Nothing Is Quite Forgotten in Brooklyn

by Alice Mattison

  “One moment,” said Marlene, who knew when other people were impatient, but might not care. Con was pacing as far as the phone cord would let her, then returning to lean on the kitchen counter so as to draw invisible lines, one after another—more and more firmly—on the countertop. “An incident last night,” Marlene continued. “Of course I can’t go into detail.”

  “My purse was stolen,” said Con loudly.

  “When?” said Marlene. “My God. Look, I know it’s not a good time to bring this up—but I think Dr. Herbert should have a look at her. She’s saying things—”

  “Last night. My purse was stolen from my mother’s apartment,” said Con.

  “Oh, my God!” said Marlene again. “A break-in? Armed?”

  “He didn’t break in. He walked in. My mother left the back door unlocked.”

  “Connie, you see what I’m saying about your mother? It’s unbearable.”

  “Yes—” Con began, but Marlene interrupted. “He didn’t hurt you?”

  “I didn’t see him. I was sleeping.”

  “Thank God you’re all right,” said Marlene (who had often proclaimed, “Since Hitler I don’t believe in God. Who needs him?”). She continued, “My own experience—well, I was all right too. A black man snatched my purse, and black men chased him. Yet people talk as if no black man would do that for a white woman.”

  “I know.”

  “Of course you know, of all people.” Marlene meant that Jerry was part black. “Oh, Connie, here I am going on. Are you sure it’s gone? Is anything else gone?” Nothing looked disturbed—and then Con remembered something. The night before, she’d put her purse down next to a little wooden box her mother had owned since Con was a baby. Her father had brought it home from the war, and on top was a copper plate on which a faintly colored map of France was embossed; in the corner, a girl in wooden shoes pointed at the map, and as a child Con had wondered why if the girl wore wooden shoes she didn’t point at a map of Holland. Standing in the kitchen, she couldn’t say for sure that the box was gone, but she was pretty sure the dresser top had been dramatically bare. The thought sent a new coil of anxiety through her body.

  “Your money?” Marlene said. “Your credit cards?”

  “Everything. I don’t have a dime.” Again she heard her mother’s voice. “Let me talk to her!”

  “In a moment,” said Marlene, then to Con, “She unlocked it when she put out the garbage.” Everyone knew about Gert’s household arrangements, which were the main topic of her conversation. “It could have been days ago. She could have been killed. Gert, darling, when did you put out the garbage?”

  Again came her mother’s voice. “The garbage? What are you talking about?”

  “Is Jerry coming?” Marlene persisted.

  “Jerry’s on a trip.”

  “Oh, for heaven’s sake.”

  “Marlene, please let me talk to my mother now.” But Gert had gone to the bathroom. “Well, I suppose nature called,” said Marlene. “We’ll call you back.” Con rushed to the bedroom. The box was gone. It was about two inches high, not very wide, with a little keyhole in front. When Con was a child, her mother had let her lock and unlock it, play with the contents and put them back. The key was kept in a drawstring bag Barbara had made in Girl Scouts. In the box Gert kept necklaces her children had made or bought her, a few old pins and bracelets. While Con stood helplessly in the middle of the bedroom, the phone rang. Only a few minutes had passed, but Gert had used the time to become afraid. “Did you reach Joanna?” she began. “Is Joanna all right?”

  “Why shouldn’t Joanna be all right?” said Con.

  “The thief could go to your house,” said her mother.

  “I’m sure she’s all right,” said Con, though as she protested she became a little frightened. The burglar had her address and keys, and a train ticket to Philadelphia, an hour and a half away. “He probably kept the money and threw away the rest,” she said, sternly calming herself. But she had to get off the phone. “Mama,” she said then, “Mama, you left the back door unlocked.”

  “No, it wasn’t me,” said her mother. “Maybe you opened the door.”

  “Of course I didn’t.”

  “Maybe the super came in. To fix something.”

  “You know that didn’t happen.”

  “Go home,” said her mother. “The cat’s too fat anyway.”

  “I can’t go home. I don’t have any money, and I have to change your locks.”

  “Go home.”

  They hung up. Con stood with her hand on the bedroom phone, now trying vainly to see the old battered jewelry box elsewhere, moved from its former position on the dresser.

  The burglar had not just grabbed. He had paused, taken two things, and decided how to hold them both as he moved quietly away. The pause made her feel his presence in the room—his recent presence—as she hadn’t before. As a young woman Con had been too capable-looking to start up men’s fantasies, and she’d rarely been whistled at or propositioned. Once, at a party, a drunken classmate had said he’d like to nibble her earlobe, and Con was intrigued, but the man didn’t touch her; later, he apologized. Now she understood that she might have awakened to find a man leaning over her, a man with a weapon, a man twice her size and weight, and she felt a variety of fear she hadn’t felt before. She was ashamed to note she was picturing a black man. She had to gain dominion over her thoughts.

  The doorbell rang. The police officers had arrived—a black man and a white woman, both bulky with equipment. They took down all possible information, and were baffled only briefly about why Con was not her mother and where her mother was. They asked several times if she’d seen or heard anything. They dusted the doorknobs and her mother’s dresser for fingerprints. Con at first didn’t mention the box, because the jewelry hadn’t been valuable, and then she did mention it. They nodded. “Anything else? Camera?”

  “No,” said Con, though she didn’t know for sure.

  They urged her to change the locks, and when she explained about her keys, her identification, and the house in Philadelphia, they thought it would do no harm to change those locks as well. “What about your car?” the woman officer said.

  “My husband has it. He’s away. They’ll never find the car.”

  “They lose interest in a day or two,” said the man. “If the car was on the block…” They closed their notebooks.

  “Could you lend me a couple of dollars?” Con said then, though she didn’t know what she’d do with only two dollars. “I don’t have a penny. I’ll mail it to the police station.”

  The woman said, “There’s a number for crime victims—” but the man stopped looking like a cop and looked embarrassed for Con. He took two dollar bills from his wallet and handed them to her. Con was embarrassed too, but she took the money, and didn’t inquire too carefully how to return it.

  The officers were slow to leave, at last shifting their solid bodies through Gert’s apartment door. As Con held the door for them, fear for her daughter made her arm stiffen. It was all she could do not to slam the door into the backside of the policewoman. She had asked them if she should change her locks in Philadelphia, not whether she should worry about Joanna’s safety. And they had been mildly in favor of changing the locks. She replaced the chain and dialed her home number. Joanna was not home or did not answer. She was at school or asleep. Con left a message—just “Call me at Grandma’s, please!”—then regretted it. Joanna certainly wouldn’t call back. Con called Directory Assistance and asked for the number of the school. Eventually she reached the attendance office. Joanna Elias was absent. Well, she was probably asleep. Con would not let herself think about Joanna.

  The detectives, she felt, had not quite believed her, with her complicated story about her mother. She could not account satisfactorily for herself, but although they had sensed it, they had not cared. New York cops were used to tricksters and the confused; if she was pathetic or despicable, she was still entitled to be heard on the sub
ject of her puny losses. She went to put the two dollars into her wallet, but she had no wallet. She put them into her pocket.

  Con spent a foolish half hour studying ads in the phone book for locksmiths, trying to guess which one would trust her for the money. She had no experience in being penniless—or, unable to put her hands on the money that was hers and Jerry’s. She had no identification. She stopped studying ads and began searching the apartment, pulling drawers from the night table, looking for money. Her mother’s apartment was only superficially disorderly—there had been one dirty mug, not six—but it contained innumerable dressers, old scarred desks, and battered end tables with drawers. Each drawer was dark with jumbled objects or dense with paper. Con searched them all, though she thought Gert would know enough not to keep money around the house. Con called her home number again, then resumed looking. She found three or four afghans and an unfinished sweater that her mother had been knitting for her years ago. She had half an idea that if she found a piece of identification of her mother’s she could perhaps convince someone she was Gert, though why that would get the locks changed and herself on a train to Philadelphia she didn’t know. Then she began to feel that she almost was Gert, that she was turning into Gert, as if her mother had left the pills, the bathrobe, even the running water, so Con could give up her own life and smoothly take over her mother’s. Something was holding her mind, slowing it and making her afraid. She looked in the mirror. She looked like herself, but maybe it was something in the air here, in the cat dander or flying orange fur, that gave her mother a stubborn passivity underneath the exterior of a sturdy old woman who could take the train to Rochester. (Why had Marlene invited Gert? Marlene’s mind was supple and quick. How did she endure Gert?) Like Con, Gert had short reddish hair—now dyed. Her face was thicker than Con’s, but similarly shaped. Con couldn’t go out for a run, but she ran the short length of the apartment several times because she couldn’t imagine her mother running.

  Her mind swirled with fears she couldn’t quite separate and name; this must be the feel of her mother’s mind. She found a piece of paper and a pencil and made a list, something either she or her mother might have done. Call a locksmith, she wrote. Find the super. She dialed the superintendent’s number and got a machine. She left a message. Then she unlocked the door, stepped onto the landing—nobody was there—and rang the three doorbells on the floor. Nobody answered. Inside, she replaced the chain, but even with it in place, the door could be opened a couple of inches.

  The locksmith was not going to change the locks for free, that was undeniable. She wondered if there really was a phone number for crime victims, and doubted that whatever service it reached would pay to have the locks changed. When a locksmith did call back, she explained what had happened. But he wouldn’t even take a check, he said, not that she had a checkbook. “I’m sorry,” he said, and did sound sorry.

  Con couldn’t think of anyone in New York City from whom she might borrow money. She now couldn’t make any call at all. She stood with her hand on the phone and took her hand away again. She stared at the newspaper her mother had left on the table, which offered a week-old story about airport security. New procedures were going to require that passengers be asked if they’d had help packing their suitcases. She ate lunch—her mother was well stocked with soup and canned tuna—and touched the wall phone in the kitchen again, then went into the bedroom, where she put her hand on the receiver of the bedside phone, then took it away, got into bed, and slept. She fell asleep thinking of her mother on these sheets.

  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.