An Invisible Thread (25 page)

He read to her from the scriptures—Psalm 51:

Have mercy upon me, O God, according to thy loving kindness: according unto the multitude of thy tender mercies blot out my transgressions. Wash me thoroughly from mine iniquity, and cleanse me from my sin.

Maurice left the Bible open to Psalm 51 and placed it by his mother in her bed. He left believing she was getting better and was only a few days away from joining him and his family again.

But that night, at 4:00 a.m., he got a phone call. His mother had passed away.

Maurice was asked to identify her body at the hospital. He didn’t want to do it, but he knew he had to. When he saw his mother’s body, he was surprised by how he felt. He felt liberated. His mother looked natural and peaceful, as if all the burdens she had carried for so long had been lifted. Maurice bent down and hugged and kissed her. He said his final good-bye.

Just a few days after that, I was in my office in the Time & Life Building when my assistant Rachel poked her head into my office, excited to tell me Maurice was on the phone.

“Oh my God,” I said aloud. “Put him through.”

It had been more than two years since I had heard from
Maurice. I had no idea where he had gone or what had happened to him. My heart was beating wildly when I picked up the phone.

“Maurice? Is that you?”

“Laurie,” he said, and I could tell he was crying.

“Maurice, are you okay? Is everything okay?”

“My mother died,” he told me. He explained how she had gotten clean and then had a stroke, and how he had identified her body. He told me that he felt sad that she was dead but happy that she was at peace.

And then he said, “Laurie, you are my mother now.”

Maurice called me right after coming home from his mother’s funeral. He told me he’d thought of calling me many times over the years he was missing but just never did. For one thing, he felt bad about the hundred dollars he owed me.

“Maurice, how could you ever think a hundred dollars would mean more to me than you do?” I exclaimed. “I was worried sick about you.”

“I’m so sorry,” he told me. “I just had to go away and figure things out.”

He told me that after his mother died he thought about how, in his life, there had been only a handful of people who truly cared for him. He lost one of them when his grandmother died and another
when his mother passed away. After that, he said, he couldn’t stand to lose one more. And so he finally called me.

We scheduled a time to get together the next day, and we met at a restaurant to catch up with each other’s lives. When I saw Maurice, he looked older, more mature; he was a man now. But his big, broad smile was just the same as I remembered it, the same as on that very first day at McDonald’s. Maurice told me about his mother losing her Section 8 apartment. He told me about his children, and he told me how, in North Carolina, he had faced a fork in the road between the two paths his life could take. In North Carolina, he’d come the closest he ever had to tumbling down the wrong path. Yet here he was, swearing he would never put himself in such a situation again.

“I know what’s at stake now,” he said. “I don’t ever want to risk losing what matters to me in the world.”

Seeing Maurice again and hearing him talk, I felt an enormous wave of relief pass over me. I felt like he’d turned a very big corner. In life, there are many different kinds of heroes, but sometimes you can be something more than a hero.

You can be a survivor.

Maurice understood that surviving the childhood he had endured, surviving the streets where he grew up and still lived, was by no means a given—in fact, it was a long shot. That is hardly an exaggeration. Just look at what happened to Maurice’s uncles.

Uncle Limp’s body broke down from years of drug abuse. He is now badly hobbled by diabetes and in prison on a parole violation.

Uncle Juice slowly lost his mind from drugs. He is still on the streets selling perfume.

Uncle Old just finished a ten-year stretch in prison for bank robbery.

Uncle Nice is in a federal penitentiary, serving ten years for drug trafficking.

Uncle E died of AIDS.

Uncle Dark is still out there somewhere on the streets. No one knows.

There were other casualties. At least five children Maurice grew up around at the Brooklyn Arms became drug addicts. He knows of at least three cousins who went to prison. One close cousin, who was the same age as Maurice and grew up with him at the Brooklyn Arms, went to jail on drug charges and, when he got out, was shot and killed.

For many of these doomed people in Maurice’s life, there was simply no escape from the heavy, burdensome weight of the past. That burden is something I am sure many, many people understand, and it is something I understand pretty well, too. I know that struggling against the vicious undertow of inherited sadness—the ever-present pull of family history—can be a lifelong battle that is never won, only endured.

For some, the battle is fated to end in tragedy.

My brother Frank had been such a good athlete as a kid, I often wonder if he might have had a career as a professional athlete. He was great at baseball, great at wrestling; he was even a champion bowler. His room was full of shiny trophies, little gold men swinging bats or crouched in wrestling poses. His love of sports was one of the few things that might have allowed him to bond with my
father. He always said his fondest childhood memory was when my father came home from work one day and gave him two tickets to see his favorite team, the Minnesota Twins, play the Yankees. My father should have connected with Frank over sports—should have spent long afternoons with him playing catch or teaching him how to bunt—but it just wasn’t that way.

Then, one night, my father came home from work and slammed the front door, a sure sign the dark cloud had descended. He made his way to Frank’s room, pushed open the door, and started yelling. Frank cowered in his bed. My father reached for one of the trophies and twisted the little statue off its base. He threw the pieces to the floor and went for another one, destroying that one, too. He didn’t stop until every last trophy had been wrenched in half or stomped or thrown against a wall. He left Frank to sleep in a pile of his jagged, broken trophies. The next time I looked in his bedroom—after I came back from school the next day—everything had been cleared away, and there were only empty shelves where once had been an army of little gold men.

It’s hardly surprising that Frank didn’t pursue sports in high school. In fact, he didn’t even graduate.

Sometime around the tenth grade, Frank lost his way.

He started drinking too much and using drugs. When he was seventeen or eighteen, he went to Florida with some of his buddies, and he got into serious trouble there. I don’t remember exactly what happened; I just know my parents had to bail him out of jail and replace a car he had totaled. He was not violent, just restless and sometimes reckless and even a little crazy here and there. I remember being at my parents’ home in Long Island one night when Frank
walked in, clearly stoned on something. He got into a screaming match with my father, and it got so heated that Frank did something completely out of character for him: he grabbed a kitchen knife and waved it at my father. I remember my mother begging Frank to stop, but it was my father—the man whose rages could not be interrupted—who defused the situation by stepping back and calming things down and letting Frank have the last word.

It was the first time I ever saw my father handle a crisis that way.

Not long after that fight, Frank agreed to enlist in the navy. That had been my mother’s desperate wish for him. She saw how lost he was, and she thought regimen and routine would do him good. Frank, horrified he had been so stoned he would pull a knife on his father, agreed. In the service he got to see the world; I remember him excitedly describing the Seychelles Islands. I remember him surprising my mother with a really nice china service for twelve that he sent from the Philippines. She’d never had nice china, and Frank remembered that. She was so happy to get it, and he was so thrilled that she was.

After almost three years in the service, Frank left the navy three weeks before his time was up to come home and be with our ailing mother. She died just two weeks after he got home. Frank then went to work building airplane wings for a company called Republic Fairchild in Farmingdale, Long Island. He fell in love with a woman named Murlene and with her two young children, Darren and Toniette. He seemed to settle into a groove, a stable, happy life. He could be shy around adults, but he was great with children, and Darren and Toniette were crazy about him. He taught Darren to
play sports and spent long afternoons with him tossing a football. Frank was always on the sideline rooting him on; he never missed any of Darren’s games.

When Darren won trophies, Frank made sure he had a big shelf for them in his room where they could forever be admired.

But when Frank was in his thirties, Republic Fairchild moved its plant to Kansas, and he lost his job. A year later he split up with Murlene. The children were still there for him, and he was still like a father to them. For more than a year, Toniette even lived with Frank, but around that time, he began to drift away. He found odd jobs, but they never lasted. He put on weight—sometimes he was nearly a hundred pounds too heavy—then lost it, then put it back on. He finally moved to Florida to be near Annette, and her children were happy to have him around. He was funny and affectionate and gentle, the kind of guy you just want to hug, and if adults couldn’t always see that innate sweetness in him, children certainly could.

When he was forty-one, he developed a serious cough. My sister thought it was just a bad cold; Frank, who never complained about anything, wasn’t too worried. The truth is Frank was too heavy, and he smoked too much. He didn’t take care of himself like he should have. It was almost as if he didn’t feel he was worth the effort. He went into the hospital for a minor procedure; the doctors ran tests on him and told him his carbon monoxide level was sky high. They didn’t let him leave and ran more tests. He called Annette, and when she got to the hospital, Frank asked her to go pick up a pizza for him.

“Are you crazy?” she said. “You can’t eat that. You’re in a hospital.”

The doctors kept him overnight, and by the time Annette came back to see him the next morning he was on a respirator. He started running a high fever, and antibiotics weren’t working. Doctors didn’t know precisely what was wrong with him, and they never found out. They ran test after test and floated theory after theory, but they never nailed a diagnosis. A pulmonologist was stumped. A kidney doctor came up with nothing. All we knew was that Frank was in critical condition and getting worse. We all flew down to see him at different times, and when I first walked into his room, I was stunned. He was pale and overweight and wheezing. He was hooked up to a respirator and couldn’t speak. Eventually, I flew back home, but Annette visited him twice a day for the next six weeks.

Then Annette called me one night and asked me to come down. “Please, I can’t be here by myself,” she said. I booked the first flight for the next morning. While I was waiting to board the plane, I got a call from Annette.

“Frank died,” she said.

I remember feeling overwhelmed with sadness. We all were. Annette, especially, beat herself up pretty badly. Frank had moved to Florida to be closer to her and her family. She saw him as much as she possibly could, but she still felt she could have done more for him. She blamed herself for not seeing that his cough was serious. She felt that somehow she had let him down. That wasn’t true at all. She had welcomed him with open arms when he moved to Florida, and when he died she was by his side, holding his hand. At Frank’s funeral, Steven got up to speak, and he told Annette not to feel bad and that we all dearly loved Frank. Still, we all felt a certain amount of guilt, because we knew Frank had taken the worst abuse from
my father. We felt that we had escaped much of it ourselves only at Frank’s expense.

It was impossible not to think that the damage my father inflicted on him is what pushed Frank off course in his life.

Doctors never did come up with a cause of death. In the end, his body just gave out—his heart, his lungs, his spirit. This diagnostic void made it even easier to believe Frank had been doomed all along. Something inside him was broken, and he never got any kind of sure footing on this earth. Worst of all, he never believed he was as good and worthy a person as he was. My siblings and I sometimes talk about Frank and remember all the funny, quirky things about him: how his proudest possession was an aqua blue Volkswagen Beetle he bought brand new for $7,400 right when VW discontinued the model; how he loved the Mets and the Yankees and how Steven would mail him box scores when he was in the navy; how, as a kid, he’d pop in his eight-track tapes of the Beatles and sing along like a rock star.

Steven remembers the time when he was ten years old and in the fifth grade and was summoned to the principal’s office over the loudspeaker. When he got to the office, there was Frank, then nineteen, with a stern look on his face.