Nothing Is Quite Forgotten in Brooklyn (13 page)

Of another letter, only a page survived.

It was extortion. Marlene did not just have a criminal mind, she was—had been—a criminal. Marlene got money from Con's mother for a black market scheme, then threatened to tell Con's father if Gert didn't send more money. Con put down the letters. Marlene was not alluring and splendid, she was selfish and crafty.
It was much better not to think this thought. Con couldn't ask Gert and Marlene about these letters, and it would be best to forget they existed. She didn't put them into her suitcase, but left them on her mother's dresser. She put the afghan on top of them.

The phone rang as she turned from the pile of letters and went into the kitchen, wanting something sweet. “I was looking at that letter from the zoning,” said Mabel Turner's voice. “I think there's a deadline.”

Con tried to focus on this very different letter, and eventually she got Mabel to read everything aloud. She had until Monday to file an appeal. How could she do that from Brooklyn? “Call me tomorrow, okay?” she said.

As soon as she hung up the phone rang again so quickly that she expected Mabel's voice again, asking a forgotten question. But it was Marlene. “Baby, I've been thinking. I know you're busy, but I think we should talk about this now,” Marlene said. Her voice sounded more confident than ever, more certain that Con understood a great deal less than Marlene did—probably a great deal less than anybody should. And yet it held, as well, the old promise of intimacy, of
possible
intimacy, as if—if Con proved worthy, and with proper tutelage she might—together they'd escape the well-meaning ordinariness that was apparently essential to anything connected with Con's mother (such as this prison of an apartment). At any minute Con and Marlene would achieve charm. They'd achieve glamour.

“Talk about what?” Con said, startled; she was scared but expectant—as if Marlene had seen her reading the letters. Marlene could explain; maybe Con had misunderstood. She eased herself back against the kitchen counter, but remained standing.

“Power of attorney,” Marlene said.

Now Con felt a tendril of anger make its way through her body. She tried to control her voice. She stood up. “I'm a
lawyer
,” she said.

“Well, I know
that
!” Marlene crooned.

“I'm actually practicing law right here in the middle of the night in my mother's apartment. I was just on the phone with a client.” She was competent, she meant. It was not precisely Marlene who doubted Con's competence; it was probably Con herself. She didn't know exactly how to acquire her mother's power of attorney, though she could find out. She didn't want to know. She didn't want to manage—or even look at—her mother's records of money coming in, money going out; they were personal, like food going in, being digested, becoming blood or shit. But if acquiring her mother's power of attorney became necessary—and Con was not sure that it was necessary now—if it became necessary, of course she could do it. She would find out how, as she was about to find out how to file an appeal in Mabel's case.

“I'm not sure you can,” said Marlene, and Con sucked in her breath. “You don't live in the same state as your mother.”

“What does
that
have to do with it?” Now she was walking with the receiver once more, as in the conversation with Jerry. No wonder she was so tired. She had to get rid of Marlene.

“I think the person who holds power of attorney must reside in the same state. I've been through this quite a bit. My aunt, my cousin.”

Con had never heard of this aunt or cousin before—had no memory of Marlene looking after frail relatives—and had
certainly never heard of a law against out-of-state holders of power of attorney.

“And Barbara's not even in the country!” Marlene was saying triumphantly.

“You're mistaken,” Con said. She'd never worked on a case involving power of attorney, but Marlene's claim was decidedly unlikely. “I'll look into it.”

“Don't,” said Marlene. “Let me take this on. I feel bad that I can't have your mother come and live with me, but honey—things aren't good. Something has to be done. And this is something I can do. If there's anything I don't understand, I know people to ask. This is something I'm good at.”

As if her mother's voice had emanated from the stained couch cushions, Con heard Gert say, “Marlene is smart about money,” as she had said it many times during Con's girlhood and later: when a decision had to be made about insurance, or Gert's pension, or investment of the death benefits and life insurance money that had come into Gert's hands when Con's father died. “I'll ask Marlene,” Gert would say. “She'll know somebody.” And Marlene had always known somebody.

But now, though it was late, and Con didn't want to think about her mother right now—her marriage was ending, actually ending—and though it was tempting just to say, “Okay, Marlene, thank you,” Con didn't. The pile of onionskin pages, marked with Marlene's large, elegant loops and angles—expertly shaded by a nicely controlled fountain pen that had probably cost more than the young Marlene could afford (and who had bought it for her?)—was still nearby. Maybe she'd jumped to a hasty conclusion about extortion. Maybe it wasn't that. But even so.

“I just don't think it's a good idea,” Con said. “Let's talk about it again in a day or two. Let me see how my mother seems when she gets home.”

“You're being unreasonable, Connie,” Marlene said. “We all know there are times when our dear Connie is unreasonable, and this is one of those times.”

“I don't think I'm being unreasonable.”

“Well, of course not! You never do, do you?”

Con sat down at the table and fingered the stripe in the color she liked so much. She would have liked to enter that orange or maybe pink stripe—would it be called coral?—as if it were a room, a quiet room. “I'm not being unreasonable. This is hasty, Marlene.”

“Have you any idea what your mother may be doing with your inheritance? Have you looked over her records?”

“I'm not sure she keeps records.”

“That's even worse!” said Marlene, but she sounded delighted with Gert's degree of helplessness. “People like Gert, when they get this way—they do crazy things with money and there's not much you can do about it if you didn't secure power of attorney.” Marlene's voice seemed to deepen as she spoke. Maybe she was smoking while talking. Con thought she heard an intake of breath, as of someone inhaling. Smoking was dangerous, but not for Marlene. No cancer cell would dare invade those lungs. She'd stare it down. That would be that.

“No. No. I'm not going to agree that you get her power of attorney, and you'd better not take her to a lawyer in the morning and just do it!” said Con, and now she was becoming unreasonable after all. It was heady to fight like this with Marlene—
risky, but thrilling. “Because if you do, I'm not letting you get away with it,” Con said. The problem was that she was starting to cry. “This is going too far, Marlene. You're not in charge of my mother, and I'm a lawyer, and there are ways to stop you.”

“Stop me from what? What in the world are you accusing me of?” Marlene said in her deep, almost masculine voice. “What am I going to do to her? Who takes better care of her than I do? Who keeps track of her if it isn't for me? You have no judgment when it comes to something like that. You'll probably believe the nonsense she's going to tell you, about me, about the past, about your father.”

“She's my mother!” Con found herself crying. “Leave her alone! She's my mother!”

There was silence, a much longer silence than phone calls ordinarily include, as if Con might never hear that voice again. Then Marlene spoke, and her voice had dropped in volume and in pitch. “Oh, Connie, I didn't mean to upset you. Of course she's your mother. Nobody doubts that she's your mother!”

“The answer is no,” Con managed to say.

“Don't worry about it,” said Marlene, and despite herself, Con was glad they weren't going to hang up in the middle of a shouting match, and was also still worried that Marlene didn't really respect her, was just changing her tactics.

“I'm going to bed,” Con said. “I'll talk to you tomorrow.”

“You know me,” Marlene was saying. “You know Marlene. You know me.” It was a kind of goodnight. The conversation, at any rate, was over.

 

Con turned to her computer, and now she thought about nothing but employment discrimination for the rest of Wednesday morning and much of the afternoon. One woman had been fired for having repeated black eyes. “You're a face,” her boss had said. She'd been a receptionist. “It would be different if you weren't a face.”

Except that suddenly Con remembered Peggy. Peggy had been right. There would be other occasions to fret about Joanna. She wrote a quick e-mail message. “I can have dinner tonight.”

“Wonderful,” Peggy wrote back. They usually met at a quiet place near Peggy's apartment. Con would leave the office early enough to get home and take a bath. A nap would be welcome, but she didn't think she'd get one. She e-mailed a friend about Joanna's arrest, a law school classmate who worked in a firm that handled political cases. The woman was interested, but not interested enough. Her message said, “It's too bad she was drunk. If we knew for sure they told her to be quiet, that would be different.”

She shouldn't have said Joanna was drunk. Con should find out whether arrests like this were common. She went to a few Web sites. Civil rights groups were busy with larger issues: prisoners were being held without charges at Guantánamo Bay; American citizens who looked as if they might be Arabs were being harassed and arrested. The cops who had arrested Joanna knew they'd done something at least ambiguous, since the charges had been dropped. Still, Joanna had spent a night in jail.

Con didn't leave work early. Aaron stuck his head into her office just as she was starting to think about turning off her
computer. He wanted to talk about the woman whose interview Con had witnessed. She ended up back in his office. Everything felt more possible after the conversation—which was good—but half an hour had passed. She could be on time at the restaurant only if she went straight from the office. But she hadn't showered in the morning. She couldn't enjoy Peggy unless she was clean. She'd be late, but would apologize, and Peggy would forgive her. In Brooklyn, she walked home quickly from the subway station, jabbed at the elevator button, barely glanced at the mail, and began taking off her clothes on the way to her bedroom.