Nothing Is Quite Forgotten in Brooklyn

by Alice Mattison

  “You’re reading your mother’s letters?”

  “Yes. Is that wrong?”

  “I suppose so.”

  “So I deserve whatever I find out?”

  “Maybe,” said Peggy. “You need to get out of here. Let’s go for a walk.” Peggy needed groceries, and Con accompanied her. The fresh air felt good on her face. “When are you going home?” Peggy asked, in the store.

  “I don’t know. There’s so much to do.”

  “You can’t do it all at once. You’ll come back.”

  Con felt like a child, following her friend as Peggy made adult decisions about vegetables and cheese. “You must think I’m an impossible person,” she said, standing behind Peggy at the cash register.

  “Your mother didn’t interest me,” said Peggy. “Sorry.” She examined her change and put it into her wallet. “But I like you,” she said as she picked up the bag. “I can’t like you less for reading her letters. Can I tell you what’s going on with me? Maybe it would distract you. Or are you too sad?”

  “Did you ever hear of somebody named Lou Braunstein?” Con said.

  “Lou Braunstein? I don’t think so. Who is he?” They were leaving the store.

  “Someone my mother knew.”

  “Is it important to know who he was?”

  “It’s all upsetting,” said Con.

  “I’ll try and find out,” Peggy said. She took the receipt from her bag of groceries and scribbled on it.

  “Now tell me about you,” Con said. Peggy was a little self-centered, but she seemed to know it, which made it all right. She listened as they set out for home. Con found she thought of it as home. She should move back to Brooklyn. Little is more absorbing than affairs with married men, and it seemed Peggy would always provide her with distraction of this sort. A Brooklyn resource. They had tea when they got back to Peggy’s apartment. Her kitchen was a mess. Then Con went back upstairs. As she climbed the stairs, she realized someone was sitting on the floor outside Gert’s apartment. She didn’t let herself be afraid. The person was leaning against Gert’s closed apartment door, and was Joanna.

  Con dropped to her knees and seized her curly-haired big girl and rocked back and forth, clutching her and crying. She had not yet recovered from the burglary, and from thinking Joanna was hurt or missing. Her feelings had been interrupted by anger at Jerry, then by Gert’s death. The thought made her angry with Gert. Jerry had never hit her. Jerry would never conceivably hit her. It was a ridiculous paranoid fantasy. It was demented. Well, Gert had been demented.

  Joanna stiffened in her arms—“Oh, for God’s sake, Mom”—and then gave way, and Con felt her firm body grow thicker and more flexible as it settled into her arms. “I miss Grandma so much,” Joanna said. “Nobody loved her as much as I did. That woman killed her. She killed Grandma.”

  “Marlene?” said Con, standing up and brushing herself off. She unlocked the door. “She didn’t kill her.”

  “You’re already getting rid of stuff?” Joanna said. “We didn’t even have the funeral.”

  Piles were everywhere. “We’ll deal with that later,” Con said.

  “We should call a rabbi,” said her child. “Grandma was Jewish.”

  “I don’t know any rabbis. She didn’t know any rabbis.”

  “The Yellow Pages,” said Joanna. She carried the backpack she used for school, stuffed with clothes. She set it down. The cat approached, and Joanna sat down on the floor to stroke and hug him.

  “You’re been out of school all week,” said Con.

  “The week went by fast.”

  “Not for me.”

  Maybe Con could just stay here with Joanna. It would be a way of leaving Jerry. She’d get a job in New York, and Joanna would go to a Brooklyn high school. The thought of a job made her remember she had never called Sarah, and now it was Saturday. She had to feed Joanna. They’d spend the night here and go home to Philadelphia in the morning. She’d had contradictory thoughts one after the other, as if one led to the other: stay here, return home.

  “Did you come on the bus?” she said.

  “Yes. Dad’s meeting us at home. I wanted him to come with me but he said there was someone he still needed to talk to.”

  “Some retired soldier from the Revolutionary War?”

  “Something like that.” Joanna laughed. “I knew you needed me.” Then she cried again. “There was no reason for Grandma to die.”

  “She was old. She had a heart attack.”

  “That woman killed her.”

  “Marlene is complicated,” said Con, “but not like that.”

  “She doesn’t love us. She likes hearing about us so she can laugh at us,” said Joanna.

  “When did you even meet her?” said Con. They were still in the living room, Joanna on the floor, though the cat had walked off.

  “A long time ago, but I was a smart little kid. She looked at me thinking ‘What can I laugh at?’ I could hear it. I was ten or eleven. I was fat, and she thought she’d never be fat. Never never never.”

  “You weren’t fat,” said Con. She was cold. She went into the bedroom for a sweater and Joanna followed her, then began looking at what Con had spread around the room. “What have you been doing?” said Joanna. She picked up a photograph.

  Gert’s drafts of letters were on the sofa but Con didn’t know where she’d put Marlene’s letters from the war. She began tidying ineffectively, then said, “Let’s make supper.”

  She wasn’t angry with Joanna anymore for joining Jerry. She was angry with Jerry, but it seemed inventive and surprising of Joanna to have gone to him, then to her. “What did you learn?” Con asked, but Joanna just shrugged.

  “It’s dirty in here,” she said. “So dusty. Isn’t it giving you a headache?”

  Con opened a window and the noise of the street came in. “I did need you,” she said. She led the way to the kitchen and put together supper. There was more meat sauce, and she cooked macaroni.

  “Daddy told me you want to leave him,” said Joanna, as they sat at the table. The striped tablecloth had become dirtier all week and it was quite dirty now, but it was still pretty, with the brilliant stripe.

  “He promised not to tell you.”

  “He said you might tell me, but he says you don’t mean it.”

  Con felt the weight of actions she’d need to perform. She would have to persuade Sarah to forget the house for former prisoners. She would have to find a rabbi in the Yellow Pages. She would have to get rid of nearly every object in this apartment. Barbara would want three ceremonial relics of their mother’s existence, and she would want ten. Plus the letters. And Joanna would take half a dozen, and Marlene could be given the painting of the sand dunes and a few other things. Her mother’s odd, inexpensive necklaces and pins were gone. Con remembered a few things from the wooden box: a copper pin her mother had loved, a string of small red stones.

  Leaving Jerry, right now, seemed not an expression of what she felt, believed, or wanted, but an unending series of additional tasks: sorting, packing, moving, setting up a household. Jerry would be slightly amused as Con tried to accomplish leaving him. His amusement was different from Marlene’s. Joanna was partly right about Marlene, but Joanna was jealous because Con had always liked Marlene too much, and so she couldn’t see her. Marlene had pulled Con slightly off center. A child would know that. Marlene had made Con feel adult and significant when she was ten or fourteen. It was not good that Con still looked to her for that reassurance, but it was so.

  “Have you been living on spaghetti?” said Joanna. She stood up, her food half eaten, to search in the refrigerator.

  “I should have made a vegetable,” said Con, surprised she hadn’t.

  “Is there ice cream? said Joanna. She checked the freezer. “Grandma had Häagen-Dazs!” she said.

  “No, I bought it,” said Con. “She had ice milk.”

  “Well, it’s healthier,” said Joanna, defending her grandmother’s choice, whatever it h
ad been.

  Jerry knocked on Con’s bedroom door as she was getting dressed. “What?” she called grouchily.

  “Never mind.”

  She was not sorry she’d slept with him, but now she wanted him to become, once more, the slightly formal guest. Jerry had not done badly, all these years, impersonating that guest, though he’d looked slightly bewildered and self-consciously adventurous, like somebody playing charades. Several times he’d had dinner with her and Fred. He’d looked amused on those occasions too, as if she had been playing a part, and he didn’t think she was good at it.

  When she came into the living room, dressed in jeans, she marveled at the sunlight, which was usually wasted on an empty room while she sat in her office with its dirty window. Jerry was sitting in shadow with a laptop on his knees.

  “Sorry,” he said, not looking up. He was closing a file. “I had a thought, and I was impatient to tell you.”

  “What’s the thought?”

  “You could come with me.”

  “Come with you where?” she said.

  “It’s just Brooklyn.”

  “Oh. Marcus Ogilvy? Was that it?”

  “Yes.”

  “What did he do?” she said. “Who was he? Where are you going?”

  She sat down. She wanted him to leave, so she could keep on looking at her old and newly recovered objects, or figure out how to open the box. But she remembered her wild jealousy of Jerry on his trips, her wish to go searching with him in some unlikely place for the remnant of a fact nobody cared to know but Jerry and Con. “Tell me,” she said, but she was wary.

  “What do you know,” said Jerry, “about the history of the subway system?”

  Con didn’t know anything, and for the next half hour, Jerry told her stories. She didn’t know—this, he made clear, was not the particular secret he was investigating—the famous secret about the lavish two-station subway, in which a car was propelled by a big fan. It was built by a nineteenth-century entrepreneur before the subway system existed. The businessman had pretended he was building a pneumatic tube just for mail, not passengers, so the Tweed gang wouldn’t stop him. Con didn’t know about the man who finally put down the money to build the first real subway, the IRT: the incomparably rich August Belmont. He was the son of August Schönberg, a Jew who became an Episcopalian and translated his last name, “beautiful mountain,” from German to French. The son also built the Belmont race track and bred Man o’ War. She didn’t know several other famous subway stories. And Con didn’t know about the bit of New York history that had caught Jerry’s attention this time—Marcus Ogilvy’s mad scheme of the 1920s, the Brooklyn Circle. “That’s what we’re going to find,” said Jerry. “It was never finished, but parts of it were built. The books say there’s nothing left, but my guess is there are perfectly obvious fragments. You Brooklynites are so used to crazy, incomprehensible structures, you probably walk past these things every day, and nobody notices.”

  She admitted it to herself: she was interested. Marcus Ogilvy was another Jew who was not quite a Jew, and obviously that was part of the appeal for Jerry. Marcus Ogilvy even had one black grandparent on his father’s side. His mother was a German Jew and Ogilvy had studied architecture in Europe as a young man, late in the nineteenth century, then returned to his native New York and made a small fortune developing new neighborhoods in Brooklyn and Queens. He was in his thirties when most of the subway was built, in the first decade of the twentieth century, but he was never enthusiastic about underground transportation. Before the subway had been built, elevated trains, including the famously defunct Third Avenue El, crossed parts of the city. They were noisy and regarded as dirty, and up-to-date thinking at the start of the new century was all in favor of the subway, which was considered a startling improvement when it was built.

  “Ogilvy loved el trains,” Jerry said, gesturing so expansively that Con felt as if she’d been reduced to someone at the back of a lecture hall. He went on to explain how Marcus Ogilvy had built a mansion on Arlington Avenue in East New York from which he could hear the reliable rumble of the Jamaica El as he fell asleep at night, and he’d enjoyed standing on the platform of the Cleveland Street Station, gazing at the city around him, taking in the relatively fresh outdoor air and the relatively clear light, up closer to heaven, instead of descending to a tunnel he always feared would collapse, or at least would harbor rats and snakes.

  Ogilvy was especially troubled about one characteristic of the subway system as it extended to Brooklyn. The lines stretched from Manhattan like tentacles of a sea creature, but (as Con had known all her life, from the story of how Gert and Marlene became friends) nothing connected them except in a very few places. From some locations in Brooklyn, it was necessary—it is still necessary—to travel into Manhattan and back in order to reach someplace else in Brooklyn. Or it is necessary to take slow and ponderous buses. Ogilvy had proposed to change all that with an elevated line that would not be ugly. Jerry opened a map. Across Brooklyn, he’d drawn a curved line in pencil. The Brooklyn Circle was to have been an elevated arc linking the Parkside Avenue Station of what is now the Q train, to the Winthrop Avenue Station on what’s now called the 2–5, then to the Crown Heights–Utica Avenue Station on the 3 and the 4, and finally to the station now called Broadway Junction, on the J (the elevated line that Ogilvy listened to from his bed), where the J meets the A and C subway lines—just being built when Ogilvy made his plans—and the elevated line now called the L, which goes to Canarsie.

  Ogilvy’s favorite word was “elegance” and in his designs and the impassioned articles he wrote about them, he actually referred to some features of the European Gothic cathedrals he’d admired as a young man, like pointed arches in the supporting pillars, to let more light into the street, and groined vaults underneath the tracks. He wanted people’s eyes to be drawn upward, their moods lightened. He wanted pedestrians to feel as if they were walking under a delicately designed street arcade, not a looming and potentially dangerous dark shape. The pillars were to be white. At that time all the subways were privately owned—the city didn’t own them until 1940. Ogilvy secured the necessary permissions, found backers, and began building supports and tracks.

  “Bits of the line are still there,” said Jerry. He stood up and walked to the window, as if it might be possible to glimpse these shapes even from here. “I think they’re still there.”

  “What happened to it?”

  “Oh, what do you think? 1929 happened. He lost everything. His backers were shaky in the first place—sane people had doubts about elevateds. The worst accident in the history of the subways was on an elevated line. And of course they’re noisy.”

  “Did he kill himself?”

  “No, he just gave up. He went to live with his daughter in Geneseo, New York. I was there last month, but there’s no trace of the house.”

  “You went looking for Marcus Ogilvy’s daughter’s house?”

  “That’s what I do.” His back was to her, and the sunlight framed his bony shape, his boyish curly head.

  Con knew better than to ask anybody why. Nothing has a why. Why did she want to go with Jerry to look for Marcus Ogilvy’s unfinished elevated railway instead of spending a pleasant sick day at home getting ready for Marlene—who would arrive in only a few hours? She didn’t know why, but she wanted to do it. Before they left, she tried again to open the wooden jewelry box. She’d need to use something like a paper clip or a bobby pin, and she didn’t know exactly what. Jerry was impatient to get started.

  The weather had turned even colder. Con put on her winter coat, which had to be ripped from a plastic bag, and smelled pleasantly of dry cleaning. Jerry still wore his raincoat. As they left the apartment they bumped into each other, and Con recalled that doorways narrow when new lovers try to go through them together. Not that they were new lovers. They emerged from the building and walked toward the subway. Jerry said they’d take the train to Parkside Avenue. As they went down the steps into
the station, Jerry said, “Funny thing—for a while I had a girlfriend around here.”

  Con pretended more nonchalance than she felt. “Around here?”

  “A couple of blocks from here. She used the same station.”

  “Maybe I know her.”

  “No,” he said. “You don’t know her.”

  Just before Parkside Avenue, the Q train emerges into modified sunlight, not as an elevated train but a simple railway, running in a ditch that’s open to the sky. The station is unusual: it has no steps, like a train station in the country. Con had always liked it; sometimes, as a girl, she went to her mother’s office after school. But she was sad, coming out now. “My mother worked near here,” she said. “P.S. 92.”

  She didn’t know, come to think of it, how many women had been in Jerry’s life since the divorce. She was in touch with him often enough that names or incidents might have come up, but apparently he concealed names and incidents. If there was one there could have been ten. There was no reason for that to be bad, but it was bad. Maybe it simply meant they weren’t as good friends as she’d thought. She might have run into him in a local restaurant with another woman. She might have made a new friend who referred to “My boyfriend, Jerry,” and it would be her Jerry. Her former Jerry.

  Which would not have mattered. “So you’re not seeing this woman anymore?” she said.

  “Who?”

  “My neighbor.”

  “Well, she’s not your neighbor.” He paused, looking toward Prospect Park and then toward Parkside Avenue, getting his bearings. “No, I’m not. We go this way.”

  Solid, square apartment houses looked well cared for. There was no sign of a failed elevated train line, and Jerry said most of this construction was more recent than the Brooklyn Circle; developers would have obliterated everything. Con had lost some of her initial eagerness. She tried to care. Jerry became not tense but a little quiet by the time they reached the school. Before then, he’d been talkative and buoyant. This must be the way he always was at the start of a trip: sure of himself, with the confidence of a detective in a story, a detective who never gets shot and always solves the murder by the end of the book. But Jerry could be arrogant; it was one of his failings. She hadn’t thought of his failings since before they’d gone to bed together. He wanted to play by himself: he didn’t know how to be with someone else. Now he was showing off, she felt, casually mentioning women to upset her, casually pretending to know what he was doing. They would find nothing. Con should have gone to work, and as she walked she thought of the notebook entry she’d found the night before, in which she’d written down that quick thought about truths. She knew it was relevant to her search for the perfect client, the perfect abused woman suffering employment discrimination. The thought made a difference: having a thought like that seemed to justify a holiday, and Con felt, suddenly, as if she’d been locked indoors for days—for years—but now was out in the cold sunshine, the brief sunlight of November. She wouldn’t tell Jerry she’d suddenly understood what was wrong with her as a lawyer, that she was here to celebrate, here in her clean winter coat. He didn’t tell her things, and she wouldn’t tell him either, but she was tempted.