The Girl with the Phony Name

by Charles Mathes

  “You know she’s in California visiting the grandkids, right?” said the raspy voice in the receiver. “They don’t got winter there. Ain’t natural.”

  “California?” said Lucy, biting her lip.

  “Yeah. ’Til the first. You want the number out there?”

  Lucy’s heart sank. The first of May was nearly a month away! She supposed she could call Theresa Iatoni in California, but how likely would it be for the woman to open up over the phone in a house full of surfer grandchildren? No, Lucy had to see the woman in person.

  “I think I’ll try her when she gets back. And if you happen to talk to her, don’t mention I called, okay? I want it to be a surprise.”

  “Sure, no problem.”

  Lucy replaced the receiver in its cradle and stood up, wondering if coming to New York had been such a good idea. Fantasies of finding her family had helped Lucy through some tough, lonely times. Did she really want to find out the truth? She might be just an illegitimate Cicarillo whose own aunt had abandoned her.

  Outside, a symphony of sirens, garbage trucks, and what sounded like gunfire rose from the streets. Lucy’s stomach rumbled like thunder, but something inside her relaxed. She had made her decision.

  Whatever the truth was, Lucy was going to find it. She had to know who she really was.

  FIVE

  Lucy spent the next few days exploring New York, gawking at the buildings and shops, but mostly just watching the people—break dancers and street musicians; stick-thin models dressed to the nines; Arabs with thousand-dollar briefcases; beggars pushing shopping carts full of litter. It was like window-shopping at the circus. After watching a teenager snatch a purse from a woman in front of Tiffany’s, Lucy even bought herself a bag of peanuts from a vendor.

  She finally found herself standing in front of the main library at Fifth Avenue and Forty-second Street, staring up at a matching pair of stone lions. Lucy trotted up the long stairs into the cavernous entrance hall of gleaming white marble, twelve-foot-high marble candelabra, vaulted ceilings so vast that she could barely hear the echo of her footsteps.

  “Where can I find old telephone books?” Lucy asked a guard.

  “Main reading room, two flights up,” mumbled the man.

  The stairs took her into a rotunda of dark wood and frescoed ceilings, the white marble giving way to red. She passed book catalogues and computers and walked into a room the size of a football field divided by a center partition. There were wooden tables and chairs with reading lamps every few feet. Halfway into the huge space was the microfilm department.

  “I’m looking for old phone books.”

  The bored teenager at the desk gave her a slip to fill out. Lucy requested the phone books of Manhattan and Brooklyn of thirty years ago. The boy returned in a minute with a stack of battered, square boxes.

  “You can view these over there,” he said, pointing at rows of ancient projectors. Lucy took the boxes over to an empty projector and opened one box. Inside was a thick roll of film, about the size of a can of tuna fish.

  Lucy struggled with the projector for ten minutes. Finally she turned to the boy beside her, a redhead about thirteen years old.

  “Can you show me how to thread this thing, please?” she mumbled. The boy rolled his eyes.

  “You never went to school or nothin’?” he said and installed the microfilm in a matter of seconds.

  “Rotten kid,” Lucy muttered to the projection of phone listings after the boy returned to the computer magazine he was scanning. No wonder she had flunked out of college.

  There were no Trelaines in any of the reels. Lucy went back to the desk again and again, until she had viewed all the phone books back to 1945. No Trelaines. It didn’t prove that Lucy MacAlpin Trelaine wasn’t a jewelry store, but still she felt a little better.

  The following morning Lucy got out the Yellow Pages and started calling hospitals. Her mother had left from New York. Circarillo was from New York. It was reasonable to assume that she had been born here, and if she had there would be a record of the birth somewhere.

  To her disappointment, however, none of hospitals she reached kept old records. “Check the health department,” said one polite gentleman with a Spanish accent. Lucy found a listing for birth and death records in the back of the phone book and dialed the number.

  “ … the information required for obtaining a birth certificate,” said the recorded voice, “is the full name as listed on the certificate, date of birth, mother’s maiden name, father’s name, borough of birth, name of hospital or building address where the birth occurred, and the reason the certificate is needed.”

  The recording gave another number for further assistance. Lucy dialed. A human being finally answered on the fourteenth ring.

  “You must give specific information in order for us to find a birth record,” said the woman patiently.

  “But I was orphaned as a child and I don’t know the specific information. That’s why I need you to check.”

  “You should ask your adoptive parents for more specific information.”

  “I wasn’t adopted,” said Lucy, collapsing onto the bed in frustration. “And there weren’t any records in the first place.”

  “All adoptions go through Albany,” said the woman, oblivious. “I can give you the number there.”

  “Thanks anyway,” said Lucy, putting down the phone unhappily. This was obviously going to be harder than she had thought. And more expensive. The Cokes in her room’s honor bar were $2.50 and they were charging her a dollar a phone call. By the time Theresa Iatoni got back from California, Lucy’s hotel bill would be over $2,000. And what if Theresa Iatoni wouldn’t meet with her or didn’t know anything?

  She sighed and rolled to the other side of the bed, where there were still some springs. New York seemed impossibly large. Lucy blanched at the thought of renting and furnishing an obscenely expensive Manhattan apartment, but she would have to find a cheaper arrangement—and a job—if she expected to survive here. And Lucy was a survivor.

  Lucy dumped the monster Sunday New York Times on the bed. The room was too hot. The odor of garbage wafted up from the alley below. So did the characteristic sounds of Love Choo-Choo, at it again. Lucy had been here nearly a week now but still couldn’t figure out whether Love Choo-Choo was a prostitute or just an enthusiastic housewife.

  “I can do it! I can do it!” callioped Love Choo-Choo at unlikely hours of the day or night, until a final “Woooo Wooooooo!” indicated that she had left the station.

  Lucy took out the Help Wanted section and started going through the classified ads. She didn’t know exactly what type of job she was looking for, but figured she would recognize it when she saw it.

  The listings weren’t too promising. Lucy figured she’d need at least what she had been making with Welcome Inn to get an apartment and pay the exhorbitant city taxes. The problem was she wasn’t qualified for anything.

  Lucy glanced at the resume she had worked up on her computer. Six jobs in eight years wasn’t going to impress anyone. The printout from her little dot-matrix Diconix wasn’t going to impress anyone either. At least “Harvard” looked good under “Educational Background”—as long as no one asked what degree she had earned. She was too honest about some things.

  After half an hour with the paper, Lucy’s fingers were black with newsprint and her spirits decidedly dampened. There were no ads for hotel inspectors. Or college dropouts. Or orphans.

  “What kind of secretary do you think I’d make?” Lucy asked the dresser. The dresser maintained a discreet silence, obviously aware of how rotten her typing was.

  Lucy ignored the hollow feeling in her stomach and started through the listings again. There had to be something she could do, even if it wasn’t the best thing in the world. She had to find something.

  Suddenly she saw it. Lucy read over the ad, again, amazed that she had missed it the first time:

  Entrepreneur needs clever

  assistant. Free
room and

  board. Weehawken, New

  Jersey. Contact Mr. Wing.

  There was a phone number with a 201 area code. Wing was a Chinese name. What kind of entrepreneurs did they have in New Jersey? Where was Weehawken, anyway? Could she commute to the city from there?

  Lucy read the magic words again: “Free room and board.” Free room and board! That would solve all her problems. Whatever the job paid, she would come out ahead if she didn’t have to pay rent and buy furniture. The taxes might even be less in New Jersey.

  Lucy picked up the phone, then put it back down.

  What was she getting herself into? This was New York City, after all, not Kankakee. For all she knew this Wing person could be a white slaver. Or an opium merchant. She’d have to be crazy to go off blindly to some strange city on the strength of an ad in the paper!

  Lucy looked at the magic words one more time—“Free room and board”—then dialed the number.

  So she would be careful. She didn’t have to take the job if she didn’t like the looks of things. They might not offer it to her anyway. It couldn’t hurt to check it out, could it?

  No one would be there on Sunday, Lucy knew, but maybe she could leave her name on a machine or with an answering service. Some ads got hundreds of responses. It was important to stand out, make them remember your name. Maybe she’d leave several messages.

  “Yes, yes, yes?” answered a voice abruptly and none too happily. Lucy was too surprised to hang up. Who worked on Sunday night?

  “Hello. My name is Lucy Trelaine. I’m calling about your ad in the paper.”

  “You clever person?” It was a comic-book Oriental accent, guttural, the ls crimped, the stresses in the wrong places.

  “Clever enough to call on Sunday,” she said warily.

  “You have experience?”

  “Experience at what?”

  “You ever raise money for new venture, maybe?”

  “No,” said Lucy carefully, “but I have worked extensively in finance and have a good deal of accounting knowledge.”

  “Woa!” came the throaty exclamation.

  Lucy felt a little guilty. The financial planner she’d worked for had made his money selling unnecessary insurance policies to little old ladies and the accountant had used her as a human adding machine. But you had to put the best face on your experience, didn’t you?

  “I run quality business,” the voice was chattering in her ear. “You quality person?”

  “As a matter of fact, my most recent position was monitoring quality for a national hotel chain.”

  “No kidding?”

  “No kidding,” she said honestly.

  “You brave person?”

  “What?”

  “You scared of lot of stuff, maybe?”

  Lucy removed the receiver from her ear and stared at it for a moment, then spoke again.

  “May I ask what kind of business we’re talking about here?” she said.

  “Very nice business, please. Service everybody needs, sooner or later.”

  “Oh? Exactly what service—”

  “Rucy Trelaine,” he said, mangling her name. “Nice name. Why should I hire you over plenty of others, Rucy Trelaine?”

  “Well, I don’t really know. I don’t know what your needs are.”

  “Need clever assistant.”

  “Well, I did go to Harvard,” Lucy muttered.

  “Famous American university?”

  “Yes.”

  “Okay. You come Weehawken tomorrow at ten A.M. Thirty-two Boulevard East. Take cab, I reimburse. My name Wing. Bye-bye.”

  The line went dead.

  Lucy put down the phone and stared out at the air shaft for a long time, hoping to hear a reassuring “I can do it.” Where was Love Choo-Choo when you really needed her?

  “So I puffed up my credentials a little,” she finally said to the ceiling. “So what? Everybody does it. I need the job.”

  The ceiling peeled disapprovingly. Lucy swallowed hard. Why did she feel so guilty? And what was she getting herself into?

  SIX

  The next morning, against her better judgment, Lucy Trelaine was in a cab going through the Lincoln Tunnel on her way to New Jersey.

  She had no idea where Weehawken was. Her New Hampshire bank belonged to a national network of cash machines and Lucy had withdrawn $100 at a local Irving Trust. She hoped it would be enough. As for this Mr. Wing, Lucy was prepared to give him the benefit of the doubt but had a fork in her purse just in case. She hoped it would be enough, too.

  Lucy had figured on a long trip, but it took practically forty minutes just to get out of Manhattan. She had only an hour left to make it to Weehawken. Would she still be reimbursed if she showed up late?

  The cab crawled through the narrow, poorly lit tunnel. Lucy tried not to breathe or think of the billions of tons of Hudson River above their heads. The air seemed like it was almost pure carbon monoxide. She marveled at the strange state life had brought her to. As if to confirm the fact, the cabbie tilted his head back and hollered through the bullet-proof partition.

  “This is Joisey. I get double fare from here.”

  Suddenly they were out of the tunnel and the sun was shining in her eyes again. She took a deep breath; the air still smelled awful. The cabbie took the first exit. They drove up a hill onto a small residential road and stopped. Lucy’s watch said 9:05.

  “That comes to twenty-nine bucks.”

  “This is it?”

  “Thirty-two Boulevard East.”

  “This is Weehawken?”

  “Yeah? So?”

  “Weehawken, New Jersey?”

  “You mean as opposed to Weehawken, France?”

  Lucy gave the driver a six-dollar tip. She would be reimbursed. She hoped.

  Boulevard East was a quiet street at the top of the Jersey cliffs. There were large, old houses on only one side of the street and they all looked out across the Hudson River to Manhattan. Number thirty-two was a gigantic, multigabled Victorian mansion covered with decorative fretwork and topped with elaborate turrets and chimneys. The trim was white, the clapboards were blue. Stately trees grew all around. A discreet sign next to the driveway read NEAT ’N’ TIDY.

  Lucy studied the quaint architecture for a minute, trying to guess what sort of business went on behind the gingerbread walls. She was baffled, though reassured, by its appearance, which was in fact neat and tidy. One chimney was taller than the others. It was white metal, clearly not an original feature of the house. Braced with metal struts, it extended ten feet above the roof.

  Realizing that she couldn’t possibly show up an hour early, Lucy turned and started up the street. Across from the house on the cliff behind a tall iron fence was a weathered bust seated on a rock. She strained to read the inscription.

  Upon this stone rested the head of the patriot, soldier, statesman and jurist Alexander Hamilton after the duel with Aaron Burr.

  “Great place to die,” said Lucy unhappily to the spectacular view of Manhattan across the river. The panorama stretched from New York harbor past the towers of the World Trade Center, all the way up the West Side to the George Washington Bridge and beyond.

  She followed the sidewalk along the top of the cliffs and through a little park. The street became shabbier, the big old houses giving way to boxlike apartment buildings and prosaic brick two-family homes with porches.

  After a few more blocks Lucy came to a restaurant. She could use a cup of coffee. And a chocolate doughnut. The lone waitress was Spanish and didn’t “habla inglés.” Coffee was no problem, but the woman didn’t seem to understand what a doughnut was. Lucy tried to think up a convincing pantomime, but couldn’t.

  Luckily she didn’t have to illustrate that she wanted to go to the bathroom—there was a door marked DAMAS in fancy script. Lucy read it “Dames” at first—it took her a minute to figure out the sign was in Spanish, not in Frank Sinatra.

  Lucy studied her appearance in the small mirror ov
er the sink. Not too bad for a dame. She was wearing her navy interview suit and had figured out how to secure the blouse’s neck scarf with the big silver brooch, hoping it would bring her luck. It had to be good for something. She took out a comb and tried to convince a few recalcitrant black hairs to cooperate with the rest of her head, then gave up.

  “Do you have a local phone book?” Lucy asked, returning to the counter. Somehow it seemed more important than ever to look for Trelaines. The waitress smiled in polite incomprehension. Lucy threw her hands up in the air, miming forgetfulness, then opened a book and walked her fingers through the listings. Finally she picked up an imaginary phone and dialed. The woman laughed and clapped her hands, then handed Lucy a greasy Hudson County phone book from a shelf under the cash register.

  Lucy sipped her coffee and browsed through the phone book. There were no Trelaines in Hudson County, but there was one listing under MacAlpin. She went over into the old-fashioned phone booth next to the door marked HOMBRES and closed the door. A little light went on above her head. Lucy deposited her quarter and dialed.

  “Hello?” answered a female voice on the second ring.

  “Hello. Robert MacAlpin, please.”

  “He’s at work.”

  “Are you Mrs. MacAlpin?”

  “Yes?”

  “Perhaps you can help me,” said Lucy, launching into her standard routine. “My name is Lucy MacAlpin Trelaine. My parents were killed in a car crash when I was baby. I’m trying to find my family. Has your husband ever talked about a woman relative with a newborn who disappeared thirty years ago?”

  “No, I don’t think so. You’d have to ask him. He doesn’t talk much about his family.”

  “When will he be home?”

  “Not till after six. He’s at the office now. In the city. You can get him there if you like.”

  Lucy looked at her watch. There was still plenty of time until ten.

  “Sure, why not?”

  The woman gave her a Manhattan phone number. Lucy thanked the woman, hung up, and dialed, giving the operator her phone credit-card number.