An Invisible Thread

by Laura Schroff

  The challenge for Maurice now was to find a way to make money. He didn’t want to panhandle anymore. There was an obvious solution, a blindingly apparent and available option: he could, like nearly every other man in his life, sell drugs. There was nothing else that would earn him anywhere near the amount of money he could make from selling crack. He’d seen how lucrative the business was, watched his uncles peel off twenties and hundreds from fat rolls of bills. And he knew how to do it: knew where to buy the drugs, how to cut them, where to sell them. He could have walked into the drug trade in a second and made hundreds of dollars his first day. When he was homeless and living in a movie theater, he thought about it—thought about it long and hard. He was fighting himself and trying to find a reason he shouldn’t give in to the call and the cash of crack.

  But something held him back. Something told him it was a dead-end choice. Instead, Maurice walked into a messenger agency in midtown Manhattan. These were agencies that hired young men and teenagers to ferry packages from company to company on foot. The first agency sent Maurice away, and the second, and the third, but he kept at it. Finally, Bullet Messenger Manpower agreed to give him a try. Maurice picked up files and letters and legal documents and ran them across town, into subways, and up and down the island of Manhattan, making around eight dollars an hour. He gave up panhandling for good.

  Maurice liked getting a paycheck and cashing it and having money he’d earned with good, hard work. He liked the money so much, he wanted more. He’d seen how it takes smarts and energy to be successful at selling drugs, and he knew he had both. He knew he could outhustle anyone on the streets. He knew he could master the salesmanship: the buying and selling and moving of merchandise. So he got in the business of selling—not drugs, but blue jeans.

  Maurice would go to Chinatown and buy knockoff Guess jeans for seven dollars a pair, then resell them for as much as forty dollars. This was the late ’80s, and the bootleg jeans business was burgeoning in New York City. At first he sold the jeans to other messengers, then branched out to drug dealers and their girlfriends. He found he could make several hundred dollars a week selling jeans. Every few days he went to Brooklyn and gave some of the money to his grandmother, so she could buy food and take care of herself. He didn’t tell her where he got the money, and she didn’t ask. Maurice knew that selling fake jeans was illegal, but he was homeless, destitute, and uncertain about his future. Under those circumstances, drawing a clear line between right and wrong is not always a simple thing to do. The imperative for Maurice was to stay alive and to make enough money to help his family; under that pressure, the choice he made—to sell blue jeans instead of crack cocaine—was, to him, the right and reasonable choice.

  After a while, Maurice made enough to move out of the Kung Fu Theater. He began renting a room for forty-five dollars a night at a cheap hotel—the kind of place that rented by the hour, mostly to hookers and johns. It was dirty and noisy and dangerous, but to Maurice it was something else as well.

  It was the first time in his life he had his own room, his own bed, his own shower.

  In this way, Maurice survived. At one point, he checked into Covenant House, a home for wayward and runaway youth in Times Square, but Maurice didn’t like it there and quickly checked out. He even did something that was once unthinkable, he walked into the offices of the Bureau of Child Welfare. He hoped they’d send him to a group home for boys where at least he’d get meals and a bed and a chance to figure things out. Instead, they pored through his files and discovered they’d once entrusted him to his grandmother’s care. They found out where she lived and sent Maurice right back to where he started.

  So Maurice went right back out on the street.

  And then his mother came home. She was released from prison after two and a half years, and the city assigned her a spot in a shelter in the tough Brownsville section of Brooklyn. Darcella was then given a two-room apartment, which meant Maurice could move in with her. And that’s what he did. It was just the two of them—his older sisters had moved in with boyfriends—and it was the best living arrangement Maurice had ever had. His mother was clean, at least for a while, and there were no cousins or uncles or drug fiends crowding them out. It was just Darcella and Maurice, a mother and her son.

  Until the day Maurice came home and saw a short, skinny man sitting in the kitchen talking to his mother.

  “Who’s that?” Maurice asked her.

  “That’s your father,” she said.

  He hadn’t seen his father since he was six years old—the day his mother showed up with a hammer to bring him home. That summer, Morris had asked to have his son live with him, and, for whatever reason, Darcella agreed. In those three months, Maurice nearly died of malnutrition. He developed ringworm and lost so much weight his ribs showed through his skin. His father’s gross neglect may have proved fatal, but Darcella arrived just in time and chased away Morris and his girlfriend with a hammer, taking her boy back home. After that, Maurice’s father disappeared from his life. Now, many years later, he was back.

  Maurice couldn’t believe how weak and frail his father was. The swagger and fearsomeness was gone; now he just looked old. Even so, the bad memories were still there, and Maurice wasn’t happy to see him.

  “What’s he doin’ here?” he asked his mother. “Get him out.”

  With that, Maurice turned and left, saying nothing to his father.

  Not much later he heard through the streets that Morris had AIDS. Maybe he had contracted it through a dirty needle, maybe unprotected sex. Maurice would see his father on the street and steer clear of him, but he couldn’t help but feel sorry for him, too. Morris was once the most powerful man he knew, scared of no one, a terror to all, and here he was shuffling around like a man twice his age. One day Maurice saw his father stumble and fall on the sidewalk. Without thinking, he ran and helped him up. After that, they spoke every once in a while, which gave Maurice the chance to ask the question he’d always wanted to ask: “Man, why did you have to be that way? I should have wanted to be just like you, but you made me want to be nothing like you. Why’d you have to be that way?”

  His father, his voice a near whisper, said, “It was the only way I knew.”

  And then he apologized, over and over. “I’m sorry, son,” he said. “Don’t you know how sorry I am? Don’t ever be like me. I don’t want you to be like me.”

  Maurice watched his father get weaker and skinnier. Toward the end, he ran into Maurice on the street and stopped him for a talk.

  “I know I never did much of anything for you, but there’s one thing I want you to do for me.”

  Maurice braced himself for the request.

  “The one thing I ask of you,” he said, “is that you name your son Maurice.”

  Maurice had always hated his name, because it had been his father’s name and his father’s name before that. He knew he would never give his own son that name, not in a million years. But the old man was sick and Maurice felt compassion, so he said to his father, “Yeah, okay, I will.”

  A few days later, a neighbor told Maurice that his father had died that morning. It was Halloween day. Maurice went to the apartment where his father had been staying and found him lying on the floor beside a mattress. Maurice bent down and picked up his father, laying him on the bed. He was startled by how light he was. The toughest guy in Brooklyn, the king of the Tomahawks, was now just skin and bones. Maurice waited until an ambulance arrived. He watched the EMTs take his father away. Then he left the apartment and walked into the street.

  At the time it happened, Maurice didn’t tell me his father had died. He was shielding me, as he usually did, from a sad and difficult chapter in his life, but the complex emotions he had for his father—the ragged, scarring, unfinished nature of their relationship—was something I would have been able to relate to. I could grasp as well as anyone how a muddied family history could impact us as adults—how the things we carry with us from childhood define who we become.<
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  Aside from our disagreements about Maurice—and that was no small thing—Michael and I were doing well as a married couple. Michael never said I couldn’t have Maurice in my life, and I kept seeing him. Eventually, Michael came with me to see him, and the three of us shared many meals and outings. Michael could see Maurice was special and finally began to understand why he was so important to me. He even relented and allowed me to invite Maurice to our home for Christmas one year. Nancy and her husband and Steven came up, too, and we all had a wonderful time—but it just wasn’t like the old days at Annette’s house. I still cannot say Michael ever bonded with Maurice in any meaningful way; he always kept a wall up between them. I was happy to have Maurice in our lives as much as he was, but it became painfully clear that my dream of having him move in with us was never going to happen. I never even brought it up.

  Michael’s stubbornness worried me on another front, too. I was over forty years old now, and my window for having a baby was closing. Having children was not something Michael and I had specifically discussed before we got married, and, in hindsight, that was a terrible mistake. At the time, I was having so much fun with him and was so wrapped up in the romance that it didn’t occur to me to sit him down and have that conversation. I knew he loved me, and I assumed that’s what people who love each other do—have kids. I didn’t think it was going to be an issue.

  So it was more than a year into our marriage when I finally sat him down and had the talk.

  “I want to have a family,” I said. “I want to have children.”

  Michael looked down at the floor, then back up at me.

  “I’m not interested in having another kid,” he said.

  I’d expected a little hemming and hawing, but his matter-of-fact tone, his decisiveness, was a shock. I told him how important it was to me to have children and what a great mother I was going to be, and wasn’t he even a little interested in seeing what our child would be like?

  “Not even in the slightest,” he said.

  He had two grown sons and loved them dearly. He was fiercely proud of them, but in his mind he was done raising children and that was that. I told him I would do all the work. I told him I’d get up for all the feedings. I told him I’d pay for a nanny—anything to make it as easy as possible. But Michael, as he had been about Maurice, didn’t budge. I kept at him, kept bringing it up; in about our thirtieth argument he finally laid down the law.

  “It’s not up for discussion, Laura,” he said. “I’m absolutely not going to do it.”

  I shrank away from him, defeated. I took my wound, nursed it as best I could, and I waited for it to heal and disappear. But what caused that wound remained as a source of pain. Over time that pain turned into resentment, and I tried to push that resentment down as far as it would go so I could keep on living. But it stayed there, below the surface but not that far down at all.

  And so I slowly let go of my dream. I’d always wanted to have two children, because I never wanted my son or daughter to be an only child. When I turned forty-two, I realized I’d all but run out of time to have two kids. Even if I could somehow miraculously convince Michael to change his mind, I’d probably only be able to have one child. It struck me that this would be selfish—that I’d be thinking only about myself and not about the child. I don’t remember when exactly it happened. Maybe there wasn’t a single moment, or day, or week. But over time, the dream that for years had been a nearly consuming passion simply ceased to be.

  All of our stories, as much as they are about anything, are about loss. And, perhaps, they are about what might have been. I wanted happy, loving parents who danced waltzes in the living room. I wanted children of my own, desperately. We all want relationships that are healthy and resolved, and sometimes that simply doesn’t happen. But the beauty of life is that inside these disappointments are hidden the most miraculous of blessings. What we lose and what might have been pales against what we have.

  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.