An Invisible Thread Read online

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  There is one instance ingrained in my memory that has left an indelible mark.

  Annette and I were half asleep in bed when we heard the yelling begin. I don’t know what it was about—I seldom did—but it went on for a long time, subsiding then rising again. I didn’t hear my mother’s voice, only my father’s. These weren’t arguments. They were blitzes.

  Then I heard a horrific crash—the sound of glass shattering. I was sure my father had thrown my mother through the big front window. Annette begged me to go and break up the fight. I was usually as scared as she was, but this time I was so worried for my mother that I ran into the living room screaming, “Mom! Mom!” When I got there, the window was intact; my father had thrown a brass lamp with a large glass shade across the room, shattering it. He’d also hurled a bowl of tomato sauce against a wall, and the green velvet sofa was covered in red. Chairs were overturned, and my mother was on the floor, bruised and bleeding. I ran to her, and to this day I remember the look of horror on her face—not horror at having been hit but horror at having me see her this way.

  Later that night, after my father passed out, Annette and I comforted her; poor little Frankie was too terrified to come out of his room. In the morning my mother told us the same thing she always told us: “Be normal; act like nothing happened.” The next day we went to school and my mother cleaned up the mess, and the incident was never mentioned, as if it had merely been a bad dream.

  Around my fifth consecutive Monday with Maurice, I told my boss, Valerie, that I had brought him up to my apartment and cooked him dinner. She looked surprised, then alarmed.

  “Laura, I don’t understand why you’re doing this,” she said. “You don’t really know this kid, you don’t know his family, you don’t know if they will be upset with you.”

  I’d told her about meeting Maurice’s mother, about how no one in his family cared what he did or who he did it with, but she wasn’t convinced.

  “Laura, you can’t have this boy up to your apartment,” she said. “That’s just crazy.” Valerie was raising her voice now, trying to get through to me. “You could have someone from social services knocking on your door and asking you what’s going on. You need to be careful here. I mean, you’re white; he’s black. You’re an adult; he’s a kid. Something could go wrong. Things could get ugly.”

  I knew Valerie was speaking from the heart. She was my dear friend, and she cared about me. And I knew, on some level, that what she was saying was true. I was in over my head. I had no business inviting this child up to my apartment. What I was doing could very easily be misinterpreted. Though Valerie didn’t say it, I knew she was also concerned about my safety. Her forceful words to me were exactly what I would expect a true friend to say. In fact, several close friends and even my sisters had told me the same thing. But in the end I had to trust my gut. I knew deep down—too deep for rational explanation—that what I was doing was the right thing to do.

  “Look, Valerie, Maurice is a good kid,” I said. “He’s a really good kid with a terrible life. He just needs someone he can turn to for help.”

  Valerie wasn’t persuaded, at least not that day, but over time, as I kept her abreast of my outings with Maurice, she stopped sounding concerned. She would later tell me she came to realize Maurice and I had a real relationship and that he was getting the kind of support that would have an impact on him for the rest of his life. “And who,” she said, “can argue with that?” Isn’t that worth a little risk?

  My other friends and colleagues at USA Today—Lou, Paul, and the rest, all kind, good-hearted people—slowly came around as well. They, too, had been worried for me, but the more they heard about my time with Maurice, the less concerned they became—and the more they wanted to know what was going on in his life. They came to enjoy hearing about our trips and outings, and they began to ask me about him all the time. Lou, a sweetheart of a guy, listened to all my stories about Maurice and told me many times that he admired what I was doing. He had two small boys at the time and he said he could not imagine what Maurice was going through. Then one day he walked into my office with a big shopping bag.

  The bag was full of clothes.

  Lou told me he’d gone through his closets at home and gathered up some shirts, sweaters, and pants he no longer wore. He knew they were probably a little bit big for Maurice, but at least they were in pretty good condition.

  “You said Maurice doesn’t have many clothes,” Lou said. “I thought maybe he could use some of these.”

  I looked through the bag. Stacks of shirts, pants, sweaters, shorts—everything neatly folded, looking almost new. A couple of items even had store tags still attached.

  My eyes teared up. I gave Lou a hug and thanked him for the clothes, then closed the door to my office and had a little cry.

  Maurice and I were settling into a nice routine. We no longer had to confirm our next Monday meeting; it was automatic. He’d just show up in the lobby, and the concierge at the front desk would ring me and send him up.

  Early on, Maurice told me that the concierge sometimes made him wait before sending him up, either to deal with other tenants or make a phone call or whatever. He would shoo Maurice off to the side and only get back to him once the lobby was clear. Maurice said they treated him differently when he was with me versus when they saw him alone. He was used to this; most grown-ups acted as if he was invisible. Once, when he was running late to see me, he asked a passerby for the time. The person said nothing and kept walking; he didn’t even look at Maurice. He asked another person; same thing. They not only weren’t giving Maurice the time; they were pretending he wasn’t there.

  I understood why the concierge might brush him off. The Symphony was a luxury building, and here was this homeless kid in grubby sweats getting funny looks from the upscale tenants. I understood they were in no position to chum around with Maurice. Still, I didn’t like that he was made to wait or that he was treated differently when I wasn’t around. One night I walked out with Maurice and stopped at the front desk. I had Maurice wait outside while I talked to the concierge.

  “I just want to say again that Maurice is my friend, and I want you guys to treat him like you would any of my friends,” I told him. “This is my home, and he should always feel welcome here, okay?”

  The concierge looked a little wounded, but he got the message.

  “Of course, Miss Schroff,” he said.

  Before long, Maurice became buddies with just about everyone on the staff.

  Try as he might, Maurice could not stay clean. His clothes were inevitably grimy and he usually smelled pretty bad, so laundry became part of our weekly deal. Then, one Monday, he walked in with a shopping bag full of clothes.

  “Miss Laura,” he said, “would you mind if, when you do my laundry, you could wash these for my family?”

  I could tell the clothes belonged to his sisters and maybe his mother and cousins. I washed and dried them, and when I gave them back to Maurice, he was thrilled by how fresh and clean they were. Maurice, I soon gathered, was the man of his house. He was taking on responsibilities and seeing to it that his family had clean clothes.

  After a while, instead of asking Maurice what he wanted me to cook, I told him he should come shopping with me. So we’d go to the supermarket and pick out things he liked—steaks, hamburgers, chicken, and, of course, chocolate chip cookie dough. At my apartment, Maurice would set the table while I cooked. After the first time, he did it without being asked. He seemed to like doing it.

  After dinner, he’d help me clear the table and get the dishes in the sink. I’d rinse them and hand them to Maurice, and he’d put them in my dishwasher. One evening, when I was on my way to take the garbage to the hallway trash room, Maurice looked at me and said, “Miss Laura, let me take that out for you. A nice lady like you should not have to dump the garbage.”

  We were establishing rituals now—setting the table, clearing the dishes, taking out the garbage—and usually we moved through them wi
thout even speaking. He loved having these chores to do, and he was very meticulous about them.

  I realized the rituals themselves were as important to Maurice as the meals.

  Rituals are what ground us in our lives, what give us a sense of safety and continuity. In my own family growing up, crazy as it was, we still had set routines—dinner at a certain hour, in bed at the same time every night, church on Sundays. In the same way, to Maurice, a simple thing like taking out the trash was comforting on so many levels. It was, to him, almost sacred.

  Of course, there was the ritual he loved best: baking and eating cookies. I knew now that he always wanted to take some home to his sisters, so I made sure to bake extra cookies. But then, one night, I noticed he hadn’t drunk all his milk.

  “Do you think I could take this milk home, too?” he asked.

  He wanted his sisters to have the full experience—not just the warm cookies, but the warm cookies and milk. From then on, we’d pick up a half gallon of milk instead of a quart, so he could take some home.

  Maurice and I were becoming comfortable around each other, to the point where I sometimes forgot who he was and just thought of him as someone I hung out with. Sometimes we’d play a board game, like Monopoly, and laugh and tease each other. Sometimes I complained to him about something at work, like I would with any friend. But every once in a while something happened to remind me that Maurice came from extraordinary circumstances. One Monday, he showed up at my apartment with a pretty bad cold. He was sniffling and snorting and couldn’t get his nose clear.

  Finally, I said, “Maurice, will you go to the bathroom and blow your nose already?”

  He looked at me and said, “Huh?”

  “Blow your nose,” I said. “Go in there and blow your nose.”

  He stared at me as if I was speaking another language. And then I figured it out—he didn’t know how to blow his nose. No one had ever taught him how to do it. No one had ever put a tissue up to his nose and said, “Blow.” He had never even heard the expression. I took some tissues and showed him how, and then for the first time in his life he properly blew his nose.

  One Saturday afternoon not long after that, my intercom buzzer rang. “I have Maurice in the lobby,” the concierge told me. We were still seeing each other every Monday, and when I had time during the week or on a weekend we’d sometimes get together, but we had no plans to see each other that day. I told the concierge to put him on the phone.

  “I’m sorry to bother you,” Maurice said, “but I’m really hungry. Can we get something to eat?”

  I said of course and told him I’d be right down. I took him to McDonald’s for his regular Big Mac, French fries, and thick chocolate shake.

  “Maurice, when was the last time you had something to eat?” I asked.

  “Thursday,” he said—two days earlier.

  It broke my heart. I guess after Monday nights I tried not to think about all the other nights of the week and if he was managing to feed himself. I knew he was enrolled in public school, for instance, but I didn’t really know for sure how he was eating during the day. But now I couldn’t avoid the harsh reality of his life—that much of the time he was hungry and had no real way to find food.

  Over our burgers I came up with a plan.

  “Look, Maurice, I don’t want you out there hungry on the nights I don’t see you, so this is what we can do. I can either give you some money for the week—and you’ll have to be really careful how you spend it—or when you come over on Monday night we can go to the supermarket and I can buy all the things you like to eat and make you lunch for the week. I’ll leave it with the doormen, and you can pick it up on the way to school.

  Maurice looked at me and asked me a question.

  “If you make me lunch,” he said, “will you put it in a brown paper bag?”

  I didn’t really understand the question. “Do you want it in a brown paper bag?” I asked. “Or how would you prefer it?”

  “Miss Laura,” he said, “I don’t want your money. I want my lunch in a brown paper bag.”

  “Okay, sure. But why do you want it in a bag?”

  “Because when I see kids come to school with their lunch in a paper bag, that means someone cares about them. Miss Laura, can I please have my lunch in a paper bag?”

  I looked away when Maurice said that, so he wouldn’t see me tear up. A simple brown paper bag, I thought.

  To me, it meant nothing. To him, it was everything.

  I’d known Maurice for about two months when, after dinner one Monday, he said, “Miss Laura, can I ask you something?’

  “Of course, Maurice.”

  “My school is having a parent-teacher night,” he said, “and I was wondering if you could go.”

  Maurice and I had occasionally talked about his school. I’d once asked him how he was doing, and he’d said, “I’m not getting into as many fights since I met you.” That was one of the first times I thought I might be making a difference in his life, so I was excited to meet his teachers and find out more about him. I also wanted his teachers to get to know me. All the warnings from Valerie and my family had made me want to have someone from Maurice’s life in my corner. To have his teachers know me and trust me would be a positive thing.

  But most of all, I wanted to see Maurice in a school setting. I needed to see him in a situation where he was a child and not the grown-up he was forced to act like. I was worried he no longer had any connection to the innocent side of himself—that the streets had stripped him of any chance to still be a silly, curious, regular kid.

  The sad truth is that I only knew Maurice as a panhandler.

  Maurice began panhandling when he was nine years old. He only did it for an hour or two a day until he raised enough money—four or five bucks—to buy a slice of pizza or a hamburger and maybe play some video games. Most people gave him nickels or dimes or quarters; once in a while he’d get a wrinkled dollar bill. At first his mother didn’t know he was panhandling, but eventually she learned he was working the streets and that he was good at it. She started going with him to have him raise money for her drugs. Maurice didn’t like doing it and ditched her. Darcella found other kids in the neighborhood—four- or five-year-olds with drug-addled mothers of their own—to take on the streets as props who begged for change.

  Maurice went back to being a one-boy operation. Vulnerable as he was, he managed to escape any real harm on the streets, except for one time at a Pizza Hut in Times Square when a patron grew tired of seeing him begging outside the entrance. The man came out, walked up to Maurice, and punched him in the face.

  Maurice staggered but did not fall. He looked at the man and said, “If you’re gonna hit a kid, you should at least knock him out.”

  Before the man could hit him again, the code of the streets kicked in. Several street vendors—immigrants from Africa who sold knockoff Louis Vuitton bags and fake Rolex watches to tourists—were right up the block, and they ran from the corner and chased the man back into the Pizza Hut. Maurice knew the vendors—they lived in the Bryant, too, six of them to a room—and they weren’t going to stand by and watch their little friend get hit. One of them pounded the window of the Pizza Hut so hard it shattered into pieces. A police car rolled up, and the vendors scattered. A cop grabbed Maurice and asked him who broke the window.

  “Do you know those guys?” the cop demanded. “Give me their names.”

  Maurice said he had never seen them before in his life.

  The next day he stole that box cutter from Duane Reade.

  When he wasn’t panhandling, Maurice was going to school. His mother was on public assistance, and to keep the checks coming, she had to keep Maurice in a classroom. He did not go every day, and he usually showed up late. But, as I would soon discover, school was very important to Maurice.

  When I met him, he was enrolled in I.S. 131, in Manhattan’s Chinatown district. He was a special education student, which meant he took classes with other students who had d
evelopmental and social issues. One of his first teachers there, Miss Kim House, knew him to be a bright but difficult boy. She noticed he usually came to school disheveled, wearing the same dirty sweats every day. His hygiene was terrible and he smelled bad, worse than any other student, and the other kids would tease him about it and make him mad. Maurice stood up to them; he was tough and wiry and could handle himself. He never hit the other children, but he got in lots of fights, lots of pushing and tackling and yelling. When he was focused, Maurice was a hard worker, and he was smart. Miss House believed he might be one of the special ones, but there were many other times when she feared he would not make it—feared that the anger inside him would overtake him and he would simply stop coming to school.

  She never knew what was at the root of his anger; in fact, she knew very little about his life at home until the day Maurice’s mother came in for a face-to-face meeting with school officials, a requirement of her public assistance program. During class, Miss House got a message to come down to the principal’s office. There was a disturbance, and it involved Maurice’s mother. When Miss House got there, she saw Darcella yelling at the principal. She was agitated, angry, out of control, screaming, waving her arms and jabbing her fingers, and not listening to anyone, not even for a moment. Someone called security.

  Miss House took Darcella by the arm and said, “Come with me.” She took her into the bathroom, brought her to the sink, and splashed cold water on her face. She told her, “Calm down, calm down, everything is fine.” Darcella stopped yelling. Miss House didn’t know why she was mad, and she didn’t care. She could tell by her bloodshot eyes that she was strung out on something. She stayed with her in the bathroom for a few minutes, bringing her down. Finally, the agitation subsided. Now, Darcella just looked tired.

  “Do you want to come upstairs and see your son?” Miss House asked.

  Darcella thought about it, then said, “No.”

  Miss House told her to go home; she could come back another time for the face-to-face. On the way out, Darcella turned to her and apologized.