Any Place I Hang My Hat (8 page)

“Right. Or reading, knitting, cooking.”

“She couldn’t cook for shit, to tell you the truth. Not that I blamed her. She was only a kid. Like she really hated to talk about her family. She wouldn’t say a word about them. But one time she said her old man made her old lady get a cook because the only thing she could make was cinnamon toast.”

It was so odd, imagining that half my genes came from a family that had a cook and a porch. Just for a second, I pictured myself reading a nice, fat novel on a porch glider in the shadow cast by the great weeping willow. Probably Great Expectations. “Was there anything she liked to do?” The sudden right shift of his eyes away from mine was a clear sign of verboten father-daughter territory. It didn’t take five and a half years of higher education to comprehend that the woman who was my mother liked to do it. “I mean, besides going out with connected guys and their girlfriends, was there anything she was enthusiastic about?”

“Like it pissed me off. She would do things for a week or two and then drop them. Sewing a thing for a pillow, where you go in and out of little holes.”

“Needlepoint.”

“Yeah, but then she forgot about that. So it was like one week futzing with her hair, then two weeks walking around downtown—the Lower East, Chinatown, the Village—then another week being friends with Lil, which was really funny because all the rest of the time Phyllis didn’t want nada to do with her. Hate at first sight, the two of them.” He made a big deal of glancing at his watch and looking horrified, but he must have understood I knew it was an act because he finally went on. “She read books and magazines sometimes, and don’t ask me what ones because I don’t remember. I probably never knew. Ladies’ magazines and books from the library.”

“What about when she did get pregnant? Was she happy about it?”

“Not at the beginning. To tell you the truth, she wanted, you know, to get rid of it. You. Sorry. I wasn’t going to stop her, but then she was the one who changed her mind.”

“She wanted to have me?”

“I don’t know. Maybe more like she kept putting it off, and then it was too late. Listen, Amy, don’t feel bad. She could have done it and she didn’t. I’m not saying she was like Mother of the Year, but she didn’t get an abortion, even though she was puking a lot and was panicked about …” he pointed to his chest “… sagging and getting those fat leg veins. For her, doing nothing was something.”

“Do I look like her?”

“I don’t know. Not really. You’re kind of her color, but her hair was redder than yours. And you got her littleness. But it’s like this. Once she took a hike, and Lil brought you up to see me on some visiting days, I made up my mind not to see Phyllis in you. Anyhow, you look more like my sister, which is better than looking like Phyllis. I mean, Linda’s a good-looking girl.”

That was true, but I looked nothing like her. Aunt Linda’s hair was black and glossy, her eyes bittersweet-chocolate brown rather than hazel, her body willowy, much more supermodel than soccer defense. She had a peaches-and-cream complexion and I did not. I was passably pretty. My aunt was a knockout.

“Did Aunt Linda and Uncle Sparky like her?”

“Linda didn’t marry Sparky till later. I guess he knew her though, ‘cause they were going together since they were like two or something.”

“So what did they think of my mother?” Chicky gave me his combination shrug and eyebrow lift that meant Do I have to waste breath giving you an answer? I looked down at my sadly chipped thumbnail in an attempt to calm myself. What if I couldn’t get him to say any more? What if he got up and left? I was on the verge of panic. If my brain could have been depicted on Nova, viewers would have seen colossal bunker-buster-bomb-size explosions instead of the normal sparks of neural activity.

I wound up giving myself a pep talk like those cloying monologues in lousy young adult fiction in which the feisty narrator peers at herself in a mirror and begins: “Okay, Self …” I said to myself: Okay, I’m a journalist. I don’t want to give my father time to ask himself, What the hell am I doing here, giving the precise information I never wanted anyone to know? I needed time to ask the questions that would elicit the information I wanted. “What part of Brooklyn did she live in?”

“The rich part.”

“Brooklyn Heights?” I asked, although the house Chicky had described didn’t sound like the elegant town houses of the Heights. Getting a blink as an answer, I went on: “Was it just on the other side of the Brooklyn Bridge?”

“No, it was like twenty, thirty minutes in. So maybe like somewhere in the middle. Who the hell can remember? It was a million years ago.”

“Do you remember how you got there?”

“Yeah, Phyllis said, ‘Make a right, make a left,’ until we got there.”

“What was the name of her street?” I got a shrug. “Do you remember the name of the neighborhood? Like Canarsie, Flatbush, Brighton Beach?”

“No, Brooklyn, the Bronx … they’re Alaska. You know. Foreign.”

“What were her parents’ names?”

“Joe, Marty, Betty, Sue. I mean, those may not be the names, but they were probably names sorta like that. Nothing too weird.”

“Do you happen to recall her mother’s maiden name?”

“No. What are you? Sherlock or something?”

“No, I’m your daughter collecting on her thirtieth-birthday present. So tell me what happened the day you went to the jewelry store.” My ice cream now was completely melted, and, having skipped supper (or dinner, as Grandma Lil would have corrected me), I was getting intoxicated by the aroma of hamburgers, sautéing onions, and french fries. I didn’t want to order anything more because Chicky always grabbed the check. I sensed Fern kept him short on money, long on dependency. “What happened?”

“So Phyllis says she just wants to look at platinum wedding rings. So I said, ‘That’s stupid because then you’ll feel bad I can’t buy you one now.’ So she swears she won’t and it would be fun to just look and see what’s there. Okay? We go to this place on Forty-seventh Street, that diamond street, right? Why she picks this place I don’t know, they all look the same, but we go in. We have to leave your little thing, baby carriage, outside and some guy in the store says he’ll keep an eye on it. So Phyllis carries you and we’re looking at platinum rings. Then she sees like trays and trays of diamond rings. Her eyes get this sparkle and the sales guy, who I can tell thinks she’s hot, even with a baby, says, ‘Oh, Mrs. Lincoln, let me show you some of our finest diamonds.’”

I thought: If he’d been planning on stealing a ring, would he have given his correct name? “You gave your name?” I asked.

“Yeah. Why not? Well, now I know why not, but I didn’t then. Anyhow, it’s like this sales guy is showing off, but I bet he couldn’t afford those rings any more than I could. Unless he’s the owner, but he looks like a loser with that pukey wavy hair that kind of kinks. Like Nixon, I remember thinking. So she’s trying on these giant diamonds and holding her hand out in front of her to see the lights in them, except she’s holding you with the other arm, so I ask her if I should hold you and she says no, if we switch you’d start crying.”

“Did I have a tendency to cry?”

“You were a baby. Babies cry. That’s why they call them crybabies. But you weren’t bad. So anyway, she’s modeling the diamonds—forget, like, the platinum wedding rings I couldn’t even afford—and all of a sudden you give out a scream and start screaming your head off. You know what I think? I figured this out one night after lights out, after I’d done a couple of months. I think she pinched you good and hard to make you scream like that. So anyway, you’re bawling and won’t shut up so finally we said, ‘Sorry, we gotta go,’ to the sales guy and we leave.”

“And?”

“Two, three days later, guess who shows up at work? The cops. And they bring me in for questioning—I could see my job at the garage going down the sewer. Then that night, a couple of detectives go to the apartment with a search warrant. I say to them, ‘What diamond ring?’ And they couldn’t find it but the next day they’re back and say, ‘You’re under arrest.’ Like, I swear to God, it was the only time in my life: I blacked out. Just for a second, but the next thing I know this detective is pulling me up from the floor. Next thing you know, I’m in a lineup and being fingerprinted and getting my picture taken.”

“And then?”

“So Phyllis comes to visit me and swears it wasn’t her. I said, ‘I’ll have you fucking killed unless you tell me the truth,’ and she whispers … I can hardly hear her, she’s on this phone behind glass. And she says yeah, she stuck it into your diaper when you started to scream. She didn’t mean to, it was in her hand. Then I tell her, ‘You take the fucking rap, you …’ I’m not gonna tell you what I called her. But she says to me, ‘They can’t prove it was you. Please, let me sell the ring. Then I can get you the best lawyer in the city.’” I waited. “So this little putz with a mouth that’s puckered up all the time, like he’s waiting for the chance to kiss someone’s ass … he’s my lawyer. I say to him, ‘I hear you’re the best lawyer in the city.’ And he says, ‘Huh?’ And I tell him Phyllis stole the ring and put it in your diaper and he says, ‘If you give the ring back I can get you a deal. You won’t even have to serve a year.’ So I tell him to get the ring from Phyllis, so next time he comes he says she said: ‘I don’t have any ring. I don’t know what Chicky did with it.’ And you know what?”

“What?”

“She never came to see me after that. Never came to the trial. After that first money you give a lawyer … What’s it called?”

“A retainer.”

“Right. He got that from her, but then he started pounding me for the rest of his money. She probably sold the ring, gave him a couple of hundred, and kept the change. But a kid needs a mother. So I kept my mouth shut and got four to six years. I never saw her again in my life.”

AS FAR AS I can piece it together, shortly before Black Tuesday in 1929, Tatty Damaris’s great-uncle Lemuel, a ne’er-do-well and know-nothing, yanked his inheritance from the Damaris New York Trust and handed it over to a slick piece of work with a pencil mustache from Toronto, who sunk it into an ailing aluminum company. Thus it was that the banking Damarises went bust and Uncle Lemmy became three times as rich as he’d been before the Crash.

Happily, he died after a long night of cocaine and a liquid his bootlegger referred to as brandy. He left his majority interest in the aluminum company to his boring brother, Alfred II. Thereafter, Tatty’s family remained wealthy by investing conservatively and squelching any urge toward philanthropy.

Tatty and I sat in the library of her parents’ Rhode Island-size apartment on a leather couch with buttons that periodically popped off, unsheathing teeny, butt-stabbing knives. Some earlier Damaris had paneled the room in dark wood. Except for a desk with pigeon-toed claw feet, a couple of tables, and green curtains like the ones Scarlett used for her dress, everything was red leather. Red leather couch, chairs, ottoman, and the bindings of the hundreds of books no one in the family had ever opened. Alfred IV, Tatty’s father, sat catercorner to us in a club chair so old that every time he shifted the springs emitted a deep errrrg, errrrg, though no guest would be tempted to titter at such sounds in front of a family who had transcended flatulence six generations earlier.

Mr. Damaris was sipping his customary vodka from his blue plastic freezer mug, a singularly unattractive method of keeping beverages cold. Periodically, he picked up a wedge of lime from the plate on his lap. He’d hold the lime aloft and squeeze it into the vodka and, occasionally, into his right eye. As always, Mrs. Damaris was sitting beside his argyle-socked feet on the red ottoman.

“’Course I remember Thom Bowles,” he told me. “Blabbermouth. Full of himself.” A dribble that was either vodka or saliva meandered from his lower lip and down his chin. “Probably a communist, to say nothing of a pip-squeak. But a ladies’ man, if you get my drift. And his ladies”—he restrained himself from laughing at his own upcoming wit—“weren’t what one would call ladies!” Besides drinking and critiquing his brokerage statements, Tatty’s father’s great pleasure in life seemed to be thinking ill of people. “Went for cha-cha girls. Am I right, Preshie?” Preshie was short for Precious, his name for his wife, Louisa.

“Right!” Like her husband and daughter, Preshie was tall and spare. Well, in her case, gaunt. Her skin had the waxy sheen of malnutrition that comes when an alcoholic anorexic denies herself even the pearl onions in her martinis. “Thom to a T.” She tweaked her husband’s big toe, which seemed to be one of their little love signals. He beamed at her, the snaggletoothed smile of a man who believes orthodontia is for Jews and children of middle management in Ohio. “You never cease to amaze me!” his wife went on. “You remember everyone! Everything!” He smiled every month or so, and then only at Preshie. She smiled all the time.

I had known the Damarises since Thanksgiving Day of my first year at Ivey, when Grandma Lil forgot to turn on the oven to roast the turkey she’d lifted from a Food Emporium. I’d called Tatty to tell her about it and she’d invited me over. Way back then, when I was fourteen, Preshie’s perpetual smile unnerved me. Now, pushing thirty, no longer awestruck by friends’ rich mothers who wore high heels in the house and rich fathers who ate supper in jackets and ties, or by chandeliers, or the conspicuous nonconsumption of a platter of turkey and bowls of mashed sweet potatoes and oyster stuffing and haricots verts served from the left by a wrinkled family retainer, I found her smile merely unsettling.

“Amy, pet, have you come up with any …” Preshie paused for a frisson of anticipation “… dirt?” Her face was so tightly drawn that only the middle of her lips moved. Tatty claimed her mother always appeared to be doing a fish imitation. “I mean dirt on Thom, for your magazine?”

Tatty shook her head in annoyance. “M,” she said to her mother, “In Depth is above dirt.” Instead of saying Mom and Dad, Tatty called her parents M and D. The upper crust, I’d discovered at boarding school, squandered much of its intellectual energy thinking up nicknames for one another. Tatty, of course, was Tatiana and Alfred IV was predictably called Four, although he just as easily could have been nicknamed Puddles (had he been a bed wetter) or Quackie or Flip or Spike.