Any Place I Hang My Hat (25 page)

Either she felt my eyes on her or she was periodically surveying the room because when she saw me, she slowly inserted a bookmark. In one fluid movement, she was up. No old-lady stiffness in her rise, no hands pushing against chair arms for leverage. She merely uncrossed her ankles and her legs took care of the rest. She was tall and quite slender, but with unusually long arms. Despite a super-femme watch with a pink leather band on one wrist and a Wonder Woman-ish silver cuff on the other, her build was more suggestive of a women’s basketball forward than a fashion model. Still, she managed to look elegant. Her hair was pulled into a bun; it was the gray that gave off silvery glints, so the overall effect was chic rather than granny-ish.

She walked toward me until she was a couple of feet away and then asked: “Amy Lincoln?”

“Yes.” My heart stopped pounding and started racing at close to the speed of light. I was relieved to see she wasn’t as cool as she was trying to look either. Her eyes began blinking at about the same speed as my heart. I wanted to cry out, You think I look like my mother! but I just said: “Nice to meet you, Ms. Moscowitz.”

“Would you like some lunch? They have good salads and sandwiches, but of course if you’d like something more …”

“A salad would be fine.” She nodded, but seemed unable to move. Finally clutching the book against her chest, she led me through a doorway tall and wide enough to accommodate an Abrams tank. I couldn’t tell if she was deliberately displaying the book’s title, but from the bookmark it appeared she was nearly finished with The Crisis of Islam: Holy War and Unholy Terror. I had to admit to myself that was cool, especially since Grandma Lil’s choice for stimulating reading had been columns with bolded names: “Among the guests were Count Roffredo Gaetani, Maisie and James R. Houghton, and raconteur Howard Stern.”

If you loved looking at golf courses, then the view from the excessively green dining room of the Hibiscus Pointe club was for you. Before Rose Moscowitz could even offer me a seat, I slid into the chair with its back toward the windows. As a journalist, you quickly learned not to sit facing any source of light that might blind you to the expression on the face of the person you’re interviewing. I could have used a glass or two of wine, but didn’t want the word alcoholic to bubble up in Rose Moscowitz’s semiconsciousness. “I appreciate your asking me to lunch,” I said. “Though I can think of about a thousand more relaxed circumstances under which to break bread.”

“I agree,” she replied, although she didn’t smile. Her drawn-on lips were slightly wider than her natural ones. Otherwise her makeup was subtle, not that heavy cosmetic veil many older women use to hide the flaws that come with growing older, the foundation that cracks along fault lines as the day wears on. Still, though well put together, she wasn’t a pretty woman. Not even attractive. Her face was an oblong, and with her prominent front teeth pushing out her lips, she would have been called horsey had she been a Wasp. Being what she was, it was evident she’d been born in those years between universal suffrage and universal orthodontia.

“If it’s all right with you,” I said, “I’d like to get business over with.” I reached into my handbag and pulled out my In Depth ID and set it before her, beside her bread plate. Then I extracted my wallet and took out my driver’s license and, for good measure, my MasterCard. She looked at the photos, at me, then back again.

“Central Park South,” she murmured to my driver’s license. “Your magazine must pay you well.”

“No. I’m subletting a two-hundred-square-foot studio that faces the buildings on West Fifty-eighth Street. The owner is our Asia bureau chief. If he ever comes back, the only place in Manhattan I’d be able to afford is an apartment in the low-income housing project in which I grew up.” I supposed she was intimidating me since I felt pressured to give up colloquial English and go for the sentence that didn’t end with a preposition.

As she handed my cards and ID back to me, the waiter came over. She ordered a chardonnay, so I did too. When he left, I put the wallet back into my bag, took out a file folder, and handed over copies of my birth certificate and Chicky and Phyllis’s marriage license from Maryland.

This was not a casual woman. She studied the two papers for several very long moments. “The name on both of these is Phyllis Morris, not Moscowitz.”

“Correct. Members of my family knew my mother had changed her name from Moscowitz. However, Morris or Moscowitz, the birth dates on the documents are hers. And when I mentioned my last name, you immediately asked if I was connected to Charles Lincoln. Obviously, you knew of him.”

She brushed some imaginary lint from the bodice of her gray dress and readjusted the silver clasp of her belt so it was perfectly centered. Her pink-banded watch had diamonds around its face. She said quietly: “There is no proof that would stand up in a court of law—”

“I’m not interested in a court of law.” When the waiter—his name tag said BUZZY—came back with our wine, she reached for her glass and, without preliminaries, took a healthy slug. I had three fingers on the stem of my glass, but my hand was trembling so much I had to leave it on the table. “I’m not interested in getting back at anyone,” I told her. “I don’t want money. I’m not even sure that I want to meet …” I hesitated, then said, “… your daughter.”

“What do you want?” I can’t say her tone was dripping with honey. When I didn’t answer right away, she twisted her watch to get the face right between the knobs of her wrist. However, she did not look to see the time.

I willed my hand to get a grip on itself and managed to bring wine to mouth without spilling any on my shirt or on the foam green tablecloth. “Did you have a mother who was around during your childhood?” I asked her. She nodded, a little coldly. “You asked what I want. Let me try to explain,” I went on. “Think about adopted children: They always wonder about their biological parents, but mostly they know there was at least a shot that their birth mothers would have kept them had it been at all feasible. They also know that their adoptive parents wanted them, or minimally, wanted a child. But for me it’s different. My mother didn’t want me. This privileged and intelligent young woman couldn’t come up with any alternative to abandonment. All my life I’ve lived with the knowledge that no matter how good I was, I wasn’t good enough.”

Rose Moscowitz leaned forward. “Look, I’m sorry about what happened to you and all that. But Phyllis was not a young woman. Well, these days they call everybody who’s female woman, but she was a girl. A girl who’d gotten herself into a terrible—excuse me, into an untenable situation.”

“You’re right. She married a punk. She was living in a tenement that had a rat in residence.” Her eyes widened and the blinking started up again. “You didn’t know that?”

“I don’t feel comfortable saying what I did or didn’t know.”

Here I was, outing my own vulnerability, and this woman’s response was the deep freeze. At that moment, part of me wanted to get right up and call John and tell him, See? This is what happens when you show that you’re vulnerable. People back off. Meanwhile, the other part of me said, Fuck vulnerability: I couldn’t have gotten to where I am from where I’ve been without being tough. Also, as far as Rose Moscowitz’s aloofness went, I was used to politicians, half of whom shut down the charm when I persisted in asking a question they didn’t want to answer. So I’d developed an immunity to the cold treatment. “Ms. Moscowitz, the last thing I want is to make you feel uncomfortable.”

She seemed a little flustered, but finally said, “Thank you.”

“But I want to check out the other half of my gene pool. And I also have a need to know about a very bright seventeen-year-old who, with or without her parents’ knowledge, chose to get out of an untenable situation by pretending to go out for a couple of hours. She never came back.”

“Didn’t your father take care of you?”

“My father was sent to prison a few months after I was born. That’s where he was when she took off. When he got out a few years later, yes, he did take care of me.”

Rose Moscowitz was silent for so long Buzzy came over and handed us menus. She put hers on the floor beside her handbag and book. Then she swallowed. “We didn’t …” she began. “We had no idea. When Phyllis ran off, we assumed it was with the man who kept coming to pick her up and drop her off. Each time he’d be driving a different car. We only knew his name was Chicky. Or that was what my husband, Selwyn, thought it was.”

“Everybody calls him Chicky,” I told her.

“My husband hired a detective. When he couldn’t track her down, he hired another one—from a big agency on Third Avenue.”

“Did you call the police?”

“Yes, but the police sergeant told Selwyn that if it were his child, he’d employ a private investigator. The police would try, but they really didn’t have the manpower to keep going on any one missing person case unless there was evidence that a crime had been committed, like kidnapping or homicide.”

“Did you believe your daughter had been the victim of some crime?”

She lifted her arm and wiggled her index finger, for the waiter. “Please, order anything you want. I mean, I would stay away from anything that’s too elaborate. The kitchen is good, but basic.”

Buzzy returned. Although he was wearing a smile, I noticed his eyes had a resentful dullness. A fleshy man with a crew cut, he had a double chin that hung below his collar and partially obscured his bow tie. His face could have been in an old news-reel, one of the crowd spewing nigger when federal marshals escorted black kids to school. Then I thought that maybe his feet hurt. “Yes, ladies?” he asked. Rose Moscowitz ordered a salade niçoise and I told him I’d have one also. “Very well, ladies.”

“I forgot where we were,” Rose Moscowitz told me.

“I was asking if you thought your daughter had been the victim of a crime.”

“My husband did. He was sure Phyllis had been, you know, sexually assaulted and killed. It took years off his life. Years.

Sometimes, late at night when I woke up and couldn’t get back to sleep, all sorts of—oh God!—horrible, sick, violent scenes would play in my mind. But most of the time, I knew she would be all right. Selwyn used to say, ‘I wish I was blessed with your naïveté.’ Except I wasn’t naïve. I knew Phyllis would not get into any relationship she couldn’t control. Yes, she was a runaway, but there’s a difference between being willful and being self-destructive. I suppose willful is too weak a word, but I can’t think of anything else to call it.” She started to stare at me again, and did nothing to disguise it.

“Do I look like her?”

“No. Not at all.”

I took a sip of wine. When she didn’t say anything, I took another. Then I said: “Do I look like anyone in your family or your husband’s?” She said nothing. “Okay, let me change the subject then. Let me try to reassure you some more. At In Depth, my beat is American politics, the Democratic Party. One of the candidates for their nomination for president has been accused of fathering a son out of wedlock.” She nodded. “I did some background on that story, enough to know what a claimant’s legal rights are in that sort of paternity case.” She gave me a single blink. “So I’m well aware I have no rights, no rights to financial restitution, no rights to ask for a DNA test. Of course, if you said to me, ‘Go to such and such a lab and give them some skin cells or blood,’ I’d be there in a shot.” She was concentrating so hard at maintaining a neutral expression that I couldn’t tell if she was listening. “I know you have no way of assessing my credibility beyond checking my bona fides and using your own judgment, but that’s the truth.”

“Who brought you up?”

“My father’s mother. Lillian Lincoln. Grandma Lil. And, as I told you, my father—the times he wasn’t serving time.”

“You mentioned you grew up in a low-income housing project. So you were poor?”

“Not impoverished. My grandma had benefits from the city and the state and worked part-time at a beauty salon. Upscale. The salon, not my grandma.”

“She was a hairdresser?”

“No, a leg waxer.” She started blinking again, but I was used to people being flummoxed upon getting this information, so I went on: “When I was fourteen, I got a scholarship and went off to boarding school in Connecticut. By that time, I was essentially bringing myself up.”

Her sigh had a little commiseration in it, or maybe pity, but I thought most of it was because she was on overload. When the bread guy came around, we both chose whole wheat, then, simultaneously, got busy doing the break-roll, pull-out-soft-stuff, eat-only-the-crust-with-a-micron-wide-schmear-of-butter business. My first thought was to make some remark about us sharing the same bread gene, but then I figured that might push her from overload to collapse.

After an uncomfortably long couple of bites of bread, she asked: “What was it like for you at a boarding school? You said you went to Ivey-Rush, didn’t you?”

“Right. Before I went there the first time, for my interview, I was a total wreck. I was afraid I’d screw up, say something I thought was perfectly okay but they’d think was incredibly coarse. Or that I’d get there, and even though I wanted it more than anything, I’d realize I wouldn’t fit in. But what struck me almost instantly was how at home I felt.” It was weird, being with Rose Moscowitz, a woman who wouldn’t win the cuddle-some award, talking to her as if she were somehow obliged to make the best of me. As if she were family.

“The interview was in February, and it had just snowed up there. The trees had white icing, and the sun was out, so everything sparkled. It was the most beautiful place I’d ever seen. Not just the trees, because I’d been up to Central Park dozens of times. What thrilled me was the entire setting, the perfection of the buildings, redbrick and tons of ivy. I remember how the brightness of the snow lit up the dark colors of the bricks and ivy. That minute, it occurred to me for the first time that no matter how right Ivey felt to me, they might decide I wasn’t right for Ivey. I was sick with dread for a whole hellish month and a half, until I got my acceptance letter.”

Probably without being aware of it, Rose Moscowitz took the excess bread she’d pulled out of the roll, buttered it, and popped it into her mouth. When she was finished swallowing, she asked: “Was it easy to fit in with the other students?”