Nothing Is Quite Forgotten in Brooklyn (3 page)

When the phone woke her, she was momentarily disoriented, then reminded herself it was afternoon, still Monday. The machine on the kitchen counter picked up and from the bedroom she heard her mother's announcement, reciting the phone number. Gert recited it twice. Meanwhile Con realized that the caller might be Joanna, and reached for the phone near the bed. “Hello?” she said as the announcement continued.

Marlene's voice said, “Can you turn that thing off?” but the announcement had ended. “I'm going to wire you money,” Marlene said then.

“Don't bother,” Con said. “But how would you do that?”

“Western Union.”

“But I'd have to go to the Western Union office. I can't leave.”

“You can't get somebody to stay there for a few minutes?” Marlene said skeptically. Then, “Did you reach Joanna? Your mother keeps asking. She's taking a nap, so you can tell me the truth.”

Con hesitated. “I can't reach her but I'm sure she's fine.”

“She's not at home?”

“Or not answering.”

“Should I call her?”

“Definitely not.”

“I wouldn't make things worse, Connie,” said Marlene. “You
know I'm no dope. I'm right about your mother. The things she's been saying! I'm not even going to tell you. Of course it's not true.”

“What's not true?” said Con. Now and then something reminded her of the past—certainly a complicated past and maybe even a mysterious past—that Gert and Marlene had shared for years before Con was even born. She envied them that time, as if she somehow knew that they'd spent all of it telling secrets they planned to keep from her.

“Look, she should be tested,” Marlene said.

“You think she's got Alzheimer's?” said Con. “What did she say?”

“Last night,” said Marlene, “she woke up and thought she was in the train. She kept asking me what stop it was.”

That didn't seem so bad. “Marlene, I should hang up.”

“My doctor is wonderful. I'm making an appointment. I'm trying to spare you heartache, Connie, heartache.”

“I'll call you back.”

“But she'll be up. I think I hear her.”

“Okay, so long then,” said Con, and hung up before Marlene could speak again. She liked this attention from Marlene. The question of the Western Union office had been unresolved. Con looked in the Yellow Pages but didn't recognize any addresses of Western Union offices in Brooklyn. Anyway, she'd have to leave the door unlocked—it couldn't be locked without a key—and would be afraid to return. The phone machine was flashing. It had recorded their call; Con listened to the first few words and erased it. She expected more from Marlene—rescue—but that had never quite happened. As an adolescent, when Marlene still
lived in Brooklyn, Con enjoyed the fantasy that Marlene might someday invite her to come and visit all by herself—maybe for weeks at a time—but when she was finally invited for an overnight visit, Con had become lost in the tangle of subway lines. There was no good way to travel across Brooklyn to Marlene's apartment, and eventually she gave up and made her way home. “Connie, I'm ashamed of you,” Marlene had said.

Now Con dialed her home number again. School would be out, so Joanna might be more willing to pick up the phone. But these days she never spent her afternoons at home, where Con was often working. When Joanna was younger, Con would stop work when she turned up. They'd eat and talk, or she'd drive Joanna somewhere while Joanna talked confidingly from the backseat. Later they'd return reluctantly to work, Joanna to her homework, Con to the case she'd been working on, with their papers intermingling on the kitchen table.

Con had a law degree, but after working in a big firm before her daughter was born, she hadn't wanted to return to that life—to hours away from home, to pantyhose and skirts. She worked part-time, taking on cases for a women's legal project and doing some of the work at home, barefoot. At present she was trying to keep the house for women ex-prisoners from being closed down. It had existed without trouble for two years in a neighborhood just outside Philadelphia, but now neighbors claimed the women were prostitutes, soliciting on the street. Joanna scoffed. She proposed that they drive to the street in the evening and see what happened. Con thought the women probably
were
soliciting on the street, but should be allowed to stay in the house anyway.

She tried the super again, left another message. She wondered if he was the burglar. Her mother would regard that supposition as unfair, and maybe she'd be right. How long could he keep his job if the tenants grew suspicious? But Con liked the thought that the super was the burglar: then he would stay where he was, rolling trash cans. He would be too busy to travel to Philadelphia, using her train ticket, to rape her daughter.

 

Con never returned the police officer's money. Fourteen years later, in November, 2003, she no longer remembered the two dollars. She tried not to think about that week in 1989, and as she'd grown older, she'd become more adept at not thinking about painful subjects. This is not a story about memory. Now she herself lived in Brooklyn, in a quite different apartment, not squarish and sunny but oddly shaped, dark, with rooms that were a little hard to find, off corridors, and were full of not-quite-finished objects—bookcases made of unpainted boards, tables stripped but never refinished. Con and Jerry had had some of them for decades, and Con had acquired others, leaving them also not quite finished. The apartment had a gray metal desk in a study that might have been a living room, separated from the living room (which should have been a dining room) by a homemade partition. She had no dining room and the kitchen was small, but she had a spare bedroom, and she was glad the study was the most noticeable room. What mattered was work, even if work was often unsatisfying.

On this November Sunday, Con was not at her desk. When she'd struggled with the hinges on the bathroom door as much
as possible, she started cleaning, as planned. She didn't mind scrubbing the basin and toilet, but disliked cleaning the bathtub—bending, reaching. If Jerry had been present he'd have done it. He undressed and climbed into the tub, cleaning quite thoroughly, and then he mopped the floor, having slopped water over it. Con and Jerry no longer lived together—they had been divorced for some years, and during a period of three years Con had met, married, and divorced someone else, a psychologist named Fred—but when Jerry was in New York he stayed in her extra bedroom. Con had moved to Brooklyn after her divorce from Fred. A few years later, she heard the crash of the first plane into the World Trade Center while walking to the subway. When she left Philadelphia, Jerry's lamp store was still open, but in the final stages of failure; on the downtown block where it had stood for decades, it was the last independent store.

For some reason Jerry often cleaned the bathroom when he visited, though she'd never asked him to, and Con might glimpse him padding with wet feet back to his room, his clothes in a bundle under his arm. She wouldn't have walked naked through the apartment, but Jerry was nonchalant, or maybe he displayed himself to provoke her.

This morning Con felt like taking a walk, but if she walked before cleaning, she wouldn't clean. When she'd finished the bathroom except for the bathtub, she found herself in her study, checking the
New York Times
Web site. It was more than seven months after the start of the war in Iraq, and the United States was considering recruiting units of the old Iraqi army to speed the creation of a new one. Though the government
had claimed casualties would be few in this war, twenty-two Americans had died in the last two weeks, and a long story discussed the effects of their deaths on those at home. Con checked her e-mail to further put off scouring the tub. She had no new messages, but she answered a couple of old ones. When she sent the second one, she saw that a new one had come in, and recognized Marlene's address.

Marlene's messages didn't begin with the recipient's name or end with her own. “I must see the leaves in Central Park,” she wrote this time. “I just decided to go to New York next weekend. If you don't have room I'll stay in a hotel.” The leaves were pretty much gone, but Con knew Marlene wouldn't care. She didn't mean the part about the hotel, either; she assumed she'd stay with Con. She'd like to go to a show, she said, and proposed that Con buy the tickets. She said she'd pay her back, but Con knew she might never do it.

Con didn't clearly remember that April week in 1989, but she did remember being thrilled, over many decades, by Marlene and Marlene's attention. It was still a thrill, but Con was busy—more than busy. These days—or weeks, or years—she was not in a good mood. The apartment was messy and likely to stay that way, and Jerry had asked if he could come later in the week. A consultant to small family businesses now that the store was gone, he came to New York to see clients, taking the train.

“Of course you'll stay here,” Con nevertheless replied to Marlene.

Still postponing the tub, she wrote a message to Jerry. He'd cross the living room in the Philadelphia house from the re
maining easy chair, around which newspapers, local and New York, would be distributed. He'd lean down past the long bones of his legs and haul his laptop from the floor, where it lived. Jerry was an impossibly tall and thin man who had grown up learning not to break the lamps in his family's store by standing up in slow stages, checking in all directions, and he still did, though his living room had little furniture in it. A table on which the laptop might have rested was here in Brooklyn, but when Con had last stopped by the Philadelphia house, Jerry hadn't replaced it. She didn't know whether he checked his e-mail sitting on the floor, or unplugged the laptop and carried it to the chair.

Jerry, now with gray in his curls, still did what he did without much explanation or inquiry. He was a persuasive man. The businesses he advised had been in families for a long time and were struggling as his had struggled. He liked to tell his clients that he'd kept the lamp store going well beyond its natural lifespan by putting all the lamps on a series of extension cords and plugging the last one into an outlet at city hall. Con wasn't sure what that was a metaphor for—what he'd wangled from the city of Philadelphia—but he seemed to manage equally well advising others in the City of New York or other cities.

“Hi,” she wrote. “Marlene just issued a royal edict: I'm to set aside a bed, she's on her way—next weekend. I can't remember when you're coming. But you'll be gone by then, won't you?”

At last, Con cleaned the bathtub. When she returned to her computer, she had a new message. However he managed it without a table, Jerry checked e-mail often.

“I have an appointment with a real estate agent for Wednes
day morning, so I'll come to you on Thursday. I'll be there about a week.”

Con wrote back: “A week? Did I agree to this? Why? And don't tell me you're finally putting the house up for sale!” Jerry had long ago bought her out of the house they'd owned together, but he had far more room than he needed.

Con went back to the
Times
Web site, and when she returned, Jerry had written, “Yes, I'm selling the house. A week because this is one of my trips.” He meant his expeditions to historical sites. He continued to take them. They continued to irritate Con, but didn't infuriate her now that she wasn't married to him. “I did ask permission,” the message continued, “but I guess you didn't realize what you were getting into, so you forgot. It's a good trip—I'll tell you about it. Did you ever hear of Marcus Ogilvy?”

“No,” Con said out loud. How odd. After all these decades, one of Jerry's trips was
toward
Con, not away from her. “No,” she typed. “I never heard of Marcus Ogilvy.”

 

Before dark that April Monday, Con spent many minutes staring out the two windows in her mother's living room, from which she could see sidewalk and an apartment house opposite. Cars passed. A delivery truck double-parked. She read the newspaper story about airports, though the story was continued from Chapter 1 and she didn't have Chapter 1. A whole new way of checking in airline passengers was about to start, including, according to the
Times
, “a process known as profiling”: a response to the bomb on Pan Am Flight 103. “Details of the profile, used
to select some passengers for further examination, are secret, but may include behavior, nationality, and other factors.” Con didn't think her mother would have taken an interest in this story. She had happened to buy a paper, and happened to leave it—for a week—on the table, open to Chapter 1.

The airlines' plan seemed silly to Con, not to mention unconstitutional. Joanna did not phone. Con found no money, though she searched without shame, even reaching her hand into her mother's nylon underwear, feeling for coins. She stopped staring at the newspaper and checked the pockets of everything in the closet—her mother's familiar shirts and jackets, all festooned with cat hair and recalling Gert's squarish shape. The pockets bellied slightly because Gert put things into them or kept her hands in them. Con found seventy-eight cents in change. She tried her house again, hanging up before the answering machine finished its message. She could call Marlene's house again, but she didn't want to. When Gert and Marlene were together—even bickering and complaining—they both were less interested in Con than when she was alone with either.

Gert and Marlene had met in the thirties. Gert was already engaged to Abe, but they couldn't afford to get married, so she still lived at home with her parents. A receptionist for a company that made bathing suits, Gert had to summon the assistant to one of the bosses—Marlene—when a buyer asked to see a bathing suit on a model. Marlene was young and considered glamorous, and she didn't object to going into the ladies', taking off everything but her girdle (keeping it on made the suit look better), putting on the suit, and entering the reception area flouncing her shoulders, a hand on one hip. When she told
her daughters the story, years later, Gert would demonstrate, slapping her own hip.