Nothing Is Quite Forgotten in Brooklyn (14 page)

The shower soothed her. When she turned off the water she heard a voice.

She wrapped a towel around herself and opened the bathroom door. “Joanna?” she said. “What are you doing here?”

“I called the airport and there was a flight.” Joanna came toward her mother, still in a jacket, keys in her hand. “I barely made it.”

Behind her Con could see that the apartment door was open. “Go close the door,” she said. Joanna's bag was in the middle of her study.

“I think I love Tim. I never should have broken up with him,” Joanna said then. “You shouldn't have been so negative about him.”

“Go close the door,” said Con. She reached up, clutching her towel, to give Joanna a damp, one-armed hug.

“Oh, my life,” said Joanna, suddenly in tears. “I shouldn't have broken up with him in the first place. I wouldn't have gone to the bar. None of this would have happened.”

“Jail was horrible, wasn't it?” said Con quietly.

“It was horrible.”

“But close the door.” Joanna turned, and Con went into her bedroom and dressed. She wouldn't cancel dinner with Peggy, who would already be on her way, or in the restaurant. Before leaving, Con perched briefly, in her jacket, on the arm of her gray squashy chair, and listened to Joanna, who was already distractedly clutching her green fibrous twine as she spoke, walking back and forth across the dusty living room rug, pushing her wild curls back with her free hand.

“I have to leave,” said Con. “I'm having dinner with Peggy.”

“I'll be all right. There are eggs, I guess.”

“Yes.” Con lingered, though she was already late. As she left she asked, “Is there some reason you
want
to see Marlene? Is that why you came home?”

“I don't do or not do things because of Marlene,” said Joanna.

 

When she and Marlene hung up after the argument, Con stood with her hand on the phone. She'd been unable to mention the letters. Did she have to think differently about Marlene from now on? Marlene had stolen money from her mother as the burglar had stolen money from Con—or so it seemed. Of course, this was a long time ago. As Con brushed her teeth, she thought not about the crime or the argument or even Jerry. She'd turned from the letters stunned at how time passes and life changes, how the young become the old, yet remain who they are until they lose everything. Her mother—the silent one in the corre
spondence—seemed much as she was now: mute, helpless before her friend's fearless competence. Con knew a little more about that friendship now, but she still didn't understand it. Marlene hadn't been friends with her mother, surely, only for Gert's pathetic contributions to the black market scheme? Did she want to show her power over Gert—to cause timid Gertrude Tepper to participate, even marginally, in wrongdoing?

All this time Con had forgotten to think about herself and Jerry, but when she went to bed, that grief overtook the others. She fell asleep feeling a kind of dread, as if that ordinary frame house full of ex-prisoners—in an old, crowded, humdrum Philadelphia suburb—were sliding into an abyss, as if ground crumbled beneath it, and everything else—all Con knew—would go with it. She was sad about arguing with Marlene and astonished by her decision to leave Jerry, but no less sure. It was necessary, but terrible. She was asleep in her mother's bed when the phone rang. It was dark. “I'm afraid of losing you,” said Jerry's voice.

She didn't want to talk lying down. Her mother's bed had no headboard. No wonder Gert's head was slipping off her neck, Con found herself thinking. She wasn't awake yet. “Look,” she said, thinking she was being clear. “What would make me feel better?” Then she said, “Wait a minute,” and put down the receiver, reached for the afghan, then rolled it and used it to prop up the pillow. When she took the phone again she was not quite lying down. “You woke me up.”

“I couldn't sleep. I thought maybe you couldn't sleep.”

“What time is it?”

“Midnight. Ten after twelve.”

Within a substantial silence she thought as clearly as she
could. “There's nothing in me I wouldn't reconsider,” she said, “except loving Joanna and believing—”

She tried to say what lay behind her work, what it was on which she could not compromise. “Believing in the Bill of Rights,” she said.

“The Bill of Rights?” he said.

“Freedom of speech. Freedom of—”

“I know what the Bill of Rights is,” said Jerry. “I guess I wouldn't stop believing in it either, but I don't think about it often.”

“I thought maybe you wanted to know if I'd stay married after all,” she said.

“It crossed my mind,” he said. “Do you mean the Bill of Rights gives you the right to leave me?”

“No, I'd have the right to leave you whether the Bill of Rights existed or not. The Bill of Rights makes it possible to resist injustice.” He wouldn't try to imprison her. He could not wrap her in the cords of the lamps and keep her. The pillow was slipping. After all, maybe she could talk lying down. She pulled the blanket around herself.

“Do you think I compromise on those things? Is that the trouble?” Jerry said. She had still not been clear.

“No,” she said. “I would never stop loving Joanna, and I'd never stop believing in the Bill of Rights.”

“You said that.”

“But anything
else
—if you had asked me—” She began to cry because she had used the past perfect tense. “If you had asked me, I would think about changing my mind.”

“So you can change your mind about loving me? I don't think I can change my mind about loving you.”

These last two days, she'd sometimes thought she was only pretending her marriage was over, but now she felt the kind of fear she'd experienced not when she first realized that her bag was not on the dresser, but when she continued not to see it, when certainty replaced anxiety. “I'm talking about you, Jerry,” she said, and she was now sitting up, legs crossed, leaning forward with her elbows on her knees. “I'm talking about being willing to consider being different.”

“How can anybody be different?”

“I can be different. I can at least consider being different.”

“You mean giving up my trips?” said Jerry. “You'll stay married to me if I give up my trips?”

She hadn't put it to herself that way, and she didn't want to know what he'd say if she said yes. She didn't want to hear him say that he'd give her up rather than give up the trips. She was cold. She leaned forward and pulled the blanket around her, making a tent that covered her head. Inside, it was dark, but if she could sit in the dark she'd know what to say. The receiver's cord made an opening in the tent.

For a moment she wanted to tell Jerry about Marlene's letters—and about the argument—but she knew she wouldn't. It would all be part of the archive of separation, the eventually large body of what would not be common knowledge between them. Common property would be hard enough to sort out, but common knowledge…it was sad to think of the jokes they'd lose.

She said, “If I'd found out—if I'd overheard you and Joanna discussing it, and if I had asked you very seriously not to let her go, would you have changed your mind?”

“We didn't discuss it when you were in the house,” he said.

“I know, but if.”

“I wouldn't have invited her if I couldn't have done it privately.”

“You're not private about the trips. You leave your cards everywhere.”

“I'm private about some parts. I don't write everything down,” he said. She was hot, now. She shook off the tent of blanket, and gleams of light came from the window and from the hall, where there was a nightlight. “Why can't you compromise?” she said. “I think I'd be all right if I could understand why you can't compromise about
anything
. That's what I'm saying,” she said. “I'd reconsider everything except those two things. You reconsider nothing. It's not just the trips. You reconsider
nothing
.”

“I don't?”

“I want to go to sleep.”

“Maybe I don't know how to reconsider. I don't think I consider, in the first place,” said Jerry.

“You sound pleased with yourself. I don't think it's anything to be particularly proud of.”

He ignored what she said, but had become interested in the topic. “I don't think I make decisions,” he continued. “I think they come to me ready-made. I couldn't reconsider—I'd have to know how they began, so as to begin them differently.”

“Did you ever try?”

There was such a long pause that she thought he'd gone to sleep, and she considered putting down the receiver. Then he said in a low, uncertain voice, “I don't know.”

She started to speak, but he kept talking. “If we separate,” he said shakily, “will Joanna be all right?”

“She won't like it. But she might be less surprised than you and I,” Con said.

Another long pause. “She'd be mostly with you?”

“Yes.” He didn't want Joanna to live with him, she noted, though he claimed to think so highly of her. And Con did want her daughter to live with her.

“Do you mind if I talk to her about it?” he said.

“Don't,” said Con quickly. “Not yet.”

Again there was a long silence, while she wondered if he was talking from the room where Joanna slept, or somewhere else. Again she grew cold. This time she lay down under the blankets, but still held the receiver to her ear. She didn't know what she hoped Jerry would say.

“Maybe it's time to be apart for a while,” he said at last. “It's going to be hard to figure out.”

“You reconsidered?” She was joking, in a way.

“Maybe not.”

“I still love you,” said Con, though she had thought she didn't.

“I love you too.”

“It's terribly, terribly sad,” she said, as if it were a story about other people.

“The saddest of sad,” he said. “Good night, dear.”

She hung up and wept in the bed, but then she slept soundly. When she awoke it was light, and for a moment she didn't understand that her mother's phone was ringing again. Then she thought Jerry had called her back and had been dialing all night. All night the phone had been ringing, and yet the machine hadn't picked up. She wondered why not, and thought that possibly someone
had broken into the apartment again and had taken the answering machine. Then the ringing stopped and the announcement began in the other room, and she understood that she'd slept through only two or three rings. She picked up the phone and said, “Hello.”

Her mother's voice, once again, explained as if it might be surprising news that she wasn't home right then, and pronounced numbers. “Hello?” said Con. “Can you hear me? I don't know how to stop the machine.”

“It's me,” said Marlene. Then more loudly. “It's
me
. Your friend Marlene.”

“I know,” said Con. “What time is it?”

Marlene sounded stymied. The machine stopped and there was a beep. “I don't know. About nine.”

“I was asleep. Look, about last night—”

“Never mind about that. Sweetheart, I have to tell you something,” said Marlene, and Con understood that if Marlene sounded strange, it wasn't because of their argument.

“Is something wrong?” said Con. Then, involuntarily, “Joanna?”

“What?”

“Nothing,” said Con. “What is it?”

“Connie—I don't know how to tell you,” said Marlene. “Connie. Sweetheart,” she said. “Gert. Your mother.”

“What?”
Con said, with the start of a scream.

“Connie, she died—she's dead. I found her dead in my house.”

“No!” Con shouted, and then, “You can't say that, it's not true.”

When Con stopped making sounds, Marlene was in the middle of a sentence and she continued to talk. She said, “It's
for the best” but it was not for the best. It was true, however. A doctor had said so. Marlene had already called a funeral home and they were coming for the body. “It's going to be complicated, getting her wherever you want her—New York, I assume. Where is your father?”

“He's dead,” Con said, and it took her a while to understand that Marlene wanted to know where her father was buried.

Finally she said, “I'll call you back,” because she was afraid she might faint. Con hung up the phone and went to the bathroom. Her mother's copy of
Prevention
was still next to the toilet, still open to the article about oat bran. Then she got back into her mother's bed. She turned onto her stomach and breathed the smell of the bed—her own smell, her mother's perhaps still—and then she just lay there. She was sure the news wasn't true, but if it wasn't true, there would be no reason to say it, so it had to be true. She didn't cry and didn't sleep. Her body hurt—her shoulders, her arms, her legs—and she lay as still as she could. She thought only in short sentences. It was impossible to think anything that made sense, anything she might think in a week or even a day. She was aware of light coming through the window, and the cat, who had emerged from some hiding place during the night and was sleeping near her. Now he jumped heavily off the bed, and soon she heard him scratching in his litter box in the bathroom. He returned, and wanted to sleep on her head. She pushed him aside and he tried again, but after that he slept on the blanket pressed against the protuberance that was Con's buttocks. She wondered when she would get up, when she would want to eat, as if she were someone else watching herself. An hour passed.

She had to pee again, and finally got out of bed. Her bare feet were cold. She returned to the bed and sat on the edge. For a long time she thought about warming her feet and at last, with what seemed like all her energy, she stood up, found the socks she'd worn the day before, and put them on. Then she put a sweater on over her pajamas—she was freezing—and went into the living room. It looked like a photograph of itself. When she saw the answering machine on the kitchen counter she knew it had recorded her entire conversation with Marlene. Then she wasn't sure. She could press “announcement” and hear her mother's voice, Gert's unbearably trusting and needless repetition of the phone number. Con could not bring herself to hear her mother's announcement. But she had to know if she and Marlene had been recorded.