Any Place I Hang My Hat Read online

  With luck, the door would open about two inches, naturally with a heavy foot behind it in case I turned out to be an ax murderer. Instead, the door opened wide. A large, middle-aged woman smiled back at me. “Hi!” She was shaped like a packing crate, although a well-groomed one.

  “Ms. Baptiste?” I inquired, handing her my ID. She studied it for a couple of seconds. “I’m a journalist.”

  “Amy Lincoln,” she said. “Any relation to you-know-who?”

  “Dubious.”

  “But who knows, right? Anyhow, I’m Judyann Baptiste. Capital J, no space, lowercase ANN. No E. I’ve heard of ... What’s its name again? Oh, In Depth. You work there?” I nodded. “Come on in,” she said, and led me through a vestibule into a beige living room. Well, not totally beige. The coffee table was golden oak, a couple of side tables cherry, and the fireplace mantel mahogany. But the rest of the room looked done by a decorator who’d gotten a kickback on a few thousand bolts of beige silk.

  I knew I had to say something, so I said: “A beautiful room.”

  “It’s monochromatic,” she said. Her voice was softer than she was, with the initial gentleness many heavy women present, unspoken amends for taking up so much space.

  “You have lovely taste.”

  “Thank you. Please, have a seat.” She swept her arm, giving me a choice of most of the furniture in the room. While her clothes—camel-colored pants and a beige twinset—also qualified as monochromatic, Judyann Baptiste was more vivid. Her hair and eyes were black, her skin a lovely pale olive, her lips bright red. It was a Mediterranean face that could have come from anywhere from Spain to Syria, though I put my money on Greece. Being a huge fan of any women’s mag article or TV show that featured makeovers, I immediately wanted to make her toss out the beige and buy a new wardrobe in jewel colors: ruby, sapphire, emerald.

  “Can I offer you anything?” she continued, her voice growing more confident. “I’ve got a full refrig. Tons of cheeses, berries like you wouldn’t believe. Cut-up cantaloupe.” I was on her turf now. She smiled, showing an endearing gap between her front teeth. “My husband likes to see a full refrig when he gets home, you know? He opens the door, grabs something Atkins-y, pours himself a glass of wine. I buy those half bottles, because for my money, you should throw out any wine that’s more than two days old. More than one day old, if you want the truth. Oh, and you name the diet soda, I’ve got it. I could start a diet soda museum.”

  Knowing I’d be suspect if I didn’t eat something, I asked for a small piece of cheese and a Diet Coke. Naturally, she came back with a rattan tray with four types of cheese, a fan of crackers, and a one-liter Diet Coke along with two hefty tumblers, one with ice, one without. I loved nurturing women like this, human cornucopias. I bit into a piece of cheddar and wished I’d grown up in this house. Not as a Moscowitz. They’d produced Phyllis. As a Baptiste, though I’d convert to Judaism, which would turn out to be fine with Judyann.

  “Great cheddar,” I told her. So she wouldn’t have time to get a word in edgewise, I added: “I’m working on a piece, and the people who used to own this house—Moscowitz—may have some information that would be useful to me as background.”

  Her red mouth drooped. “It’s not about the house?”

  “No. God, would that be a dream assignment.” To make sure I stayed in her good graces, I spread some goat cheese on a cracker. Maybe sheep cheese. “Did you ever meet the Moscowitzes?”

  “A couple of times. You know how it is. You look at a house once, then you have to go back to make sure you’re not reading the kitchen from another house onto this one, or whether the master bath is actually in the bedroom or if you have to go out into the hall, which would not be for me. Oh, and I think Gene—my husband—came another time with the broker, but that was to check the basement. What’s the point of making a bid if a place is falling apart from the bottom up?”

  “You’re right.”

  “But it was a while ago. Let’s see, we’ve lived here ... whatever. Fourteen, fifteen years. My husband would know. I always tell him, ‘You’re math, I’m verbal.’ ”

  “Do you know where the Moscowitzes”—I glanced at my notepad, which I knew was blank—“Rose and Selwyn—moved to?”

  “Three guesses, but I’ll give you a clue. Florida.”

  “Do you happen to know where in Florida?”

  “I’m pretty sure Boca. But that was before half of New York moved there. People were still calling it Boca Raton.”

  “Did Mr. Moscowitz retire? I know he was in the bike business.”

  “Right. He retired. Emphysema, I think.” Judyann put her index and middle fingers to her red lips as if she were holding a cigarette. She blew the imaginary smoke out slowly, through pursed lips, as though she herself still missed it.

  “Do you have any idea if they’re alive?”

  “Well, the people next door, the Kleins ...” she gestured toward the left with her chin “... kept in touch. I think they even visited them down there. Now they’re in Florida too, but I don’t think in Boca. Someplace else.” Before she could go on, I got the Kleins’ first names, Lawrence and Naomi, although I learned everyone called her Cookie. “But they only moved a year or so ago, so I guess I would have heard something. Cookie loved to talk. Talk, talk, talk. Not nasty gossip. Just—What do they call it? A yenta. Knows everybody’s business, tells everybody’s business.”

  “Before we get to what Cookie may have told you, what were your thoughts on the Moscowitzes, the couple of times you met them?”

  “Nice. She was tall, on the slim side. A little clothes-horsey. I mean, who wears those cuff kind of bracelets in their own house? Blondish. Receding chin. He was short and dumpy. I remember saying to Gene, ‘Can you imagine that guy riding a bike?’ Well, I guess he didn’t have to ride them, just sell them.”

  I made a couple of notes just to show how seriously I was taking her opinion, then asked: “What were they like in terms of personality?”

  “He was friendly. Like you’d expect from someone who’s essentially a salesman. But when it came to dollars and cents, tough. To be fair, my husband’s that way too. I was so scared during the negotiations that we wouldn’t get the place. I mean, this is my dream house. But at the closing, Selly Moscowitz and Gene were acting like old friends. Both of them probably thought they got the better of the deal.”

  “And Rose Moscowitz?”

  “Smart. Even though she had a college degree, she told me she never stopped taking courses. At Brooklyn College and LIU. Philosophy, Italian. Or maybe Italian philosophy.” She shrugged. “I guess Italians have philosophers.” Petrarch came to mind, quickly followed by Pico and Pomponazzi, but I shrugged back the impulse to comment. “She was okay. I mean, not the warmest person in the world, but not not-nice. More than polite. Maybe it’s that she really didn’t have much of a personality. Oh, I think she may have had some work.” She pointed both index fingers toward her chest. “I don’t get it. She should have gotten a chin implant, not breasts. They looked so unnatural. And if she was so philosophical, why would she get plastic surgery? She had a modelish figure. It looked like she’d glued a couple of tennis balls to her chest. Well, bigger than tennis balls, but I’m not much for sports.”

  I opened the Diet Coke and poured it into the no-ice glass. “Do you remember if you ever got a forwarding address for them? Or a number to call if you had any questions about ... I don’t know. Air-conditioning or the plumbing?”

  “Do you want some lemon or lime with your soda?” Judyann inquired.

  “No thanks.”

  I was going to push her about a forwarding address again, but she stood, a somewhat slow but not undignified process: “Give me a couple of minutes,” she said. “I wrote something somewhere... .” In a moment, she was out of the living room, climbing the stairs. I wanted to yell at her: Hey, are you crazy, leaving a total stranger alone in your house? Instead, I leaned forward and stared at the fireplace. The ceiling was incredibly high, so I
figured the fireplace had to be nine or ten feet tall. The mahogany mantel was carved with flowers and birds and held up by columns. Above the ledge of the mantel, more carving framed a huge mirror. At the very top was a cornice with a long-necked bird—egret, heron, crane, whatever—rising, as if to fly off to Manhattan.

  It was so easy to picture myself in this house. On a school snow day, stretched out before a fire, reading, now and then dipping into a bowl of popcorn. What had been so awful in this wonderful house to make Phyllis take flight, get into a stolen car, and drive off with a guy like my father? Sexual or emotional abuse, the contemporary justification for all antisocial acts in B movies and B-minus fiction? Had she been a reckless kid? An incorrigible? Clearly she’d savored Chicky’s two-bit criminality. She’d enjoyed hanging with the mob guys he knew. And if he was telling the truth about her stealing the diamond ring and then setting him up to take the rap, then she was also a considerably more effective criminal than he was.

  “I’ve got it!” Judyann called out. As I’d flown off to Moscowitzland, leaving the Baptistes behind, I tried not to look startled by her sudden reappearance. She waved a black-and-white notebook. “Everything about the house, including ...” She sat beside me, riffled through the pages, and handed it to me. ROSE MOSCOWITZ, it said, all in tiny capitals so perfect they didn’t seem handwritten. An address on Orchid Lake Drive in Boca Raton. A phone number.

  I copied them down. “Thank you,” I said. “This is a huge help. Just one more question.” She nodded, happy to keep me there. She was either very friendly or very lonely: maybe both. “When you were looking at the house—When was that again?”

  She chewed her bottom lip. Some red lipstick stuck to the bottom of her two front teeth. “Let me see. Nineteen eighty-something. My youngest, Karen ... She’s calling herself Kerri now, K-E-R-R-I. She went off to college in September of eighty-seven. Everyone thought we were crazy, buying this house after our kids were grown, but we loved it, so we said, ‘Why not?’ We started looking in the summer of eighty-seven, which means we bought it in ... I think April of eighty-eight.”

  I calculated: If Phyllis had run off in 1972 at age sixteen, then she’d been born in 1956, which would make her thirty-two when the Baptistes bought the house. Well, it was worth a shot. “The Moscowitzes had a daughter. Phyllis, I think her name was. When you were here, looking at the house, did you happen to meet her?”

  Judyann shook her head. “No. I don’t think they ever mentioned a daughter.” I clicked my pen and the point retracted. “That was why it was so funny.”

  “What?”

  “About three or four years ago, the doorbell rings, and it’s this woman. She says she was looking at her roots or for her roots or whatever and that she was the Moscowitzes’ daughter.”

  “Phyllis?”

  She shook her head.

  “Veronica?”

  “I don’t remember. Her last name wasn’t Moscowitz anymore, but I have no idea what it was. I invited her in. It was a weekend. Gene was off playing golf. Anyhow, I gave her the tour of the house.”

  “Did she seem familiar with it?” I asked.

  “Oh, completely. It’s funny. She even showed me—well, there actually is a secret staircase that you get to through the linen closet. It goes down into this little butler’s pantry off the kitchen. I told her I never knew it existed. She said her parents never knew either. She and her friends found it one night.”

  I clicked the pen again, but couldn’t think of anything to write. My mother must have been in her early forties then, when she rang the Baptistes’ doorbell. “What did she look like?” I asked.

  “Well, she wasn’t tall like her mother. Petite, actually. Pretty. Wearing a shawl or something. A little artsy but very presentable. More than that, actually. Uh, red hair, what they call Titian, that dark red. I really can’t remember anything more about her.”

  “Did she seem intelligent?”

  “Yes. She reminded me of Rose Moscowitz in that way. I mean, they didn’t look that much like mother-daughter. Except they were both a little too serious. Even when the daughter showed me the staircase, I remember, there wasn’t any sign of ... I don’t know. Mischief.”

  “Did she say where she lived?” I asked softly.

  “One of the suburbs,” Judyann said. “I’m ... I guess about seventy-five-percent sure. Maybe she didn’t say it, but I have that distinct impression.”

  “A suburb of New York?”

  “A suburb of New York.”

  Chapter Eight

  I SQUINTED, BUT still couldn’t find Tatty in Blue J’s. The place was an ersatz olde neighborhood saloon in the East Seventies. A brass foot rail ran along the long, dark bar, although it looked more like aluminum tubing in the dim lighting. The bar itself, the few tables, and the four booths in back were a blackened wood that had been either tap-danced on or distressed—a process said to involve beating wood with chains to give it age and character. The place had opened one balmy June night in 1990, just in time for a new generation of boarding-and day-school teenagers with fake IDs to claim it as their own. Outsiders called the place a preppy bar. Whatever the description, it was a place where privileged New Yorkers could get bagged and vomit with their own kind.

  The same crowd was still there, only older, minus those who had either gotten married or serious. After the breakup of each of her marriages, Tatty headed right back to Blue J’s and took up right where she had left off. All the old crowd did. In her case, it meant running into one or both of her ex-husbands whenever she walked in, but that potentially sticky circumstance was handled gracefully, if not painlessly.

  Among the newly divorced, Blue J etiquette dictated standing at least five feet from a former spouse and going about your business as if he or she were not there. About a half year after signing the final papers, it was expected that the acrimony had diminished sufficiently that you both could manage the private school salute: jaw dropping in feigned wonderment/delight along with a How-are-you flapping of four fingers (thumb at a ninety-degree angle, at ear-canal level). The entire greeting could be executed in not more than a single second.

  When I finally found Tatty, I asked, “Can you tell me why you claim to be supercautious about your drinking—”

  “Hello.”

  “Hello. Anyway, your claim—”

  “I don’t claim,” she replied. “I am.”

  “For once in your life will you let me get a complete sentence out?”

  “You just did.”

  “Tell me why, Tatty, if you don’t want to wind up like, you know, your parents—”

  “You mean alcoholic?”

  “Why is it that you’re here four or five times a week?”

  “It’s where everybody goes. I have one, repeat one, Lillet au citron, see what’s new, and then go on to wherever I’m going.”

  “But if you want to avoid the sort of people who puke on their coral suede Tod driving moccasins and make idiot conversation, why come here? Don’t you think it’s an odd coincidence that you, Ms. Almost-Temperance, met both husbands in a bar?”

  “You know that Bobby was in my dance class when I was eleven. And Roy was only tending bar here to support himself while he wrote his screenplay.”

  “Tatty, they both were serious drinkers.”

  “Amy, they could have a few drinks, but they weren’t alcoholics. Trust me, I know better than anyone what alcoholics look like and neither of them was it.”

  I had never liked Blue J’s and went there only to meet Tatty. I’d always worked three part-time jobs during the academic year—the usual: restocking library shelves, waitressing. For three summers I was a flagman with a Boston road construction company that paid union wages. Whenever I came back to New York, spending money on margaritas was not on my to-do list.

  Also, early on, I recognized that the people in Manhattan I wanted to be with weren’t frittering away their intellectual and financial resources at a bar, chugging Sam Adams or sipping martinis, a
ttempting wit while describing their hangovers from the previous night’s drinking.

  I glanced around. From the end of their adolescences to the beginning of their thirties, Blue J loyalists only set one foot in the outside world. The other remained glued to the brass rail. No job, no lover, no cause could bring them the satisfaction of being one of the chosen who got the flapping fingers, the two-cheek kisses, the I cannot believe how fucking fabulous you look at Blue J’s.

  The only time half of them did anything—say, went to the theater or a ball game—was if a play or team was so hot that tickets were unavailable. Then they simply shelled out quadruple to a scalper. Charities got money, never time. I couldn’t understand why their contempt for the city’s real life got to me: maybe because I’d worked so damned hard to be something and the Blue J’s clique acted as though being something was nothing.

  Also, whenever I walked into the place—at age seventeen on Christmas break from Ivey or now, at twenty-nine—I always got depressed by the women. At least half of them were tall and blond. While I was there, they made me wish I were too. I guess I could have been blond, if not tall, but even the slight temptation to be like them shamed me. Blue J’s was something out of a horror movie in which aliens sucked out your essence and turned you into them. Tatty, meanwhile, patted the undercurled ends of her sprayed-stiff, dark blond hairdo. Being old money allowed her to use visible hair spray. Nouveau riche blond hair had to flutter—if not fly—in a breeze.

  The only advantage I could see to Blue J’s was that once you waved your hellos, you and the person you’d go in there to see could hang at a table or a booth way in the back of a long, rail-road-train-like space and talk freely, protected by the drone of other conversations, wrapped in darkness.

  We sat at a table whose top was the size of the average apple pie. “Why are you in such a sucky mood?” Tatty demanded.

  “My mother.”

  “Your mother?”

  For the next hour or so, I filled her in about my research on the Moscowitzes and my interview with Judyann Baptiste. “You’re getting someplace!” she exclaimed after I’d finished. “Then how come you’re acting as if your best friend died? I’m still here.”