Any Place I Hang My Hat (7 page)

“Of course not!” Well, now and again, on long nights with too little homework, I had mulled over the possibility. “That was my point, Chicky. You didn’t do anything so terrible that you can’t talk about it. She was the one who took a walk on us. Believe me, nothing you tell me will make me think less of her than I already do.” He was preparing his no. “Trust me,” I continued. “And nothing I hear could ever make me love you less.” His feet did an aw-gee-whiz shuffle.

“Let me tell you something psychological I learned, Ame. Before Oprah. Right after I got out the first time, there was another lady had a show in the afternoon. A talk show, except this lady was white. With a face to stop a clock and skinny legs. And if that wasn’t bad enough, she kept interrupting whoever was on with a lot of dumb-ass questions.” He caressed the diamond on his earlobe between thumb and index finger. “So she’s talking to some guy about Children of Divorce.”

“Were you and my mother ever divorced?”

Chicky cocked his head to the side, his attitude of intense cerebration. “Not really. But see, it was just the same because we didn’t get married anyplace actually real. We went to this little dip-shit town in Maryland because she was sixteen and a half.”

“She was sixteen and a half when she married you?”

“Yeah. We thought she was pregnant, but you know what? She wasn’t. But by that time we were already married. By this weird guy with a long black hair growing on top of his nose. I kept thinking, What’s wrong with him? Why does he want to go around with a hair growing out of his nose? I was dying to pull it out. So anyhow, he had a little office behind a drugstore down there. The whole thing didn’t feel legal. You know? No ‘Here Comes the Bride,’ no rabbi or minister or nothing. So why pay a lawyer for divorce papers? Who was ever going to go poking around Maryland to see if I ever got married there? Anyhow, a couple months later, she got pregnant.”

“With me?”

“With who else? Baby Jesus? So what was I telling you about?”

“A white woman on TV with skinny legs.”

“Yeah, so she’s talking to this psychologist guy and he says something like, Don’t ever say bad things about the person you got divorced from even if they was a total shit because then, like, your kid could feel guilty about loving a total shit. Or get mad at you for putting your ex down and hate you unconsciously. So I said to myself then and there, I didn’t want to make things lousier for Amy than they already was. And I warned my mother she better not call Phyllis a whore or anything in front of you.” He rubbed his nose on the back of his hand, then wiped it on his shirt. “Did she?”

“No.” Yes.

“So I did like what a lawyer does when he’s plea-bargaining: I took Phyllis off the table.”

“Put her back on, Chicky. It’s time.”

He peered down at his watch, a humongous thing of stainless steel that, like his diamond stud, had been a gift from Fern. “Amy babes, I really gotta go.”

“Fern can wait.”

“What can I tell her?”

I understood the truth was not acceptable. “Say your probation officer had a lot of questions about how come you’re having so much trouble getting work. Now come on, Chicky. I need to hear about my mother.”

Twice, he offered me a sorrowful sigh. Then he sniffled. When that didn’t work he said: “Her name was Phyllis Morris.” Not exactly news, but I nodded encouragingly. “She was a little bit of a thing. There was a song one time, ‘Five foot two, eyes of blue.’ You know? Well, she was just like that, except her eyes were green. And I think she was five three. And s-m-a-r-t, smart. She had a ninety-seven average. I swear to God.”

“Was she in your class?”

“What? No. I was like nineteen. She was a kid from Brooklyn.”

“Where did you meet her?”

“Washington Square Park. See, all the Brooklyn and Queens girls used to come on Friday nights to meet NYU guys. Or maybe poets. So a bunch of us from the project would go up there.”

“Did she think you went to NYU?”

“You know, I told her I did. But she didn’t buy it. She was smart.”

“But she went out with you anyway, I mean, even though you weren’t at NYU?”

“In my mind, she was a kid looking for excitement. A little, not a lot. So I was what you’d call perfect for her. I’m a nice guy. Basically. Anyhow, that first night …” For a second, his face softened until it was almost sweet. “… I hot-wired a ’68 Camaro RS. She watched me and was, like, That’s fabulous! She thought it was so cool, stealing cars. I drove her back into Brooklyn and we parked near Coney Island. She didn’t want to go home. But I made her.”

“Where did she live?”

“You wouldn’t believe it. The richest part of Brooklyn. In a gorgeous house! Huge. With a giant porch and a really giant tree in front. A four-door Chrysler Imperial in the driveway. Gold, with a white vinyl top. Her old man’s.”

“What did he do?”

“I don’t know. Store or stores or something.”

“What did he sell?”

“Bikes. You know, like what the little kids ride and regular bikes. I met him once and he wasn’t even polite. I put out my hand. Guess what?”

“What?”

“He didn’t shake it. He ignored me, like I wasn’t even there. And he said, ‘Phyllis, get in the house right now!’”

“Did she?”

Chicky’s grin took years off him. If not for the dentures and the crow’s-feet, he was a brash, young hoodlum with gooped-up black hair and a lot of personality. “Are you kidding? That wasn’t after the first night we were together. It was maybe a week or two later. I was driving a blue Dodge Charger that day. So she turns her back on her old man, stomps away from us to the car and waits”—he crossed his arms over his chest and sniffed impatiently—“till I come over and open the door for her. And so we’re driving away”—he laughed and shook his head—“and she rolls down her window and gives him the finger.”

My ice cream was almost melted, so I swallowed a spoonful of green chocolate-chip-mint soup. “What happened then?”

“Nothing. I brought her over to my mother’s. But Lil said something like, I don’t want no jailbait staying here. Get her the hell out. So my friend Jesús, Uncle Chuy, remember him? His big sister was a shoe buyer at Macy’s and had her own place. Phyllis stayed there a few days, till her old man cooled off.”

“And then she went home?”

“Yeah, but she kept getting him super pissed by sneaking out to see me. And then we had that pregnancy scare. That’s when we got married. But then she really did get pregnant, with you. I was thinking, Shit, I’m gonna have to get a serious job when the kid comes along, which, don’t get me wrong, was fine, and then you were born. I got a good job doing intake and exhaust work at this garage on Tenth Avenue, specialized in Fords. Good garage, but you know I’m a Chevy guy: Chevys go, Fords too slow, I always say. But I didn’t say that to my boss. Sometimes he let me drive his Torino GT. Nice, I gotta admit. ‘Sky blue metallic’ was what they called the color. But it was really more like turquoise. If you cared about cars, Amy, you’d go ‘Wow!’”

“Wow!” I said, and began making two piles of sugar and Sweet’n Low packets, side by side. “So I was born and we were all living in that apartment with Mickey Rat. Then what happened? You stole the diamond ring for my mother?” He closed his eyes. “Chicky, did she ask you to do it?”

“No.” His voice had a sandpaper edge. Then he looked at me. “I didn’t steal any ring.”

“Oh. I thought that …” All my life I’d been told, by Chicky, by my grandmother, by Joan Murdoch, the social worker: My father had taken me and my mother to the diamond district on Forty-seventh Street to look at rings “for fun.” I, who questioned everything, had no reason to question the story that inside a store, while my mother was quieting me down, he’d pocketed a five-carat rock. “You didn’t steal the ring. So where was it? How come you went to prison for grand larceny?”

He took so long it felt as if we were stuck in an eternity of silence.

My father leaned forward and grasped the edge of the table.

“Tell me, Chicky.”

“No.”

“If I don’t know, I’ll always feel like I do now. Not empty, but always a little sad, knowing I’ll never be full—a complete person.”

“Fucking Phyllis stole the ring.”

“What?”

He jabbed his finger toward me. “You wanted it, I gave it to you. Okay? So happy birthday.” He swiveled his head searching for the waitress and when he didn’t see her, roared, “I asked for the goddamn check an hour ago!”

Naturally, everyone in the diner stiffened, that terrified rigidity that comes with thinking, Oh, God, he’s a lunatic and he might have a gun and I want to live so should I duck or will that attract his attention—

Years earlier I’d realized I could never be out in public with either my father or my grandmother without their acting coarse, tasteless, pretentious, or at least vociferously dumb. I couldn’t afford to get embarrassed by them. My grandmother could come up for Chrysanthemum Day at Ivey-Rush in a getup she believed to be haute Wasp: heavy wool hunting jacket, pearls, tweed skirt. What she actually looked like was Mamie Eisenhower on a really bad day in 1953. But I was okay with it. She could say, “Awwwwfly glod to meet you,” when I introduced her to my teachers. I did not die of mortification. My father could come up for commencement at Harvard and, after the academic robes came off, call my friends “sweetheart” while looking them up and down like a pimp sizing up a new girl for his stable. And I could live with it.

But now, his terrifying everyone in the diner was something else. During the total of eighteen years and three months he’d served in the slammer, what might have been a native surliness had grown to rage whenever he felt under pressure. I had to stop it. I banged a fist on the table. It didn’t make much sound, but it got his attention. “Chicky! Get a grip.” He could go either way, I guessed: calm down or jump up and grab the shirt of the guy behind the counter, bellowing for a check. I glanced at the counterman, then back to my father. “If I were he, Chicky, I’d be thinking about pressing the alarm button under the cash register drawer and getting the cops here.” All I got was the glare a badass kid gives the teacher. “Calm down.”

“I’m calm,” he said, a little too loud. At that point, however, his slit eyes blinked. It was a minute before he spoke. “All right. I’m okay now.”

“Good.”

“Sorry if I scared you.”

“You didn’t,” I told him. “I know you too well. Now, tell me about my mother.”

“If that’s what you want. It was like this.” He paused, closing his eyes for a moment to look at the past. “Phyllis was big into platinum. For the Maryland thing, I bought her real gold, kind of a skinny little ring, but I told her, ‘Listen, I’ll get you, like, one of those really fat platinum wedding bands—’ You know, Amy. Those ones that go from the knuckle up to the next knuckle. Anyhow I said I’d get it for her for a first-anniversary present. I mean, I already was into this loan shark Mitchy for two thou for the honeymoon and then I had to up it to three when we were in Puerto Rico because I got her pearls. So meanwhile, we were going out almost every night with this connected guy, Angie, Angelo was his real name, plus his girlfriend and some of their friends because Phyllis … she had this thing about, kinda mob guys. Like a groupie, except for the Mafia instead of a band. The only problem was I was working this legit job in the garage. The pay wasn’t bad, but hey, like I told you, we were living in this dump with the mattress on the floor because who the hell had money for furniture what with pearls and cocktail lounges. Right?”

“Right.”

“Plus we were staying out late and I overslept sometimes and my boss was getting hot under the collar about it. Said I was a damn good mechanic, but if I couldn’t show up on time I wasn’t any use to him.”

I’d been stacking packets, and sugar was beating Sweet’n Low, but now I stopped. “What was there about mob guys that she found so attractive?”

“Who the hell knows.” I waited. “Maybe a power trip. Like they could push people around.” He looked dubious about his own explanation. “It could be the bad guy thing. Like the way at the beginning, when she got this large charge from me stealing cars.”

“She wasn’t concerned about getting into trouble with a stolen car if you got pulled over by a cop?” My father, I’d always thought, was somewhat unendowed in the superego department. I had hoped my mother was not.

He emitted a single heh, barely a chuckle. “Funny you should say that. With Phyllis, it was like she never ever thought anything could really happen to her. Even if we got pulled over, she probably would’ve figured the cop would arrest me and make a date with her. And the weird thing is, I bet you a million bucks that’s what would happen.”

Any second, Chicky’s eyes could fall on his giant watch and he’d want to rush off, dreading the wrath of Fern. This probably would be the only time I could get him to talk about my mother, and I needed to get some sense of what kind of person she was. For two days, I’d been thinking about Freddy Carrasco: Let’s say he wasn’t psycho. Let’s say he was what I guessed he was, a sweet, pathetic case, a motherless kid trying to make himself bigger by identifying himself with a rich, power-wielding guy. Freddy had picked himself a United States senator, a father figure he could study on C-SPAN or Charlie Rose. He could even confront him in the flesh, albeit unsuccessfully. All the information I could get on my mother, Phyllis Morris Lincoln, who took off before my first birthday with a guy whose last name might have been Hussain, resided in my father’s brain. Not exactly a situation fraught with promise.

“Chicky?”

“Yeah?”

“What was my mother’s ethnicity?” Even before the third syllable of ethnicity, I realized all I could get was my father’s double blink of blankness. “I mean was she a Wasp? Morris is an English name.”

“I can’t remember. She didn’t look Jewish or Italian or anything, not with her red hair. And she had a cute little nose. Up, but not like Miss Piggy. But maybe Jewish? I don’t know. Irish? She was darker than that. Her hair. Very white skin. That’s it. That’s all I can remember.”

“Did she have any special interests?”

“You mean like model cars?”