An Invisible Thread (19 page)

Then she kissed me, and I woke up crying. The next morning I felt strangely calm and confident. Suddenly I wasn’t worried at all—in fact, I
knew
I would get the job. I knew because that’s what my mother told me would happen. And she was right. I got the job.

I feel like she’s been with me ever since, looking over my shoulder. I’ve said I didn’t know why I turned around on Broadway and came back to see Maurice, but that is not entirely true. I may not have consciously known what was happening, but now I have no doubt about what caused me to turn around.

I know it was my mother, looking down from high above, who steered me to Maurice.

Most of the Mondays I spent with Maurice were quiet and uneventful. Given my childhood and certainly his, quiet and uneventful were good things. On those Mondays I just tried to be a friend to Maurice and not necessarily a substitute parent. I didn’t drill him with lessons in order to guide him toward a better life, but I did try to show him what was important to me in my life. I know that in that way, lessons were learned.

One Monday we decided to bake a cake from scratch: chocolate with chocolate frosting. I got out a couple of bowls, a whisk, a measuring cup, and a few other things we needed. Then I laid out the recipe on the counter. Maurice looked at it and asked me what it was.

“That’s the recipe for the cake,” I replied. “That tells us how to make it.”

He didn’t understand. He’d never seen anyone bake a cake or cook anything based on a recipe. He couldn’t grasp why it was important.

“Why can’t you just put all the stuff in there?” he asked.

“Because then you won’t know what you’ll end up with. If you want it to be good, you have to put the right stuff in.”

I showed Maurice how the recipe worked. I asked him to fill the measuring cup with flour, and he did. I told him we needed precisely a teaspoon of vanilla extract. I went right down the recipe, explaining each ingredient, stressing how we needed to make our measurements exact. I knew as I was doing this that I was teaching Maurice something other than how to bake a cake. He was getting to see how discipline and diligence pay off. Perhaps he was even learning that what you get out of life depends precisely on what you put into it. Maurice whipped up the batter, and we put it in the oven. After it rose and cooled, we frosted it, and Maurice got to eat some of the frosting right out of the can. We admired our creation together for a moment. Then we poured a couple of glasses of milk and each cut ourselves a giant slice.

It was a pretty delicious way to learn a lesson.

Another time, Maurice found an ashtray in my apartment and asked me if I smoked. I told him I had, but that I’d quit. I told him why he should never smoke cigarettes or, for that matter, drink or do drugs. I told him what happened to your brain and your body when you doused it with toxic chemicals. I knew Maurice had seen with his own eyes how drugs could devastate a person; he knew that drugs were destroying his mother. But I still wanted him to hear me state categorically that he needed to avoid these harmful, potentially
deadly vices if he wanted to live a happy life. I didn’t preach these points; I’m not the preaching type. But I said them, clearly and forcefully, and it’s possible I was the only adult who ever said this to him.

Once, he asked me when I was finally going to spend my quarters. He was fascinated with my giant jug of spare change, and it made no sense to him that all I did was put coins in and never take coins out. I explained I was saving that money for when I might need it. This, too, was a brand-new concept to him. He didn’t understand what it meant to have savings. To him, money changed hands quickly and never lasted. The people in his life didn’t have the luxury of setting money aside. I explained about my savings account and my plan to buy a nicer car someday, or maybe a house, or maybe just keep the money in the bank in case I had an emergency. I know it baffled Maurice to see all those dimes and quarters just sit there—thousands of them, good for at least a couple hundred meals. I imagine he may have even felt the temptation to take some quarters out of the jug. I can say with absolute certainty that he never did, not because I counted or measured them—he could have swiped fifty quarters off the top and I’d never have noticed—but because he knew it simply wasn’t worth the risk. That old plastic jug of change taught Maurice what it meant to have savings, but it also taught him the valuable lesson of risk versus reward. It taught him to think
forward
.

Sometimes we talked about the future, both his and mine. I remember once telling him he needed to be “a straight arrow” and explaining what that meant: he needed to think about the right thing to do, pick the right course of action, then stay on that course
no matter what. We talked about how temptations can pull you off your course and derail your plans. We talked about what it takes to stay on course in the face of adversity: focus, courage, perseverance. Again, I didn’t sit there with a chalkboard and a pointer. I just answered Maurice’s questions and made observations.

From time to time, though, I
did
press Maurice about one thing: I kept asking him what he wanted to be when he grew up. I thought it was important for him to set goals and have a dream. I wanted him to not only pick a future but to visualize it as well. One night, Maurice was quiet for a long time after I asked him the question. I could tell he was really thinking about what he wanted to be.

Finally, he said, “I want to be a policeman.”

Many years later, he told me why he wanted to be a cop. When he was young, he went to a phone booth and dropped in a quarter to make a call. The machine ate his quarter, the only money he had. He kicked the booth in frustration and kicked it again and again, and all of a sudden he felt a searing pain in his knee. He collapsed to the ground, looked up, and saw a policeman standing over him, holding a black flapjack in his hand. The cop had slugged Maurice on the knee, and now he and his partner were standing over him laughing.

“It took my quarter,” Maurice explained.

The cops kept laughing. Maurice got up and started to run, but before he did he looked at the officers’ badges.

“I got your badge numbers,” he yelled back at them. “I’m gonna report you both.”

He knew that even if he did report them, it would come to nothing. He knew there was only one thing he could do to stop cops
from abusing the poor and defenseless. And that was to become a cop himself.

I told Maurice it was a great idea and that he had every opportunity in the world to make his dream come true, provided he remained “a straight arrow.”

Some Mondays Maurice sat around and did his homework. After a while, he started showing up on Saturday afternoons, asking if he could just hang out with me. When I could, I’d stay around the apartment with him and play a board game or watch TV, but there were times when I had to run an errand or be somewhere. On those days, I let Maurice stay in my apartment alone. He told me he loved those days, because he could do anything he wanted—eat, read, watch a movie, take a nap—and nobody could bother him. Those were the first times in his life he had a real home—with food and water and electricity—all to himself.

Some Mondays we went shopping for clothes. I was careful not to buy Maurice too many things, and I never bought him any flashy, designer clothes, except for at Christmas. I just got him what he needed when he needed it. Most Mondays we went shopping for food, and we’d pick up the turkey and roast beef and other cold cuts I used to make the sandwiches I was now leaving for him with the doormen. I tried to make the sandwiches as hefty as I could, because I knew they might be his only meal of the day. I added fruit or applesauce or pickles and, always, fresh cookies, his favorite. I made sure to always put his lunch in a brown paper bag, just as he had asked. Sometimes, on Fridays, I’d leave a little envelope with ten dollars in it along with the sandwich. I wanted Maurice to be able to buy food over the weekend.

Then, one Saturday afternoon, Maurice had the concierge ring me from the lobby. When he came up, he was in tears. I’d seen Maurice cry only once, and I knew him to be an extremely tough little boy. I sat him down, brought him some juice, and asked him what was wrong.

“My mother got caught selling drugs, and now she’s in jail,” he said.

He’d spoken to me about his mother only one time, when he told me she stayed home to cook and clean. Now, he opened up to me about her.

“She’s in Riker’s Island,” he said. “Riker’s is a really bad place with really bad people.”

We sat and talked about his mother for a long time. He told me she’d been arrested before, and he never knew when she would get out of jail and come home again. He had no idea how long she’d be in jail this time, either. He admitted he had lied to me about what his mother did; he had gotten the idea to say she was a stay-at-home mom from TV commercials. He admitted she was a drug addict and that she stole things to sell and pay for her habit. She cashed in all their food stamps and used the money for drugs, and that was why they seldom had anything to eat at home. Her addiction had gotten worse once she started using crack.

He said the reason he didn’t tell me about her was because he thought it would scare me away.

“I hate that my mother is a crack addict,” he said.

I didn’t say much to Maurice; mostly, I just listened. I didn’t want to pass judgment on her. I knew about parents with dangerous, destructive habits, and I knew there was no cheap wisdom I could
hope to impart. I couldn’t tell Maurice everything was going to be okay; I could be pretty sure that once his mother got out of prison, she’d go right back to using and dealing. I figured Maurice just needed someone to listen to him. And so I let him talk.

Later, he told me this was the first time in his life he felt he had someone he could turn to with a problem.

Maurice’s mother was still in jail when his birthday rolled around in April. I resolved to give him the best birthday celebration he’d ever had. I asked him what he liked to do in his wildest dreams, and it didn’t take him long to answer.

“Can we go out to Annette’s?” he asked.

His wildest dream was hanging out in the suburbs with my sister and her family. I told him of course, but pushed him to think of something else.

He pondered it some more, then mentioned there was a wrestling event coming up at Madison Square Garden. It was called Wrestlemania, and all the best professional wrestlers would be there. He rattled off some names I’d never heard of: Hulk Hogan, Ricky Steamboat, Randy Savage, “Rowdy” Roddy Piper. He had talked about wrestling before, and I knew it was one of the very few things he seemed to genuinely enjoy.

“Laurie,” he said—by then he had heard my nieces and nephew call me Aunt Laurie, and he asked if he could call me that—“could we go to Wrestlemania?”

“Let me look into it,” I said.

I called the Garden and bought the best tickets available. I wrapped them in a box and handed them to Maurice a few days before his birthday. “An early gift,” I told him. He jumped so high
he nearly scraped the ceiling when he saw the tickets. We went to Wrestlemania together, and Maurice screamed at the top of his lungs for the next two hours. The Garden was packed with thousands of excited kids, all around Maurice’s age. I was so happy that, for one night at least, he could be just another kid in this delirious crowd.

Part two of his birthday celebration was a Saturday night dinner at the Hard Rock Café. I invited my sister Nancy and my brother, Steve to come along. Maurice asked if he could have steak again, and this time he knew how to cut it with his knife. The waitress brought over a small cake with candles, and the whole restaurant sang “Happy Birthday” to him.

The next day, a Sunday, we drove out to Annette’s house for a birthday dinner—part three. Maurice got another cake and more presents. On the way home, he was so tired he fell right asleep. I’d like to think visions of pile-diving wrestlers in crazy spandex suits were dancing in his head.

Back in the city I parked the car and walked Maurice home. He gave me a big kiss on the check and thanked me for his birthday.

“It was the best birthday I ever had,” he said.

He turned to go, but then he stopped and faced me again.

“Bye, Laurie,” he said. “I love you.”

It was the first time he said that to me.