Nothing Is Quite Forgotten in Brooklyn

by Alice Mattison

  “Hi, Mama, how are you?” said Con.

  “I’m fine, but Marlene says I have to go to the doctor. Why should I go to the doctor?”

  “A checkup is always smart,” Con said lamely.

  “But I’m not sick.”

  Now that she had Gert on the line, Con couldn’t imagine how to confess to her mother that she didn’t know where Joanna was. “Well, just in case,” she said. Then, “Marlene’s worried about your memory.”

  “Oh, my memory. I can’t think straight. That’s not what you go to a doctor for. Just this morning, I couldn’t remember—you know Barb’s friend? I couldn’t remember that name no matter what I did. I was lying in bed trying to come up with it.”

  Con supplied the name of Barbara’s closest New York friend, but that wasn’t the friend Gert meant. She mentioned a girlhood best friend.

  “A man,” said Gert.

  “You mean Donald?” Donald was the name of Barbara’s former husband.

  “Donald!”

  And then Gert didn’t remember that Con’s purse had been stolen. It came out gradually. Con said, “Well, I’m still trying to deal with everything here.” She was determined to tell her mother that Joanna was missing, but somehow to do it in a way that would not alarm her.

  “The cat is trouble,” said her mother.

  “No, of course not,” said Con. She had forgotten the cat. She hadn’t seen him all day. “I mean changing the locks. But also—”

  “Why should you change the locks?” said her mother.

  Eventually Con told the whole story over again. She waited for her mother to decide, as she had the day before, that the person they must worry about was Joanna, but today Gert’s mind didn’t go in that direction. “Why would somebody do that? He took your purse?”

  “Marlene knows all about it. Marlene will explain.” And Con got off the phone. She sat down on her mother’s brown sofa and put her hands to her face. Marlene was right. Marlene would call back, she knew, and sure enough, she did. “Okay, kid, see what I mean?”

  Con wanted to talk about Joanna. “Don’t you care…” she began. She said it with more force than she usually used with Marlene, then felt she might cry, and paused to breathe.

  “If you knew how much I care!” Marlene said, with a self-conscious sob that embarrassed Con. The woman couldn’t stand opposition. How could Con have loved such a person all her life? “She’s breaking my heart,” Marlene was saying. It was Gert who was breaking Marlene’s heart, not Joanna. “Whatever she says, promise me you won’t believe her. Last night she thought—well, I didn’t want to say the main thing, but you won’t mind—you’ll just laugh, you’re no baby. She thinks I had an affair with your father. What might be worse, she doesn’t mind. Twice this morning she wanted to know if Abe gave me money when he was my husband.”

  “What?” But Con liked “you’re no baby.” She’d always feared that Marlene considered her a baby.

  “Isn’t that ridiculous?”

  It was not ridiculous, it was simply too large to be looked at right now. “Marlene, please, I need to talk about Joanna.” She explained what Howard had told her.

  “Oh, Connie,” said Marlene. “Oh, baby. Everything at once. What shall we do?”

  “I don’t know.” She wept. “Marlene, I don’t know.” Weeping was luxurious.

  “Tell me again where Jerry is,” said Marlene. “He may know where she is.”

  “That’s what Barbara said,” said Con. “He’s at Fort Ticonderoga.”

  “That silly tourist trap?”

  “Yes.”

  “I’ll call you back.”

  Waiting for more phone calls, Con searched the apartment again. She could not have said what she was looking for. In Gert’s bedroom were several chests of drawers: in one, Con’s mother kept her big bras, her nylon panties with cotton crotches. On top—next to the wooden box—Con had set her purse the night she arrived. Two other chests, which had belonged to Con and Barbara as children, were side by side against the wall. Now Con pulled out a drawer from one of those and sat on the bed with it. She believed that if she could pay such close attention to what she found that she forgot Joanna, the girl herself would phone.

  The drawer contained shoe boxes, their lids held on with yellow tape. The first ones she looked into were full of photographs. In one box, she and her sister were little girls. There were few baby pictures, but many of two children in sunsuits. Sometimes a graceful arm—Gert’s—stretched between the children or pushed hair out of someone’s eyes.

  In another box, her father, in uniform, squinted into the sun. He’d been younger than fifty when he died. He looked very Jewish for a soldier; Con always thought that about pictures from the war. In another drawer were old clothes, smelling of mothballs. Con found two dollars in a pocket and transferred them to her own pocket.

  Then she found a stack of letters from her father, written during the war. A rubber band holding them together came apart when she touched it. Once he wrote that Bob Hope performed for the men. Another time, a friend had received a “Dear John” letter. “I sat with the guy playing checkers for hours,” said her father.

  “There’s nothing wrong with the baby,” he said in another letter. “She will be as smart as Barbara.” In another letter he wrote, “You don’t have to say anything to your friend Marlene. She is the way she is and she’ll never be any different.”

  Gert would never miss these letters. Con put them into her suitcase, then considered that she was stealing her mother’s love letters, and replaced them in the drawer. She picked up another bundle. More letters, in a different handwriting.

  On top lay what looked like the second page of a letter, hastily written.

  How should we have known about the fire? The doll carriage was in the alley between the buildings, its inside was charred and sodden. Brenda was asleep against Bernard’s shoulder. She drooled in her sleep and his lapel had a round damp patch. He handed her to me and she woke up and tried to hit me. Her mother dresses her in little dresses and she had wet herself. Her legs were bare and wet. It was freezing out.

  Con had no idea who Brenda and Bernard were. The next page was in the same handwriting, but apparently from a different letter.

  There’s no reason for you to give me that kind of advice. I’m doing fine. So is he. Let me know if you want me to send the coat. I know it is hot in Florida but it isn’t hot every minute. Your loving friend, Marlene.

  Gert had moved to Florida with Barbara when Con’s father had first been stationed there. Then he was sent overseas. These letters were from the war years, of course. Marlene had been single, living in New York.

  Con turned the pages of the letters. Most were in the wrong order. Some were stained, as if Gert had left them on the kitchen table for weeks, living around them. She read a piece of another one.

  All this is a little silly, anyway, this volunteering. The mayor is trying to get us to feel as if we’re part of the war effort. I feel that anyway, just living. I don’t need this kind of thing but now I’m glad I’m doing it, because of Bernard. Also, maybe I can become a photographer or a radio operator.

  This time Con was less scrupulous. She shuffled the letters together. The original rubber band had lost its elasticity. She went into the kitchen for a plastic bag large enough to hold them, and for a moment caught herself thinking that there wouldn’t be any plastic bags because it was only 1944. On her way back, she was stopped by the ringing of the phone.

  “Hello?”

  “I got you the numbers of five motels near Fort Ti,” said Marlene.

  “That’s a good idea.” Her own voice sounded unfamiliar. Who was Brenda? she wanted to say. How did the fire start? She wrote down names and numbers on a used envelope. Then she hung up and without much hope dialed the first motel. Jerry was not staying there, but when she looked again at the name of the second one—Mountain View—she knew it was right. “I don’t think he’s in his room,” said the proprietor. “But maybe
his daughter is.”

  “His daughter?”

  “She went out with him yesterday,” he said, “but today I think she hung around.”

  “Try the room,” said Con. She heard ringing.

  “Hello?” said Joanna’s sleepy voice.

  Chapter 2

  Con reached the lake in Prospect Park. She approved of this time of year, of its colors—richer browns than the exhausted tones of late winter—and of the annual surprise of open sky when the leaves had fallen and light outlined tree branches. She liked to be cold; she liked wind flattening her hair, but today was foolishly warm for November, which suggested global warming and thus made her grouchy and guilty, though she knew that one warm day in November was not necessarily the result of global warming. In cold weather, she walked fast and felt young, though she wasn’t.

  Con told people she was the oldest of the Brooklyn newcomers, most of whom were Joanna’s age: artists, teachers, and writers in their twenties and thirties. She needed to say she had lived in Brooklyn as a child, but she was unlike people her own age who had lived in New York all along. She cried more easily. She had missed the toughening events: the muggings of the seventies; the eighties’ frenzy for real estate while homeless people lined the walls in Grand Central Station; Mayor Koch, much of Mayor Giuliani. But she’d been in New York for September 11, 2001. From the windows of her apartment, in the cold months she could see a scrap of the Manhattan skyline, which she now didn’t like looking at because the World Trade Center—which she’d never liked looking at—was gone.

  Con was no expert on sexual harassment in the workplace, whether such experts existed or not. At present she was a lawyer for a project that fought job discrimination against women. Just now, like almost everyone else in the office, Con spent her time on a big case against an insurance company. If the company’s employees were beaten up at home, they didn’t get time off to go to court, and seemed less likely to be promoted. Victims of domestic violence often became victims of sexual harassment in the workplace as well, and Con was studying that issue too. Both Joanna and Marlene had long taken an interest in Con’s work, but both seemed disappointed that she wasn’t more straightforwardly aggressive. “What did you do yesterday?” Marlene might ask. On a typical day, Con spent time in the law library and attended two meetings. Marlene wanted her to swoop down on discriminatory offices, or at least on courthouses, but Constance was not a litigator. She was trying to find the perfect client.

  She sometimes wondered what her life would have been like if she and Jerry had lived in Brooklyn all along, if the store had always been on Flatbush Avenue, or if some member of the Elias family had moved it there. Would she still be married to Jerry? Would the store be gone now—like the actual store—or would it be stalwartly selling lamps to schoolteachers from the Midwest, upwardly mobile Caribbean families, and stubborn Chasidim?

  On her way home, the cell phone rang again. “Forget I said he raped me.”

  “All right, Jo.”

  “Now, can I get out of this? I mean, given the terms of my internship. Do I have to come back?”

  Con said, “If it’s sexual harassment, there’s lots you can do, starting with reporting him to the people who gave you the money.”

  “They’d laugh. It happens every year. Each intern thinks she’s different.”

  “Well, still—”

  “Look, that’s not what I want. Forget what I said about rape. I just don’t want to go back to New York.”

  “Because of Tim?” Tim was a photographer who earned his living taking portrait photographs of children. He’d be out at the moment—Sunday was his busiest day.

  “No, not because of Tim. That’s a long story, too.”

  “When you say each one thinks she’s different,” Con said—she had reached her building and was feeling for the right key—“do you mean each one thinks he’ll leave her alone?”

  “Or that he’ll mean something by it. Or both. You’ve been a woman. Or maybe you haven’t.”

  “Watch it, Jo.”

  “Sorry, I’m edgy. You’re not going to help me think this through, I can tell.”

  Con was getting into the elevator. “But what do you want?” she said. The phone died. Often Joanna went too far. Once, she’d destroyed a wooden sculpture she’d made, just before a critique in art school. “I thought I was improving it,” she had said to Con. “When I started with the knife, I thought I was improving it.”

  Con didn’t want Joanna home right now—but even more, she didn’t want her to resign the internship, whatever had happened. If Joanna did come home, however, she’d have to be polite to Marlene. For a start, she’d need to vacuum around her sculptures, which tended to shed. If Joanna didn’t come, Con would have to vacuum, sometime before Friday. But today was only Sunday. She tried to decide whether she was morally bound to mention Marlene’s visit, if it meant Joanna would give up her internship to avoid seeing Con’s old friend. She could never figure out just why Joanna disliked Marlene.

  The motel near Fort Ticonderoga was more than two hundred miles from Brooklyn, but when Joanna’s voice reached Con’s ear she grabbed air with her free hand as if to seize her child.

  “What’s wrong, Mom? Are you crying?”

  “I didn’t know where you were.”

  “Sure you did,” said Joanna, sounding uncertain.

  “Did you run away? How did you get there?” Con said.

  “Bus. Dad gave me money. He told you,” Joanna said.

  Con felt physically ill, as if the room had just lurched. “What do you mean?”

  “I had money. He gave me enough for lunch, and emergencies.”

  “Before he left?”

  “Of course before he left. Look, he told me last week you said this was okay.”

  “He told you I said it was okay?” said Con stupidly.

  “You didn’t know,” Joanna said, her voice flat.

  “No.” Jerry had deceived her, and the news shoved itself into Con’s body with as much force as if the deception had been sexual, maybe more force. He had conspired with their child to deceive her.

  “I sort of knew you didn’t know,” Joanna was saying. “That’s why I didn’t say anything, just in case. Stop crying, Mom. I’m fine.” Then her voice became quiet. “I’m sorry.”

  “But why didn’t you call me?” Con said. “Why didn’t you tell me, once you were there?” She wasn’t angry with Joanna. She pictured Jerry, somehow overhearing this conversation and shrugging, his shoulder moving in an easy way as he dismissed any notion that Con might have been consulted, as he dismissed her. She saw his shoulder, his neck, the way his thin arm would slightly rearrange itself as the one-shoulder shrug moved down through his fingers, as he shook out of his fingers the very idea of telling her. The imagined arm and shoulder made her know what she felt. She was in the kitchen, and as she talked to Joanna, the objects belonging to her mother, there on the counter—the bottle of sherry, a dying plant, the cat food and water dishes, some bowls and canisters—looked more and more fragile, sadder and sadder, as if they were the last quiet frame of a tragic movie. Joanna didn’t answer.

  Con took the receiver to the table and sat down with it. “Where is he?”

  “Driving around. Figuring out old roads. Tomorrow we’ll be in a boat, if he can find some local to rent us one.”

  He had never given Con a thought. He was figuring out roads, he was not even making sure that she didn’t discover what he’d done. Once he’d made the plan with Joanna, Con had not been in his mind at all. It was as if the marriage had ended so long ago that she was no longer still opposite him at the imaginary table we all carry in our minds—she was not a loved presence and not even a presence. She said, “When is he coming back to the motel?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “I need to talk to him,” said Con. She hadn’t told Joanna anything. “Tell him my purse was stolen.”

  “Stolen?”

  “Yes. Look, I better hang up
and call the police. The police in Philadelphia are looking for you.”

  “I hope they don’t talk to the school!” Joanna said.

  “Maybe you should have thought of that.” Con said good-bye. She was too relieved to be more than slightly angry with Joanna, even though Joanna was old enough to have known what was wrong with her escapade, whether Jerry knew or not.

  She phoned the police and called off the search. She phoned Howard and got his machine. She was glad she didn’t have to talk to him. He admired Jerry. He’d make an excuse for Jerry.

  For years, she’d felt angry with Jerry much of the time, but her anger was based on love. Lately she’d felt weary—not surprised enough to be angry—and sometimes she realized that a week or more had passed when she hadn’t thought about Jerry, except in practical ways, at all. At some point she’d excused him from her own mental table, whether he was present in life or not. Maybe it wasn’t fair to be shocked that he seemed to have dismissed her as well, but Con was shocked.

  Jerry was indefensible, but Joanna was safe, and Con was hungry. She had never eaten lunch, and it was now well into the afternoon. She wanted fresh vegetables, but her mother had only frozen peas and frozen broccoli. She found some rice and an onion, and cooked what she had with plenty of salt and pepper. She ate mounds of rice. By the time she was done, it was five o’clock. Five o’clock on Tuesday afternoon. Con put her dish in the sink and took the packet of Marlene’s old letters from her suitcase, where she’d put it underneath her clothes. She wanted distraction. She wanted the rest of the story about Brenda and the fire. Some letters were still in envelopes, but some were just loose sheets. Others were folded together, sometimes with pages from a different letter. Marlene wrote a large, sloppy script, always on onionskin—presumably to save postage—but with big margins, so not many words were on any one page. Some letters weren’t dated at all, others were dated “Friday.” She seemed to write often on Fridays. Some envelopes had legible postmarks, some didn’t. The letters seemed to have been sent from New York in 1943 and 1944.