Any Place I Hang My Hat (5 page)

As antidumping insurance, I began: “Okay, something about me I haven’t told you before.” Since he wasn’t turning over on his side, getting ready to be rapt, I didn’t let much more than a second go by before saying: “Joan Murdoch.”

The next five seconds felt like minutes. At last he managed to say: “Who’s Joan Murdoch?”

“When I was seven, the second time my father went to the big house, they assigned a social worker to me. I’m not sure why. I don’t think it was routine with a grandparent as temporary guardian, but I like to imagine that Grandma Lil seemed either dumb or flaky enough to make the Department of Human Resources decide she was capable of taking me to Macy’s, wandering off to see if there were any free makeovers, and forgetting about me. Not just for a few minutes. For good. Or maybe she had a record, too. Shoplifting. It was her hobby. The way some people read mysteries or crochet afghans. She’d swipe a couple of lamb chops, a potato, and voilà, takeout!”

John turned onto his side and propped up his chin on the heel of his hand. Good.

He was too caught up in the story to remember he was on the verge of taking a hike.

On the other hand, I had never before mentioned my grandma’s habit of lifting goods she could not afford. Now he’d realize Chicky’s criminality wasn’t a genetic anomaly.

“Where was I?” I asked.

“Lamb chops and potatoes,” John said. “And the social worker.”

“Right, Joan. Well, she’d come by, like, I don’t know, once a month or something. She’d always bring me a paperback. Kids’ classics. A Wrinkle in Time. The Phantom Tollbooth. I mean, I was already the best patron the library had, but it was something else to actually own a book. So I was always excited when she came over. And all her routine social work questions were painless enough.”

“Was there anything you didn’t tell her?”

“Well, I wouldn’t say, ‘Yo, Ms. Murdoch, my grandma Lil heisted a big hunk of cheddar at Bloomingdale’s food department and we’ve had great grilled cheese sandwiches three nights in a row.’”

“Anything else?” John asked. I almost asked him what was he waiting for. Some nightmarish story of abuse or neglect? But I didn’t want to bring him out of my Scheherazade spell.

“No. There were no secrets. Joan knew my grandma did not exhibit Type A behavior employmentwise. I mean, she made just enough working at the beauty salon to supplement my government check. If that took two days, she’d work two days. If it took two and a half? After that fourth hour, Grandma Lil was out of there—probably even if she was in the middle of someone’s bikini wax. But otherwise it was okay.”

“Did you feel your grandmother loved you?”

I shrugged, but then realized I needed to say something. “I never really thought about it. She knew I could pretty much look after myself, but she did whatever she had to. And if something bad ever happened to me, she’d have been … I really don’t know. Anywhere from upset to devastated. No, not devastated. I don’t think she had that kind of emotional range. But genuinely sad. Listen, I was an easy kid. She never had to hit me or discipline me because there never was any reason to. Most of the time I was more mature and better behaved than she was.”

I got off my grandma. “Anyhow, back to Joan Murdoch,” I went on. “She asked my grandma Lil if she could take me to the Museum of Natural History one Sunday and of course my grandma said yes. I loved it. I wanted to live there. After that, every three or four weeks, Joan would come downtown, pick me up, and take me someplace. Usually to museums. Sometimes we went bowling. A couple of times she took me up to the Bronx Zoo. She handled it really well, as if we were two cordial acquaintances. Not overly friendly. And without Oh, you poor little diamond in the rough pity.”

“She must have really liked you.”

“I guess so. Well, I was a do-gooder’s dream girl. One of those thirsty little flowers ready to soak up whatever culture or kindness came her way. And I wasn’t bad company. When you’re a kid who depends on the kindness of strangers, you either get nothing or else you learn to charm the hell out of people to get what you need. I know you find the charm business hard to believe.”

“Cut the self-effacement shit,” John said. “You are charming.”

I figured he might already be regretting saying that, so I immediately jumped in. “Anyway, one year—I was eight or nine—Joan took me to see the Christmas tree in Rockefeller Center. I was, like, Wooow! So she talked to my grandma—she knew we were Jewish. Not that my grandma would volunteer information like that, but I’d told Joan. Anyway, she got permission to take me to her family’s tree-trimming party at her parents’ house on Staten Island. There were her parents, her sister, her sister’s husband and kids. I went there every year, except later, when I’d go to Tatty’s family’s house on Jupiter Island for Christmas break.

“Anyhow, the Murdochs were originally from Scotland, so for Christmas they blasted bagpipe records and ate these oatmeal fried things called bannocks. And they gave me my own tree ornament. A Santa’s elf in a green outfit with teeny green shoes with pointed toes, and a little loop of wire coming out of his elf hat for hanging. And year after year, they kept it for me and …”

Other than a mention to Tatty or maybe Chicky that I’d gone to the social worker’s house for a trim-a-tree party, I’d never told anyone about the Murdochs. I always relied on my one-volume encyclopedia of the deprived childhood stories that I’d been telling since my first year at Ivey. My New York accent—“She’s so genuine!”—to say nothing of stories featuring runaway mother and imprisoned father took me places where the F train didn’t go. Like La Jolla. Jackson Hole. Ogunquit. One time to Rome and Capri. I learned to mesmerize a dinner party in Palm Beach with now-appalling, now-amusing vignettes of life in the projects. By the time I got to Harvard, I was a gifted guest. I’d go from Thanksgiving in New Brunswick to Christmas in Florida to spring break hiking on the Maine coast or riding bikes in Circleville, Ohio. My stories remained the same, though I altered my delivery to suit my audience.

New, unrehearsed tales of my past might be risky. I could be boring. Seem pitiful. Then what? Goodbye to my reputation for charm. Who knows? Maybe I’d get choked up. Then John would feel compelled to stay the night, comfort me. It was past eleven-thirty.

So I yawned.

Instead of sitting at the desk in my office and rereading Thom Bowles’s alleged autobiography, a total snore full of paragraphs suitable for insertion in any Democrat’s Earth Day or Martin Luther King Jr. Day speeches, I found myself staring at Grandma Lil’s photograph. No one had ever said there was a resemblance between her and me, but I sat back in my chair wondering how much of her I’d inherited.

I had some notion of what I’d gotten from her before Ivey-Rush, Harvard, Columbia Journalism, Alzheimer’s, and death separated us. Grandma Lil took home more than hair dye from Beauté. She brought home lessons about the finer things of life and insisted I master them whenever Chicky wasn’t around, i.e., most of my early life.

She offered me these treasures not because I was an eager student, or even a polite listener, but because no one else was willing to hear her breathy communiqués on gauche colors (teal, burnt orange), how to set a proper table (the water goblet is at the top and to the right of the knives), or the merits of a Parisian face peel.

“A lady is always nice to the help,” she advised me one night, raising the water goblet she’d lifted from Bloomingdale’s, which I later learned was a red wineglass. Holding the stem between her thumb and middle finger, her pinky a quarter inch aloft, she took a dainty sip through lips so puckered it seemed she was kissing the rim of the Baccarat.

I was around ten at the time. We were having steak for dinner. Dinner for two, due less to mutual delight than to our mutual shafting: my mother skipping and Chicky being otherwise engaged making license plates. That night, Grandma had “picked up” our steak at a Gristede’s in the East Sixties on her way home from Beauté. She believed her luck at avoiding what she called “unpleasantness” came from never heisting from the same store more than once in any year. Ergo, the quality of the meals she tucked under her pilfered black cashmere shawl (Henri Bendel) varied considerably, from Upper West Side vacuum-packed Scottish smoked salmon to kielbasa.

“Amy, you listening?” I nodded, my mouth full of oversalted sirloin broiled until it attained rigor mortis. “I happened to overhear Silvana Feldstein today.” She pronounced the stein the Teutonic way, “schtine.” “You’ve head me speak of her. Her husband is in real estate. Old money.” Probably 1979. “Well, Silvana was talking about this man—”

Grandma raised a finger in a hold-on-a-second gesture and leapt from her chair. With a fast hop-step that looked like the opening of a Latvian folk dance, she clunked her foot down on a bloated cockroach. I heard a barely audible crunch as insect became one with floor. The original red and blue flecks on the linoleum had darkened over the years, and the only way to distinguish between dirty dot and flattened bug was by size.

“—this guy named James,” she went on, booting the squished half-inch corpse under the stove. “He owns a catering business—I told you what catering is?”

“Yeah,” I said.

Grandma sat, picked up her fork, and pointed it at me. “Amy.” She sighed, then wearily soldiered on. “Don’t say ‘yeah.’ Well-bred girls don’t say ‘yeah.’ They say ‘yes.’”

“Yes. Hey, Grandma, I gotta go, I got a math test tomorrow.”

“Anyway, this James guy is such a … I forget what word Silvana used… . But he’s such a shit to his waiters—”

“I told you, I gotta study.”

“Who’s stopping you? So listen. James is such a shit to his waiters that one of them actually spit on the cheese straws! And half the guests at the hemophilia benefit saw him do it!”

“A cheese straw?” I inquired. I already knew what hemophilia was and could figure out benefit.

“Not like a straw, you know, for soda.”

“Then what?”

“It’s something rich goyim eat. So Amy, you listening?”

“Yes.”

“What does the story tell you?”

“I give up.”

“It’s Treat your help good and they’ll be good to you.” I angled Grandma Lil’s picture until I could no longer see her staring at me, and turned back to my monitor with my notes on Thom Bowles.

Technically, my office was a cubicle enclosed on three and a half sides by wallboard and some hideous plastic meant to look like smoked glass. When I looked out, all objects and people appeared blackish-brown, as if saturated with pollutants. Still, I allowed myself tokens of pleasantness: a weekly rose for a bud vase, a Van Gogh Summer Fields mug, a tenth-reunion picture of my Ivey-Rush class on Lilac Day as a screen saver. A Rosie the Riveter mouse pad. The phone rang. I took out one of the foam earplugs I used so as not to hear muttered bytes of office conversation and the clicks of other people’s keyboards. “Amy Lincoln,” I said.

“Hi,” a male voice said. “My name is Fred.” He paused. “Freddy. Whatever.” I said something like uh-huh rather than saying Hi, Freddy, thereby risking even a brief conversation with a telemarketer offering to manage my portfolio. “Actually it’s Fernando. Fernando Carrasco. I saw you two nights ago. At the party for Senator Bowles on Central Park West.”

Of all the men I’d seen at the fundraiser, there was only one I was interested in talking to. “Are you the guy with the CCNY sweatshirt?” I asked, putting on a big smile. Some physiology-of-emotion grad student I went out with in my junior year swore doing that made you sound friendly.

“Yeah. I’m the guy.”

“Are you okay? They didn’t rough you up or anything, did they?”

“No. This big guy, I guess a bodyguard, went down with me in the elevator and kind of shoved me out the door of the building. He said, ‘Don’t let me see you again,’ or something like that.”

“Uh-huh. And how did you know how to call me, Freddy?”

“I saw Amy Something on your press thing. I got a copy of In Depth and found you on the … What’s that list called? Oh, masthead. You were the only Amy.”

“Glad you found me. Hey, do you actually go to City?”

“Yeah.”

“Where exactly is it?” I asked.

“A Hundred-thirty-eighth Street and Convent Avenue. Why? Do you just want to see if I know where it is?”

I put back the smile and improvised. “Just trying to make sure you weren’t that scrawny guy with the red vest who kept trying to show me what a brilliant raconteur he was.” I grabbed a pen from my Van Gogh mug and jotted: Fernando Carrasco, a.k.a. Fred/Freddy. I never took notes on the computer; the clicks of fingers on keyboard reminded people this was not a conversation between friends.

“Not scrawny. No vest,” my friend Freddy assured me.

“No paternity suit?” I inquired.

“No,” he said evenly. “William Bowles, Thomas’s father, paid off my mother three months before I was born. And then he sent my father out of town.”

I knew what my editor, Happy Bob, would expect me to be doing at eleven-thirty that morning. Thomas Bowles had a radical tax proposal: a confiscatory inheritance tax. Of course it had a snowball’s chance in hell of passing, but then again, those were the same odds as Bowles actually winning the Democratic nomination, much less the presidency. In Republican-right rhetoric, what he was aiming for was class warfare. Was it really? Could such a policy kill capitalism? Or could it be a revolutionary equalizer?

So I should have been calling a few congenial economists and sociologists, asking, Hey, what would happen if the right to pass along wealth went down the tubes? What would the world be like if Alfred and Preshie Demaris, Tatty’s parents, could not bequeath to her the Florida house, the trusts, the house in Southampton, the collection of English garden statuary, Great-grandfather Kent’s three Rousseaus and two Rodins, and other possessions ad (practically) infinitum. What if, instead of piping Cornelli lace or lilies onto cakes a couple of times a week, Tatty had to earn enough to pay for her own food, clothing, and shelter?

Instead, I was sitting in a Starbucks a couple of blocks down from my office on Union Square waiting for Freddy Carrasco to show. I felt fairly confident he wasn’t a madman, but I knew enough from life and movies and Grandma Lil (“You’ll learn when you’re dead he wasn’t Mr. Nice Guy”) that the most successful kind of psychopath isn’t the creep, it’s the one with a sweet smile. Why I thought Starbucks would offer me protection if Freddy turned out to be toting an Uzi was a question I began pondering as I sipped my Espresso Macchiato. Except at that instant, he entered—this time wearing a blue fleece pullover. His hands were stuck in his pockets. His ears were such a dark red from the cold they almost looked purple.