Nothing Is Quite Forgotten in Brooklyn (22 page)

“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.

Con didn't see how this could be done. She tried to stand and found she could. “I don't want you to lean on me,” she 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.

“The cops are on their way over,” the man called.

Con reached the window and looked up at the man, like an actress playing a dog or cat. She had an impulse to say “Woof.” Then, as the man watched, she moved her hands up the short walls at the side of the tracks, so as to get upright again. Jerry was crawling behind her. He hadn't needed to hold on after all. “My husband is crazy,” she heard herself say. “I'm sorry. He's a historian.”

“You're not allowed to be out there,” the man said.

She said, “Of course not. It's not safe. He's nuts, and now he's hurt. Can we come through your apartment to get down? He can't get down the way we came up.”

“I don't know if I can let you do that,” the man said. “I don't know anything about you.”

“I live on Sterling Place,” said Con. She almost said that Jerry lived in Philadelphia, but remembered she had called him her husband. “We live on Sterling Place. Prospect Heights?”

The man considered. “My brother lives near there,” he said, as if that proved something. “Wait.” He closed the window.

“I don't know if I can make it down,” Jerry said. “This ankle is killing me.”

“He'll be back,” said Con. The man returned and opened the window again. Con retrieved her bag and brushed off her coat as best she could, then made her way over the sill. “I'm sorry to be so dirty,” she said. When she got inside, the man was standing to the side—not blocking her path but leaning against his stove—holding a knife pointed at her. She turned, raising her hand, to tell Jerry to stay outside. Maybe he could scream. Maybe the cops had really been called, and would arrest but also protect them.

“I'm sorry, ma'am,” said the man. “I have to be sure. You can't be too careful.”

Con stood still, studying him, then understood. “You think we're going to hurt you?” she said.

“I let you into my home,” said the man.

This was true. “It's all right,” she said to Jerry, who climbed onto the sill and sat there for a moment. He couldn't put weight on the injured ankle and had to try several times before, with a cry, he ended up on his hands and knees on the man's kitchen floor. Now Con supported him as he stood and leaned against her. With the cherrywood man remaining where he was—apparently protecting his stove—they moved side by side, leaning together, across the kitchen, through a sparsely furnished, ex
tremely clean living room, and out into the corridor. There was no elevator, and it took them a few moments to figure out how to get down the stairs. Finally, Jerry hopped, and Con waited below to steady him if he started to tumble. At last they reached the downstairs lobby, crossed it, and, leaning together, made their way outside, stared at by two middle-school kids and a woman with a stroller. There was no sign of any cops. “Where's the subway?” said Jerry. “We'll never get a cab around here.”

Con wanted to try, but first insisted they walk a block away from Marcus Ogilvy's abandoned, cathedral-like structure, soaring in an abbreviated way between apartment houses. She didn't want to see any cops, just in case. And then they kept going. She kept an eye open for a cab but never saw one. It took most of a cold hour to reach the subway station and then they couldn't quite find it. The Long Island Rail Road, running down Atlantic Avenue, was between them and the station. At last a young woman came along, and in answer to Con's question said, “Oh, the mystery way” and pointed out an underpass that would take them through the railway station and upstairs on the other side of it. They had to climb down many stairs, then up many more. But beyond the railroad, in the fading afternoon light, was the Broadway Junction Station, the proposed terminus of the Brooklyn Circle. The el could be reached with an escalator.

If Marcus Ogilvy had had his wish, they could have traveled back to Con's apartment much more quickly. Maybe there was something else they could have done, even as things were, but she was too tired to figure it out. They went all the way into Manhattan and back. Jerry's ankle started to swell. Con re
membered that she'd had almost no sleep the night before, and almost no lunch. She fell asleep leaning against the window of one of the trains, and when they got off the last train, Jerry with his bad ankle supported her. It was dark out. As they made their way slowly up the street and along the last block to Con's apartment house, she remembered Marlene, arriving at 5:33 at LaGuardia. It was ten after five. She was starving. She was dirty. Marlene had no cell phone. Still in the street, Con dialed Joanna's cell phone with her own. “I don't even know what I want you to do,” she began.

“Think what it is,” Joanna said. “I'll do it.”

“Where are you?”

“I'm at Barney's.”

“You've been there all day?”

“No—I was home for an hour or so,” said Joanna.

“Your dad has a sprained ankle,” Con began. Should she explain her day to Joanna now, or later, or never? “We're just getting home, and Marlene's arriving in twenty minutes.” Joanna said she'd call the airline and have Marlene paged. “She can take a taxi,” she said. “She doesn't need you to meet her. I'll ask them to tell her to take a taxi.”

“Can she really do that?”

“Of course. Which airline?”

Con would even have a little time. She could change her clothes. She could eat something. She could get Jerry off her shoulder and put him to bed somewhere. They made their way, he hopping, up the three steps to her front door, then up the difficult marble step into the lobby, then into the elevator and down the corridor into the apartment. She noticed something
odd as she passed the open kitchen doorway, but deposited Jerry on a chair in her study before she went back to see. Her mother's wooden box was not where it had been; it was on the counter instead of the table. And it was open. Next to it was a bent paper clip. Joanna had opened it. Con glanced at the tangle of necklaces and random objects, then gathered up the jewelry box and her old black nylon purse, brought them into her bedroom, and stuffed them into her bottom drawer. Then she stripped off her clothes, put on a bathrobe, returned to the kitchen, and ate six crackers. Then she went into the bathroom and filled the tub with hot water.