Any Place I Hang My Hat Read online

  “You were the one who always said trying to find my mother was a lousy idea.”

  “It was lousy when the mere thought of it put you in a snit for two weeks. But now I’m for it because you’re for it. You’re engagé. Not that I can tell it from the way you’re acting. What you’re doing is stuff that arises out of ... whatever. An emptiness. It’s sort of brave. Or maybe it’s that you simply have to know one way or the other.” She paused for a minute and toyed with a Plexiglass frame that held a card featuring dreadful cocktails in garish hues, including blue, that nobody had ever ordered. The card’s colors had dimmed over the years, not from exposure to light, for there was almost none, but because no one had ever bothered to wipe the thousands of accumulated fingerprints off the Plexi. “So with all this fabulously interesting stuff you’re doing, why are you being so snappy?”

  “Do you mean snappish?” I asked. “Like irritable?”

  “Irritable? Either you have the world’s worst PMS or it’s still all about John.”

  “It is not about John. And PMS-wise, all I ever do is bloat up slightly. Two pounds’ worth, tops, and you know it.”

  “You’re lying about either PMS or John, but that’s not my business.” We sat in the noisy silence of the bar. “You’re the one who always says talking helps,” she tried.

  “Oh, one thing more about my grandparents,” I said. “Unless you’d rather discuss my bloating.”

  “Go ahead.” Her shrug of indifference wasn’t convincing.

  “No Selwyn or Rose Moscowitz came up on the websites of either the Sun-Sentinel or the Palm Beach Post. Those are the two newspapers I figured would cover the Boca area. So I made a couple of calls down there to see if they had anything in their library.”

  “And?”

  “And I spoke with two editors, did the professional courtesy waltz.”

  “What’s that?”

  “I know how busy you must be but I’d appreciate it if you could possibly ... blah, blah, blah.”

  “Did either of them ever hear of In Depth?”

  “Yes, Tatty.” Because it wasn’t about food or fashion, Tatty never read the magazine, although she subscribed and looked at my byline. Because she had no interest in it, she assumed nobody else did either and thought of it as an obscure periodical with a national circulation of about four hundred. “The Sun-Sentinel guy found something,” I added.

  “What?”

  “Selwyn Moscowitz died six years ago.”

  “I’m sorry,” Tatty said politely. Then she lifted the slice of lemon garnishing her glass and licked it. “The only thing bad about Blue J’s is they use such ooky old lemons. Did you feel at all bad?”

  “About the late Selwyn?” She nodded and put the garnish on the side of her cocktail napkin, then folded the napkin over it so we could be spared the lemon’s decrepitude. “No, I don’t feel bad about him. How can I feel bad about losing a grandfather I never knew I had?”

  “Everybody has grandfathers,” she replied patiently. In the fifteen years of our friendship, the notion had flitted through my mind once or twice that Tatty was dumb rather than droll. This was the third time.

  “Everybody does have grandfathers,” I agreed. “And everybody has a mother. Do you want to know what the six-year-old obit said about mine?”

  “No. I deeply don’t give a shit.” She made a face as though she were still tasting the lemon, then said: “Of course I want to know!”

  “It says, ‘He leaves his beloved wife, Rose, and a daughter, Véronique.’”

  The times I wasn’t furious at Grandma Lil, or merely wishing her invisible and inaudible, I pitied her so much it was almost an ache. Here was a woman who was so conspicuous about denying what she was—brunette, working class, undereducated, Jewish, uncultured—that she hadn’t a single friend among brunettes, working-class people, et cetera. That might have been bearable, or even a cause for celebration for someone like her, except among those she was trying to emulate, she was considered at best a joke, and at worst, beneath notice.

  So whom did she have? Her husband, Grandpa George, a lox and sturgeon slicer at Ike & Myron’s Smoked Fish Specialties, stopped embarrassing her when, at forty-two, he crossed against a red light and got hit by an M21 bus, which killed him instantly. Her son, Chicky, part-time grease monkey turned felon, couldn’t even manage to get incarcerated at one of those nice, golf-course-y federal prisons where the better class of offenders go. Her daughter, Linda, had curved, two-inch nails polished Pussy Pink and a fireman husband who was, in Grandma Lil’s eyes, unforgivably swarthy.

  All my grandmother had was me. Yet early on, I understood I was not just a burden, but a disappointment. The only story she could ever come up with about my early years was one of vanquished hopes. “You were the cutest baby. You could have been beautiful, except you stayed almost bald.” She’d elongate baaaaaald until about two seconds before I could act on my desire to strangle her. “Once your so-called mother ran off with—do I have to tell you?—the lowest of the low, I put a little hat on you every time I took you out so no one could see. They’d say, Oh, she’s so pretty! Except you used to pull the hat off all the time. You should have seen their faces. Shocked! Then, I swear to God, you’d start to cry.”

  Still, nights when she came home exhausted after waxing the ladies at Beauté and stealing dinner, I felt obliged to keep her company. By age six or seven, I probably intuited the reason for her desperate loneliness was that no one wanted to listen to her.

  For Grandma Lil, there was no reading romance novels or filing supermarket coupons, all those other avocations of ordinary people. What she did do was obsess about Beauté’s clientele, reading gossip columns and wedding announcements as well as committing to memory the photographs of their beautiful rooms and the personality profiles she found in tony magazines. Grandma Lil wanted to learn about what her idols wore to the opera, never what they listened to. So Amy, you know what Mrs. Andrews’s whole name is? Wait, let me try to remember. Uh ... Okay: Leslie Jensen Arundel Andrews. Every one of those names is Old Society. You know how I found out?

  How, Grandma? In moments like this, she got so enthused she forgot her little rule, the one she recited to me at least once a day: Back straight! Chin up, up, up! She would hunch over, her neck thrust forward with eagerness. She reminded me of the sea turtle in the Central Park Zoo, sticking his head out of his shell, greedy for some exciting turtle business that never would happen for him.

  I overheard, because she was laughing about it. She was talking to Elizabeth Stoll—you know, Mrs. Robert Stoll—how come she couldn’t have her whole name printed on her informals—that’s writing paper for, like, not wedding invitations. Little notes. Not letters.

  So all the times I wanted to scream at Grandma Lil that she was repulsive or pathetic, I kept silent. I knew if I cut myself off from her, she would have nobody. She’d probably go mad and I’d wind up in foster care with a Hasidic family in Williamsburg with eighteen children and they’d rename me something hideous, like Schmeel or Kroogele.

  Tatty and I left Blue J’s and had dinner at an Indian restaurant. This was an off night; the chicken tandoori looked like an illustration of dermatitis. I came home feeling, as I sometimes did after being with her, starved for reality. I turned on my computer and read Le Monde, ABC of Madrid, the Times of India, and the Irish Independent online, and got that sitting-in-a-cafe worldly feeling, which, from experience, I knew would be gone by morning. Still, if anyone wanted to talk to me about Iraq for the next twenty-four hours, I wouldn’t sound quite like the American provincial I was.

  By the time I got into bed I’d succeeded in exhausting myself to the point where I was certain sleep was seconds away. But like all the other nights in the week, my head hitting the pillow was the cue for me to start worrying about what would happen if I never met anyone else who was right for me, anyone else I really wanted to go to bed with. If John hadn’t been the most technically proficient guy I’d ever slept with, he def
initely was the most passionate, and that brought it out in me. The whole time we’d been together I’d totally believed it was I who made him wild, that it wouldn’t be the same for him with anybody else, either.

  So as to not think about him, I turned off the lamp and decided to dwell on something I at least could do something about—the search for my mother. The first thing that popped into my mind was a question: How come Grandma Lil had hated Phyllis right from the start? It didn’t make sense.

  Okay, my grandma knew Chicky wasn’t any prize, but at least he’d brought home a girl from a well-off family, someone academically competent—if that talk about a 97-percent average in high school was true. Here was Phyllis, whose mother was always in the market for education. Chances were, then, no matter what Phyllis thought about her own mother, she most likely hadn’t been brought up to sound like a dese-and-dose, gum-cracking slut. Yet Grandma Lil had always vowed, I couldn’t stand her from Day One, that little ... Usually her voice would trail off, but when she was particularly riled up or tired, she’d say that little whore.

  Or did it take one to know one? Not a whore. A phony, someone trying to be something else and failing. Did my mother see through Grandma Lil faster than the two seconds it generally took most people? And did my grandma somehow comprehend that my mother wasn’t some slut Chicky had picked up, but a faux slut, a girl from a background of tasteful bat mitzvahs, summer camp in Maine, bookshelves overburdened with hardcovers?

  If Phyllis had failed at slutdom, was she or was she not now succeeding as Véronique?

  Grampy Selwyn’s obit didn’t say where he was headed. A shady spot in a cemetery? An urn with a frieze of palm trees? I spent most of the day making phone calls. There were a multitude of Moscowitzes in south Florida, and for some reason, many of the places I called had them buried or entombed neither chronologically nor alphabetically by first names, but by some whimsical process I could not discern.

  I was offered a Sherwin Moscowitz as well as a couple of Seymours in the Boca area, but it wasn’t until four in the afternoon that I finally located him at, or in, Menorah Gardens in West Palm Beach. I wasn’t sure if this move from Boca was upward, downward, or sideways on the social mobility scale. It was pretty much a wasted day, because Véronique was not the one who had paid for perpetual care of the grave site; it was Rose. However, my new friend Dawn in the Menorah Gardens office gave me my grandmother’s address and phone number, and said she’d buy a copy of In Depth. I told her I’d send her one.

  In the evening, I walked across the park and over to John’s neighborhood, West End Avenue, then up to Ninety-seventh for a dinner date I’d made weeks earlier. Erin Leung had been a friend at P.S. 97, though not a close one. Still, she was one of the few kids I’d hung out with back then who’d gone on to complete college. She’d gotten a graduate degree in math from the University of Maryland and now performed arcane manipulations of Asian stock indices for Citibank. She’d also become a total foodie, i.e., a person who thinks green cardamom is a subject for conversation.

  The chances of getting a good meal at Erin’s were fifty-fifty. It could be something elegant and delicious featuring shredded duck, or something horrifying based on the latest food fad. One year it was a vertical pile of frisée, smoked cheeses with a vague aroma of dead protoplasm, and roasted tomatoes. Another time it was some sort of lilliputian crab you were supposed to eat, carapace and all; I might as well have been chewing a fish-scented fingernail, although it wasn’t quite that appealing.

  This time, I smelled something garlicky and good. I rang the doorbell feeling hopeful. And indeed, Erin informed her five friends gathered for dinner that Neapolitan cuisine was making a really, really huge comeback. We had pasta and potato soup, and a meat dish I liked until I learned it was fried rabbit. We sat around the table, arguing about the war until ten-thirty. The three guys there, all single, were about as enticing as the fried rabbit. I didn’t get all choked up saying good-bye.

  With all the people I knew, from the projects through Ivey-Rush, Harvard, Columbia, and work, I could spend all the nights of my life having evenings like this. Little suppers in apartments and, as one or two of us got not only older but richer, town houses. Dinners à deux at restaurants with something low and tight to display cleavage and booberage. Or I could go to a play or concert or movie, with or without company.

  I stopped to get some gum to get the remnants of rabbit out of my teeth, and walked home, not through the park.

  The first thing I did each night when I got back to my apartment was call my voice mail, just in case someone had phoned in the fifteen minutes between the last check and turning the deadbolt on the door. Being a control freak, I had different venues for different phone tasks. Calls to Tatty, which tended to be late and long, were made while I was in the bathtub, with handheld between shoulder and chin, until the skin on my fingers started to pucker. Calls from her were received on my couch, or rather, the apartment’s owner’s couch?bed, as were calls to and from other friends, regardless of gender or sexual preferences.

  I talked to guys I was going out with lying back, my legs draped over the arm of the couch, unless I knew the relationship was doomed, in which case I sat on a pretty wood chair carved for slim-hipped people, which the owner had bought on a trip to Sri Lanka in his Christian Science Monitor days.

  John was in his own category. Our conversations were under the covers, no matter what the topic, from phone sex to the clearly unromantic, like arguing over whether Bush’s religiosity was profound or politically expedient.

  Picking up my phone messages, however, had a business aspect to it, so I adapted a quasi-business posture, sitting on the edge of the couch and leaning sideways to write. I kept a pad and pen on top of a chest the owner used as an end table. Tatty had warned me the piece was antique, probably Korean, and to keep my soda cans off it. Anyhow, I made my call for my messages, expecting the recording to announce: You have no new messages in your mailbox.

  Instead, I heard a familiar male voice say, “Hey, Amy.” My God! I was so startled I slid off the edge of the couch. That sounds comical. It was not. As I went down, my side smashed into the antique chest. An instant afterward, the bottom of my spine slammed onto the floor with a bang that traveled from vertebra to vertebra until it resonated—Boing! Boing!—in my skull. Slowly, I touched my side to see if there was any blood, at the same time trying to catch the breath that departs with a sudden blow.

  All I’d heard was “Hey, Amy,” and then I’d dropped the phone. I tried to reach for it, but recoiled when the pain stabbed me again. With desperation, I drew back the phone with my foot. I screamed as the pain in my side sliced all the way to my center. Then I replayed the message.

  The voice continued: “I had a meeting with the lawyer you sent me to, that Ms. Maller. She was so nice. She told me—” Oh. The physical hurt and the realization I’d sustained injury over Freddy Carrasco, not John Orenstein, made me groan, one of those terrible aaargh! sounds villains in comic books make when they get their just desserts. I touched my side again. No blood. “—some interesting stuff about, you know, about proving paternity. Give me a call if you get the chance. I’m in for the night and I’ll be up till, God, two, three a.m. Otherwise, I’ll leave this message at In Depth, too. Thanks.” Then he gave me his number. As I dialed it, I tried getting up, but it didn’t seem like such a great idea. So I stayed on the floor.

  “You wouldn’t believe how nice she was,” Freddy began. “I mean, tea, coffee, mineral water—sparkling or still. I was so glad I wore a tie and jacket, because this is an office that never heard about dress-down Fridays. Or dress-down, period. I told her I could pay her something, maybe not her usual rates, but she just shook her head, like Totally out of the question.”

  “Nice,” I managed to say. “Did she have any advice?”

  “Basically, there are a couple of ways you can make someone take a test to check DNA for paternity, even if he doesn’t want to. If there’s some written reco
rd that there was a connection between your mother and him. So I sat there, thinking and thinking.” Meanwhile, I was thinking that when I touched my side, it was so painful that I could be bleeding internally. “I told Ms. Maller I doubted it. On the other hand, I never threw out my mother’s stuff. How can you could throw someone’s existence into a couple of Hefty bags? I guess after I have kids and die, they won’t want to pay the fees at the ministorage place for a grandmother they never met.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “So where was I? Oh, my mother’s stuff. My girlfriend and I are going to go through every single one of my mother’s papers over the weekend—or as long as it takes.”

  “Good.”

  “Except who knows if there was anything incriminating? My guess is, my father’s father, when he heard about my mother being pregnant and all, he probably went straight to a lawyer.”

  “Forget probably,” I told Freddy. I tried to shift my position, but that was too hard. Even breathing required concentration because inhalation hurt so much.

  “So the lawyer would have told my grandfather not to put anything into writing, and he would have warned my father not to either.”

  “But if Thom Bowles is your father, he might have written something to your mother before she became pregnant.” I recalled the phrase contemporaneous notes and documents from the Clinton investigation, but didn’t have the energy to remind Freddy about it. Plus this was out of my hands now. Freddy was smart. Also, he now had a smart lawyer. I went on: “You said Mickey Maller mentioned something about there being a couple of ways to go about—”

  “Right. She told me that if I could prove my father provided for my support in any way—or possibly my grandfather—she wanted to look that up. So if there’s some bank record somewhere with a check from William Bryson Bowles or Thomas Bowles to Nina Carrasco, I may be in good shape.” I didn’t have the heart to tell him chances were dubious to nil that a bank would keep routine records for twenty-one years. “I told Ms. Maller if I find anything, or even if not, I’d like for her to call the senator’s lawyer to ask for a DNA test. I mean, I checked out her credentials: Vassar and NYU Law School. A class act. I can’t imagine anyone thinking, Hey, this is a veiled threat of blackmail or something if she makes the call. And you know what? I think she was relieved I wanted her to do it, because that showed I wasn’t trying to extort money, and I wasn’t a crazy stalker.”