An Invisible Thread (2 page)

And so, when I met Laura, I asked myself this question—does she really care about what we’re doing here, or does she just want a job?

I arranged for Laura to come back for a second interview, and that’s when I asked her to tell me what mattered to her in life. She didn’t hesitate. She talked about her family and her friends, about loyalty and community, about making a difference in people’s lives. It became clear to me that Laura was a woman who
cared
. And, as
her enthusiasm for what we were doing at
Ms.
clearly showed, she understood the importance of empowering people to dream bigger dreams and lead better lives. Not long after that second interview we offered Laura the job. Not surprisingly, she swept through the ad community with passion and conviction and helped generate tremendous ad growth for the magazine.

And yet, it wasn’t until years later that I truly learned how remarkable Laura is.

It was after I left
Ms.
magazine and went to work at
USA Today
, another revolutionary start-up that had to battle for every advertising dollar. As a sales executive there, I had to persuade national brands to take a leap of faith by advertising their products and services in a colorful, broadsheet daily national newspaper, something the country just wasn’t used to. The task was daunting, and I realized I needed to hire smart people I trusted. Laura was first on my list. She jumped on board and once again did a phenomenal job, selling millions of dollars worth of advertising in
USA Today
.

But that’s not what made me realize how remarkable she is.

Over the years Laura and I became more than business colleagues; we became friends. We ate meals together, discussed boyfriends, went shopping, and did everything friends do. We developed a genuine interest in each other’s lives. So it was not surprising that, the Tuesday after Labor Day in 1986, Laura came into my office and told me about something that had happened to her the day before.

I had no way of knowing that the story she told me would one day find its way into this book. I could not have known that the incident she relayed to me would, in my mind, come to define Laura
and the kind of person she is. At the time it was just a story, one of many we shared. I doubt either of us believed it would be something we’d still be talking about today, twenty-five years later.

What Laura told me was that, while she was out walking not far from her midtown Manhattan apartment, a little boy, eleven years old, stopped her in the street and asked for spare change. She said the boy had such sad eyes and told her he was really hungry. She said that at first she just walked away, but then, for some reason, she came back. And instead of just giving the boy a quarter, she took him to lunch.

My first reaction was surprise. Personally, I had become so immune to seeing panhandlers on the streets of Manhattan I was reasonably sure I would have kept on walking past the boy and not come back. I admired Laura for what she did. That night we went to dinner together and talked more about this boy—Maurice. I don’t think I had ever seen her so animated and excited about anything. Though she had just met this child, she was obviously already invested in his well-being. Something about him, it seemed, had touched her heart.

Over the days and weeks and months that followed we had many more conversations about Maurice, and the more she told me about him the more I realized why Laura was doing what she was doing. But still, to be honest, I wasn’t always sure that Laura’s involvement with this boy and his horribly dysfunctional family was the right decision for her. I worried that she might come to harm or that what she was doing might be misconstrued. At times I was really angry with her, because I felt she was putting herself at great risk. I wondered if Laura had thought about the huge responsibility
she was undertaking. What if her acts of kindness toward Maurice made him dependent on her? What if this unloved and emotionally abused child needed more from her than she could provide? I shared all of these concerns—all of these “what ifs?”—with Laura, often quite forcefully. I felt I had to be a voice of reason for her.

But pretty soon it became clear that Laura wasn’t guided by reason. She was guided by faith, conviction, and love.

Laura persuaded me, more through her actions than her words, that she would never abandon Maurice. Over time, in our many talks about him, I realized that Laura—by involving Maurice in some of the simple rituals of her life—was teaching him valuable lessons that would last his lifetime. She told me that no matter what happened to her—no matter how successful she became as an ad sales executive, how busy she was, or how much her own personal life changed—she was committed to Maurice for life. I knew Laura well enough to know these weren’t just words. Her commitment to Maurice was not something she took lightly and not something she would ever walk away from.

It was then I finally began to understand just how remarkable Laura’s story is.

We live in a cynical world, and sometimes our cynicism gets in the way of seeing things for what they are. My own hard-earned New Yorker’s cynicism had prevented me from understanding the special bond between Laura and Maurice, but somehow Laura had seen past all the problems and risks and
unreasonableness
of what she was doing to see it for what it really was—a sweet, heartfelt connection between two people who needed each other.

And now, I couldn’t be happier that Laura is sharing her story
with the world. I believe there’s a powerful message in her small and simple gestures, and I hope you will be as inspired by her story as I have been.

Years ago I remember reading a quote from Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. He said, “Take the first step in faith. You don’t have to see the whole staircase, just take the first step.”

Thank you, Laura, for taking that first step with Maurice.

—Valerie Salembier
senior vice president, publisher,
and chief revenue officer
Town&Country

The boy stands alone on a sidewalk in Brooklyn and this is what he sees: a woman running for her life, and another woman chasing her with a hammer. He recognizes one woman as his father’s girlfriend. The other, the one with the hammer, he doesn’t know.

The boy is stuck in something like hell. He is six years old and covered in small red bites from
chinches
—bedbugs—and he is woefully skinny due to an unchecked case of ringworm. He is so hungry his stomach hurts, but then being hungry is nothing new to him. When he was two years old the pangs got so bad he rooted through the trash and ate rat droppings and had to have his stomach pumped. He is staying in his father’s cramped, filthy apartment in a desolate stretch of Brooklyn, sleeping with stepbrothers who wet the bed, surviving in a place that smells like death. He has not seen
his mother in three months, and he doesn’t know why. His world is a world of drugs and violence and unrelenting chaos, and he has the wisdom to know, even at six, that if something does not change for him soon, he might not make it.

He does not pray, does not know how, but he thinks,
Please don’t let my father let me die
. And this thought, in a way, is its own little prayer.

And then the boy sees his father come up the block, and the woman with the hammer sees him too, and she screams, “Junebug, where is my son?!”

The boy recognizes this voice, and he says, “Mom?”

The woman with the hammer looks down at the boy, and she looks puzzled, until she looks harder and finally says, “Maurice?”

The boy didn’t recognize his mother because her teeth had fallen out from smoking dope.

The mother didn’t recognize her son because he was shriveled from the ringworm.

Now she is chasing Junebug and yelling, “Look what you did to my baby!”

The boy should be frightened, or confused, but more than anything what the boy feels is happiness. He is happy that his mother has come back to get him, and because of that he is not going to die—at least not now, at least not in this place.

He will remember this as the moment when he knew his mother loved him.

“Excuse me, lady, do you have any spare change?”

This was the first thing he said to me, on 56th Street in New York City, right around the corner from Broadway, on a sunny September day.

And when I heard him, I didn’t really hear him. His words were part of the clatter, like a car horn or someone yelling for a cab. They were, you could say, just noise—the kind of nuisance New Yorkers learn to tune out. So I walked right by him, as if he wasn’t there.

But then, just a few yards past him, I stopped.

And then—and I’m still not sure why I did this—I came back.

I came back and I looked at him, and I realized he was just a boy. Earlier, out of the corner of my eye, I had noticed he was young. But now, looking at him, I saw that he was a child—tiny
body, sticks for arms, big round eyes. He wore a burgundy sweatshirt that was smudged and frayed and ratty burgundy sweatpants to match. He had scuffed white sneakers with untied laces, and his fingernails were dirty. But his eyes were bright and there was a general sweetness about him. He was, I would soon learn, eleven years old.

He stretched his palm toward me, and he asked again, “Excuse me, lady, do you have any spare change? I am hungry.”

What I said in response may have surprised him, but it really shocked me.

“If you’re hungry,” I said, “I’ll take you to McDonald’s and buy you lunch.”

“Can I have a cheeseburger?” he asked.

“Yes,” I said.

“How about a Big Mac?”

“That’s okay, too.”

“How about a Diet Coke?”

“Yes, that’s okay.”

“Well, how about a thick chocolate shake and French fries?”

I told him he could have anything he wanted. And then I asked him if I could join him for lunch.

He thought about it for a second.

“Sure,” he finally said.

We had lunch together that day, at McDonald’s.

And after that, we got together every Monday.

For the next 150 Mondays.

His name is Maurice, and he changed my life.

Why did I stop and go back to Maurice? It is easier for me to tell you why I ignored him in the first place. I ignored him, very simply, because he wasn’t in my schedule.

You see, I am a woman whose life runs on schedules. I make appointments, I fill slots, I micromanage the clock. I bounce around from meeting to meeting, ticking things off a list. I am not merely punctual; I am fifteen minutes early for any and every engagement. This is how I live; it is who I am—but some things in life do not fit neatly into a schedule.

Rain, for example. On the day I met Maurice—September 1, 1986—a huge storm swept over the city, and I awoke to darkness and hammering rain. It was Labor Day weekend and the summer was slipping away, but I had tickets to the U.S. Open tennis tournament that afternoon—box seats, three rows from center court. I wasn’t a big tennis fan, but I loved having such great seats; to me, the tickets were tangible evidence of how successful I’d become. In 1986 I was thirty-five years old and an advertising sales executive for
USA Today
, and I was very good at what I did, which was building relationships through sheer force of personality. Maybe I wasn’t exactly where I wanted to be in my life—after all, I was still single, and another summer had come and gone without me finding that someone special—but by any standard I was doing pretty well. Taking clients to the Open and sitting courtside for free was just another measure of how far this girl from a working-class Long Island town had come.