An Invisible Thread (11 page)

Most nights we’d be in bed when he arrived at midnight or later. We’d listen for the telltale sounds—the way he slammed the front door or the clinking of ice in a glass in the kitchen, letting us know he wasn’t done drinking. But sometimes there was no noise at all.

Sometimes it would just start.

My brother Frank would be sound asleep, and my father would appear in his bedroom, a dark figure in the doorway. And then he would scream and curse at the boy, as if Frank were a man he held some mortal grievance against.

“Frank, you miserable, no-good son of a bitch!!”

Frank, not yet six, would jolt awake, then lay there still, cowering under the covers. Five minutes of yelling. Ten minutes. It seemed
like it would never end. In the other room Annette and I would hear it and hold each other for comfort; down the hall we could hear baby Nancy crying in her crib. My mother would not always rush in to stop him; she knew defending Frank would likely make the situation worse and earn both her and Frank even more abuse. But some nights the rages were so scary, it was impossible for her not to go and protect her boy. Usually, my father wouldn’t stop until he’d exhausted himself, and then he’d slam the door and go drink some more and finally, in the dead of night, pass out.

There was never a real reason for him to turn on my brother. Sometimes all it took was seeing something that made him think of Frankie.

We were all subject to those rages, but most of the time they were aimed at my mother and at Frankie. At dinner one night, Frankie simply asked my father to pass him a bowl of spaghetti. My father, drunk, grabbed it and threw it at him. Frankie just sat there, covered in sauce. Another night my father picked up a package of ten Flying Saucer ice cream sandwiches from Carvel on his way home from work. He set them on the kitchen table, and I was so excited that for a moment I forgot our most important rule: don’t say anything that might provoke Dad.

I announced, “I’m so excited I could eat all of them by myself.”

I was seven years old; it’s something kids say.

My father said, “Good, now you’re gonna eat every one.”

The other children hurried away at this first sign of trouble, and my father sat down at the table and told me to start eating. My mother was at work and was not there to stop him. I got through one Flying Saucer, then two, then a third. Halfway through the
fourth I started sobbing. In the middle of the sixth or seventh, I threw up. Satisfied, my father got up and walked away. The other sandwiches melted in the sink: no one dared come for them after my punishment was over.

We lived in absolute terror of pushing a trigger. When my father was at work we’d frantically clean the house and try to leave nothing out of place. Inevitably, we’d miss something, and that was all it took. When my father was home, we never spoke loudly, if we spoke at all. In our bedroom, when Annette and I quarreled about something, we’d argue in whispers. If I got mad, I’d raise my voice, and Annette would beg me to be quiet. I’d speak louder until, out of terror, she conceded the point and pulled the covers over her head. I won quite a few arguments that way.

Watching my father go after someone else was always worse than when he targeted me. One Christmas, my mother bought him a handsome beige suede jacket. My father, sober, loved it and slipped it on, modeling it, to my mother’s delight. But the next day, drunk, he stuck the jacket in my mother’s face.

“What am I, a pimp?”

Then he took those shearing scissors and cut the jacket into shreds.

Worst of all was when he hit my mother. I couldn’t bear to see him do it; I’d feel sick and panicked and utterly helpless. I was terrified that one day he’d go too far.

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 without 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.