Any Place I Hang My Hat Read online

  I had reassured myself I was a damn good reporter, but was I? No. Fifteen minutes after I got myself comfortable in the hardwood library chair, I was out of there. I dashed down Fifth Avenue, running the nine blocks to the library’s business branch on Madison to check some factlette in their collection. Then back and forth, again and again. I, organized Amy Lincoln, who, since kindergarten, had never handed in a paper or an article late, who kept her nail polish bottles lined up according to their position on the color wheel, I, who could barely write a shopping list without first making an outline, had become scattered.

  Running from library to library, I moved like a demented soccer forward, chunking past office workers, Arab pretzel men, Senegalese watch vendors, cops, tourists. My discombobulation added to my already off-the-chart anxiety and produced an all-over glaze of sweat that made me regret wearing wool as my first layer of sweater. Over the years, I’d become Total Sweater Girl. Coats can be a literal drag for a reporter; I learned that four layers was right for a cold day. Getting dressed I’d mixed lavender, orchid, plum, and violet. Hey, great combo, I commended myself before I left the apartment. But I caught a glimpse of my reflection in a store window. I looked like an out-of-towner trying to pass as a hip New Yorker.

  I was worn out by ten-thirty. My feet throbbed and I was suddenly aware that the little toe on my left foot was begging for an intermission. I ordered myself to stay in one place for at least an hour. The sudden shift from frenzy to stillness made me hypervigilant. I felt four or five pulses thumping away in different parts of my body. My dry mouth tasted as if I’d been sucking on rubber bands. At some point, I realized, I had to deal with the pile of books sitting before me.

  I took the one on top and began leafing through real estate records for 1970 to 1972. Those were the years just before I was born, when Phyllis Moscowitz Morris eloped with Chicky Lincoln. Maybe it was the feel of paper, the rhythmic turning of pages, but slowly the spell of the library came upon me. True, this particular research room was gloomier than Hell, but for me, any room filled with books was usually a balm.

  Until I left for boarding school, my library was more home to me than my grandma’s apartment. When, at age nine, I recognized I was too short to beat anyone but a third-grader one-on-one in basketball, I headed to the Hamilton Fish Park branch of the New York Public Library every day after school. Within weeks, I became the librarians’ pet. Sure, they’d say Shush to me now and then, yet they seemed so benevolent as to appear angelic. They actually wanted me to read. They kept telling me how smart I was. Best of all, unlike Grandma Lil, they made no demands on my patience. They did not want to confer with me for a half hour about the details of a photograph of Glenn Close in a 1984 Cadillac Eldorado convertible—as seen in a stolen-from-Beauté copy of Harper’s Bazaar. Librarians truly wanted to know What did you think of that book on Copernicus? Until I was ten or eleven, whenever my grandma forgot to pick me up, one of them would walk me home.

  The Hamilton Fish was a bland, tan brick building that looked like a generic library inside, yet my mind’s eye saw the interior as grand, a high-ceilinged, glowing space. Starry pinpoints of light reflected off the protective plastic covers on the books. Objectively, I know the plastic was cloudy with fingerprints and sneezes, tacky from the caked-on residue of other people’s Cheez Doodles. Still, I viewed the light given off by the books as celestial.

  I put down the ’70 to ’72 real estate records and picked up the next book, and then the next. By one o’clock, my eyes were so dry I could no longer blink. My neck ached from hunching over to read tiny print. My stomach growled with resentment while I kept working to find who, from the masses of Moscowitzes in the borough of Brooklyn, could be my Moscowitz.

  Finally, I had to admit I was famished. Huddling over a Kings County business directory printed in what must have been a four-point font, I did the pretend-to-sneeze bit, covering my mouth with one hand in order to sneak in a major hunk of protein bar with the other. Except just at that moment, I found myself staring at the names of my maternal grandparents: Rose and Selwyn Moscowitz.

  My God! There it was! For once, Chicky hadn’t made up some lame story when he claimed my mother’s father owned bike stores. He’d been telling the truth. In 1970, a Selwyn Moscowitz had actually owned two bicycle stores in Brooklyn—one in Flatbush, one in Park Slope. Selly’s Cyclery. Selly, along with Rose, also owned the buildings in which the stores were located. I tried to swallow the protein bar. It wouldn’t go down. A big glob of protein—one of those chocolate, peanut butter, marshmallow things with the bitter undertaste of a low-end artificial sweetener that would shortly be declared a carcinogen—was leaning against my uvula. Not to panic, I calmed myself.

  When I tried swallowing again, the glob glued itself to the back of my soft palate. Rose and Selwyn Moscowitz. I coughed hard. Nothing happened. I coughed harder. Zilch. Making hideous glugging sounds that a librarian and several patrons felt obliged to recoil from, I tongued the thing over to my back teeth. To hide my desperate chewing, I rested my jaw on the heels of my hands and covered my mouth. At last, the friction of molars against food generated enough heat to transform the glob from a lump to a liquid, and I was able to swallow.

  Moscowitz, Selwyn & Rose. Except in that instant I realized I wasn’t out of the woods globwise. Whatever I’d swallowed had congealed again and restuck itself in my esophagus, mid-breastbone vicinity. It seemed to be settling there for life. Or maybe death, because, as my eyes fixed on those two names, a lightning bolt of pain slashed upward from my heart to my jaw.

  Talk about psychosomatic, I chuckled to myself, in the superior, humorless way of one who considers herself a summa cum laude graduate of therapy. Except this was genuine pain. Because I knew only half of my medical history, this could be It: the inevitable heart attack brought on by Morris/Moscowitz myocardial infarction genes. And all those years I brooded over cancer and schizophrenia.

  Pushing back from the desk, I hauled myself up, or as up as I could manage. I probably looked like Quasimodo in a lavender sweater. But standing, I could drop dead and be noticed instead of quietly decomposing in the chair. My heart rushed on faster and faster, as it tried to make me understand: This is the Big Good-bye. They’d find my ID and call In Depth and Gloria Howard would volunteer to track down my father. How would Tatty find out? From Four, whose favorite daily reading was the obituaries? Hmmm, looks like little Amy died Wednesday. Would Gloria think to call John and let him know? Would Tatty? Would my father have the brains or the money or even time enough away from Fern to arrange a funeral? Would anyone think to call a rabbi?

  I must have stood for three or four minutes, now drenched with sweat, fearing postmortem humiliation as well as death; a librarian filling out the “Dead Body on Premises” form would spot chocolate dribbles and note I’d been sneaking food. My mind went blank at that point until—who knows how many minutes later?—the pain began to abate. The pressure in my chest eased, too. Sixty grams of protein were finally moving.

  I sat back down for a few minutes, just in case. I was okay. Psychosomatic. I moved on then, albeit gingerly, up the library’s grayed staircase and into yet another research room. Not dead yet. I put my fingers on my wrist and glanced at my watch, but I was too rattled to remember my normal pulse rate.

  I checked the shelves, and hefted a book of Kings County residential properties over to a long table. Selly and Rose, I discovered, owned a six-bedroom house on Wakehurst Road. In another book I read: “built 1898.” I sat straight and motionless in the spine-hating discomfort of the wooden library chair.

  Well, not totally motionless. Apparently, I was compulsively clicking my pen. I knew this because an old guy down the table from me was kind enough to hiss, “Could you ssstop with the pen?” I muttered, “Sorry,” but before I could get back to “built 1898,” I realized he was still glaring at me. I glared back. He was wearing an orange and brown plaid shirt, the loveliness of which was only enhanced by a bolo tie, that hideous s
tring thing worn by antifeminist senators from the southwest. The bolo’s fastener, in the shape of a steer’s skull, was larger than the guy’s Adam’s apple, though smaller than his nose. As I knew he would, Bolo blinked first, then got up from the table and disappeared. I went back to the listings and reread “six bedrooms.”

  Had the Moscowitzes known about me? My God! All that real estate. All that money! Yet my mother—Phyllis—had turned her back on it and run off to be with Chicky. I waited for an insight into what had made her leave them, and later leave me. Maybe I’d have a genuine epiphany.

  Not even an ersatz epiphany. Instead, my old sense of feeling fucked returned. It wasn’t that John F. Kennedy, Malcolm in the Middle cosmic realization that life is unfair. Cosmic was never my style. As a kid, I’d focused all my anger onto my socks. I had two pairs—one to wear, one to wash out and dry. Sitting in the library, the socks came back. All I could see was the old bathroom sink in Grandma Lil’s apartment. Its porcelain was worn off so the area around the drain always looked filthy.

  Now that familiar picture joined with a new vision. Split screen. On one side, there I was age ten, tenderly soaping the back of the sock, so that the cat’s cradle of cotton threads, all that separated Achilles tendon from sneaker, wouldn’t rip. Beside it, the image of another girl’s hand—young Phyllis’s—trying to yank open a drawer that was almost impossible to open, overstuffed as it was with cashmere socks.

  Every time I asked, Grandma Lil told me she didn’t have the money for more socks. Nevertheless, she herself was in good shape, having heisted enough sheer and textured panty hose and knee-highs to take care of all the Rockettes. But she couldn’t be bothered to lift a third pair of socks for me. Maybe she believed a well-bred young lady ought to steal her own footwear.

  Knowing this train of thought would go no place fast, I shoved my notepad into my fanny pack and handed in the real estate records. Outside the library, in all my sweaters, I sat on the nonsmokers’ side of the steps and stared at traffic, watching yellow cabs darting in front of buses, daring them to try something. I began wondering how come, closing in on my thirtieth birthday, I’d never before tried to find out whether Phyllis was still alive.

  Tatty, had she been there, would have said it had been my fear of finding my mother and discovering she was a whore or an asshole, or even whore + asshole. No, I’d argue. What I’d really feared was not finding her, thus dooming myself to spend the rest of my life on a fruitless quest for Phyllis Morris Moscowitz.

  Except, I told myself, that was unlikely. I was a pro. I did this kind of research for a living. The odds were I’d know in weeks, if not days, whether Phyllis was findable. So what had been the big deal? How come I hadn’t tried before?

  Sitting on the stone steps, my butt went numb with cold and my hands got so icy I stuck them in my armpits. I wound up hugging myself. The one person it would make sense to talk to about all this—John, trained in history, the compleat researcher—was out of my life. We used to speak to each other three or four times a day, the Hey–¿Qué pasa? call. One time, on a late afternoon, we’d both said Bored! That was when we started having mini-research races. Like who could come up with the most titillating fact about a president’s sex life in less than sixty seconds. John won in fourteen with President Buchanan, who was reputed to have been lovers with Senator William R. de Vane King. Even if I couldn’t find my mother, John could.

  I could talk to Tatty. Her best-friend status should have made her the hands-down choice to confide in. Except I could write the script of our discussion before it occurred. We’d been going back and forth about our mothers since we were fourteen.

  Who else to talk to? No one. I hugged myself some more, trying to find comfort in the conventional wisdom that no matter how alone I felt, most of the people in the world had it much worse—losing liberty, losing health, losing family, losing a village with the blast of one bomb. So I wound up not only feeling bereft, but guilty for making such a fuss with my good fortune.

  Back inside, I trudged toward the library’s telephone book collection. A ray or two of sunshine was sneaking in between an ancient shade and a window sash. Minuscule particles of disintegrating Cheyenne and Montpelier directories, suspended in the room’s overbreathed air, twinkled in the brightness. I watched them until a kid who was having a bad dreadlock day handed me the 1970 Brooklyn phone book. Within thirty seconds, there it was. Not merely Moscowitz, Selwyn, 925 Wakehurst Rd., but Moscowitz, Phyllis. She’d had her own phone. I waited until the kid whipped it up to find the directories for 1974 through 1980. Only Selwyn. Either Phyllis was dead, hadn’t returned post-Chicky, or came home only to leave again, not staying long enough to get her own listing.

  I got on a computer and did a reverse address search. By 1990, a family named Baptiste owned the house. In 1990, I’d been at Harvard, a freshman with four pairs of socks. One of them was a lamb’s wool that some guy who’d been sleeping with my roommate had left on the floor. After a week of watching those abandoned socks sticking out from under her bed curled like two fat, friendly kittens, I’d picked them up, washed them, and adopted them.

  According to what came up on the screen, the Baptiste family still owned the house. A few minutes later, I also discovered 925 Wakehurst in a street-by-street architecture guide to New York City. The listing called the house “a jewel of a Queen Anne. Shingled. Gabled.” No photograph. But, God, my mother had lived in a jewel! I ran back to my apartment to shower, then stopped at an ATM. From there I got on the subway, the same Brooklyn-bound Q train I always took to Aunt Linda’s.

  People accustomed to journalists—politicians, legislators, performers—can be interviewed over the phone. But I assumed the Baptistes, now residing in the jewel, would require a face-to-face meeting if I was to get anything worthwhile. Fine. Face-to-face was my forte. For whatever reason—being short and therefore viewed as nonthreatening, or being someone whose New York accent made people think she had been born into a family unable to afford premium-package cable TV and was therefore an unassuming person—I could almost always get people to talk.

  I got off nine stops before Sheepshead Bay and found myself in another Brooklyn, in another world entirely. This was not Aunt Linda and Uncle Sparkyville. This was comfortable country. Comfortable was a Grandma Lil word. According to her, refined people didn’t talk about money, but if they did, they used comfortable for those who were well-off, but not stinking rich. Brooklyn’s “comfortable” country was not dot-com-era real estate, as in some ten-thousand-square-foot loft in Soho.

  And it was definitely not old money like Tatty’s family’s endless apartment on Park Avenue. This was a ’hood for successful hardware store owners and pediatricians.

  Their homes were grand but solid Victorians, pleased—though not proud—to show themselves under the cold, brilliant blue March sky. As I went right, left, left again to get to Wakehurst, I noted they stood far back from the sidewalks, discreet, but not so distant as to appear snobbish. If you have legitimate business here, they announced silently, you may come up and ring our chimes.

  But standing in front of 925 Wakehurst Road I couldn’t be discreet. I said, “Holy shit!” and gaped—the whole jaw-dropping, eyes-opening-large business. What a house! Too simple to be called grand, too grand to be charming. Although a part of the facade was obscured by tall evergreens trimmed into large, breastlike mounds, it was clear a huge expanse of front porch must run the length of the house. The entrance was toward the left, but only slightly off, more eye-pleasing than eccentric. However, the door was so deeply shaded by the porch’s green-shingled overhang that it was a leap of faith to believe there was a front door. The second floor was in four separate sections of differing heights. The part farthest to the right was a circular tower with three windows, topped by a cone-shaped turret. As a girl my mother could have played Rapunzel Moscowitz.

  The house’s facade was painted a warm shade equidistant between yellow and white. So were the architectural doodads,
such as the scallops of wood running above all the second-floor windows. Two of the second-story sections had a third floor above them, but despite the varying heights of roofs, 925 had a unity, as all were covered with the same color shingles—a green several tones richer and darker than the overhang above the porch.

  I did that inhale, exhale, inhale, squaring-of-the-shoulders business that female characters do in movies to show they’re feisty or spunky—or some dimpled adjective never applied to men. I felt neither feist nor spunk. My palms were so drippy I kept wiping them on my pants until they looked as though I’d sent only the below-the-knee half to the dry cleaner. I loved this house, but I couldn’t approach it.

  Why am I scared? I asked myself. Certainly from my days at Ivey onward I had visited friends who lived in much grander homes, so I wasn’t afraid of dropping dead from pleasure at the mere sight of a Persian rug. Maybe having always thought of myself as descended from people doomed to shtetls and low-income housing projects—to say nothing of petty crime and grand larceny—I couldn’t assimilate the fact that 50 percent of me came from people who, long before I was born, had achieved such material success.

  Anyhow, since the feisty/spunky thing was still not working, I trudged up the path, climbed the front steps, and rang the front doorbell. It chimed a complicated series of notes: Mahler, for all I knew. I wanted to run.

  “Just a sec,” I heard from somewhere deep in the house. Heavy feet clomped down carpeted stairs, across what was probably a wood floor, and to the front door. On either side of the door were long, skinny rectangles, panels of stained glass. I could vaguely make out a pair of eyes peering through an amber-colored petal of what was either a giant chrysanthemum or a zinnia.

  “Hi!” I offered my adorable, I-almost-have-dimples smile and held up my In Depth credentials to the amber glass. “My name is Amy Lincoln. I’m working on a story.”