Nothing Is Quite Forgotten in Brooklyn (23 page)

 

Even though her mother had died while Con was staying in her apartment, it didn't mean she'd be trapped there forever. Joanna had the key to their house, but it was too late to go there now, on Saturday evening. If Con had been alone, she thought she might have just taken up her mother's life where Gert had left it, used up the soup and bought more. Joanna wouldn't let her do that. Con made up a bed for her daughter on the sofa, where she herself used to sleep, though she was tempted to offer Joanna the bed, which seemed to close around Con each time she got into it. The loss of her purse was just the first sign of Gert's death, a symptom.

After she put sheets on the sofa, she got into her pajamas and returned to the living room to turn out lights. Joanna was in bed, maybe asleep.

Just then the phone rang. Con reached for the nearest phone—the one in the kitchen. She was sure it would be Jerry, but the caller was Sarah.

“You're in the office?” Con said, trying to keep her voice low. “It's Saturday night. It's midnight.”

“No, I'm not in the office,” Sarah said. “Constance, why haven't you called me?”

“I know,” said Con. “I've been crazy. My mother died.”

“Your mother died? I thought she was visiting her sister.”

“Her friend. She died there.” There was a long pause, and she could hear the drag of breath on a cigarette. Sarah smoked only when she was upset.

“Then didn't you have all the
more
reason to call me?” Sarah said. “I'm sorry. I'm sorry about your mother. But Constance. I stopped by the office to pick something up today, and while I was there, Mabel Turner came in. I know she lost the hearing, and I know the appeal probably won't win, but we have to file it. We have to keep that house going. It's a principle we need to establish, aside from everything else. When did your mother die?”

Con wondered if Sarah believed that her mother was dead. “During the night. Thursday night. Her friend called me yesterday morning. Then Mabel called me. She's giving up the house. It was never working, Sarah. The whole idea—well, it was an idea. Just an idea. Not practical.”

Con wished she had taken this call in the bedroom. Now Joanna was sitting up on the sofa, looking at her.

“This house has worked for two years,” Sarah said. “It's one of the best there are, and it's legal under the disability laws. If we lose the appeal, we might be able to go to federal court. Look, I know Mabel called you. And we're supposed to protect the house, whether it's perfect or not. We have until Monday to file an appeal, and I'm filing it. I'm taking you off this case.”

“I think Mabel never intended to stay,” Con said.

“Mabel intended to stay, and Mabel is staying. And if she didn't, someone else would run the house. But it doesn't sound as if you gave her much encouragement.”

“I'd just found out about my mother.”

“I'm sorry, Con. I really am sorry. I lost my mother, and I know how it feels. But all you had to do was call me. All you had to do was tell
her
to call me.”

“I'm sorry,” said Con.

“I'm sorry too,” Sarah said. “Constance, I don't see how you and I can keep working together. You simply gave up. You encouraged the client to give up. I don't think there's any excuse for that, and I'm sorry to say this at such at time. Well, let's talk next week. Let's both calm down and talk next week. Take it easy.” Sarah hung up.

“Who was that?” said Joanna, as Con put down the phone.

“I don't want to think about it,” Con said, and went to bed. How quickly could she forget everything about this week—this entire week?

 

As soon as she'd washed the grime of the Brooklyn Circle off her body, Con called the airport to track down Marlene. The plane had landed; the message had been given to Ms. Silverman. Con poured some scotch, then ordered sushi to be delivered, considering that Marlene would like the idea of something exotic, whether she liked the way it tasted or not.

Glass in hand, Con went into the living room, where Jerry lay on the sofa with an ice pack. As he turned his head and she
began to speak her hands seemed to become lighter, harder to control, so she had to put her drink down on a bookcase. She wanted to touch him, but didn't. Her hands—not the rest of her—wanted to touch him. Her hands had acquired a layer of softer but more highly charged air than that in the rest of the atmosphere; they had their own opinion. She pressed them to her sides. “You need more ice?” she said. “Or scotch?”

“A glass of water would be good. Thanks. The ice is still okay.” As Con went for the water, her hands still felt lighter and larger than usual, pleasanter than the gray cold hands she'd carried for years. Jerry's eyes, when she handed him the water, gleamed as if he knew. It was infuriating, really. She hadn't forgotten his faults. He looked back at the television screen. Six Americans had died that day in a helicopter crash in Iraq. Soon it would be four hundred Americans dead, many more Iraqis. Con returned to the kitchen and drank, looking at her hands. Then she looked around for something to do. There had to be dozens of tasks, but she couldn't think of any. She went down to the street and looked up and down for taxis.

Joanna came home. To Con's relief, she didn't ask just how her father had injured his ankle. Her shedding green sculptures were still everywhere, and nobody had vacuumed around them. Con's eye fell on one in her study: grayish and large, it was made of ungainly—but pleasing—twisted braids. It established itself. Maybe she'd buy it when Joanna finally left. What would Joanna charge her mother? “How's Barney?” she said. “Acting fresh?”

“Same as ever.” Joanna sat down at Con's computer and began typing. “Look, Barney's a sexy guy. He has sex on his
mind—sex and art. Sometimes it's hard to know just where one ends and the other begins.”

Con lingered in the doorway. “So he wants to make sculptures out of his interns?”

“Something like that,” Joanna said. “What can I do? I've never learned so much in my life. The tricks he shows me with metal—I never did anything like this in school. And the guy's sense of shape is incredible.”

“You're sleeping in here tonight, remember?” Con said. “On the inflatable mattress.”

“Should I get my stuff now,” said Joanna, “or can I answer my e-mails?”

“No hurry.” The sushi arrived. Con had ordered many maki rolls. Marlene didn't come, and Con called the airport again—hungry, tense, distracted by Jerry's ordinarily unmomentous presence. She was on her way from kitchen to bedroom, when she happened to glance at the apartment door as it opened on its own. Marlene was quite late, but here she was, walking in without ringing and somehow without the look of someone arriving. She carried nothing but a black tote bag with a map of the London underground, which swung from her shoulder. Her glasses were lopsided on her strong face, and the reflection on them from an overhead light fixture made her look like a Cubist painting.

She didn't seem to know where she was, despite the confident step. Con peered into Marlene's face and saw the moment at which Marlene recognized her—saw her intelligent, greedy pleasure. Con stepped forward, shy, and hugged her friend. She reached up to run her hand over Marlene's well-shaped head,
as she might with a child, though even in age Marlene looked formidable, with her white hair waving a little around her ears, emphasizing her big, haughty nose. The hair felt not quite clean. Now the tote bag, which looked heavy, slid to the floor, and Marlene grasped Con's shoulders. “My daughter!” she said, in a familiar, slightly mocking falsetto; the tone mocked the supposed daughter and somehow confessed sincerity at the same time, because it was self-mocking as well. The eyes were dark and annoyed. She straightened her glasses. “The cabbie has my bag,” she said. Now her voice was deep. “He took all my money, the bastard, after driving me all over the city.”

“You've been driving around all this time?” said Con.

“Oh, I waited for a while at the airport. I thought maybe you'd show up after all.”

“I'm sorry,” said Con. “I'll get your bag.”

“Apparently you don't bother to lock your doors, here in the country,” Marlene said. Her perfume, which suggested air and wind, had never changed over all these years. “Downstairs,” Marlene continued, “as I was about to ring, somebody came along. I guess I don't look like a terrorist.”

“Sit down,” said Con. Con led Marlene into the kitchen and went downstairs. She retrieved a black wheeled overnight bag from the cab and brought it to the elevator, enjoying the brief, tired, relieved solitude, and even the elevator's familiar creakiness, in which she took the kind of pleasure a real country dweller—who could legitimately keep doors unlocked—might take in the ruts on his untraveled road.

Marlene was not in the kitchen but in the study. There, a half-finished sculpture lay on the floor. Balls of twine surrounded a
central solid shape; but Marlene was considering something large and dark red on the table. “Is this an ashtray?” she said, picking it up. She had always been slim, with long, narrow hands. (“I should have been a pianist,” she'd said in Con's girlhood; the tone suggested that playing the piano was a slightly hilarious concept. At other times she said, “I should have been a poker player” or “a gun runner” because she could lie without getting caught.) Con had no ashtrays. She'd forgotten that Marlene smoked. Surely she didn't
still
smoke? What did doctors say to women in their eighties who smoked? “No,” she said.

“Where did you get that?” said Marlene.

“Do you need to smoke in here?” said Con.

“No. Maybe one. That ashtray was mine.”

“It was my mother's,” said Con.

“She liked it, so she took it,” Marlene said.

“If you have to smoke, I'll give you something,” Con said. “I don't use it as an ashtray.” As a child, she remembered, she had run her hand around and around it. It would be dirty with ashes, and her mother would tell her to stop. Her mother stopped smoking and it remained an ashtray, and then her mother stopped letting friends smoke in her apartment, and the dish became a candy dish, or just a pretty object. “Do you like sushi?” she said.

“Raw fish?”

“That's part of it.”

“Is that what we're having? As a matter of fact, I had a snack at the airport.”

Con got her into the kitchen, which was too small for so many people. She set the table. “Jerry's here,” she said.

“Your first husband?”

“That's right.”

“What's he doing here?” Marlene tapped on the table. Obviously she wanted to smoke.

“He comes to New York on business these days,” said Con. “He stays here sometimes.” She didn't want to talk about the afternoon, about Marcus Ogilvy's secret that was not a secret—but was, since nobody knew about it but Con and Jerry. She had been too lenient with Jerry.

“Just don't let him get too close,” said Marlene presciently, as Jerry hobbled into the kitchen, apologizing for not coming to say hello right away, shaking hands, glad to see Marlene, whom he'd known only slightly when he and Con had been married. Con called Joanna. “I've got Joanna, too,” she said.

“I thought we might be alone,” said Marlene.

By the time they ate, it was nearly ten, and Con was glad; there need not be an evening. Marlene ate maki rolls matter-of-factly with her long fingers, not bothering with chopsticks, soy sauce, or wasabi. The four of them ate everything Con had ordered. As soon as the food was gone, Marlene produced a cigarette from her pocket and lit it. Joanna left the room, and Con went to make up a bed for Jerry on the sofa. If they'd been alone, she'd have invited him back to her bed. She noted that Joanna had brought an armload of bedding into the study.

Marlene was not in the kitchen when Con returned there. The cigarette had been stubbed out on her plate. Con cleared the table, then went to the closet in the hall for more sheets and blankets. Someone was in the bathroom—Marlene, she assumed—so Con opened the door to the extra room, now va
cated by Joanna. Naked, Marlene was just lying down on the bare mattress. Her slimness made her look young when she was dressed, but without her clothes she was an old woman, with slack, sagging breasts, and loose flesh at her belly. Like a victim of some disaster, she drew herself into the fetal position. “Oh—I'm sorry!” Con said.

“Did you bring me a pillow?” said Marlene. She didn't lift her head, but the tone made her question seem not helpless but amused, as if Con was too young and foolish to have thought of a pillow.

“Don't you have a nightgown?” said Con. Marlene's bag was still in the study, and Con brought it in, opened it, and found a pair of dark blue satin pajamas. “I have to put a sheet on,” she said. “Should I help you?”

She was exhausted too. She disliked coaxing Marlene's arm into her pajama top, then supporting her as she pulled the other sleeve into position. She got Marlene to stand, helped her into the pants, and made up the bed. Then she awkwardly kissed Marlene's faintly lined cheek and left her standing next to the bed.

Con's toes hurt where she'd bruised them on the train tracks. She had an anxious moment as she got ready for bed: Jerry might find another woman, one who'd last longer than the unnamed woman from her neighborhood. Well, none had lasted so far. And if he did, maybe he'd cheat on her with Con.

She'd kept her own bed for herself. That night she awoke only once, and felt sleepers on all sides of her. How good to have Joanna temporarily near her, neither in jail nor in Barnaby Willis's ambiguous studio, and not in Tim's North Caro
lina apartment either. As Con fell asleep again, her mother's ghost—dark gray, not white, looking as her mother looked in photographs from the forties: stocky, alert, kind, with a black coil of hair at her neck—moved toward her as if down a dark street. Con could recognize her perfectly though her mother's shape was dark and the street was dark. “It's Mommy,” she said to Barbara, who was there too. “I see Mommy.”