Part Seven: What He Built
Nathaniel Ashworth liquidated a significant portion of his holdings in the spring of the following year. His business partners were alarmed. His financial advisers held a series of meetings in which they used words like “overextension” and “emotional decision-making” and suggested he take some time before committing to anything. He listened to all of them politely and then proceeded with his plans.
He purchased a building — a large, nineteenth-century hospital annex on the east side of the city that had been sitting vacant for a decade — and he hired an architect and a team of specialists in pediatric medicine and began converting it into something that had not quite existed before: a center specifically dedicated to children with conditions that mainstream medicine had classified as untreatable. Not a hospice, though it had the warmth of one. Not a research hospital, though it had rigorous medical staff. Something between the two — a place that held open the possibility of recovery while also honoring the child in front of it, regardless of outcome.
He spent more on it than he had told his advisers he was going to, because as the project developed he kept seeing things that needed to be added: a garden on the roof where families could sit; a music room where children who could not yet speak could still express something; a small library filled not with books about illness but with books about everything else. He wanted it to be, above all, a place that believed in the children inside it.
He named it after Elliot’s first name and then changed his mind and named it after the thing that had saved him.
“One Cup of Hope” opened on a Wednesday in late October — almost exactly two years after the Thursday morning when a homeless boy in a too-large coat had walked through a hospital corridor and changed everything. Nathaniel stood outside the building on the morning of the opening, holding Elliot, who was by now a sturdy, bright-eyed two-year-old with a great interest in pigeons and a habit of saying “more” with a commanding clarity that made his father laugh. Several journalists had gathered for the ribbon-cutting, and one of them — a young woman with a recorder she held out with professional insistence — asked Nathaniel to tell her what the liquid in the cup had been, so she could report it.
He looked at his son.
He looked at the building behind him, with its warm lights on in every window.
He looked at the recorder.
“It was not a substance,” he said.
The journalist waited.
“It was the compassion of someone who had nothing but faith,” he said. “And that is not a thing you can analyze in a laboratory. It is not a thing you can reproduce. You can only try to pass it on.”
