figure even allowing for the number of people who lie to pollsters. And most are giving more time than ever. These are commitments, not gestures. The average volunteer offers nearly five hours a week, for a total of 19.5 billion hours in 1987 -- the equal, roughly, of 10 million full-time employees. There is something infectious about mercy.

And so it is that George Bush, the heir-elect, looks out over the nation and raptly muses about a thousand points of light, savoring the phrase, if not quite understanding it. He did not add that the lights are shining into corners that have grown bleak and dim in the past eight years. And he got the numbers wrong. Out of sight of the Rose Garden, something like 80 million individuals are doing whatever they can to address the problems that politicians are fleeing.

Try to draw a profile of the typical do-gooder, and the only thing certain is that it is probably wrong. Volunteer work is not the sole province of the housewives holding Christmas fairs, the idle rich sponsoring benefits and the young selling cookies. The aggressive, entrepreneurial cast of much modern charity reflects the fact that the largest number of volunteers, according to a J.C. Penney survey, are between the ages of 35 and 49.