Nothing Is Quite Forgotten in Brooklyn (5 page)

“But I'm your lawyer,” said Con.

“That's why I'm calling.”

“I have to see the papers.”

“He'll bring them back. I didn't know when I could reach you.”

“Well, call me when you get them. I need to get off the phone,” said Con. “I'm expecting a call from my daughter.”

“I hear you,” said Mabel, and Con thought she might mean something uncomfortably close to what Con was feeling: that
Con would like to hear from her daughter, but had no convincing reason to expect a call. The women Mabel worked with—and for all she knew, Mabel herself—probably knew about daughters who didn't call: errant daughters, missing daughters, hurt daughters. Con determined to fix her life, at least for the moment. If she fixed her life, nothing bad would have happened to Joanna. She brushed her teeth, showered, put on clean clothes. She straightened her mother's apartment a little, replacing what she'd disarranged the day before. She ate cereal with raisins and drank coffee. As she ate she remembered a phone conversation with her mother, just a few days before this trip. “Not that my old friend Marlene is always nice—you shouldn't think that,” Gert had said, in the middle of a conversation about something else. “She thinks I'm stupid.”

“No, she doesn't,” Con had said. “She wouldn't have invited you if she thought you were stupid.”

“I invited myself,” said Gert. “I just hope I'm not so stupid I make her mad.”

 

Con in her Brooklyn apartment in 2003 finished cleaning the bathroom and went for a walk. She liked to walk fast because it felt more like running, which, lately, made her knees hurt. In her crowded neighborhood, even fast walking wasn't always possible. Pedestrians pushed strollers and talked on cell phones, and there were constant small disasters of breakage, spillage, and the discharge of bodily fluids. Today the weather was cloudy and surprisingly warm for November, and Con opened her jacket. She carried money in one pocket and a cell phone
in the other, but though she kept the phone on, she hoped it wouldn't ring. At the corner she turned toward Prospect Park, falling into step behind families with children; it was almost like a summer Sunday. A woman ran with a stroller next to a little girl who pedaled a wobbling bicycle, pink streamers floating back from the handlebars. They stopped when the bike wobbled. As Con walked on, her cell phone rang.

The call was from Joanna. Even when Joanna had been missing—back in 1989—when Con could calm down she understood that her daughter was probably not dead, and indeed, though Joanna's disappearance would make Con change her life, Joanna was not only alive but, in 2003, had been staying with her mother until a few days earlier. She lived in Durham, North Carolina, with a boyfriend named Tim, and just now she'd interrupted a three-month stay in New York to go back there for a week or so. “What are you doing?” Joanna said.

“I'm on my way to the park.” The woman and children passed Con. At the corner they all waited to cross Grand Army Plaza.

“I've got a problem,” Joanna said.

“About Tim?” Without an excuse—she'd never met him—Con didn't like Tim.

“No, nothing's wrong with Tim,” said Joanna. “Barney called.”

Joanna had flunked out of one college and interrupted attendance at another to spend time in rehab because of a drinking problem. Eventually she'd graduated with a degree in art, and had become a sculptor, making her living waiting on tables. She'd quit her restaurant job and come to New York when she'd been awarded a three-month internship with a
well-known sculptor in TriBeCa. Staying in Con's spare bedroom, she filled the apartment with her work and kept Con up late talking about sculpture and the famous sculptor, whose name was Barnaby Willis. Barnaby Willis worked in steel, and Joanna was learning techniques she had never picked up in school. “I could work like this too, maybe,” she'd said, a couple of weeks earlier.

“I thought you didn't want to,” Con had said.

“I think I do want to.” What Barnaby Willis did was expensive and even dangerous—welding, manipulating metal—but bold and ambitious, and Con liked hearing Joanna sound ambitious. “Sculptors have to learn so much,” Joanna said. “Things people in hard hats know.”

Another day she said, “I once did a piece in aluminum. Aluminum sucks. But steel—you can bend steel, twist it. Steel has ductility.” Joanna's present sculptures were large but not rigid shapes—something like sea creatures, something like plants, made of industrial gray-green twine that she secured from a factory. Sometimes she knotted it until it took on a shape, sometimes she actually crocheted or knitted. Con loved to look at them; she could scarcely believe that her years of worrying about Joanna might be over. Sometimes she didn't believe it, and worried.

“How did you learn to do that?” Con had said one night, watching as Joanna crocheted an irregular gray shape with an enormous needle. “It looks like something you'd have to have surgically removed.”

“That's the idea,” said Joanna. “Grandma knitted and crocheted. Don't you remember, all over her house?”

Con didn't remember.

“She made sweaters and blankets,” said Joanna. “Wonderful ugly colors.”

“Did she teach you?”

“I guess so.” She paused and continued, “I wouldn't mind working in wool. A ten-foot monster made of green alpaca. It would cost ten thousand dollars to make, but maybe I'd sell it and make a hundred thousand. An investment. Want to invest?” Joanna was tall and sturdy, with roughly cut black curls. She looked up from crocheting and her eyes snapped. When she wasn't angry with Con, she teased her.

“I've invested plenty in you already,” said Con, pleased.

“Somebody has to. You can't make sculpture out of nothing. Well, I guess you can. Maybe I'll collect garbage and make garbage sculpture.”

“Not while you're living in
my
house,” said Con with mock ferocity. She liked conversations like that. “Aren't you upset?” she had asked when Barnaby was called out of town and Joanna said she thought she'd go back to North Carolina until he returned. “This is your time with him.”

“Oh, mostly I just clean up after him,” Joanna had said, sounding quite different from the way she'd talked about Barnaby Willis before. “And watch my ass to make sure he keeps his hands off it. Two weeks away will be fine, and I've got to talk to Tim.” She sounded slightly drunk that night; Con kept changing her mind about whether to be concerned.

Now, on the phone, she tried to concentrate. “What about Barney? What does he want?” It had taken her a moment to remember that Barney was the sculptor. For the first couple
of weeks, Joanna had used his full name each time, with a slight laugh that told Con she was excited by her good fortune. He'd become Barnaby only recently, and in the last days before Joanna went to North Carolina, he'd become “Barney, who can't be bothered to pick up his own laundry.”

“He's back in New York. He wants me there.”

“Is that bad?” Con said. She entered the park. The leaves were definitely gone, or were shrunken, shattered and dull brown. A woman in an Islamic head scarf, on her way out, organized treats for three small children.

“Of course it's bad,” Joanna said impatiently. “But do I have to go? I'm asking you as a lawyer. Just because of the internship, do I have to?”

“You'd rather stay with Tim?”

Whatever her feelings about Tim, Con hoped that Joanna would stay in the south another week. Joanna had never liked Marlene, and it would be better if they were not in the apartment together. It would also be good if Jerry were gone before Joanna showed up. The three of them had not lived together for many years, and the situation would require thought.

“It has nothing to do with Tim,” Joanna said. “I'm not sure I want to work with Barney anymore.”

This was not good news; Joanna had a long history of incompletion. But something about the tone, this time, was different. “Jo, you're not sleeping with Barney, are you?”

There was a pause. “Not so far,” said Joanna.

“Then what is it?”

Joanna sighed. The park was not crowded after all, and the cobblestone path was peaceful, framed by late fall's dull, subtle
colors. Here and there a tree was still yellow. Con took her usual turn, so as to pass the lake. “It's not like that,” Joanna was saying.

“Well, I guess I don't know how it is, then,” said Con. “Listen, the connection isn't good. Call me in a few minutes, okay?”

“I thought you were an expert on sexual harassment in the workplace,” Joanna said.

“Nobody's an expert in that subject,” said Con. “I can hardly hear you,” she said then, and hung up.

But she didn't turn the phone off and in a moment it rang again. “The truth is, Barney raped me,” said Joanna. “I really don't want to come back.”

Con was almost at the lake. A flock of furious black birds—a flurry of black spots—made noise in the tops of trees.
“What?”
she said.

“Well, maybe it wasn't rape. It wasn't rape.”

“Was it or wasn't it?”

“Surely you of all people know that's a complicated question, Ms. Attorney!” Joanna hung up.

 

In her mother's apartment, younger Con—more worried Con—stared at the phone and it rang again. This time it was Mabel Turner's boyfriend. “She said you were mad at me.”

“I'm mad at her, not you,” said Con. “If she expects me to represent her, she has to show me what comes, not give it to somebody else.”

“Yeah, I apologize. I talked her into it. I thought the lawyers in my office could give it a quick look. I didn't look at the papers—I just gave them to my boss.”

“Could I talk to him?” said Con.

“I don't think that's such a good idea. He does a lot of real estate law. He doesn't think much of that house. Prisoners. He keeps telling me it's probably illegal.”

“It's not illegal.”

Before she'd ever heard of the house, the irate neighbors had gotten a building inspector to order it closed down for a zoning violation; there was a law against more than a few unrelated people living together. Somehow Mabel or her boyfriend had learned enough to request a hearing. Nervous at last, Mabel came to see Con only after the hearing was over, and Sarah had immediately taken an interest in the case. She'd been hoping for one like it. Everyone in her office assured Con that the results of the hearing wouldn't be announced for several weeks more, so Con had felt able to come to New York. She'd planned just to give Mabel a call that week, to encourage her.

Now Con was pleased with herself for being able to sound something like a lawyer on the phone despite her state of mind. As she hung up, she found herself wondering if the women really were turning tricks outside the house, and suddenly recalled Joanna's insistence that they weren't. Joanna had wanted to go and see. Might she have gone, now that Con wasn't around to stop her? She could have reached the house on a SEPTA train. What if the women were soliciting, and Joanna had run into their pimp? Con didn't let herself continue that line of thinking.

The next phone call was from Barbara. Con's sister had lived in London for ten years. Con wouldn't have thought to call her sister when she was in trouble, but when she heard Barbara's
cranky but cheerful voice, “Mom? Wait a minute, Connie?” she sank to the floor where she was—in the kitchen—and leaned back against the cabinets, almost in tears. “Barb, Joanna's gone, nobody can find her,” she began.

“
Joanna's
gone? I thought you were going to tell me something's wrong with Mom.”

“Why?”

“Because you're answering her phone.”

“She's with Marlene.”

“Oh, I forgot. She told me. She told me several times.” When Barbara was in New York, they stayed up half the night talking and when Con got herself to London they rode around on buses and on the tube, both talking at once. Con followed her sister at such times, at ease, wondering why life ordinarily felt so much more difficult, but when she was alone again she was relieved. Nothing quite worked out for Barbara beyond today—she couldn't keep a job or a man for long—but somehow she always had enough money for today, and today was interesting or even brilliant. She would have been a tourist anywhere, and it made sense that she'd settled in a city she'd never know in any other way. But Barbara could listen and give advice, and sometimes she made Con's life seem more interesting just by its proximity to hers. What was happening to Con just now did not feel interesting but sickening—gray and ugly and, somehow, all her own fault.

Once again she told the whole story. “She's run away,” Barbara said.

“Why would she run away?”

“All kids her age want to run away. Didn't you? It was my
primary fantasy. As soon as you left, she packed a bag and took off.”

“I'm afraid she's in the house and she's dead,” said Con—making herself say it.

“No, no. She ran away. God what a stinker.”

Run away was better than dead.

“Can you reach Jerry?” said Barbara. Everyone assumed she needed Jerry.

“No. I had to cancel the credit card. I thought he'd call when it didn't work.”

“You have to talk to Jerry. Maybe she said something to him.” This was possible. “More cops,” said Barbara. “Is Fort Ticonderoga a town or is it just a fort? Are there cops?”

“But all they could do would be look for the car,” said Con. “I suppose I could call the fort.”

“Call the fort.”

Con was able to get a number for Fort Ticonderoga. A message said the fort wasn't open until summer. There was a museum. It sounded like history for children, not the kind of history Jerry liked, in which scraps of reality might be lying around. This history had been tamed, the blood scrubbed away. She called her mother, feeling obscurely that if she could just explain to Gert what had happened, Gert, despite everything, would know where Joanna was. Marlene answered the phone. “I was just about to call you,” she said. “Did you at least change the locks?”