Any Place I Hang My Hat (26 page)

“Not at the very beginning, because most of them went so out of their way to be nice. It underscored that I really didn’t belong, because a lot of them weren’t particularly nice to each other.”

“They were snobbish?”

“Only a few. The woman who’s been my best friend since Ivey was perfectly awful at first. But I don’t think it had much to do with anybody’s wealth or social status. It’s more the nature of fourteen-year-old girls. Cliquish, occasionally cruel. So if they’re excessively kind to you, you know you’re pathetic. You’d probably find the same thing today at any public high school in the country.”

“But in the long run you liked it?” she asked.

“In the long run I loved it.”

I needed a breather. As luck or God would have it, the two salades niçoise arrived at that moment, awesome creations in giant oval glass bowls. Tomato and potato wedges and black olives ringed the base of a mountain of lettuce. At the top, skinny string beans and anchovy fillets spilled out from a tuna volcano. Rose Moscowitz watched as I transferred five of the six anchovies to my bread plate.

“That’s exactly what I do!” she declared. “I never say no anchovies, and I keep thinking, Oh, the next time I should remember to order just one. But I always forget. I can’t believe there’s somebody else who does the same thing.” She sucked in her lips for a second, as if struggling to keep her mouth closed. When she opened them, she asked: “What do you do with your one anchovy?”

“Watch.” I put my final anchovy onto my bread plate, cut it into dainty slivers, then placed the slivers randomly about my salad.

Her brows moved up in astonishment. Unlike Grandma Lil, who drew on her eyebrows in a bad imitation of the Jean Harlow–ish grease-pencil arch, Rose Moscowitz’s were unpluckcd. “Could it be genetic?” she asked.

“You mean like a low-tolerance-for-anchovies gene?” She seemed so silvery, like a cold moon, that I was taken aback when she actually smiled.

Her smile encouraged me: I spent most of the salad asking her about herself, most people’s favorite subject. Her mother had come from Poland as a child and her father’s parents from Hungary. She was the first person in either family to go to college. She’d gone to Brooklyn, had majored in English. “In those days, women didn’t work once they get married. It was like announcing, My husband is unable to support me. So I never even thought of working. I just went to college because I like to know things.”

“Did your husband go to college also?”

“No. In fact, he had to quit high school to work. At a bicycle shop near Prospect Park. By the time we were married he was almost ready to buy his own store. But he was very proud of my degree. A lot of men of our generation wouldn’t have been, because it was like the woman showing them up. But Selwyn wasn’t at all like that. We went to the theater two or three times a month. The ballet. He was always buying tickets for something.”

“He sounds like a wonderful man.” So what happened with Phyllis? I wanted to ask.

“Tell me more about yourself,” she said. “How was it at Harvard? Did you feel comfortable there?”

“Never completely. Even though I was getting good grades, it took me five semesters to convince myself I wouldn’t flunk out. But ever since I knew about Harvard, I wanted to go there. I wanted its magic. I wanted to be able to say those two syllables anywhere in the world and, if not be automatically accepted, at least know I’d probably be at the front of most people’s line. I could have gotten better financial assistance packages at Penn and Vassar, but I wanted the name. I felt I needed it. I know that sounds shallow, but that’s how it was.”

“Did you like it?”

“I guess so. I got a fine education, met some extraordinary people. Some nice ones, too. But Harvard’s institutional reputation loomed too large for me. I wasn’t able to love it. All I could be was grateful I was there.”

“I’m sure you got as much out of it as anybody possibly could.”

“No. I’m not brilliant. I’m definitely not a scholar. I’m just smart and hardworking. Probably manipulative, too. Kids like I was—intelligent, tenacious, and socially or economically challenged—tend to be very good at getting powerful people to help them accomplish their goals. Teachers, social workers, rich alumni, deans of admission. It’s not that hard. People genuinely want to help. They love to have a success to brag about and also to do a good deed. What they don’t want is a permanent responsibility. And they can’t even think about the possibility of endorsing a failure. So out of all the deserving kids in the world, it’s the assertive and, frankly, the facile ones who get helped. Like me.”

Rose Moscowitz’s town house, one of the apricot residences, was surprisingly pleasant. I guess my first thought after I cannot faint when she led me into her living room to look at family photographs was Hey, this is really nice. Her gray and silver chill had led me to expect white marble expanses with furry white rugs ripped off the backs of baby mammals. Instead, the floor was composed of large blue tiles and covered with brightly patterned, almost gaudy rugs that I hoped had not been woven by child labor. The furniture was a mix of heavy dark Spanish and light country French, plus a mosaic-tiled table here, a rough-hewn rocking chair there.

“This is so pretty,” I said. “All these wonderful pieces work so well together.” I tried to keep my eyes from darting about the room, searching for pictures of my mother.

“Thank you. A lot of this”—her arm made a sweeping gesture around the whole room—“is what Selwyn and I picked up when we traveled. Quite a few of the pieces didn’t look right in our house in Brooklyn and wound up in our guest room or the attic. But when we bought this house, it all seemed to fall into place.”

I wondered whether all the cheery objects were reflections of Selwyn’s taste or choices she herself had made before she grayed with widowhood. I didn’t wonder too long because she motioned me over to a long, narrow table that stretched between two windows. It was covered with framed photographs. Now that I was there, my grandmother was looking as if she regretted inviting me. She stopped short a good foot and a half before the table. I wondered whether she was afraid I’d barrel ahead, grab the frames, and fog the glass by heavy breathing. Or that I’d sweep the pictures off the table in a rage.

“I guess you want to see what your mother looks like.” Her voice was flat. Before I could answer she reached out and handed me a photograph of a man and woman. “That’s Phyllis and her husband, Ira. They live on Long Island.”

“I know.”

“How did you find us?”

I didn’t answer. I just stared at my mother. Unless Ira was seven feet tall and four hundred pounds, Phyllis was as petite as advertised. And pretty. Liquid green eyes, red hair, a face like a valentine—high cheekbones tapering into a small, slightly pointy chin. “My father … I can’t believe it. He said he couldn’t remember whether or not she was actually a redhead.”

My grandmother sighed. It was less an exhalation of breath than a vocalization of weariness that her own mother’s family must have brought with them from Poland. “Actually, when she was younger her hair was somewhere between very dark red and reddish-brown.” She picked up another photo and, before handing it to me, took back the one I was holding. “This was her a couple of months before she ran away. It’s one of the ones Selwyn gave to the police and the private detectives. When we knew she was all right, I wanted to get rid of all those pictures, but Selwyn wouldn’t let me. He said it was a lovely picture and that the pain of what happened would pass.”

“Did it?”

“No. Not for me. Not for Selwyn either, although he’d never admit it.” In the photograph, my mother looked so seventies I almost wanted to laugh: hair way past her shoulders, a purple velvet shirt with bell sleeves that ended about three inches short of her wrists, frayed bell-bottom jeans. A peace symbol hung from some sort of a metal necklace that looked as if it had been made from a wire hanger. “Once she started seeing, um, your father, her whole style changed.”

“To what?” I asked. I couldn’t take my eyes away from my mother’s to look up.

“I’m not sure. Updated gun moll. Maybe motorcycle girl. All of a sudden, her clothes were too short and too tight. She went from looking so natural, like one of those girls who put daisies into the soldiers’ rifles, to being heavily made-up with everything iridescent.”

Looking at my mother at sixteen, I felt more cut off from her than ever. “Well, Ms. Moscowitz, you were right. I don’t look anything like her.”

“Please, you don’t have to call me Ms. Moscowitz. Call me … anything you’d like.”

I was afraid that if I called her Grandma, she’d clutch her chest and quickly take her place beside Selwyn. “Is Rose okay with you?”

“It’s fine. Are you finished with that picture? If you’d like, I’ll have copies made and send them to you.”

“I’d like that very much.”

“Let me show you something else,” Rose said. She walked over to a tall, carved cabinet that said Spanish as much as a rose between teeth. She opened the doors on the bottom and took out a leather album, dark blue with gold tooling. At first I thought it was a wedding album, but then I saw it didn’t have those stiff pages. Rose and Selwyn was engraved in gold script across the cover. Inside were pages and pages of pictures, held in place by the old-fashioned triangular glue-y things in each corner. She hurried through page after page, then stopped. “Look.” A nicely rounded, well-buffed nail pointed to a black-and-white picture of a bride and groom—Rose and Selwyn—and two other people I assumed were the maid of honor and best man.

The finger came to rest on the maid of honor, so I looked closely. “Oh my God!” I said, or more likely gasped. “She looks so much like me!” It wasn’t just the woman’s round face, the small cleft in the chin, the wide-spaced eyes. She had my broad shoulders. Posed beside my grandmother, it was clear she was around my height as well.

“That’s Selwyn’s sister, Carol.”

“Is she still—”

“Alive?” Rose asked. “Yes. She lives in California, in Marin County. She and her husband moved out there in the mid-fifties. They built up a very nice business. They service boats. Whatever that means. I’m not sure. I suppose scraping things off the bottom, although I doubt if they do that themselves.”

“Did she age well?”

“Very nicely.”

Twenty or thirty photos later, I determined that when I got to be seventy-six, I could deal with looking like Great-aunt Carol, sans her natural look of chopped gray hair and sun-bleached lips. By that time, it was pretty clear to me that my grandmother was controlling what I could see in the picture albums—there were three more—and I was just along for the ride. We sat side by side at the dining room table while Rose, middle finger dampened, moved through the pages without actually opening them up. Obviously she had some sort of a system going because she’d go turn-turn-turn, lick finger, turn-turn, and stop at a page that, sure enough, had another picture of Great-aunt Carol, Great-uncle Mike, and Selwyn at the Monterey Jazz Festival, a decade later than the previous picture I’d seen.

I was wiped to the point of suggesting we both take naps, so after Rose said, “We went to Tuscany with Carol and Mike,” I said: “After those pictures, I’d like to see some more of my mother.” Her head bobbed down and up, which I took for a nod of yes. Still, I needed to feel more secure that she was simply avoiding telling me about Phyllis for a short while, not clamming up forever. However, I sensed she was one of those people who preferred to experience life obliquely rather than directly. So I got as oblique as I could: “Do Phyllis and Ira have children?”

Rose bobbed her head again. I kept quiet not because I was cool, but because I didn’t want her to feel as if I were browbeating her. I couldn’t risk leaving, then never getting copies of the pictures she’d promised me. I didn’t want to discover that she changed her number to an unlisted one. So no pressure.

Also no answer. I was fantasizing about driving back down to Miami Beach, buying a somewhat whorish halter top I’d seen in a store window, and getting drunk at one of the bars on Ocean Drive. Or maybe popping a few Percocets, not that I had any. I took this train of thought as a sign that all was not well with me.

“They have two sons,” my grandmother finally said.

“Oh.” Either they looked like Freddy Krueger or Rose had put their photos away in anticipation of my visit.

“Nicholas and Ryan. They’re both very bright boys. And polite. Good values, too. That’s what I’m happiest about, their character.” She closed the album and clasped her hands on it, then shut her eyes. She looked as exhausted as I felt. “According to my daughter, I’m not very emotive. Well, I grew up in an era when talking to near-strangers about your personal life was not thought of as openness. More that you had a screw loose.” Then she fell silent.

I rubbed the heels of my hand along my quads, something I always did after a run or when, like now, I was a basket case with sweaty palms. Dear God, please don’t let her get all schmaltzy and start telling me about her loneliness and crying about Selwyn. Or offer up some hideous tale of incest between Selwyn and Phyllis, or her and Phyllis, to explain my mother’s intractable ways. Oh God, save me from emotive.

“Both times when Phyllis was pregnant,” Rose said at last, “I was hoping for a girl. I’m happy to have a granddaughter.” She took time out to inhale and exhale. “And I couldn’t have asked for better.”

“Thank you.” I was getting choked up, so it came out a Rod Stewart imitation. “And vice versa.”

“I suspect we share a not-very-emotive gene as well as the one for anchovies,” my grandmother said. I nodded and we sat in silence for a time that didn’t seem too long because this time it was bearable.

Finally I said: “We share something else. We were both abandoned by Phyllis.”

“I was up most of last night,” Rose said. “I have to admit I was reeling from the mere fact of your existence. The one thing I couldn’t get over was that Phyllis is such a good mother.”

“You never call her Véronique?”

“Only when I had to. Her first marriage—I should say her second—was very short, only a couple of years. His name was Preston Groesbeck.” She spelled it for me. “That must have been around 1978. Of course by then we knew she was all right. The detective agency we hired … they tracked her down about a year after she ran away. She was living in Los Angeles. They found her because she’d used her own Social Security number. That’s not supposed to be public information, but I suppose they have ways. She was living in what they called a group house. It sounded like they were a bunch of hippies or post-hippies who came and went. To make a long story short, we agreed to wire her some money and she agreed to call as long as no questions were asked. Well, we wired the money. And when she got it, she actually called. I was surprised. Anyway, she said she’d been in San Francisco and now was leaving L.A. to go to an ashram. She wouldn’t say where, claimed she didn’t know, that it could be anywhere, even India. But she did say that she would call us once she settled in to let us know she was all right.”