Any Place I Hang My Hat (32 page)

All that day and into the night, whenever I stopped work for even a minute—to get a drink of water or massage the muscles in my neck—I kept hearing the voice from that morning phone call. Hello. And seconds later, the greeting again as a demand: Hello? Had this been my mother? It hadn’t been too deep for a forty-seven-year-old woman whose estrogen might be on the skids. I found myself analyzing that single word. An intelligent Hello. The speaker sounded calm. It had been minutes before nine o’clock, but no hint of gotta-get-to-work pressure. No sharp edge as if expecting some annoying acquaintance or a telemarketer. Certainly not the deadened Hello of a depressed housewife with expectations of nothing. On the other hand … I closed my eyes again. It had probably been Ira.

“Amy!” Rose Moscowitz exclaimed. “How are you?”

“Fine. I figured that if you felt as unsure of yourself as I did about—you know—this actually being grandmother and granddaughter business, we’d both wait for months or a year before picking up the phone, and then we’d hang up because it would be awkward. Too much time would have passed.” Naturally, the instant after I said that, I worried she might respond with I beg your pardon in a Queen Victoria voice.

“That’s just what I was thinking,” she said. “I didn’t know your work hours, so I wrote on my calendar Call Amy for Saturday. Not that I’d forget.” She paused for a moment. “I have a big calendar on the bulletin board in the kitchen. It comes every year with beautiful pictures of Utah. I have no idea why we get it. Why I get it. Maybe Selwyn made some investment out there. I love being in Boca and seeing all those snow and mountain and desert scenes. I’m sorry. I’m going on and on. Anyway, now when I look at the calendar, it’s nice to see Call Amy in one of the boxes.”

“Thank you.”

“Can I call you back? You shouldn’t run up a big long-distance charge.”

“It’s fine. The magazine pays for my cell phone, it’s a flat fee. I’m constantly calling around the country.” I had opened the window for a breath of spring from the park and to hear the clopping of horses’ hooves, taking tourists in the hansom cabs on a ride to see how beautiful the city was at night. Unfortunately, one of my neighbors appeared to be cooking up a late supper of fried garlic. I got up and closed the window.

“Good,” Rose was saying. “I’d hate to think of me chattering on and on and you being upset when you get your telephone bill. Tell me, are you working on something new? I bought the magazine Friday when it came out. Your article on the environment was brilliant.”

“Readable, anyway.”

“Don’t be so modest.”

“Well, just think of it as your DNA in action.”

I gave Rose a three-sentence summary of what my Democratic left, Middle East piece was going to be about. Even though I knew she was intelligent, her grasp of the issues surprised me. Everyone in the country had the TV tuned to Iraq for the war, and it was not a huge surprise that a Jewish woman who had made the move from Brooklyn to Boca was informed about Israel. Still, her knowledge of geopolitics, from preemptive counterproliferation to a comparison of Thom Bowles, Howard Dean, and Eugene McCarthy really wowed me. I actually jotted down a note to check whether McCarthy had in fact run for president against George H. W. Bush and Dukakis in ’88 as a candidate for some minor party.

We talked for almost half an hour. Just as I was about ready to wrap it up, Rose said: “I called Phyllis.”

My only thought was Oh shit, now she’ll know who the hang up was this morning. “You told her about meeting me?”

“Yes. It wasn’t something I looked forward to doing, but I felt obligated. I hope you understand.” She hesitated. “Were you planning to surprise her?”

I wasn’t planning on anything. If I were someone very objective standing outside myself, I’d have said it was inevitable that I’d try to make contact with her. But right then, from where I sat, I saw myself juggling four or five conflicting emotions, everything from What if I think she’s terrific and she doesn’t want anything to do with me? to What if I’m overcome by rage and want to punch out her lights? “Oh, please don’t worry. I wouldn’t—”

“I know that.” I heard her take a sip of something. I imagined chamomile tea.

“How did she react to the fact that you know about my existence?”

“Badly. Not that she got hysterical. She’s not that type. When she was a teenager, part of the reason we were so shocked by her rebelliousness and then the running away was because we didn’t fight. If we said, You can’t do this or that, we knew she didn’t like it, but we thought she was pouting. Not seething. Not running around with the worst kind of—” She cut herself off. “I apologize, Amy. I’m so sorry.”

“Okay. Look, I really don’t want to talk about my father, at least not now. Let’s just say that his criminal record is probably longer than a single page. On the other hand, he loved me, he raised me during the times he had his freedom. To the best of his ability, he was a good parent.”

“He sounds admirable.”

“In some ways he is. In any case, I love him.” I wished I had some chamomile tea. “Did your daughter say anything about wanting to meet me, or not wanting to meet me?”

“I couldn’t tell. It wasn’t clear. When I told her about meeting you, she gave out a gasp. Not a loud gasp, but still, hearing that much—I don’t know—emotion from her surprised me. I wanted to talk about you, about how lovely you are and how you look like Carol. I mentioned Harvard, but she kept saying in a very quiet voice, ‘Oh my God, Oh my God,’ and really, I could hardly get a word in edgewise.”

“She didn’t ask anything else?”

“Let me think. It started out ‘Don’t you dare tell Ira’ and then, before I could say I wouldn’t do a thing like that, she was being—how should I put it?—much less confrontational, much less emotional. More like her usual self. She said what a shock it was, how awful she felt that she never told us about you.” I wanted to ask Rose if she thought it odd that her daughter had not said how awful she felt about abandoning a child, but I didn’t. I wanted to ask what the hell was wrong in that family that my mother turned out the way she did. “Then she begged me not to see you again.”

“And what did you say?”

‘“Not on your life, Phyllis.’ Then she made a threat.”

My stomach did a somersault the way stomachs are wont to do at such moments. “What was it?” I asked in my gentle voice.

Rose’s voice got softer, but not gentle. “She said I would have to choose between you and my grandsons. I don’t think she meant it. I think she was just, I don’t know. Beside herself.”

I could hear her breathing faster. “Rose, if you had to make a choice, I know you would choose your grandsons. They’ve known you all their lives; I’m sure they love you and need someone like you. But I don’t think you have to choose. Your daughter is probably beside herself about a lot of things, like having her past lives intrude on the one she’s living now. And she’s probably upset about not knowing what to expect of me. Oh, and one more thing: She realizes someone other than herself knows that she left my father but never divorced him. She’s had two bigamous marriages. Trust me, she’s not going to keep a loving grandmother with that knowledge apart from her grandchildren. All three of them.”

Strange, after being on the phone talking to my maternal grandmother about her daughter/my mother, the woman I dreamed about that night was Grandma Lil. Not Grandma Lil with a plastic-wrapped filet mignon in her coat pocket, and not Grandma Lil making me practice on our one unbroken chair how a real lady sits: No, no, no. For Christ’s sake, what’s so hard about it? If you can learn your times tables you can learn to sit like you got refinement. Amy, pay attention. I’m teaching you stuff you can’t get in books. All right, there you are, facing front, your back’s straight—come on, straighter. Chin up a little bit. Okay, now this is where it gets hard. Knees together to the left, ankles together to the right, so like your legs are making the letter … Whatever. Z? V? You’re supposed to be so smart? Figure it out.

In the dream, as in life, she had Alzheimer’s. Not in its early stages, when she got fired from Beauté after coming to work on the wrong days and not showing up on the right ones and burning clients with hot wax. I came home for a week in August after my summer job in Boston ended and found her sitting in a puddle of her own urine watching an oily-haired televangelist declaring, God wants to be the center of your life! That turned out to be the week from hell, taking her to doctors, calling Social Security, Medicare, and fifteen other agencies to start the paperwork that would get her help. I observed her trying so hard and unsuccessfully to get her lipstick on straight; she looked stricken, on the verge of tears. What chilled me was my sense that somehow she’d lost the physical ability to cry. I put on her lipstick for her and told her how elegant she looked.

Joan Murdoch, my old caseworker, advised me on how to go about finding a place for Grandma Lil. Thus, a potential drawn-out, bureaucratic nightmare lasted six weeks. Between Joan’s help and a phone call by the stepfather of one of the guys in my house at Harvard—a man who had given up charity to take on serious philanthropy—I was finally able to find a place to take care of her.

The dream I had was set after that awful month and a half, in the institution where she wound up. Institution sounds pejorative, but it was an appealing sprawl of buildings in which the people who changed her stinking diapers had the humanity to treat her not just with professionalism, but with fond detachment.

Lilly, sweetheart, look who’s here! one of the aides says in the dream. Grandma’s wheelchair is pulled up to one of the long tables in the dayroom. It’s a place filled with sunshine, although the dream windows are more Ivey-Rush chapel than Gurwin Jewish Geriatric Center. Long rectangles of yellow daylight slant across the dayroom floor, and are crowned with the reds, blues, and purples of stained glass.

Grandma Lil looks up and her face breaks into a smile the likes of which I never saw in all my years living with her. I know you! she says brightly. What’s your name? I tell her it’s Amy and she pats a chair beside her wheelchair and says, I can’t find my teeth. She’s fairly sanguine about it, smiles—oddly, with teeth intact—and hands me a spoon. As far as I can recall, the rest of the dream is me feeding her mashed bananas that she eats happily.

For a short while, reality wasn’t that different. Until she dwindled into a mere organism, devoid of speech and personality, kept alive by a feeding tube, there were moments of surprising sweetness in her dementia. When I came home from college Christmas of my junior year, I had no home to go to anymore, so I stayed at Tatty’s. I took the train out to Long Island every few days. I’d meet Grandma Lil in the dayroom or in her room. At the sight of me she’d break into an enormous smile. I knew she didn’t remember me from one visit to the next, but there was something about me that delighted her. Once she called me Ma. You like my dress, Ma? She was in bed that morning, watching cartoons, wearing a blue hospital gown, one of those things that tie in the back. Gorgeous! I told her. You look like a million bucks.

All during that winter break, I couldn’t get my father or Aunt Linda to come with me and visit her. I offered to pick them up. Nothing doing. I said, “You know, they really make it very pleasant for family members to drop by. It’s very clean. It doesn’t smell or anything.” My father said he couldn’t get away. He was busy. I offered to let him drive Tatty’s Jaguar, knowing he couldn’t turn down an offer like that. But he did. Aunt Linda said she couldn’t handle it emotionally. I tried one more time with my father. “Chicky, she’s your mother. Believe me, I know what she was like. But at least once, get out there. Show your face. Look, she’s getting great care, but it’s important for the people who work there to know she has family behind her.” He told me sorry, he was tied up with a million things and that there was no point in going because with Alzheimer’s, they don’t even know who you are.

After she died, my memory, and nearly all my dreams of Grandma Lil, were mostly about the Lillian Lincoln with that dazzling smile. I wondered, as the disease progressed, whether it was stripping off the layers of her personality until she became her essence, a sweet girl with an eager smile who liked being fed mashed bananas. Maybe deep down I understood this was the true Grandma Lil, and that’s why she appeared in my dreams.

Or was this tender child some entirely new person, one so far from snobbery and venality that the girl in the gorgeous blue hospital gown could never have been the woman who brought me up?

I am always irritated when a character in a movie, wakened by the phone, appears dazed and gropes for it through four or five rings. It’s a performance by second-rate actors playing alcoholic cops, or actresses eager to display erect nipples under white satin. So when my cell phone and alarm clock went off simultaneously with dueling tunes, “Karma Chameleon” and the Muppets’ theme, it took me less than a second to spring into a sitting position, grab the clock, and put an end to the Muppets. People do get weird about early-morning phone calls, thinking it’s about dear Auntie Ethel, but my assumption was it was someone I’d interviewed who’d somehow gotten my number and been up all night worrying if he/she had blabbed too much. Or that Chicky had gotten arrested again, the thought of which frightened me, although it would not have made me reel in surprise. So, not in any panic, I allowed myself a full second to flip open the phone and say “Hello” to whoever would be calling me at six o’clock in the morning.

“Hey, Amy. It’s—”

“Hey, John.” I was too shocked to try for cool. On the other hand, I would have liked to avoid awkward. Unfortunately, that didn’t happen because I squawked John rather than said it.

“I know you get up around now.” And are still sleeping alone. “I don’t want to cut into your running time, but I wanted to talk to you. I was sorry when I got your message that you wouldn’t come for Passover. But it’s great to know you’re getting someplace in the mother search. Look, I’d like to hear a little about it. And also, I thought that the last time we spoke … I hope I didn’t sound rude or—I don’t know—mean. I didn’t want to end things on a sour note.”