An Invisible Thread (16 page)

Sometimes, but not often, I’d invite Sue to sleep over at my house. This was always a gamble—I never knew if my father would explode when she was around. One night, Sue and I were fast asleep in my bedroom when I was awakened by the sound of my father’s voice downstairs. I couldn’t tell what he was saying, but it didn’t matter. I knew what was coming. I shook Sue out of her sound sleep and told her to get dressed.

“What’s wrong?” she asked groggily.

“Just get dressed. You have to go home.”

I hustled Sue out of the house at two in the morning, and Annette and I drove her home. I never told her why I did it, or at least not until many years later. I didn’t want any of my friends to see my father in one of his rages. I couldn’t bear to have them know I lived this way.

Around that time, business at the Windmill started going south. I’m sure my father gave away thousands and thousands of dollars worth of free drinks. Slowly and steadily, the Windmill dragged him under. At home, money was tight; my parents worked longer hours with fewer rewards. The screw was tightening. We hadn’t had a major blowout in a while, but we could all sense one was coming. It was only a matter of time.

I was at Sue’s house one afternoon when the phone rang. She told me it was my sister Annette. I took the phone, and I could tell by Annette’s voice that something was terribly wrong.

“Get home right now,” she said.
“Right now.”

I jumped on my bike and furiously pedaled the few blocks home.
When I walked through the front door, the first thing I noticed was the fake plastic mimosa tree we usually kept in the foyer upended and lying in the middle of the den. I held my breath as I walked in the direction of the screaming. Usually my father’s rages happened at night, so I could hide in my bedroom, shut off all the lights, and disappear in the darkness. But this was broad daylight, the middle of the afternoon. There was no place to hide. I heard my mother pleading with my father. Part of me wanted to run upstairs, where the other children were huddled, but I just couldn’t do it. I was sixteen years old now. I couldn’t pretend it wasn’t happening anymore.

I walked into the kitchen. The table and chairs, relatively new replacements for the ones my father had destroyed, were in pieces again. My mother was lying on the floor, curled into a ball. My father was standing over her, ruthlessly kicking her.

Something in me snapped. I had tried to break up their screaming matches before and I had yelled at my father to stop bullying Frankie, but this was different. I ran up to him and told him to stop and started hitting him with my fists. With one arm, he swatted me away, and I flew across the room, crashing against a wall. He went right back to kicking my mother.

I shocked myself by getting right back up. I didn’t know if I was hurt, and I didn’t care. I was running on adrenaline. I went up to my father and clenched my hand into a fist. I put my fist in his face and held it there, inches from his nose, and I yelled at him louder than I ever had before. I heard my mother begging me to go away, to leave him alone. I knew she didn’t want my father to hurt me, too. But I held my ground and shook my fist in his face and flew into my own terrible rage.

“Stop or I will call the police!” I screamed. “Stop right now or I will have you arrested!!”

I don’t know if it was my rage, an echo of his own, that did it. I don’t know if my father saw the lack of fear in my face. I don’t know if it was my threat to call the cops—surely the first time any of us threatened him in that way. But, whatever it was, it worked. My father stopped kicking my mother and just shut down. The power went out of him. His shoulders slumped, and he stood there harmlessly, looking confused and defeated. Finally he shuffled away. I went to my mother. Soon Annette came down, and then Nancy and Frankie and even little Steven. We all sat in the wreckage of the kitchen with my mother, watching her cry. Later that day she drove herself to the hospital.

She had a dozen bruises and three broken ribs.

They bandaged her up and sent her back home with no questions asked.

Over time, my mother’s bruises healed. She didn’t leave my father after that, and she never would. But something changed for me that day. Something was different now that I had stood up to him. It was like I’d found a weapon I could use against him. It was as if, for the first time, I saw a way out.

In many ways, that was the day I grew up.

Not long after our Thanksgiving together, I asked Maurice what he usually did for Christmas.

“Nothing,” he said with a shrug.

“What do you mean? Don’t you celebrate Christmas?”

“Nope.”

I pressed him on this, and Maurice told me his family didn’t usually do anything. He could remember a couple of times when his mother cooked something special around the holidays, but Maurice spent his last Christmas all by himself at the Salvation Army. He had the free meal they offered, and a staffer took him over to a bin filled with toys for poor children. Maurice had picked out a stuffed white teddy bear for himself.

That was the closest he’d ever come to getting a Christmas gift.

I asked him if he wanted to spend this Christmas with me and my family. He quickly said yes and smiled his biggest smile.

The Saturday before Christmas, Maurice and I went together to buy a Christmas tree. We picked out a nice one from a sidewalk vendor and lugged it home. I pulled out my decorations, which included little red apple ornaments, tinsel, and colored lights. Then I played an album of Christmas carols, and we drank hot chocolate while we trimmed the tree.

After we finished decorating the tree we had dinner and, of course, baked cookies. Then I handed Maurice a piece of paper and told him to write down what he wanted Santa Claus to bring him this year.

“There ain’t no Santa Claus,” he stated, laughing.

“Maybe not,” I said, “but you still have to make a list for him.”

Maurice scribbled something down. At the top of his list he wrote
remote-control racecar
.

Maurice asked if he could just sit and look at the tree for a while. I dimmed the lights in the apartment, and, with the Christmas carols still playing, we sat on the sofa and stared at the tree, saying nothing. We sat like that, with the glow of the tree lighting up our faces, for quite a long time. Then Maurice finally spoke.

“Thank you for making my Christmas so nice,” he said. “Kids like me—we know everything that’s going on out there. We see it on TV. But we’re always on the outside looking in. We know about stuff like Christmas, but kids like me, we know we can never have it for ourselves, so we don’t think about it.”

I marveled again at how wise Maurice was, given his circumstances. He was still so young, but he had a definite outlook on life, a
perspective shaped by his experience. He understood precisely where he fit in society. He may not have known how to blow his nose, but he understood the way of the world better than a lot of people twice his age.

A few days later, on Christmas Eve, Maurice came over to my apartment. My sister Nancy, who lived by herself about thirty blocks south of me, was there, too. She had gotten to know Maurice and really liked spending time with him. When Maurice came into my apartment, he saw ten or twelve wrapped presents under the tree, and his eyes grew wide. He must have known at least some of them were for him. We had a lovely dinner, and afterward we sat by the tree listening to Christmas carols again. I let Maurice open one of his presents. I knew there were a lot of basic things he needed—socks, T-shirts, underwear, gloves, a hat, a winter jacket, things like that. Over the months since I’d met him I’d been mindful not to buy him things he didn’t really need; I didn’t want to be the “rich lady” who bought him stuff. But Maurice had never really celebrated Christmas, and this was just too good an opportunity to spoil him a little. I did buy him a lot of clothes that Christmas, but there was one special gift I let him open on Christmas Eve.

Maurice carefully unwrapped the box. He let out a little squeal when he saw the remote-control racecar. He and Nancy assembled it while I got dinner ready, and Maurice asked if he could bring it to my sister Annette’s house so he and Derek could play with it.

Incredibly, that was the first wrapped present he had ever received.

Maurice and Nancy came over again on Christmas morning,
and we all drove to Annette’s house. When we got there, Maurice couldn’t believe how big Annette’s tree was—probably twice the size of mine. Beneath it lay a million dazzling gifts, or so it seemed. Annette loved to decorate the house for the holidays: wreaths, a manger, tinsel everywhere. Maurice walked around in wonder. Before long it was time for all of us to gather in the living room and open presents. Everyone had a present for Maurice, including my nieces and nephew. I’d helped Maurice pick out presents for them, too. The children were nearly lost in a flurry of wrapping paper, but I could see Maurice got T-shirts, underwear, a hat and gloves, a winter jacket, even a shirt by Tommy Hilfiger, which absolutely floored him. He got his own basketball, a pair of sneakers, and lots of other little gifts. He couldn’t believe all of it was for him.

Then Maurice showed Derek his new remote-control car, and the two of them pounced on it, racing it up and down the hallways, in and out of the den. I don’t think I’ve ever enjoyed seeing a child play with a toy more than I did that day. At the big dining room table Maurice liked so much, we all held hands and said grace. After dinner Annette handed out sheet music, and we all sang Christmas carols to Steven’s accompaniment on an organ—the very organ Steven had once played for our mother. I don’t know if it was because Maurice was there, but it was the nicest, warmest Christmas we’d had as a family in years.

When it got late, Nancy and I helped Maurice load up his presents, and we said good-bye to my family and drove back to Manhattan. Maurice asked if he could leave his racecar and his other toys at my apartment. He told me he wanted to have them to play with when he came over, but I knew he was afraid someone would
steal them if he took them back to the Bryant. That night, the only presents he took with him were a new parka and some other clothes. He also took home a shopping bag I’d filled with hand-me-down clothes for his sisters and some extra food Annette had packed for them. Maurice had experienced Christmas in a way he never had before, and he wanted to bring his sisters a little piece of what he had seen.

When Maurice was gone, I looked over at my sofa where I’d left the amazing Christmas present Maurice had given me earlier that day. He’d walked in and sheepishly handed it to me, mumbling, “Merry Christmas, Miss Laura.” Now, I went over to the sofa and held it in my hands as I looked at the tree Maurice and I had trimmed together.

He had given me the only thing he had to give.

It was the white stuffed teddy bear from the Salvation Army.

Sitting there, I thought about what this Christmas meant to Maurice and what it meant to me. He spent it with a family that wasn’t his own—and that was sad—but he spent it with people who had come to care for him and even love him—and that was good. He didn’t have to go to the Salvation Army by himself. Instead, he got to see what a happy, loving family looks like. That Christmas, as I imagined what my sister’s family must have seemed like to Maurice, I couldn’t help but think that my sister was living the dream she and I had shared from the time we were little girls. Many nights, we’d talked about what our own families would be like—what sort of homes we’d live in, what our husbands would do, what kind of classes our kids would take. For Annette and I, dreaming of families of our own and wanting them to be safe and loving was more than
just a girlhood wish; it was a survival mechanism. It was the only way we could rectify what had gone wrong in our own childhood, the only way we could undo what had been done. It was not merely something we wanted; it was something we
needed
.

And so, that Christmas, I thought about how Annette had made this dream come true. And I thought about my own dream and my own desire to have a loving husband, beautiful children, and a big home in the suburbs. Here I was, thirty-six years old, still single, still alone. Why hadn’t my dream come true? Why wasn’t I a wife and a mother? The truth is, it wasn’t because I hadn’t tried.

Early on, Maurice had asked me if I had children, and I had said no. This was true. But there was something I didn’t tell him, something I didn’t tell most people in my life.

I didn’t tell him that I had once been married.

I met Kevin on a platform of the Long Island Railroad when I was twenty and still living at home. I should tell you that Kevin is not his real name; I’ve changed it to protect the guilty. I was working for Icelandic Airlines, and I’d see Kevin on the platform while I waited for my train. He was strikingly handsome, with light brown hair, deep-set hazel eyes, and a kind of easy confidence about him that I found terribly attractive. We’d steal glances at each other, and after a while we’d even nod and say hi. Finally, one night when our trains were delayed, we sat together while we waited and began to talk.