Nothing Is Quite Forgotten in Brooklyn (30 page)

 

Gert's refrigerator, by Saturday night, was empty, and Con wiped it out with a damp rag and replaced her own little store of groceries. Nothing else had been accomplished. Barbara kept saying she was jet-lagged, and interrupted everything, proposing different tasks or making objections. As for Con, she was no less distracted than she'd been all week. They had an argument about the striped tablecloth, which Con had come to love that week, and which Barbara insisted she had bought for her mother and should keep. Con knew she'd put the canceled checks into an old manila envelope, but now she couldn't find it, though she
searched and searched. She was afraid she might have thrown it out; she knew she was muddled. Together she and Barbara decided nothing and created additional chaos. After a while Peggy politely retreated to her apartment. Then the sisters sat down and talked, as if they'd been impatient to get out of sight of an exacting supervisor. Joanna, in the bedroom, slept. When she awoke they went looking for a restaurant, and found an open bar where they ate sandwiches. Barbara was too tired to drive back to the motel, and after several minutes of negotiation she slept on the sofa while Joanna and Con shared Gert's bed. Con lay awake, next to her lightly snoring daughter.

In the morning, yet again, Con resolved to get control of her life. She had to get Barbara out of there, and eventually that happened—she went off to visit a friend, postponing the question of the memorial service. She seemed to have forgiven Con for having their mother cremated. The thought of Gert in flames was one of many topics to avoid.

Con had given Barbara a key to the apartment. She promised to return the following weekend, when they would hold a memorial service, which Barbara promised to plan. “I know bits of things to recite,” she said. “Even Jewish bits. Joanna will recite something.”

As soon as she was gone, Con and Joanna filled the suitcase they'd started the day before, and then another one. Joanna took the answering machine and her enormous garbage bag. Con left the tablecloth.

“The cat,” said Joanna.

Once again, Con had forgotten the cat. She went down to Peggy's apartment. Peggy promised to feed him. “Cats
manage on their own for quite a while,” she said, which was what Con had said vainly to her mother a bit more than a week ago.

With her cash jammed into an old brown leather purse of her mother's that didn't have long enough straps to hang off her shoulder—so it dangled from her wrist—and with her mother's old brown suitcase in one hand, her own in the other, Con ushered Joanna out the door of her mother's apartment at 3:30 p.m. on Monday, April 24, 1989, and they made their way to Penn Station.

 

Con's arms seemed to work, and she put her hands to her face, which felt cold. Now Peggy stood to put on her coat, and Joanna—head down, scowling, silent at last—shrugged into her jacket. Con fumbled to get her arms into the sleeves of her jacket, standing between the tables. A man was passing and she waited and even nodded at him when he smiled. She buttoned her jacket. She was extremely tired. She needed to go to the bathroom, but that could wait.

“And what became of Grandma's cat?” said Joanna.

Peggy turned around. “Don't you remember? My cousin's neighbor took him.”

She led the other three out of the restaurant and they turned in the direction of Lincoln Center, just a few blocks away. The traffic was confusing. They spoke only when it was necessary. As they reached the sidewalk just before Lincoln Center, Con said to Marlene, “Is it true?”

Marlene looked at her, disgusted. “Gert was the only human
being I have ever loved.” Even now, Con's first thought was
Not me?

They reached the doors of the New York State Theater. Con found the e-mail reservation in her bag. It was early, and the lobby was not crowded. It seemed inconceivable to attend the performance of an opera right now, but she didn't know what else to do. The others waited while she went to the box office window to pick up the tickets, and as she joined the line, Con remembered meeting her mother in the lobby of this theater years earlier, to watch the New York City Ballet. They almost never went out together; this time, Gert had bought tickets as a present. When Con entered the lobby, excited—Suzanne Farrell would be dancing—she'd caught sight of Gert, waiting for her. Her mother had no idea how to dress up: there she stood in a familiar blue pantsuit with big pockets; Gert wore no clothes without pockets. She looked worried. Maybe she was afraid they wouldn't be able to find each other. Con remembered the moment Gert caught sight of her, the transformation in her face. It was not just relief, it was joy—extravagant, embarrassing—at the sight of her daughter. Gert too must have been abashed at the strength of her feeling, because she greeted Con fretfully: “Is that jacket warm enough?”

But Con had seen the first expression, and knew the truth. At the time, she probably didn't reply, but more than thirty years later, she did. “No,” she said to her long dead mother. “No, Mama, the jacket isn't warm enough.” She waited some more, then received the tickets and returned to the others. Slowly, they began to climb the stairs.

The ladies' room outside the auditorium had no line. Peggy
gestured, and they all nodded. There was no line inside either. There were four stalls. Marlene, Peggy, Joanna, and Con went into the stalls.

Con was alone for the first time in many hours. She hung her bag on a hook and, again, put her hands to her face and held them there for a long time, feeling her own features, almost as if she had thought her face might have been replaced with a different face. Then she opened her jacket, unzipped her pants, and pulled them down. She sat. To her left and right was silence, and she knew that all four of them were sitting on toilets, waiting for their bladders to calm down and remember what to do. The pause was long.

For a while Con just sat, grateful for solitude. Then—toilets are conducive to thought—she began to think. People don't have moments of lucid, significant new thought often, but I'm almost at the end of the story, and part of the reason for the story is that Con, at this moment, did. She didn't know yet if she believed Joanna. She didn't know if she'd fallen in love, again, with Jerry. But she knew she missed her mother, that was something. And she knew something else. Truths are often false. Marlene might have loved Gert and killed her anyway. And Con should live differently. She should live with more tolerance for forgivable flaws, and less tolerance for unforgivable ones. She heard the sound of urine splashing into a bowl.

All these years, her daughter had kept silent. As they walked, a few minutes later, toward the auditorium, Con put her hand on Joanna's arm and when all four hesitated at the doorway, she handed Peggy two tickets for seats next to each other. Peggy put her hand under Marlene's arm. They received programs. Con and Joanna were sitting to the left
of the aisle and Marlene and Peggy to the right, several rows away.

They shrugged out of their jackets and sat down. “Joanna,” said Con.

“Are you mad at me?” said Joanna.

“Why would I be mad at
you
?”

“You'd rather not know. You don't think it's true. You want to go on thinking good thoughts about Marlene.”

“How long have you been planning this?”

“Oh, years. But I didn't know for sure that I'd do it. I liked thinking about it—but maybe it was just a fantasy, you know? When you said she was coming, I thought, Maybe it's time. But I still wasn't sure. Even when I found the clipping I wasn't sure I'd say anything. I kept watching myself to see if I'd do it.”

“I'm not mad at you. But what do you want?”

“What do I
want
? I want my grandmother.”

“You might have had an easier time,” Con said.

“Do you think I'm right?”

Con considered. “I think you are.”

“If Grandma had lived you'd have stayed with Dad. You needed to break up with Dad because you weren't going to break up with Marlene.”

“Well, I don't know about that!” said Con.

“I'm not asking you to call the cops,” said Joanna. “I don't look forward to testifying at the murder trial of Marlene Silverman.”

“No.”

“But there is something I want from you,” Joanna continued.

Behind them, two women had come down the aisle and seated themselves, an older woman with white hair and a
younger one. “
Have
an obsession!” the older one seemed to remark.
“Carrots!”

“Carrots?” said the younger one, or that is what Con heard. Maybe the old woman meant “carats.” As in diamonds.

“I want you to listen to me,” said Joanna. “What happened to me in North Carolina. Do something about it.”

Con had just decided to live differently. “I should,” she said. “I should quit my job and spend all my time trying to make people see what is happening in this country.” She flipped through her program without looking at it. “All I care about,” she said—and as she spoke it sounded familiar—“is you and the Bill of Rights.”

“This once,” said Joanna.

“Okay,” Con said. “Okay.” She thought for a moment. “I'll look at the police report.” Then she reached across the armrest and pressed Joanna to her body, and Joanna pushed her big head with its wonderful curls into her mother's face and neck. They stayed that way until they were embarrassed, until the armrest began to hurt Con's side.

The orchestra walked in, in twos and threes, and began warming up their instruments. They each played a note, another note, a run of notes. Con took out her cell phone. She wanted to call Jerry, but she remembered where she was and turned it off. “Turn off your cell phone,” she said to Joanna, and Joanna took her phone from her pocket and stabbed the little oval button with her long lovely finger. The phone played its valedictory tones and subsided. Joanna put it away. The theater darkened, and the opera—which, Con reminded herself, would have a doubtful ending—began.

I
'd like to thank The MacDowell Colony and The Corporation of Yaddo for residencies during which some of this book was written. For generous help with this novel, I thank April Bernard, Susan Bingham, Donald Hall, Susan Holahan, Andrew Mattison, Edward Mattison, and Sandi Kahn Shelton. I'm endlessly grateful to my loyal and resourceful agent, Zoë Pagnamenta, and my brilliant editor, Claire Wachtel. Thanks as well to everyone in the Bennington Writing Seminars—colleagues, students, alumni, and our late director, the incomparable Liam Rector—for your companionship in the writing life.

Cover design by Robin Bilardello

Cover photograph by George Marks/Getty Images