Any Place I Hang My Hat Read online

  “Look, Aunt Linda, it’s as if we’d been matched up by a computer. Everything’s right except ...” I patted my chest over my heart. She shrugged, opened a cabinet above the sink. “The lamb smells fantastic,” I said.

  “You want to know my secret? Rosemary, yeah, sure. But also a teeny bit of cumin.” The inside of the door was mirrored and she chccked her lipstick. “How’s Chicky doing with that old lady who’s keeping him?”

  “Have you met her?”

  “You’ve got to be kidding.” She closed the cabinet door. “He’s passing himself off as twenty-six. No, wait, thirty-six, which is still a joke, but she’s buying whatever he’s selling. What name is he using with her?”

  “James Madison.” I sighed.

  “Like the high school? Pa-the-tic. He dropped out of high school the beginning of his junior year.”

  “Aunt Linda.”

  “What?”

  “What haven’t you told me about my mother?”

  “What are you talking about?” High heels squeaking on the vinyl tiles, she walked to the breakfast nook and sat down. “You think I’m hiding stuff?”

  “No. But we haven’t talked about her ... God, it’s been ages. I think I was still in college. So maybe in that time you thought of something else, but it wasn’t important. I mean, if it had been, you would have called and told me.”

  With her index finger that ended in an apricot-colored nail, she pointed to a chair. I sat. “What? You thinking about if you get married? Genes and things?”

  “Well, genes are an issue.”

  “Fine. You got your smartness from her. Ask Chicky: She had an A-plus average! Like she could’ve gotten into Harvard too. Well, maybe not Harvard, but one of those good colleges you can never remember the names of.”

  I picked up a napkin ring, with dark and light blue crystals sewn on, and twisted it carefully around the paper napkin. Aunt Linda hated laundry but loved accessories, both for herself and her house. “Okay, she was rebelling against her family. And I guess sex was a major item. But what else attracted her to my father?”

  “If there wasn’t any sex or rebelling, trust me, angel pie, they wouldn’t have stayed together for two seconds.”

  “Was she bookish?”

  “Reading? No. I mean, not that I ever saw. I mean, if Chicky hadn’t said, ‘You wouldn’t believe how smart she is! A ninety-seven average!’ I wouldn’t have believed she was so smart at the beginning. She just seemed like a regular person. Quiet.”

  “How come you never liked her?”

  “Did I ever say that? That’s not fair, Amy, putting words in my mouth. Okay, she was kind of ... not cold. Cool, I’d call it. Like she never said anything nasty, but you felt she wasn’t trying to meet you halfway because you weren’t worth it—to her. She didn’t say anything unless you asked her a question. Then she’d answer. Polite, but not ... really with you. Like she was waiting for someone to come along and take her out of wherever she was. Which happened to be with us.”

  “She came from Brooklyn, right?” Aunt Linda nodded. “Do you know what part?”

  “No. See, Sparky and I were just engaged then, so I was still living at home. The grand duchess Lil hated him because of his being a fireman and Italian, I mean, she didn’t care about him not being Jewish because if I’d have come home with a guy with a side part and a Wasp name—Sutton Van Schmuck or something—then it would have been fine. So me and Sparky didn’t see Chicky and Phyllis all that much. We hung out with Sparky’s family or other probationary firemen and their wives and girlfriends.”

  “Do you recall where she went to high school?”

  “Hey!” Uncle Sparky sauntered in. “Two beautiful women in one room! How lucky can I get?” A guy can be described as a bear of a man simply because he is large, but Uncle Sparky looked like Smokey’s cousin in an FDNY T-shirt. He was what is politely called hirsute, covered in every conceivable place a man can have hair; the hair on his neck and shoulders rose above the collars of his T-shirts, so he had a perpetual dark brown ascot. His nose had been broken during some teenage fracas in Little Italy and as a result was squished against his face, so his nostrils were on display, the way a grizzly’s are. My uncle was so XXL that it was nearly impossible to picture him racing up a ladder to save someone from a burning building. But then again, it’s hard to imagine a five-hundred-pound grizzly running thirty-five miles an hour. Yet Uncle Sparky was surprisingly graceful for someone so massive, whether simply ambling around the house or grabbing Aunt Linda and demonstrating the twirl and dip they did to their wedding song, “You Light Up My Life.”

  He put his arm around my aunt and tenderly kissed her check. Then, in his usual greeting, he pinched my cheek and tousled my hair. “So, what did I miss? I heard the doorbell. You think you can keep Amy to yourself, talking a blue streak and not fill me in?”

  “We were talking about your favorite sister-in-law.”

  Uncle Sparky glanced up at the clock, which was shaped like a teapot; he was probably going through the list of his three brothers’ wives. “Right. Gotcha,” he said at last. “You mean Phyllis.”

  “Yeah. Amy was just asking me ...” She pursed her lips into a rosebud. “What were you just asking me?”

  “If you remember where my mother went to high school.”

  “God, I don’t have the foggiest,” my aunt said. “Sparks, hon, do you remember?” She and my uncle had been going out since eighth grade, so he had known my mother as long and as well as Aunt Linda had.

  “No.” He gave me a look just short of pitying. “Chicky was always bragging about what a brain she was, that she was, you know, college material. But I don’t think neither of them ever mentioned where she went to school.”

  “Did you think my mother was smart?” I asked him.

  “Yeah, come to think of it. Not like she hung around reciting poems. Most of the time she was pretty quiet, just doing lovey-dovey stuff with Chicky, like battering her eyelashes. But I always said to Linda, ‘That girl knows the time of day and then some.’ You could tell she was taking everything in.”

  My aunt got busy trimming the stems of the bouquet I’d brought, so that the flowers would fit into a glass pitcher for a centerpiece. My uncle observed her snipping as if it were some never-before-seen and quite marvelous technique. “How was she as a mother?” I asked.

  Aunt Linda, holding a pink, daisylike flower between her thumb and forefinger, eyed me and said, “Amy, baby, I don’t think there’s anything me and Sparky haven’t told you over the years. From all I ever saw, she was an okay mother. You know, not Miss Kitchy-kitchy-coo, but I never saw her do anything wrong. She was a kid, seventeen or something like that, and to be honest, I was surprised she was so responsible. If you cried she fed you, if you pooped she changed you. Like any mother would. Or should.”

  “Did she breast-feed me?”

  Uncle Sparky did a sidestep of discomfort. Aunt Linda stuck a fern into the pitcher and then said: “I don’t think so. I mean, there was always a bottle. She let me hold you and feed you.” I could tell my aunt wanted to give me something to hold on to, and she added: “You were so cute! Your eyes were sort of greeny and kind of almond-shaped, even then. And you were bald. With the pinkest cheeks! You’d stare right into my eyes. And you made the world’s loudest burps.”

  I smiled, then turned to my uncle. “Did you sense my mother’s dissatisfaction?”

  “Listen, if you’d have said, Hey, this is someone who’s gonna turn her back on her baby, to say nothing of her husband, I wouldn’t have believed it. All right, I didn’t think she was matched up in heaven to Chicky. She was too shrewd and probably too classy. But I wouldn’t have believed she would—Jesus, I hate to say it—that she would have dropped him like a hot potato, much less have abandoned you. Truth of the matter? If she hadn’t mailed that letter saying she wasn’t coming back, to this day I’d have thought she was dead, you know, murdered, or maybe had some freaky accident.”

  I let the s
ubject drop. My uncle carried the salad to the table. Aunt Linda handed me three bottles of dressing—orange, white, and green—and I brought them over. We all sat and she dished out salad with a wooden fork-and-spoon set Uncle Sparky had whittled, then topped off with his wood-burned designs on the handles. As a kid, I’d always believed they were a cabbage and a penis and tried not to look at them when I went there for dinner.

  I told them about following Thom Bowles around on a campaign swing. Then Aunt Linda filled me in on her technique for getting the seeds out of a cucumber with an apple corer so you got cute little cuke circles, and Uncle Sparky told me about how many guys in the fire department had taken up cigarettes again after 9/11 and were now in an antismoking program.

  Finally I said: “Look, I don’t want to take advantage of your hospitality—”

  “But you’re going to.” My uncle smiled as he said it.

  “Sparks, baby,” my aunt responded, “put a sock in it. Go ahead, sweetie.”

  “I just want to be sure I have the right information. My mother’s family name was Morris. Her given was Phyllis. Right?”

  My aunt’s mouth dropped open so wide that I could see a couple of tiny smears of her Copper Kisses lipstick on her bottom teeth. Finally she asked: “You’re thinking of trying to look for her?”

  “Are you kidding? No. I just want to know a little about her. Her background. Her genes, okay? I mean, every time I’ve gone to a doctor, it’s always ‘Is there any heart disease in your family?’ and I only have half an answer. And just—I don’t know—general information.”

  “What if she died or something?” Uncle Sparky asked.

  “Forgive me for saying this, Amy,” my aunt said, “but good riddance to bad rubbish. To leave a darling little baby who’s not even a year old. There’s no explanation good enough for that.”

  She might have gone on, but my uncle apparently thought she should put a sock in it, because he suddenly said, “Phyllis, right. That was her name. No doubt about that, unless she made that up. But Morris? My ass, if you’ll excuse me. Morris was one of those made-up last names like Jews used to do all the time. Not that Italians didn’t. Tony Bennett? Dean Martin? We still do. The guy who made up The Sopranos? Give me a break.”

  “What was the family name originally?”

  My uncle’s shrug brought his shoulders up to his ears. My aunt said: “Moscowitz.”

  “You’re kidding,” I said.

  “Of course I’m not kidding. Who’d make up a crazy thing like that?”

  “How do you know?”

  “Chicky told me.”

  “He never told me. He always seemed positive—”

  “Amy, honey-bunny, he told me years ago. Right when he married her, when they thought she was pregnant but she wasn’t. You know your father. A mind like a sieve. In one ear, out the other.”

  “Moscowitz?” I murmured, more to myself than them.

  “And I’ll tell you the only other thing I know about her,” Aunt Linda said. “My mother told it to me, so take it with a grain of salt. A whole box of salt, because my mother and the truth were never best friends, as you well know.” I nodded. “A couple of weeks or a month after Phyllis left, my mother said she heard on the grapevine that Phyllis was living in Greenwich Village, like a couple of miles away. Talk about chutzpah. Okay, true, the Village is like another planet. She was supposed to be living with some guy, but she wasn’t Phyllis anymore. It was something ... I can’t swear to this. But it was, I think, Veronica. You know? Like the rich girl in the Archie comics.” She gave me a second helping of salad. “I wish I could help you more. But I don’t know a thing about Moscowitz heart disease, my sweetie.”

  Chapter Six

  MY ARTICLE ON Thom Bowles was published to accolades, or what passed for accolades at In Depth—the left side of Happy Bob’s smile twitched slightly higher and he said, “Nice work.” After that, I was on to the Democrats’ possibilities with the Christian right, followed by a piece on the rise of populism.

  Except my mind had other ideas about how to occupy itself. Disregarding the wisdom I’d received from Mary Rooney in seventh grade—If you sit around waiting for a guy to call, he won’t—I worked halfheartedly, waiting to hear from Freddy Carrasco and John Orenstein, as a cold, damp March blew in.

  The so-called real world was barely a distraction. It was the Axis of the Extremely Annoying countries—France, Germany, and Russia—versus the Axis of the Excessively Eager, i.e., us and the British. At work, I read six newspapers each day online, plus the usual four delivered to my desk. The war watch on the Internet occasionally distracted me as I waited for the phone to ring. At home, I surfed from CNN to MSNBC to PBS to Fox while periodically picking up the phone to check if the reason for its silence was that the line was dead. Naturally I got a dial tone every time, which then allowed me to agonize that my lifting the receiver had, in a second, cut off the incoming call that would have transformed my life.

  As we galumphed toward war, I flew to Memphis for the three days of a convention of big-shot conservative Christian activists, men of vigorous handshakes and women of Jesus-makes-me-so-darn-happy smiles. As a group, they were far more cordial to reporters than, say, run-of-the-mill Episcopalians, and eager to explain their beliefs. I squeezed in six or seven interviews a day, toured Graceland with a freelancer from the Gospel Advocate, and engaged in much intense chitchatting at no-alcohol cocktail parties, trying to get the sense of their professed bipartisanship while I glommed a few of an astounding variety of cream-cheese-based hors d’oeuvres.

  But I couldn’t numb myself with busyness. In spite of the vow I’d made to myself years earlier, I became one of those women waiting for a man’s summons to bring her to life, checking my voice mail almost hourly, flipping open my cell phone hoping for a message icon. Sure, I knew there was nothing stopping me from calling John, but the old double-standard doubts were creeping up on me; I’d gone with egalitarian behavior and what had come of it? A silent cell phone. Maybe even the best of guys, deep down, wanted a woman—colleague, friend, girlfriend—who wasn’t eager. Forget eager: who played hard to get.

  Daily, I left word for Freddy, pursuing him with the practiced ardor of a supermarket-tabloid reporter out for a scoop. I needed to know what his juvenile record was about. Homicide or aggravated graffiti? Was he mental? No matter what the truth about his paternity ultimately was, did he believe he was telling it? Why had it been important enough for him to pursue it so?

  Time after time, I clicked on Thom Bowles’s fencing team photo and swore I was staring at Freddy’s face. Sure, I knew there was a good chance that if I saw Freddy again I’d realize I’d imagined the resemblance. And yes, having had my article published, I knew that even if I went back and yanked out one of Bowles’s well-tinted hairs, got a perfect DNA paternity match, and wrote an insightful expose, In Depth would not touch it. Still, I couldn’t let go of Freddy’s find-the-parent, win-a-prize fantasy.

  But that was nothing compared with my waiting to hear from John. Fifteen days without a call: a new personal best. He, who had me on auto-dial on both his home and cell phones, who’d sometimes call twice or three times a day to discuss the Paul Wolfowitz testimony he was watching on C-SPAN, or to offer a factoid he’d discovered while researching Geraldine Ferraro for a Biography show, had not called since we’d last slept together, the time I’d told him about Joan Murdoch.

  I spent what seemed like hours (and probably was) discussing with Tatty whether he had spotted me at the Mahler concert gaping at him and La Belleza. Had he said to himself, Thank God! Finally, Amy knows. Now I won’t have to go through a melodramatic mess with her begging me for one more night to talk things out? Or had a new enthusiasm simply struck him—garbage trucks or turtles? Was he filming a landfill or turtle eggs hatching somewhere?

  Reminding myself that John’s decency would absolutely preclude his simply dropping me didn’t calm me in the least. Whenever there was a message on my home phone or cell, I’d
press the button and expect Uh, Amy, I sent back the copy of Kavalier & Clay you lent me and, uh, obviously my cousin’s wedding ... I asked you to go to with me, hut I’m sure you can understand ... Listen, I truly wish you the best. You’re a wonderful person.

  Ergo, I wasn’t astounded that when I got off the plane in New York and opened up my cell phone, there was a message from John. Except it wasn’t a kiss-off: “Amy, okay, I’m a total shit for not calling, but I’ve been working day and night. That PBS deal for Herbert Hoover finally came through! Can you believe it? I thought it was dead in the water. Anyway, I’m sorry I’ve been so ... uh, negligent. This call is to say hi and let you know I’m not a rat. Oh, and to remind you that we have my cousin Laurel’s wedding Saturday night. Give me a call if you get a chance and are still speaking to me. Otherwise, be ready a little before six because we have to drive up to Westchester. Did I tell you the invitation said black tie? Okay, see you.”

  So I figured John didn’t think La B was, as yet, sufficiently conversant with upper-middle-class Jewish mores to face a family wedding during which strangers might grab her hand and pull her into a circle for twenty minutes of “Hava Negila,” followed by “Shout” and then dinner music from a Tex-Mex klezmer band.

  John actually double-parked in front of my apartment and came to pick me up, the sort of behavior Grandma Lil would have cooed over. With his latest haircut grown out and a black tuxedo shirt, he’d moved up from good-looking to handsome. Hip, too, the sort of guy who bounds up the stairs to the stage to accept a Best Something award. “Hey, Amy. You look beautiful.” His words had a warmth that contradicted his cool looks.

  “You look good—” I was just about to say “too” when he kissed me.

  “Sorry about the not calling,” he murmured. I jerked back my head, but at least I managed a smile.

  “At least it wasn’t a shock.”

  “Do you want to discuss why you couldn’t talk throughout the entire 2000 convention in L.A.? Or the Bush-Gore business in Florida when the only thing I got from you was a message not to call because you were too tired to talk?” Before I could come up with an answer, he said: “Hey, great outfit.”