Nothing Is Quite Forgotten in Brooklyn Read Online Free Page B

again, left another message. She wondered if he was the burglar. Her mother would regard that supposition as unfair, and maybe she’d be right. How long could he keep his job if the tenants grew suspicious? But Con liked the thought that the super was the burglar: then he would stay where he was, rolling trash cans. He would be too busy to travel to Philadelphia, using her train ticket, to rape her daughter.
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    Con never returned the police officer’s money. Fourteen years later, in November, 2003, she no longer remembered the two dollars. She tried not to think about that week in 1989, and as she’d grown older, she’d become more adept at not thinking about painful subjects. This is not a story about memory. Now she herself lived in Brooklyn, in a quite different apartment, not squarish and sunny but oddly shaped, dark, with rooms that were a little hard to find, off corridors, and were full of not-quite-finished objects—bookcases made of unpainted boards, tables stripped but never refinished. Con and Jerry had had some of them for decades, and Con had acquired others, leaving them also not quite finished. The apartment had a gray metal desk in a study that might have been a living room, separated from the living room (which should have been a dining room) by a homemade partition. She had no dining room and the kitchen was small, but she had a spare bedroom, and she was glad the study was the most noticeable room. What mattered was work, even if work was often unsatisfying.
    On this November Sunday, Con was not at her desk. When she’d struggled with the hinges on the bathroom door as muchas possible, she started cleaning, as planned. She didn’t mind scrubbing the basin and toilet, but disliked cleaning the bathtub—bending, reaching. If Jerry had been present he’d have done it. He undressed and climbed into the tub, cleaning quite thoroughly, and then he mopped the floor, having slopped water over it. Con and Jerry no longer lived together—they had been divorced for some years, and during a period of three years Con had met, married, and divorced someone else, a psychologist named Fred—but when Jerry was in New York he stayed in her extra bedroom. Con had moved to Brooklyn after her divorce from Fred. A few years later, she heard the crash of the first plane into the World Trade Center while walking to the subway. When she left Philadelphia, Jerry’s lamp store was still open, but in the final stages of failure; on the downtown block where it had stood for decades, it was the last independent store.
    For some reason Jerry often cleaned the bathroom when he visited, though she’d never asked him to, and Con might glimpse him padding with wet feet back to his room, his clothes in a bundle under his arm. She wouldn’t have walked naked through the apartment, but Jerry was nonchalant, or maybe he displayed himself to provoke her.
    This morning Con felt like taking a walk, but if she walked before cleaning, she wouldn’t clean. When she’d finished the bathroom except for the bathtub, she found herself in her study, checking the New York Times Web site. It was more than seven months after the start of the war in Iraq, and the United States was considering recruiting units of the old Iraqi army to speed the creation of a new one. Though the governmenthad claimed casualties would be few in this war, twenty-two Americans had died in the last two weeks, and a long story discussed the effects of their deaths on those at home. Con checked her e-mail to further put off scouring the tub. She had no new messages, but she answered a couple of old ones. When she sent the second one, she saw that a new one had come in, and recognized Marlene’s address.
    Marlene’s messages didn’t begin with the recipient’s name or end with her own. “I must see the leaves in Central Park,” she wrote this time. “I just decided to go to New York next