Any Place I Hang My Hat (19 page)

I overheard, because she was laughing about it. She was talking to Elizabeth Stoll—you know, Mrs. Robert Stoll—how come she couldn’t have her whole name printed on her informals—that’s writing paper for, like, not wedding invitations. Little notes. Not letters.

So all the times I wanted to scream at Grandma Lil that she was repulsive or pathetic, I kept silent. I knew if I cut myself off from her, she would have nobody. She’d probably go mad and I’d wind up in foster care with a Hasidic family in Williamsburg with eighteen children and they’d rename me something hideous, like Schmeel or Kroogele.

Tatty and I left Blue J’s and had dinner at an Indian restaurant. This was an off night; the chicken tandoori looked like an illustration of dermatitis. I came home feeling, as I sometimes did after being with her, starved for reality. I turned on my computer and read Le Monde, ABC of Madrid, the Times of India, and the Irish Independent online, and got that sitting-in-a-cafe worldly feeling, which, from experience, I knew would be gone by morning. Still, if anyone wanted to talk to me about Iraq for the next twenty-four hours, I wouldn’t sound quite like the American provincial I was.

By the time I got into bed I’d succeeded in exhausting myself to the point where I was certain sleep was seconds away. But like all the other nights in the week, my head hitting the pillow was the cue for me to start worrying about what would happen if I never met anyone else who was right for me, anyone else I really wanted to go to bed with. If John hadn’t been the most technically proficient guy I’d ever slept with, he definitely was the most passionate, and that brought it out in me. The whole time we’d been together I’d totally believed it was I who made him wild, that it wouldn’t be the same for him with anybody else, either.

So as to not think about him, I turned off the lamp and decided to dwell on something I at least could do something about—the search for my mother. The first thing that popped into my mind was a question: How come Grandma Lil had hated Phyllis right from the start? It didn’t make sense.

Okay, my grandma knew Chicky wasn’t any prize, but at least he’d brought home a girl from a well-off family, someone academically competent—if that talk about a 97-percent average in high school was true. Here was Phyllis, whose mother was always in the market for education. Chances were, then, no matter what Phyllis thought about her own mother, she most likely hadn’t been brought up to sound like a dese-and-dose, gum-cracking slut. Yet Grandma Lil had always vowed, I couldn’t stand her from Day One, that little … Usually her voice would trail off, but when she was particularly riled up or tired, she’d say that little whore.

Or did it take one to know one? Not a whore. A phony, someone trying to be something else and failing. Did my mother see through Grandma Lil faster than the two seconds it generally took most people? And did my grandma somehow comprehend that my mother wasn’t some slut Chicky had picked up, but a faux slut, a girl from a background of tasteful bat mitzvahs, summer camp in Maine, bookshelves overburdened with hardcovers?

If Phyllis had failed at slutdom, was she or was she not now succeeding as Véronique?

Grampy Selwyn’s obit didn’t say where he was headed. A shady spot in a cemetery? An urn with a frieze of palm trees? I spent most of the day making phone calls. There were a multitude of Moscowitzes in south Florida, and for some reason, many of the places I called had them buried or entombed neither chronologically nor alphabetically by first names, but by some whimsical process I could not discern.

I was offered a Sherwin Moscowitz as well as a couple of Seymours in the Boca area, but it wasn’t until four in the afternoon that I finally located him at, or in, Menorah Gardens in West Palm Beach. I wasn’t sure if this move from Boca was upward, downward, or sideways on the social mobility scale. It was pretty much a wasted day, because Véronique was not the one who had paid for perpetual care of the grave site; it was Rose. However, my new friend Dawn in the Menorah Gardens office gave me my grandmother’s address and phone number, and said she’d buy a copy of In Depth. I told her I’d send her one.

In the evening, I walked across the park and over to John’s neighborhood, West End Avenue, then up to Ninety-seventh for a dinner date I’d made weeks earlier. Erin Leung had been a friend at P.S. 97, though not a close one. Still, she was one of the few kids I’d hung out with back then who’d gone on to complete college. She’d gotten a graduate degree in math from the University of Maryland and now performed arcane manipulations of Asian stock indices for Citibank. She’d also become a total foodie, i.e., a person who thinks green cardamom is a subject for conversation.

The chances of getting a good meal at Erin’s were fifty-fifty. It could be something elegant and delicious featuring shredded duck, or something horrifying based on the latest food fad. One year it was a vertical pile of frisée, smoked cheeses with a vague aroma of dead protoplasm, and roasted tomatoes. Another time it was some sort of lilliputian crab you were supposed to eat, carapace and all; I might as well have been chewing a fish-scented fingernail, although it wasn’t quite that appealing.

This time, I smelled something garlicky and good. I rang the doorbell feeling hopeful. And indeed, Erin informed her five friends gathered for dinner that Neapolitan cuisine was making a really, really huge comeback. We had pasta and potato soup, and a meat dish I liked until I learned it was fried rabbit. We sat around the table, arguing about the war until ten-thirty. The three guys there, all single, were about as enticing as the fried rabbit. I didn’t get all choked up saying goodbye.

With all the people I knew, from the projects through Ivey-Rush, Harvard, Columbia, and work, I could spend all the nights of my life having evenings like this. Little suppers in apartments and, as one or two of us got not only older but richer, town houses. Dinners à deux at restaurants with something low and tight to display cleavage and booberage. Or I could go to a play or concert or movie, with or without company.

I stopped to get some gum to get the remnants of rabbit out of my teeth, and walked home, not through the park.

The first thing I did each night when I got back to my apartment was call my voice mail, just in case someone had phoned in the fifteen minutes between the last check and turning the deadbolt on the door. Being a control freak, I had different venues for different phone tasks. Calls to Tatty, which tended to be late and long, were made while I was in the bathtub, with handheld between shoulder and chin, until the skin on my fingers started to pucker. Calls from her were received on my couch, or rather, the apartment’s owner’s couch?bed, as were calls to and from other friends, regardless of gender or sexual preferences.

I talked to guys I was going out with lying back, my legs draped over the arm of the couch, unless I knew the relationship was doomed, in which case I sat on a pretty wood chair carved for slim-hipped people, which the owner had bought on a trip to Sri Lanka in his Christian Science Monitor days.

John was in his own category. Our conversations were under the covers, no matter what the topic, from phone sex to the clearly unromantic, like arguing over whether Bush’s religiosity was profound or politically expedient.

Picking up my phone messages, however, had a business aspect to it, so I adapted a quasi-business posture, sitting on the edge of the couch and leaning sideways to write. I kept a pad and pen on top of a chest the owner used as an end table. Tatty had warned me the piece was antique, probably Korean, and to keep my soda cans off it. Anyhow, I made my call for my messages, expecting the recording to announce: You have no new messages in your mailbox.

Instead, I heard a familiar male voice say, “Hey, Amy.” My God! I was so startled I slid off the edge of the couch. That sounds comical. It was not. As I went down, my side smashed into the antique chest. An instant afterward, the bottom of my spine slammed onto the floor with a bang that traveled from vertebra to vertebra until it resonated—Boing! Boing!—in my skull. Slowly, I touched my side to see if there was any blood, at the same time trying to catch the breath that departs with a sudden blow.

All I’d heard was “Hey, Amy,” and then I’d dropped the phone. I tried to reach for it, but recoiled when the pain stabbed me again. With desperation, I drew back the phone with my foot. I screamed as the pain in my side sliced all the way to my center. Then I replayed the message.

The voice continued: “I had a meeting with the lawyer you sent me to, that Ms. Maller. She was so nice. She told me—” Oh. The physical hurt and the realization I’d sustained injury over Freddy Carrasco, not John Orenstein, made me groan, one of those terrible aaargh! sounds villains in comic books make when they get their just desserts. I touched my side again. No blood. “—some interesting stuff about, you know, about proving paternity. Give me a call if you get the chance. I’m in for the night and I’ll be up till, God, two, three a.m. Otherwise, I’ll leave this message at In Depth, too. Thanks.” Then he gave me his number. As I dialed it, I tried getting up, but it didn’t seem like such a great idea. So I stayed on the floor.

“You wouldn’t believe how nice she was,” Freddy began. “I mean, tea, coffee, mineral water—sparkling or still. I was so glad I wore a tie and jacket, because this is an office that never heard about dress-down Fridays. Or dress-down, period. I told her I could pay her something, maybe not her usual rates, but she just shook her head, like Totally out of the question.”

“Nice,” I managed to say. “Did she have any advice?”

“Basically, there are a couple of ways you can make someone take a test to check DNA for paternity, even if he doesn’t want to. If there’s some written record that there was a connection between your mother and him. So I sat there, thinking and thinking.” Meanwhile, I was thinking that when I touched my side, it was so painful that I could be bleeding internally. “I told Ms. Maller I doubted it. On the other hand, I never threw out my mother’s stuff. How can you could throw someone’s existence into a couple of Hefty bags? I guess after I have kids and die, they won’t want to pay the fees at the ministorage place for a grandmother they never met.”

“Uh-huh.”

“So where was I? Oh, my mother’s stuff. My girlfriend and I are going to go through every single one of my mother’s papers over the weekend—or as long as it takes.”

“Good.”

“Except who knows if there was anything incriminating? My guess is, my father’s father, when he heard about my mother being pregnant and all, he probably went straight to a lawyer.”

“Forget probably,” I told Freddy. I tried to shift my position, but that was too hard. Even breathing required concentration because inhalation hurt so much.

“So the lawyer would have told my grandfather not to put anything into writing, and he would have warned my father not to either.”

“But if Thom Bowles is your father, he might have written something to your mother before she became pregnant.” I recalled the phrase contemporaneous notes and documents from the Clinton investigation, but didn’t have the energy to remind Freddy about it. Plus this was out of my hands now. Freddy was smart. Also, he now had a smart lawyer. I went on: “You said Mickey Maller mentioned something about there being a couple of ways to go about—”

“Right. She told me that if I could prove my father provided for my support in any way—or possibly my grandfather—she wanted to look that up. So if there’s some bank record somewhere with a check from William Bryson Bowles or Thomas Bowles to Nina Carrasco, I may be in good shape.” I didn’t have the heart to tell him chances were dubious to nil that a bank would keep routine records for twenty-one years. “I told Ms. Maller if I find anything, or even if not, I’d like for her to call the senator’s lawyer to ask for a DNA test. I mean, I checked out her credentials: Vassar and NYU Law School. A class act. I can’t imagine anyone thinking, Hey, this is a veiled threat of blackmail or something if she makes the call. And you know what? I think she was relieved I wanted her to do it, because that showed I wasn’t trying to extort money, and I wasn’t a crazy stalker.”

It took a few seconds before I could say “Right” or “Good thinking” or whatever I finally said. I tried to come up with a way to extend the conversation so I wouldn’t have to say goodbye. I felt scared. Phobiawise, after elevator fear, my number-two terror was dying alone, unable to do anything. Whenever I was in the mood to torment myself, I’d imagine choking to death on a piece of takeout dim sum. Or it could be blood pressure: It was low-normal, except it would plummet so much from the hot bath in which I was unwinding that I’d faint and—glub, glub—drown.

So it was predictable that I’d begin thinking if I had a broken rib it would pierce my heart or lung. Maybe I should just say, Hey, Freddy, I fell and hurt my side and am having trouble getting up. He might say, Why don’t you call 911? Or maybe, Oh, too bad. Gotta run. Would he think I was some old lady, an almost thirty-year-old trying to lure him out in the night? Or would he feel guilty the rest of his life after reading my obit—providing someone remembered to phone it in to the Times—because I’d said something about having gotten hurt and he did nothing?

“Freddy, let me know what happens.”

“Sure. And Amy, thank you again. No matter how this turns out, I know you could have kept your distance, and I’ll always be grateful you saw your way to help me.”

Once I hung up, I was able to haul myself up to a sitting position and then relied on my legs to get me standing. Between boarding school soccer, running in the park every day, and walking the two and a half miles from home to work and back again, I was a woman of iron calves and steel quads. I washed up, said my prayers, and got into bed, only to start a raging debate with myself: Was this pure hypochondria? If I went to the emergency room, would the triage nurse look at me with the expressionless contempt a whiner gets from medical professionals? If I stayed home, even if the broken rib missed my heart, could it have stabbed my abdominal aorta and make me bleed to death internally, like the guy who wrote Rent?