Any Place I Hang My Hat (12 page)

He’d bought it for her as a birthday surprise. Instead of choking him, as many women might have done, Aunt Linda said, “Oh my God, I love it!” They never moved anywhere else. I’m not sure whether they intended to fill the two other bedrooms with children or if from the beginning they knew they needed no one else and decided to devote the rooms to their hobbies—her needlework, his wood burning. In my apartment, I had their handmade college graduation gifts: her framed crewel design of the Manhattan skyline with Home Sweet Home arcing over the buildings; his eight coasters onto which he’d burned Harvard’s seal, complete with Veritas on the three open books.

The table was already set when I got there, pale blue dishes on oval placemats that were straw or seagrass—one of those excessively dry, frizzy fibers. My aunt’s blue-plate theory was that there is no food that looks bad on blue. The table stood in the breakfast nook, a tight area with a bay window. It looked out on a birdhouse that hung from a low, scrawny branch of an old oak. For decades the tree had been assaulted by car exhaust from the nearby parkway and the bay’s salt air. The birdhouse had fared better. Modeled after the White House, it was one of Uncle Sparky’s wood-burning masterpieces. Except when it was very windy, the incredibly detailed North Portico faced the kitchen window. True, it was actually a pale brown house with the black detailing of the burning plus a hundred coats of varnish, but it was, nevertheless, a great address for a sparrow. Beyond the birdhouse, the narrow backyard was nearly invisible. A shrouded gas barbecue and cushionless aluminum-frame lounge chairs glowed in the ghostly light of the fog.

“You know,” Aunt Linda said as she sliced the tomatoes I’d brought, “if you got one of these slow cookers, you could go to work and come home to a delicious meal. Save a fortune from all the takeout you working girls live on. Someday, one of you will die from cheap sushi and maybe you’ll all get smart.” Somehow, my father’s sister—to say nothing of Chicky himself—had managed to emerge unscathed from Grandma Lil’s refinement lessons. They might have been raised by a blowsy, gum-cracking dame who wore glitter nail polish. “Like, what did you have for supper last night?”

“Peanut butter and jelly on whole wheat, uh, milk and a cookie.”

“What kind of cookie?”

“Chocolate chip.”

“Carb City, lambie. I’m not saying cut out all carbs—I’m not a fanatic—but you gotta choose. The jelly or the cookie. Not both. You got a cute, athletic little body, but the minute you hit forty, the weight starts piling on. And you’re petite.”

“Short.”

“Whatever. God forbid you should look like a beach ball when you’re fifty.”

As always, indoors or out, rain or shine, my aunt was wearing form-fitting jeans with four-inch heels. That night, her black hair was pulled straight back and held by a leopard-print scrunchie in a ponytail that went halfway down her back. Her black sweater was so predictably tight it looked on the verge of unraveling if she inhaled too deeply. On each wrist, she wore a cuff of hammered copper that echoed her copper man-in-the-moon earrings. My aunt was pretty in the way my father was handsome: a bony Frank Sinatra face and piercing dark eyes softened by an awning of lashes. Her makeup (of the three-differently-colored-stripes-of-eye-shadow school) was flawlessly applied.

“Anything new with that guy you’re seeing?” She slid the tomatoes off the cutting board into a bowl of dark leaves and a rainbow of chopped-up raw vegetables.

“Not really.”

“You speak foreign languages, right?”

“Spanish and French. And I read a little Latin. But what—”

“So translate what ‘not really’ means.”

“It means that the relationship doesn’t seem to be going anyplace. You know, after two years—”

“That time you brought him here and the two of you went fishing with Sparky? He’s very, very cute. And a nice guy. We both thought so. You could just tell. So what is the ‘not really’ all about?”

“I guess we’ve got everything going for us except love.”

“I don’t buy that for two seconds. Every time one of you said something, the other one would look so proud, like Isn’t that, like, the most darlingest thing you ever heard?”

“Look, Aunt Linda, it’s as if we’d been matched up by a computer. Everything’s right except …” I patted my chest over my heart. She shrugged, opened a cabinet above the sink. “The lamb smells fantastic,” I said.

“You want to know my secret? Rosemary, yeah, sure. But also a teeny bit of cumin.” The inside of the door was mirrored and she chccked her lipstick. “How’s Chicky doing with that old lady who’s keeping him?”

“Have you met her?”

“You’ve got to be kidding.” She closed the cabinet door. “He’s passing himself off as twenty-six. No, wait, thirty-six, which is still a joke, but she’s buying whatever he’s selling. What name is he using with her?”

“James Madison.” I sighed.

“Like the high school? Pa-the-tic. He dropped out of high school the beginning of his junior year.”

“Aunt Linda.”

“What?”

“What haven’t you told me about my mother?”

“What are you talking about?” High heels squeaking on the vinyl tiles, she walked to the breakfast nook and sat down. “You think I’m hiding stuff?”

“No. But we haven’t talked about her … God, it’s been ages. I think I was still in college. So maybe in that time you thought of something else, but it wasn’t important. I mean, if it had been, you would have called and told me.”

With her index finger that ended in an apricot-colored nail, she pointed to a chair. I sat. “What? You thinking about if you get married? Genes and things?”

“Well, genes are an issue.”

“Fine. You got your smartness from her. Ask Chicky: She had an A-plus average! Like she could’ve gotten into Harvard too. Well, maybe not Harvard, but one of those good colleges you can never remember the names of.”

I picked up a napkin ring, with dark and light blue crystals sewn on, and twisted it carefully around the paper napkin. Aunt Linda hated laundry but loved accessories, both for herself and her house. “Okay, she was rebelling against her family. And I guess sex was a major item. But what else attracted her to my father?”

“If there wasn’t any sex or rebelling, trust me, angel pie, they wouldn’t have stayed together for two seconds.”

“Was she bookish?”

“Reading? No. I mean, not that I ever saw. I mean, if Chicky hadn’t said, ‘You wouldn’t believe how smart she is! A ninety-seven average!’ I wouldn’t have believed she was so smart at the beginning. She just seemed like a regular person. Quiet.”

“How come you never liked her?”

“Did I ever say that? That’s not fair, Amy, putting words in my mouth. Okay, she was kind of … not cold. Cool, I’d call it. Like she never said anything nasty, but you felt she wasn’t trying to meet you halfway because you weren’t worth it—to her. She didn’t say anything unless you asked her a question. Then she’d answer. Polite, but not … really with you. Like she was waiting for someone to come along and take her out of wherever she was. Which happened to be with us.”

“She came from Brooklyn, right?” Aunt Linda nodded. “Do you know what part?”

“No. See, Sparky and I were just engaged then, so I was still living at home. The grand duchess Lil hated him because of his being a fireman and Italian, I mean, she didn’t care about him not being Jewish because if I’d have come home with a guy with a side part and a Wasp name—Sutton Van Schmuck or something—then it would have been fine. So me and Sparky didn’t see Chicky and Phyllis all that much. We hung out with Sparky’s family or other probationary firemen and their wives and girlfriends.”

“Do you recall where she went to high school?”

“Hey!” Uncle Sparky sauntered in. “Two beautiful women in one room! How lucky can I get?” A guy can be described as a bear of a man simply because he is large, but Uncle Sparky looked like Smokey’s cousin in an FDNY T-shirt. He was what is politely called hirsute, covered in every conceivable place a man can have hair; the hair on his neck and shoulders rose above the collars of his Tshirts, so he had a perpetual dark brown ascot. His nose had been broken during some teenage fracas in Little Italy and as a result was squished against his face, so his nostrils were on display, the way a grizzly’s are. My uncle was so XXL that it was nearly impossible to picture him racing up a ladder to save someone from a burning building. But then again, it’s hard to imagine a five-hundred-pound grizzly running thirty-five miles an hour. Yet Uncle Sparky was surprisingly graceful for someone so massive, whether simply ambling around the house or grabbing Aunt Linda and demonstrating the twirl and dip they did to their wedding song, “You Light Up My Life.”

He put his arm around my aunt and tenderly kissed her check. Then, in his usual greeting, he pinched my cheek and tousled my hair. “So, what did I miss? I heard the doorbell. You think you can keep Amy to yourself, talking a blue streak and not fill me in?”

“We were talking about your favorite sister-in-law.”

Uncle Sparky glanced up at the clock, which was shaped like a teapot; he was probably going through the list of his three brothers’ wives. “Right. Gotcha,” he said at last. “You mean Phyllis.”

“Yeah. Amy was just asking me …” She pursed her lips into a rosebud. “What were you just asking me?”

“If you remember where my mother went to high school.”

“God, I don’t have the foggiest,” my aunt said. “Sparks, hon, do you remember?” She and my uncle had been going out since eighth grade, so he had known my mother as long and as well as Aunt Linda had.

“No.” He gave me a look just short of pitying. “Chicky was always bragging about what a brain she was, that she was, you know, college material. But I don’t think neither of them ever mentioned where she went to school.”

“Did you think my mother was smart?” I asked him.

“Yeah, come to think of it. Not like she hung around reciting poems. Most of the time she was pretty quiet, just doing lovey-dovey stuff with Chicky, like battering her eyelashes. But I always said to Linda, ‘That girl knows the time of day and then some.’ You could tell she was taking everything in.”

My aunt got busy trimming the stems of the bouquet I’d brought, so that the flowers would fit into a glass pitcher for a centerpiece. My uncle observed her snipping as if it were some never-before-seen and quite marvelous technique. “How was she as a mother?” I asked.

Aunt Linda, holding a pink, daisylike flower between her thumb and forefinger, eyed me and said, “Amy, baby, I don’t think there’s anything me and Sparky haven’t told you over the years. From all I ever saw, she was an okay mother. You know, not Miss Kitchy-kitchy-coo, but I never saw her do anything wrong. She was a kid, seventeen or something like that, and to be honest, I was surprised she was so responsible. If you cried she fed you, if you pooped she changed you. Like any mother would. Or should.”

“Did she breast-feed me?”

Uncle Sparky did a sidestep of discomfort. Aunt Linda stuck a fern into the pitcher and then said: “I don’t think so. I mean, there was always a bottle. She let me hold you and feed you.” I could tell my aunt wanted to give me something to hold on to, and she added: “You were so cute! Your eyes were sort of greeny and kind of almond-shaped, even then. And you were bald. With the pinkest cheeks! You’d stare right into my eyes. And you made the world’s loudest burps.”

I smiled, then turned to my uncle. “Did you sense my mother’s dissatisfaction?”

“Listen, if you’d have said, Hey, this is someone who’s gonna turn her back on her baby, to say nothing of her husband, I wouldn’t have believed it. All right, I didn’t think she was matched up in heaven to Chicky. She was too shrewd and probably too classy. But I wouldn’t have believed she would—Jesus, I hate to say it—that she would have dropped him like a hot potato, much less have abandoned you. Truth of the matter? If she hadn’t mailed that letter saying she wasn’t coming back, to this day I’d have thought she was dead, you know, murdered, or maybe had some freaky accident.”

I let the subject drop. My uncle carried the salad to the table. Aunt Linda handed me three bottles of dressing—orange, white, and green—and I brought them over. We all sat and she dished out salad with a wooden fork-and-spoon set Uncle Sparky had whittled, then topped off with his wood-burned designs on the handles. As a kid, I’d always believed they were a cabbage and a penis and tried not to look at them when I went there for dinner.

I told them about following Thom Bowles around on a campaign swing. Then Aunt Linda filled me in on her technique for getting the seeds out of a cucumber with an apple corer so you got cute little cuke circles, and Uncle Sparky told me about how many guys in the fire department had taken up cigarettes again after 9/11 and were now in an antismoking program.

Finally I said: “Look, I don’t want to take advantage of your hospitality—”

“But you’re going to.” My uncle smiled as he said it.

“Sparks, baby,” my aunt responded, “put a sock in it. Go ahead, sweetie.”

“I just want to be sure I have the right information. My mother’s family name was Morris. Her given was Phyllis. Right?”

My aunt’s mouth dropped open so wide that I could see a couple of tiny smears of her Copper Kisses lipstick on her bottom teeth. Finally she asked: “You’re thinking of trying to look for her?”

“Are you kidding? No. I just want to know a little about her. Her background. Her genes, okay? I mean, every time I’ve gone to a doctor, it’s always ‘Is there any heart disease in your family?’ and I only have half an answer. And just—I don’t know—general information.”

“What if she died or something?” Uncle Sparky asked.

“Forgive me for saying this, Amy,” my aunt said, “but good riddance to bad rubbish. To leave a darling little baby who’s not even a year old. There’s no explanation good enough for that.”

She might have gone on, but my uncle apparently thought she should put a sock in it, because he suddenly said, “Phyllis, right. That was her name. No doubt about that, unless she made that up. But Morris? My ass, if you’ll excuse me. Morris was one of those made-up last names like Jews used to do all the time. Not that Italians didn’t. Tony Bennett? Dean Martin? We still do. The guy who made up The Sopranos? Give me a break.”