Any Place I Hang My Hat (24 page)

The only thing holding me back from Florida, from maybe getting to talk to Rose Moscowitz, was Happy Bob’s okay. “Are you sure you don’t just want a few days in the nice warm weather?” he asked. A phlegmy sound resonated from his throat: a chuckle, or perhaps a chortle. As usual, he masked his distrust of his own handpicked editorial staff behind what he considered an open smile. His teeth, mottled with brown, always reminded me of the Dead Sea scrolls. “Why can’t you do this online, or at a library? Get some expert at Columbia or NYU. Spend a day in Washington and come back—”

“Bob, three-quarters of the authorities I want to talk to are in Florida.”

“What’s wrong with the phone?”

“They’re not going to give me an hour answering my questions on Kucinich’s program for alternative energy sources—solar and ocean. That’s what’s wrong.”

Happy Bob tugged at the black hair between his eyebrows, his reflective gesture. Finally he smiled again: “Don’t let me see you come back with a suntan.”

By my second day in Florida, I knew I had almost enough information for a good piece. I’d assembled piles of data on the rising ocean due to global warming, and on sewage disposal for America’s ever-increasing population of a certain age, one not known for great bladder control. I even watched C-SPAN at night in my hotel; John Edwards was charming a United Synagogue convention in South Carolina and I took notes. Best of all, I’d gotten a free ride to check out my maternal grandmother.

At high noon, coated with SPF 30, I let the sun roast my face while my final interview, a meteorologist from the Gavarian Oceanographic Institute held forth with such dire warnings about the rising oceans it sounded as if all Miami’s Latinos and gays and Jews and blacks and Others would soon be frolicking on the sand in southeastern Alabama.

I’d taken her out to lunch on the theory I could get more out of her away from the distractions of the ever-changing line and bar graphs that kept flashing on the screens on the wall across from her desk. Anyhow, she was pencil-thin and had enough broken blood vessels on her face to make me suspect she was bulimic, so I figured she’d be easy on the expense account because she wouldn’t gorge in front of a relative stranger.

“It’s not just a question of sea level rise and increased precipitation,” she was saying about global warming. “It impacts on everything. Weather-related mortality, farm yields, forest composition, and I’m just touching the surface here—loss of habitat and species.” While she talked, I multitasked, breathing in the sweet, humid Miami air; wanting almost to cry, that such an outstanding woman could be in thrall to compulsive puking; taking notes on ecological Armageddon; brooding about how I should present myself to Rose Moscowitz. Normally, I not only planned ahead, I wrote everything down in outline form so I could critique my own strategies. Yet for some reason, when it came to approaching my grandmother, I hadn’t figured out a thing.

So now I was free to worry. Rose M. might be senile and not even know she’d ever had a daughter named Phyllis/Véronique. What if she lived in a gated community? If she said no to a meeting, how could I get past the guards? Under what guise could I present myself? Should I use the name Amy Lincoln? Maybe she didn’t know anything about her daughter and Chicky Lincoln. But maybe she did. I didn’t want to use my name, put her on guard, and have her refuse to see me. On the other hand, how could I use a fake name? She might ask to see some ID.

“Precipitation has been consistently rising?” I asked.

“Over land at high latitudes in the northern hemisphere, yes. But there’s been a decrease in precip. since the 1960s over the subtropics and the tropics. From Africa to Indonesia. They’re both causes of, uh, great concern.” We hadn’t gotten any bread, but she kept glancing at a bread basket on the table next to ours. “Off the record?”

“Sure,” I said.

“The Bush administration’s position isn’t just dangerous, it’s primitive. They ignore accepted scientific evidence because it’s not to their immediate economic benefit. They don’t care about—”

Just then, the waiter came around. The meteorologist almost snatched the menu from his hand and began devouring it with her eyes. I got a little nervous because I knew In Depth wouldn’t pay for a binge. Fortunately, she only had a cheeseburger, fries, and lemonade, followed by a rather long trip to the ladies’ room. When she came back, her eyes were slightly bloodshot and I caught a whiff of vomit and Juicy Fruit.

After I was finished with her, I started feeling guilty about taking the afternoon off. So I drove from Miami to Miami Beach because John Kerry was in town. I watched him dump on the Bush tax cut before the Hardy-Schmidt Conduit distributors convention at the Fontainebleau Hotel. They seemed unable to comprehend supply-side economics or, indeed, Senator Kerry, though I thought he was in good form. His press person gave me fifteen minutes on the bus with him on the way to his next stop, a Guatemalan-American leadership organization, and I got enough substantive, quotable stuff on his environmental views to put a genuine smile on Happy Bob’s face. Then I popped three Advils and took a taxi back to retrieve my rented car and go back to my hotel on the beach. Excellent. I’d worked two whole days. Now this night would be mine.

I recalled my talk with Judyann Baptiste. Rose Moscowitz was a woman who had a college degree. She’d continued her education: Italian, philosophy, whatever. Even if I wanted to do it, I doubted if she could be easily duped. I had to come up with some reasonable story so she’d not only be willing to see me, but to talk about her daughter as well.

How about the truth? I asked myself.

My hotel was two blocks from the ocean, one of those formerly decrepit Deco ruins restored to aqua and yellow razzle-dazzle. Once inside, I’d realized about two seconds after registering that this was not a place for cool fashionistas and music minimoguls. My room was about as large as a medium-size walk-in closet, and the building’s electrical system seemed overwhelmed by the guests’ insistence on turning on their air conditioners.

I sat in the only chair in the room, a director’s chair covered in white canvas. Except for a taupe rug, the entire room was white, from pleated shades to bed linen to the little basket that held the CDs, an odd collection of classical guitar, hip-hop, and country music of the you’ve-left-me-and-stomped-on-my-heart variety.

The lukewarm breeze being exhaled by the air conditioner wasn’t the only reason my silk T-shirt clung to me like a wet washcloth. I sat staring at the display on my cell phone, half hoping to find the battery on the verge of death. But it was fully charged. I stood to check out my notes for Rose Moscowitz’s phone number in Boca Raton, but sat back down, realizing I’d memorized it. I dialed carefully, not wanting mistakenly to reach some random widow and cause so much confusion and pain that I would not have the heart to try again.

Oh my God! It was ringing. I was praying passionately to reach either her voice mail or a phone company recording that the number was no longer in service, when a woman answered: “Hello.”

“May I please speak with Rose Moscowitz?”

“This is she.”

I gave her an A for grammar and a C for warmth. Just from those few words I knew she wasn’t the sort of grandmother who either baked or ate chocolate chip cookies. “Mrs. Moscowitz, I am a writer and associate editor of In Depth magazine.”

“Yes.” A cautious yes, but at least it wasn’t Huh? or Wha’?

“Our offices are in New York, but I’m here in south Florida researching and working on an article. I was wondering—since I’m down here—if I can meet you… .” I swallowed, but there was nothing to swallow. My mouth was dry because all the moisture in my body was being utilized to manufacture sweat.

“Meet me for what purpose?”

“Actually, it’s a personal matter.” I was nervous that she’d hear the clack my tongue made as it attempted to unglue itself from my hard palate.

“A personal matter?” It wasn’t a query, as in I don’t understand. It was said superciliously—a personal matter?—the way a hoity-toity matron in an old movie would address a groveling plebeian asking for a favor.

Fuck favors. I would never have gotten into boarding school and Harvard if I’d been a person who knew her place. Nor was I the type who’d try to top a cold remark with an even icier one. I was not Rose Moscowitz’s inferior. And I wasn’t her better. I was her equal. People like me, the successfully upwardly mobile, behaved as if we really did believe that all men and women are created equal, despite the sad amount of evidence to the contrary.

Yet the weekend before I went off to Ivey-Rush for my first year, my aunt and uncle took me for a bon voyage brunch at a pancake house not far from where they lived in Sheepshead Bay. Uncle Sparky asked, “You scared, kiddo?” “Yeah,” I said, “I’m scared.” As if to prove it, my hand shook and three drops of syrup landed on my pink T-shirt. Aunt Linda dipped the edge of her napkin in her glass of water and handed it to me, but Uncle Sparky went on talking: “You should be scared. This boarding school business is a big deal. But when you get there … Okay, be scared. Just act not scared. They let you in because you’re as good as they are.”

“Yes, Mrs. Moscowitz, a personal matter. But before I go into it, please feel free to check my credentials. On the Internet, In Depth dot com. They have the masthead there.” I decided not to explain the word masthead as I would have been obliged to for anyone on my father’s side of the family. “Of course, it’s also in the magazine.” She was so quiet she could have died two sentences earlier. I sensed I ought to lay it on thick. “I’m a graduate of Ivey-Rush Academy, Harvard, and the Columbia School of Journalism. I know their registrars’ offices aren’t open in the evening, but I’ll be glad to call you back tomorrow, after you’ve checked.” As she still hadn’t said anything, I added: “And I’ll be glad to meet you in any public place and show you my photo ID.”

“You haven’t given me your name.”

“Oh, sorry. Amy Lincoln.” Naturally, at this very moment that I’d been dreading, saying who I was, the air-conditioning shifted into high gear for the first time since I checked in. My sweaty silk shirt turned into a cold compress. Cradling the phone between chin and shoulder, I rubbed my upper arms, but despite that they were soon covered with goose bumps. Amy Lincoln appeared to be a conversation stopper. My teeth started chattering.

“You did say this was a personal matter,” Grandma Warmth said. “May I assume you’re related to a … Charles Lincoln?” She said Chicky’s name as if she were saying cockroach.

“Yes. I’m Charles Lincoln’s daughter. But it’s not my father I’d like to talk to you about. It’s my mother.”

“Your mother?”

“My mother. Your daughter.”

LIKE SO MANY of the gated communities I’d seen in Florida during the Bush-versus-Gore mess, Hibiscus Pointe in Boca Raton had a security booth with an overlarge sign on the window announcing the security guard’s name, so that even residents with fairly advanced cataracts could see RODRIGO. Rodrigo, actually, was worth seeing: noble head, manly brows, luscious lips that needed only a touch of ChapStick.

“Hi. I’m here to see Rose Moscowitz. My name is Amy Lincoln.”

He pressed his computer monitor touch-screen two or three times, then flashed an Antonio Banderas knowing look that said, You would find me wickedly amusing, although his actual words were: “Yes, Miss Lincoln, she’ll meet you at the clubhouse. Do you know where it is?” When I shook my head, he punched a key. A printer wearily exuded directions. The gate rose slowly.

Speed bumps every twenty feet or so along Hibiscus Boulevard made sure I didn’t get anywhere at a New York clip.

I wondered if anybody from New York could truly love this life. Probably, because more and more people wanted to live this way. It wasn’t only rich whites. And not just in Florida, either. All over the country, I’d noticed the haves of all races, colors, and creeds hurrying to get themselves guarded so that their have-less and have-not fellow citizens could not steal their botanical prints. I wondered if this wouldn’t be the true Reagan-Bush legacy: not a return to the laissez-faire, invisible-hand capitalism of Adam Smith, but a slide into a tsarist state, where government existed to enrich the rich.

I was minutes from meeting my grandmother. Clutching the steering wheel as if it were a lifesaver, I drove at the prescribed fifteen miles per hour past single-family homes and blocks of two-story attached houses the signs pointed out as villas. There appeared to be three permissible colors for residences in Hibiscus Pointe: muted pink, pale apricot, and cirrhotic yellow. The development did not seem particularly Floridian. I had no sense an ocean was ten miles away. The Pointe was a fungible community with palm trees that, but for the humidity, could have been in Phoenix.

Rose Moscowitz: The more I thought about meeting her, the more my broken ribs throbbed as if my pounding heart were attached to them. I slowed to about ten miles per hour, fearing that in this unstrung state, I’d mistake the accelerator for the brake and run over a urologist in a golf cart. After a couple of wrong turns onto Orchid Circle and Bird of Paradise Way, I got to the clubhouse, large and apricot, with a red-tiled roof. I gave over the car to a valet named MIGUEL and walked inside, into a blast of air that could have originated in Antarctica.

No men waited in the marble-floored, crystal-chandelier-lighted frostiness of the clubhouse lobby. Chairs and couches, upholstered in dark green chintz decorated with pink, red, and yellow hibiscus, were mostly occupied by women of a certain age, i.e., the age that would qualify them to be grandmothers of people my age. I stood just inside the heavy glass door and gave the space my reporter’s once-over, that 180-degree visual sweep to get a sense of the place, as well as the women in it. Actually, that makes me sound too relaxed. My heart was still thudding, and I half expected to wind up shrieking at the sight of myself morphed into a seventy-eight-year-old with jowls and an Hermés scarf.

I quickly eliminated the gossipy twosomes, then the lone women, eyes demurely lowered, deep in thought or checking out one another’s shoes. Instead, I focused on the one woman who was reading. Her back was straight, her head bent so she could read the book resting on her lap.