Any Place I Hang My Hat (22 page)

“I guess so. I was so tired and strung out from the painkillers last night, I couldn’t keep looking.”

“So you’re really going through with this looking-for-her thing?” She shook her head almost imperceptibly and made a near-silent Tsk.

“I think so.”

“Let me ask you something, Amy. Say you find her and she turns out to be a total creep. What then?”

“I’ve thought of that,” I replied.

“Besides the disappointment, you could start thinking: Half of me is a creep. Not that there’s any creep in you. You know that. Even with Harvard. But you could feel that way. Or what if you find her and think, What a loser! and you don’t want anything to do with her? Except she calls you and calls you—”

I cut her off. “I’d get my number changed.”

Aunt Linda took off her scarf, pulled her hair back, did some fast winding, and made a ponytail. “You want the truth, hon? I know you’re strong, you know you’re strong. But strong people can still break.”

“I know.”

“And she’s a bitch. Who else could do a thing like what she did?”

“A messed-up kid.”

“You grew up without a mother, Amy, so what do you need one for now?”

“I need to see where I come from.”

“You come from New York, for Christ’s sakes!” She glanced down at her persimmon toes, then back at me. “You know, that’s the one thing I can never say in front of Sparky, even after all these years. Like even though it’s not making fun of Jesus or anything, I don’t want him to think I don’t respect his religion. He doesn’t go to church, but I think he still believes it. Even the virgin business. Where was I? Oh, Phyllis. You got nothing of her except her brains, because we both know Chicky is no Einstein.”

“But they’re finding more and more personality traits are genetic—all those studies of twins separated at birth.”

“What? Never mind, don’t explain. You went to the best college in the world and I got out of high school with a seventy-eight average. What do you think, Amy, your genes will make you run away from your baby?” When I didn’t answer she added: “Don’t be stupid! You’ll be a wonderful mother. What’s with you and John?”

“Nothing. It’s finished.”

“Last time you were over, you sounded like things weren’t going too good.”

“They weren’t. We broke up.”

“You broke it off?” Her beautifully tweezed eyebrows lifted at the thought of such idiocy.

“It was mutual.”

“So look, if John’s out of the picture, all the more reason not to look for Phyllis. Who have you got to fall back on if she turns out to be weird? Or even not weird. I mean, she could be mature now. Say you find her and all she wants is to make it up to you. Can’t do enough for you. A whole life without a mother and now you got Mademoiselle Véronique with a guilt complex ’cause she abandoned her baby and she can’t do enough, which would be nice, except she’s a total pain because she can’t stop making you lace doilies or something.”

Without asking if I wanted anything, my aunt walked over to the kitchen area and found the coffeepot. She measured out coffee and water and arranged what she said were soy cookies—two net carbs each. “They don’t taste great,” she observed, “but on the other hand, they don’t taste like shit either.”

“Do I look like my mother?”

“You’ve sort of got her eyes,” she said reluctantly, turning from me to watch the coffee drip into the glass pot. “And you’ve got her height, but she was—I don’t know what you’d call it—teeny-boned. She had a real long neck, like Audrey Hepburn. Except to me she always looked a little lollipop-ish because she had this big head, but Sparky always said she was a man’s woman, not a woman’s woman. Whatever that means.” She shrugged. “Well, I know what it means, but I think guys liked her more because she was cold than for her looks. You know, guys have this big ego thing, thawing a cold girl out so she becomes a hottie, but only for them.”

She grasped her bra straps between thumbs and forefingers and shifted everything slightly to the right. “Remember when we came up to visit you at Ivey-Rush on our way to Nantucket? It was right after you got into Harvard and that other good school but you were all upset about stupid Yale?” I nodded. “Well, that time, Sparky said you looked so much like Phyllis he almost did a double take, but then, after he kept looking at you, it was less and less. You know why? Because Phyllis was a cold bitch and you were a real person, even after hanging out with all those rich girls for three years.” She took two mugs from the cabinet. “Do you think if you wanted to, you could get him back?” she asked.

“Who?”

“You know who.”

“No,” I told her. “I don’t think I could.”

“I bet you could. Whatever it is, apologize. You don’t have to win every argument. Unless … Was it another woman?” I shrugged. “Men.” She sighed. She reached over and took my hand. I noticed there were white blotches on hers, which I guessed meant she’d done something to get rid of liver spots. “Listen, angel pie, if it’s over, it’s over. You have to go out, find someone else.”

“Aunt Linda, you know it’s not that easy.”

“You only think that because you think too much. There are thousands of guys who’d jump at the chance to marry you! Just go eeny-meeny-miney-mo with the best ones and pick somebody.”

“You know, I never thought of marriage that way.”

“It works, lovie. All over the world, what do you see?”

“Women without money or power dependent on men.”

“No, Amy. You see arranged marriages. And you know what? When the husband dies, the wife cries.”

Despite two mugs of Aunt Linda’s killer coffee, I fell asleep the moment she left. I woke up a couple of hours later feeling so drugged that for a minute I had no idea what time it was or why breathing hurt. Recalling offered no particular consolation, so I trudged back to the computer. I had a vague notion I needed to dig deeper into the degree of John Kerry’s commitment to marine ecosystems, but instead I watched my screen saver, a bunch of baby robins breaking out of their blue eggs.

God knows how many times I watched them. The room was dark except for the light of the screen, so until the phone rang that nest was all that existed. “Amy Lincoln?”

It was who I thought it was. “Dr. Shea D’Alessandro. How are you feeling?”

“Not too bad.” My keyboard was almost noiseless, so I went online and started checking out old Kerry marine ecology stories in the Boston Globe.

“Not too bad considering three broken ribs.” He chuckled. “I’d like to see you in the office early next week, check how you’re doing.”

“Okay. I’ll call Monday and make an appointment.” I bookmarked two articles, then moved on to the Cape Cod Times.

“By the way, I looked through a couple of old issues of In Depth. You’re a political writer.”

“Right.” A piece written in 2000 began Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass., has become the point man in championing a fishery management program that some compare to the fencing-off of the prairies and others hope will help end overfishing. “Forgive me if I sound drugged, but I am.”

“That’s okay. If the pain eases, two or three ibuprofen should do the trick. That’s like Advil, Motrin. But I guess you know what ibuprofen is.”

I went back to Google and typed Véronique Hochberg. “Yes.” I always hated it when guys didn’t say anything—whether out of shyness or arrogance—and I wound up struggling to make conversation. Still, I added: “But you’re right to be specific.”

“Did you major in journalism at college?”

“No.” I pressed Enter. “I got a master’s in it at Columbia.”

“Where did you do your undergraduate work?” he asked.

There it was. I double-clicked. A squib in Newsday: Group to Restore Theater. A group of Shorehaven residents … former home of the Bard’s Company … for years a movie house … Bring Back the Bard is headed by Janice Asher. Its members include Barbara Kiprik, Ken Warner, Véronique Hochberg. “I’m sorry. I didn’t hear what you said, Dr. D’Alessandro.”

“Please, call me Shea. I asked where you went to college.”

“Harvard.”

“Oh. Now I’m doubly impressed.”

There was a tiny photo with the article, the Bring Back the Bard committee. She was on the left. I copied the photo, then pasted and enlarged it. “Oh, sorry, Shea. My call waiting. Thanks so much for checking up on me. I’ll see you early next week.” If he said goodbye as I hung up, I didn’t hear it.

It was the second picture I’d ever seen of my mother, the first without sunglasses. She was the shortest person in the group. She must have had long hair, because it was pinned on top of her head, although the photo was so indistinct it could have been a large sponge. She was wearing a tank top, a long skirt, and had on a bunch of necklaces. She looked casual and chic and so petite that the rest of the group looked like Goliaths. Smiling Goliaths. Everyone in the photo was smiling. Except for my mother.

I GOT TO my office by seven Monday morning, because I guessed—correctly—that my eleven-thirty appointment with Dr. D’Alessandro would be no ten-second poke ribs/You’re coming along nicely. Sure enough, I had almost an hour to check out the waiting room.

Right away I spotted a copy of In Depth there, along with a slew of high-end magazines. By merely hanging around to see one of the doctors at Park Avenue Orthopedic Associates, the average upper-middle-class New Yorker could gain such advantageous knowledge as why the director Aki Kaurismäki should have won the Palme d’Or for The Man Without a Past and in what sort of a mold to bake game pâtés.

From the look of the waiting room, Shea D’A and his partners were devotees of the Bauhaus aesthetic. Or perhaps they’d simply given a blank check to a decorator and said, We want a guy office. The waiting space was a long rectangle with six black Mies van der Rohe–style chrome-and-leather chairs. There was also a square-armed couch, dark red, that looked displeased with its color. The rug, with its quadrilateral shapes, was also red and black. The space was cold, bringing to mind more “Nazi” than “Stendhal.”

In Depth and the other magazines hung from the rungs of a narrow chrome ladder on a wall to the left of the receptionists’ desk. With only a little shelf of mints, gum, and a couple of bags of stale nuts, they could have had a concession. The receptionists, three of them, were white-, black-, and brown-skinned, but all had black hair to coordinate with the decor.

I skimmed Architectural Digest for a couple of minutes and spotted a cappuccino maker that probably cost more than my net worth. Reluctantly, I put the magazine aside and spent the time reading the pile of material for my next article: where the candidates stood on environmental issues. I had to get beyond the customary Democratic stance: We’ll-fight-polluters-and-all-those-who-don’t-give-a-damn-about-the-Chittenango-ovate-amber-snail. I highlighted quotes and votes until a technician took me in for more X-rays.

When I was finally led back to the waiting room, I tried to get back to work. But my mother kept intruding. Same old story, latest revision of the one I’d been telling myself since I was a kid. In this most recent version, she was age seventeen, telling her ten-month-old daughter, See you later, sweets, knowing, even at that moment, there would be no “later,” that she wasn’t coming back. She probably didn’t wait for the elevator—just ran down the stairs. Out!

I let myself experience her relief. Freedom! It was like being illuminated from within. Thank God, no more terror-filled nights listening for the scratchings of rats’ feet. No more worrying about what will happen when Chicky gets out of prison. He could kill me. Or worse, want me back. Freedom! No more wiping dribbles and shit off a still-bald baby. No more listening to dribbles and shit spewing forth from an imbecile mother-in-law whose IQ is half of mine.

The story then skipped ahead, a few days, a few weeks. Phyllis was suddenly feeling low, realizing she was aching for the velvet of her baby’s cheek. How can I get her back? Sneak into the project at three in the morning, past sleeping cops in a squad car, open stupid Lil’s door with my key and snatch Amy? Except what if I’m caught, charged with abandonment or something, thrown into jail? Calm down. Think. All right, I could get a lawyer, get him to do something for me, so I could keep her. Except a lawyer: His eyes would be filled with contempt for me. Abandoned her baby. Spoiled Brooklyn bitch. Maybe, being a lawyer, he’d even figure out that I should be the one in prison for snatching that diamond ring, not Chicky. He’d report it to the DA. But I want Amy back.

The conflict in the Phyllis/Véronique story was always the same, her desire versus her dread. But there could be—was—only one way to finish the story, the true one. Dread always triumphed. The End. I lowered my head, closed my eyes.

When I opened them, I saw the stack of papers in my lap. For the five thousandth time in my career I wished that instead of being a writer at In Depth, I could be something else, something with emotion: an orthopedist (Scalpel! Saw!), a pollster (Up four percentage points in Delaware!), a soccer coach, the requisite short girl in the chorus line of a Broadway musical, tip-tapping and singing her little heart out.

Another fifteen minutes went by until one of the black-haired, white-bloused receptionists at the desk ushered me into Shea D’A’s office. More black leather. In back of him, a black-and-white Ansel Adams poster of a desolate tree. The doctor sat behind a sleek black desk with curved sides, twirling a pen between his thumbs and forefingers. He gave me a blue-eyed glance, then looked off to the side, to a light box displaying two X-rays of ribs, presumably mine.

“They’re what I expected,” he said to the X-rays.

“Any restrictions on activity?” I inquired.

He turned back. Under yet another double-breasted jacket, he wore a blue shirt one shade darker than the hue of his eyes. Blue eyes had never done it for me. Growing up on the Lower East, I’d known mostly dark-eyed people. While I understood how some women could find light eyes appealing, I could never be drawn to a man from a culture that valued reticence and sweaters with snowflakes.

“Long walks are fine,” he told me. “No weight training. No—”

“I run three to four miles a day.”