Any Place I Hang My Hat (2 page)

Getting back to my parents’ photo: Despite its being an interior shot in a dark bar, my mother wore large sunglasses. Because she was on Chicky’s lap, I couldn’t gauge her height, but obviously I got my stature—or lack of it—from her. Also, since it was a black-and-white picture, she appeared to have shoulder-length charcoal gray hair and ivory lips. Chicky told me she was a “stunning redhead.” Grandma Lil swore her hair was brown.

Through the years, I’d tinted the chiaroscuro photograph two ways. First, my mother has my color hair, red-highlighted brown; she’s wearing a headband. Red-highlighted Mom isn’t the least bit wooden. She’s adorable, exuberant, doing such a fabulous adaptation of the Frug or the Monkey that all the other dancers have stopped to watch her. My other image is Sophisticated Mom, languid on a chaise longue in Cap d’Antibes, flaming hair dipping, Nicole Kidman-like, over one of her huge green eyes. (Mine are large and hazel, nice enough, but there has never been a sonnet extolling hazel eyes.)

I guess it’s important to mention that just three weeks before my mother took off, Chicky also had to say his goodbyes. He was making his first trip up the river, this time to the Downstate Correctional Facility, to serve four to six for grand larceny, to wit, stealing a five-carat diamond ring for my mother.

With good time, he returned when I was four. We moved out of Grandma’s into a room with kitchen privileges in an apartment in the West Thirties. The bathroom only had a shower, so I had my baths in the kitchen sink. We stuck to each other like glue. Luckily, he loved Fat Albert as much as I did. I recall our TV had a screen so wide and luminous that it lit the entire room. I fell asleep most nights watching the colors flickering through my closed lids. I was convinced that if I concentrated, I’d be able to see whatever grown-up movie Chicky would be watching after my bedtime. How did we get such an extravagant TV? I suppose one of Chicky’s high school friends—men I knew as Uncle Denny, Uncle Moose, Uncle Chuy—must have stolen the television for him as a Welcome Back, Chickman! gift.

“Amy babes,” Chicky would ask every day, “what you want for lunch?” Naturally I was in on the joke, knowing that no matter what I said it would be macaroni and cheese—whatever pasta he’d gotten on sale plus half a can of undiluted Campbell’s Cheddar Cheese Soup. We’d share it, eating from the pot. Sadly, my father was back inside a little more than two years later. Grand larceny again. This time, assault as well.

He’d committed this crime for me. Chicky had decided I needed a more stable environment. Instead of trying to get a job, not easy with a criminal record, he determined he should be self-employed. So he set himself up as a limo driver with a car that had his name on it. He accomplished that entrepreneurial coup by stealing a 1979 Lincoln Continental. Then he talked his old boss, Frank Silvaggio, into hiring him back. On one of my quarterly visits to the prison, when I was nine, he raised his right hand: “I swear on my mother’s grave, Amy babes. That assault thing? I’m innocent.”

“Grandma’s still alive,” I pointed out. “I live with her. Remember? They gave her custody again because you had to go away.”

“Yeah. Sorry, Ame. It stinks for you, it stinks for me. So listen to what really happened.” Chicky explained he’d merely been driving his new Lincoln. Yeah, yeah, it was stolen and he’d been a moron because he’d left the New Jersey plates on overnight thinking, Hey, the guy I’m gonna get nonhot New York plates from wouldn’t want Chicky Lincoln knocking on his door at three in the morning, and also I didn’t wanna leave you at Grandma Lil’s overnight because I knew you hated Raisin Bran. But he swore all he’d done was drive the Lincoln with Frank and Vinny DeCicco, along with some poor schnook of a restaurateur, to a remote section of Van Cortlandt Park in the Bronx. “It was Frank and Vinny that roughed up the guy. I was, you know, sitting behind the wheel, looking the other way, listening to my Temptations tape. On a stack of Bibles, babes, I was minding my own business.”

“You call what happened to that restaurant guy ‘roughed up’?” I demanded. “Chicky, he was in the hospital for three weeks.”

“Yeah? And what did he prove in the end? Huh? He could’ve gotten his tablecloths and aprons and crap from Silvaggio’s Linen Service and not wasted all that time in the hospital.”

So my upbringing was pretty much left to Grandma Lil, not the brightest bulb on the menorah. However, it was convenient for me to have someone to blame for my preference for schmaltzy movies over exquisite literature, as well as my secret belief that Polyhymnia’s muse-dom should be abrogated in favor of Estée, goddess of makeup. Also, Grandma taught me all the indispensable life lessons she’d garnered from her ladies at Beauté. The best skiing in the world is at Chamonix. The only permissible color for patent leather accessories is black.

Grandma Lil’s photograph is in a tasteful russet leather frame. Even in my office’s harsh fluorescence, her photo bore no resemblance to me or my father. (God is good.) As a kid, I thought she looked like a relative of the Potato Heads. She had Mrs. P’s Oooh! thick ruby lips, Oh-my-God! eyes, and front-facing ears. Though not Mrs. P’s sweetly dumb demeanor. Grandma could have been the start of a whole new product line, the Supercilious Potato Heads.

Whenever there was a camera around, Grandma Lil got grander than usual, as though she should be posing for Sargent and photography was a comedown. She’d perform her concerto of sighs, then shrug, acknowledging defeat. After that, she’d spit delicately on her palms and slick down her Dutch girl–style blond hair over her ears. She’d lift her chin, suck in her cheeks, and dilate her already-sizable nostrils. In the photograph, she looks not merely haughty, but also capable of exhaling two grapefruit. In all fairness, however, what look like arrogantly elevated eyebrows could be open to exegesis. Drawn on each day with light brown pencil, they never were in the same place. Their raised position might have indicated disdain or that the bulb on her magnifying mirror had blown.

Grandma Lil’s blondness? Once every three or four weeks, she’d pocket a bottle of Beauté’s Morning Sun formula. At our bathroom sink, she tried to duplicate the Look that murmured New York socialite. But whether because of ineptitude or some missing secret ingredient, her hair always turned out the brash yellow of egg yolk rather than the pale, high-fat-content French butter blonde of the Ladies.

Finally, one more Lincoln, Aunt Linda. Breaking stereotype, my father’s sister was a beautiful but dumb brunette. She had married an amiable, handsome fireman who was her intellectual equal. I remember as a kid, whenever they took me somewhere for the day or had me over for a weekend, my jaw would be charley-horsed afterward from smiling. I suppose I was hoping that they’d be so enchanted they’d take me back to Brooklyn to live with them. They didn’t. They never had children, so probably it wasn’t anything personal. In any case, they were only inches from Grandma Lil, in the heart-shaped Lucite frame they’d given me for my twenty-first birthday: Aunt Linda and Uncle Sparky (actually Anthony) Napolitano.

Oh, my own curriculum vitae: By age fourteen, I sensed a change of scenery might be salutary. Chicky was still in the big house. With each visit, I grew unhappier about the lulls in our conversation. How come we couldn’t kid around anymore? With each visit, I’d get more revolted by the stink of the inmates. Eventually, whenever I climbed onto the bus to go up to Sing Sing, I was already nauseated. With each visit, I’d get more leers, more tongues ostentatiously trailing over lips, more rasping queries—“You bad girl?”—from the prisoners and their visitors, to say nothing of the guards.

Back home, two of my good friends from school, Alida and Lucy, both smart girls, dropped out to take care of their babies. Another, Jade, left to support her family. She was earning fifty bucks a head performing fellatio on homebound New Jersey commuters who would have otherwise gotten peevish during the usual thirty-minute wait to get into the Holland Tunnel. Some other girl, a couple of years ahead of me, became paranoid from a crack overdose and wound up stabbing her sister to death.

Around that time, my social worker, Joan Murdoch, mentioned that some of the best New England boarding schools were looking for girls from poor families. “What for?” I demanded, immediately seeing myself on my knees in a scullery maid’s outfit—minus the singing mice and a fairy godmother.

“They want their students to get to know all different types of people—”

“Like one of those Rich or poor, black or white, Native American, Asian, we’re all one big American family who accepts each other’s differences videos?”

“Partly, but—”

“They always play ‘My Country, ’Tis of Thee’ and show five million faces, but—I swear to God—they use the same Orthodox rabbi in every one.”

“Don’t interrupt me, Amy. They also know they’re lucky to have such wealth. They think it’s only fair to give some promising girls from low-income families the opportunity to get the same education rich girls get.”

“What’s the catch?”

“Well,” she said slowly, “you wouldn’t be living at home during the school year—” Sold!

My guidance counselor at Intermediate School 495 genuinely believed I could do well anywhere, but she asked: “How about Bronx Science, Amy? I don’t know if you’d be comfortable at a place like … Ivey-Rush.” Yes, that Ivey-Rush. Even I knew about it. But then, for years I’d been reading the copies of Town and Country Grandma Lil swiped from her job. I knew from boarding schools.

So I said to my guidance counselor: “Don’t worry, Ms. Buonavitacola. If I get in, I’ll be fine.”

The brochure was printed on shiny paper so thick it didn’t squeak: Located in the serene and verdant Connecticut Valley, the Ivey-Rush Academy was founded in 1903 by Susannah Ivey and Abigail Rush. These two young graduates of Mount Holyoke College were determined “to provide young women with an education as rigorous as that offered to young men.”

Serene sounded good. As far as the verdancy business went, the only things not green in the brochure’s photographs were Tuttle Chapel (redbrick) and the students (white and yellow, as well as browns ranging from beige to mahogany), although once I got there I realized that about two-thirds of the nonwhites in the photo must have been hired for the day from some Diversity, Our Specialty model agency).

Joan Murdoch helped me fill out the application. When we finished, I told her that if I were half as gifted as all my teachers raved I was, I had a shot. She agreed. Once Grandma Lil discovered she would still be my legal guardian and that my going away would not jeopardize her monthly check from the City of New York, she signed her name to my application in the rounded, overlarge letters of the semiliterate.

With the application, I submitted a heart-wrenching essay about visiting Chicky in prison: “Father’s Day” was full of shocking language—in quotation marks, to assure the admissions committee that I, personally, wasn’t the kind of girl who’d say “cocksucker.” Having the typical fourteen-year-old’s penchant for the lurid, I filled it with graphic descriptions of disgusting smells, oozing sores, plus wails from junkie girlfriends begging for money. Ivey-Rush was thrilled with such a well-phrased account of degradation. And to show you how refined they were, when the first alumna interviewer discovered that Amy Lincoln, the leading candidate for the year’s Fahnstock Scholarship—the school’s guarantee of at least one black face in the class photograph—was white, not only did she do a reasonably good job of hiding her dismay, she recommended that the admissions committee let me in. Graciously, they designated me a “full needs” student, which meant all fees, room, board, and books plus ten dollars a week spending money were on the house.

But to get back to work, and to the Democrats: A waiter was offering tiny circles of pumpernickel overlaid with curls of smoked salmon, which in turn were topped by minuscule twirls of créme fraîche. Most of the guests appeared to be going through the predictable internal debate—How much sodium how many calories how many carbs can this three-quarter-inch canapé contain?—before wolfing down a few.

Senator Thom Bowles declined the hors d’oeuvres without a second’s consideration and remembered to flash a fast, egalitarian, vote-for-me smile at the waiter. The candidate had been to enough parties like this that he knew even slightly salty salmon could cause dry mouth; caviar was also a no-no, not just because of its salinity, but because a really fine Beluga might turn his teeth gray.

By this time, it was a little after eight-thirty on a Monday night late in February. The sleet and hail beating against the windows sounded like hundreds of angry women tapping acrylic nails. I had spent the afternoon with the senator’s top adviser on taxes, mostly in a dark conference room, drinking a dangerous amount of Diet Dr Pepper to keep myself from getting comatose as I studied her graphs and pie charts. My pantsuit itched and I was so tired I felt my immune system was compromised. Lichen could grow on the insides of my cheeks and over my tongue.

At that point, it occurred to me that I ought to get the hell out of the fundraiser, get home, and go to bed. Any details I’d forgotten? I knew that the footwear king’s name was Harlan Kleinberg, but I had to get his wife’s first name, though it was dubious that I would mention them in the article. Still, if I did I wasn’t going to be able to refer to her as the Missus. I headed toward her, figuring she was just the type to have an annoying name—Tawnee Blankenship-Kleinberg—when I heard a voice above the Manhattan murmur of the guests. I turned and saw a guy at the door. He was about nineteen. Clean-cut, but not overly so, not like those kids who try to grab you in airports. He wore jeans and a sweatshirt with CCNY, City College of New York, in an arc across his chest. His black hair was soaked into a tight cap from the weather and sparkled with flecks of hail that had not yet melted. Café-with-a-lot-of-lait skin. Built small, one of those mini-men who make the average woman standing beside him appear the size of a Thanksgiving Day parade balloon.

“I’m here to see the senator,” the kid was telling the Missus and a man who looked like he might have difficulty spelling cat. I assumed the latter was part of Bowles’s security detail. Even though the CCNY guy didn’t appear nuts, the Missus and Security seemed to be blocking his entrance. Their heads, however, were turned away from him, toward the living room, as if seeking instruction on what to do. I figured the kid might be a too-enthusiastic Bowles Brigade volunteer. “I said”—his voice got louder, though not aggressively so—“I’d like to see Senator Bowles, please.” I strolled toward the front door until I was about four feet from him. He glanced at me, at my press ID, then immediately looked back at the guests. “Senator Bowles,” he announced. Really loud.