Nothing Is Quite Forgotten in Brooklyn (4 page)

Gert said that though she admired Marlene's looks and vivacity, they didn't become friends for several months because Gert was shy and Marlene barely noticed her. But one day, one of the buyers was rude to Marlene. (Con thought her mother meant that he'd said she didn't look good in the bathing suit; much later she realized he must have propositioned Marlene.) Marlene was afraid to leave the office—it was winter, so it was dark outside at the end of the working day—and she asked Gert to walk her to the subway. Naturally, Marlene was dressed again when they left the office, but such a point had been made of her dazzling appearance that as a child hearing the story, Con pictured her stepping out into the cold in a bathing suit. The two young women walked to the subway station. Gert thought she spied the man in question, edging into the shadows near the building. They talked loudly about Gert's boyfriend, so the man might think Abe would show up at any moment and defend Marlene.

At the subway station, they conferred again. Marlene was still afraid. They lived in different neighborhoods in Brooklyn, and their neighborhoods were reached by different trains. So kindhearted Gert went with Marlene on the Jamaica el, instead of taking the IRT—but as everybody knew, once you got to Brooklyn there was no way to get from the northeastern part (where Marlene lived) to the southwestern part (where Gert lived) without going most of the way back: the lines in Brooklyn fan out instead of connecting. At Marlene's stop, Gert went home with her. Marlene, astonishingly, had her own tiny apart
ment, and of all things they ate bacon and eggs for supper. Then Gert spent the night on the couch in a borrowed nightgown. After that, they were friends.

Marlene told Con her own version of this story three times, several years apart, apparently forgetting she'd told it before. The first time, she said she'd only pretended to be afraid of a man: she simply wanted to make friends with Gert. Nobody had lurked in the shadows. The second time, she said she was dating her boss, and had quarreled with him. She had an appointment to meet him, but if she kept walking, talking loudly to Gert about another man (Abe), then the boss—waiting in the shadows—would become jealous. The third time she said again that she'd only pretended to be afraid: she had been trying for months to think of a way to make friends with Gert. She considered Gert refined, because she came from a nice family. Marlene's relatives were in Toledo, Ohio. Her parents were dead. She wanted to become part of a family—Gert's family—but she was afraid Gert disapproved of her for modeling bathing suits (and occasionally dating the buyers). “And I don't mean just having a drink, if you follow me,” she'd said to Con.

The various stories raised more questions than they answered. Con didn't believe Marlene would go to so much trouble to make her boss jealous, but it was even harder to believe she'd schemed to make friends with Con's ordinary mother. But Gert's story raised the same question—why did she want to be friends with flighty Marlene? And the trains—did the problem with the trains make sense? Was traveling in Brooklyn
so
difficult that Gert would have spent the night at Marlene's when she didn't even know her? The past was lit only partially, and in
the dappled light of the little she knew, what Con wanted most to see was hidden. She could picture Gert at an old-fashioned switchboard, and Marlene coming out of the bathroom in that sleek black tank suit, with her hips swaying. But she couldn't see the expressions on either girl's face. Now Gert needed Marlene, but Marlene didn't need Gert, and wasn't in the habit of making sacrifices. Con couldn't imagine why Marlene—who made no secret of her frequent irritation with Gert—stayed friends with her.

She was supposed to call her office, and since she remembered the number, she finally did, trying to distract herself from the question of Joanna's whereabouts. The secretary was glad to hear from her. Something was up but she didn't know exactly what, and the head of the office was on another line. Con gave her mother's number. Now she was waiting for so many phone calls that she felt justified sitting near the phone, waiting, just running her finger down the orange stripe on the tablecloth. She couldn't think how long her mother had owned this tablecloth, but she knew from the way she felt, looking at it, that it did not go back to her childhood, to the time when she was so small that her mother seemed infallibly interesting and trustworthy.

It didn't have the sad, dense purity of objects that had been around longer than she could remember, from the times, during the war, when Gert had repeatedly packed up her baby—and then two babies—and moved. There were such objects: the stolen jewelry box with its map of France; a small oil painting Marlene had done, of an orange sand dune and blue sea and sky; a big square glass ashtray, dark red, with beveled sides and
smooth cuts at each corner, where a cigarette might rest. It had one broken corner. The striped cloth was much newer than these things. It came from a time after Con had discovered that her mother, though frantic with good will, could not—maybe because she was frantic—guess what her children felt.

Con ran again. Ten steps from one end of the apartment to the other, ten back. The phone rang at last: the director of the office, a lawyer named Sarah. Mabel Turner had called. Con didn't mention her present predicament. “I'll call her,” she said. That number had escaped the burglar.

“It's probably not the decision, this soon,” Sarah said. “But if it is, and it's a no, we've got to move fast.” There had been a zoning hearing.

Con suspected that Sarah considered her foolish, not quite capable of seeing for herself what mattered. She hung up and tried unsuccessfully to reach Mabel. She wondered whether, when they were in prison, women had the use of a phone. She tried Joanna again and left a second message. “I don't care if you stayed home from school. Please call me. Something happened.”

A week ago she and Joanna had argued about Jerry's trips. “It's easier for me to understand him,” Joanna had said. “I'm African American, like him.” Jerry did not usually describe himself as African American. He refused to discuss race or specify what his was. His father had been a Jew, his mother a light-skinned black woman from the neighborhood who worked in the lamp store and married the boss's son; Jerry looked ethnically ambiguous. Joanna was only half as African American as Jerry, but her skin was as dark as his, with a rosy tinge, and she sometimes said, “I'd have been a slave.” At other times
she remembered she was mostly Jewish and said, “Hitler would have killed me.” Joanna had a restless, strikingly mature laugh. Would she laugh at a man with a gun? And what would he do then?

If Joanna was perfectly all right, anything Con might do to find her would be the needless effort of a neurotic. If Joanna was not all right, a sensible mother would call anybody, whatever anyone might think. But without her address book, it was difficult. The people in Philadelphia whose phone numbers she remembered were somehow—like people she thought of in New York—the wrong people. At last she called the lamp store—she knew that number—and reached the manager, Howard, a loyal and humble man with scraps of gray hair around a wide, bald crown. When Joanna was a baby, Con would sometimes walk to the store with the stroller. Howard would pretend to pinch off Joanna's nose, then solemnly show her the tip of his thumb between his fingers. “I got your nose,” he'd say. Now he listened intently. “Shall I call the police?” he said when she paused.

“No. But if you could go to the house…”

“I'll find her,” said Howard.

In her mother's house, she was only a daughter. She had never lived in this apartment, in Park Slope. Gert had moved in when Con was in college, and on vacations she slept on a sheet tucked around the sofa cushions. Mornings, she'd gaze out the window at the polygon of sky between the tops of nearby buildings. Her mother would be drinking coffee at the table, her back to her daughter, wearing a pink bathrobe, an ancestor of the present pink robe.

She and her mother, during those vacations, were alone;
Con's sister, Barbara, had her own place in the city. Gert was still working then—she had eventually become a school secretary—and she told funny stories about the pupils and teachers. Earlier and later her stories never arrived anywhere, but in those years they had punch lines. Gert was competent though slow, puzzled by those who were less conscientious than she was. Some teachers never did paperwork on time, no matter how many times she mentioned it.

Gert had been a single parent through the war, with her husband in the army. Then she'd been a married woman for what must have seemed, in retrospect, like a minute—eleven years. And then Con's father had a heart attack and died, and Gert returned to the single life, which probably felt a little more natural, though harder and sadder, as she brought up her girls.

The doorbell rang. It was dark outside. The day was gone. At the door was the building superintendent, a tense, quick-talking Puerto Rican man. He was sorry about the break-in. “I tell her, make sure you lock that door! Does she listen?”

Con was sure he had never said such a thing. She was annoyed with him for condescending to her mother, though she knew she did the same thing herself. She demanded to know how she could get her locks changed and he shook his head sympathetically. “Aren't you supposed to
do
something?” she asked. The super was vague. He said he'd bring new locks, but he didn't know when. He went away.

The phone rang. “I went to your house,” said Howard's voice.

“Howard, what is it?”

“It's locked up. No lights. The newspaper's outside. The mail.”

“Did you ring the tenants' bell?”

“Nobody home there either. Their mail was taken in.”

“I'm calling the police.”

“I already did,” said Howard. “They want her friends' names. I have a number for you to call. Have you got a pencil?”

“She could be in there—”

“At first they wouldn't even listen—teenagers are always taking off. You got a pencil?” he said again.

Gert kept pens and pencils in a bowl; after several tries Con found a pen that worked. She hung up quickly. “If only Jerry was with you” was the last thing Howard said, but she didn't want Jerry. She wanted to touch Joanna's taut, lithe shoulders so badly her fingers hurt. Howard had spoken quickly. She'd never heard him speak quickly. In a moment she found herself talking to a police officer for the second time that day. He wrote down all the names she could think of. “The parents never know the real friend,” he said, “but sometimes the friends that the parents think of can tell you the name of the real friend.”

“I understand,” said Con miserably.

“You don't have numbers for these kids?” She explained where she was and what had happened. There was a pause she didn't like. “If you can get here that might be better,” he said. “You could notice something.”

“Do you think the burglar—”

“I'll get back to you,” said the officer. She hung up. She could pour some cat food into a bowl and leave the house, taking her suitcase and leaving the door unlocked. She had enough money for a subway token, and she could go to Penn Station. Conceivably she could sneak onto Jersey Transit. But what if she
was caught? And if she got home, how would she get in? Now, anyway, she didn't want to leave this phone. Joanna had this number. To her slight embarrassment, Con was hungry. There was more canned soup. There was bread. There was vanilla ice milk.

The police officer had said there was no reason to break down the house door and find out what or who was inside, or not yet. Con did not call him back. She sat near the kitchen phone all evening, turning on the television and turning it off again, unable to concentrate on the Speaker of the House or the
Exxon Valdez
, the ship that had run aground in Alaska, causing a huge oil spill. She wanted to call Howard, who seemed wise and fatherly, but he might not continue to be wise.

Con brought a blanket and slept on the carpeted floor near the table that night, just where she'd so luxuriously studied the striped tablecloth in the morning. She could not have said why she was sleeping on the floor; a phone was next to the bed. By then she was rigid, unable to think what to do, unable to do anything. She woke often, slept, then woke again. At six, she lay looking at the brightening sky above the building tops, unable to remember a painful dream. At some point she'd moved to the sofa.

She had slept in her clothes. She lay unmoving for a long time. Her pants were twisted uncomfortably against her crotch, but if she stayed where she was, maybe she could keep clear of fright; maybe fear filled some but not all the air in the room. She reminded herself that the only trouble she was sure she had was the missing bag. It wasn't logical to think that Joanna was in trouble simply because Con couldn't find her. Tenta
tively, Con moved her legs, stood up, and shifted her clothes. Then she sat down again.

For an hour, she sat with her legs drawn up under her. Sometimes she played with the dark red glass ashtray on the end table next to her. She remembered fitting her fingers in the cuts for cigarettes when she was a child, and now she ran her index finger on the ashtray's broken edge, then on its whole, smooth slopes. At the edge of memory was the knowledge of how it had broken, but when she tried to focus on the event, she couldn't. She had been little, her father had been present, and the memory had a wolf in it, but that part must have been a dream. Something had frightened her—that was all she knew. At last she stood and loped back and forth in the living room, in a sloppy way, not fast enough to call it running. She went to the bathroom; on the floor near the toilet her mother had left a copy of
Prevention
magazine, open to a story about the benefits of oat bran. She returned to the living room. When the phone finally rang, the call was from Mabel Turner, apologetic for not calling the day before. They'd received legal papers. She'd given them to her boyfriend, who worked in a law office.