An Invisible Thread (23 page)

I think back to my own father and how contentious our relationship was. He had dominated my childhood, but as an adult I refused to let him hold the same power over me. I had essentially cut him off. At the same time I felt bad about leaving my sisters and brothers to take care of him as he got older. I didn’t want to skip out on that responsibility. So I’d go back to Long Island at least once or twice a month to see him and help tidy up the house and do anything I could to help Nancy, who tended to most of my father’s needs, and Steven, who was still living at home and had to bear the brunt of my father’s bitterness.

In the spring of 1987 I drove to Long Island and cleaned my
father’s house from top to bottom. I did laundry, folded sheets, picked up stray cigarette butts. I was nearly finished when he came home from somewhere. There were times when he’d be happy to see me and everything would be great, but if he was angry about anything, he’d do what he always did: curse, criticize, belittle. On this day, he immediately started picking on me. I can’t remember what he said; I think I’ve blocked it out. I was tired and irritable, and finally I lost control and let my father have it.

“You’ve been nothing but a bully your whole life,” I told him, rising up into a fury. “You bullied mom, and that’s why she died of cancer. You bullied Frank, and that’s why he stutters and his life is so hard. You constantly abuse all of us, and I’m sick and tired of it. I’m not going to put up with it anymore!”

My father was shocked into silence. I walked out the door and never spoke to my father again.

About a year and a half later, only a few weeks after I turned thirty-eight, Annette called me to let me know he was really sick. He hadn’t been well in a while, and he was getting weaker. We had to get Meals on Wheels to bring food to the house for him. His doctors told him to stop smoking, but he never did. Even when he was hooked up to an oxygen tank at home, he still found a way to smoke; the Meals on Wheels volunteers refused to go into our house because they were afraid it would blow up. Then my father’s breathing became labored, and my sisters took him to a hospital. They called me to let me know Dad was getting worse. I did not go see him, and my sisters and brothers understood why. However, they worried that if I didn’t see him before he died, I’d be filled with remorse. I told them I was okay with my decision, and they never pushed me.

Annette spent the most time with him at the hospital. She was there the day his breathing got raspy and my father sputtered, “I am going to die.” But his breathing had been bad before, and he’d said that many times. The nurses told my sister she should go home and come back in the morning.

Later that day, they called her and told her he had taken a turn for the worse. She rushed back to the hospital, but by the time she got there our father had died. He had died alone with none of his children there, and I couldn’t help but think of my mother’s final hours, how all of us surrounded her holding her hands and telling her how much we loved her. To this day I cannot say I regret not speaking to my father in his last months on earth. I know that may sound callous to some, but it is the truth. I do feel tremendous sadness that he died alone. I feel sadness, because I know the kind of father he could have been.

None of his children knew what to say at his funeral. Finally, it was Steven, the youngest, who wrote an obituary for him and read it at the mass. Steven, then twenty-five, talked about how my father loved
The Honeymooners,
and how, like the show, he had his own devoted followers—the people who drank in his bars. He talked about my father’s time at the Picture Lounge and the bowling alley bar and at Funzy’s Tavern and how everywhere he went he made new friends. “He wasn’t just a bartender; he was more than that,” Steven said. “He had a great memory for faces. He had a knack for remembering drinks. And he had the gift of gab.” It was a beautiful speech and it made all of us cry, and it was 100 percent true. My father
was
a wonderful man—we just didn’t get to see him be that as much as we should have.

Years later Steven told me that in one of his last conversations with my father, he asked him why he acted the way he did.

“I don’t know,” my father said. “I don’t mean to yell at you. I am sorry that I was the way I was.”

My father apologized to Steven many times that day and, in that way, apologized to us all. I already knew he was sorry about the things he did, and I knew he couldn’t change who he was. I know, too, that he loved my mother, more deeply than he could have ever hoped to show her. I told myself that in heaven my father wouldn’t be able to torment my mother anymore. In heaven, he wouldn’t be broken. In heaven, maybe he and my mother would dance those waltzes after all.

One year after his father died, Maurice met a girl named Meka. One of his uncles was dating her mother, and they’d see each other all the time. He didn’t like her at first; he thought she was too loud, too argumentative. He could see she had a sweet side, but mainly she liked to fight, and Maurice had had enough fighting in his life. One night Meka leaned over and kissed him. He said, “I don’t like you that way.” But she didn’t give up, and soon enough Maurice was feeling something he’d never felt before.

I remember Michael and I took Maurice and Meka to dinner. She was very sweet and told me she loved to read. There were things about her I really liked, but she was so young, like Maurice, and I left that dinner feeling pretty worried. I was afraid she’d get pregnant, and I couldn’t imagine Maurice having to raise a child. Later, I asked him to promise me he would be careful, and he did. But I couldn’t shake a nagging feeling that something might happen.

Maurice’s life was actually fairly stable at that point. His mother had gone back to using drugs, but she wasn’t nearly as hardcore as before. As soon as Maurice turned eighteen, he was eligible to apply for a Section 8 apartment of his own. His mother was no longer eligible—her prison sentence had taken care of that—but here was a way for Maurice to finally help his mother. He could get an apartment and let Darcella live there. He filled out all the paperwork, and, on one of the greatest days of his life, a city official handed him the keys to a two-bedroom apartment on Hillside Avenue. Maurice walked through the front door, dropped to his knees, and kissed the floor.

He hadn’t had a proper home in ten years. And now he had one.

Maurice moved his mother into the apartment while he stayed with Meka in Brooklyn. He and Meka fought a lot, but they also had their share of fun. They liked going to Coney Island, and Maurice was proud of the giant stuffed white teddy bear he won there in a game. The day he found out Meka was pregnant was another one of the great days of his life. He had never thought about having children, never pictured himself bouncing a son on his knee, but now that he was facing fatherhood he felt nothing but elation. He didn’t know why it meant so much to him to have a child. He just knew that it did.

Maurice was there at St. Vincent’s Hospital in downtown Manhattan when Meka gave birth to a healthy baby boy. He held his tiny, gnarled son and kissed him on the forehead. Earlier he’d told Meka what he’d like to name his son, and she told him she liked the name and it was fine with her.

And so that night, he held his firstborn son, Maurice.

The next day he left the hospital and took the subway to his apartment to see his mother. She was living there with his sister LaTonya and her young son; his sister Celeste’s young daughter was visiting. Maurice turned the corner, looked up at his apartment, and stopped dead in his tracks.

All he saw was charred, smoldering holes where the windows once were.

Maurice ran upstairs, terrified for his family. His apartment had been gutted in a fire. He asked neighbors about his mother, but no one knew what had happened. Only later that day did Maurice discover his mother and sister and niece and nephew were safe and sound. He also found out what had caused the fire.

His niece and nephew had been playing with a lighter and set fire to Maurice’s giant white teddy bear; the apartment went up in flames.

In an instant, Maurice was homeless again.

When Maurice told me he had a son, I was not happy at all. Of course I knew he was going to have children some day, but he was only nineteen and I felt he was too young, too unsettled, to have a child of his own. I told him it was irresponsible to bring a baby into the world, given his circumstances, and how terrified I was that the cycle that had consumed his parents and nearly consumed him was now starting again. Maurice understood how I felt, and all he told me was that he would be okay.

“Don’t worry, Laurie. I got this,” he said.

Because of my reaction, he didn’t ask me to come see his new
son, nor did he bring him around when we met in the city. I wish I could have been happier for him and more supportive, but I just couldn’t. I was worried the responsibility of having a son might push Maurice into making bad decisions. I was also having a hard time seeing Maurice as a full-grown man. I had met him only eight years earlier when he was just a child himself. And here he was, a father, charged with raising a child of his own. To be honest, the thought of that terrified me. I believed in Maurice and I knew he was special, but I felt that whatever gains he had made since meeting me were fragile. Not because of him, but because of the world he lived in.

I wonder, also, if my own baby issues had something to do with my reaction. This was right around the time it was becoming clear to me that I would never have children of my own. Something I had wanted more desperately than anything else was slipping away, and there was nothing I could do about it. And here was Maurice, too young to be a father, not ready for the responsibility, having a son at nineteen. Did some part of me resent how cavalierly he seemed to be approaching fatherhood? Was I mad at God for how unfair it seemed? Perhaps.

What helped me deal with it was seeing how thrilled Maurice was to be a father. He told me he wanted his son to have all the things he never had and to never know the kind of troubles he had faced every day. I could see Maurice’s face light up whenever he talked about his son. He called him Junior and showed me pictures, and he promised over and over that he would be a good father to his boy. I realized that if I believed in Maurice, I had to believe in him
through even the most difficult of times. I had to let Maurice live his own life.

Sometime after his son’s first birthday, Maurice and I got together in Manhattan. Christmas was coming up, and the winter air was thin and cold. Maurice and I talked about Meka and about Junior and about how he was doing.

Then Maurice did something he had never done before.

He asked to borrow money.

He said Meka had seen a winter coat she loved, and he wanted to buy it for her. He said the coat cost three hundred dollars.

“Maurice, that’s pretty expensive for a coat,” I said.

“But she saw it and she really likes it, and I want to get it for her,” he said.

I had never even considered what I would do if Maurice asked me for money. I thought back to when I had given him the choice between cash and brown bag lunches and he had chosen the lunches hands down. I’d spent thousands and thousands of dollars on Maurice, but our relationship had never been about money. I was taken aback that he was asking for money now.

I’d also been feeling guilty about spending less time with him and about how I had reacted to his son, and so I told him I’d make him a deal.

“I will give you two hundred dollars outright, but I will loan you the other hundred. You have to start paying me back immediately. I don’t care if it’s a quarter a week, but you have to pay me back. Do you understand, Maurice?”

“Absolutely,” he said. “And thank you so much, Laurie.”

We walked to an ATM, I pulled out three hundred dollars, and he hugged me and thanked me again. Then we went our separate ways.

The next Monday, when we were set to get together, I didn’t hear from Maurice. I didn’t hear from him the Monday after that. A month went by, then another.

And just like that, Maurice disappeared from my life.

In the eight years since I’d met Maurice, the longest we’d ever gone without talking or seeing each other was three weeks. We’d each become an automatic part of the other’s routine, and our conversations and outings were, at least to me, integral to my life. Now, all of a sudden, he was gone. I knew Maurice lived in Brooklyn, but I didn’t have his address—he’d always kept me away from wherever he lived, preferring just to meet me in Manhattan. And I didn’t have a phone number for him. This was still before cell phones, and I wasn’t even sure he had a landline. After I moved to White Plains, Maurice would always call me at my office on Mondays to confirm we were getting together. I could always count on hearing from him sooner or later.

But now, nothing. He’d been missing for eight months when my
birthday rolled around, and I was sure I’d hear from him then. Since I’d met him, he’d never forgotten to call me and wish me a happy birthday. But that day passed, too, with no word. I started poring through phone books and calling every Mazyck I could find, to no avail. Thanksgiving, then Christmas, then another birthday, and still nothing. I told my assistant Rachel at
Teen People
magazine, where I was working, that if anyone named Maurice should call, she should find me and put it through immediately. On the streets of Manhattan I’d think I had seen him on a corner or in a bus, but it was never him. I had to face the possibility that Maurice could be out of my life for good. I even started worrying he might be dead.