P.S. 92 was a massive, plain structure with a small paved yard. It tolerated no nonsense, its unequivocal architecture seemed to say; any scraps of lost train lines would have been swept away. But Jerry drew her closer to the fence behind it. “That’s the sort of place we’ll find something,” he said. Between the school and other buildings was an amorphous lot with a low structure. Con saw an old iron pillar, but surely not the right sort. They turned on Nostrand Avenue, where there were stores, and began zigzagging—one block north, one block east—peering through gaps between buildings. Con had decided Jerry was deluded and she was not interested, but she was interested in spite of herself.
“So are you glad you dumped Fred?” he asked as they walked.
“Well, that was a while ago,” she said. “I don’t think about it much. After the fact, it became a foregone conclusion.”
“I knew all along it wouldn’t work out,” said Jerry. “You should have ended it sooner. You should be different as a lawyer, too. Less timid.”
Now she was angry. He could be superior about bits of history if he knew something she didn’t know, but not, please, about her own life and her own judgment. “What, you’re some sort of oracle?” she said, and her voice was sharper than she’d expected. “Why don’t you tell me right now—is there anything you are quite sure you don’t know?”
“Oh, sure,” said Jerry mildly. The more she revealed what she felt, the blander and more reasonable he would become. Now he explained, as if their entire conversation had been impersonal, that the Brooklyn Circle line had passed not along the street but through the blocks, behind the houses. “It wasn’t going to be as tall as some of the elevateds,” he said. “About level with the second-floor windows.”
Con didn’t answer. Again, she spotted a steel upright object, this time with a crosspiece. She waited to see whether he’d speak, but he didn’t.
But half a block later Jerry suddenly grew extremely quiet: his long limbs slowed and it was as if he were completely alone. Then he put an arm on her shoulder. At least he hadn’t forgotten she was there. He pointed. It was a stretch of three pillars with fretwork and arches intact between them, in the middle of a block off Winthrop Street, in a parking lot. She knew in an instant that what she was seeing was like nothing she’d ever seen before. The pillars did not resemble fragments of other elevated train structures. They were gray metal, and the pointed arches between them were sharply cut. They looked light. They didn’t seem high or heavy enough, she said out loud, but Jerry said, yes, they would have supported the tracks and the trains; the design was what made it possible, as in the cathedrals of Europe.
He’d brought her along, after all. She had almost decided to let go of her anger, to delight in him the way she would in a child who’d produced such a discovery: to let herself see it without living in their past, hers and Jerry’s. She wanted to touch these pillars but they couldn’t get close enough. Jerry had a small camera, but they were too far to take a picture that would mean much. From his pocket he produced a stack of three-by-five index cards. He scribbled with a ballpoint pen, leaning on his knee and then, after a grunt asking permission, on her shoulder.
They continued walking, now passing attached houses with aluminum siding. On New York Avenue, there was something between two buildings, but so fragmented Jerry said he couldn’t be sure. Then, near Wingate Park, off Brooklyn Avenue, was a good-sized section. A wall had been built but Con was pretty sure she could see tracks. Jerry took photographs this time, and filled more cards with scribbles. Con lent him her leather purse to lean on, then regretted it because he wrote more. She was cold.
The houses became smaller and more suburban-looking, and the streets were quieter. All the avenues were named after New York cities. They’d seen few people as they walked, but a man on a stoop now called “How y’doing?” Everyone they saw was black. Now there was plenty of room behind houses for dilapidated bits of an old elevated railway, and twice they spotted single pillars, then another set of three. Now Con could recognize them easily, with their distinctive pointed arches. Near Utica Avenue they found a complete set of track work on six or eight pillars. A light, sturdy structure, it was just visible behind some houses. Jerry stopped a man in the street. “Can you tell me what that is?”
The man looked. “Part of the Long Island Rail Road they no longer use,” he said authoritatively.
“Oh, thanks,” Jerry said.
“People look at it out their windows,” said Con. “They have to wonder how it got there. Maybe some of them know.”
“No,” said Jerry, a little impatiently. “They don’t know. They think it’s part of the Long Island Rail Road, if they think at all. New York is full of mysteries. Do you know about the High Line, in Manhattan?”
Con didn’t. “An old railroad. People see it all the time and aren’t curious, but that’s not surprising. If you were curious about everything you’d have a heart attack every day.”
“You just like feeling superior,” said Con.
“No!” Jerry actually sounded hurt, and she put her hand on his arm.
“Just teasing,” she said.
At Utica Avenue—a busy street full of stores—Con almost forgot about the Brooklyn Circle. She lived not far away, but had never been here. In a Korean grocery they bought apples and pretzels and bottles of water. Con had hoped for lunch.
They crossed Eastern Parkway. Now the neighborhoods became shabbier, and Con and Jerry seemed more conspicuous. “Are you a teacher?” a little girl asked Con. Near Pacific Street—almost at the end of their walk—was another set of tracks. It was wedged between small apartment buildings, as if removing it had been too much trouble, or maybe it even helped support the buildings. The tracks crossed a narrow vacant lot strewn with garbage and glass. Jerry walked confidently into the lot to get a better look at the tracks, just twenty feet from the street, but Con remained on the sidewalk. “We’re almost at the end,” he called. “I’d given up on finding something like this.” The tracks were somewhat different from the others, with double pillars linked by small platforms.
Con was tired and cold, and pretzels and apples had not satisfied her. She stayed where she was, and at last Jerry returned. They began to walk slowly past the structure. “You’re not as interested as I thought you’d be,” he said.
She didn’t try to be fair. “You’re a solipsist,” she said finally. “You don’t quite know anybody else is real.”
He stopped where he was and looked at her. His buoyancy was gone, and suddenly he looked older, somehow both more Jewish and more African American. His face was less handsome, but maybe better, and Con was sorry she’d spoken. “What do you mean?” he said.
“I shouldn’t have said that.” They’d stopped, and she was cold already, but it seemed necessary to wait right where they were, at a street corner a few yards beyond the structure. “It’s beautiful,” she said quietly. “I should have said it’s beautiful.”
“But you don’t really care?”
“You want me to care.”
“I want everything about you, Connie,” Jerry said. “Yes, I want you to care!” Now he sounded angry. “I want you to care about Marcus Ogilvy trying to build a train line. I want you to care about Joanna being arrested for saying what she thinks! I want you to care about me trying to figure things out—but you—you don’t look. You don’t see what there is to see.”
“Of course I do,” Con said with some irritation. “That’s not the least bit fair.” They were arguing like married people. She needed a consultation with Peggy to decide whether he was right or not—whether he was unreasonable to make her want to admire broken-down train tracks in cold weather without lunch, or whether she was unreasonable not to see the romance of it.
Of course, in part, she understood. “I do see that what you’ve found is wonderful,” she said. She thought again of Peggy, of what Peggy had told her about the question she’d asked long ago. “Does the name Lou Braunstein mean anything to you?”
she said then.
Jerry turned just then, as if to go back the way they’d come. “Lou Braunstein? Sure. Forties crook. A wonderful guy. Behind some of the biggest scams in those years. He went to prison for some kind of complicated tax and investment thing, but even before that—during the war—he was one of the big guys. Why? He might have had something to do with the money for this project—why Ogilvy ran into so much trouble. Of course, Braunstein was a kid at that point—he was just the errand boy, if his group was in it at all. Ogilvy got lured into a bad investment scheme, but the D.A. never quite succeeded in pinning it on anybody organized; some guy with a green eyeshade went to prison, but he was just following orders.”
“No kidding,” said Con.
“Why are you interested in him?”
Con tried to think why she was interested in him. Why she’d been interested, fourteen years earlier, in Lou Braunstein. Why she’d asked Peggy who he was. It was so hard to remember that week—the week she’d lost her bag; the week her mother died. She had flashes in her memory, moments. Sitting up in bed talking to Jerry, sitting up in bed talking to Marlene, coming up the stairs and finding Joanna leaning against the door. “He had something to do with Marlene,” she said.
“Really? Lou Braunstein?”
“I think he was Marlene’s husband,” Con said. “Is that possible?”
“Well, I suppose anything’s possible,” Jerry said, “but it doesn’t seem likely. Don’t you think you’ve confused him with some other guy with a Jewish name?”
“I suppose so,” said Con, but now they were walking back to the short, graceful section of Marcus Ogilvy’s tracks. Sunlight coming through the fretwork made patterns on the ground. They stopped and looked.
“We could climb that,” said Jerry.
“Are you crazy?” But she wasn’t angry anymore.
“Why not?”
Con’s black woolen coat was so clean. And it came down to her knees. If she’d expected to do any climbing, she’d have dressed differently. “It’s illegal,” she said.
“I don’t see any signs.”
“Of course it’s illegal.”
He began slapping his thigh lightly, rhythmically, like someone getting ready to move vigorously. They stood under the tracks, and afternoon sunlight touched their faces and clothes. Jerry gazed up. He pulled out his note cards and scribbled, then moved to another part of the lot and scribbled some more. It was a section of track about fifty feet long, and everything that had supported it—that still supported it. Jerry photographed it from every possible point. His pleasure was palpable. In truth, the pillars didn’t look hard to climb, with cutouts in the gray metal just right for a hand or a foot. Still, she was relieved when he seemed to have forgotten the idea.
But then he said, “Okay, let’s go up,” as if they’d already agreed. She was curious too. She could have her coat cleaned again. They started up. Jerry went first. Con had no trouble. Nobody was in the street, and they seemed unobserved. What they were doing didn’t feel unsafe. It felt like playing on an innovative playground. In summer, the neighborhood kids were probably all over this structure. Looking up, Con could see cleaner spots, places in the elaborate fretwork below the tracks where children had held on as they climbed. She confidently put her hands where they wanted to go. Her purse bounced on her back.
At the top they heaved themselves over a metal fence and onto a track bed. The tracks were still there, ending at the back of what looked like a warehouse. They were not dirty. They would not be hard to walk on, but maybe she wouldn’t try that. On either side, faceless apartment windows seemed to ignore everything. Maybe the residents weren’t home, or maybe they didn’t look out these windows.
Jerry gingerly stepped along the tracks. Con crouched, holding the barrier she’d just climbed over, watching her ex-husband and new lover, watching his graceful legs. Maybe she would keep him as her lover.
“Come on,” called Jerry. He was leaning on his knee, writing. Next he stretched in several directions to take photographs.
“I’m fine here,” said Con.
Then Jerry took a misstep between the tracks, and yelped, coming down hard on an ankle. He’d had a weak ankle for years, she recalled. And there was a knock on the window behind Con. Still holding on, she turned. A man stood at the window, an elderly man in a white shirt. He was waving his hand as if to shoo her away, frowning. She smiled reassuringly and turned back to Jerry. “Are you all right?” she called.
“I don’t know yet.” He was grimacing, stooping. He slowly stood up and put weight on his foot. “Not all right. But maybe it’ll stop hurting in a minute.” Carefully he raised his foot and shook it. There was little danger of his falling between the tracks to the lot below—there were plenty of crossbars and underpinnings. But he might have got a foot caught in one of Marcus Ogilvy’s graceful openings and cutouts, the ones that had allowed the light to touch them when they stood below.
“Can you come back here?” she said. She didn’t know how they’d get down. She looked behind her. The man was still watching, a flash of sun on the window glass hiding his mouth but his forehead and eyes visible. He looked puzzled. She wasn’t sure he could see Jerry, who was beyond her, along the track. She gestured. She smiled again. The man looked. His skin was bright brown, the color of dark cherrywood, his forehead big and shiny.
He knocked again, and when she turned he frowned and shooed her once more. She shrugged, and started—as well as she could—toward Jerry. The wind up here was strong, and she had a sudden fear of falling through the spaces between the tracks after all. Now that she was closer, she could see that the spaces were larger than she had believed. She would die. She would die trying to make her way toward Jerry, and she remembered holding him in the night, and the feeling that she was at the edge of something, or fast disappearing into something, that without his touch and the thought of Joanna she’d be obliterated, gone. He should never have ventured out on the tracks. He should never have wanted to come up here. It was sooty. Her coat—still with the conscientious smell of recent dry-cleaning—was already dirty. If only she’d worn her short jacket. The coat flapped and caught at her legs. She might trip on it and plunge through the spaces between the tracks. She took a step. Now there was no place to put her hand, so she leaned over carefully and got down on her hands and knees, but her coat was seriously in the way, and her bag—a flat, attractive, moderately expensive leather bag—thumped at her side. She considered letting it go, dropping it through the space in the tracks and forgetting it. Were things that bad? Could she let her purse—and what was in it—go? For she knew that even in this quiet neighborhood, someone might well come along and take it before she got down.
The thought of the other bag made her more willing to drop this one. If it was that sort of universe she lived in, where what is lost may be returned—well! But she didn’t. She backed up and left the bag on the ledge where she’d been clinging, just below the window of the cherrywood man. He seemed to be gone. She considered taking off her coat but was afraid to move that drastically, afraid that its breadth might make a sail in the wind and pull her down. She opened the coat, got back down on her knees, and with one hand yanked the skirt of the coat up in back, folded over on itself, so it was out of the way. She began crawling toward Jerry, stopping twice to refold the skirt of the coat.
Jerry was leaning over, clutching his ankle with his free hand. Con didn’t know what she could do for him, but she continued toward him. At last he reached forward and touched her shoulder.
“Be careful. We’ll both fall,” she said.
“We won’t fall. There isn’t room to fall,” said Jerry. “Kids come up here all the time. If they fell down and died, you’d have read about it in the paper.”
“Not in New York,” said Con. She meant New York was so big, nobody would hear about it. She was sure parts of Brooklyn weren’t even on the map. “Can you walk?”
“If I could lean on you, maybe,” Jerry said.
“Just a touch on your shoulder,” said Jerry.
Con heard the sound of a window opening. “I’ve called the cops,” called the man with the broad forehead, leaning out.
“We’re going to be arrested,” said Con.
“But the cops will get us down first,” Jerry said.
“But I don’t want to be arrested,” Con said. It was too absurd—mother, father, and daughter running afoul of the law the same week. She’d die of humiliation. She’d be disbarred. Jerry looked cleaner than she felt, almost dapper, his white shirt still looking crisp through his open raincoat. He smiled at her. “It’s going to be okay,” he said. “Then we’ll get married again.”
“I don’t think so,” said Con. She turned and got down on her hands and knees again. She began crawling back. Below her she could see the pattern of the tracks in shadows on the lot below, but it looked far away, so she looked ahead instead of down. The tracks might be poorly fastened. The fastenings would have loosened over the years, and wouldn’t have been kept in repair. Con and Jerry’s combined weight might send the whole section, with them on top, crashing down.
Nothing Is Quite Forgotten in Brooklyn Page 18
