by Susan Isaacs
Watching TV gave me something else to worry about while I waited for Dan Summers’s call. Skies there were either cruelly bright or obliterated by desert sandstorms. Almost immediately, I got hooked on the high-decibel TV anxiety that drowned out my own. The anchors’ voices escalated from consternation to near-hysteria at each commercial break. We’ll be right back with our military analyst, retired General Monte Bluchner, who, despite a lamentable problem with the letter S, will tell us all about Iraqi weaponsh of mash deshtruction that could conceivably kill thousandsh of our young sholdiers. Or When we return we’ll ask Bernice Wollman in Basra if this (camera pans from the reporter to the ground, revealing a six-foot-something blob resembling burnt marshmallow) could be the remains of Saddam!
However, Dan Summers called back in less than a half hour. “Charles Lincoln and Phyllis Morris”—so even though my father had at some point known her actual name had been Moscowitz, she must have come up with fake ID—“got married on February eighteenth, 1973.”
“A thousand blessings on your head, Dan.”
“It was nothing.”
“Do you happen to have Phyllis Morris’s birth date?” It was a leap, assuming that my mother hadn’t changed her date of birth as well as her name, but a leap worth taking. With any luck, she would not have been sophisticated or prescient enough to know how important someone’s DOB can be when it comes to tracking her down.
“June fifth, 1956. Which makes her—”
“A couple of months short of forty-seven,” I informed him. “Dan, thank you so much!”
I didn’t need a master’s degree in journalism to take the next few steps in trying to find my mother. Providing the name of the someone you’re looking for isn’t hopelessly common, like Mary Johnson, any semicompetent Googler can track down a person she’s looking for as long as she has a birth date, a willingness to pay for a couple of pricey databases, and a few hours.
I got out of bed and ordered in some sushi, which struck me as sturdy, rib-repairing sustenance. But I had to face the fact that although I could easily log onto In Depth’s network and use Lexis and Nexis, I needed a last name. All I had was Véronique. I’d try Lincoln and Morris, but I was sure she’d dropped both names. And I was willing to bet twenty bucks that she hadn’t gone back to using Moscowitz.
Usually I was a whiz at this sort of thing, but after a couple of hours, yellowtail maki, and a salmon-skin handroll, I was on the verge of calling for help. I considered Gloria Howard, because she was the most efficient researcher I’d ever met—except for John. Or going back to the old school tie: Jay Polla had been in all my classes at P.S. 97 since kindergarten and was now a narcotics detective in the Bronx. We’d reconnected standing on a line buying tickets to a Yankees’ playoff game and had one of those dinner-once-every-two-years relationships. Jay would not only have access to New York State motor vehicle records, he might also be sympathetic to me wanting to find my mother. His father had taken a walk a couple of weeks after he was born.
My apartment was starting to smell like cat’s breath from the sushi, so I tossed out the remains and opened a window. A blast of cold air hit my face, and I got a whiff of winter. It was almost April, but no hint of lilacs, no spring rain. Just another day that made it seem as if New York were doomed to an eternal February.
From eternal February, it took me about a second and a half to free-associate warm weather, and from there, Florida. Florida made me recall the late Selwyn Moscowitz, Brooklynite turned Boca Man.
I needed help with Florida. Grabbing two more Percocet and downing them with the now-cold green tea, I returned to my computer and brought up my notes from the four crazy weeks in November and December I’d spent in south Florida in 2000 covering the presidential election debacle.
What I now needed was a Florida lawyer. Although my beat had been Democrats even back then, one afternoon in the shampoo aisle of a drugstore I’d started chatting about frizz control with a woman. She turned out to be a litigation associate at Greenberg Traurig, the law firm arguing for Bush. We’d had late dinner a couple of times during that month. I’d been fascinated that though Barbara Axinn was a registered Democrat who’d voted for Gore, she was so passionate in arguing the Bush case that she’d believed her cause was not merely just, but true.
We spent the first few minutes on the phone catching up. I was still covering Democrats and subletting a studio apartment. She was still at the same firm, but had become a partner. She’d taken up riding and bought a horse she kept out in the country. She’d also bought a condo on the ocean.
The condo got to me. There had been a weekend interlude during my junior year when I’d considered the law. I’d rejected it, mainly because I didn’t want to be a lawyer. Why should I earn several hundred thousand per annum practicing law when I could make forty-three thou at In Depth? As Barbara talked, I pictured me in a condo with tiled floors and kilim rugs and a terrace overlooking the Atlantic. I decided we’d had enough pleasantries, so I asked: “Barbara, if someone dies in Boca and leaves a will, is it a matter of public record?”
“Sure.” She hesitated. “Well, I’m pretty sure it’s public. Let me double-check with our trusts-and-estates maven. I’ll get back to you. Is there any rush on this?”
“Whatever you can do,” I replied.
“I’ll see if I can catch him before he leaves for the day,” she volunteered. “Is this general info or are you interested in one person in particular?”
“Selwyn Moscowitz.” I spelled out both names. “A wife, Rose. And a daughter whose name is probably Véronique—or maybe Phyllis. By the way, this is just the first stage of an investigation I’m working on.” If Barbara chose to believe I was in hot pursuit of a scoop for In Depth, so be it.
“I’ll get back to you as soon as I can,” she promised. “And totally off the record.”
“Off the record” was what I wanted to hear. Ergo, I was not to be surprised when she called back less than an hour later. I understood the attraction people have toward the media. Whether you’re loved or hated, if you’re a reporter from Radio Prague or Asahi Shimbun or Men’s Wear Daily, once you manage to connect with anyone short of a Colin Powell-level newsmaker, he would often blab on as long as you kept throwing out the questions. You, the journalist, by being attentive, are affirming his big-shot status and making him a part-time pundit.
“My partner had an associate down at the courthouse,” Barbara reported. “He asked him to look up the will. The only two heirs are the wife, Rose Bernstein Moscowitz, and a daughter, Véronique Hochberg. Accent aigu on the first e in Véronique. H-O-C-H-B-E-R-G. If you give me your fax number, I’ll have the associate fax it to you.”
I’d called Aunt Linda at ten the following morning, ostensibly to chat, and offered a lighthearted account of me and my ribs. Her pause between “Oh my God!” and “Do you need me to help you with anything?” might have only lasted a second, but it was long enough to indicate a lack of enthusiasm, if not reluctance. Just as I was about to tell her I was fine, she said, “Give me a few minutes just to put on my face and call Sparky to say where I’m going and I’ll be on my way.”
Although the temperature was in the forties, Aunt Linda was wearing open-toed slides. Red, with a clear Lucite heel, to match her red pants. One of her fashion dicta was shoes must match pants, except for jeans. “Amy, I love how you keep your place. So neat!” She’d come with a tote bag of food and was bending over, putting stuff away in my midget refrigerator. She glanced over at me: “I’m going to have to let the chicken stew defrost in the fridge. There’s only room for the meatballs ’cause your freezer’s so teeny. I think you’re going to love it. The chicken stew. I have a secret ingredient. Savory.”
“Sounds great,” I said.
“What do you think about my hair this way?” A red scarf, worn like a headband, pulled her dark hair away from her face. It hung down to the middle of her back. “Do I look too much like Cher?”
“No. You look like you. Fantastic.
I love you in red.”
“But not all red,” she said, pointing to her army green, navel-baring sweater. “I got you two-percent milk because it’s better for coffee and an extra one percent won’t kill you.” She closed the refrigerator door. “You’re really a good housewife,” she continued. “Not a wife. You know what I mean, like the way you wipe off the top of the ketchup. None of those little black gookies around the cap. You didn’t learn that from my mother.”
“You’re not kidding,” I agreed. “You know what one of my earliest memories is? Butter on a plate. It had melted and Grandma put it back into the refrigerator so it became a solidified blob with toast crumbs embedded in it. I remember staring at the butter—it was at my eye level—and feeling disgusted.”
Aunt Linda nodded. “That sounds so like her. I used to hate going to the fridge. Even when my father was alive and he brought home day-old everything from the store, she’d keep bagels forever and wouldn’t let us throw them out. Chicky used to run to the fridge every morning to see the green stuff—we didn’t know what it was called, but we knew it was pukey ... Where was I? Oh, he looked to see if the green stuff grew more overnight and then he’d report to me. And you know what she’d do? Cut the mold off and make us eat the nonmoldy part. Did she do that with you?”
“No. She was just careless, messy. When I was seven I was boosting myself up on the counter, so I could clean out the sink.”
Once she was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s, I looked back on life with Grandma Lil and wondered whether, ten or even twenty years before anyone said This is a disease, she was showing signs of incipient dementia. As a kid, I recognized she was flakier than any other adult I knew. When she sprinkled scouring powder in the morning, I knew I’d be scrubbing when I got home from school. She’d meander through the apartment, admittedly a short meander, shaking a can of Ajax over tub, toilet, and sinks, then forget to clean. Even at eight or nine, I understood it was vagueness and not irresponsibility. Pots would burn as the water in them for her cup of instant coffee boiled away. There were occasional nights when she seemed to forget the existence of dinner and got annoyed, or maybe embarrassed, when I asked for money. Lower lip protruding in a pout, she would open the change purse of her wallet, then mutter Shit when I told her to give me bills, not coins.
I got up from the couch and walked to the desk, an over-dainty, overgilded thing with bowed legs and teeny balls for feet. My computer sat on it along with a wood box, a street find that I’d sanded and stained and used as a filing cabinet. I took a paper from the first folder.
“What’s this?” Aunt Linda asked when I handed it to her. She held it at arm’s length, pulled back her head, and squinted. “Some legal thing?”
“It’s a fax. My maternal grandfather’s will.”
“Whose? Anyhow, I can’t read it.”
“Phyllis’s father’s will.”
My aunt’s persimmon lips parted and her jaw dropped. “Did he leave you something? Oh, God, it would be so great if—”
“No. I have no idea if he even knew I existed. He left all of it to his wife—except his cuff links and an Audemars Piguet watch.”
“Never heard of it,” she declared.
“It’s an expensive Swiss watch.”
“One of those thin ones? They make men look gay.”
“Aunt Linda, he left the cuff links and watch to my mother.”
“So?”
“Well, it could be because she’s so rich money wouldn’t mean anything to her,” I countered. “Or maybe it was a way of acknowledging her existence without really giving her a share of his will.”
“You think they were still on the outs because she ran away from home?”
“I have no idea,” I told her.
Mechanically, Aunt Linda pulled out the desk chair and sat. “When was this?”
“He died in 1997. He and his wife were living in Boca Raton. She’s still alive, or at least still has a phone listing.”
“You called her, Amy?” I shook my head. “What about Phyllis?”
I took the will from her hand and pointed midway down a page. “Her name isn’t Phyllis anymore. It’s Véronique Hochberg.”
“No!” She laughed. Then she asked, “Did I just get lipstick on my teeth?”
“No.”
“Is that chutzpah or is that chutzpah? Say it again with that French accent!” I did. “Sorry I’m laughing,” Aunt Linda continued. “I know this is serious for you, honey.”
“It’s okay.” I refolded the cuffs on my sweater. I’d been wearing an Ivey sweatshirt that had been washed so often it had gone from its original dark green to the color of ash. But when my aunt decided she was coming over, I’d switched to my lavender sweater and put in my gold ball earrings. “So Phyllis is still alive.”
“I guess so. I was so tired and strung out from the painkillers last night, I couldn’t keep looking.”
“So you’re really going through with this looking-for-her thing?” She shook her head almost imperceptibly and made a near-silent Tsk.
“I think so.”
“Let me ask you something, Amy. Say you find her and she turns out to be a total creep. What then?”
“I’ve thought of that,” I replied.
“Besides the disappointment, you could start thinking: Half of me is a creep. Not that there’s any creep in you. You know that. Even with Harvard. But you could feel that way. Or what if you find her and think, What a loser! and you don’t want anything to do with her? Except she calls you and calls you—”
I cut her off. “I’d get my number changed.”
Aunt Linda took off her scarf, pulled her hair back, did some fast winding, and made a ponytail. “You want the truth, hon? I know you’re strong, you know you’re strong. But strong people can still break.”
“I know.”
“And she’s a bitch. Who else could do a thing like what she did?”
“A messed-up kid.”
“You grew up without a mother, Amy, so what do you need one for now?”
“I need to see where I come from.”
“You come from New York, for Christ’s sakes!” She glanced down at her persimmon toes, then back at me. “You know, that’s the one thing I can never say in front of Sparky, even after all these years. Like even though it’s not making fun of Jesus or anything, I don’t want him to think I don’t respect his religion. He doesn’t go to church, but I think he still believes it. Even the virgin business. Where was I? Oh, Phyllis. You got nothing of her except her brains, because we both know Chicky is no Einstein.”
“But they’re finding more and more personality traits are genetic—all those studies of twins separated at birth.”
“What? Never mind, don’t explain. You went to the best college in the world and I got out of high school with a seventy-eight average. What do you think, Amy, your genes will make you run away from your baby?” When I didn’t answer she added: “Don’t be stupid! You’ll be a wonderful mother. What’s with you and John?”
“Nothing. It’s finished.”
“Last time you were over, you sounded like things weren’t going too good.”
“They weren’t. We broke up.”
“You broke it off?” Her beautifully tweezed eyebrows lifted at the thought of such idiocy.
“It was mutual.”
“So look, if John’s out of the picture, all the more reason not to look for Phyllis. Who have you got to fall back on if she turns out to be weird? Or even not weird. I mean, she could be mature now. Say you find her and all she wants is to make it up to you. Can’t do enough for you. A whole life without a mother and now you got Mademoiselle Véronique with a guilt complex ’cause she abandoned her baby and she can’t do enough, which would be nice, except she’s a total pain because she can’t stop making you lace doilies or something.”
Without asking if I wanted anything, my aunt walked over to the kitchen area and found the coffeepot. She measured out coffee and water and arranged what she sa
id were soy cookies—two net carbs each. “They don’t taste great,” she observed, “but on the other hand, they don’t taste like shit either.”
“Do I look like my mother?”
“You’ve sort of got her eyes,” she said reluctantly, turning from me to watch the coffee drip into the glass pot. “And you’ve got her height, but she was—I don’t know what you’d call it—teeny-boned. She had a real long neck, like Audrey Hepburn. Except to me she always looked a little lollipop-ish because she had this big head, but Sparky always said she was a man’s woman, not a woman’s woman. Whatever that means.” She shrugged. “Well, I know what it means, but I think guys liked her more because she was cold than for her looks. You know, guys have this big ego thing, thawing a cold girl out so she becomes a hottie, but only for them.”
She grasped her bra straps between thumbs and forefingers and shifted everything slightly to the right. “Remember when we came up to visit you at Ivey-Rush on our way to Nantucket? It was right after you got into Harvard and that other good school but you were all upset about stupid Yale?” I nodded. “Well, that time, Sparky said you looked so much like Phyllis he almost did a double take, but then, after he kept looking at you, it was less and less. You know why? Because Phyllis was a cold bitch and you were a real person, even after hanging out with all those rich girls for three years.” She took two mugs from the cabinet. “Do you think if you wanted to, you could get him back?” she asked.
“Who?”
“You know who.”
“No,” I told her. “I don’t think I could.”
“I bet you could. Whatever it is, apologize. You don’t have to win every argument. Unless ... Was it another woman?” I shrugged. “Men.” She sighed. She reached over and took my hand. I noticed there were white blotches on hers, which I guessed meant she’d done something to get rid of liver spots. “Listen, angel pie, if it’s over, it’s over. You have to go out, find someone else.”