Brenda is upstate with his wife’s sister, I forget where. His wife thought he wasn’t a good influence and now that she’s working such long hours he would have to keep her all the time and she didn’t think that was a good idea, so she has been sent off somewhere. Which would make it easier for Bernard and me to be together if he would only listen, but his heart has gone out of everything. He thinks he has nothing to look forward to but trouble, but I think when the war is over, and that will be soon, everybody will forget all about this stuff, and once rationing is ended it will not matter who tried to find a way around it and who didn’t. We didn’t do anything wrong, when we were able to get the meat it worked out very well and I’m sure there are kids growing up in New York with strong bones and teeth because we went to all that trouble and expense. Or is it milk that gives you strong bones and teeth?
Well, I’m going on and on. Better see if I can get some hot water. I need to soak my feet.
Love,
Marlene
Of another letter, only a page survived.
Bernard has been arrested and his wife is taking Brenda and going to her mother’s in Ohio. I don’t think he’ll go to jail. I think you should stop complaining about your lousy money given this eventuality which nobody could have foreseen. It was in the Brooklyn Eagle, just a small item. They got it mostly wrong. The trouble is, Bernard and I are just small potatoes but others I may have mentioned are not small potatoes.
Gert, dear,
Could you burn up any letters from me that you kept? I don’t know who they’re going to talk to or when, but I know there are things in my letters it would not be a good idea to spread around, for other people’s sake if not for mine. Think of Brenda, who is just starting out in life and doesn’t need this trouble.
Thanks,
Marlene
P.S. I think I better not write for a while. I hope you’ll be home soon anyway.
It was extortion. Marlene did not just have a criminal mind, she was—had been—a criminal. Marlene got money from Con’s mother for a black market scheme, then threatened to tell Con’s father if Gert didn’t send more money. Con put down the letters. Marlene was not alluring and splendid, she was selfish and crafty. It was much better not to think this thought. Con couldn’t ask Gert and Marlene about these letters, and it would be best to forget they existed. She didn’t put them into her suitcase, but left them on her mother’s dresser. She put the afghan on top of them.
The phone rang as she turned from the pile of letters and went into the kitchen, wanting something sweet. “I was looking at that letter from the zoning,” said Mabel Turner’s voice. “I think there’s a deadline.”
Con tried to focus on this very different letter, and eventually she got Mabel to read everything aloud. She had until Monday to file an appeal. How could she do that from Brooklyn? “Call me tomorrow, okay?” she said.
As soon as she hung up the phone rang again so quickly that she expected Mabel’s voice again, asking a forgotten question. But it was Marlene. “Baby, I’ve been thinking. I know you’re busy, but I think we should talk about this now,” Marlene said. Her voice sounded more confident than ever, more certain that Con understood a great deal less than Marlene did—probably a great deal less than anybody should. And yet it held, as well, the old promise of intimacy, of possible intimacy, as if—if Con proved worthy, and with proper tutelage she might—together they’d escape the well-meaning ordinariness that was apparently essential to anything connected with Con’s mother (such as this prison of an apartment). At any minute Con and Marlene would achieve charm. They’d achieve glamour.
“Talk about what?” Con said, startled; she was scared but expectant—as if Marlene had seen her reading the letters. Marlene could explain; maybe Con had misunderstood. She eased herself back against the kitchen counter, but remained standing.
“Power of attorney,” Marlene said.
Now Con felt a tendril of anger make its way through her body. She tried to control her voice. She stood up. “I’m a lawyer,” she said.
“Well, I know that!” Marlene crooned.
“I’m actually practicing law right here in the middle of the night in my mother’s apartment. I was just on the phone with a client.” She was competent, she meant. It was not precisely Marlene who doubted Con’s competence; it was probably Con herself. She didn’t know exactly how to acquire her mother’s power of attorney, though she could find out. She didn’t want to know. She didn’t want to manage—or even look at—her mother’s records of money coming in, money going out; they were personal, like food going in, being digested, becoming blood or shit. But if acquiring her mother’s power of attorney became necessary—and Con was not sure that it was necessary now—if it became necessary, of course she could do it. She would find out how, as she was about to find out how to file an appeal in Mabel’s case.
“I’m not sure you can,” said Marlene, and Con sucked in her breath. “You don’t live in the same state as your mother.”
“What does that have to do with it?” Now she was walking with the receiver once more, as in the conversation with Jerry. No wonder she was so tired. She had to get rid of Marlene.
“I think the person who holds power of attorney must reside in the same state. I’ve been through this quite a bit. My aunt, my cousin.”
Con had never heard of this aunt or cousin before—had no memory of Marlene looking after frail relatives—and had certainly never heard of a law against out-of-state holders of power of attorney.
“And Barbara’s not even in the country!” Marlene was saying triumphantly.
“You’re mistaken,” Con said. She’d never worked on a case involving power of attorney, but Marlene’s claim was decidedly unlikely. “I’ll look into it.”
“Don’t,” said Marlene. “Let me take this on. I feel bad that I can’t have your mother come and live with me, but honey—things aren’t good. Something has to be done. And this is something I can do. If there’s anything I don’t understand, I know people to ask. This is something I’m good at.”
As if her mother’s voice had emanated from the stained couch cushions, Con heard Gert say, “Marlene is smart about money,” as she had said it many times during Con’s girlhood and later: when a decision had to be made about insurance, or Gert’s pension, or investment of the death benefits and life insurance money that had come into Gert’s hands when Con’s father died. “I’ll ask Marlene,” Gert would say. “She’ll know somebody.” And Marlene had always known somebody.
But now, though it was late, and Con didn’t want to think about her mother right now—her marriage was ending, actually ending—and though it was tempting just to say, “Okay, Marlene, thank you,” Con didn’t. The pile of onionskin pages, marked with Marlene’s large, elegant loops and angles—expertly shaded by a nicely controlled fountain pen that had probably cost more than the young Marlene could afford (and who had bought it for her?)—was still nearby. Maybe she’d jumped to a hasty conclusion about extortion. Maybe it wasn’t that. But even so.
“I just don’t think it’s a good idea,” Con said. “Let’s talk about it again in a day or two. Let me see how my mother seems when she gets home.”
“You’re being unreasonable, Connie,” Marlene said. “We all know there are times when our dear Connie is unreasonable, and this is one of those times.”
“I don’t think I’m being unreasonable.”
“Well, of course not! You never do, do you?”
Con sat down at the table and fingered the stripe in the color she liked so much. She would have liked to enter that orange or maybe pink stripe—would it be called coral?—as if it were a room, a quiet room. “I’m not being unreasonable. This is hasty, Marlene.”
“Have you any idea what your mother may be doing with your inheritance? Have you looked over her records?”
“I’m not sure she keeps records.”
“That’s even worse!” said Marlene, but she sounded delighted with Gert’s d
egree of helplessness. “People like Gert, when they get this way—they do crazy things with money and there’s not much you can do about it if you didn’t secure power of attorney.” Marlene’s voice seemed to deepen as she spoke. Maybe she was smoking while talking. Con thought she heard an intake of breath, as of someone inhaling. Smoking was dangerous, but not for Marlene. No cancer cell would dare invade those lungs. She’d stare it down. That would be that.
“No. No. I’m not going to agree that you get her power of attorney, and you’d better not take her to a lawyer in the morning and just do it!” said Con, and now she was becoming unreasonable after all. It was heady to fight like this with Marlene—risky, but thrilling. “Because if you do, I’m not letting you get away with it,” Con said. The problem was that she was starting to cry. “This is going too far, Marlene. You’re not in charge of my mother, and I’m a lawyer, and there are ways to stop you.”
“Stop me from what? What in the world are you accusing me of?” Marlene said in her deep, almost masculine voice. “What am I going to do to her? Who takes better care of her than I do? Who keeps track of her if it isn’t for me? You have no judgment when it comes to something like that. You’ll probably believe the nonsense she’s going to tell you, about me, about the past, about your father.”
“She’s my mother!” Con found herself crying. “Leave her alone! She’s my mother!”
There was silence, a much longer silence than phone calls ordinarily include, as if Con might never hear that voice again. Then Marlene spoke, and her voice had dropped in volume and in pitch. “Oh, Connie, I didn’t mean to upset you. Of course she’s your mother. Nobody doubts that she’s your mother!”
“The answer is no,” Con managed to say.
“Don’t worry about it,” said Marlene, and despite herself, Con was glad they weren’t going to hang up in the middle of a shouting match, and was also still worried that Marlene didn’t really respect her, was just changing her tactics.
“I’m going to bed,” Con said. “I’ll talk to you tomorrow.”
“You know me,” Marlene was saying. “You know Marlene. You know me.” It was a kind of goodnight. The conversation, at any rate, was over.
Con turned to her computer, and now she thought about nothing but employment discrimination for the rest of Wednesday morning and much of the afternoon. One woman had been fired for having repeated black eyes. “You’re a face,” her boss had said. She’d been a receptionist. “It would be different if you weren’t a face.”
Except that suddenly Con remembered Peggy. Peggy had been right. There would be other occasions to fret about Joanna. She wrote a quick e-mail message. “I can have dinner tonight.”
“Wonderful,” Peggy wrote back. They usually met at a quiet place near Peggy’s apartment. Con would leave the office early enough to get home and take a bath. A nap would be welcome, but she didn’t think she’d get one. She e-mailed a friend about Joanna’s arrest, a law school classmate who worked in a firm that handled political cases. The woman was interested, but not interested enough. Her message said, “It’s too bad she was drunk. If we knew for sure they told her to be quiet, that would be different.”
She shouldn’t have said Joanna was drunk. Con should find out whether arrests like this were common. She went to a few Web sites. Civil rights groups were busy with larger issues: prisoners were being held without charges at Guantánamo Bay; American citizens who looked as if they might be Arabs were being harassed and arrested. The cops who had arrested Joanna knew they’d done something at least ambiguous, since the charges had been dropped. Still, Joanna had spent a night in jail.
Con didn’t leave work early. Aaron stuck his head into her office just as she was starting to think about turning off her computer. He wanted to talk about the woman whose interview Con had witnessed. She ended up back in his office. Everything felt more possible after the conversation—which was good—but half an hour had passed. She could be on time at the restaurant only if she went straight from the office. But she hadn’t showered in the morning. She couldn’t enjoy Peggy unless she was clean. She’d be late, but would apologize, and Peggy would forgive her. In Brooklyn, she walked home quickly from the subway station, jabbed at the elevator button, barely glanced at the mail, and began taking off her clothes on the way to her bedroom.
The shower soothed her. When she turned off the water she heard a voice.
She wrapped a towel around herself and opened the bathroom door. “Joanna?” she said. “What are you doing here?”
“I called the airport and there was a flight.” Joanna came toward her mother, still in a jacket, keys in her hand. “I barely made it.”
Behind her Con could see that the apartment door was open. “Go close the door,” she said. Joanna’s bag was in the middle of her study.
“I think I love Tim. I never should have broken up with him,” Joanna said then. “You shouldn’t have been so negative about him.”
“Go close the door,” said Con. She reached up, clutching her towel, to give Joanna a damp, one-armed hug.
“Oh, my life,” said Joanna, suddenly in tears. “I shouldn’t have broken up with him in the first place. I wouldn’t have gone to the bar. None of this would have happened.”
“Jail was horrible, wasn’t it?” said Con quietly.
“It was horrible.”
“But close the door.” Joanna turned, and Con went into her bedroom and dressed. She wouldn’t cancel dinner with Peggy, who would already be on her way, or in the restaurant. Before leaving, Con perched briefly, in her jacket, on the arm of her gray squashy chair, and listened to Joanna, who was already distractedly clutching her green fibrous twine as she spoke, walking back and forth across the dusty living room rug, pushing her wild curls back with her free hand.
“I have to leave,” said Con. “I’m having dinner with Peggy.”
“I’ll be all right. There are eggs, I guess.”
“Yes.” Con lingered, though she was already late. As she left she asked, “Is there some reason you want to see Marlene? Is that why you came home?”
“I don’t do or not do things because of Marlene,” said Joanna.
When she and Marlene hung up after the argument, Con stood with her hand on the phone. She’d been unable to mention the letters. Did she have to think differently about Marlene from now on? Marlene had stolen money from her mother as the burglar had stolen money from Con—or so it seemed. Of course, this was a long time ago. As Con brushed her teeth, she thought not about the crime or the argument or even Jerry. She’d turned from the letters stunned at how time passes and life changes, how the young become the old, yet remain who they are until they lose everything. Her mother—the silent one in the correspondence—seemed much as she was now: mute, helpless before her friend’s fearless competence. Con knew a little more about that friendship now, but she still didn’t understand it. Marlene hadn’t been friends with her mother, surely, only for Gert’s pathetic contributions to the black market scheme? Did she want to show her power over Gert—to cause timid Gertrude Tepper to participate, even marginally, in wrongdoing?
All this time Con had forgotten to think about herself and Jerry, but when she went to bed, that grief overtook the others. She fell asleep feeling a kind of dread, as if that ordinary frame house full of ex-prisoners—in an old, crowded, humdrum Philadelphia suburb—were sliding into an abyss, as if ground crumbled beneath it, and everything else—all Con knew—would go with it. She was sad about arguing with Marlene and astonished by her decision to leave Jerry, but no less sure. It was necessary, but terrible. She was asleep in her mother’s bed when the phone rang. It was dark. “I’m afraid of losing you,” said Jerry’s voice.
She didn’t want to talk lying down. Her mother’s bed had no headboard. No wonder Gert’s head was slipping off her neck, Con found herself thinking. She wasn’t awake yet. “Look,” she said, thinking she was being clear. “What would make me feel better?” Then she said, “Wait a minute,�
�� and put down the receiver, reached for the afghan, then rolled it and used it to prop up the pillow. When she took the phone again she was not quite lying down. “You woke me up.”
“I couldn’t sleep. I thought maybe you couldn’t sleep.”
“What time is it?”
“Midnight. Ten after twelve.”
Within a substantial silence she thought as clearly as she could. “There’s nothing in me I wouldn’t reconsider,” she said, “except loving Joanna and believing—”
She tried to say what lay behind her work, what it was on which she could not compromise. “Believing in the Bill of Rights,” she said.
“The Bill of Rights?” he said.
“Freedom of speech. Freedom of—”
“I know what the Bill of Rights is,” said Jerry. “I guess I wouldn’t stop believing in it either, but I don’t think about it often.”
“I thought maybe you wanted to know if I’d stay married after all,” she said.
“It crossed my mind,” he said. “Do you mean the Bill of Rights gives you the right to leave me?”
“No, I’d have the right to leave you whether the Bill of Rights existed or not. The Bill of Rights makes it possible to resist injustice.” He wouldn’t try to imprison her. He could not wrap her in the cords of the lamps and keep her. The pillow was slipping. After all, maybe she could talk lying down. She pulled the blanket around herself.
“Do you think I compromise on those things? Is that the trouble?” Jerry said. She had still not been clear.
“No,” she said. “I would never stop loving Joanna, and I’d never stop believing in the Bill of Rights.”
“You said that.”
“But anything else—if you had asked me—” She began to cry because she had used the past perfect tense. “If you had asked me, I would think about changing my mind.”
“So you can change your mind about loving me? I don’t think I can change my mind about loving you.”
Nothing Is Quite Forgotten in Brooklyn Page 11
