Any Place I Hang My Hat Read Online Free PDF Page A

psychotic.”
    “Right. Anyway, he came into the apartment and hardly got past the door. Before the I-am-his-son stuff, and before Bowles’s bodyguard grabbed him and frisked him and dragged him back into the elevator, all he did was try to speak to the senator. He is not a psychotic. The End.” She looked skeptical. “Okay, so his voice was a little loud.”
    “Where were Bowles’s Secret Service agents?”
    “Secret Service doesn’t kick in until a hundred twenty days before the general election.”
    This legality displeased Tatty. A single tsk emerged. After a moment of silence, she said, “About this boy, man, whatever. Was he believed?”
    “Hard to tell. The party broke up with what is known as unseemly haste. Before I could get to Thom Bowles, he came over to me and muttered, off the record, that the kid had been stalking him whenever he came to New York. I asked if he’d gotten a restraining order. He wasn’t sure. Said I should ask his campaign manager. Lovely Moira said the kid was a radical right dirty-tricks person, but they hadn’t gotten an order because then the paternity charge would have inevitably become public. She also said she was relying on my sense of decency not to blow this out of proportion, which was her way of warning she would rip the flesh from my bones if I made it the focal point of my coverage.”
    “Did the boy look like a Bowles?” Tatty asked. Her intelligence was keen, but almost entirely visual. She could remember a painting forever, but even if she’d read War and Peace five times, to her it would only be an Audrey Hepburn film. Add that visual ability to the fact that she was related to, or a former schoolmate of, the New York affiliate of Everyone Who Matters—a self-designated group of patricians, i.e., families who managed to slog through the entire twentieth century without completely exhausting their inherited wealth—she might have actually known what features or mannerisms were peculiar to Bowleses.
    “I have no idea what Bowleses are supposed to look like and, frankly, I don’t give a damn.” Having unburdened myself, I pictured the half-frozen kid in his sodden gray sweatshirt and the senator in his gray pinstriped suit tailored slightly on the baggy side so as not to look custom-made. “Well,” I conceded, “if there’s a petit size for guys, they’d both wear it. You know, they’ve both got butts the size of …” I held up my two fists side by side.
    “You’re still as cultivated as you were on your first day of school.”
    “My first day of school was at P.S. 97.”
    “You know I meant your first day of boarding school.” Tatty’s voice was pitched low. Dictionwise, she was fond of vowels, though not enamored. For a score or more years, alumnae and alumni of New England boarding schools hadn’t sounded like the preppies of old who articulated as if auditioning for Lady Windermere’s Fan. Still, her diction was different enough from mine that a non–New Yorker might find it hard to believe we’d both been born and bred on the same twenty-two-square-mile island. “Besides their butts,” Tatty asked, “was there a resemblance?”
    “I don’t think so,” I told her. “I mean, Thom Bowles looks like the Marlboro Man, except photocopied to three-quarter size. The kid could have been Italian, Latino, Jewish—your basic Mediterranean model. Or some other mix that results in beige. Listen, I may be semi-street-smart, but I can’t look at a guy and say, ‘Oh, yeah, Sri Lankan and Belgian.’”
    “Did he have an accent?”
    “No. Well, he didn’t start reciting Leaves of Grass, so I can’t vouch for his every word, but he sounded like a regular guy in a sweatshirt.” I thought back to I am Senator Thomas Bowles’s son! “Probably a guy in a sweatshirt from one of the five boroughs. Anyhow, the moment was sensational only in the tabloid sense. Honestly, I didn’t think of him being a psycho or a drama queen.” True, it had been a