Any Place I Hang My Hat Read online

  “Was she in your class?”

  “What? No. I was like nineteen. She was a kid from Brooklyn.”

  “Where did you meet her?”

  “Washington Square Park. See, all the Brooklyn and Queens girls used to come on Friday nights to meet NYU guys. Or maybe poets. So a bunch of us from the project would go up there.”

  “Did she think you went to NYU?”

  “You know, I told her I did. But she didn’t buy it. She was smart.”

  “But she went out with you anyway, I mean, even though you weren’t at NYU?”

  “In my mind, she was a kid looking for excitement. A little, not a lot. So I was what you’d call perfect for her. I’m a nice guy. Basically. Anyhow, that first night ...” For a second, his face softened until it was almost sweet. “... I hot-wired a ’68 Camaro RS. She watched me and was, like, That’s fabulous! She thought it was so cool, stealing cars. I drove her back into Brooklyn and we parked near Coney Island. She didn’t want to go home. But I made her.”

  “Where did she live?”

  “You wouldn’t believe it. The richest part of Brooklyn. In a gorgeous house! Huge. With a giant porch and a really giant tree in front. A four-door Chrysler Imperial in the driveway. Gold, with a white vinyl top. Her old man’s.”

  “What did he do?”

  “I don’t know. Store or stores or something.”

  “What did he sell?”

  “Bikes. You know, like what the little kids ride and regular bikes. I met him once and he wasn’t even polite. I put out my hand. Guess what?”

  “What?”

  “He didn’t shake it. He ignored me, like I wasn’t even there. And he said, ‘Phyllis, get in the house right now!’”

  “Did she?”

  Chicky’s grin took years off him. If not for the dentures and the crow’s-feet, he was a brash, young hoodlum with gooped-up black hair and a lot of personality. “Are you kidding? That wasn’t after the first night we were together. It was maybe a week or two later. I was driving a blue Dodge Charger that day. So she turns her back on her old man, stomps away from us to the car and waits”—he crossed his arms over his chest and sniffed impatiently—“till I come over and open the door for her. And so we’re driving away”—he laughed and shook his head—“and she rolls down her window and gives him the finger.”

  My ice cream was almost melted, so I swallowed a spoonful of green chocolate-chip-mint soup. “What happened then?”

  “Nothing. I brought her over to my mother’s. But Lil said something like, I don’t want no jailbait staying here. Get her the hell out. So my friend Jesús, Uncle Chuy, remember him? His big sister was a shoe buyer at Macy’s and had her own place. Phyllis stayed there a few days, till her old man cooled off.”

  “And then she went home?”

  “Yeah, but she kept getting him super pissed by sneaking out to see me. And then we had that pregnancy scare. That’s when we got married. But then she really did get pregnant, with you. I was thinking, Shit, I’m gonna have to get a serious job when the kid comes along, which, don’t get me wrong, was fine, and then you were born. I got a good job doing intake and exhaust work at this garage on Tenth Avenue, specialized in Fords. Good garage, but you know I’m a Chevy guy: Chevys go, Fords too slow, I always say. But I didn’t say that to my boss. Sometimes he let me drive his Torino GT. Nice, I gotta admit. ‘Sky blue metallic’ was what they called the color. But it was really more like turquoise. If you cared about cars, Amy, you’d go ‘Wow!’”

  “Wow!” I said, and began making two piles of sugar and Sweet’n Low packets, side by side. “So I was born and we were all living in that apartment with Mickey Rat. Then what happened? You stole the diamond ring for my mother?” He closed his eyes. “Chicky, did she ask you to do it?”

  “No.” His voice had a sandpaper edge. Then he looked at me. “I didn’t steal any ring.”

  “Oh. I thought that ...” All my life I’d been told, by Chicky, by my grandmother, by Joan Murdoch, the social worker: My father had taken me and my mother to the diamond district on Forty-seventh Street to look at rings “for fun.” I, who questioned everything, had no reason to question the story that inside a store, while my mother was quieting me down, he’d pocketed a five-carat rock. “You didn’t steal the ring. So where was it? How come you went to prison for grand larceny?”

  He took so long it felt as if we were stuck in an eternity of silence.

  My father leaned forward and grasped the edge of the table.

  “Tell me, Chicky.”

  “No.”

  “If I don’t know, I’ll always feel like I do now. Not empty, but always a little sad, knowing I’ll never be full—a complete person.”

  “Fucking Phyllis stole the ring.”

  “What?”

  He jabbed his finger toward me. “You wanted it, I gave it to you. Okay? So happy birthday.” He swiveled his head searching for the waitress and when he didn’t see her, roared, “I asked for the goddamn check an hour ago!”

  Naturally, everyone in the diner stiffened, that terrified rigidity that comes with thinking, Oh, God, he’s a lunatic and he might have a gun and I want to live so should I duck or will that attract his attention—

  Years earlier I’d realized I could never be out in public with either my father or my grandmother without their acting coarse, tasteless, pretentious, or at least vociferously dumb. I couldn’t afford to get embarrassed by them. My grandmother could come up for Chrysanthemum Day at Ivey-Rush in a getup she believed to be haute Wasp: heavy wool hunting jacket, pearls, tweed skirt. What she actually looked like was Mamie Eisenhower on a really bad day in 1953. But I was okay with it. She could say, “Awwwwfly glod to meet you,” when I introduced her to my teachers. I did not die of mortification. My father could come up for commencement at Harvard and, after the academic robes came off, call my friends “sweetheart” while looking them up and down like a pimp sizing up a new girl for his stable. And I could live with it.

  But now, his terrifying everyone in the diner was something else. During the total of eighteen years and three months he’d served in the slammer, what might have been a native surliness had grown to rage whenever he felt under pressure. I had to stop it. I banged a fist on the table. It didn’t make much sound, but it got his attention. “Chicky! Get a grip.” He could go either way, I guessed: calm down or jump up and grab the shirt of the guy behind the counter, bellowing for a check. I glanced at the counterman, then back to my father. “If I were he, Chicky, I’d be thinking about pressing the alarm button under the cash register drawer and getting the cops here.” All I got was the glare a badass kid gives the teacher. “Calm down.”

  “I’m calm,” he said, a little too loud. At that point, however, his slit eyes blinked. It was a minute before he spoke. “All right. I’m okay now.”

  “Good.”

  “Sorry if I scared you.”

  “You didn’t,” I told him. “I know you too well. Now, tell me about my mother.”

  “If that’s what you want. It was like this.” He paused, closing his eyes for a moment to look at the past. “Phyllis was big into platinum. For the Maryland thing, I bought her real gold, kind of a skinny little ring, but I told her, ‘Listen, I’ll get you, like, one of those really fat platinum wedding bands—’ You know, Amy. Those ones that go from the knuckle up to the next knuckle. Anyhow I said I’d get it for her for a first-anniversary present. I mean, I already was into this loan shark Mitchy for two thou for the honeymoon and then I had to up it to three when we were in Puerto Rico because I got her pearls. So meanwhile, we were going out almost every night with this connected guy, Angie, Angelo was his real name, plus his girlfriend and some of their friends because Phyllis ... she had this thing about, kinda mob guys. Like a groupie, except for the Mafia instead of a band. The only problem was I was working this legit job in the garage. The pay wasn’t bad, but hey, like I told you, we were living in this dump with the mattress on the floor because who the hell
had money for furniture what with pearls and cocktail lounges. Right?”

  “Right.”

  “Plus we were staying out late and I overslept sometimes and my boss was getting hot under the collar about it. Said I was a damn good mechanic, but if I couldn’t show up on time I wasn’t any use to him.”

  I’d been stacking packets, and sugar was beating Sweet’n Low, but now I stopped. “What was there about mob guys that she found so attractive?”

  “Who the hell knows.” I waited. “Maybe a power trip. Like they could push people around.” He looked dubious about his own explanation. “It could be the bad guy thing. Like the way at the beginning, when she got this large charge from me stealing cars.”

  “She wasn’t concerned about getting into trouble with a stolen car if you got pulled over by a cop?” My father, I’d always thought, was somewhat unendowed in the superego department. I had hoped my mother was not.

  He emitted a single heh, barely a chuckle. “Funny you should say that. With Phyllis, it was like she never ever thought anything could really happen to her. Even if we got pulled over, she probably would’ve figured the cop would arrest me and make a date with her. And the weird thing is, I bet you a million bucks that’s what would happen.”

  Any second, Chicky’s eyes could fall on his giant watch and he’d want to rush off, dreading the wrath of Fern. This probably would be the only time I could get him to talk about my mother, and I needed to get some sense of what kind of person she was. For two days, I’d been thinking about Freddy Carrasco: Let’s say he wasn’t psycho. Let’s say he was what I guessed he was, a sweet, pathetic case, a motherless kid trying to make himself bigger by identifying himself with a rich, power-wielding guy. Freddy had picked himself a United States senator, a father figure he could study on C-SPAN or Charlie Rose. He could even confront him in the flesh, albeit unsuccessfully. All the information I could get on my mother, Phyllis Morris Lincoln, who took off before my first birthday with a guy whose last name might have been Hussain, resided in my father’s brain. Not exactly a situation fraught with promise.

  “Chicky?”

  “Yeah?”

  “What was my mother’s ethnicity?” Even before the third syllable of ethnicity, I realized all I could get was my father’s double blink of blankness. “I mean was she a Wasp? Morris is an English name.”

  “I can’t remember. She didn’t look Jewish or Italian or anything, not with her red hair. And she had a cute little nose. Up, but not like Miss Piggy. But maybe Jewish? I don’t know. Irish? She was darker than that. Her hair. Very white skin. That’s it. That’s all I can remember.”

  “Did she have any special interests?”

  “You mean like model cars?”

  “Right. Or reading, knitting, cooking.”

  “She couldn’t cook for shit, to tell you the truth. Not that I blamed her. She was only a kid. Like she really hated to talk about her family. She wouldn’t say a word about them. But one time she said her old man made her old lady get a cook because the only thing she could make was cinnamon toast.”

  It was so odd, imagining that half my genes came from a family that had a cook and a porch. Just for a second, I pictured myself reading a nice, fat novel on a porch glider in the shadow cast by the great weeping willow. Probably Great Expectations. “Was there anything she liked to do?” The sudden right shift of his eyes away from mine was a clear sign of verboten father-daughter territory. It didn’t take five and a half years of higher education to comprehend that the woman who was my mother liked to do it. “I mean, besides going out with connected guys and their girlfriends, was there anything she was enthusiastic about?”

  “Like it pissed me off. She would do things for a week or two and then drop them. Sewing a thing for a pillow, where you go in and out of little holes.”

  “Needlepoint.”

  “Yeah, but then she forgot about that. So it was like one week futzing with her hair, then two weeks walking around downtown—the Lower East, Chinatown, the Village—then another week being friends with Lil, which was really funny because all the rest of the time Phyllis didn’t want nada to do with her. Hate at first sight, the two of them.” He made a big deal of glancing at his watch and looking horrified, but he must have understood I knew it was an act because he finally went on. “She read books and magazines sometimes, and don’t ask me what ones because I don’t remember. I probably never knew. Ladies’ magazines and books from the library.”

  “What about when she did get pregnant? Was she happy about it?”

  “Not at the beginning. To tell you the truth, she wanted, you know, to get rid of it. You. Sorry. I wasn’t going to stop her, but then she was the one who changed her mind.”

  “She wanted to have me?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe more like she kept putting it off, and then it was too late. Listen, Amy, don’t feel bad. She could have done it and she didn’t. I’m not saying she was like Mother of the Year, but she didn’t get an abortion, even though she was puking a lot and was panicked about ...” he pointed to his chest “... sagging and getting those fat leg veins. For her, doing nothing was something.”

  “Do I look like her?”

  “I don’t know. Not really. You’re kind of her color, but her hair was redder than yours. And you got her littleness. But it’s like this. Once she took a hike, and Lil brought you up to see me on some visiting days, I made up my mind not to see Phyllis in you. Anyhow, you look more like my sister, which is better than looking like Phyllis. I mean, Linda’s a good-looking girl.”

  That was true, but I looked nothing like her. Aunt Linda’s hair was black and glossy, her eyes bittersweet-chocolate brown rather than hazel, her body willowy, much more supermodel than soccer defense. She had a peaches-and-cream complexion and I did not. I was passably pretty. My aunt was a knockout.

  “Did Aunt Linda and Uncle Sparky like her?”

  “Linda didn’t marry Sparky till later. I guess he knew her though, ‘cause they were going together since they were like two or something.”

  “So what did they think of my mother?” Chicky gave me his combination shrug and eyebrow lift that meant Do I have to waste breath giving you an answer? I looked down at my sadly chipped thumbnail in an attempt to calm myself. What if I couldn’t get him to say any more? What if he got up and left? I was on the verge of panic. If my brain could have been depicted on Nova, viewers would have seen colossal bunker-buster-bomb-size explosions instead of the normal sparks of neural activity.

  I wound up giving myself a pep talk like those cloying monologues in lousy young adult fiction in which the feisty narrator peers at herself in a mirror and begins: “Okay, Self ...” I said to myself: Okay, I’m a journalist. I don’t want to give my father time to ask himself, What the hell am I doing here, giving the precise information I never wanted anyone to know? I needed time to ask the questions that would elicit the information I wanted. “What part of Brooklyn did she live in?”

  “The rich part.”

  “Brooklyn Heights?” I asked, although the house Chicky had described didn’t sound like the elegant town houses of the Heights. Getting a blink as an answer, I went on: “Was it just on the other side of the Brooklyn Bridge?”

  “No, it was like twenty, thirty minutes in. So maybe like somewhere in the middle. Who the hell can remember? It was a million years ago.”

  “Do you remember how you got there?”

  “Yeah, Phyllis said, ‘Make a right, make a left,’ until we got there.”

  “What was the name of her street?” I got a shrug. “Do you remember the name of the neighborhood? Like Canarsie, Flatbush, Brighton Beach?”

  “No, Brooklyn, the Bronx ... they’re Alaska. You know. Foreign.”

  “What were her parents’ names?”

  “Joe, Marty, Betty, Sue. I mean, those may not be the names, but they were probably names sorta like that. Nothing too weird.”

  “Do you happen to recall her mother’s maiden name?”
r />   “No. What are you? Sherlock or something?”

  “No, I’m your daughter collecting on her thirtieth-birthday present. So tell me what happened the day you went to the jewelry store.” My ice cream now was completely melted, and, having skipped supper (or dinner, as Grandma Lil would have corrected me), I was getting intoxicated by the aroma of hamburgers, sautéing onions, and french fries. I didn’t want to order anything more because Chicky always grabbed the check. I sensed Fern kept him short on money, long on dependency. “What happened?”

  “So Phyllis says she just wants to look at platinum wedding rings. So I said, ‘That’s stupid because then you’ll feel bad I can’t buy you one now.’ So she swears she won’t and it would be fun to just look and see what’s there. Okay? We go to this place on Forty-seventh Street, that diamond street, right? Why she picks this place I don’t know, they all look the same, but we go in. We have to leave your little thing, baby carriage, outside and some guy in the store says he’ll keep an eye on it. So Phyllis carries you and we’re looking at platinum rings. Then she sees like trays and trays of diamond rings. Her eyes get this sparkle and the sales guy, who I can tell thinks she’s hot, even with a baby, says, ‘Oh, Mrs. Lincoln, let me show you some of our finest diamonds.’”

  I thought: If he’d been planning on stealing a ring, would he have given his correct name? “You gave your name?” I asked.

  “Yeah. Why not? Well, now I know why not, but I didn’t then. Anyhow, it’s like this sales guy is showing off, but I bet he couldn’t afford those rings any more than I could. Unless he’s the owner, but he looks like a loser with that pukey wavy hair that kind of kinks. Like Nixon, I remember thinking. So she’s trying on these giant diamonds and holding her hand out in front of her to see the lights in them, except she’s holding you with the other arm, so I ask her if I should hold you and she says no, if we switch you’d start crying.”

  “Did I have a tendency to cry?”