Nothing Is Quite Forgotten in Brooklyn

by Alice Mattison

  Could she have meant Marlene? Or was M “mother” and “she” was Marlene? Surely Con had never felt that embarrassing sort of need for Marlene.

  There were more names and phone numbers, plans for work, shopping lists, lists of people to phone: her mother; Barbara. A flurry of facts, names, and numbers, in the last used pages. Addresses. Directions. This must have had to do with the case she’d been working on when the bag was stolen, the last case she’d worked on for that job. Everything had ended at once: her marriage, her job, her life as a daughter. This notebook.

  The next-to-the-last entry said “Mountain View Motel” with a phone number. The last was a note to herself in blue ink, followed by another one, in black. The first said, “Mabel Turner and her gang not terrific clients. Possible to dump them? Find different but comparable client? Ethical to dump them?” Then came a space. The second note was in larger handwriting, as if Con had been excited. “NO,” she’d written. “NO. Nobody’s consistently terrific. Nobody’s terrific. The point is how we describe them. Orange stripe on white can be honestly described as white stripe on orange.” She stared at the sentence. It seemed like something she had always known—something everybody had always known—but also something she still didn’t know: that there was more than one truth, more than one way of telling the truth.

  Her mother had had a striped tablecloth, and that was what Barbara had taken. Losing her mother had made loss the theme of Con’s days; losing Barbara was only part of the life of loss. She looked back over fifteen years and saw nothing but loss, nothing but sorrow. As with the stripe on the tablecloth, this was one way to see it. She took a shower and washed her thinning, graying hair, feeling kind toward it for once.

  When Con awoke in her mother’s bed on Saturday morning, she thought the problem was that she’d lost the cat. Then she remembered. She’d forgotten to offer the cat to Peggy the night before. But why would Peggy want him? For a long time Con couldn’t bring herself to get out of bed. For once, the phone did not ring. She made up her mind to go running. Then she’d figure out how to go home. She still didn’t have keys to her house, and Jerry and Joanna were still away from home. Now it seemed cumbersome to imagine the burglar going to Philadelphia and finding his way to University City so as to hurt Joanna. Now she knew he just wouldn’t have the energy, as she herself, the day after her mother died, did not have the energy to get out of bed.

  She wanted things. She’d known the dark red glass ashtray all her life. Now she knew that Marlene had taken it from a hotel—cheating on one alarming lover with another—and given it to her mother. Barbara must not have it; Con must have it. What if Marlene had lied, and her mother came home from Rochester to find Con packing her belongings or giving things away? Maybe her mother was fine and Marlene was demented.

  Con put on her sweatpants and running shoes and took her mother’s new key, which she first stuck into her sock—where its sharp edges nicked her skin—and then into the pocket of her T-shirt. She remembered the man at the funeral home, someone besides Marlene who believed that Gert was dead. She made her way down to the street. The fresh new morning was kind; she stretched against an iron railing and took off slowly. A man passing said, “Way to go, girl.” But she was soon breathless. She gave up and walked. Now she wanted to be back in the apartment, where she could cry.

  On her way to the shower, she considered her mother’s enormous collection of towels. Her mother had acquired objects with abandon; apparently she thought she’d never die. Instead of taking a shower, Con moved piles of towels to the sofa, then began taking clothes from the closet and laying them on the bed. She found dresses her mother had made years ago. How could Con dispose of them? She had never properly appreciated her mother.

  When she was finally bathed and dressed, she called Marlene. “It’s hard,” Con said, when Marlene said hello in her ordinary voice.

  “Oh, Connie, my old friend,” said Marlene, and at that Con began to cry loudly and openly. She had no tissue, and walked with the phone—it was the kitchen phone—as far as she could, looking for one.

  “It’s for the best,” Marlene said again.

  “No, it isn’t!” Marlene never talked like that. She never made the remarks people habitually make to keep from noticing how bad they feel.

  “She was terrified,” said Marlene. “She’d say something that didn’t make sense, and then she’d point out what she’d said.”

  “There are medicines.”

  “Which might slow it down.”

  “It still isn’t better that she’s dead.” Con remembered something her mother used to do. When a decision had been reached, she’d pat the furniture—a table, the top of a bookcase. A little tap, as if to say, “So.”

  “Nobody can pick the best moment to die,” said Marlene. “The moment when you start enjoying life only forty-nine percent of the time.”

  “I don’t think I enjoy life forty-nine percent of the time,” said Con, “and I’m not ready to die.”

  “Her last act was traveling, visiting a friend,” said Marlene. “Would you want her last act to be having her diaper changed?”

  “Was it a good visit?” said Con. “Was any of it good?”

  “Connie, don’t idealize your mother. I loved her, you loved her, but at best she was a little boring, and now that her mind was going—well, forgive me, honey, but it was excruciating. You’d have felt the same way.”

  This could be true. Maybe she was as bad as Marlene. Con couldn’t bear this conversation, so she thought about the percentage of time she was happy. She decided it wasn’t a matter of percentages. Working, she was often unhappy, but the happiness of accomplishment was intense. She said, “I know you’re right, but I can’t feel it.”

  “It would have been selfish to keep her alive—if we could have,” said Marlene.

  “No,” said Con. “If I could have decided, I’d have kept her alive for her own sake, not mine.”

  “I’ve always loved the way you think,” said Marlene. Then, “Have you found her will?”

  “I haven’t thought much about it,” said Con. “I have to figure out what to do with this apartment. I have to get home. My job—”

  “Well, I have a copy,” said Marlene. “I’m her executor.”

  “What?” said Con. She should have thought about her mother’s will a long time ago. “How did that happen?”

  “She asked me to help,” Marlene said. “A couple of years ago—I was visiting, and she brought it up. She had a will, but it was way out of date. There are things you have to do—otherwise, the taxes—well, you know. So I took her to an old lawyer friend in New York. Don’t worry, you and Barbara get all her money. What there is.”

  “But I didn’t even know!”

  “She didn’t want to bother you. You were busy.”

  Con was too dispirited to protest—and what good would that do now? At least she didn’t have to deal with it. Off the phone, she determined that she should stop looking at old clothes and pay more attention to financial records and documents, but she didn’t. As the hours passed she was surrounded by larger and larger piles of her mother’s possessions. Barbara was coming—she didn’t know when. She had to hide anything she wanted from Barbara. She put the red glass ashtray into her suitcase. It was huge. She loved knowing Marlene had stolen it. Sometimes crime is interesting, not so terrible. Nothing she wanted was mixed in with her mother’s dresses. Her mother had a desk in the bedroom. Con should look at the contents of the desk. She should find her mother’s will.

  The desk did not contain the will, but it contained canceled checks going back many years. Con found a used envelope, full of birthday and Mother’s Day cards from Barbara and herself, and a few handmade cards from Joanna. She threw out all but the handmade ones, and put the canceled checks into the envelope with them. Then she found a pen and wrote “CANCELED CHECKS.” She left the envelope on the dresser so as to pack it later.

  She continued taking things apart, and found something
else of interest. Her mother had written letters on unlined pads of paper in pastel colors. Several pads were in the second drawer. It seemed Gert wrote drafts of her letters and kept them—at least in recent years. Con found none from the war years. Maybe she hadn’t written drafts in those more spontaneous days, when even Gert had been young and knew what she thought. Con took the pads, and with only a moment’s hesitation sat on the sofa to read them, pulling her legs up under her.

  Gert wrote conventional letters to a few relatives, who’d have to be notified now. Con looked around for her notebook so as to make a list, forgetting for a moment that it was gone. She postponed this task. Gert had placidly delivered her own meager news and news of Con and Barbara, always given a positive tilt. Sentences reappeared year after year: “Barbara enjoys living in England.”

  The only letters worth reading were those to Marlene, but reading them wasn’t pleasant. The blandness disappeared, and Gert complained about Con and Barbara. Now she wrote drafts not to polish polite sentences but to calm herself down. In one letter the sentence “Connie despises me” had been crossed out. Then she’d written, “I keep thinking that Connie despises me” and she’d crossed that out too. The sentence that remained was “I know Connie doesn’t despise me but sometimes she talks as if she does. She must be having trouble with Jerry. He isn’t an easy man to live with.” Con didn’t bring Joanna often enough, though “Joanna is crazy about her grandmother, I’m happy to say.” Gert’s complaints about Barbara were more familiar, because Gert had complained about Barbara to Con more than once (and, presumably, about Con to Barbara). But she’d let herself be more honest in her letters to Marlene, and her disapproval of Barbara was unqualified. Marlene had apparently argued with Gert about her daughters. “Maybe you are right about Connie,” Gert wrote once, without further explanation. Parts of the letters were less interesting, and at times Con found something unintelligible—answers to questions Marlene had presumably asked. Several times Gert wrote, “It hasn’t come yet” and once she said, “Could you explain better about that money? I don’t understand.” Could she have meant the tax money that would be saved if Marlene had the will redone? That was possible.

  If Marlene had written about her, Con wasn’t sure she wanted to find those letters, but she put the drafts in her lap aside, and began searching again. She wished she had thought to talk to her mother about her will, about taxes and the estate. Or that her mother had asked her. It made her squirm that Marlene had done it when she had not. Marlene had always advised Gert about money: it would have seemed natural to Gert to put her in charge of the will.

  Each time Con had looked through her mother’s possessions, she’d skipped the second drawer in one of the dressers against the wall. It was stuck. Turning from her mother’s stationery pads, she pulled out the drawer under it, and was able to reach in and remove something that had worked its way partway over the back of the drawer. It was a single letter in a thick envelope addressed to her mother: old, creased, and stained. She recognized the return address, on Albemarle Road. Her mother used to speak of a time “when Marlene lived on Albemarle Road.”

  Other than this envelope, the drawer contained only baby clothes her mother had made, knitted hats and sweaters. She took the letter and returned to the sofa, where her mother’s drafts were still spread out. The letter was typed. Of course she read it immediately. By now there was no stopping.

  Albemarle Road

  Brooklyn

  March 3, 1949

  Dear Gert,

  You are probably wondering why I’m writing you a letter when I could pick up the phone. Or you are wondering why I am writing you a letter when you may have thought I would never have anything to do with you again. Or Abe has not told you a thing and you are wondering what I am talking about. Or maybe you are wondering how the corner of the ashtray broke. I am talking about the ashtray Lou and I took from the Plaza during the war. I promised I’d give it to you, and then I did give it to you, although by then it didn’t matter so much who saw it, with everything that happened.

  Now, who knows, with what your husband has done, a whole lot more may be about to happen. Maybe he didn’t tell you what he’s done. I better start at the beginning. This was last Saturday when you were in New Jersey for your uncle’s funeral. I was sorry to hear about that. I know you hadn’t seen him or your aunt in a long time but it’s hard to lose anybody, and you don’t have many left in that generation. Anyway, Lou and I had a fight. Sometimes I wonder why I married him, we got along so well before, but now it’s just accusations and worrying and wanting to know if I love him. And somehow he got it into his head I was fooling around with Abe—which for heaven’s sake I hope you know is not true. Frankly he’s not even my type. What with one thing and another, it ends up with Lou dragging me into the car and we go over to your place. He swears he’s not going to say anything, he just wants to see how Abe looks at me when the door opens. Well, you know how Abe looked at me—he looked how Abe looks. He always has the same look, as if he’s counting inside and he’s not allowed to talk until he gets to five. So he stands there looking at us, holding the door.

  Pardon me if I’m not being so complimentary about your husband. And pardon me for this long letter. I can see it’s going to be a long letter. So after a while he says “Gert’s not here,” and I say, “Could we come in, Abe? How are the girls?” Of course the girls are asleep, and he comes to his senses and lets us in and he even offers us tea, but Lou says, “I don’t suppose you have any whiskey?” so he brings out a bottle and we have a little drink. The radio is on and I think this will be all right, we’ll just listen to the music and have a drink and go home.

  Lou sits there fiddling with the big red ashtray, turning it and playing with it, even though it’s full of butts. You know how he can’t ever keep his hands still. And wouldn’t you know, after a while he gets to talking, and I guess he’d had a few earlier because the drink made a difference and he takes another one, and the next thing you know he’s saying things about Abe and me. I thought I’d die. Whereupon it comes out, and I hope you had no idea about this, that your husband knows all about the little investment Lou talked you into, that we said was going to be a secret. I don’t know how he knew and I hope you didn’t tell him, but after pretending to be friendly it turned out Abe wasn’t so friendly, he had something to say to Lou, and the upshot of it is, Abe accuses Lou of stealing your money—his money—and Lou throws the ashtray. He can get like that. Of course he didn’t throw it at Abe, he threw it at the wall, but Abe got upset, and he ran to see if the girls were all right, for what reason I don’t know. A corner of the ashtray broke off and I picked it up. It was sharp and I threw it in the garbage. But it broke off cleanly and the rest of it wasn’t sharp so I put it back where you keep it on the corner table. The butts were all over the floor and I cleaned them up, with Lou saying, “What are you doing that for? Let him clean it up.” We got out of there quickly but this is not all.

  Gert, why did you tell him about that investment? It was your money from what your father left. Maybe you didn’t tell him. I suppose there are a lot of ways he could tell, if he’s looking at everything. But here’s what he did. Or, I think he must have done it. At least, somebody went to the cops, and now they’re looking at a lot of things Lou does. You know Lou’s business, it’s complicated and I don’t ask questions, and I know as well as you do that it’s not all on the up-and-up but he does no real harm to anybody and that’s just the way he is. He’s always been that way, as we both know. So now he may have to go back to prison and heaven knows what.

  You see why I didn’t just pick up the phone. This is a lot to explain, especially if Abe didn’t tell you. And if he did, you may be very angry. Or Abe may be angry with you about the money, or maybe he hasn’t said. Anyway, he knows. So I thought it was best just to write instead of calling when for all I know he’s home, or the girls ask questions.

  Gert, there is something else I want to say and maybe I’m ju
st not the kind of person to say this out loud and maybe that is another reason why I am writing you a letter, which I hope you will read and destroy immediately. It’s been good with Lou but, Gert, if I have to choose, I am not letting go of what I have with you and I hope you feel the same. I mean, I do not expect you to choose between Abe and me. Abe is a much better husband than Lou Braunstein and I know that. But if Abe isn’t going to let you see me or call me, I just want you to know I’m not going anywhere and when you can get in touch I will be thinking about you already.

  Hug the little girls for me and take care of yourself. I won’t call but you call me when you can. Even if Lou goes away for a long time, I may blame Abe but I know why he did that and I don’t blame you.

  With my love,

  Marlene

  When Con finished reading the letter, she walked back and forth across the room, again and again, rapidly. She didn’t want to know all this, or to think through what it meant. To distract herself at last, she picked up Gert’s drafts once more and looked at the most recent. “I need to visit you,” Gert had written to Marlene. Her prose had become simple, her handwriting shaky. “I will tell Connie she has to stay in the apartment to take care of the cat, but it is because I think her husband hits her. It is all I can think to do to get her away from him.”

  It was Saturday: Peggy would be home. Con put down the letter, left the apartment, walked quickly down one flight, and rang Peggy’s doorbell. “I’m crazy,” Con said. “Could I come in?”

  “Of course,” said Peggy, and drew her inside. She turned off the television set. Her apartment was shaped like Gert’s but was furnished in a more old-fashioned, elaborate way, possibly by the aunt whom Peggy had replaced there. It smelled of cigarettes, but surely they too weren’t left over from the aunt. Con had not seen Peggy smoke.

  “I found some letters,” said Con.