Nothing Is Quite Forgotten in Brooklyn

by Alice Mattison

  A heavy swirl of red made her blink. She had been crying again. All she could see of the painting in front of her was red in the center. Then her vision cleared. Hands snatched at the red robe of Jesus while cruel idiots behind him jeered and stared and loved the excitement of what was about to happen. The painting’s violence caused Con to make a sound, an exclamation of surprise. “What?” said Peggy, and looked around.

  Con smiled at her in what felt like a sentimental way, as if they were looking at a picture of kittens and a baby, not a man being stripped naked by people about to kill him, a scene that compelled her, whatever her mood, whether the man was divine or not. The arm grabbing the red fabric was about to pull it up, which would be dreadful. Jesus ignored all this; he looked upward, and it was hard not to look up with him. His hand pointed to himself and also up. Spears pointed up. There were clouds. But in front of Jesus a man leaned over, incising a hole into the cross, to make it easier to nail Jesus onto it.

  Peggy said, “That’s his mother.” Three women watched not Jesus or the crowd but the man with the awl. One was Mary, and another put her hand on Mary’s upper arm to futilely warn her back, maybe even to push her back. “El Greco had a fight with the people who commissioned the painting,” said Peggy. “They didn’t like it that he put the three Marys in, or that the crowd is higher than Christ’s head on the canvas. He got mad and demanded a lot of money, which I think he didn’t get.”

  “Idiots,” said Con.

  The painting gave her a sadomasochistic thrill about the enormity of the humiliation that was coming. She had seen paintings and reproductions of paintings by El Greco many times before, but had not felt this uncomfortable stirring, almost as if she were a combination of the people in the painting: the brutes, and the mother who watches a calm workman prepare to torture and murder her son. Con did not identify with Christ; she couldn’t imagine that calm. Maybe El Greco couldn’t either. Con thought none of the prayerful saints looking skyward—in painting after painting—was convincing. They looked more like people trying to read skywriting.

  Then, one painting with an upward swoop was not unconvincing. “Look,” she said. It was the Virgin of the Immaculate Conception, a woman rising into the sky, surrounded by flying angels, with a city below her. The angels’ wings looked capable of keeping them up. The painting made Con giddy. “Here,” she said, “I believe in the verticality.”

  “He’s vertical all the time,” said Peggy. Marlene had moved on.

  “But usually I don’t believe it.”

  “I don’t see the difference.”

  “Swoosh!” said Con, to demonstrate, and gestured so violently in the crowded hall that she smacked a stranger in the face, a woman coming up behind her to look at the painting.

  “Hey!” said the woman.

  “I’m sorry!” said Con. “I didn’t hurt you, did I?”

  “As a matter of fact, you did,” the woman said. She was younger than Con, maybe in her late thirties or forties, wearing panty hose and a suit. She put her hand to her nose. “Blood,” she said. She showed Con her hand. Reaching her bloodied hand out, she seemed to resemble one of the saints or martyrs in the paintings, perhaps displaying the stigmata. That thought seemed slightly funny to Con, but the woman was neither amused nor forgiving.

  “I’m so sorry!” Con said again. “I didn’t realize you were behind me.”

  “But it’s so crowded here, you should have realized,” said the woman.

  “I should have. I’m so sorry,” Con said again.

  “Jen, let me see,” said the man with her. “Do you have a Kleenex? I don’t seem to have one. You’ve got to hold something to your face.”

  What if the woman was a hemophiliac? If she died, Con had killed her. A crowd was gathering. A man handed the woman a clean white handkerchief. Everyone would blame Con and take care of Jen, this young woman with cool blue eyes now looking at Con over the top of the handkerchief.

  “What happened?” Marlene now said.

  Peggy explained.

  “Well, if this woman is going to push her way to the front—” Marlene said loudly, gesturing in her turn. Con raised a hand to stop her, then lowered it, looking around to see if she’d struck anyone else. “I saw her push,” Marlene said. “She pushed past me.”

  “An accident,” said the owner of the handkerchief, who had earned the right to take charge by owning and sacrificing such a useful and clean object. The small crowd, like the crowds around saints and Christ in the paintings—greedy for event—dispersed. Con moved along, looking at paintings without seeing them, fighting tears yet again. She was pleased that Marlene had lied for her.

  They stopped at a painting Con knew well, because it belonged to this museum: A Cardinal. A man in early old age sat on a wooden chair, grasping one arm. Tensely, did he grasp it tensely? He wore a cardinal’s red robes and hat, and the skirts of the robe opened to display a white lace garment underneath. The patterned floor under his chair seemed to tilt slightly, and as Con and her party stood looking at it—at a moment when the crowd happened to be elsewhere—the painting seemed to pitch the man forward, toward them. And so the clutching of the chair seemed necessary to keep the cardinal from sliding off it. What Con had long loved about the painting was a scrap of white paper on the floor in front of him, the aberration in the formal pose.

  Joanna appeared beside them. They hadn’t seen her since she’d refused their company. “Are you almost done?” she said.

  “You don’t like it?” said Con.

  “Too crowded,” said Joanna. “What was all that?” She shrugged in the direction of the gallery they’d come from. “Did you guys get into a fight?”

  Con said, “It was nothing.” Then she said, “Marlene rescued me from an angry mob.”

  Joanna didn’t answer. She looked at the painting in front of her, the cardinal with the scrap of paper. “I hate this,” she said.

  “Oh, you do not,” said Con.

  “How do you know whether I hate it or not?” Joanna squared her solid shoulders to look up and down the painting. “This kind of painting,” she said. “People find this in it, they find that in it—this one’s supposed to be the Grand Inquisitor, but nobody’s sure, and once it is, you can see cruelty, et cetera, et cetera. But he’s just using tired Christian iconography, that’s all it is.”

  “So the paper on the floor is a symbol of something?” said Peggy. “That’s what I like, the scrap of paper on the floor.”

  “It’s where he signed it. I guess he was showing off. He didn’t want to put it in the corner. I guess it’s a symbol—I don’t know of what. He somehow manages to be unbearably pious and unbearably egocentric at the same time.”

  “But it’s odd,” said Peggy.

  “I think the guy does look cruel,” Con said. The man wore glasses.

  “Cruelty, disorder,” said Marlene. “Cruelty and disorder.”

  “It’s a show-off painting,” said Joanna. “‘Look at me,’ he’s saying, ‘I’m violating perspective! Look at me, I’m so religious!’ I bet he was obnoxious. This painting is so male. How can you stand it?”

  “You’re confusing him with Barnaby Willis,” Con said.

  “Oh, honestly, Mother, I know the difference between El Greco and Barnaby Willis!”

  “I’d give anything for a cup of coffee,” Marlene said then.

  Peggy said, “Does disorder have to do with cruelty? The paper on the floor—you can’t put it out of your mind.”

  “Disorder doesn’t necessarily have to do with cruelty,” said Con.

  “Maybe it does,” Peggy said.

  “Of course it does,” Joanna said. “Let’s go. Marlene wants coffee. I want food. What time is it?”

  The day was disorderly. Reasonable people would be thinking about an early supper. Con, cranky all afternoon, wanted—surely they all wanted—something sweet, something sweet and a cup of coffee. They made their way slowly out of the museum. As they walked, Con found herself thinking a
bout Jerry. Maybe he’d be her third husband. Third husbands were good, Peggy had always said. Third husbands were lovable because you were afraid they’d die, so their faults were adorable. Con didn’t think Jerry had high cholesterol, but she didn’t know for sure. Something else could be wrong….

  Peggy suggested a little place on a side street near Lincoln Center. At last, they took a taxi. Peggy sat with the driver and Con was squeezed between Joanna and Marlene. Marlene talked steadily about Central Park as they drove through it to the West Side. “The leaves are pretty much gone,” she said. “When Lou and I got married, it was October and the leaves were glorious. We spent our wedding night at the Hotel Pierre. I said, ‘I’d rather have a short fancy honeymoon than a long, cheap one.’ I didn’t feel like being alone with him for a week in Florida.”

  “Marlene,” Con said suddenly. “Are you pleased with the way you’ve lived? How should we live?”

  “I never wanted children,” said Marlene.

  Con was sorry she’d asked. When they stopped, Peggy paid and helped Marlene out of the cab. Con walked with Joanna, and Joanna touched her arm. “You know how to live better than she does,” Joanna said, and Con turned her head and kissed her tall daughter’s ear. Peggy held the door at the little restaurant, two steps down. A waiter fussily seated them and offered menus. They shrugged off their coats.

  Emptying Gert’s refrigerator took more time than Con would have imagined. Barbara argued with Peggy about the mustard, which she thought Peggy should take. Peggy was willing to take only a bottle of green olives with pimentos. Almost everything else was wilted or crusted over or oddly colored. Con found a bottle of soy sauce and couldn’t imagine Gert cooking with soy sauce. She had probably bought it to use in a recipe—so as to impress a daughter—maybe around 1970. Joanna went into the bedroom, saying she’d put clothes into plastic bags for donation. When Con passed the open bedroom door a while later, Joanna was asleep. Later she thought she heard her crying. She went into the room, partly because it was lunchtime and she’d offered to go and buy sandwiches. Joanna was sitting cross-legged on the floor. A half-filled garbage bag was in front of her, and a pile of dresses to one side. She was reading Marlene’s letters.

  “Where did you get those?” Con said.

  “What is all this shit?” said Joanna.

  “Old letters. I want to keep them. Put them away.”

  “I’m just looking.”

  Con glanced behind her. “I really want to keep them. I’d rather Barbara didn’t know about them.”

  Joanna looked up. “Oh. Okay. Because they’re from Marlene? There are letters from Grandma too. Why didn’t she mail them?”

  “I think they must be drafts,” said Con.

  It wouldn’t be possible to leave that day. She didn’t know why she’d thought she could.

  “She seems mad at Marlene in this one,” Joanna said. “I read one where she was mad at you, too.”

  “Marlene was always complicated,” Con said, with the feeling that she was talking faster than she should have been. “I love it that Grandma stayed friends with her. Sometimes Marlene must have found Grandma a little dull.”

  “Grandma isn’t boring,” said Joanna.

  “No, of course not,” Con said, noticing but not commenting on the present tense.

  Con looked around the room. It was chaotic. Drawers were open everywhere. As she stood, perplexed at what had happened to her mother’s bedroom, Joanna gathered the letters and stuffed them into the garbage bag.

  “What are you doing? I’m keeping them,” said Con.

  “Oh, we’re keeping everything in here,” Joanna said. The bag was big, half full already.

  “What else did you put in?”

  “Knitting patterns, stuff like that.” Joanna had tilted forward on her knees, and was reaching deep into the bag. Her thighs were strong and solid. She seemed a little frightening—so full of purpose. Then she sat back. Her face was flushed, maybe teary.

  “You’ll miss Grandma,” Con said.

  “What did Marlene do to her?” said Joanna.

  “She didn’t do anything. It just happened.”

  “Marlene’s not a good person,” Joanna said. Con lowered herself to the floor to take her daughter in her arms, but Joanna wrenched away.

  Looking around the restaurant, Marlene smiled at all of them—mischievous, conspiratorial. “My feet hurt,” she said. “I’m kicking my shoes off.”

  “Marlene,” Joanna said, shoving her chair back slightly, as if to get a larger and longer view of the old woman, who sat diagonally across from her, looking shrewdly around, sizing up the place. “Marlene,” she said, “did you go to prison after the war?”

  Con was sitting next to Marlene, and she saw Peggy’s eyes, across the table, register alarm, then quickly survey the room, as if looking for a distraction. Joanna put her ratty backpack on the table, and began taking things out: a scarf, a water bottle, a fat sketchbook with pages coming out, a black cotton pouch that looked like something a medieval peasant might have carried to market containing his year’s wages, a large box of Tampax.

  “I looked up Turandot,” Peggy said then. “The City Opera uses supertitles, but I thought we still might want to know in advance what it’s about. I never saw it.”

  “It’s Puccini’s last opera,” Con said. She was grateful to Peggy for taking the group’s attention from Joanna, who had put back what she’d taken out, but was still rummaging in her backpack. It was impossible to know what the question—which Marlene had ignored—had meant, or whether the rummaging was connected to it.

  A waiter appeared and everything stopped while they figured out what to order. Joanna wanted a salad. Marlene asked for tea and strudel. Peggy and Con ordered coffee and chocolate cake. The waiter looked disapproving so Peggy ordered a bottle of wine as well. “That’s a good idea,” Con said, fearing—as usual—that Joanna would drink too much of it, but Joanna refused a wineglass. They returned to a discussion of the opera, and Peggy explained that it was about a Chinese princess who has her suitors slaughtered if they can’t answer three riddles.

  “It sounds stupid,” Con said.

  “Is it gruesome?” said Marlene.

  “I think so, for an opera at least,” said Peggy.

  Marlene said, “If you can’t enjoy stupid plots, you can’t enjoy opera.” The waiter poured Peggy a taste of wine, and as soon as she’d nodded, Marlene held her glass out.

  “What’s odd,” Peggy continued, “is that it’s a twentieth-century opera, but the plot is like a parody of nineteenth-century operas. A disappointed suitor is beheaded at the beginning. Offstage, thank God. The hero answers the riddle and she still doesn’t want to marry him. I think that’s the power of it: this woman would rather kill everybody than marry anybody.”

  “Love of cruelty,” Con said.

  “Cruelty, or maybe it’s the wish to annihilate. To make things go away,” Peggy said. Their food arrived. The slabs of chocolate cake were satisfyingly large. Con began eating hers at the edges, comforted to know there was so much of it.

  “The opera is not complimentary toward China,” Peggy said. “For a long time it was illegal to perform it there. It’s his last work—did I say that? He didn’t finish it, but somebody else did—so the very end is not as good.”

  “We’ll make certain not to enjoy it,” said Marlene, smiling at Peggy. Marlene had a closed-mouth smile; her teeth never showed.

  “Cruelty is exciting,” said Joanna.

  “I don’t think so!” Con said.

  “Of course it is,” said Peggy. “Cruelty and disorder—but not just any disorder. That’s why the scrap on the floor works. It’s the control in the rest of the painting. The hands on the arms of the chair. That makes the scrap unbearable. It’s violent. Don’t you have to struggle not to try to pick it up?”

  “If we’re going to have a good time,” Marlene said, “we’d better just decide we like blood.”

  Peggy went on, “In the
opera, the chorus is the crowd around the palace.” She tasted her cake. “Sometimes they scream for blood, sometimes for mercy.”

  “Does the hero marry her at the end?” asked Con.

  “Yes, they somehow figure out that they love each other, though I don’t think they’ve actually met,” Peggy said.

  “Oh, I’m not going to like it,” said Con.

  “The music is wonderful,” Peggy said.

  “I won’t read the supertitles.”

  “No, no,” Joanna said. “Don’t you get it? The pleasure is in the extremes. Puccini’s as smart as you—he knows this is an extreme plot. Trust him. Don’t just dismiss it. Don’t think it’s silly.”

  “Have you ever seen it?” said Con.

  “No,” said Joanna. She had not begun to eat her salad, and now she put it aside and again began taking things from her backpack. The pack, worn and dirty, took up much of the table, its webbing straps scattered amid the food and glasses. Con pulled the wine bottle out of danger. Peggy had ordered an undelicate Italian red wine. Con took some more.

  At last Joanna found an envelope, which apparently was what she wanted, and Con recognized it as one of hers, with her bank’s logo in the corner. She’d probably left it opened and empty on the corner of the kitchen table, and Joanna must have picked it up to put something into it. From it she withdrew a yellowed scrap of newspaper. The print looked crowded and smudged.

  “What’s that?” Con said.

  “You went to prison, didn’t you, Marlene?” Joanna said in a voice that sounded surprisingly gentle and surprisingly weary, all but middle-aged.

  “Prison?” said Marlene. “Well, that’s a long not very amusing story.”

  “You went to prison after the war for selling meat and butter on the black market. You were part of an enormous ring—mostly they didn’t prosecute, but the man who ran your ring was high up in the crime world, and they were after him. You both went to prison, along with a couple of other people. My grandmother kept the clipping.”