Any Place I Hang My Hat (18 page)

I calculated: If Phyllis had run off in 1972 at age sixteen, then she’d been born in 1956, which would make her thirty-two when the Baptistes bought the house. Well, it was worth a shot. “The Moscowitzes had a daughter. Phyllis, I think her name was. When you were here, looking at the house, did you happen to meet her?”

Judyann shook her head. “No. I don’t think they ever mentioned a daughter.” I clicked my pen and the point retracted. “That was why it was so funny.”

“What?”

“About three or four years ago, the doorbell rings, and it’s this woman. She says she was looking at her roots or for her roots or whatever and that she was the Moscowitzes’ daughter.”

“Phyllis?”

She shook her head.

“Veronica?”

“I don’t remember. Her last name wasn’t Moscowitz anymore, but I have no idea what it was. I invited her in. It was a weekend. Gene was off playing golf. Anyhow, I gave her the tour of the house.”

“Did she seem familiar with it?” I asked.

“Oh, completely. It’s funny. She even showed me—well, there actually is a secret staircase that you get to through the linen closet. It goes down into this little butler’s pantry off the kitchen. I told her I never knew it existed. She said her parents never knew either. She and her friends found it one night.”

I clicked the pen again, but couldn’t think of anything to write. My mother must have been in her early forties then, when she rang the Baptistes’ doorbell. “What did she look like?” I asked.

“Well, she wasn’t tall like her mother. Petite, actually. Pretty. Wearing a shawl or something. A little artsy but very presentable. More than that, actually. Uh, red hair, what they call Titian, that dark red. I really can’t remember anything more about her.”

“Did she seem intelligent?”

“Yes. She reminded me of Rose Moscowitz in that way. I mean, they didn’t look that much like mother-daughter. Except they were both a little too serious. Even when the daughter showed me the staircase, I remember, there wasn’t any sign of … I don’t know. Mischief.”

“Did she say where she lived?” I asked softly.

“One of the suburbs,” Judyann said. “I’m … I guess about seventy-five-percent sure. Maybe she didn’t say it, but I have that distinct impression.”

“A suburb of New York?”

“A suburb of New York.”

I SQUINTED, BUT still couldn’t find Tatty in Blue J’s. The place was an ersatz olde neighborhood saloon in the East Seventies. A brass foot rail ran along the long, dark bar, although it looked more like aluminum tubing in the dim lighting. The bar itself, the few tables, and the four booths in back were a blackened wood that had been either tap-danced on or distressed—a process said to involve beating wood with chains to give it age and character. The place had opened one balmy June night in 1990, just in time for a new generation of boarding-and day-school teenagers with fake IDs to claim it as their own. Outsiders called the place a preppy bar. Whatever the description, it was a place where privileged New Yorkers could get bagged and vomit with their own kind.

The same crowd was still there, only older, minus those who had either gotten married or serious. After the breakup of each of her marriages, Tatty headed right back to Blue J’s and took up right where she had left off. All the old crowd did. In her case, it meant running into one or both of her ex-husbands whenever she walked in, but that potentially sticky circumstance was handled gracefully, if not painlessly.

Among the newly divorced, Blue J etiquette dictated standing at least five feet from a former spouse and going about your business as if he or she were not there. About a half year after signing the final papers, it was expected that the acrimony had diminished sufficiently that you both could manage the private school salute: jaw dropping in feigned wonderment/delight along with a How-are-you flapping of four fingers (thumb at a ninety-degree angle, at ear-canal level). The entire greeting could be executed in not more than a single second.

When I finally found Tatty, I asked, “Can you tell me why you claim to be supercautious about your drinking—”

“Hello.”

“Hello. Anyway, your claim—”

“I don’t claim,” she replied. “I am.”

“For once in your life will you let me get a complete sentence out?”

“You just did.”

“Tell me why, Tatty, if you don’t want to wind up like, you know, your parents—”

“You mean alcoholic?”

“Why is it that you’re here four or five times a week?”

“It’s where everybody goes. I have one, repeat one, Lillet au citron, see what’s new, and then go on to wherever I’m going.”

“But if you want to avoid the sort of people who puke on their coral suede Tod driving moccasins and make idiot conversation, why come here? Don’t you think it’s an odd coincidence that you, Ms. Almost-Temperance, met both husbands in a bar?”

“You know that Bobby was in my dance class when I was eleven. And Roy was only tending bar here to support himself while he wrote his screenplay.”

“Tatty, they both were serious drinkers.”

“Amy, they could have a few drinks, but they weren’t alcoholics. Trust me, I know better than anyone what alcoholics look like and neither of them was it.”

I had never liked Blue J’s and went there only to meet Tatty. I’d always worked three part-time jobs during the academic year—the usual: restocking library shelves, waitressing. For three summers I was a flagman with a Boston road construction company that paid union wages. Whenever I came back to New York, spending money on margaritas was not on my to-do list.

Also, early on, I recognized that the people in Manhattan I wanted to be with weren’t frittering away their intellectual and financial resources at a bar, chugging Sam Adams or sipping martinis, attempting wit while describing their hangovers from the previous night’s drinking.

I glanced around. From the end of their adolescences to the beginning of their thirties, Blue J loyalists only set one foot in the outside world. The other remained glued to the brass rail. No job, no lover, no cause could bring them the satisfaction of being one of the chosen who got the flapping fingers, the two-cheek kisses, the I cannot believe how fucking fabulous you look at Blue J’s.

The only time half of them did anything—say, went to the theater or a ball game—was if a play or team was so hot that tickets were unavailable. Then they simply shelled out quadruple to a scalper. Charities got money, never time. I couldn’t understand why their contempt for the city’s real life got to me: maybe because I’d worked so damned hard to be something and the Blue J’s clique acted as though being something was nothing.

Also, whenever I walked into the place—at age seventeen on Christmas break from Ivey or now, at twenty-nine—I always got depressed by the women. At least half of them were tall and blond. While I was there, they made me wish I were too. I guess I could have been blond, if not tall, but even the slight temptation to be like them shamed me. Blue J’s was something out of a horror movie in which aliens sucked out your essence and turned you into them. Tatty, meanwhile, patted the undercurled ends of her sprayed-stiff, dark blond hairdo. Being old money allowed her to use visible hair spray. Nouveau riche blond hair had to flutter—if not fly—in a breeze.

The only advantage I could see to Blue J’s was that once you waved your hellos, you and the person you’d go in there to see could hang at a table or a booth way in the back of a long, rail-road-train-like space and talk freely, protected by the drone of other conversations, wrapped in darkness.

We sat at a table whose top was the size of the average apple pie. “Why are you in such a sucky mood?” Tatty demanded.

“My mother.”

“Your mother?”

For the next hour or so, I filled her in about my research on the Moscowitzes and my interview with Judyann Baptiste. “You’re getting someplace!” she exclaimed after I’d finished. “Then how come you’re acting as if your best friend died? I’m still here.”

“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.