An Invisible Thread (12 page)

Finally, I said, “Maurice, will you go to the bathroom and blow your nose already?”

He looked at me and said, “Huh?”

“Blow your nose,” I said. “Go in there and blow your nose.”

He stared at me as if I was speaking another language. And then I figured it out—he didn’t know how to blow his nose. No one had ever taught him how to do it. No one had ever put a tissue up to his nose and said, “Blow.” He had never even heard the expression. I took some tissues and showed him how, and then for the first time in his life he properly blew his nose.

One Saturday afternoon not long after that, my intercom buzzer rang. “I have Maurice in the lobby,” the concierge told me. We were still seeing each other every Monday, and when I had time during the week or on a weekend we’d sometimes get together, but we had no plans to see each other that day. I told the concierge to put him on the phone.

“I’m sorry to bother you,” Maurice said, “but I’m really hungry. Can we get something to eat?”

I said of course and told him I’d be right down. I took him to McDonald’s for his regular Big Mac, French fries, and thick chocolate shake.

“Maurice, when was the last time you had something to eat?” I asked.

“Thursday,” he said—two days earlier.

It broke my heart. I guess after Monday nights I tried not to think about all the other nights of the week and if he was managing to feed himself. I knew he was enrolled in public school, for instance, but I didn’t really know for sure how he was eating during the day. But now I couldn’t avoid the harsh reality of his life—that much of the time he was hungry and had no real way to find food.

Over our burgers I came up with a plan.

“Look, Maurice, I don’t want you out there hungry on the nights I don’t see you, so this is what we can do. I can either give you some money for the week—and you’ll have to be really careful how you spend it—or when you come over on Monday night we can go to the supermarket and I can buy all the things you like to eat and make you lunch for the week. I’ll leave it with the doormen, and you can pick it up on the way to school.

Maurice looked at me and asked me a question.

“If you make me lunch,” he said, “will you put it in a brown paper bag?”

I didn’t really understand the question. “Do you want it in a brown paper bag?” I asked. “Or how would you prefer it?”

“Miss Laura,” he said, “I don’t want your money. I want my lunch in a brown paper bag.”

“Okay, sure. But why do you want it in a bag?”

“Because when I see kids come to school with their lunch in a paper bag, that means someone cares about them. Miss Laura, can I please have my lunch in a paper bag?”

I looked away when Maurice said that, so he wouldn’t see me tear up.
A simple brown paper bag
, I thought.

To me, it meant nothing. To him, it was everything.

I’d known Maurice for about two months when, after dinner one Monday, he said, “Miss Laura, can I ask you something?’

“Of course, Maurice.”

“My school is having a parent-teacher night,” he said, “and I was wondering if you could go.”

Maurice and I had occasionally talked about his school. I’d once asked him how he was doing, and he’d said, “I’m not getting into as many fights since I met you.” That was one of the first times I thought I might be making a difference in his life, so I was excited to meet his teachers and find out more about him. I also wanted his teachers to get to know me. All the warnings from Valerie and my family had made me want to have someone from Maurice’s life in my corner. To have his teachers know me and trust me would be a positive thing.

But most of all, I wanted to see Maurice in a school setting. I needed to see him in a situation where he was a child and not the grown-up he was forced to act like. I was worried he no longer had any connection to the innocent side of himself—that the streets had stripped him of any chance to still be a silly, curious, regular kid.

The sad truth is that I only knew Maurice as a panhandler.

Maurice began panhandling when he was nine years old. He only did it for an hour or two a day until he raised enough money—four or five bucks—to buy a slice of pizza or a hamburger and maybe play some video games. Most people gave him nickels or dimes or quarters; once in a while he’d get a wrinkled dollar bill. At first his mother didn’t know he was panhandling, but eventually she learned he was working the streets and that he was good at it. She started going with him to have him raise money for her drugs. Maurice didn’t like doing it and ditched her. Darcella found other kids in the neighborhood—four- or five-year-olds with drug-addled mothers of their own—to take on the streets as props who begged for change.

Maurice went back to being a one-boy operation. Vulnerable as he was, he managed to escape any real harm on the streets, except for one time at a Pizza Hut in Times Square when a patron grew tired of seeing him begging outside the entrance. The man came out, walked up to Maurice, and punched him in the face.

Maurice staggered but did not fall. He looked at the man and said, “If you’re gonna hit a kid, you should at least knock him out.”

Before the man could hit him again, the code of the streets kicked in. Several street vendors—immigrants from Africa who
sold knockoff Louis Vuitton bags and fake Rolex watches to tourists—were right up the block, and they ran from the corner and chased the man back into the Pizza Hut. Maurice knew the vendors—they lived in the Bryant, too, six of them to a room—and they weren’t going to stand by and watch their little friend get hit. One of them pounded the window of the Pizza Hut so hard it shattered into pieces. A police car rolled up, and the vendors scattered. A cop grabbed Maurice and asked him who broke the window.

“Do you know those guys?” the cop demanded. “Give me their names.”

Maurice said he had never seen them before in his life.

The next day he stole that box cutter from Duane Reade.

When he wasn’t panhandling, Maurice was going to school. His mother was on public assistance, and to keep the checks coming, she had to keep Maurice in a classroom. He did not go every day, and he usually showed up late. But, as I would soon discover, school was very important to Maurice.

When I met him, he was enrolled in I.S. 131, in Manhattan’s Chinatown district. He was a special education student, which meant he took classes with other students who had developmental and social issues. One of his first teachers there, Miss Kim House, knew him to be a bright but difficult boy. She noticed he usually came to school disheveled, wearing the same dirty sweats every day. His hygiene was terrible and he smelled bad, worse than any other student, and the other kids would tease him about it and make him mad. Maurice stood up to them; he was tough and wiry and could handle himself. He never hit the other children, but he got in lots of fights, lots of pushing and tackling and yelling. When he was
focused, Maurice was a hard worker, and he was smart. Miss House believed he might be one of the special ones, but there were many other times when she feared he would not make it—feared that the anger inside him would overtake him and he would simply stop coming to school.

She never knew what was at the root of his anger; in fact, she knew very little about his life at home until the day Maurice’s mother came in for a face-to-face meeting with school officials, a requirement of her public assistance program. During class, Miss House got a message to come down to the principal’s office. There was a disturbance, and it involved Maurice’s mother. When Miss House got there, she saw Darcella yelling at the principal. She was agitated, angry, out of control, screaming, waving her arms and jabbing her fingers, and not listening to anyone, not even for a moment. Someone called security.

Miss House took Darcella by the arm and said, “Come with me.” She took her into the bathroom, brought her to the sink, and splashed cold water on her face. She told her, “Calm down, calm down, everything is fine.” Darcella stopped yelling. Miss House didn’t know why she was mad, and she didn’t care. She could tell by her bloodshot eyes that she was strung out on something. She stayed with her in the bathroom for a few minutes, bringing her down. Finally, the agitation subsided. Now, Darcella just looked tired.

“Do you want to come upstairs and see your son?” Miss House asked.

Darcella thought about it, then said, “No.”

Miss House told her to go home; she could come back another
time for the face-to-face. On the way out, Darcella turned to her and apologized.

“I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” she said.

“It’s okay,” said Miss House.

Now, at least, she had some inkling why Maurice was the way he was. All of the boys in her special ed class had their outbursts and bad moments, but Maurice would get angrier than any of them. In his darkest moods he would just shut down and drift to the back of the classroom, disappearing into himself. At least now there was some context for Maurice’s behavior. After Darcella’s disruptive visit, Maurice stopped coming to school. He missed four days in a row. Miss House asked the principal for permission to visit his home and find out where he was. She went to the Bryant Hotel and saw what I had seen. It was a more deplorable situation than she could have imagined. Then she saw Maurice come to the door, and when he saw her, his face—like hers—registered shock. She could not believe what she was seeing; he could not believe she had come to see it.

While she spoke to Maurice’s grandmother, Maurice cowered behind a bedsheet strung across the room. Miss House knew he was embarrassed. She stood next to Grandma Rose and told her Maurice hadn’t been to school in four days.

“Is he in trouble?” Rose asked. “He been suspended?”

“No, he’s not in trouble,” Miss House said. “He’s just been absent.”

“He’s a good boy,” Rose said. “A very good boy. And you’re a good woman for lookin’ out for him. Thank you so much. Thank you so much.”

Before she left, Miss House said good-bye to Maurice.

She looked him in the eyes and said, “You need to come back to school.”

And he did.

After that, Miss House paid a little extra attention to Maurice. She figured out what it was that set him off—chaos, disorder, disruptions. His life at home was shockingly unstable, and more than anything he needed a little peace and quiet. Her classroom had two carrels in the back for reading, and when things got hectic, she’d have him go back and sit in a carrel. He loved sitting there by himself; he got all his work done that way. Maurice soon figured out Miss House was in his corner, and to him her support was like a life preserver. One day after school, he followed Miss House as she got on a subway and went to a bank in midtown. She finally spotted him lingering in the back as she stood in line.

“What are you doing here, Maurice?”

“I got nothing to do,” he said, “so I just came along with you.”

She bought him a hot dog and told him he had to go home.

Her kindness helped, but Maurice’s troubles did not just disappear. He was still always late in the mornings, and much of the time he seemed exhausted—too tired to focus. His grades were bad, and he didn’t seem to care in the least about making them better. His clothes were still dirty, and he still smelled bad. And he still fought with the boys who made fun of him. The only thing that gave Miss House hope were tiny signs of progress—Maurice was getting a little better at speaking in front of the class, and he was fighting a little bit less.

She also found hope in something she’d hear Maurice say once in a while. Usually, he shared nothing about his personal life with
other students, or with her. But every now and then he would tell her something, and he would say it with pride.

“I went to Miss Laura’s house last night.”

When Maurice asked me to come to his school, I asked, “What about your mother? Shouldn’t she go with you?”

“Nah,” he said. “She’s not gonna go.”

“Maurice, I’m happy to go with you, but you need to tell your mother about it and ask her if she can go. If she can’t, I’ll go.”

My brief encounter with Darcella led me to think he was probably right: she wasn’t interested in going. Even so, I didn’t want him to bypass her altogether. She was his mother, and I knew that he loved her, in the unconditional way children love their parents. I never wanted to do or say anything that would get in the way of that. Growing up, I was never allowed to speak badly of my father, no matter how horrible his behavior. I would start to say something, and my mother would cut me off and sternly warn me never to say it again. “But
you
do!” I’d implore. “
You
say bad things.”

“I am his wife and I can,” she said. “He is your father; don’t ever forget that.”

Maurice agreed to ask his mother and to tell her I would go if she couldn’t. We had our dinner, cleared the table, and baked our cookies. Afterward Maurice asked, “Miss Laura, when you come to my school, are you gonna wear your same work clothes?”

I’d been meeting him right after work, so he was used to seeing me in my stylish dresses and skirts and sweaters.

“I guess I could come home and change first,” I said.

“No,” he said. “I want you to wear your work clothes. You always look so classy.”

The Wednesday of the parent-teacher meeting, I met Maurice in my garage, and we drove down to I.S. 131. It was a couple of big, drab buildings on Hester Street; one of the wings was curved, sort of like a low-rent Guggenheim. I was surprised to see that I felt nervous. I wanted to make a good impression on Maurice’s teachers. We walked into his classroom, where Miss House was waiting.

“Hi, I’m Laura Schroff. It’s so nice to meet you,”

Miss House shook my hand and said, “It’s very nice to meet you, too. I’ve heard so much about you from Maurice.” Her greeting was warm, but I could tell she was holding back, sizing me up. She had to be curious about who I was and why I had taken this role in Maurice’s life.

“Maurice, why don’t you take a walk around,” she said. “I’d like to speak to Miss Schroff privately.”

Maurice looked panicked and froze in his tracks. He didn’t want to go. Two months earlier, I wouldn’t have been able to decipher his reaction, but now I knew exactly what he was thinking.