Any Place I Hang My Hat Read online

  Any Place I Hang My Hat

  Susan Isaacs

  To Robert Stoll with love and admiration

  Contents

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  Eight

  Nine

  Ten

  Eleven

  Twelve

  Thirteen

  Fourteen

  Fifteen

  Sixteen

  Seventeen

  Eighteen

  Nineteen

  A Biography of Susan Isaacs

  Acknowledgments

  Of what avail is an open eye if the heart is blind?

  —Solomon Ibn Gabirol (c. 1021-1058),

  A Choice of Pearls

  Chapter One

  I STEPPED OFF the elevator right into the entrance gallery of the co-op. Wow. It was oval. White marble floor, black lacquered walls, ringed with eight or ten white columns topped with marble busts, like a hall of fame for some minor sport. The hostess of the fund-raiser eyed my photo ID, which hung from a metal bead chain. “Well,” she said, “In Depth magazine. I absolutely adore it.”

  “Tha—” I replied.

  I didn’t get out nk you because she cut me off: “Is the photographer meeting you here?”

  “Sorry, we don’t use them. No photos, no illustrations.” She’d had her eyes done, so they couldn’t open wider than they already were. Still, I sensed she was surprised. “Only text,” I explained. “We’re the serious, boring weekly.”

  “Right. Of course no photos. I don’t know what I was thinking. But don’t call In Depth boring. I think people are feeling desperate for depth these days. Well, enjoy. Feel free to help yourself to hors d’oeuvres.” Her dress, I noticed, was the 2003 New York noncolor, white. Ivory silk bands were sewn horizontally, making her look as if she’d stopped her own mummification to join the party.

  Although the words In Depth on my press credentials were clear enough to her, I could see she couldn’t quite make out my name. I helped her. “Amy Lincoln.” A microsecond of hostess uncertainty: Lincoln? Her upper lip twitched. Should her first smile have been warmer? Her heretofore unlined forehead furrowed as she pondered asking: Any relation to the—?

  If she could have seen the rest of the fruit on our family tree, she wouldn’t have pondered. Any relation to the—? Please! So where did the name come from? Though highly unlikely, it’s conceivable that Grandma Lillian Lincoln’s explanation of the family surname was a misconception, not her usual flagrant lie: something to the effect that in the penultimate year of the nineteenth century, some Protestant clerk on Ellis Island with an antic sense of humor wrote down “Samuel Lincoln” when my great-grandfather—full of beard, dark of eye, and large of nose—stepped before him.

  More likely, Great-grandpa Schmuel Weinreb heard the names Washington and Lincoln while hanging out around the pickle barrel in downtown Nizhni Novgorod listening to stories about the Golden Land. Flipping a kopek, he got tails. Could he truly have believed that by being a Lincoln, he could keep anyone in New York from noticing his six extant teeth and ten words of English? Probably. My family tended to prefer fantasy to actual thought.

  Take Grandma Lil. She took the subway uptown a day or two or three a week to fill in as a substitute waxer, ripping the hair off the lips, legs, and random chins of the famous and the merely rich at Beauté, an uptown, upscale salon.

  From the jet-set and celebrity clientele, Grandma learned about the finer things of life, information she felt obliged to pass on to me, mainly because no one else would listen. Inadvertently, she also taught me what not to do. Early on, I sensed that pointing out that one shouldn’t wear white shoes before Memorial Day was not the way to endear oneself to one’s neighbors in one’s low-income housing project.

  Anyhow, a hundred and five years after Great-grandpa Schmuel, there I was, Amy Lincoln, at a political fund-raiser hosted by some men’s footwear magnate in his ten-room co-op on Central Park West. His wife, now high on the abracadabra combo of In Depth and Lincoln, murmured to me: “If you want something more than hors d’oeuvres, I can have our chef, Jean-Pierre, whip up a light supper.” This time she aspirated the hors hard enough for me to get a whiff of the garlic in Jean-Pierre’s boudin blanc terrine. I said no thanks.

  Listen, I was there to do my job, to observe the most recently declared Democratic candidate for the presidential nomination, Senator Thomas Bowles of Oregon. Originally the scion of an old and still-monied New York family, Bowles had gone west and made a larger, eco-friendly fortune for himself by finding some new way to recycle tires.

  Normally, reporters were not allowed into private homes for events like these, probably on the theory that they’d pick up a disparaging remark and use it as their lead. Or they’d glom a thousand bucks’ worth of Beluga, leaving seventy-five potential contributors with two hundred pygmy buckwheat blinis and a surfeit of lemon wedges. The senator’s campaign manager, normally a human piranha, had made an exception for me because In Depth was so dignified it never published bitchy observations regarding a candidate’s dyed hair or ferocious temper. And naturally, any insinuations about unconventional sexual predilections, even really sick and/or fantastically interesting ones, were left to lesser periodicals.

  Anyhow, I’d been traveling with Senator Bowles’s campaign for a few days now. I’d watched him avoid probably thirty thousand empty calories by sipping bottled water, and was awed by his willpower and robust bladder. Politically, he was a little to the left of where I stood; the word evil—à la Reagan’s evil empire and W’s axis of evil—wasn’t in his vocabulary, and corporation was consistently a pejorative. Still, going on this campaign swing had been a plus for me. I was impressed by the thoughtful way Thom Bowles spoke about his big issues. With eagerness, too, as though complex ideas were not to be recoiled from but enjoyed. I admired his I-dare-you-to-call-me-liberal American flag pin as well as his clarity: Two days earlier, in Story City, Iowa, his explanation of the social and psychological underpinnings of global terrorism had turned an audience of small business owners from thinking “pinko weenie tree-hugger” to “Hey, he really knows his stuff.”

  Bowles was in his second term in the Senate, and from the start of his political career, he’d been a frequent talking head on news shows. His depth of knowledge, aw-shucks persona, and seeming lack of self-righteousness combined with a bit of humor made his the perfect response to all those ranting right-wing babes with Alice-in-Wonderland hair and Jewish neo-cons so low-key they appeared anesthetized. Also, he could make ordinary voters comprehend the gravity of issues—the greenhouse effect, the crises in Social Security funding and in the penal system—that usually left them snoring.

  Alas, his campaign had gotten off to a bumpy start. During his announcement of his candidacy, the senator proclaimed: “Our penile system is in atrocious shape!” A single, nervous fluff in a career remarkably free of bloopers and gaffes. After cruel and hilarious coverage on The Daily Show, the other late-night talk show hosts kept it alive for two weeks. This had been Thomas Bowles’s first penile-free week, but his usual fluency and light touch had diminished; he actually seemed rattled. Day after day, sprinkles of sweat covered his forehead. He couldn’t seem to stop inserting uhs as if they were commas, so on guard was he against a “pubic policy” suddenly bursting forth.

  I glanced toward the living room. I figured the senator must be in the center of the herd of Manhattanites standing between the marble-covered Italian console that was serving as a bar and a Louis-probably-XV chair so commodious that at least three Bourbons could have sat side by side by side on its gold-damask-covered seat. However, Thom Bowles was
not easy to spot. While he photographed as Strapping Western Outdoor Man, with rectilinear jaw and skin the color of a sun-dried tomato, he was not much more than five foot seven and built along the lines of a gazelle.

  Before I get to what happened to Thom Bowles at that fundraiser (and after), I should return to me for a minute, because this narrative is only peripherally about the senator. His fund-raiser is simply a good place to start my own story of loss, love, passion, abandonment, social mobility, and Discovery of Missing Person—not necessarily in that order. I don’t want to sound overly dramatic, but my existence has had a fair amount of Drang, if not bona fide Sturm.

  Okay, so there I was, Amy Elizabeth Lincoln, journalist. With an A.B. (Harvard, ’94) and an M.S. (Columbia School of Journalism, ’96). The sort of woman who ought to be self-confident enough not to have to flash her academic credentials. I stood on the border of entrance gallery and living room in the headache-inducing heat and Saharan aridity of that apartment on Central Park West, wearing a too-woolly gray herringbone pantsuit under which—in thrall to some idiot early-morning sexual fog—I’d put on my one and only thong. So I’d had a daylong itch I could not scratch. Admittedly, I had a fair amount of self-discipline, both below the belt and above the neck. People usually make associate editor at In Depth in their mid-thirties. I’d done it at twenty-eight. I could be very focused.

  A little more about the magazine: No Spielberg cover photos à la Newsweek for us. No cartoony drawing of some schmendrick on a cloud to go with “Does Heaven Exist?” à la Time either. In Depth’s cover was merely its contents listed on the front page. As for our readers, they were educated, the sort who did not have to be reminded of the difference between monetary and fiscal policy. They could nod knowingly at a reference to Keats’s epitaph.

  My beat was the Democrats, an assignment that ought to have gone to a staffer with a more mordant sense of humor than mine. However, a sense of humor and focus were necessary not merely to face Democrats, but also to deal with one’s personal issues. Ergo, a brief step off the footwear mogul’s seventy-five-thousand-dollar, creamy yellow and pink Savonnerie rug and onto the grimy, commercial-grade gray carpet in my cubicle at In Depth. The photos on my desk best introduce my family and my life.

  My parents were framed in burled bird’s-eye maple. It was the only photograph I’d ever seen of them together.

  First, father. Charles “Chicky” Lincoln, a.k.a. Chaz Linconi, a.k.a. Dallas Armstrong, a.k.a. Charles Von Hamburg. In that picture, Chicky was sitting comfortably on a high stool—bar, not soda fountain—with Phyllis Morris Lincoln, a.k.a. my mother, albeit not for long, perched atop his knee. The photo, one of the few of my father that wasn’t a mug shot, was taken a few months after I was born, probably in late ’73 or early ’74.

  Except for Chicky’s amiable expression, he looked like the sort of guy a teenage girl would go out with to frighten her parents. Tall: six feet two inches. Long black sideburns, longer hair. Not bushy like Woodstock guys’ of that era. Chicky’s hair was held in place by some kind of James Dean slime. His biceps looked so buff they stretched out the sleeves of his tie-dyed T-shirt. Back then, in the early seventies, he was working as a part-time driver for Frank (“Clockwork”) Silvaggio, a caporegime in the Gambino family, who had originally hired my father in the mistaken belief that all Jews are smart.

  My mother? From their size differential, it seemed clear she was somewhere between tiny and petite. That could have made her look like a ventriloquist’s dummy on Chicky’s lap. Except with her arms pressed stiffly against her sides and her lower legs parallel lines ending in espadrilles, she looked more rigid than any mere block of wood. The marriage had clearly gone south by then.

  From the bits of information I’d gleaned over the years from assorted relatives, neighbors, and the random social worker, my parents’ troubles began with the Housing Issue: Their love nest was a walk-up on the Lower East Side of New York, a few blocks north and west of Grandma Lil’s housing project. At the time my parents lived there, it had been one hundred and fifty years since the neighborhood had gone from humble to slummy. It would be another twenty-five before it was rehabbed enough for cool Jews to move back—along with the hip of all races, creeds, and national origins.

  The story went that Chicky tried to pass off their two-room apartment as in a “happening” part of town. My mother told him it was a hellhole. Chicky once admitted to me that the three of us had shared the premises with a rodent. “It wasn’t like huge. Sort of like ... cutely chubby.” He said he’d named it Mickey, “because Phyllis was having hysterics. So I made a joke about it.” My mother, however, didn’t laugh. She called it a rat.

  There was also the Money Issue. They had next to nothing. That was because Chicky was paying off a loan shark from whom he’d borrowed to take my mother on an extravagant honeymoon to El San Juan Hotel that included gambling and pearls. “Amy, babes, you never saw pearls like that! Like from chickens instead of oysters.”

  Despite the pearls my mother was discontent. I can say that with great assurance because the week before my first birthday, she left me with Grandma Lil while she ran some errands. “See you later, sweets,” my mother is said to have called out to me as she walked out the door. She never returned.

  A couple of days after she left, she mailed a brief letter postmarked New York to say she wasn’t dead. I suppose that was the good news. The bad news was her certainty that I’d be better off without her. She wasn’t coming back. Eventually, through the George Washington Plunkett Apartments’ grapevine—where someone knew someone on Bank Street in Greenwich Village who was the great-uncle of one of my mother’s blabbier girlfriends—Grandma Lil learned my mother had been keeping company with a guy whose first name sounded like Maumoon. His last name was some variation of Hussain, and he was said to be a bodyguard for the Consul of the Permanent Mission of the Republic of Maldives to the United Nations. My mother supposedly met him at a hot dog stand outside a B.B. King concert at the Fillmore East. Whether she’d actually run off to Suradiva with him or ditched him was anybody’s guess.

  Getting back to my parents’ photo: Despite its being an interior shot in a dark bar, my mother wore large sunglasses. Because she was on Chicky’s lap, I couldn’t gauge her height, but obviously I got my stature—or lack of it—from her. Also, since it was a black-and-white picture, she appeared to have shoulder-length charcoal gray hair and ivory lips. Chicky told me she was a “stunning redhead.” Grandma Lil swore her hair was brown.

  Through the years, I’d tinted the chiaroscuro photograph two ways. First, my mother has my color hair, red-highlighted brown; she’s wearing a headband. Red-highlighted Mom isn’t the least bit wooden. She’s adorable, exuberant, doing such a fabulous adaptation of the Frug or the Monkey that all the other dancers have stopped to watch her. My other image is Sophisticated Mom, languid on a chaise longue in Cap d’Antibes, flaming hair dipping, Nicole Kidman-like, over one of her huge green eyes. (Mine are large and hazel, nice enough, but there has never been a sonnet extolling hazel eyes.)

  I guess it’s important to mention that just three weeks before my mother took off, Chicky also had to say his good-byes. He was making his first trip up the river, this time to the Downstate Correctional Facility, to serve four to six for grand larceny, to wit, stealing a five-carat diamond ring for my mother.

  With good time, he returned when I was four. We moved out of Grandma’s into a room with kitchen privileges in an apartment in the West Thirties. The bathroom only had a shower, so I had my baths in the kitchen sink. We stuck to each other like glue. Luckily, he loved Fat Albert as much as I did. I recall our TV had a screen so wide and luminous that it lit the entire room. I fell asleep most nights watching the colors flickering through my closed lids. I was convinced that if I concentrated, I’d be able to see whatever grown-up movie Chicky would be watching after my bedtime. How did we get such an extravagant TV? I suppose one of Chicky’s high school friends—men I knew as Uncle Denny, U
ncle Moose, Uncle Chuy—must have stolen the television for him as a Welcome Back, Chickman! gift.

  “Amy babes,” Chicky would ask every day, “what you want for lunch?” Naturally I was in on the joke, knowing that no matter what I said it would be macaroni and cheese—whatever pasta he’d gotten on sale plus half a can of undiluted Campbell’s Cheddar Cheese Soup. We’d share it, eating from the pot. Sadly, my father was back inside a little more than two years later. Grand larceny again. This time, assault as well.

  He’d committed this crime for me. Chicky had decided I needed a more stable environment. Instead of trying to get a job, not easy with a criminal record, he determined he should be self-employed. So he set himself up as a limo driver with a car that had his name on it. He accomplished that entrepreneurial coup by stealing a 1979 Lincoln Continental. Then he talked his old boss, Frank Silvaggio, into hiring him back. On one of my quarterly visits to the prison, when I was nine, he raised his right hand: “I swear on my mother’s grave, Amy babes. That assault thing? I’m innocent.”

  “Grandma’s still alive,” I pointed out. “I live with her. Remember? They gave her custody again because you had to go away.”

  “Yeah. Sorry, Ame. It stinks for you, it stinks for me. So listen to what really happened.” Chicky explained he’d merely been driving his new Lincoln. Yeah, yeah, it was stolen and he’d been a moron because he’d left the New Jersey plates on overnight thinking, Hey, the guy I’m gonna get nonhot New York plates from wouldn’t want Chicky Lincoln knocking on his door at three in the morning, and also I didn’t wanna leave you at Grandma Lil’s overnight because I knew you hated Raisin Bran. But he swore all he’d done was drive the Lincoln with Frank and Vinny DeCicco, along with some poor schnook of a restaurateur, to a remote section of Van Cortlandt Park in the Bronx. “It was Frank and Vinny that roughed up the guy. I was, you know, sitting behind the wheel, looking the other way, listening to my Temptations tape. On a stack of Bibles, babes, I was minding my own business.”