From time to time, though, I did press Maurice about one thing: I kept asking him what he wanted to be when he grew up. I thought it was important for him to set goals and have a dream. I wanted him to not only pick a future but to visualize it as well. One night, Maurice was quiet for a long time after I asked him the question. I could tell he was really thinking about what he wanted to be.
Finally, he said, “I want to be a policeman.”
Many years later, he told me why he wanted to be a cop. When he was young, he went to a phone booth and dropped in a quarter to make a call. The machine ate his quarter, the only money he had. He kicked the booth in frustration and kicked it again and again, and all of a sudden he felt a searing pain in his knee. He collapsed to the ground, looked up, and saw a policeman standing over him, holding a black flapjack in his hand. The cop had slugged Maurice on the knee, and now he and his partner were standing over him laughing.
“It took my quarter,” Maurice explained.
The cops kept laughing. Maurice got up and started to run, but before he did he looked at the officers’ badges.
“I got your badge numbers,” he yelled back at them. “I’m gonna report you both.”
He knew that even if he did report them, it would come to nothing. He knew there was only one thing he could do to stop cops from abusing the poor and defenseless. And that was to become a cop himself.
I told Maurice it was a great idea and that he had every opportunity in the world to make his dream come true, provided he remained “a straight arrow.”
Some Mondays Maurice sat around and did his homework. After a while, he started showing up on Saturday afternoons, asking if he could just hang out with me. When I could, I’d stay around the apartment with him and play a board game or watch TV, but there were times when I had to run an errand or be somewhere. On those days, I let Maurice stay in my apartment alone. He told me he loved those days, because he could do anything he wanted—eat, read, watch a movie, take a nap—and nobody could bother him. Those were the first times in his life he had a real home—with food and water and electricity—all to himself.
Some Mondays we went shopping for clothes. I was careful not to buy Maurice too many things, and I never bought him any flashy, designer clothes, except for at Christmas. I just got him what he needed when he needed it. Most Mondays we went shopping for food, and we’d pick up the turkey and roast beef and other cold cuts I used to make the sandwiches I was now leaving for him with the doormen. I tried to make the sandwiches as hefty as I could, because I knew they might be his only meal of the day. I added fruit or applesauce or pickles and, always, fresh cookies, his favorite. I made sure to always put his lunch in a brown paper bag, just as he had asked. Sometimes, on Fridays, I’d leave a little envelope with ten dollars in it along with the sandwich. I wanted Maurice to be able to buy food over the weekend.
Then, one Saturday afternoon, Maurice had the concierge ring me from the lobby. When he came up, he was in tears. I’d seen Maurice cry only once, and I knew him to be an extremely tough little boy. I sat him down, brought him some juice, and asked him what was wrong.
“My mother got caught selling drugs, and now she’s in jail,” he said.
He’d spoken to me about his mother only one time, when he told me she stayed home to cook and clean. Now, he opened up to me about her.
“She’s in Riker’s Island,” he said. “Riker’s is a really bad place with really bad people.”
We sat and talked about his mother for a long time. He told me she’d been arrested before, and he never knew when she would get out of jail and come home again. He had no idea how long she’d be in jail this time, either. He admitted he had lied to me about what his mother did; he had gotten the idea to say she was a stay-at-home mom from TV commercials. He admitted she was a drug addict and that she stole things to sell and pay for her habit. She cashed in all their food stamps and used the money for drugs, and that was why they seldom had anything to eat at home. Her addiction had gotten worse once she started using crack.
He said the reason he didn’t tell me about her was because he thought it would scare me away.
“I hate that my mother is a crack addict,” he said.
I didn’t say much to Maurice; mostly, I just listened. I didn’t want to pass judgment on her. I knew about parents with dangerous, destructive habits, and I knew there was no cheap wisdom I could hope to impart. I couldn’t tell Maurice everything was going to be okay; I could be pretty sure that once his mother got out of prison, she’d go right back to using and dealing. I figured Maurice just needed someone to listen to him. And so I let him talk.
Later, he told me this was the first time in his life he felt he had someone he could turn to with a problem.
Maurice’s mother was still in jail when his birthday rolled around in April. I resolved to give him the best birthday celebration he’d ever had. I asked him what he liked to do in his wildest dreams, and it didn’t take him long to answer.
“Can we go out to Annette’s?” he asked.
His wildest dream was hanging out in the suburbs with my sister and her family. I told him of course, but pushed him to think of something else.
He pondered it some more, then mentioned there was a wrestling event coming up at Madison Square Garden. It was called Wrestlemania, and all the best professional wrestlers would be there. He rattled off some names I’d never heard of: Hulk Hogan, Ricky Steamboat, Randy Savage, “Rowdy” Roddy Piper. He had talked about wrestling before, and I knew it was one of the very few things he seemed to genuinely enjoy.
“Laurie,” he said—by then he had heard my nieces and nephew call me Aunt Laurie, and he asked if he could call me that—“could we go to Wrestlemania?”
“Let me look into it,” I said.
I called the Garden and bought the best tickets available. I wrapped them in a box and handed them to Maurice a few days before his birthday. “An early gift,” I told him. He jumped so high he nearly scraped the ceiling when he saw the tickets. We went to Wrestlemania together, and Maurice screamed at the top of his lungs for the next two hours. The Garden was packed with thousands of excited kids, all around Maurice’s age. I was so happy that, for one night at least, he could be just another kid in this delirious crowd.
Part two of his birthday celebration was a Saturday night dinner at the Hard Rock Café. I invited my sister Nancy and my brother, Steve to come along. Maurice asked if he could have steak again, and this time he knew how to cut it with his knife. The waitress brought over a small cake with candles, and the whole restaurant sang “Happy Birthday” to him.
The next day, a Sunday, we drove out to Annette’s house for a birthday dinner—part three. Maurice got another cake and more presents. On the way home, he was so tired he fell right asleep. I’d like to think visions of pile-diving wrestlers in crazy spandex suits were dancing in his head.
Back in the city I parked the car and walked Maurice home. He gave me a big kiss on the check and thanked me for his birthday.
“It was the best birthday I ever had,” he said.
He turned to go, but then he stopped and faced me again.
“Bye, Laurie,” he said. “I love you.”
It was the first time he said that to me.
Maurice’s mother was released from Riker’s Island shortly after we had celebrated his birthday. She came out of prison clean and sober, healthier than she’d been in years. This was a pattern for many hardcore addicts: years of horrific drug abuse that turned them into zombies and pushed them to the brink of death, followed by a jail term that literally saved their lives. The time in prison allowed their bodies and brains to heal and bought them at least a few more years of life. But for many, this new energy and resilience only made it easier to jump back into the world of drugs, starting the cycle again. Maurice’s mother stayed clean for a few weeks after returning to the Bryant, but, sadly, she was back on crack before long.
Maurice and I continued meeting every Mond
ay and many Saturday afternoons for the next two years. At least once every few weeks we went out for Saturday dinners at my sister Annette’s house, still one of Maurice’s favorite things to do. I was continually amazed at how often Maurice would experience something for the first time. I remember one Christmas Eve at Annette’s when her daughter Brooke came home from a friend’s house crying. She’d mentioned Santa Claus to her friends, and they laughed at her for believing he was real. When she came home, she asked her brother and sister if this was true. They said yes, and Brooke was inconsolable. That evening we were all due at church for a Christmas pageant. Brooke, playing an angel, was decked out in her wings and halo, but she was still distraught about Santa Claus and couldn’t stop crying. We had our coats on and were almost out the door, but Brooke refused to go. Maurice was watching this unfold. He could see Brooke’s tantrum was making us late. He watched as Bruce approached his weeping daughter. He’d seen fathers handle situations like this before. He felt sure he knew what was coming.
Bruce sat next to Brooke and put his arms around her, stroking her hair. He told her everything would be okay and held her until she stopped crying. Maurice could not believe what he’d seen. In his world, a crying child would have been yelled at and probably hit.
He later told me this was the first time he ever saw a parent comfort a child who was sad.
For Maurice’s fifteenth birthday, I decided I wanted to buy him his first bike. He loved riding with my nephew, and I’m sure he envied Derek’s flashy bicycle. A few weeks before his birthday I drove out to Greenlawn, and Bruce, Annette, and Derek took me to the local bike shop. There, I spotted a Ross chrome ten-speeder that was just stunning. We all had the same thought: such a nice bike could be dangerous for Maurice to own. I knew he could never bring the bike to the Bryant; it would be stripped or stolen within minutes. But I didn’t think Maurice should be prohibited from owning a nice bicycle simply because of his circumstances. It wasn’t his fault he lived like he did; he was just a boy. I figured as long as he kept it in the bike room at the Symphony and watched where he took it, it would be okay for him to have it.
So I bought the Ross and had them hold it until we picked it up on Maurice’s birthday. I told Maurice it was Derek who was getting a new bicycle, and we were going with him to get it. Everyone came along: Bruce and Annette and all three kids. Suddenly, the manager came around from the back of the store pushing a gleaming new bicycle with a big red bow on it. He wheeled it up to Maurice and said, “Congratulations on your new bike, kid.”
Maurice pointed at Derek and said, “No, that’s for him.”
And then all at once we howled, “SURPRISE!”
It took Maurice a good two minutes to truly comprehend the bike was his.
We took it back to Annette’s, and Maurice and Derek went riding for hours, until Bruce called them in for dinner. Even then Maurice didn’t want to stop.
I think back to that day quite often. I think about Maurice’s surprise and about his unbridled bliss as he peddled it madly that afternoon. I think about the innocence of that moment—the purity of his reaction. I think about what it must have meant to him to own something like the Ross. But I also think about how fleeting such moments of innocence are, about how good intentions and wide-eyed optimism and even love can only protect us from the harsh, corrupting reality of life for so long. Getting that shiny Ross bicycle was surely magical for Maurice.
But magic, like Santa Claus, isn’t real.
Just a couple of weeks after buying Maurice his bike, I got a call from Nancy. She said she wanted to fix me up with a guy she had met through work. I was thirty-eight years old, and I’d been divorced for over a decade. I’d been out on a bunch of dates since then and had a couple of relationships that had at least gotten off the ground, but nothing had ever really clicked for me romantically. As I got older, I began to wonder if it ever would, but I still had the same dream—to have a family of my own—and I wasn’t ready to give that up. I wasn’t all that crazy about blind dates, but I told my sister to go ahead and set it up.
Michael and his uncle ran a lucrative business renting cars to travelers in Europe. He was divorced and had two sons, one graduating college and the other about to start. We joined my sister and her fiancé, John, at El Quijote, a traditional Mexican restaurant in the Chelsea district of Manhattan. I remember I wore a smart blue business suit and had lobster. I also remember I hadn’t felt that comfortable on a date in a long, long time. Michael was warm and funny and gracious and sophisticated, and I said good night thinking that I liked him.
He called me up a couple of days later and asked for a second date, and we went to a restaurant in my neighborhood. We’d talked about Mandy Patinkin, and Michael showed up with a CD of his songs. On our third date Michael picked me up at my apartment and presented me with a pack of L&M cigarettes. He knew I no longer smoked, so I was confused. But then I got it: the L&M was for Laura and Michael. For our fourth date we went to a restaurant in the suburb of White Plains, where he lived. I followed him there in my car, and at a toll booth an attendant said, “That fine-looking gentleman ahead of you paid the twenty-five-cent toll for you.” Nice, I thought. Classy. It’s only a quarter, but still.
I told Maurice about Michael right after our first date. I said I had met this guy, and he was nice, and I was interested in seeing where it would go. Maurice would occasionally ask me why I didn’t have a boyfriend, and I’d always shrug him off. Now I wanted to be upfront with him, because I thought he might worry a boyfriend would change our arrangement or maybe even end it. I wanted to assure him that would never happen. Maurice seemed genuinely excited and happy for me.
“It’s about time you met someone nice,” he said. “Someone who is gonna take care of you.”
And, just as I had told Maurice about Michael, I told Michael about Maurice. I told him about this amazing kid I’d met on the street and how we’d become friends and how we met every single Monday and how we were important parts of each other’s lives. Michael nodded and said, “That’s great,” but he didn’t seem especially curious about it. I was used to people asking a lot of questions about Maurice, but Michael just didn’t.
Over Memorial Day weekend we went up to see his brand-new boat, a thirty-six-foot Grand Banks trawler that had just arrived from Singapore. He named it Paddington Station. I hadn’t spent much time on a boat, but I took to it right away. When Michael asked me to go on a two-week cruise with him starting the Fourth of July weekend, I immediately said yes.
Then I talked to Maurice about it. I’d have to miss two of our Mondays in a row, the first real interruption in our schedule since we’d met. Once again, Maurice was amazing: he told me he was excited for me and not to worry about him, and how I deserved to be treated nicely, and go have fun. He made me feel like it was okay to go, but still I felt a real tug in my gut about missing two of our Mondays. I remembered what Miss House had said: you cannot just wake up one day and abandon this boy. But I wasn’t doing that; I was just taking two Mondays off. Even so, I couldn’t shake the feeling I was somehow letting Maurice down.
After our boat trip, Michael asked me to move in with him in Westchester. By then, I was completely in love; I felt Michael offered me everything I could hope for in a man. He was kind, attentive, and generous, and he seemed like an amazing father. Plus, he didn’t have a temper or drink too much. I was eager to move in with him, but I felt that same tug in my gut: what about Maurice? We lived only two blocks from each other in Manhattan, and Maurice could just drop by and hang out. Now I’d be leaving the city and moving to a suburb forty-five minutes away. When I thought about sitting Maurice down and telling him, it made me want to cry. It was like a riddle that had no answer: how do I follow my heart and be with Michael but not give up what I have with Maurice?
Oddly enough, Maurice was about to move, too. His mother had been awarded her own apartment in Brooklyn under Section 8, a federal program that subsidized housing for low-income families. This
would be the very first real home Maurice had ever had. He was set to move on Labor Day weekend—the very weekend I planned to move in with Michael. Seeing that Maurice was excited about his own move lessened some of my guilt, but not by much. I knew that even if Maurice moved to Brooklyn, he could easily come into Manhattan to see me, but once I moved to Westchester, our special arrangement would be changed forever.
When I sat him down and told him I was moving, I couldn’t stop myself from crying. We were still going to meet every Monday in the city, and we’d still talk on the phone and otherwise keep up our friendship, yet I felt a deep sadness that something special between us—the sweetness of baking cookies in my apartment, of seeing Maurice set the table and do his laundry and trim the Christmas tree—was being lost. Once again, Maurice rescued me from my anguish.
“Laurie, we’ll still see each other every Monday,” he said. “We can still go to the Hard Rock. Everything is gonna be just the same.”
This kid from the streets was reassuring me it was okay to go to Westchester.
Then Maurice said, “Don’t worry about me. I’m gonna be just fine. Laurie, this is your time now.”
I packed up everything I owned and had it moved to White Plains, and on Labor Day weekend I drove up to my new home, a fairly nondescript, split-level ranch house with a stream running through the backyard. I told Maurice to call me as soon as he was settled into his new apartment. He had packed up his belongings, too—everything except his bike, which would stay in the bike room at the Symphony. I’d tipped the doormen to let Maurice come get it whenever he wanted. Maurice didn’t call me that weekend, and I got worried. Finally, that Monday, he called. He was crying so hard I couldn’t understand what he was saying. I told him to calm down and tell me what had happened. Maurice caught his breath and spit it out.
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