An Invisible Thread: The True Story of an 11-Year-Old Panhandler, a Busy Sales Executive, and an Unlikely Meeting with Destiny

“I stopped thinking about Stan. I hate to believe my compassion for him and others like him was a casual thing, but if I’m really honest with myself, I’d have to say that it was. I cared but I didn’t care enough to make a real change in my life to help. I was not some heroic do-gooder. I learned, like most New Yorkers, to tune out the nuisance.”

Prior to her relationship with Maurice, Schroff has a casual connection with another homeless person, Stan, a middle-aged man that she regularly brings a cup of coffee to. After several weeks of doing this, one day Stan isn’t on his usual grate and he never is again. For a time, Schroff wonders about him but not in a serious way, never enough to inquire about what became of him. She thinks this is a by-product of living in a busy, individualistic society and that she has been trained not to care.

“There was something else I didn’t know about Maurice as I sat across from him that day. I didn’t know that in the pocket of his sweatpants he had a knife.”

There are many things that Schroff cannot fathom about Maurice’s life. One of them is the amount of violence he must endure, both the reality of it at home and the looming threat of it on the streets. While Schroff only sees a small child, really Maurice is a world-wise resident of the streets.

“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.”

Schroff questions her intentions in helping out Maurice, realizing that the people in her life might question her too. She wonders if she is doing this for herself, to feel like a savior to this child. She isn’t quite sure what to make of her intense motivations at first, but she knows it feels right.

“But they did not make me feel fulfilled. Even then, I had a vague sense something was missing […] I decided I wasn’t going to wait for Maurice to call me. I was going to go out and find him.”

Schroff gives Maurice her business card, which he promptly pitches in the trash. At first, she thinks their entanglement is done after that first lunch. Over time, he fills a void in her life that she didn’t even know she had. She decides that the connection must be maintained, no matter what that requires of her.

“When Maurice told me about the joint Grandma Rose gave him, he did not mention it with sarcasm or scorn. He said it matter-of-factly. To him, it was a real gift, a true act of kindness. It meant someone had thought of him.”

Schroff is horrified to learn that Maurice’s grandmother gave him drugs when he was 6 years old. It is a clear indication of how pervasive and normal drug use is in Maurice’s family. Maurice is devoted to his grandmother and views it as a genuine gift. This anecdote also highlights the socio-economic gap between Schroff and her new friend.

“He didn’t know what I was talking about. He had no comprehension of the concept of breakfast, lunch, and dinner. He didn’t know different foods were served at different times. To him, there was no such thing as a structured meal.”

Schroff endeavors to treat Maurice to a nice dinner in a restaurant and not in a fast food place. When she asks him about this, she discovers that for him, food does not arrive at regular intervals and meals are not normally eaten with others as a communal experience, making their time together unique.

“My father took the scissors to the glove. He ripped through the hard leather, shredding it to ragged chunks. Frank couldn’t bear to see this; he ran inside the house, bawling.”

Nunzie’s drunken destruction of Frank’s beloved baseball glove is a clear example of how cruel Schroff’s father becomes after drinking. Frank’s glove is his dearest possession. There is no replacing it with another glove, even though that’s what Nunzie tries when he sobers up. The destruction of the glove also represents the destruction of Nunzie’s children’s innocence.

“But now we had a pact. A friendship pact. Only years later would I be able to take the full measure of what this handshake meant.”

Schroff asks Maurice to agree to some ground rules for their relationship, mostly that he will not betray her trust by taking anything from her house on this first invitation over to her apartment. What Schroff sees later is that this pact makes demands of her as well, namely that she hold up her end of the bargain and be forthright and dependable.

“She propped her head against the doorframe. Her eye rolled back in her head. This was Maurice’s mother, Darcella.”

Once Schroff begins taking on a prominent role in Maurice’s life, she feels she needs to meet his mother. Schroff wants to take Maurice to a baseball game but doesn’t want to do so without Darcella’s permission. When Schroff takes it upon herself to make contact, she finds only a drug addled woman, no one she can talk to and connect with in any real way. She also realizes the gravity of Maurice’s homelife.

“At the time, I thought Maurice was merely embarrassed by his living situation but as I learned more about his family, I realized he was protecting me […] He did not want me to even brush up against his world.”

Realizing how dangerous his welfare motel home is, Maurice is upset to learn that Schroff visited there. He makes her promise she will never return. She agrees, thinking he is just mortified by his family. Really, she was in more danger there than she could possibly imagine. In this role reversal, Maurice is trying to protect Schroff.

“But sometimes we are not drawn to that which is different from what we know and fear. Sometimes we are drawn to that which is exactly the same.”

It saddens Schroff that her mother grew up with an emotionally abusive and unloving father and then went on to select the same kind of husband. For too many years, Schroff watched her mother suffer with a man who did not know how to be a father or husband, who used violence to communicate and would not fairly examine his feelings.

“I looked away when Maurice said that, so he wouldn’t see me tear up. A simple brown paper bag, I thought. To me, it meant nothing. To him, it was everything.”

When Schroff begins to better understand just how much food insecurity Maurice is dealing with, she offers to begin packing him school lunch. He is excited about this offer, for reasons beyond the obvious nourishment. He asks if she can put his food in a brown bag with his name on it. This, he tells her, is a clear sign that someone cares about you, if someone sends in your lunch in a brown bag with your name on it. Schroff is touched and eager to comply with the request.

“‘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 just can’t come in and out of his life.’”

Schroff attends Maurice’s back-to-school night, filling in as his surrogate parental figure. His teacher, Miss House, is pleased to see Schroff there and fills Schroff in on who Maurice is at school—bright but angry and absent far too often. Miss House also extracts a promise from Schroff that she will not walk out on Maurice, and that she is not going to abandon him as so many others have done.

“Maurice didn’t have any place like that [...] all he knew was noise and traffic and congestion. The closest he came to experiencing nature was walking through central park.”

Time spent out in nature was an essential and pleasurable part of Schroff’s childhood, a setting where she could escape from the troubles of her family. She wishes for Maurice to have that too—an idyllic natural space to find refuge in. She takes him out of the city to find it.

“Then he said, ‘Miss Laura, some day when I grow up, I’m gonna have a big table like that for me and my family. I want to sit around and talk just like they do.’”

Schroff is surprised by what attracts Maurice’s attention the most when the two of them spend time with Schroff’s sister, Annette, in her big suburban home. Although he enjoys the swings and bike riding, Maurice most appreciates the dining room table where the family gathers to break bread and connect with one another.

“At the end of the night, he shook Maurice’s hand and gave him a tender pat on the shoulder. It made me think about what a great father he sometimes was and might have been if only he had known how.”

On the first Thanksgiving that Maurice spends with Schroff’s family, she is nervous about how her father might behave. His drinking, she knows far too well, can unleash a monster from within him. But to her pleasant surprise, Nunzie is on his best behavior and is gentle and affectionate with Maurice. She wishes she could’ve accessed this side of him more during her own childhood.

“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.”

It takes Schroff a long time to name her father’s violence as abuse since her mother always encourages them to “act normal, act like nothing happened” immediately afterwards. But when she finally stands up to him, Schroff feels good, like she has taken away his power over her.

“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.”

Maurice tries to explain to Schroff what his past Christmases have been like—mostly spent alone with a free meal and one free toy from the Salvation Army. He realizes other kids get more, even a lot, but that isn’t for kids like him. Schroff resolves to change this and give him a nice Christmas for the first time in his life.

“I took it all in, tears running down my face. My mother never really spoke to me like this. She had told me she loved me, and she may have told me she was proud of me but to hear her say it now, in this way, meant the world to me.”

As painful as losing her mother is, her final moments offer solace and connection for Schroff. Her mother takes the chance to truly tell each of her children how special and loved they are. Her passing comes with a sense of peace.

“On those Mondays, I just tried to be a friend to Maurice and not necessarily a substitute parent. I didn’t drill him with lessons towards a better life but I did try to show him what was important to me in my life.”

Schroff tries hard not to lecture Maurice or overstep her bounds. She knows he has been through enough stress and her apartment and their outings together should be a place of peace and dependable companionship. She does try to teach him little things that she feels have a big impact, like learning how to set a table or bake a cake.

“It made no sense to him that all I did was put coins in and never take them out. I explained I was saving that money for when I might need it. This, too, was a brand-new concept to him.”

It is important to Schroff that Maurice begin to conceive of a future beyond the day and the moment. She is glad when he starts to talk about future career goals for when he grows up. She is also glad when he shows interest in the idea of saving money for a rainy day.

“I’d been out on a bunch of dates since then and had a couple of relationships that had least gotten off the ground, but nothing ever really clicked. As I got older, I began to wonder if it ever really would, but I still had the same dream—to have a family of my own.”

Having a family, an opportunity to correct the angst of her own youth, is an idea that Schroff clings to despite the lack of a central romantic attraction in her life. It is the idea of a family that makes her continue to meet men and date. Family, even more than romantic love, is an idea that she prioritizes.

“The truth was Maurice was shaken by my move. He was used to be abandoned by the adults in his life and he couldn’t help but think I might abandon him too.”

One of Schroff’s worst fears is Maurice feeling abandoned by her. She feels intense guilt about moving out of the city and into the suburbs with her then boyfriend, Michael. But Maurice doesn’t let on how troubled he is by the growing distance between them.