Any Place I Hang My Hat

by Susan Isaacs

She pulled back the cuff of her sweater to get a look at her watch. It, too, was gold. It wrapped around several times, as if it had been modeled on the Slinky. Her wrists were much smaller than mine. Although we were about the same height, side by side we probably looked like Barbie and a Cabbage Patch kid. “This can’t take longer than twenty minutes or so,” she told me, not looking directly into my eyes. “I have to pick up my sons and bring them—”

  I reached into my backpack and handed her my cell phone. “It will take however long is necessary. You can apologize for being unavoidably detained.” Maybe I was ODing on adrenaline; my nerves were aquiver like a plunked tuning fork. Still, I sounded amazingly like a person who has her wits about her.

  “I have my own cell phone,” she replied, but didn’t reach for it. She wasn’t exactly hostile. More like someone resigned to an unavoidable delay at an airport. For a few seconds I just stared at her, my cell phone in one hand, coffee cup in the other. After nearly thirty years of studying my own face in the mirror, from admiring my gift for making cross eyes as a kid to agonizing over zits to the daily application of makeup, I knew it well. Now I kept searching for something of myself in her face.

  Her eyes were green, but of an intense emerald color that comes from contact lenses, not nature. My hair was brown with red highlights. Hers was the dark red found on Irish setters and Titian’s women, as well as in two-step, three-hundred-dollar coloring processes in salons such as Beauté. Her skin was porcelain. Mine wasn’t dark, but over the years of playing sports and working as a flagman during college summers, I had grown permanently ruddy, in the manner of white trash girls in Gone With the Wind who went without bonnets. So we shared a five-foot-three gene and maybe a couple of coloring genes. But I could find no other likeness.

  She adjusted her bracelets to her satisfaction, then asked: “Well?”

  “Tell me something about your life now,” I said.

  “I thought you wanted to know about—”

  “We have a deal. My questions get answered. I know what I’m doing. I don’t know if your mother mentioned it, but I earn my living as—”

  “Whatever. My life? I’m married, but you know that. Ira has a successful business. Lighting fixtures, indoor and out, and lamps. He also has the contract to maintain fixtures for all Nassau County’s governmental buildings. And for the Diocese of Rockville Centre, which is quite a coup for someone named Ira Hochberg. What else do you want to know?”

  “You have two boys?” This phrasing was in lieu of my asking, Besides me you have two other children? Instead of anger for forcing her into a conversation she didn’t want to have, or fear that I’d drop in on Ira and read aloud from Phyllis Moscowitz: The Adolescent Years, the only emotion my mother displayed was annoyance. Sighs. Now and then compressing her lips together in an expression more intense than pique but less than disgust. She shifted around in the small, woven cafe chair. Her annoyance threw me. I was so used to going through the world getting myself liked. Isn’t Amy Lincoln adorable and feisty and wonderfully down to earth? Or something like And so bright. Harvard! My mother, however, seemed to have a natural immunity to my charm. Maybe worse, she didn’t seem to hate me. Still, I tried a smile. “Are you a full-time mother?”

  She was trying to turn the rings on the left hand with her pinky. I noticed what I assumed she wanted me to see: Besides the wedding band, she wore a ring with two diamonds slightly larger then M&Ms. “What does the term full-time mother mean?” she asked.

  “That you’re at home raising your sons rather than working outside the home.”

  “Then yes, I’m a full-time mother. I thought you wanted to know about me back then.” I probably should have said, Wow, what a beautiful ring! She said: “Are you asking me all this to soften me up or do the questions have some point?”

  “To soften you up.” I tried one more smile, my broad one that shows a hint of dimples. In response, she reached down to the depths of her giant handbag and after a few seconds retrieved an inch-long enamel box with a minuscule paisley design, opened it, and popped what looked like a little mint into her mouth. “Okay,” I said, “let’s get on to the information I’m really interested in.”

  “Is that a cappuccino?” she asked me.

  “A cafe au lait. Can I get you something?”

  “One of those. And a chocolate croissant.” I walked back to the counter and in a few moments came back with her order. She lifted the plate up to nose level, sniffed, then turned the pastry around, as if she had to do a 360-degree examination. Then she lifted the croissant, not between two fingers, but by clutching it in her fist. With her mouth open wide, she ripped off about a third of it and chewed with something less than delicacy: lips smacking, mouth making chomp, chomp sounds. I was so startled because Rose, her mother, had been well mannered. One of my dubious legacies from Grandma Lil was hypervigilance when it came to table manners, no matter how archaic or stupid they might be. If someone passed a creamer without offering the handle, they got an immediate minus five. Clutching a croissant as if it were a leg of fried chicken was beyond the pale. I remembered that the first time we’d gone out to dinner together, John had made me inordinately happy when he’d broken off a bite-size piece of roll, buttered it, and popped it in his mouth.

  “What attracted you to my father?”

  “What do you think?” She ran her tongue over her top front teeth, presumably to mop up any chocolate or stray crumbs.

  “I believe I was pretty clear before. I want all my questions answered.”

  “He was ... Do people still call him Chicky?” I nodded, expecting she would ask me how he was or what he was doing now. “He was a rebel,” she said. “A car thief. Did you know that?”

  “Yes. What else is there about him that made you willing to run away from home?”

  “Frankly? He was a great fuck. Of course, that’s by a teenager’s standards. Does that”—she opened her mouth and widened her eyes in mock astonishment—“shock you?”

  “Do I look shocked?” I sipped my coffee. It had cooled but still had that wonderful bitter French bite. “You stayed with him for a considerable amount of time. He told me you were living under fairly hellish circumstances, with a rat—”

  “I will not under any circumstances talk about that!” The woman behind the counter seemed unnerved by my mother’s outburst. She edged closer to the cash register. My mother demanded: “How the hell can you talk about a rat in a place like this?”

  “Let’s move on then. You married him, at least in part, because you thought you were pregnant. You weren’t. How come you stayed?”

  “I can’t remember. I was a kid.”

  “Why didn’t you go back to your family? What was there about your parents that was so terrible you couldn’t—”

  “They were boring. Okay? I know that doesn’t sound like a big deal. But just try living with it. More than boring. Suffocating. And incredibly pretentious. My father would give me endless lectures. He’d sit in his chair in the living room and keep trying to get me to sit too, but I would never give him the satisfaction. He’d blab on and on about my getting some goal in life. Oh, and that I needed to do something after school, like being a candy striper. Or collect dollhouse furniture. His big thing was that I should join a group of nice, young people and take long bike rides. Like out to Montauk Point. He hadn’t a goddamn clue as to who I was. And worse, he didn’t care. He knew what he wanted in a daughter and it was never me.”

  “And your mother?”

  “A five-foot-seven cube of ice. A cube that fancied herself an intellectual. I don’t think there was one time in all my teenage years that she said, ‘Véronique, you look great.’”

  “Your name was Phyllis then, right?”

  “That’s not exactly a brilliant deduction. My mother or someone told you.”

  “But boring parents ... Is there anyone who got through adolescence without thinking her parents were boring or stupid or crass or snobbish? Was there anything else about th
em?”

  “Like what?”

  “Were they abusive to you in any way?”

  “Emotionally abusive.” She bit off another hunk of croissant with the same sound effects as she had the first. She washed it down with her coffee, a surprisingly silent operation. “Completely unloving. Nothing I did was worth anything to them. I mean, even if I had taken up stamp collecting for him or let her take me to orchestra concerts, it wouldn’t have been enough for them. The fact of my collecting stamps or going to concerts would have made stamp collecting and concerts the wrong thing to do. Maybe it doesn’t sound like a big thing now, but believe me, I was dying in that house. If I’d been forced to stay there, I would have committed suicide. You know why? Because eventually they’d break me. They’d turn me into them. And I’d rather be dead than be that way.”

  “I hope to have children one day, so now I’m going to ask you some medical information. Not a lot. Rose can give me the family history.”

  “Rose? Are you and Rose best friends now?”

  “I met her. We’ve exchanged a couple of letters and phone calls.”

  “Are you planning a round-the-world trip or a Fifth Avenue penthouse with your inheritance from Rose?” my mother asked. “Because if you are, you should know she loves the boys, absolutely loves them. And what she has isn’t serious money anyway.”

  “How was your pregnancy with me?”

  “What? You want the truth? Terrible.”

  My heart was so heavy it sank into my gut. “Why was it terrible?”

  “Because he couldn’t even afford a doctor. I had to go to a clinic up at Bellevue. It was like being in hell. Sometimes there weren’t even enough chairs for all the women, and most of them ... It wasn’t their first baby. They would bring their other children with them and they kept screaming at the top of their lungs. And most of them were dirty. I know that’s not politically correct to say, but that’s how it was.”

  “Was I born in Bellevue?” She nodded. “Forgetting about the clinic for a minute, how did the pregnancy go medically?”

  “All right.”

  “No problems during the nine months or with the delivery?”

  “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.”