Nothing Is Quite Forgotten in Brooklyn
Page 3
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 remaining 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 Wednesday 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.
Gert said that though she admired Marlene’s looks and vivacity, they didn’t become friends for several months because Gert was shy and Marlene barely noticed her. But one day, one of the buyers was rude to Marlene. (Con thought her mother meant that he’d said she didn’t look good in the bathing suit; much later she realized he must have propositioned Marlene.) Marlene was afraid to leave the office—it was winter, so it was dark outside at the end of the working day—and she asked Gert to walk her to the subway. Naturally, Marlene was dressed again when they left the office, but such a point had been made of her dazzling appearance that as a child hearing the story, Con pictured her stepping out into the cold in a bathing suit. The two young women walked to the subway station. Gert thought she spied the man in question, edging into the shadows near the building. They talked loudly about Gert’s boyfriend, so the man might think Abe would show up at any moment and defend Marlene.
Marlene told Con her own version of this story three times, several years apart, apparently forgetting she’d told it before. The first time, she said she’d only pretended to be afraid of a man: she simply wanted to make friends with Gert. Nobody had lurked in the shadows. The second time, she said she was dating her boss, and had quarreled with him. She had an appointment to meet him, but if she kept walking, talking loudly to Gert about another man (Abe), then the boss—waiting in the shadows—would become jealous. The third time she said again that she’d only pretended to be afraid: she had been trying for months to think of a way to make friends with Gert. She considered Gert refined, because she came from a nice family. Marlene’s relatives were in Toledo, Ohio. Her parents were dead. She wanted to become part of a family—Gert’s family—but she was afraid Gert disapproved of her for modeling bathing suits (and occasionally dating the buyers). “And I don’t mean just having a drink, if you follow me,” she’d said to Con.
The various stories raised more questions than they answered. Con didn’t believe Marlene would go to so much trouble to make her boss jealous, but it was even harder to believe she’d schemed to make friends with Con’s ordinary mother. But Gert’s story raised the same question—why did she want to be friends with flighty Marlene? And the trains—did the problem with the trains make sense? Was traveling in Brooklyn so difficult that Gert would have spent the night at Marlene’s when she didn’t even know her? The past was lit only partially, and in the dappled light of the little she knew, what Con wanted most to see was hidden. She could picture Gert at an old-fashioned switchboard, and Marlene coming out of the bathroom in that sleek black tank suit, with her hips swaying. But she couldn’t see the expressions on either girl’s face. Now Gert needed Marlene, but Marlene didn’t need Gert, and wasn’t in the habit of making sacrifices. Con couldn’t imagine why Marlene—who made no secret of her frequent irritation with Gert—stayed friends with her.
She was supposed to call her office, and since she remembered the number, she finally did, trying to distract herself from the question of Joanna’s whereabouts. The secretary was glad to hear from her. Something was up but she didn’t know exactly what, and the head of the office was on another line. Con gave her mother’s number. Now she was waiting for so many phone calls that she felt justified sitting near the phone, waiting, just running her finger down the orange stripe on the tablecloth. She couldn’t think how long her mother had owned this tablecloth, but she knew from the way she felt, looking at it, that it did not go back to her childhood, to the time when she was so small that her mother seemed infallibly interesting and trustworthy.
It didn’t have the sad, dense purity of objects that had been around longer than she could remember, from the times, during the war, when Gert had repeatedly packed up her baby—and then two babies—and moved. There were such objects: the stolen jewelry box with its map of France; a small oil painting Marlene had done, of an orange sand dune and blue sea and sky; a big square glass ashtray, dark red, with beveled sides and smooth cuts at each corner, where a cigarette might rest. It had one broken corner. The striped cloth was much newer than these things. It came from a time after Con had discovered that her mother, though frantic with good will, could not—maybe because she was frantic—guess what her children felt.
Con ran again. Ten steps from one end of the apartment to the other, ten back. The phone rang at last: the director of the office, a lawyer named Sarah. Mabel Turner had called. Con didn’t mention her present predicament. “I’ll call her,” she said. That number had escaped the burglar.
“It’s probably not the decision, this soon,” Sarah said. “But if it is, and it’s a no, we’ve got to move fast.” There had been a zoning hearing.
Con suspected that Sarah considered her foolish, not quite capable of seeing for herself what mattered. She hung up and tried unsuccessfully to reach Mabel. She wondered whether, when they were in prison, women had the use of a phone. She tried Joanna again and left a second message. “I don’t care if you stayed home from school. Please call me. Something happened.”
A week ago she and Joanna had argued about Jerry’s trips. “It’s easier for me to understand him,” Joanna had said. “I’m African American, like him.” Jerry did not usually describe himself as African American. He refused to discuss race or specify what his was. His father had been a Jew, his mother a light-skinned black woman from the neighborhood who worked in the lamp store and married the boss’s son; Jerry looked ethnically ambiguous. Joanna was only half as African American as Jerry, but her skin was as dark as his, with a rosy tinge, and she sometimes said, “I’d have been a slave.” At other times she remembered she was mostly Jewish and said, “Hitler would have killed me.” Joanna had a restless, strikingly mature laugh. Would she laugh at a man with a gun? And what would he do then?
If Joanna was perfectly all right, anything Con might do to find her would be the needless effort of a neurotic. If Joanna was not all right, a sensible mother would call anybody, whatever anyone might think. But without her address book, it was difficult. The people in Philadelphia whose phone numbers she remembered were somehow—like people she thought of in New York—the wrong people. At last she called the lamp store—she knew that number—and reached the manager, Howard, a loyal and humble man with scraps of gray hair around a wide, bald crown. When Joanna was a baby, Con would sometimes walk to the store with the stroller. Howard would pretend to pinch off Joanna’s nose, then solemnly show her the tip of his thumb between his fingers. “I got your nose,” he’d say. Now he listened intently. “Shall I call the police?” he said when she paused.
“No. But if you could go to the house…”
“I’ll find her,” said Howard.
In her mother’s house, she was only a daughter. She had never lived in this apartment, in Park Slope. Gert had moved in when Con was in college, and on vacations she slept on a sheet tucked around the sofa cushions. Mornings, she’d gaze out the window at the polygon of sky between the tops of nearby buildings. Her mother would be drinking coffee at the table, her back to her daughter, wearing a pink bathrobe, an ancestor of the present pink robe.
She and her mother, during those vacations, were alone; Con’s sister, Barbara, had her own place in the city. Gert was still working then—she had eventually become a school secretary—and she told funny stories about the pupils and teachers. Earlier and later her stories never arrived anywhere, but in those years they had punch lines. Gert was competent though slow, puzzled by those who were less conscientious than she was. Some teachers never did paperwork on time, no matter how many times she mentioned it.
Gert had been a single parent through the war, with her husband in the army. Then she’d been a married woman for what must have seemed, in retrospect, like a minute—eleven years. And then Con’s father had a heart attack and died, and Gert returned to the single life, which probably felt a little more natural, though harder and sadder, as she brought up her girls.
The doorbell rang. It was dark outside. The day was gone. At the door was the building superintendent, a tense, quick-talking Puerto Rican man. He was sorry about the break-in. “I tell her, make sure you lock that door! Does she listen?”
Con was sure he had never said such a thing. She was annoyed with him for condesce
nding to her mother, though she knew she did the same thing herself. She demanded to know how she could get her locks changed and he shook his head sympathetically. “Aren’t you supposed to do something?” she asked. The super was vague. He said he’d bring new locks, but he didn’t know when. He went away.
The phone rang. “I went to your house,” said Howard’s voice.
“Howard, what is it?”
“It’s locked up. No lights. The newspaper’s outside. The mail.”
“Did you ring the tenants’ bell?”
“Nobody home there either. Their mail was taken in.”
“I’m calling the police.”
“I already did,” said Howard. “They want her friends’ names. I have a number for you to call. Have you got a pencil?”
“She could be in there—”
“At first they wouldn’t even listen—teenagers are always taking off. You got a pencil?” he said again.
Gert kept pens and pencils in a bowl; after several tries Con found a pen that worked. She hung up quickly. “If only Jerry was with you” was the last thing Howard said, but she didn’t want Jerry. She wanted to touch Joanna’s taut, lithe shoulders so badly her fingers hurt. Howard had spoken quickly. She’d never heard him speak quickly. In a moment she found herself talking to a police officer for the second time that day. He wrote down all the names she could think of. “The parents never know the real friend,” he said, “but sometimes the friends that the parents think of can tell you the name of the real friend.”