An Invisible Thread (13 page)

He was worried Miss House was going to tell me what a bad student he was and how many fights he got into and why it wasn’t safe for me to spend time with him.

He was terrified he was going to lose what we had.

I looked at Maurice and put my hand on his shoulder. I didn’t say anything; I just looked at him. Words were not going to convey what I needed him to know. I needed him to know I would never walk out on him.

I needed him to
believe
I wasn’t going away.

I smiled, gave him a little wink, and nodded. His face relaxed and he smiled back at me.

He believed me.

Maurice went into the hallway, and Miss House and I sat in two undersized chairs.

“You should know that Maurice is very proud of you,” she said. “He speaks about you often.”

“I’m very, very proud of him,” I said. “He’s such a special boy.”

“How in the world did you two meet?”

I told her our story, about our dinners on Monday, about my visit to the Bryant, and about how I felt Maurice had finally come to trust me.

“I hope I am making a difference in his life,” I said.

“You are,” Miss House told me. “Maurice is not an easy child to control. He’s always late, if he decides to show up at all. And he’s always getting into fights. He shows enormous anger at times, but he’s smart and sweet, and lately he hasn’t been fighting quite as much.”

I could tell Miss House cared about Maurice. I could tell she
liked
him. She had a classroom full of kids whose lives were complicated, each with his or her own fears and insecurities, and she cared deeply for them all. But she could see that Maurice’s circumstances were worse than most, and, instead of turning her back on him, she turned to face him head-on. She tried to make a difference. I’m sure she wasn’t making very much money, but that didn’t matter—she was still determined not to let this child fall through the cracks.

“Miss Schroff, I must say something to you,” she said, leaning
forward. “Children like Maurice are always disappointed in life. Every day someone else lets them down. I hope you realize you can’t just come in and out of his life. If you are going to be there for him, you have to really be there for him.”

Miss House looked me square in the eyes.

“You cannot just wake up one day and abandon this boy.”

I had only known Maurice a couple of months at that point, but I already knew he would be in my life for a long, long time. I just knew that in my heart. And that’s what I told Miss House.

“Maurice is my friend,” I said. “And I would never walk out on a friend.”

After our talk, I met Maurice in the hallway. He was nervous and wanted to know what Miss House had said about him. I told him we would talk about it over dinner. We drove to Junior’s restaurant in Brooklyn; Maurice had heard they made the best cheesecake in the city and was dying to try it. After our meal, I told him what Miss House had said.

“She cares about you and she wants you to do well in school,” I said. “She says you’re very, very smart, and she is on your side.”

Maurice beamed. He was clearly thrilled by the feedback.

“But here’s what she needs you to do,” I said. “You need to stop getting into fights, do your homework, and, most important, get to class on time.

“I know it’s hard to concentrate at home with so much going on, but you have to somehow find a way to get your homework done. And you need to get to school on time. If your class starts at seven forty, you need to be there at seven forty, even seven thirty. You can’t
show up at eight or eight thirty. That’s unacceptable, Maurice. Do you understand?”

I didn’t let up on him. I told him how important punctuality was in the working world and how he simply had to get in on time, how it was up to him to take control of his situation as best he could. The more I drilled him, the more confused he looked until he looked away and started to cry.

I had never seen him cry before, and it broke my heart.

“Maurice, what’s the matter? Are you okay?”

“Miss Laura, you just don’t understand,” he said. It occurred to me in that instant that Maurice felt he had disappointed me.

“My room doesn’t even have a clock in it,” he said. “I never know what time it is.”

“Maurice, I’m sorry I was so hard on you. We can figure this out together. Would it help if I bought you an alarm clock?”

“Yeah, that would help,” he said.

“Okay, then, I’ll get you an alarm clock, and I’ll also get you a watch. When you go home, hide them somewhere so no one can take them. Keep them next to you when you sleep. In return, you have to promise me you’ll try your best to get to school on time, okay?”

“Okay, I promise I will,” he said.

“I know it’s not easy, Maurice. I know your life isn’t easy.”

Maurice looked relieved. This was heartening to him; it made him realize bad situations could sometimes be fixed. He could make changes to the life he was living, and, with a little bit of help, maybe live another kind of life altogether.

Maurice told me that for the longest time he believed he was
illiterate. He’d been evaluated by school officials, and his mother had been at the evaluation. After it was over, she had told Maurice he couldn’t read or write. He didn’t think this was true—he
could
write, even though he wrote very slowly—but after a while he just heard it so often from his mother and his cousins that he came to believe it himself. The worse he did at school, the more it proved he’d never amount to much.

That’s when I told him I’d been a terrible student myself, so terrible I flunked a few classes and never went to college.

Maurice was surprised by that. To him, I didn’t seem like someone who’d had trouble at school. And if I had overcome it and become successful, maybe he could, too. Maybe he didn’t have to be what everyone said he was.

I’ve always liked this popular quote by a well-known gardening writer, Elizabeth Lawrence: “There is a garden in every childhood, an enchanted place were colors are brighter, the air softer, and the morning more fragrant than ever again.”

I like this because it captures the wonder of two things, nature and childhood. And because it reminds me of my happier moments in Huntington Station. It’s not like we lived in the country—in fact, we weren’t that far from one of the first fully enclosed shopping malls on Long Island—but we did have lots of trees and some woods nearby and backyards where we could roll around in fresh-cut grass. We never worried about locking our doors, and our parents never worried about us when we ran out to play. Huntington Station in the 1950s was a safe haven. There
was
something special about the time
I spent outdoors as a child—those days when my mother would pack up the towels and the Johnson & Johnson’s Baby Oil and take us all to Robert Moses Beach for the day. Or when I’d chase a pretty butterfly in the yard, or think I’d found a four-leaf clover, or just simply lay in the grass and stared up at elephant-shaped clouds. Moments when I felt the world was a magical place indeed.

Maurice didn’t have any place like that. He didn’t have an enchanted garden. I thought of Lawrence’s words when Maurice told me he had never been outside the city, not even for a day. He’d been locked inside the concrete mass of Manhattan and Brooklyn and Queens his whole life; all he knew were noise and traffic and congestion. The closest he came to experiencing nature was walking through Central Park.

Around our eighth week together, I called my sister Annette, who was married with three young children and living in Greenlawn, a lovely town an hour outside the city on Long Island’s North Shore. I asked if it would be okay to bring out Maurice for a visit. Her children were around Maurice’s age—Colette was eleven, Derek, nine, and Brooke, seven—and I thought he’d enjoy spending a day doing all the outdoor stuff they usually did: playing on the swings in their backyard, riding bikes, tossing a baseball around. Annette didn’t hesitate.

“I can’t wait to meet him,” she said.

That Saturday, Maurice and I set out on the Long Island Expressway. He was wearing new pants I’d bought for him and a nice blue sweatshirt, and he was a bundle of excitement and nerves. He had no idea what to expect. This was the first time he was leaving the confines of New York City.

It would also be the first time he ever set foot in a private home.

On the drive out, Maurice sang along to the score from the movie
La Bamba
. On one of our Mondays, we’d gone to the movies and watched the film about the doomed 1950s singer Ritchie Valens. Maurice loved the movie and loved the song, and I had bought him the sound track. He played it all the time in my apartment and car. He’d belt out the lyrics and ask me to play it again and again. I got a little sick of it, but I was happy to oblige him. It felt good seeing him lose himself in a song.

We got to Greenlawn and pulled into the driveway of Annette’s home. It was a two-story colonial on an acre of land with a sprawling, beautifully manicured front lawn and an even bigger backyard circled by a fence. Greenlawn was a big step up from Hungtington Station, a solidly middle-class town. Maurice couldn’t believe a single family owned all this property. The front lawn alone, with its gleaming green grass, seemed to him an impossibly luxurious expanse. Inside the house I introduced Maurice to my sister and her family—her husband, Bruce, a lovely guy who sold medical supplies, and their three beautiful kids. The children curiously eyed Maurice, as children will do with any newcomer. Their mother had told them about him—how he came from a poor family and didn’t have the things they had and how they should make him feel at home. Derek didn’t waste any time.

“Wanna see my room?” he asked, leading Maurice upstairs. The girls and I tagged along. I could tell Maurice was surprised to see each kid had their own bedroom. This, too, was a luxury he could hardly comprehend. Derek’s had baseball pennants and posters on
the walls; the girls’ were frilly and filled with stuffed animals. He walked around wordlessly, taking it all in.

“Let’s go play on the swings,” Derek said, leading all the children out back. I watched Maurice play for a while; his camaraderie with Annette’s son and daughters was effortless. To them, Maurice was not invisible, as he was to so many adults. To them, he was just another kid. I watched Maurice swing higher and higher, his feet lurching into the sky.

There was a lot about Annette’s house that Maurice couldn’t quite believe. A room just for watching TV? A washer and dryer just for them? A bathroom downstairs and two more upstairs? Most confusing of all was the dining room, devoted solely to sitting and talking and eating. Maurice lived in a single room with eight to twelve people. If he ate there at all, it was in whatever spot he was in when someone handed him food.

Young Derek, in charge of activities, suggested he and Maurice go bike riding. Bruce went to the garage and pulled out Derek’s old bike for Maurice. They rode up and down the quiet streets and didn’t come back for an hour.

Soon, it was time for dinner. Maurice sat across from me at the big dining room table as Annette brought out heaping plates of food—chicken, broccoli, mashed potatoes, the works. Maurice unfolded his napkin and put it on his lap, as I’d taught him, and he looked to me as if to say, “Like this?” I nodded discreetly. Maurice snuck looks at me when he held his fork, cut his chicken, and served himself extra mashed potatoes; I nodded and smiled, letting him know he was doing just fine. Annette and her family treated Maurice like the guest of honor, asking him questions without prying
too much. Dinner stretched into a second hour. Later, Maurice told me he couldn’t believe people sat around and just
talked
to one another over dinner. That was a completely new experience for him. I noticed he was the last one to finish his food; Derek and his sisters were long done while Maurice still had a half-full plate. It wasn’t because he wasn’t hungry or the food wasn’t delicious.

Maurice was savoring the meal.

After dinner the kids watched TV in the den while my sister and I caught up on each other’s lives. I peeked in a couple of times and saw Maurice curled up peacefully on the sofa.

“Laura, stop worrying. He’s fine,” Annette said. It’s true, he was, but I felt anxious, like I was waiting for a shoe to drop. I guess it was ingrained in me to think a quiet afternoon at home could turn chaotic in an instant, but I knew that Annette had vowed long ago to create a childhood for her kids that was different from our own. Now, she had a family that could enjoy a fall Saturday without fighting or, worse, cowering in fear. It had taken her a while—years and years—before she could truly let down her guard and relax, even around her new family. That Saturday when Maurice and I spent the day with her family, I realized my sister was truly achieving her dream; she had the one thing that had eluded us all for so long: peace.

Finally, it was time to go, and the kids said good-bye to Maurice. I watched him shake hands with Derek in that way boys do, awkwardly, thin limbs jangling up and down. On the ride home Maurice was quiet; he didn’t ask me to play
La Bamba
.