Any Place I Hang My Hat (42 page)

“No. Normal. Okay?”

“What about your other pregnancies?”

She put her cup back down on the saucer a little too vehemently. “What does that have to do with you?”

“It’s part of your medical history.”

“They were fine. No problems.”

“Were there any miscarriages or anything like that?”

She shook her head. “Does Chicky still have all his hair?” she inquired.

“Yes.” Unfortunately, not all his teeth, but I saw no reason for me to mention that. “Have you had any medical problems? Diseases? Operations?”

“Why don’t you ask Rose?”

“You seem to have less than a close relationship. You might not want to confide in her.”

“I’m fine. Nothing is wrong. I had a hysterectomy two years ago, but that was all about fibroids. And I’m on antidepressants, but who isn’t?” She took her napkin and polished up the citrine on her bracelet.

“When did you decide to leave Chicky?”

“I don’t know. I mean, I knew right from the beginning that

I’d want out in a year or two. He was never going to make a decent living. He had a few friends who were, well, I guess they’d be called connected. I’m not talking about godfathers. Lower-level guys. But they were fun. I was just a kid. I guess I was attracted to their flashiness. You wouldn’t believe what some of the girlfriends looked like. The men were like Chicky but different. Oh, they liked him because everybody did. But when you hung out, you could see they had no respect for him.”

“You mean, they wouldn’t want him for a colleague.”

“The highest up he was ever going to get was chauffeur. Not that I ever wanted to be married to someone in the Mafia, but even if he’d been hanging around with guys who owned clothing stores or travel agencies or something, he’d still be driving. Do you know what I mean?”

“I’m assuming you’re saying he lacked a certain entrepreneurial spirit. But when did you decide to leave?”

“After he went to jail. I was living with his mother. You knew her, right?”

“Of course I knew her. You left me with her and she brought me up. That was most of my childhood, because Chicky kept going off to prison.”

“Look, don’t blame me for leaving you with Lil. You were crawling then. Every single time I got down on the floor, you’d crawl over to her. You were happier with her than you were with me. To be perfectly honest, I couldn’t bear it there. It was like living in hell, having to listen to her talk about Jackie Onassis’s clothes, like she knew something about fashion. There were cockroaches. All over the place.”

“Did you run off with someone?” I asked.

“Yes, a diplomat. I only stayed with him a couple of days. Then I went off on my own. First to San Francisco. But then I left. It was a really bad scene in Haight-Ashbury by then.”

“Where did you get the money to travel?”

This time she centered the two diamonds in the ring with her right thumb and middle finger. “I had a little money saved.”

“From selling the five-carat diamond ring?” If I hadn’t grown up in a neighborhood where kids routinely stared down other kids to establish primacy, I might have been cowed by the look she shot me. Her eyes, rimmed with brown eyeliner that had been expertly smudged, narrowed. Her white skin flushed a pink that wasn’t pretty. Her nostrils dilated too, but I sensed that was for effect. “What’s wrong with my asking about a stolen ring? He served the time for stealing it.”

“I don’t like to think about it.”

To reinforce my primacy, I took my spoon and pointed it at her. “Well, for the next few minutes, your job is to think about it. After that, you’re free. In terms of the ring, you have absolutely nothing to worry about. The statute of limitations ran out by the time I was six. There’s no good reason not to talk.”

She crossed her arms tightly over her black sweater. “Why should I have anything to worry about?”

“You don’t, unless you’re not straight with me. Then, we can start discussing the fact that you never got a divorce from my father. That means you’ve entered into two bigamous marriages. That guy in Arizona or wherever and the one you’re in with Ira.”

For a second, I thought she was going to give back the two-thirds of the croissant she’d already eaten. She looked sick. Her eyes, which really weren’t all that pretty except for the green sheen of her lenses, grew huge. “You promised me, you swore if I spoke to you this one time you’d never bother me again.”

“What can I tell you? I come from a criminal background.” Clearly, from the looks the patisserie lady was giving us from behind the counter, it was obvious we weren’t out for a mother-daughter kaffeeklatsch. Our volume was too low for her to hear us, but I decided to change the video she was watching. I rested my chin in the palm of my hand and smiled at my mother until my cheeks could rise no higher. Then I sat back. “Believe me, I don’t want to have to see you again or deal with you again. But I do want the truth.”

“You want to hear what you want to hear, not the truth,” she said.

“So what happened? You were in the jewelry store looking at rings. You pinched me, I started screaming my little lungs out, the ring went into my diaper. Then what? You got out of the store?” She shook her head up and down: Yes. “I see. You think I’m wired,” I observed. “I’m not. But okay, this is just for me. You can give silent answers.”

“I was a different person then. A young girl. I was living in slum conditions. I never got more than two hours sleep a night between you—I don’t hold it against you or anything. You were a baby. But after Chicky went away I had to sleep on a terrible convertible sofa. I could feel the bars underneath. Lil wouldn’t give up the bedroom. Anyway, go ahead. Ask what you want to ask.”

“You showed the ring to Chicky after you took it?” She nodded. “Did he want to take it back or send it back?”

“He didn’t know what to do. As usual.”

“When did the cops come?”

“That’s not a yes or no answer.”

“When did they come?”

“On the fourth day after.”

“They had a search warrant?” I got a yes on that. “Obviously they didn’t find the ring. Where did you hide it?” She pointed to herself in the general area of her solar plexus, although I assumed that was not where she’d stashed it. “Did they take him away then?”

“The next day. They came back.”

“But by then,” I said, “you told him you’d hock or sell the ring and use the money for a lawyer for him. Did you cry?” The look she gave me showed that if she had any physical courage, she’d throttle me on the spot. Instead, she rubbed her hands together, then sniffed the tips of her fingers. I had no idea why. “Did you cry?” I insisted. Yes, she nodded. “So you said you had to stay with me. Who could separate a mother and baby? And since the authorities were looking at him as the perpetrator anyway, he might as well keep denying it. There was no ring. No proof. Right? Anyone could have taken it. You’d get him the best lawyer in New York and everything would be fine. Did he tell you where to fence it?”

“Yes, but I didn’t go there. Most of the guys Chicky knew weren’t much smarter than he was. I went to the one I told you about before, who was connected.”

“How much did you get for it?” She wasn’t answering. She shook her head with an unnecessary ferocity, although it did make her curls bop back and forth. “This is the deal,” I snapped. “I ask and you answer.” She held up one finger. “One thousand for a five-carat diamond ring?”

“It wasn’t a quality stone,” she whispered.

“When he was charged and then convicted, didn’t he tell anyone that it was you, not he, who’d stolen it?”

“Not he,” she repeated. “I feel sorry for you. You need to make sure I don’t forget you went to Harvard. Anyway, he told Lil. But he said to leave it because a little girl needs her mother. Naturally, she made my life a living hell.”

“Why didn’t you just run after you took the ring?” I demanded. “Why did you let him go off to prison? If you’d run, they wouldn’t have suspected him.”

“But then I’d have had to spend the rest of my life worrying about a knock on the door during the night and opening it and seeing the cops. This way, they wouldn’t look anymore. They had their robber.”

“You took off when I was ten months old?”

“Something like that. With the man in the diplomatic corps.” The bodyguard from the Maldives. “I went off with him, but I didn’t want to be tied down. That’s when I hitched to S.F. A thousand doesn’t go that far, and I knew I had to save it. Then I came back to the city. I lived in the Village. What else do you want to know?”

“What was I like?”

“You were all right. You know. A baby,” she said quickly, brushing off the subject.

“Give me some incidents. Is there anything you remember?”

“Look, I wish I could oblige you. No, really I do. It must have been hard on you not having a mother, but trust me, you really preferred Lil. Frankly, I was fucked-up beyond belief. You were much better off without me. If you need me to say I’m sorry, I will, but the truth of the matter is that I had to get out of there just to survive. I admit it, I was an unfit mother.”

“So you don’t remember anything about me?”

“Not really. First of all, I was in a state of turmoil. And second of all, it was better, healthier for me to forget you. There was no way I could go back without getting into big trouble for abandonment. And Chicky might’ve made a big stink about me being the one who did it. So it was better to blank out the past.”

“You never thought about me or missed me?” I was mortified at begging, but I just wanted one small gift from her. Anything.

“You know, you’re putting me in a very uncomfortable position. You’re forcing me to hurt you. The answer is no, I was so glad to be out of there that the relief drowned out anything else that might have come up. And after that, I just forgot because I started another life.”

“What do you know about me?”

“Just that you went to Harvard. My mother started going on about you but I cut her off. Trust me, she’s dangerous in her own quiet way. The only reason she’s taken you up is because she wants a do-over. I wasn’t the child she wanted. There was never a minute of my childhood that I didn’t know that.”

“Did she mention to you what I do or—”

“Look, you can call me the biggest bitch in the world, but I don’t care. I don’t want to know. I have family now. That’s my life. My whole life.”

“All right,” I said, “so let me tell you something about my life.” Her knuckles rapped nervously against the little café table, like a judge demanding order. “Stop the knocking. This will take less than a minute. All through the years, I understood I was different from my father, Lil, Aunt Linda. I had brains. I had ambition. I had a relentless work ethic. So I figured if I wasn’t like the Lincolns, I had to be like you, whatever you were. I imagined you as smart. I thought you were probably wild but courageous, in a fucked-up way.”

“What is this, a soliloquy or something?”

“No. A soliloquy would be when a character is talking to herself, without a listener—within the universe of the play. I have a listener.”

“I don’t have to take this shit from you.”

“You do. For another thirty seconds or so. The one thing I didn’t have to imagine about you is that you were morally defective. That didn’t take imagination. It was so clear from what you did. I was afraid that if things got rough with a husband or with a child, I was doomed to do what you did: take a walk. Oh, one last thing. The best part of my life has been this last half hour.”

“What do you mean, the best part of your life?” I stood, reached into my backpack, and retrieved a twenty from my wallet. I carefully smoothed out the bill on the table. “Because,” I said, right before I turned my back on her, “I learned I’m nothing like you.”

PERHAPS TO CELEBRATE the joy of spring, Chicky wore an azalea pink rayon shirt with a wide band of green around the collar and across the pocket. Since the first three buttons were open, he was able to display both his chest hair and a new, braided gold chain. “Eighteen carat,” he confided so softly that only about half the patrons of the Royal Athens diner could hear him.

“Really nice,” I said. “I guess if you’re talking jewelry, it means you don’t want to hear any more about my mother.”

“Amy babes, listen, from the minute I heard Phyllis ditched you, I knew someday you’d decide, Hey, I gotta find her. So I’m glad you did what you had to do and it turned out okay. Personally, I wish she’d’ve dropped dead in agony in 1974. That’s after you were born in ’73, because she had to be around for that. But in ’74, it would’ve been great if she died screaming in pain with no medicine before she copped that ring. Anyhow …” He hooked his thumb under the chain and lifted it so it could better catch the light. “You see some guys and they look like they’re gonna choke to death in their chains because they’re so tight. You know why?”

“Because the guys gained weight?”

He stuck out his lower lip and rocked his head back and forth weighing that possibility. “Yeah, maybe. But most of the time it’s because they’re cheap. They buy it just long enough so it’ll close. I’ll say this for Fern, when she gives, she gives good.” Then he winked at me. “Remember what I used to tell you about my mother? Lil’s got quality with a capital K. Well, Fern gives quality with a capital Q.”

Fern, however, was not generous with a capital G with my father’s allowance, so I ordered my usual dish of ice cream. He had his usual malted. For a few minutes, we became unnecessarily intent on eating, me scraping the spoon across my scoop of peach for minimouthfuls, he taking sips and swishing the malted around his mouth thoughtfully, like an oenophile checking out a burgundy.

“Chicky, listen, I need to talk a little more about my mother. I know you don’t want to hear it but—”

“S’okay. When was it? Oh, I remember. When I got out after serving my time for that Lincoln Continental business: I had this girlfriend, Cindy Lou. She always used to say, ‘Chicky, I gotta ventilate.’ That meant like getting it off her chest. So I get what you need to do. It’s okay. Talk about her, that … I know you’re grown up, but you’re still my kid. So I won’t say what I want to call her even though you know what I mean.”