Nothing Is Quite Forgotten in Brooklyn (21 page)

“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 Ogil
vy'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.

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.