Any Place I Hang My Hat Page 2

  “You call what happened to that restaurant guy ‘roughed up’?” I demanded. “Chicky, he was in the hospital for three weeks.”

  “Yeah? And what did he prove in the end? Huh? He could’ve gotten his tablecloths and aprons and crap from Silvaggio’s Linen Service and not wasted all that time in the hospital.”

  So my upbringing was pretty much left to Grandma Lil, not the brightest bulb on the menorah. However, it was convenient for me to have someone to blame for my preference for schmaltzy movies over exquisite literature, as well as my secret belief that Polyhymnia’s muse-dom should be abrogated in favor of Estée, goddess of makeup. Also, Grandma taught me all the indispensable life lessons she’d garnered from her ladies at Beauté. The best skiing in the world is at Chamonix. The only permissible color for patent leather accessories is black.

  Grandma Lil’s photograph is in a tasteful russet leather frame. Even in my office’s harsh fluorescence, her photo bore no resemblance to me or my father. (God is good.) As a kid, I thought she looked like a relative of the Potato Heads. She had Mrs. P’s Oooh! thick ruby lips, Oh-my-God! eyes, and front-facing ears. Though not Mrs. P’s sweetly dumb demeanor. Grandma could have been the start of a whole new product line, the Supercilious Potato Heads.

  Whenever there was a camera around, Grandma Lil got grander than usual, as though she should be posing for Sargent and photography was a comedown. She’d perform her concerto of sighs, then shrug, acknowledging defeat. After that, she’d spit delicately on her palms and slick down her Dutch girl–style blond hair over her ears. She’d lift her chin, suck in her cheeks, and dilate her already-sizable nostrils. In the photograph, she looks not merely haughty, but also capable of exhaling two grapefruit. In all fairness, however, what look like arrogantly elevated eyebrows could be open to exegesis. Drawn on each day with light brown pencil, they never were in the same place. Their raised position might have indicated disdain or that the bulb on her magnifying mirror had blown.

  Grandma Lil’s blondness? Once every three or four weeks, she’d pocket a bottle of Beauté’s Morning Sun formula. At our bathroom sink, she tried to duplicate the Look that murmured New York socialite. But whether because of ineptitude or some missing secret ingredient, her hair always turned out the brash yellow of egg yolk rather than the pale, high-fat-content French butter blonde of the Ladies.

  Finally, one more Lincoln, Aunt Linda. Breaking stereotype, my father’s sister was a beautiful but dumb brunette. She had married an amiable, handsome fireman who was her intellectual equal. I remember as a kid, whenever they took me somewhere for the day or had me over for a weekend, my jaw would be charley-horsed afterward from smiling. I suppose I was hoping that they’d be so enchanted they’d take me back to Brooklyn to live with them. They didn’t. They never had children, so probably it wasn’t anything personal. In any case, they were only inches from Grandma Lil, in the heart-shaped Lucite frame they’d given me for my twenty-first birthday: Aunt Linda and Uncle Sparky (actually Anthony) Napolitano.

  Oh, my own curriculum vitae: By age fourteen, I sensed a change of scenery might be salutary. Chicky was still in the big house. With each visit, I grew unhappier about the lulls in our conversation. How come we couldn’t kid around anymore? With each visit, I’d get more revolted by the stink of the inmates. Eventually, whenever I climbed onto the bus to go up to Sing Sing, I was already nauseated. With each visit, I’d get more leers, more tongues ostentatiously trailing over lips, more rasping queries—“You bad girl?”—from the prisoners and their visitors, to say nothing of the guards.

  Back home, two of my good friends from school, Alida and Lucy, both smart girls, dropped out to take care of their babies. Another, Jade, left to support her family. She was earning fifty bucks a head performing fellatio on homebound New Jersey commuters who would have otherwise gotten peevish during the usual thirty-minute wait to get into the Holland Tunnel. Some other girl, a couple of years ahead of me, became paranoid from a crack overdose and wound up stabbing her sister to death.

  Around that time, my social worker, Joan Murdoch, mentioned that some of the best New England boarding schools were looking for girls from poor families. “What for?” I demanded, immediately seeing myself on my knees in a scullery maid’s outfit—minus the singing mice and a fairy godmother.

  “They want their students to get to know all different types of people—”

  “Like one of those Rich or poor, black or white, Native American, Asian, we’re all one big American family who accepts each other’s differences videos?”

  “Partly, but—”

  “They always play ‘My Country, ’Tis of Thee’ and show five million faces, but—I swear to God—they use the same Orthodox rabbi in every one.”

  “Don’t interrupt me, Amy. They also know they’re lucky to have such wealth. They think it’s only fair to give some promising girls from low-income families the opportunity to get the same education rich girls get.”

  “What’s the catch?”

  “Well,” she said slowly, “you wouldn’t be living at home during the school year—” Sold!

  My guidance counselor at Intermediate School 495 genuinely believed I could do well anywhere, but she asked: “How about Bronx Science, Amy? I don’t know if you’d be comfortable at a place like ... Ivey-Rush.” Yes, that Ivey-Rush. Even I knew about it. But then, for years I’d been reading the copies of Town and Country Grandma Lil swiped from her job. I knew from boarding schools.

  So I said to my guidance counselor: “Don’t worry, Ms. Buonavitacola. If I get in, I’ll be fine.”

  The brochure was printed on shiny paper so thick it didn’t squeak: Located in the serene and verdant Connecticut Valley, the Ivey-Rush Academy was founded in 1903 by Susannah Ivey and Abigail Rush. These two young graduates of Mount Holyoke College were determined “to provide young women with an education as rigorous as that offered to young men.”

  Serene sounded good. As far as the verdancy business went, the only things not green in the brochure’s photographs were Tuttle Chapel (redbrick) and the students (white and yellow, as well as browns ranging from beige to mahogany), although once I got there I realized that about two-thirds of the nonwhites in the photo must have been hired for the day from some Diversity, Our Specialty model agency).

  Joan Murdoch helped me fill out the application. When we finished, I told her that if I were half as gifted as all my teachers raved I was, I had a shot. She agreed. Once Grandma Lil discovered she would still be my legal guardian and that my going away would not jeopardize her monthly check from the City of New York, she signed her name to my application in the rounded, overlarge letters of the semiliterate.

  With the application, I submitted a heart-wrenching essay about visiting Chicky in prison: “Father’s Day” was full of shocking language—in quotation marks, to assure the admissions committee that I, personally, wasn’t the kind of girl who’d say “cocksucker.” Having the typical fourteen-year-old’s penchant for the lurid, I filled it with graphic descriptions of disgusting smells, oozing sores, plus wails from junkie girlfriends begging for money. Ivey-Rush was thrilled with such a well-phrased account of degradation. And to show you how refined they were, when the first alumna interviewer discovered that Amy Lincoln, the leading candidate for the year’s Fahnstock Scholarship—the school’s guarantee of at least one black face in the class photograph—was white, not only did she do a reasonably good job of hiding her dismay, she recommended that the admissions committee let me in. Graciously, they designated me a “full needs” student, which meant all fees, room, board, and books plus ten dollars a week spending money were on the house.

  But to get back to work, and to the Democrats: A waiter was offering tiny circles of pumpernickel overlaid with curls of smoked salmon, which in turn were topped by minuscule twirls of créme fraîche. Most of the guests appeared to be going through the predictable internal debate—How much sodium how many calories how many carbs can this three-quarter-inch canapé con
tain?—before wolfing down a few.

  Senator Thom Bowles declined the hors d’oeuvres without a second’s consideration and remembered to flash a fast, egalitarian, vote-for-me smile at the waiter. The candidate had been to enough parties like this that he knew even slightly salty salmon could cause dry mouth; caviar was also a no-no, not just because of its salinity, but because a really fine Beluga might turn his teeth gray.

  By this time, it was a little after eight-thirty on a Monday night late in February. The sleet and hail beating against the windows sounded like hundreds of angry women tapping acrylic nails. I had spent the afternoon with the senator’s top adviser on taxes, mostly in a dark conference room, drinking a dangerous amount of Diet Dr Pepper to keep myself from getting comatose as I studied her graphs and pie charts. My pantsuit itched and I was so tired I felt my immune system was compromised. Lichen could grow on the insides of my cheeks and over my tongue.

  At that point, it occurred to me that I ought to get the hell out of the fund-raiser, get home, and go to bed. Any details I’d forgotten? I knew that the footwear king’s name was Harlan Kleinberg, but I had to get his wife’s first name, though it was dubious that I would mention them in the article. Still, if I did I wasn’t going to be able to refer to her as the Missus. I headed toward her, figuring she was just the type to have an annoying name—Tawnee Blankenship-Kleinberg—when I heard a voice above the Manhattan murmur of the guests. I turned and saw a guy at the door. He was about nineteen. Clean-cut, but not overly so, not like those kids who try to grab you in airports. He wore jeans and a sweatshirt with CCNY, City College of New York, in an arc across his chest. His black hair was soaked into a tight cap from the weather and sparkled with flecks of hail that had not yet melted. Café-with-a-lot-of-lait skin. Built small, one of those mini-men who make the average woman standing beside him appear the size of a Thanksgiving Day parade balloon.

  “I’m here to see the senator,” the kid was telling the Missus and a man who looked like he might have difficulty spelling cat. I assumed the latter was part of Bowles’s security detail. Even though the CCNY guy didn’t appear nuts, the Missus and Security seemed to be blocking his entrance. Their heads, however, were turned away from him, toward the living room, as if seeking instruction on what to do. I figured the kid might be a too-enthusiastic Bowles Brigade volunteer. “I said”—his voice got louder, though not aggressively so—“I’d like to see Senator Bowles, please.” I strolled toward the front door until I was about four feet from him. He glanced at me, at my press ID, then immediately looked back at the guests. “Senator Bowles,” he announced. Really loud.

  Well, he caught the attention of everyone in that endless living room. Forty or fifty people in four-hundred-dollar shoes swiveled in a single direction: toward the door. They then spread out, opening up like a line of chorus cuties, with Thom Bowles having the star tapper’s center spot. He stood still. Although I was too far away to really be sure, it seemed to me I could read something out of the ordinary in the movement of his eyelids. Flicker, flicker, flicker, flicker, fast as a strobe. CCNY, though unsmiling, had the pleasant expression of someone selling Boy Scout cookies. So what was the senator’s blinking business? Fear? I couldn’t stop thinking: Wow! Could this be my dream? A sensational story?

  Sure, I worked for In Depth. Yet now and then I’d sensed in myself the instincts of a tabloid reporter. Any sign of Crash! Clash! Conflict! was music to my ears. Unfortunately, the magazine’s unofficial motto was Shhhh! Anyhow, my gut began screaming out to myself: Shit! Why can’t you keep a disposable camera in that abyss of a backpack? My intellect then reminded me that in this era of almost incessant visual excitation, only In Depth deliberately stayed away from the cutting edge.

  Now all eyes were riveted on the kid except mine, which were on Thom Bowles. From where I was, near the front door in the vast entrance gallery, the senator’s sun-dried face was growing redder. Cut the crap, I told myself. He’s not afraid, he’s perfectly ... And if he seems afraid, well, what candidate these days can endure even the pop of a champagne cork without a shudder?

  Suddenly, Bowles’s stick of an index finger began stabbing the air in a forward direction. Out! A vicious stab. Get that kid out of here! Except CCNY and I were probably the only ones who saw it, as everyone else’s eyes were fixed on the kid. Out! Out! OUT! the finger shouted. I turned back to the kid. No twirling eyeballs. No threatening gestures. Certainly no weapon. Just another college guy who chose that moment to cry: “I am Senator Thomas Bowles’s son!”

  Which was interesting because Senator Bowles and his wife only had two daughters.

  Chapter Two

  DAMN IT, YOU’RE not from one of those square states, are you?” my best friend demanded.

  “You know I’m not.”

  “So?”

  “So,” I repeated, “what do you want to hear?”

  “Meaningful New York gossip might be nice. Or something street-smart.” Charlotte’s Yums, the Upper East Side haven for foodies, had the peachy illumination generally found in the ladies’ rooms of restaurants catering to dames who were not only grande, but riche. Tatiana Damaris Collier Brandt stood in a terra-cotta-tiled aisle and looked back at a small flask of viscous golden liquid. It sparkled in her hand and resembled an extraterrestrial elixir from one of the old Star Treks—tranya or something, though Tatty had explained it was an essence of lemon and blood orange she was contemplating using in her work.

  Having flunked out of three colleges and two marriages, she had turned a pastime, baking, into a career. She made and decorated cakes for her fellow bluebloods and in-the-know social climbers and charged anywhere from two thousand to eighteen thousand dollars. A single hundred would buy you one breathtaking cupcake, a minuscule Eden, although she insisted on hiding Adam’s schlong behind a buttercream calla lily.

  “That boy who broke into the fund-raiser,” she went on. “What was his con or scam or whatever you call it?”

  “His scam?” I asked. Tatty was excited, which in her case meant blinking twice in ten seconds and clearing her throat.

  “Everybody’s talking about it. You were near the door when he came in. Right?”

  “Right.”

  “And you had no thought of impending danger?” she demanded.

  “Danger from what? A surface-to-air missile?”

  Tatty and I had been best friends from the evening of our second day at Ivey-Rush. She was seated down from me at the same long table in the refectory. In conversation with another girl, though looking right in my direction, she referred to me, not at all sotto voce, as the “poor little poor girl.” Somehow I executed a Jackie Chan-type leap over the table and punched her in the mouth, knocking out her left lateral incisor and splitting her lip. This soon got the headmistress’s attention. She handled the situation by promptly making us roommates.

  “This boy could have been a danger,” Tatty remarked. She was fond of drama performed by others.

  “Give me a break.”

  When she thought she was being misunderstood or ignored, Tatty spoke with irritating slowness, each consonant distinct. Her next sentence emerged as if she were dictating to substandard voice-recognition software: “Didn’t you get the impression something was wrong?”

  “No.” I was the fast-talking New Yorker. “Nothing was wrong. It was a lousy night, so he’d been rained and sleeted on. As far as I could tell, he seemed like a normal nineteen- or twenty-year-old City College wet person who, for all I know, will graduate, make billions, and become a perpetually dry person with an umbrella-toting chauffeur, thus underscoring the accessibility of the American dream.”

  “Your American dream, not mine,” Tatty muttered.

  “Your American dream dropped dead in 1929, but you’re all too self-centered to notice.”

  The kid who’d crashed the fund-raiser had vanished, but his claim about being Senator Bowles’s son was all over town. Country, too. The Today show had an exclusive with Bowles’s wife, Jennifer, who
, when pressed, conceded to Katie that she believed it was possible the intruder had been dispatched by certain political interests to tarnish her husband’s reputation and silence his progressive voice. But which interests? Treacherous Democrats who wanted Lefty Bowles out now, more than a year before the Super Tuesday primaries? Unscrupulous Republicans who’d swoop down and attack any Democrat? Jen Bowles didn’t know. And no, she wasn’t making accusations. The intruder could have been a random unbalanced person. The senator’s wife wore a peach-colored twinset, a peach and blue plaid scarf, and crystalline tears in her sky blue eyes.

  The other morning shows had featured the senator’s campaign manager, Moira Fitzgerald, a woman around forty built along the lines of a Hummer. In her trademark turtleneck of kelly green, Irish eyes unsmiling, she offered a more scathing version of the conspiracy theory.

  “I hate to disappoint you, but the whole incident lacked drama,” I told Tatty. I followed her trench coat past the mustard department and around the olive oils as she moved into the produce section. Amethyst grapes, emerald mangos, and ruby plums were displayed and lit like gems in Cartier’s. Any fruit larger than a strawberry rested on its own fluted, white paper cup.

  “How could it be undramatic?” she inquired as she picked up some new, green fruit. A plum? A hairless kiwi? “You were standing in the entrance foyer. That person pushed his way in and made the accusation about Thom Bowles. Didn’t you sense danger? Or at least feel any excitement?” I took the green fruit from her hand and bit into it. Plum-like and somewhere between mealy and mushy. I wanted to spit it out, but I was stuck. Tatty went on: “What I don’t understand is why your nerve endings weren’t twitching, you, who grew up in the bowels of this city.”

  I swallowed the plum glob. “Stop with the fecal imagery. I’m eating.”