An Invisible Thread (4 page)

Maurice, wide-eyed, watched it all. Finally, the police came and asked Morris who had attacked him so savagely.

“Some guys,” is all he said.

And with that, Morris limped away. Maurice, just five years old, watched his father go. His family, as he knew it, was no more.

My first lunch with Maurice was over thirty minutes after it began, but I didn’t want to say good-bye to Maurice just yet. When we stepped out into the street, the sun was bright and strong, so I asked Maurice if he wanted to take a walk in Central Park.

“Okay,” he said with a shrug.

We walked into the south end of the park and strolled along a path toward the Great Lawn. Bicyclists, joggers, mothers and toddlers, laughing teenagers, everyone, it seemed, was carefree. Once again, we didn’t say much; we just walked side by side. I wanted to know more about him and about the circumstances that led him to begging in the street but I held back, because I didn’t want him to think I was snooping around.

I did ask him one thing.

“So, Maurice, what about you? What do you want to do when you grow up?”

“I don’t know,” he said without hesitation.

“No? Don’t you ever think about it?”

“No,” he replied flatly.

Maurice didn’t spend his days dreaming of becoming a policeman, or an astronaut, or a shortstop, or the president; he didn’t even know these were dreams most boys have. And even if he could have imagined a life for himself beyond the misery that was his world, what would have been the point of dreaming about that life? There was nothing Maurice wanted to be, because there was no reason to believe he could be anything except what he was—a scrounger, a beggar, a street kid.

In the park there was a brisk fall breeze, leaves fluttered away from trees, and the sun peeked through the giant elms. We seemed a million miles away from the concrete core of the city. I didn’t ask Maurice any more questions. I just let him enjoy this break from his street routine. When we left the park, we passed a Häagen-Dazs, and I asked him if he wanted some ice cream.

“Can I get a chocolate cone?” he asked.

“You bet,” I said.

I ordered two cones, and when I handed one to him, I saw Maurice smile for the very first time. It was not a big smile, not wide and toothy like you see with most kids. It was quick to appear and just as quick to vanish. But it happened, and I saw it, and it seemed to me like a beautiful, shiny new thing.

When we finished our ice cream I asked, “Is there anything else you want to do?”

“Can we go play video games?”

“Sure we can.” So we walked to an arcade on Broadway. I gave Maurice a few quarters and watched him play Asteroids. He lost himself in the game like any kid would. He jerked the joystick and
stuck out his tongue and stood on his toes and made noises as he blew up things with his spaceship missiles. It was fun to watch him play.

Later that day, it occurred to me that buying lunch for Maurice and spending a couple of hours with him had made me feel—at very little expense in time and money—inordinately good. And that, in turn, made me feel guilty. Was the only reason I had stopped and bought him lunch to make myself feel good for a while? Had I, instead of window-shopping or going to a movie, chosen to divert myself by buying Maurice a burger and an ice cream? Was there something inherently patronizing about what I did, something maybe even exploitative?

Help out a poor kid, feel better about your own life?

I didn’t have the answers back then. All I knew was that being with Maurice felt right. We left the arcade and strolled down Broadway, winding up on 56th Street, right where we had met. I opened my purse and handed Maurice my business card.

“Look, if you’re ever hungry, please call me and I’ll make sure you have something to eat.”

Maurice took the card, looked at it, and stuffed it in his pocket.

“Thank you for my lunch and my Häagen-Dazs,” he said. “I had a great day.”

“Me too,” I said. And then he went one way, and I went another.

I wondered if I would ever see Maurice again. Certainly there was a very good chance I wouldn’t. At that time, I didn’t know how tough things were for Maurice, how truly dire his family life was. If I had, I don’t think I’d have let him walk away. I think I might have hugged him and never let go.

But I did walk away, and when I turned around to look for him in the bustle of Broadway, he was already gone, invisible again. I had to accept he might be out of my life for good—that our strange little friendship was over just as it was beginning.

Yet I believed then and I believe now that there is something in the universe that brings people who need each other together. There is something that helps two wildly disparate people somehow forge a bond. Maybe it is precisely the thing that haunts us most that makes us reach out to others we think can provide some solace. Maybe it was my own past that made me turn around and find Maurice that day. And maybe, just maybe, that invisible thread of fate would bring us back together again.

And then, as I walked back home, I felt a surge of regret, because, while I had given Maurice my business card, I hadn’t given him a quarter for the call. This was way before cell phones, and I couldn’t be sure he had a landline in his apartment. If he wanted to reach me he’d likely have to use a pay phone, which meant he would have to beg for the quarter.

But in the end it wouldn’t have mattered anyway.

Because on the way home Maurice threw my business card in the trash.

The next day at work, I couldn’t get Maurice out of my mind. I told my friend and boss, Valerie, about our lunch, and I told a couple of my fellow sales reps, Paul and Lou, about this amazing kid I’d met. Everyone had the same reaction: “That’s wonderful,” “Good for you,” “What a great thing to do.” It didn’t seem like any big deal to them that day.

Of course, we were all pretty caught up in the business of advertising. When I met Maurice, I was in charge of coaxing financial companies to run ads in
USA Today
. I spent a lot of time calling my contacts at the investment firm Drexel Burnham Lambert, going after their tombstones: advertisements that formally announced a company’s offering of stocks. Tombstones were boring, straightforward ads full of dry type and numbers—no
photos, no pizzazz. But to us, they were Picassos—page after page of sweet commissions.

The really big prize for me was American Express. Their ad team was flirting with the idea of buying space in
USA Today,
but they weren’t at all sure if we could deliver the kind of production quality they insisted on for their ads. I spent months and months cajoling them to take the plunge. I knew that getting such a prestigious account would be huge for the paper and also pretty important for me. My contacts there were two imposing, impenetrable women, and for countless meetings and lunches I felt like I was getting nowhere. But then, one afternoon, I was at my desk when one of the stoic women called: American Express was in for two pages. If they were happy with how the ad looked and where it was positioned, I was pretty sure they’d end up buying more. And they did, eventually running nearly a hundred pages of ads. That was a huge score for me, my proudest moment at
USA Today
. When I met Maurice, I was at the top of my game.

It was a long, long way from where I had come.

My dream, coming out of high school in Huntington Station, the town in Long Island where I grew up, didn’t require that I get a college degree. What I really wanted to be was a stewardess. I’d been a terrible student, anyway, and the only thing I knew I wanted to do was get out of my hometown and see the world. I figured working in the airline industry was the way to make that happen.

But first, I got a job as a secretary at an insurance firm. I worked for three sweet old guys in fat ties and short-sleeve shirts, typing letters, taking dictation, answering phones. Since my office skills
weren’t quite up to snuff, I signed up for secretarial school, and it was there, amid the clacking Remingtons, that I met a woman who worked for Icelandic Airlines.

She told me they were hiring office staffers. Not my dream job, to be sure—I’d be at a desk instead of in the clouds—but it was a start. I made an appointment with the airline to take a typing test, and I practiced my typing night after night. When I took the test I marshaled every last bit of my focus and walked out sure I’d banged out sixty immaculate words in a minute.

I failed the test.

I was mortified, so I asked the administrator—no, pleaded—if I could walk around the block and come back and take the test again. “Please, please, I was nervous. I didn’t do anywhere near my best.” The administrator took pity on me and sent me around the block, and when I came back I took a deep breath and pounded the keys again.

And I failed again.

Now the administrator
really
felt sorry for me. My two failed tests gave me a chance to talk to her, to blow past the formality and be a real person, vulnerable but determined, a little goofy but a lot resourceful—and this, I would soon learn, was my strength. The administrator decided she liked me, and she recommended me for a job as a receptionist.

On the way to work on my last day at the insurance firm, driving along Northern State Parkway in my beloved beige 1964 Volkswagon, I felt like my life, at nineteen, was finally beginning. I passed a car carrying two nuns, and they looked at me and gave me two beatific smiles. I smiled back as beatifically as I could. Then I
said, “See you later, girls,” and I gunned the VW. I moved from the slow lane into the fast lane, and then I felt myself lose control of the car—I’d cut across a crevice in the pavement dividing the lanes, and the car jumped just for an instant. My hands came off the wheel, and before I knew it the car was swerving toward the metal parkway divider. I got really scared, grabbed the wheel, and turned it sharply to the right. The VW spun around three times before flipping over and landing upside down on the side of the road.

And then there was silence, and broken glass was everywhere. I was lying on the inside roof of the car, staring up at the seats. I looked to my left and I saw them—the two nuns, worried looks on their faces. A businessman who pulled over after seeing the accident took off his suit jacket, laid it across the bottom of the broken driver’s-side window, and pulled me out. The nuns tried to comfort me as I cried hysterically.

An ambulance took me to the hospital, and I learned that other than a couple of black eyes and losing my voice from all the crying, there was nothing wrong with me, I’d survived the crash without a scratch. I looked around for the two nuns, but they weren’t there. Maybe they had been my guardian angels, cushioning me from more serious injury. Maybe God had other plans for me.

The Icelandic office was on 50th Street and Fifth Avenue, the very heart of Manhattan. Across the street from St. Patrick’s Cathedral, a hundred yards from Saks Fifth Avenue, around the corner from 30 Rock—I felt like I was “That Girl,” and if I’d worn a beret I’d have tossed it in the air every day. The job wasn’t too exciting—I answered phones, ushered people in and out, that kind of thing—but
I still loved it because the experience was new and exciting. Eventually I got promoted to secretary and then to telephone sales, a fancy name for reservations. Most thrilling of all was that the hopelessly naïve premise of my dream—that working for an airline would somehow make me a world traveler—actually proved to be true. I got incredible discounts on plane and hotel tickets—so incredible that I’d routinely grab a girlfriend and fly to Rome on a Friday evening, spend Saturday shopping in the Trastevere district, and be back in New York City by Sunday night. Another time I got round-trip tickets to Kitzbühel, Austria, plus six nights in a classy chalet, all for fifty-seven dollars! It’s hardly surprising I stayed at Icelandic for five years.

But after a while I was itching to do more, and what I saw other people doing, what I thought I could be really good at, was sales. Talking to people, building trust, schmoozing them at lunches, getting them to see things
your
way—I felt like maybe that could be my calling. The only problem at Icelandic was that the nontelephone sales staff was all male—except, of course, for Gudrun.

Gudrun was a statuesque Scandinavian beauty who was the office’s token female sales rep. I figured out pretty quickly I could never hope to supplant her. Yes, I was charming and persuasive in my own nudgy way, and, sure, I was a fairly cute and certainly perky brunette. But Gudrun was tall and blonde and gorgeous and quite possibly a mythical Nordic goddess. I knew I’d hit the glacier ceiling at Icelandic, and if I wanted a career in sales I’d have to go somewhere else. I gave myself exactly six months to find a job in sales.

Then I saw an ad in the
New York Times
: “Sell Advertising Space for Twice Weekly Travel Trade Publication.” I didn’t have anywhere
near enough experience, nor did I know anything about advertising, but I called anyway and wrangled an interview. The night before I was due in the offices of
Travel Agent
magazine, I planned to cook myself a nice dinner, shampoo and blow-dry my hair, do my nails, and get a good night’s sleep—then bounce out the door the next morning and be fifteen minutes early. But plans don’t always go… well, according to plan. As I was cutting the tips off asparagus stalks, I nearly sliced off the top of my left index finger.