Any Place I Hang My Hat Read online

  “You were a baby. Babies cry. That’s why they call them crybabies. But you weren’t bad. So anyway, she’s modeling the diamonds—forget, like, the platinum wedding rings I couldn’t even afford—and all of a sudden you give out a scream and start screaming your head off. You know what I think? I figured this out one night after lights out, after I’d done a couple of months. I think she pinched you good and hard to make you scream like that. So anyway, you’re bawling and won’t shut up so finally we said, ‘Sorry, we gotta go,’ to the sales guy and we leave.”

  “And?”

  “Two, three days later, guess who shows up at work? The cops. And they bring me in for questioning—I could see my job at the garage going down the sewer. Then that night, a couple of detectives go to the apartment with a search warrant. I say to them, ‘What diamond ring?’ And they couldn’t find it but the next day they’re back and say, ‘You’re under arrest.’ Like, I swear to God, it was the only time in my life: I blacked out. Just for a second, but the next thing I know this detective is pulling me up from the floor. Next thing you know, I’m in a lineup and being fingerprinted and getting my picture taken.”

  “And then?”

  “So Phyllis comes to visit me and swears it wasn’t her. I said, ‘I’ll have you fucking killed unless you tell me the truth,’ and she whispers ... I can hardly hear her, she’s on this phone behind glass. And she says yeah, she stuck it into your diaper when you started to scream. She didn’t mean to, it was in her hand. Then I tell her, ‘You take the fucking rap, you ...’ I’m not gonna tell you what I called her. But she says to me, ‘They can’t prove it was you. Please, let me sell the ring. Then I can get you the best lawyer in the city.’” I waited. “So this little putz with a mouth that’s puckered up all the time, like he’s waiting for the chance to kiss someone’s ass ... he’s my lawyer. I say to him, ‘I hear you’re the best lawyer in the city.’ And he says, ‘Huh?’ And I tell him Phyllis stole the ring and put it in your diaper and he says, ‘If you give the ring back I can get you a deal. You won’t even have to serve a year.’ So I tell him to get the ring from Phyllis, so next time he comes he says she said: ‘I don’t have any ring. I don’t know what Chicky did with it.’ And you know what?”

  “What?”

  “She never came to see me after that. Never came to the trial. After that first money you give a lawyer ... What’s it called?”

  “A retainer.”

  “Right. He got that from her, but then he started pounding me for the rest of his money. She probably sold the ring, gave him a couple of hundred, and kept the change. But a kid needs a mother. So I kept my mouth shut and got four to six years. I never saw her again in my life.”

  Chapter Four

  AS FAR AS I can piece it together, shortly before Black Tuesday in 1929, Tatty Damaris’s great-uncle Lemuel, a ne’er-do-well and know-nothing, yanked his inheritance from the Damaris New York Trust and handed it over to a slick piece of work with a pencil mustache from Toronto, who sunk it into an ailing aluminum company. Thus it was that the banking Damarises went bust and Uncle Lemmy became three times as rich as he’d been before the Crash.

  Happily, he died after a long night of cocaine and a liquid his bootlegger referred to as brandy. He left his majority interest in the aluminum company to his boring brother, Alfred II. Thereafter, Tatty’s family remained wealthy by investing conservatively and squelching any urge toward philanthropy.

  Tatty and I sat in the library of her parents’ Rhode Island-size apartment on a leather couch with buttons that periodically popped off, unsheathing teeny, butt-stabbing knives. Some earlier Damaris had paneled the room in dark wood. Except for a desk with pigeon-toed claw feet, a couple of tables, and green curtains like the ones Scarlett used for her dress, everything was red leather. Red leather couch, chairs, ottoman, and the bindings of the hundreds of books no one in the family had ever opened. Alfred IV, Tatty’s father, sat catercorner to us in a club chair so old that every time he shifted the springs emitted a deep errrrg, errrrg, though no guest would be tempted to titter at such sounds in front of a family who had transcended flatulence six generations earlier.

  Mr. Damaris was sipping his customary vodka from his blue plastic freezer mug, a singularly unattractive method of keeping beverages cold. Periodically, he picked up a wedge of lime from the plate on his lap. He’d hold the lime aloft and squeeze it into the vodka and, occasionally, into his right eye. As always, Mrs. Damaris was sitting beside his argyle-socked feet on the red ottoman.

  “’Course I remember Thom Bowles,” he told me. “Blabbermouth. Full of himself.” A dribble that was either vodka or saliva meandered from his lower lip and down his chin. “Probably a communist, to say nothing of a pip-squeak. But a ladies’ man, if you get my drift. And his ladies”—he restrained himself from laughing at his own upcoming wit—“weren’t what one would call ladies!” Besides drinking and critiquing his brokerage statements, Tatty’s father’s great pleasure in life seemed to be thinking ill of people. “Went for cha-cha girls. Am I right, Preshie?” Preshie was short for Precious, his name for his wife, Louisa.

  “Right!” Like her husband and daughter, Preshie was tall and spare. Well, in her case, gaunt. Her skin had the waxy sheen of malnutrition that comes when an alcoholic anorexic denies herself even the pearl onions in her martinis. “Thom to a T.” She tweaked her husband’s big toe, which seemed to be one of their little love signals. He beamed at her, the snaggletoothed smile of a man who believes orthodontia is for Jews and children of middle management in Ohio. “You never cease to amaze me!” his wife went on. “You remember everyone! Everything!” He smiled every month or so, and then only at Preshie. She smiled all the time.

  I had known the Damarises since Thanksgiving Day of my first year at Ivey, when Grandma Lil forgot to turn on the oven to roast the turkey she’d lifted from a Food Emporium. I’d called Tatty to tell her about it and she’d invited me over. Way back then, when I was fourteen, Preshie’s perpetual smile unnerved me. Now, pushing thirty, no longer awestruck by friends’ rich mothers who wore high heels in the house and rich fathers who ate supper in jackets and ties, or by chandeliers, or the conspicuous nonconsumption of a platter of turkey and bowls of mashed sweet potatoes and oyster stuffing and haricots verts served from the left by a wrinkled family retainer, I found her smile merely unsettling.

  “Amy, pet, have you come up with any ...” Preshie paused for a frisson of anticipation “... dirt?” Her face was so tightly drawn that only the middle of her lips moved. Tatty claimed her mother always appeared to be doing a fish imitation. “I mean dirt on Thom, for your magazine?”

  Tatty shook her head in annoyance. “M,” she said to her mother, “In Depth is above dirt.” Instead of saying Mom and Dad, Tatty called her parents M and D. The upper crust, I’d discovered at boarding school, squandered much of its intellectual energy thinking up nicknames for one another. Tatty, of course, was Tatiana and Alfred IV was predictably called Four, although he just as easily could have been nicknamed Puddles (had he been a bed wetter) or Quackie or Flip or Spike.

  “I know In Depth is too ... What’s the word? High-tone. It’s too high-tone for gossip.” At her second “high-tone,” Four laughed a single har from so deep in his chest it sounded like a pulmonary problem. Preshie did another toe tweak to show she was pleased by his appreciation, while Tatty did her standard gaze heavenward, her usual expression of disdain and embarrassment.

  “Listen, Mrs. Damaris,” I said, “forget what’s acceptable at In Depth. I’m not too high-tone for gossip.” I took a sip of my second glass of Gevrey-Chambertin (the family never scrimping on anything that contained alcohol) and turned back to Four, knowing he retained every sordid story he’d ever heard. “How well do you know Thom Bowles, sir?”

  “Knew his father better. Andover, Bowdoin. Us both. Few years older.” Four was only slightly more generous with complete sentences than he was with charity. I assumed he meant that William Bowles, Thom’s
father, had been older than he by a few years.

  “Even if I were tempted to write about that young man who’s claiming Senator Bowles is his father, your wife is right: In Depth wouldn’t publish it,” I reassured Four. “But just to satisfy my own curiosity, were there any murmurings back then as to why Thom Bowles left New York and moved out west?”

  Four took a long sip from his plastic beer stein and hummed, “Hmm ...” He hummed fairly often, probably to occupy himself until his neurons could manage to fire up in his alcohol-sodden brain.

  “There was something!” Preshie said. Her eyes glinted from either excitement or her martini. “I remember, Four-y. You came home from the club and gave me an earful. About Thom and one of those girls.”

  Tatty avoided looking at me, as she usually did at times like these, after M and D had set sail on their nightly voyage from conviviality to stupor. What she didn’t understand and could not explain was how come she’d returned home to this pair after both her failed marriages. Not for comfort. Although not overtly mean, they weren’t particularly nice to her. She claimed she’d come back for the kitchen where she made her cakes. I’d often suggested she was still seeking the love these two ought to have had for her, being her parents. But maybe it was simpler. Everyone needs a place to hang her hat.

  “Yes, yes. Something,” Four replied to his wife. “Oh! The Puerto Rican girl.”

  “Hispanic,” she corrected. “Unless you know for a fact she was from PR.”

  “Hush, Preshie. Thinking.” Also slurring, but it was nearly seven and he’d been drinking for close to an hour. “Thinking.” Tatty flashed me a Time to get out of here look. Since I couldn’t pretend not to have seen it, I ignored it.

  “Was Thom Bowles involved with a woman from Puerto Rico?” I pushed on. Four was either nodding off or studying the viscosity of vodka. “The woman from Puerto Rico?” I said a little louder.

  “Right. Worked for Whitey.”

  “Thom’s father,” Preshie explained. “William. Everyone called him Whitey.”

  “Girl was a secretary. Bookkeeper. Something.” Still gripping his freezer mug, he raised it high above his head. Then he put his left forearm across his belly and attempted to snap his fingers in what I guessed was a flamenco gesture. “Cha-cha-cha.”

  “Do you remember her name, D?” Tatty inquired. He moved his head once to the left, once to the right: No.

  “So Thom got involved with this woman,” I prompted as he took a long slurp. Finally his head went up, then down: Yes. “Did he get her pregnant, Mr. Damaris?”

  “Worse.”

  “Worse?”

  “Wanted to marry her, for heaven’s sake!” “Did he?” Tatty and I demanded together. “Wanted to,” Four repeated. “Don’t worry. Whitey took care of that.”

  I hated leaving Tatty with M and D. But she had, after all, responded “Over my dead body” when, a month earlier, I’d asked if she wanted to go to an all-Mahler concert. Not that hearing Das Lied von der Erde was my idea of a fun night either. But John loved Mahler. Just four weeks earlier, before we’d somehow fallen from mutual enjoyment to unspoken dissatisfaction, I’d been positive he’d ask me to go. So positive that I bought two tickets. That way, when he did ask, I could say, John, you’re kidding! I already have two tickets! thus exhibiting my exquisite taste, a necessity after I’d laughed uproariously when he’d inquired a few months earlier, “Wouldn’t it be great to get to hear the Tuaregs from Mali play instruments they made from tools?” and then saw from his expression he hadn’t been joking. Obviously, there were no limits to his enthusiasm for music.

  But the Mahler offer never came, and John got lost in his research on Garth Brooks for Biography. So stuck with two tickets, I’d asked Gloria Howard, the senior editor of In Depth who was in charge of Europe. In the six years we’d been on the magazine together, I’d discovered she loved every art form I loathed. Thus, I was certain she’d be thrilled with the invitation, just as I would have bet a week’s salary that she adored the novels of Alain Robbe-Grillet.

  Alas, going to a New England boarding school had not classed up my intellect. I’d been immune to Harvard’s transmuting power, which had been known to turn even dumbo jocks into contemplative souls. J-school, of course, did nothing to improve my taste. Being a journalist did not require aesthetic sensitivity. To ace any class, all I needed to do was demonstrate I could write a simple declarative sentence and also appear enraptured by any discussion of ethics.

  Since P.S. 97, I’d understood mine was not a sensitive, artistic nature. My gift was being able to give back to my teachers what they wanted—and then some. A thirst for knowledge, an incurable bookworm, the Extra Credit Kid. The neighborhood being a little iffy, plus Grandma Lil not liking what she referred to as “the element,” i.e., my friends, she never let me out after six o’clock. Thus, given the choice of watching Falcon Crest with her at the kitchen table as her stupnagel exegesis of the Channings’ and the Giobertis’ relatives drowned out the dialogue, or being alone in the bedroom reading the Narrative of Sojourner Truth, I opted for scholarship.

  Sure, I was also smart. And yeah, I could express myself. But the finer things in my life were never esoteric or abstract. I wanted Born on the Fourth of July and A Fish Called Wanda, not revivals of nouvelle vague films. As my taste developed, I learned to love some accessible art: the Impressionists, Puccini operas. But I couldn’t change my preference for American-style stick-in-the-knife-and-twist-it politics to the stuff of Foreign Affairs. I recalled reading Richard Hofstadter’s Anti-Intellectualism in American Life during my last year of Ivey, and being unable to decide which side to root for.

  But all along, the people I most admired embraced enthusiasms I not only didn’t share, but couldn’t comprehend. Joan Murdoch, the social worker, took me to the circus every year. I pretended to love the clowns, but thought them unreservedly unfunny; I couldn’t understand this sensible woman’s almost childlike delight in them. At Ivey, I didn’t get what there was about the band Devo that made the hippest, smartest kids love it so. Or Philip Glass while at Harvard. I’d heard enough Mahler, read enough Donald Barthelme, seen enough Peter Greenaway films, and inspected enough Matthew Barney art to understand that a certain understanding was missing in me.

  John was more high-culture than I for the simple reason that he was interested in almost everything. He really didn’t need a remote. He could quite happily watch MTV, aerobatics, The Grand Illusion, or a performance of one of Schönberg’s twelve-tone lovelies.

  Somehow, while Grandma Lil was coaching me on how to eat asparagus, I’d missed Elementary Highbrow. Not that I was a total music lowbrow. I really liked Haydn and Mozart. But me going to hear Mahler was like a Cro-Magnon hanging out with a bunch of Homo sapiens hearing 12 X 5. Sure, I could observe other listeners exhibiting signs not just of comprehension, but of pleasure. Except I couldn’t get no satisfaction.

  So there I sat, praying for release from recital-hall hell. Forget Eliot’s “Hell is oneself” and Sartre’s “L’Enfer blah-blah-blah.” Genuine hell was sitting in an overheated auditorium listening to the infinitely irritating, eternally long sixth movement of Das Lied von der Erde knowing I had done this to myself and, moreover, that John now would never think, Hey, I was wrong. There’s no limit to Amy’s openness to culture.

  Gloria Howard, naturally, was leaning forward in her seat. Maybe she wanted to be the first to leap up and yell Bravo! though, more likely, she was being drawn to the orchestra by her passion for Mahler. Her profile looked beautiful, transformed by the music. Normally she wasn’t even pretty, and with her new haircut and dark brown skin, she looked amazingly like Spike Lee minus facial hair. Of course, Spike Lee probably wouldn’t be sitting in Rose Recital Hall in a navy dress with white cuffs and collar. Gloria put herself together in the way her mother’s or grandmother’s generation would have called ladylike. She always appeared perfectly groomed, feminine, and asexual in the manner of women who run for high office.
/>   I longed to be as ambitious as Gloria. What she was going for was the executive editorship of In Depth. Now, at thirty-three, she probably planned to occupy it within two years. Besides being extremely smart (or possibly brilliant) and speaking six languages, Gloria was unique at In Depth. She did not posture. Nor did she lie. She did not fib, dissemble, or even pretend. Ever. If she hated Mahler, she would have told her boyfriend, I hate Mahler. Find someone else to go with.

  At work, Happy Bob, the current executive editor, called Gloria “my conscience” and “my bullshit detector.” Like a shark, there was something about Happy that let you know the perpetual smile he wore wasn’t a sign of geniality. Still, one of the rare times he seemed in genuinely good spirits was at editorial meetings, when Gloria would respond “Not much” to his “What do you think of that?” His chest would puff with pride as she’d cogently explain why some particular idea of his sucked. It never occurred to him to view her directness as an attack. Too bad for him. Had he asked her, Do you want to make me appear impulsive and unimaginative so you can get my job fifteen years before I plan to retire? she would have answered, Yes.

  Finally, Das Lied was over. After too many curtain calls for the tenor and the soprano (a bratwurst in basic black) and bows for the conductor and orchestra, the lights went up. “What did you think?” I asked Gloria before she could ask me.

  “There are no words.” Her sigh was contented.

  “Gloria, there are always words.” We moved along the aisle to get out for intermission.

  “No, there are not always words. However, since you wouldn’t let me pay for the tickets, I’ll give you words: ‘incredibly moving.’ It’s clearly Mahler’s most personal piece.”

  “Oh, definitely,” I said. The crowd at the bar was pretty thick, but I was desperate for a Coke. A sugar high (if not general anesthesia) might get me through the rest of the program. Gloria kept me company while I waited on line. With her intelligent face and white-cuffed air of authority, she made me feel as if I were back at the circus with Joan Murdoch: grateful that superior people liked my company. But I was still smelling elephant shit while the uptown set was having a cultural experience. I looked into Gloria’s satiny brown eyes. People talk about eyes sparkling, but that’s usually more about vivacity than actual sheen. Hers were truly glistening—moist with feeling, reflecting the foyer’s subdued illumination as tiny stars.