Nothing Is Quite Forgotten in Brooklyn

by Alice Mattison

  “They have lovely equipment attached to their fronts,” said Peggy.

  “Oh, if only that was all there was to them!” said Con. Jerry’s lovely equipment had made her happy only two days before.

  “Loving women is just as hard,” Joanna said. “Loving people who don’t love back. It doesn’t matter if they’re men or not. It doesn’t matter about equipment.”

  She said it firmly enough that nobody could disagree.

  Marlene stopped chewing. “Loving women,” she said. “Are you referring to homosexual love or friendship?”

  “Any kind of love,” said Joanna promptly.

  “Gert never loved me as much as I loved her,” Marlene said casually, while sawing through meat. She had eaten almost all her lunch.

  “You’re kidding me,” said Con. “She adored you. She never felt sure of you—I guess she knew you were smarter.”

  “That may have been the way it looked to you,” said Marlene, “but it wasn’t how it was.”

  “But you were so powerful.”

  “But she had children.”

  “But you’d call, and she’d go nuts.” Now that Con knew she missed her mother, she remembered perfectly those long-ago moments when Gert turned from her and Barbara to lose herself in friendship.

  “No, you’d go nuts, and she’d be off the phone. Gert didn’t know how lucky she was to have me.”

  Joanna’s spoon clattered to the side of her bowl and everyone looked at her, but she said nothing. Then she said, “Tooth.”

  “You have a toothache?” Peggy said.

  “No, I banged the spoon on my tooth.” Then she said with a catch in her voice, “It wasn’t always money you wanted, was it?” She said it to Marlene. Marlene was still chewing, looking at her plate. Everyone else was done—Con had been looking around for the waiter. She didn’t know what Joanna meant, whether it was a strange joke or a real question. Peggy looked confused, but didn’t say anything. Con wanted to go to the museum. Now Marlene had definitely stopped eating. Con didn’t remember seeing the waiter again, but noticed that the check was on the corner of the table. They split it up—not fairly, but everyone contributed. Con didn’t know whether Joanna’s remark about money had come before or after the check had been put down. A joke about money might make sense with the check on the table.

  They left the restaurant. When Con stepped from the darkly carpeted, darkly upholstered interior onto Brighton Beach Avenue, Marlene and Joanna had preceded her, and they stood waiting, apart, each momentarily abstracted. The Q train’s supports and track bed dimmed the street and sidewalk, and then a train passed above them, and as Con looked it seemed that what deepened and filled the complicated shadows was not its shape but its noise. When it passed, in relative silence Brooklyn’s interrupted light again speckled and striped the old woman and the young one. Joanna’s face was shadowed; Marlene squinted, as a squib of sunlight found her white hair and hooded eyes, and the sidewalk under her shoes.

  Con eating breakfast at her mother’s table might have been turning into her dead mother—slouching as her mother did, picking with a fingernail at a three-dimensional stain on the tablecloth—but Joanna was not turning into Con; she was a good reminder of Con’s present life as she awoke, sat up, and began talking, shaking her big teenaged head from side to side as if her ears needed air. “Who was that on the phone?”

  “Aunt Barbara.”

  “I thought so. Who was it last night?”

  “Someone from my office,” Con said. She paused. “Aunt Barbara is at a motel near Kennedy Airport. She’s on her way here.”

  “Okay,” said Joanna. She scratched her breasts under her pajama top and went barefoot to the bathroom, then came to the table and sat there, but when Con said, “Toast? Cereal?” she said, “I’m not hungry yet.”

  Con left her at the table and tried making a list of all they had to do before they could leave. Of course they didn’t have to empty the apartment yet, but they certainly had to empty the refrigerator. Yet what were they to do with everything in it? She said, “I’ve gotten to know one of the neighbors,” and left Joanna to ring Peggy’s doorbell. She didn’t have her phone number.

  Con didn’t ask—yet—about the cat, but she asked if Peggy would take some food. “You have to be willing to throw away good food,” Peggy said. “People die in my family every week. You have to be merciless. I’ll come up later.”

  Upstairs again, Con made up her mind to be merciless. She found a suitcase and began putting into it things of her mother’s she wanted. Joanna insisted on adding Gert’s knitted afghans and shawls and blankets, and even a bag of half-knitted sweaters for babies who’d grown up while Gert searched for more yarn from the correct dye lot.

  “It’s the most Grandma thing in the place,” said Joanna. “Except for the answering machine.”

  “The answering machine?”

  “I’m taking that. I want her voice.”

  Con didn’t think she wanted to own her mother’s hesitant voice, sounding baffled about this disturbing invention as she recited her phone number twice. Today Con felt grimly reconciled to her mother’s death. She could do without her mother. Yet when she opened the drawer with the photographs, she dropped to her knees and spread her hands on them as if she touched something alive. Her mother had amassed these objects so deliberately: how was Con to discard them?

  “Where’s her body?” said Joanna, coming along behind her.

  “It’s being cremated.”

  “Did it already happen?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Mom, don’t you care?” But then she left the room and Con didn’t see her for a while.

  Barbara and Peggy met on the staircase. Con came out to greet her sister and there was Peggy as well. It seemed amazing that her sister in London could turn so quickly into her sister here in her arms. Barbara felt soft and indefinite. Her hair was waved and streaked, and she looked more professional than Con did. After she and Barbara embraced, Con tried to introduce both Barbara and Joanna to Peggy, but Barbara was exclaiming over her niece, whom she then introduced to Peggy. The moment when the sisters would have looked at each other and allowed themselves full consciousness of what they had lost—whom they had lost—was postponed, and felt staged when it happened. Barbara wanted coffee. She had questions. Con felt accused, once more, when she said that Gert was being cremated.

  “It makes her so gone,” said Barbara.

  “But you told me to do it.”

  “You should have said no,” said Barbara.

  Con said, “And if we had a body, we’d have to have a burial. And a real funeral.”

  “Well, what shall we do about a funeral?”

  “Memorial service.”

  Barbara exhaled noisily and settled herself. “All right, memorial service. But shall we sit shivah?”

  “I’ve been sitting shivah since I got here,” Con said. “I sat shivah before she died.”

  Barbara ignored that. “I’ll stay around for a while,” she said. “There are relatives we need to invite…. Are they all upset?”

  Con had not phoned anyone else. She had intended to make a list, but had not done it. Barbara now listed their father’s two sisters and some cousins of their mother’s. She carried her coffee to the sofa and took off her shoes. “Shall we plan it today?” she said. “We can check with people….”

  “Today,” said Con, “I’m going home.”

  “Oh,” said Barbara. “I thought you were going to stay here.”

  “Why would I stay here?”

  “Well, somebody should, for a while, don’t you think?” She put the coffee cup down on the end table to gesture, then swept her hand around the apartment. “The cat…” Once again, Con had forgotten the cat, but Joanna knew where he hid, and dragged him out and cuddled him.

  “Did you think I was going to live here?” Con said. “What about Joanna? What about school? I’ve already been stuck here a week.”

  Peggy made an ir
ritated noise. She was taking things out of the refrigerator, her back to the room.

  “I just can’t believe we don’t have a mother!” Barbara said. Then she stood up, picked up the coffee mug, and started to walk toward Con, who stood at odds with herself in the middle of the floor, as so often this week. “Joanna could stay with Jerry,” Barbara said then. “Besides, you told me you were leaving him.”

  Con didn’t answer. When Barbara lifted her arm and let it drop—a gesture that said “I give up”—Con remembered how she’d always done that, how Barbara had lifted her arm when she wore a red plaid cotton dress to second or third grade, with a handkerchief pinned to her chest. “Barbara,” she said quietly, “I’m glad you came.”

  “Of course I came,” said Barbara, with a broad, shaky smile. She had shiny black eyes that became shinier now. She looked pretty and kind.

  “Do you want more coffee?” said Con—as if they had all day, as if it were her house. But the phone rang, and it was Marlene. Con told her about the arrival of Joanna and then Barbara, but Marlene didn’t sound interested. “Listen, do you have my address?” she said. “When can you send me the financial records?”

  “Financial records?” said Con, and she saw Joanna look up sharply. Maybe it would be wiser not to send Marlene the canceled checks, or not right away. She’d look them over, at least.

  “There must be canceled checks and so forth,” Marlene was saying.

  “I saw canceled checks,” Con said. “I’ll find them.”

  “It’s not a large apartment,” said Marlene. “Just get them to me before you go home.”

  “I have to go,” Con said. “My sister—”

  “All right, all right.” The phone clattered, and she was listening to nothing. Marlene had hung up.

  A taxi all the way to the Metropolitan Museum would have been ridiculously expensive, Marlene said, and she didn’t mind changing trains. She seemed tired as she climbed the stairs at 86th Street in Manhattan, but the walk to Fifth Avenue was not long. At the museum, the broad, shallow steps—which had made Con feel royal as a girl—were busy with people going both ways under the banners announcing exhibits. Con didn’t know why she was nervous. Marlene wanted to rest before looking at paintings, and they sat on benches in the Great Hall. Then she wanted to go to the ladies’ room. Then they sat on a bench again. “Connie,” she said then, after silence—they watched crowds pass, and Joanna studied a map of the museum—but then she stopped. Her eyes were darker and deeper than ever. Her face seemed less taut than usual, less disdainful. Con was sure Marlene would say she needed to take a cab back to Brooklyn and forget El Greco and the opera. But instead she said, “You’d know this. When did El Greco live? Before or after Michelangelo?”

  Con didn’t know. “After,” said Joanna, who was shifting restlessly in front of them. “Michelangelo died when El Greco was young.”

  Marlene said, “I was not a good painter, but I actually was”—she paused—“a painter. Paint is wonderful.”

  “Do you paint, Joanna?” Peggy said. “I know you sculpt.”

  “I’ve painted. Lately if you give me a canvas I want to cut a hole in it and stick my arm through.”

  “Learn to paint,” Marlene said. “Ugly big lumps will take you just so far.”

  “I know how to paint,” said Joanna evenly.

  “I wasn’t bad, before the war,” said Marlene. “I never went back to it after the war, and during the war—well, nothing was possible.”

  “Except kissing sailors,” said Con, but nobody was listening.

  “Shortages,” Marlene continued. “Rationing.”

  Joanna said, “My grandmother, during the war—”

  She stopped, and Marlene was silent for a long minute. She stretched her right arm forward, then her left, as far as possible, shaking out the long fingers of each hand. Then she said, “I temporarily lost touch with Gert, not long after we kissed those sailors. She moved to Florida. I’m sure she sent her address, but I never got it.” Since Marlene had spoken of her boyfriend the criminal, Con had been trying to remember her letters to Gert from the war years. She remembered almost nothing—mostly a feeling of discomfort. Now she started, opened her mouth to speak, and closed it again. For a moment she’d wondered if she’d only dreamed or imagined the letters. No. Joanna said nothing, and after a while Marlene said, “Let’s go.” She stood and stretched again, a limber and lively woman in black, carrying a small black nylon purse that hung from one shoulder. She touched Con’s arm, and then let her weight rest on it. They began to walk toward the elevator. Con’s body seemed compressed by the weight of Marlene’s hand and arm, which stayed where they were. She felt her bones move closer together, and she thought of them as lighter, more fragile objects than she usually did. Her bones were those of a fish.

  Gert’s voice spoke casually in Con’s ear, with its old nasal bluntness. “You’re tough.”

  “Something incredible,” Con said—to herself, not to any of her companions.

  “What?” Peggy turned and looked over her shoulder. “What’s incredible?”

  She and Joanna paused and Joanna looked at her skeptically. “How long ago did my mother die?” Con said. They all considered, but Con answered her own question. “She died in April, 1989. Fourteen and a half years.” They were passing Greek and Roman antiquities. Joanna dropped behind them. “My purse came back,” she said.

  “What purse?” Peggy came to stand beside her.

  “The week my mother died, my purse was stolen,” Con said. “Someone mailed it to Jerry’s house, and he brought it from Philly. It’s at home. I almost couldn’t leave today. I didn’t want to leave it.”

  “That is incredible,” said Peggy. “I remember when it was stolen.”

  Glad to have a topic other than her mother and Marlene, Con described the bag and its contents. She told them about the wallet—red nylon, worn at the corners—and the cards inside. She described the small hair brush and the light blue plastic tube with two tampons inside. Peggy and Marlene listened, walking past the ancient, distinguished exhibits in the museum, nodding as if Con’s rediscovery had equal meaning. As Con spoke she began to cry, and then she couldn’t stop. Her mother watched from somewhere in the air—baffled, irritated, loving. Through tears Con said, “And a little wooden box my mother used for jewelry. It was next to my bag, on her dresser, when I went to sleep that night.”

  “Is the jewelry all there?” said Peggy.

  “Oh, I guess so. It wasn’t fancy jewelry.” Con stopped to wait as they arrived at the elevator and waited for Joanna. They emerged on the second floor, joining crowds moving toward and away from the El Greco show.

  “Can we get some rules clear here?” Joanna said. “Do we have to stick together? I can’t do museums with people who insist on sticking together.”

  “Then I guess we don’t,” said Peggy, sounding amused, “but I’d like to stay with your mother, if that’s all right.”

  Con thought she’d better stay with Marlene. Approaching the paintings, she tried to clarify her thoughts. She had two goals for the afternoon, and it occurred to her that they contradicted each other. First, she wanted calm—enough calm to look at pictures, to enjoy her friends and her daughter, to hold on to her thoughts about her mother. She wanted Joanna to keep silent and the anticipatory tension she still felt—which had increased when Marlene said she hadn’t been in touch with Gert during the war—to go away. But Con wanted something else as well. Anticipatory tension doesn’t readily disappear. She felt almost ready to understand something she’d wanted to understand all her life, and she wanted—she intensely wanted—the risk and excitement of discovery. She wanted to know what it had been like to be Gert and Marlene before Con herself was born, or when she was a child: to penetrate that privacy, to be part of it. It seemed dangerous to want to know—she herself would do nothing to try to find out more than she knew already, not today—but she couldn’t stop wanting to know. And though she wanted Joanna to stay s
ilent, she also did not want that. Joanna had something to say, that was clear.

  As they paused in front of the first paintings, Con firmly put aside these thoughts in favor of calm, in favor of spending the rest of the day taking in the entertainment that would be provided by El Greco and Puccini, not by anyone she knew. The first paintings seemed irrelevant. Why did people hang paintings and why did others come and stand in front of them? Too many people were standing in front of these. The people pretended to be overwhelmed, or didn’t bother to pretend and talked about something else. Con was determined not to pretend, but she couldn’t keep herself from adopting the pose of an intelligent woman looking at paintings. Marlene marched from painting to painting and said nothing. Peggy read the descriptive placards. El Greco was a disorderly painter, Con thought. She had eaten too much lunch. Disorderly and religious, and Con didn’t trust religion. El Greco was a disorderly painter, she found herself thinking once more, and wondered what she meant by it. Around her people with headsets stared as they listened to the instructive voices inside. What did those people know? Would she be better off if she knew it?

  He painted standard religious scenes—with elongated figures, of course. Anyone could see that El Greco made no attempt to make the figures realistic, but someone behind Con said, “So real,” as if that were the issue, and Con felt a familiar contempt for everyone in the museum but herself, then argued inwardly with her contempt. She was worse than Marlene. She had forgotten to look at the last two or three paintings. Her mother was dead, Marlene had a bad secret, and Jerry had nearly caused them to be killed falling from ancient elevated train tracks, or attacked by neighborhood vigilantes—and she wanted to be with Jerry again, but surely that too was an emotion not to trust.