An Invisible Thread (7 page)

“Frank!” my father bellowed.
“Frank!!”

My sister Annette and I sprang into action. We ran around the house shutting all the windows, so our neighbors wouldn’t hear what was to come. No one had ever told us to do this; we just did it on
our own out of instinct. My father trundled down the hall to my brother’s bedroom and found Frank there. He stuck the tape measure in his son’s face.

“What did you do to this?!”

My father never hit me or my sisters. He saved that for our mother and for poor Frank. But violence is not always a bodily thing. This time Frank flew out of the room, ahead of any blows. My father looked around the room for something to focus on.

He saw my brother’s baseball mitt.

He grabbed it and stormed down the hall, through the living room, out the front door, and into the garage. Frank saw what was in his hand and chased after him, screaming, “Dad, no! I’m sorry!
I’m sorry!!
” My sisters and I followed, begging him to stop.

My father went to the wall and pulled down a pair of shearing scissors.

My father took the scissors to the glove. He ripped through the hard leather, shredding it into ragged chunks. Frank couldn’t bear to see this; he ran inside the house, bawling. I went to the phone and called my mother at work: “Come home
right now
!” Annette ran and hid in her room with Nancy.

When my mother came home, she found Nunzie passed out on the living room sofa. Scattered around him: pieces of Frank’s baseball mitt. Frank was curled up in a corner of his bedroom, and my mother tried to comfort him as he cried. But there was nothing she could say or do.

The next morning, my father acted as if nothing had happened. So did we. This was how we handled it, how our mother told us to
handle it. I can still hear her whispering to us, “Be normal, act normal.” A few days later, my father came home with a new baseball glove for Frank.

He didn’t realize he could never replace the one he had destroyed.

When we met on the corner on our fourth Monday together, I told Maurice that instead of going out I would cook him dinner in my apartment. He was clearly surprised, but he said, “Great.” I surprised myself a little, too, with the invitation. I’d been thinking of giving Maurice a home-cooked meal, but the same doubts kept creeping in: Should I be inviting this child into my home? Could this somehow backfire? What will people think? But when I met Maurice on the corner that night—when he smiled as soon as he saw me—I knew it was okay.

We walked over to my apartment building, the Symphony. The doorman, Steve, greeted me with a wave.

“Good evening, Miss Schroff,” he said.

Then he looked down at Maurice, still in his dirty burgundy
sweats. For a moment, they just stared at each other. It was Steve’s job to know everyone who came and went in the building, but I could tell he was having trouble sizing up our situation.

“This is my friend, Maurice,” I finally said.

That cleared up nothing.

We walked through the lobby to the elevators. The Symphony was a new building, and the spacious lobby was dazzling—gorgeous rust-and-black-granite floors, high ceilings, art deco fixtures, a grand concierge desk. Everything was sleek and shiny. The elevator was bright and roomy, and the hallway to my apartment was lushly carpeted. Maurice silently took it all in.

My apartment was small, but to me it was a luxurious sanctuary: big windows that went up to the ceiling, two double closets, a brand-new galley kitchen, and a balcony. I had a mahogany hope chest, a lovely oval dining room table, and an elegant antique bureau. The color scheme was an inviting blue and mauve. Everything was exactly how I wanted it.

I told Maurice to take a seat on the sofa. He sat up against the right arm, on the very edge of the cushion. His eyes went right to the floor where I kept my giant jug of change. It was a clear plastic jug, a couple of feet tall, filled halfway to the top with nickels and dimes and quarters. The jug idea was something I got from my father, who used to put all his bartending tips in a bucket he kept in his bedroom. He never took money out, he only put more in. We kids were fascinated to see this mountain of money grow and grow. Every March he’d sit us down and have us roll up all the coins, and it would add up to several thousand dollars, which he used to pay his taxes. Years later, when I started working, I got a big jug of my own.
I’m guessing there had to be at least a thousand dollars in coins in the jug. For a kid like Maurice, who subsisted on dimes and quarters he begged for on the street, the jug had to look like some kind of treasure.

“Do you want a Diet Coke?” I asked him.

“Yes, please,” he said.

I brought out the drink and sat on the sofa.

“Maurice, I want us to have a serious conversation about something, and it’s a conversation we’re going to have only once, so I want you to listen carefully.”

Maurice tightened up.

“The reason I invited you to my apartment is because I consider you my friend. Friendship is built on trust, and I want you to know I will never betray that trust. I want you to know you will always be able to trust me. But if you betray my trust, we can no longer be friends. Do you understand?”

Maurice looked at me with his big round eyes and said nothing. He seemed confused, even startled.

“Is that clear?” I asked again. “Does that make sense to you?”

Then Maurice asked me a question.

“Is that it? You just want to be my friend?”

“Yes, that’s it.”

Maurice visibly relaxed. He stood up and stuck out his hand. We shook on it.

“A deal’s a deal,” he said.

Much later, Maurice told me he’d been terrified when I sat him down for this talk. In his experience adults usually wanted something from him. His mother, his uncles, Snake the pimp—there was
always an agenda, always an angle, to their interactions.
And now this white lady wants something too. Now
, he figured,
I’m finally going to learn why she’s being so nice to me.

It hardly made sense to him that all I wanted was to be friends.

But now we had a pact. A friendship pact. Only years later would I be able to take the full measure of what that handshake meant.

I told Maurice that while I cooked dinner I wanted him to set the table. I handed him plates and forks and knives. I put three chicken breasts in the broiler and boiled up pasta and vegetables, and I could hear Maurice fumbling with the silverware at the small table that defined my dining area. After a few minutes, he came into the kitchen.

“Miss Laura, can you teach me how to set the table?”

It was the first time he ever asked me to teach him something.

I went out and set the table as he watched. Fork on the left, knife on the right, plate, napkin, glass. When we sat down to eat, I noticed Maurice staring at my hands.

“What’s the matter, Maurice?”

“I’m trying to figure out how you use your knife and fork together.”

I slowed down my movements so he could see. Once again, I didn’t say anything—I didn’t give him a lesson. I simply let him learn by watching. Maurice was a sponge, fiercely curious and intelligent. He’d learned all the tricks of the drug trade by watching his mother and uncles; he was an expert on surviving on the streets because he’d seen it done. But he’d never seen anyone set a table or properly use a fork and a knife.

He had never eaten a meal at a dinner table in someone’s home.

Now, he watched me with my knife and fork and picked it up right away. Table etiquette isn’t a crucial skill in life, but it is a handy one. And Maurice, I could tell, was more than eager to learn it.

I noticed Maurice ate only half his dinner.

“Is your chicken okay?” I asked.

“It’s great,” he said.

“How come you didn’t finish it? Aren’t you hungry?”

Maurice looked sheepish.

“I want to bring some home to my mama,” he said. “Is that okay?”

“Maurice, I have more in the kitchen. You finish that, and I’ll make you a plate you can take home.”

Maurice devoured the rest of his dinner.

Afterward, we both cleared the table, and in the kitchen I handed him a roll of cookie dough.

“How about some cookies? You cut ’em; I’ll bake ’em.”

I gave him a knife; he wasn’t sure what to do. I showed him how to open the roll and told him to cut each piece about an inch thick and then into four more pieces. Maurice listened and went to work. We arranged the pieces on a cookie sheet, put them in the oven, and, fifteen minutes later, ate warm chocolate chip cookies with milk.

Maurice
loved
the idea of dessert—it was something else he wasn’t used to having. It was a treat, and he didn’t have many treats in his life. It became his favorite part of our meals together. He made sure to tuck away four cookies to bring home.

It was nearly 9:00 p.m., and I wanted to get Maurice home. I still couldn’t believe no one would wonder where he’d been. I
wrapped up a plate of food for him, and we sat down to talk before he left.

“Maurice, let me ask you something. Do you have your own toothbrush at home?”

“No,” he said.

“Do you have a towel or a washcloth?”

“No.”

“Do you have a bar of soap there?”

“No, Miss Laura.”

I went to my closet and pulled out a towel and a washcloth, and I found an extra toothbrush and toothpaste and a bar of soap. I put them in a plastic shopping bag along with the leftovers. I would soon learn that anything Maurice brought home with him quickly disappeared. His sisters, his uncles, he didn’t know who took them exactly—the stuff just vanished. Eventually I bought Maurice a large footlocker with a combination lock, and he kept his stuff in there.

“One more thing,” I said to Maurice. “I have a surprise for you.”

He perked up.

“How would you like to go to a Mets game this Saturday?”

Maurice lit up. All these years later, I can still see his face in that moment, bathed in something like joy.

“But listen, Maurice. I need your mother to sign a note saying she’s okay with you riding in my car and going to the game, okay? Can you bring this to her and have her sign it?”

I’d typed up a permission slip and gave it to him. I asked him to meet me on Wednesday, same time and spot, with the note. “I’m not going to take you to the game without it,” I told him. “You must
get this signed and bring it back.” He promised he would, and we agreed to meet that Wednesday so he could give me the note.

“Thank you so much for my dinner and all this stuff,” Maurice said.

I walked him down through the lobby and past Steve again.

“Good night, Maurice,” Steve said.

Maurice was startled. The doorman knew his name.

That Wednesday night I waited on 56th Street for Maurice to bring me the note. I waited for ten minutes, then fifteen, then twenty. I waited until seven forty-five.

Maurice never showed up.

During one of my early dinners with Maurice—I can’t remember which—I asked him to tell me more about his mother. He was hesitant to say anything about her at all, but I pressed him a bit. I felt I needed to know as much about her as I could. After all, I was spending time with her son, infringing on her territory. Could his mother really not care what he did or who he was with?

“Maurice, does your mother work?” I asked.

“No.”

“So what does she do all day?”

“She stays home and she cleans. She vacuums and dusts.”

This made sense to me; plenty of moms are stay-at-home moms. I formed a picture of Maurice’s mother in my mind: harried, exhausted, too many kids, no man to help. I was still trying to get my head
around how a boy his age could be on his own to roam the streets at night. What mother would allow that? And if she did, why hadn’t Maurice shown up that Wednesday? Had she not wanted him to go to the Mets game with me? Was his mother even in his life anymore?

After Maurice didn’t show up with the note, I decided I had to find out these things for myself. I decided to go to the Bryant Hotel and meet Maurice’s mother.

All I knew was what Maurice had told me: that he lived with his mother and grandmother and sisters in a room at the Bryant. I knew it was a welfare hotel. In the news, I’d heard a bit about New York City’s many welfare hotels, but I’d never been to one, or even near one. I figured it would be better if I didn’t go alone, so I asked my friend Lisa, who lived three doors down the hall from me, to come along. After work on Thursday we walked over to the Bryant, on the corner of 54th Street and Broadway.