An Invisible Thread Read online

  We walked over to my apartment building, the Symphony. The doorman, Steve, greeted me with a wave.

  “Good evening, Miss Schroff,” he said.

  Then he looked down at Maurice, still in his dirty burgundy sweats. For a moment, they just stared at each other. It was Steve’s job to know everyone who came and went in the building, but I could tell he was having trouble sizing up our situation.

  “This is my friend, Maurice,” I finally said.

  That cleared up nothing.

  We walked through the lobby to the elevators. The Symphony was a new building, and the spacious lobby was dazzling—gorgeous rust-and-black-granite floors, high ceilings, art deco fixtures, a grand concierge desk. Everything was sleek and shiny. The elevator was bright and roomy, and the hallway to my apartment was lushly carpeted. Maurice silently took it all in.

  My apartment was small, but to me it was a luxurious sanctuary: big windows that went up to the ceiling, two double closets, a brand-new galley kitchen, and a balcony. I had a mahogany hope chest, a lovely oval dining room table, and an elegant antique bureau. The color scheme was an inviting blue and mauve. Everything was exactly how I wanted it.

  I told Maurice to take a seat on the sofa. He sat up against the right arm, on the very edge of the cushion. His eyes went right to the floor where I kept my giant jug of change. It was a clear plastic jug, a couple of feet tall, filled halfway to the top with nickels and dimes and quarters. The jug idea was something I got from my father, who used to put all his bartending tips in a bucket he kept in his bedroom. He never took money out, he only put more in. We kids were fascinated to see this mountain of money grow and grow. Every March he’d sit us down and have us roll up all the coins, and it would add up to several thousand dollars, which he used to pay his taxes. Years later, when I started working, I got a big jug of my own. I’m guessing there had to be at least a thousand dollars in coins in the jug. For a kid like Maurice, who subsisted on dimes and quarters he begged for on the street, the jug had to look like some kind of treasure.

  “Do you want a Diet Coke?” I asked him.

  “Yes, please,” he said.

  I brought out the drink and sat on the sofa.

  “Maurice, I want us to have a serious conversation about something, and it’s a conversation we’re going to have only once, so I want you to listen carefully.”

  Maurice tightened up.

  “The reason I invited you to my apartment is because I consider you my friend. Friendship is built on trust, and I want you to know I will never betray that trust. I want you to know you will always be able to trust me. But if you betray my trust, we can no longer be friends. Do you understand?”

  Maurice looked at me with his big round eyes and said nothing. He seemed confused, even startled.

  “Is that clear?” I asked again. “Does that make sense to you?”

  Then Maurice asked me a question.

  “Is that it? You just want to be my friend?”

  “Yes, that’s it.”

  Maurice visibly relaxed. He stood up and stuck out his hand. We shook on it.

  “A deal’s a deal,” he said.

  Much later, Maurice told me he’d been terrified when I sat him down for this talk. In his experience adults usually wanted something from him. His mother, his uncles, Snake the pimp—there was always an agenda, always an angle, to their interactions. And now this white lady wants something too. Now, he figured, I’m finally going to learn why she’s being so nice to me.

  It hardly made sense to him that all I wanted was to be friends.

  But now we had a pact. A friendship pact. Only years later would I be able to take the full measure of what that handshake meant.

  I told Maurice that while I cooked dinner I wanted him to set the table. I handed him plates and forks and knives. I put three chicken breasts in the broiler and boiled up pasta and vegetables, and I could hear Maurice fumbling with the silverware at the small table that defined my dining area. After a few minutes, he came into the kitchen.

  “Miss Laura, can you teach me how to set the table?”

  It was the first time he ever asked me to teach him something.

  I went out and set the table as he watched. Fork on the left, knife on the right, plate, napkin, glass. When we sat down to eat, I noticed Maurice staring at my hands.

  “What’s the matter, Maurice?”

  “I’m trying to figure out how you use your knife and fork together.”

  I slowed down my movements so he could see. Once again, I didn’t say anything—I didn’t give him a lesson. I simply let him learn by watching. Maurice was a sponge, fiercely curious and intelligent. He’d learned all the tricks of the drug trade by watching his mother and uncles; he was an expert on surviving on the streets because he’d seen it done. But he’d never seen anyone set a table or properly use a fork and a knife.

  He had never eaten a meal at a dinner table in someone’s home.

  Now, he watched me with my knife and fork and picked it up right away. Table etiquette isn’t a crucial skill in life, but it is a handy one. And Maurice, I could tell, was more than eager to learn it.

  I noticed Maurice ate only half his dinner.

  “Is your chicken okay?” I asked.

  “It’s great,” he said.

  “How come you didn’t finish it? Aren’t you hungry?”

  Maurice looked sheepish.

  “I want to bring some home to my mama,” he said. “Is that okay?”

  “Maurice, I have more in the kitchen. You finish that, and I’ll make you a plate you can take home.”

  Maurice devoured the rest of his dinner.

  Afterward, we both cleared the table, and in the kitchen I handed him a roll of cookie dough.

  “How about some cookies? You cut ’em; I’ll bake ’em.”

  I gave him a knife; he wasn’t sure what to do. I showed him how to open the roll and told him to cut each piece about an inch thick and then into four more pieces. Maurice listened and went to work. We arranged the pieces on a cookie sheet, put them in the oven, and, fifteen minutes later, ate warm chocolate chip cookies with milk.

  Maurice loved the idea of dessert—it was something else he wasn’t used to having. It was a treat, and he didn’t have many treats in his life. It became his favorite part of our meals together. He made sure to tuck away four cookies to bring home.

  It was nearly 9:00 p.m., and I wanted to get Maurice home. I still couldn’t believe no one would wonder where he’d been. I wrapped up a plate of food for him, and we sat down to talk before he left.

  “Maurice, let me ask you something. Do you have your own toothbrush at home?”

  “No,” he said.

  “Do you have a towel or a washcloth?”

  “No.”

  “Do you have a bar of soap there?”

  “No, Miss Laura.”

  I went to my closet and pulled out a towel and a washcloth, and I found an extra toothbrush and toothpaste and a bar of soap. I put them in a plastic shopping bag along with the leftovers. I would soon learn that anything Maurice brought home with him quickly disappeared. His sisters, his uncles, he didn’t know who took them exactly—the stuff just vanished. Eventually I bought Maurice a large footlocker with a combination lock, and he kept his stuff in there.

  “One more thing,” I said to Maurice. “I have a surprise for you.”

  He perked up.

  “How would you like to go to a Mets game this Saturday?”

  Maurice lit up. All these years later, I can still see his face in that moment, bathed in something like joy.

  “But listen, Maurice. I need your mother to sign a note saying she’s okay with you riding in my car and going to the game, okay? Can you bring this to her and have her sign it?”

  I’d typed up a permission slip and gave it to him. I asked him to meet me on Wednesday, same time and spot, with the note. “I’m not going to take you to the game without it,” I told him. “You must get this signed an
d bring it back.” He promised he would, and we agreed to meet that Wednesday so he could give me the note.

  “Thank you so much for my dinner and all this stuff,” Maurice said.

  I walked him down through the lobby and past Steve again.

  “Good night, Maurice,” Steve said.

  Maurice was startled. The doorman knew his name.

  That Wednesday night I waited on 56th Street for Maurice to bring me the note. I waited for ten minutes, then fifteen, then twenty. I waited until seven forty-five.

  Maurice never showed up.

  During one of my early dinners with Maurice—I can’t remember which—I asked him to tell me more about his mother. He was hesitant to say anything about her at all, but I pressed him a bit. I felt I needed to know as much about her as I could. After all, I was spending time with her son, infringing on her territory. Could his mother really not care what he did or who he was with?

  “Maurice, does your mother work?” I asked.

  “No.”

  “So what does she do all day?”

  “She stays home and she cleans. She vacuums and dusts.”

  This made sense to me; plenty of moms are stay-at-home moms. I formed a picture of Maurice’s mother in my mind: harried, exhausted, too many kids, no man to help. I was still trying to get my head around how a boy his age could be on his own to roam the streets at night. What mother would allow that? And if she did, why hadn’t Maurice shown up that Wednesday? Had she not wanted him to go to the Mets game with me? Was his mother even in his life anymore?

  After Maurice didn’t show up with the note, I decided I had to find out these things for myself. I decided to go to the Bryant Hotel and meet Maurice’s mother.

  All I knew was what Maurice had told me: that he lived with his mother and grandmother and sisters in a room at the Bryant. I knew it was a welfare hotel. In the news, I’d heard a bit about New York City’s many welfare hotels, but I’d never been to one, or even near one. I figured it would be better if I didn’t go alone, so I asked my friend Lisa, who lived three doors down the hall from me, to come along. After work on Thursday we walked over to the Bryant, on the corner of 54th Street and Broadway.

  The Bryant was in a busy but run-down stretch of midtown Manhattan, just a few blocks up from Times Square. It was a squat twelve-story building, with a limestone façade giving way to a corroded brick exterior. Down the block was the Ed Sullivan Theater that today houses the David Letterman show but in those days was where they taped the CBS sitcom Kate & Allie. Maurice would later tell me the sitcom helped him survive. He would go into the theater during tapings and sit in the audience, then go backstage and eat food set out on tables for the crew. After a while people assumed the boom guy, a tall black man, was his dad. The crew got to know him and let him hang around, but then the show went off the air. It was a good ride while it lasted.

  Lisa and I walked up to the entrance of the Bryant. On the sidewalk outside, men and women milled around talking and yelling and laughing, and several children played and chased one another around parked cars. They were about Maurice’s age and I looked to see if he was there, but he wasn’t. We walked up three concrete steps and through the front door into the Bryant’s wide lobby, and there, too, life was spilling over: old women and young children and loud men—a noisy, chaotic scene. The lobby reeked of something: a stale, dirty smell. The walls were painted a glossy beige, and whatever furniture had once been there was long gone. The floors were grimy and littered with newspapers and coffee cups. Two overhead fluorescent bars lit the lobby with an eerie, flickering glow.

  On one side, a uniformed guard sat in a small Plexiglas booth. He looked us over as we walked in and slid open a partition so he could hear us.

  “We are friends of Maurice Mazyck,” I said. “We’d like to go up and see him.”

  “Maurice, the little kid?” he said. “You know him?”

  “Yes, we’re friends of his.”

  The guard looked suspicious, but he came out of his booth and walked us to the elevators. The main elevator, with a crudely painted black door covered with scrawled graffiti, wasn’t working. The guard took us a little farther back to the freight elevator. He rang a buzzer, and another uniformed guard arrived to take us upstairs. The freight elevator rattled up to the fifth floor. The hallway was dark and dreary: no carpet, crumbling plaster walls, scattered trash, a strong smell of fried food. The baseboards were black with soot. Everything was strangely quiet, compared to the lobby. Save for a distant raised voice, it seemed all but abandoned. We came to apartment 502, marked only by two numbered stickers—the 5 was missing—and the guard stood behind us, watching. I looked at Lisa, and her face told me she was thinking the same thing I was—we had crossed over into a world neither of us knew existed. I took a deep breath and knocked on the door of 502.

  For a long time, nothing happened. No one stirred inside. I knocked again—still nothing.

  “Go ahead. Knock again,” the guard said.

  Finally, I heard a sound inside the apartment: shuffling footsteps coming to the door. A lock turned slowly, then another. The door creaked open.

  A woman appeared and leaned against the doorframe. She had on brown sweatpants with no drawstring; the pants were sliding down past her underwear. She had on a stained white T-shirt and nothing on her feet. Her dark hair was matted and wild. Some of it covered her face; some of it stuck straight up. I couldn’t tell how old she was. She might have been eighteen or forty. She was bone-thin, and her movements were in slow motion. Her knees seemed close to buckling. She looked in our direction, but I could see she did not register our presence. She was in some kind of trance, awake but not really conscious. She opened her mouth as if to say something, but only a slurred, mumbled sound came out. She propped her head against the door frame. Her eyes rolled back in her head.

  This was Maurice’s mother, Darcella.

  There were many, many nights in Brooklyn when Darcella did not know where she and her children would sleep. The girls, Celeste and LaToya, weren’t even ten yet, and Maurice was a tiny wisp of a thing, barely six. Their father, Morris, had just disappeared for good, so they were on their own. Some nights they stayed in shelters; some nights, with a cousin. Some nights Darcella would bring the children with her to a friend’s house to do drugs, and she’d pass out there. Maurice and his sisters would huddle together in a corner and sleep until morning came.

  Some nights, the family would be rousted from wherever they were staying and sent into the streets. Maybe they’d overstayed their welcome in a cousin’s apartment; maybe there had been a fight at a shelter. Darcella would walk with her children down desolate streets, heading nowhere, and sing to them so they would feel less afraid. She had a beautiful voice; when she was younger she had sung in a church choir. Maurice loved hearing her sing. He liked when she sang uplifting gospel hymns, but most of all Maurice loved it when his mother made up songs on the spot. She’d point out something on the street and work it into a lyric: an abandoned car, a stray cat, a junkie in an alley. And the sweet, lilting chorus was always the same:

  How can this be

  Me and my three

  Living so desperately

  If they were lucky, they found a shelter to take them in for the night.

  Darcella—uncommonly pretty, with dimples that sprang up whenever she smiled—began doing drugs shortly after Maurice was born. By then, everyone in her life was already an addict: her husband, her many brothers, even her mother. The places she lived were havens for dealers and drug fiends. It was as if a relentless tide finally swept her under. When Maurice was an infant, she became addicted to heroin.

  The addiction consumed her whole. She shot heroin into her veins right in front of her children. Young Maurice watched her drug ritual without understanding what it meant. All he knew was that when it was over, his mother was happy, and so it did not seem to him to be a hideous thing. He’d watch as Darcella gathered her works: the cap to a ketchup bottle, a syri
nge, a thick rubber band, a strip of tin foil, a cotton ball, a lighter, and a glassine packet of heroin. He’d watch as she filled the cap with water and gripped it with a pair of pliers. Then the heroin went in and on top of it a cotton ball that absorbed the dope. Then the lighter beneath the cap, heating it all up. She’d roll up the cotton ball and stick the syringe into it, drawing the heroin into the needle. Then she’d wrap the rubber band around her arm and pull it tight until a vein popped up and then press the needle into the vein and push down. Toward the end of a stash of heroin, after she’d shot up many times, she wouldn’t be able to find a vein in her arm, so she’d shoot herself in a branch of the ulnar artery in her hand, between the index and middle fingers.

  As she injected, she’d say, “Oh, that’s good,” and her head would tilt back. She would hum a tune and wave her hand through the air to the melody, and she would drift, drift, drift away until there was no pain at all.

  For Maurice, these were the best moments—when his mother found her peace. It was the moments that came before it, when she was fidgety, angry, hopelessly restless, that upset Maurice and made him want to help his mother somehow. It happened once on the subway, the agitation and restlessness, and Darcella pulled out her works right there, right in front of everyone.

  “Stand up around me,” she told her children, and Maurice and his sisters formed a wall so no one could see her shoot up. A minute later it was over, and the children sat down. Darcella was drifting and people were staring, but Maurice didn’t care, because his mother was happy now and that’s all that mattered to him.

  Maurice did not understand what his mother was doing to herself, nor did he comprehend what she did to pay for her habit. All he knew was that men would come into their apartment—strange men—and leave a short while later. Sometimes, though, the men would never make it past the doorway. Sometimes they walked straight into a trap.

  When they were living in the dangerous Marcy Projects in Bed-Stuy, Darcella often lured men to her apartment and gave them sex in exchange for money or drugs. But, more often than not, the promise of sex was just a ruse. Usually this happened late at night, while Maurice and his sisters were asleep on the tiger-striped living room sofa, but sometimes Maurice would be awake and watch it all go down. His uncle Juice, then sixteen, would stand behind the door holding a ten-pound dumbbell. He’d wait until Darcella brought the man inside, then jump out and hit the man on the head with the weight. They’d rifle through his pockets and take everything. Then Uncle Juice would drag him down to the lobby and leave him there. One time Juice didn’t even bother going to the lobby; he cold-cocked his victim, pushed him into the hallway, and left him there. A short while later, cops knocked on the door and asked Darcella if she knew the man on the floor outside her apartment. She shrugged and said no, closed the door, came inside, and shot up the heroin she’d stolen.