Nothing Is Quite Forgotten in Brooklyn (27 page)

“Today,” said Con, “I'm going home.”

“Oh,” said Barbara. “I thought you were going to stay here.”

“Why would I stay here?”

“Well, somebody should, for a while, don't you think?” She put the coffee cup down on the end table to gesture, then swept her hand around the apartment. “The cat…” Once again, Con had forgotten the cat, but Joanna knew where he hid, and dragged him out and cuddled him.

“Did you think I was going to live here?” Con said. “What about Joanna? What about school? I've already been stuck here a week.”

Peggy made an irritated noise. She was taking things out of the refrigerator, her back to the room.

“I just can't
believe
we don't have a mother!” Barbara said. Then she stood up, picked up the coffee mug, and started to walk toward Con, who stood at odds with herself in the middle of the floor, as so often this week. “Joanna could stay with Jerry,” Barbara said then. “Besides, you told me you were leaving him.”

Con didn't answer. When Barbara lifted her arm and let it drop—a gesture that said “I give up”—Con remembered how she'd always done that, how Barbara had lifted her arm when she wore a red plaid cotton dress to second or third grade, with a handkerchief pinned to her chest. “Barbara,” she said quietly, “I'm glad you came.”

“Of course I came,” said Barbara, with a broad, shaky smile. She had shiny black eyes that became shinier now. She looked pretty and kind.

“Do you want more coffee?” said Con—as if they had all day, as if it were her house. But the phone rang, and it was Marlene. Con told her about the arrival of Joanna and then Barbara, but Marlene didn't sound interested. “Listen, do you have my address?” she said. “When can you send me the financial records?”

“Financial records?” said Con, and she saw Joanna look up sharply. Maybe it would be wiser not to send Marlene the canceled checks, or not right away. She'd look them over, at least.

“There must be canceled checks and so forth,” Marlene was saying.

“I saw canceled checks,” Con said. “I'll find them.”

“It's not a large apartment,” said Marlene. “Just get them to me before you go home.”

“I have to go,” Con said. “My sister—”

“All right, all right.” The phone clattered, and she was listening to nothing. Marlene had hung up.

 

A taxi all the way to the Metropolitan Museum would have been ridiculously expensive, Marlene said, and she didn't mind changing trains. She seemed tired as she climbed the stairs at 86th Street in Manhattan, but the walk to Fifth Avenue was not long. At the museum, the broad, shallow steps—which had made Con feel royal as a girl—were busy with people going both ways under the banners announcing exhibits. Con didn't
know why she was nervous. Marlene wanted to rest before looking at paintings, and they sat on benches in the Great Hall. Then she wanted to go to the ladies' room. Then they sat on a bench again. “Connie,” she said then, after silence—they watched crowds pass, and Joanna studied a map of the museum—but then she stopped. Her eyes were darker and deeper than ever. Her face seemed less taut than usual, less disdainful. Con was sure Marlene would say she needed to take a cab back to Brooklyn and forget El Greco and the opera. But instead she said, “You'd know this. When did El Greco live? Before or after Michelangelo?”

Con didn't know. “After,” said Joanna, who was shifting restlessly in front of them. “Michelangelo died when El Greco was young.”

Marlene said, “I was not a good painter, but I actually
was
”—she paused—“a painter. Paint is wonderful.”

“Do you paint, Joanna?” Peggy said. “I know you sculpt.”

“I've painted. Lately if you give me a canvas I want to cut a hole in it and stick my arm through.”

“Learn to paint,” Marlene said. “Ugly big lumps will take you just so far.”

“I know how to paint,” said Joanna evenly.

“I wasn't bad, before the war,” said Marlene. “I never went back to it after the war, and during the war—well, nothing was possible.”

“Except kissing sailors,” said Con, but nobody was listening.

“Shortages,” Marlene continued. “Rationing.”

Joanna said, “My grandmother, during the war—”

She stopped, and Marlene was silent for a long minute. She stretched her right arm forward, then her left, as far as possible, shaking out the long fingers of each hand. Then she said, “I temporarily lost touch with Gert, not long after we kissed those sailors. She moved to Florida. I'm sure she sent her address, but I never got it.” Since Marlene had spoken of her boyfriend the criminal, Con had been trying to remember her letters to Gert from the war years. She remembered almost nothing—mostly a feeling of discomfort. Now she started, opened her mouth to speak, and closed it again. For a moment she'd wondered if she'd only dreamed or imagined the letters. No. Joanna said nothing, and after a while Marlene said, “Let's go.” She stood and stretched again, a limber and lively woman in black, carrying a small black nylon purse that hung from one shoulder. She touched Con's arm, and then let her weight rest on it. They began to walk toward the elevator. Con's body seemed compressed by the weight of Marlene's hand and arm, which stayed where they were. She felt her bones move closer together, and she thought of them as lighter, more fragile objects than she usually did. Her bones were those of a fish.

Gert's voice spoke casually in Con's ear, with its old nasal bluntness. “You're tough.”

“Something incredible,” Con said—to herself, not to any of her companions.

“What?” Peggy turned and looked over her shoulder. “What's incredible?”

She and Joanna paused and Joanna looked at her skeptically. “How long ago did my mother die?” Con said. They all
considered, but Con answered her own question. “She died in April, 1989. Fourteen and a half years.” They were passing Greek and Roman antiquities. Joanna dropped behind them. “My purse came back,” she said.

“What purse?” Peggy came to stand beside her.

“The week my mother died, my purse was stolen,” Con said. “Someone mailed it to Jerry's house, and he brought it from Philly. It's at home. I almost couldn't leave today. I didn't want to leave it.”

“That
is
incredible,” said Peggy. “I remember when it was stolen.”

Glad to have a topic other than her mother and Marlene, Con described the bag and its contents. She told them about the wallet—red nylon, worn at the corners—and the cards inside. She described the small hair brush and the light blue plastic tube with two tampons inside. Peggy and Marlene listened, walking past the ancient, distinguished exhibits in the museum, nodding as if Con's rediscovery had equal meaning. As Con spoke she began to cry, and then she couldn't stop. Her mother watched from somewhere in the air—baffled, irritated, loving. Through tears Con said, “And a little wooden box my mother used for jewelry. It was next to my bag, on her dresser, when I went to sleep that night.”

“Is the jewelry all there?” said Peggy.

“Oh, I guess so. It wasn't fancy jewelry.” Con stopped to wait as they arrived at the elevator and waited for Joanna. They emerged on the second floor, joining crowds moving toward and away from the El Greco show.

“Can we get some rules clear here?” Joanna said. “Do we
have to stick together? I can't do museums with people who insist on sticking together.”

“Then I guess we don't,” said Peggy, sounding amused, “but I'd like to stay with your mother, if that's all right.”

Con thought she'd better stay with Marlene. Approaching the paintings, she tried to clarify her thoughts. She had two goals for the afternoon, and it occurred to her that they contradicted each other. First, she wanted calm—enough calm to look at pictures, to enjoy her friends and her daughter, to hold on to her thoughts about her mother. She wanted Joanna to keep silent and the anticipatory tension she still felt—which had increased when Marlene said she hadn't been in touch with Gert during the war—to go away. But Con wanted something else as well. Anticipatory tension doesn't readily disappear. She felt almost ready to understand something she'd wanted to understand all her life, and she wanted—she intensely wanted—the risk and excitement of discovery. She wanted to know what it had been like to be Gert and Marlene before Con herself was born, or when she was a child: to penetrate that privacy, to be part of it. It seemed dangerous to want to know—she herself would do nothing to try to find out more than she knew already, not today—but she couldn't stop wanting to know. And though she wanted Joanna to stay silent, she also did not want that. Joanna had something to say, that was clear.

As they paused in front of the first paintings, Con firmly put aside these thoughts in favor of calm, in favor of spending the rest of the day taking in the entertainment that would be provided by El Greco and Puccini, not by anyone she knew. The first paintings seemed irrelevant. Why did people hang
paintings and why did others come and stand in front of them? Too many people were standing in front of these. The people pretended to be overwhelmed, or didn't bother to pretend and talked about something else. Con was determined not to pretend, but she couldn't keep herself from adopting the pose of an intelligent woman looking at paintings. Marlene marched from painting to painting and said nothing. Peggy read the descriptive placards. El Greco was a disorderly painter, Con thought. She had eaten too much lunch. Disorderly and religious, and Con didn't trust religion. El Greco was a disorderly painter, she found herself thinking once more, and wondered what she meant by it. Around her people with headsets stared as they listened to the instructive voices inside. What did those people know? Would she be better off if she knew it?

He painted standard religious scenes—with elongated figures, of course. Anyone could see that El Greco made no attempt to make the figures realistic, but someone behind Con said, “So real,” as if that were the issue, and Con felt a familiar contempt for everyone in the museum but herself, then argued inwardly with her contempt. She was worse than Marlene. She had forgotten to look at the last two or three paintings. Her mother was dead, Marlene had a bad secret, and Jerry had nearly caused them to be killed falling from ancient elevated train tracks, or attacked by neighborhood vigilantes—and she wanted to be with Jerry again, but surely that too was an emotion not to trust.

A heavy swirl of red made her blink. She had been crying again. All she could see of the painting in front of her was red in the center. Then her vision cleared. Hands snatched at
the red robe of Jesus while cruel idiots behind him jeered and stared and loved the excitement of what was about to happen. The painting's violence caused Con to make a sound, an exclamation of surprise. “What?” said Peggy, and looked around.

Con smiled at her in what felt like a sentimental way, as if they were looking at a picture of kittens and a baby, not a man being stripped naked by people about to kill him, a scene that compelled her, whatever her mood, whether the man was divine or not. The arm grabbing the red fabric was about to pull it up, which would be dreadful. Jesus ignored all this; he looked upward, and it was hard not to look up with him. His hand pointed to himself and also up. Spears pointed up. There were clouds. But in front of Jesus a man leaned over, incising a hole into the cross, to make it easier to nail Jesus onto it.

Peggy said, “That's his mother.” Three women watched not Jesus or the crowd but the man with the awl. One was Mary, and another put her hand on Mary's upper arm to futilely warn her back, maybe even to push her back. “El Greco had a fight with the people who commissioned the painting,” said Peggy. “They didn't like it that he put the three Marys in, or that the crowd is higher than Christ's head on the canvas. He got mad and demanded a lot of money, which I think he didn't get.”

“Idiots,” said Con.

The painting gave her a sadomasochistic thrill about the enormity of the humiliation that was coming. She had seen paintings and reproductions of paintings by El Greco many times before, but had not felt this uncomfortable stirring, almost as if she were a combination of the people in the painting: the brutes, and the mother who watches a calm workman
prepare to torture and murder her son. Con did not identify with Christ; she couldn't imagine that calm. Maybe El Greco couldn't either. Con thought none of the prayerful saints looking skyward—in painting after painting—was convincing. They looked more like people trying to read skywriting.

Then, one painting with an upward swoop was
not
unconvincing. “Look,” she said. It was the Virgin of the Immaculate Conception, a woman rising into the sky, surrounded by flying angels, with a city below her. The angels' wings looked capable of keeping them up. The painting made Con giddy. “Here,” she said, “I
believe
in the verticality.”

“He's vertical all the time,” said Peggy. Marlene had moved on.

“But usually I don't believe it.”

“I don't see the difference.”

“Swoosh!” said Con, to demonstrate, and gestured so violently in the crowded hall that she smacked a stranger in the face, a woman coming up behind her to look at the painting.

“Hey!” said the woman.

“I'm sorry!” said Con. “I didn't hurt you, did I?”

“As a matter of fact, you did,” the woman said. She was younger than Con, maybe in her late thirties or forties, wearing panty hose and a suit. She put her hand to her nose. “Blood,” she said. She showed Con her hand. Reaching her bloodied hand out, she seemed to resemble one of the saints or martyrs in the paintings, perhaps displaying the stigmata. That thought seemed slightly funny to Con, but the woman was neither amused nor forgiving.