Any Place I Hang My Hat (17 page)

People accustomed to journalists—politicians, legislators, performers—can be interviewed over the phone. But I assumed the Baptistes, now residing in the jewel, would require a face-to-face meeting if I was to get anything worthwhile. Fine. Face-to-face was my forte. For whatever reason—being short and therefore viewed as nonthreatening, or being someone whose New York accent made people think she had been born into a family unable to afford premium-package cable TV and was therefore an unassuming person—I could almost always get people to talk.

I got off nine stops before Sheepshead Bay and found myself in another Brooklyn, in another world entirely. This was not Aunt Linda and Uncle Sparkyville. This was comfortable country. Comfortable was a Grandma Lil word. According to her, refined people didn’t talk about money, but if they did, they used comfortable for those who were well-off, but not stinking rich. Brooklyn’s “comfortable” country was not dot-com-era real estate, as in some ten-thousand-square-foot loft in Soho.

And it was definitely not old money like Tatty’s family’s endless apartment on Park Avenue. This was a ’hood for successful hardware store owners and pediatricians.

Their homes were grand but solid Victorians, pleased—though not proud—to show themselves under the cold, brilliant blue March sky. As I went right, left, left again to get to Wakehurst, I noted they stood far back from the sidewalks, discreet, but not so distant as to appear snobbish. If you have legitimate business here, they announced silently, you may come up and ring our chimes.

But standing in front of 925 Wakehurst Road I couldn’t be discreet. I said, “Holy shit!” and gaped—the whole jaw-dropping, eyes-opening-large business. What a house! Too simple to be called grand, too grand to be charming. Although a part of the facade was obscured by tall evergreens trimmed into large, breastlike mounds, it was clear a huge expanse of front porch must run the length of the house. The entrance was toward the left, but only slightly off, more eye-pleasing than eccentric. However, the door was so deeply shaded by the porch’s green-shingled overhang that it was a leap of faith to believe there was a front door. The second floor was in four separate sections of differing heights. The part farthest to the right was a circular tower with three windows, topped by a cone-shaped turret. As a girl my mother could have played Rapunzel Moscowitz.

The house’s facade was painted a warm shade equidistant between yellow and white. So were the architectural doodads, such as the scallops of wood running above all the second-floor windows. Two of the second-story sections had a third floor above them, but despite the varying heights of roofs, 925 had a unity, as all were covered with the same color shingles—a green several tones richer and darker than the overhang above the porch.

I did that inhale, exhale, inhale, squaring-of-the-shoulders business that female characters do in movies to show they’re feisty or spunky—or some dimpled adjective never applied to men. I felt neither feist nor spunk. My palms were so drippy I kept wiping them on my pants until they looked as though I’d sent only the below-the-knee half to the dry cleaner. I loved this house, but I couldn’t approach it.

Why am I scared? I asked myself. Certainly from my days at Ivey onward I had visited friends who lived in much grander homes, so I wasn’t afraid of dropping dead from pleasure at the mere sight of a Persian rug. Maybe having always thought of myself as descended from people doomed to shtetls and low-income housing projects—to say nothing of petty crime and grand larceny—I couldn’t assimilate the fact that 50 percent of me came from people who, long before I was born, had achieved such material success.

Anyhow, since the feisty/spunky thing was still not working, I trudged up the path, climbed the front steps, and rang the front doorbell. It chimed a complicated series of notes: Mahler, for all I knew. I wanted to run.

“Just a sec,” I heard from somewhere deep in the house. Heavy feet clomped down carpeted stairs, across what was probably a wood floor, and to the front door. On either side of the door were long, skinny rectangles, panels of stained glass. I could vaguely make out a pair of eyes peering through an amber-colored petal of what was either a giant chrysanthemum or a zinnia.

“Hi!” I offered my adorable, I-almost-have-dimples smile and held up my In Depth credentials to the amber glass. “My name is Amy Lincoln. I’m working on a story.”

With luck, the door would open about two inches, naturally with a heavy foot behind it in case I turned out to be an ax murderer. Instead, the door opened wide. A large, middle-aged woman smiled back at me. “Hi!” She was shaped like a packing crate, although a well-groomed one.

“Ms. Baptiste?” I inquired, handing her my ID. She studied it for a couple of seconds. “I’m a journalist.”

“Amy Lincoln,” she said. “Any relation to you-know-who?”

“Dubious.”

“But who knows, right? Anyhow, I’m Judyann Baptiste. Capital J, no space, lowercase ANN. No E. I’ve heard of … What’s its name again? Oh, In Depth. You work there?” I nodded. “Come on in,” she said, and led me through a vestibule into a beige living room. Well, not totally beige. The coffee table was golden oak, a couple of side tables cherry, and the fireplace mantel mahogany. But the rest of the room looked done by a decorator who’d gotten a kickback on a few thousand bolts of beige silk.

I knew I had to say something, so I said: “A beautiful room.”

“It’s monochromatic,” she said. Her voice was softer than she was, with the initial gentleness many heavy women present, unspoken amends for taking up so much space.

“You have lovely taste.”

“Thank you. Please, have a seat.” She swept her arm, giving me a choice of most of the furniture in the room. While her clothes—camel-colored pants and a beige twinset—also qualified as monochromatic, Judyann Baptiste was more vivid. Her hair and eyes were black, her skin a lovely pale olive, her lips bright red. It was a Mediterranean face that could have come from anywhere from Spain to Syria, though I put my money on Greece. Being a huge fan of any women’s mag article or TV show that featured makeovers, I immediately wanted to make her toss out the beige and buy a new wardrobe in jewel colors: ruby, sapphire, emerald.

“Can I offer you anything?” she continued, her voice growing more confident. “I’ve got a full refrig. Tons of cheeses, berries like you wouldn’t believe. Cut-up cantaloupe.” I was on her turf now. She smiled, showing an endearing gap between her front teeth. “My husband likes to see a full refrig when he gets home, you know? He opens the door, grabs something Atkins-y, pours himself a glass of wine. I buy those half bottles, because for my money, you should throw out any wine that’s more than two days old. More than one day old, if you want the truth. Oh, and you name the diet soda, I’ve got it. I could start a diet soda museum.”

Knowing I’d be suspect if I didn’t eat something, I asked for a small piece of cheese and a Diet Coke. Naturally, she came back with a rattan tray with four types of cheese, a fan of crackers, and a one-liter Diet Coke along with two hefty tumblers, one with ice, one without. I loved nurturing women like this, human cornucopias. I bit into a piece of cheddar and wished I’d grown up in this house. Not as a Moscowitz. They’d produced Phyllis. As a Baptiste, though I’d convert to Judaism, which would turn out to be fine with Judyann.

“Great cheddar,” I told her. So she wouldn’t have time to get a word in edgewise, I added: “I’m working on a piece, and the people who used to own this house—Moscowitz—may have some information that would be useful to me as background.”

Her red mouth drooped. “It’s not about the house?”

“No. God, would that be a dream assignment.” To make sure I stayed in her good graces, I spread some goat cheese on a cracker. Maybe sheep cheese. “Did you ever meet the Moscowitzes?”

“A couple of times. You know how it is. You look at a house once, then you have to go back to make sure you’re not reading the kitchen from another house onto this one, or whether the master bath is actually in the bedroom or if you have to go out into the hall, which would not be for me. Oh, and I think Gene—my husband—came another time with the broker, but that was to check the basement. What’s the point of making a bid if a place is falling apart from the bottom up?”

“You’re right.”

“But it was a while ago. Let’s see, we’ve lived here … whatever. Fourteen, fifteen years. My husband would know. I always tell him, ‘You’re math, I’m verbal.’ ”

“Do you know where the Moscowitzes”—I glanced at my notepad, which I knew was blank—“Rose and Selwyn—moved to?”

“Three guesses, but I’ll give you a clue. Florida.”

“Do you happen to know where in Florida?”

“I’m pretty sure Boca. But that was before half of New York moved there. People were still calling it Boca Raton.”

“Did Mr. Moscowitz retire? I know he was in the bike business.”

“Right. He retired. Emphysema, I think.” Judyann put her index and middle fingers to her red lips as if she were holding a cigarette. She blew the imaginary smoke out slowly, through pursed lips, as though she herself still missed it.

“Do you have any idea if they’re alive?”

“Well, the people next door, the Kleins …” she gestured toward the left with her chin “… kept in touch. I think they even visited them down there. Now they’re in Florida too, but I don’t think in Boca. Someplace else.” Before she could go on, I got the Kleins’ first names, Lawrence and Naomi, although I learned everyone called her Cookie. “But they only moved a year or so ago, so I guess I would have heard something. Cookie loved to talk. Talk, talk, talk. Not nasty gossip. Just—What do they call it? A yenta. Knows everybody’s business, tells everybody’s business.”

“Before we get to what Cookie may have told you, what were your thoughts on the Moscowitzes, the couple of times you met them?”

“Nice. She was tall, on the slim side. A little clothes-horsey. I mean, who wears those cuff kind of bracelets in their own house? Blondish. Receding chin. He was short and dumpy. I remember saying to Gene, ‘Can you imagine that guy riding a bike?’ Well, I guess he didn’t have to ride them, just sell them.”

I made a couple of notes just to show how seriously I was taking her opinion, then asked: “What were they like in terms of personality?”

“He was friendly. Like you’d expect from someone who’s essentially a salesman. But when it came to dollars and cents, tough. To be fair, my husband’s that way too. I was so scared during the negotiations that we wouldn’t get the place. I mean, this is my dream house. But at the closing, Selly Moscowitz and Gene were acting like old friends. Both of them probably thought they got the better of the deal.”

“And Rose Moscowitz?”

“Smart. Even though she had a college degree, she told me she never stopped taking courses. At Brooklyn College and LIU. Philosophy, Italian. Or maybe Italian philosophy.” She shrugged. “I guess Italians have philosophers.” Petrarch came to mind, quickly followed by Pico and Pomponazzi, but I shrugged back the impulse to comment. “She was okay. I mean, not the warmest person in the world, but not not-nice. More than polite. Maybe it’s that she really didn’t have much of a personality. Oh, I think she may have had some work.” She pointed both index fingers toward her chest. “I don’t get it. She should have gotten a chin implant, not breasts. They looked so unnatural. And if she was so philosophical, why would she get plastic surgery? She had a modelish figure. It looked like she’d glued a couple of tennis balls to her chest. Well, bigger than tennis balls, but I’m not much for sports.”

I opened the Diet Coke and poured it into the no-ice glass. “Do you remember if you ever got a forwarding address for them? Or a number to call if you had any questions about … I don’t know. Air-conditioning or the plumbing?”

“Do you want some lemon or lime with your soda?” Judyann inquired.

“No thanks.”

I was going to push her about a forwarding address again, but she stood, a somewhat slow but not undignified process: “Give me a couple of minutes,” she said. “I wrote something somewhere… .” In a moment, she was out of the living room, climbing the stairs. I wanted to yell at her: Hey, are you crazy, leaving a total stranger alone in your house? Instead, I leaned forward and stared at the fireplace. The ceiling was incredibly high, so I figured the fireplace had to be nine or ten feet tall. The mahogany mantel was carved with flowers and birds and held up by columns. Above the ledge of the mantel, more carving framed a huge mirror. At the very top was a cornice with a long-necked bird—egret, heron, crane, whatever—rising, as if to fly off to Manhattan.

It was so easy to picture myself in this house. On a school snow day, stretched out before a fire, reading, now and then dipping into a bowl of popcorn. What had been so awful in this wonderful house to make Phyllis take flight, get into a stolen car, and drive off with a guy like my father? Sexual or emotional abuse, the contemporary justification for all antisocial acts in B movies and B-minus fiction? Had she been a reckless kid? An incorrigible? Clearly she’d savored Chicky’s two-bit criminality. She’d enjoyed hanging with the mob guys he knew. And if he was telling the truth about her stealing the diamond ring and then setting him up to take the rap, then she was also a considerably more effective criminal than he was.

“I’ve got it!” Judyann called out. As I’d flown off to Moscowitzland, leaving the Baptistes behind, I tried not to look startled by her sudden reappearance. She waved a black-and-white notebook. “Everything about the house, including …” She sat beside me, riffled through the pages, and handed it to me. ROSE MOSCOWITZ, it said, all in tiny capitals so perfect they didn’t seem handwritten. An address on Orchid Lake Drive in Boca Raton. A phone number.

I copied them down. “Thank you,” I said. “This is a huge help. Just one more question.” She nodded, happy to keep me there. She was either very friendly or very lonely: maybe both. “When you were looking at the house—When was that again?”

She chewed her bottom lip. Some red lipstick stuck to the bottom of her two front teeth. “Let me see. Nineteen eighty-something. My youngest, Karen … She’s calling herself Kerri now, K-E-R-R-I. She went off to college in September of eighty-seven. Everyone thought we were crazy, buying this house after our kids were grown, but we loved it, so we said, ‘Why not?’ We started looking in the summer of eighty-seven, which means we bought it in … I think April of eighty-eight.”