Nothing is Quite Forgotten in Brooklyn by Alice Mattison

From the Publisher

One quiet spring day in 1989, Constance Tepper arrives from Philadelphia to watch over her mother's Brooklyn apartment and her orange cat. Con's mother, Gert, has left town to visit her old friend Marlene Silverman in Rochester. Marlene has always seemed alluring and powerful to Con, and ever since Con was a little girl, the long-standing bond between Gert and Marlene has piqued her curiosity. Now she finds herself wondering again what keeps them together.

Con's week in Brooklyn will take a surprising turn when she wakes to find that someone has entered her mother's apartment and her own purse is missing. Stranded, with no money, she begins to phone family and friends. By the end of that week, she will experience a series of troubling discoveries about her marriage, her job, and her family's history, and much of her life will be changed forever.

In the fall of 2003, now living in Brooklyn and working as a lawyer, Con has almost forgotten that strange and shattering week. But a series of unsettling reminders and surprising discoveries—including traces of a lost elevated train line through Brooklyn—will lead to grief, love, and more questions. At last, a confrontation between Marlene and Con's daughter will unravel some of the mysteries of the past.

The New York Times - Dominique Browning

Con doesn't try to find out what she needs to know—her daughter forces it on her. And this, finally, gets us to the heart of the story, to what makes it succeed: the poetry of Mattison's detailed evocation of love and affection, withdrawal and confusion, peace and forgiveness, being a mother and being a daughter.

Publishers Weekly

Mattison's latest combines a dark comedy of manners with even darker midlife family suspense. Constance "Con" Tepper plays the starring role in two long vignettes that take place 14 years apart. In the first vignette, Con is 45 and staying in her mother Gertrude's Brooklyn apartment to watch the cat. During this episode, "Gert" has a terrifying and paralyzing experience, the repercussions of which affect both her and others' lives in the intervening years and in the later vignette. Although there are almost too many threads to keep track of in Con's story, the one that is most important and most fully realized jumps back to an even earlier episode: a mid-century correspondence between Gert and her friend Marlene Silverman. This fascinating epistolary device acts as a tempting breadcrumb trail through the women's lives and leads to the wrenching denouement. Though not all the subplots work (a major one involving Con's biracial daughter, Joanna, is flat), the overarching examination of friends and family is captivating. (Sept.)

Kirkus Reviews

A woman confronts suspicious circumstances surrounding her mother's death 14 years earlier. Mattison, known for her unusual structures, has bifurcated her latest novel (The Wedding of the Two-Headed Woman, 2004, etc.), which alternates between 1989 and 2003. In 1989, Con, 45, is babysitting her 70-something mother Gert's cat in Gert's Brooklyn apartment while Gert is visiting her friend Marlene. Marlene and Gert's friendship dates back to World War II, during which, as Con learns from perusing her mother's old correspondence, Marlene manipulated Gert into investing in a black-market racket run by Marlene's mobster boyfriend Lou. Con's husband Jerry, who travels solo to research historical arcana, is visiting Fort Ticonderoga, and Con is miffed that her teen daughter Joanna has accompanied Jerry, who's never asked Con along on one of his expeditions. The irascible, imperious Marlene calls repeatedly, urging Con to let her assume power of attorney for Gert, who, she claims, is losing her faculties. One night, Marlene informs Con that Gert died in her sleep. In shock, Con overlooks the smoking guns, including Marlene's failure to call 911, Marlene's insistence that Con hand over Gert's financial records, the fact that Marlene, a vet assistant, is handy with a euthanasia needle and especially the fact that Marlene had somehow been appointed Gert's executor in place of Gert's two daughters. By 2003, Con recalls these events-except for the profound dislocation wrought by her mother's death-only in blurred fragments. She's long divorced from Jerry, and feisty Joanna has won a fellowship to intern with a womanizing sculptor. Marlene, Con's friend Peggy, Joanna and Jerry (researching an abortiveBrooklyn train project) are all converging on her for the weekend. Although Con has forgotten her misgivings about Marlene, Joanna has not. Joanna suspects Marlene did more than merely siphon money from Gert, and she sets out to learn more. Reconstructing Marlene's malfeasance makes for a pleasant puzzle, but the real pleasure here is time spent with the less flamboyant characters as they cope with more mundane upsets.

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Chapter One

Even when Constance Tepper was a girl, the skeptical, blunt telephone voice of her mother's friend Marlene Silverman made her happy—uneasy but happy. Marlene knew something about life that Con's mother would never know, but which Constance seemed to have been born suspecting, looking around in her crib for an eye to catch. Their conversations were about other people's foolishness. "I know!" Con would say, pressing herself into her mother's heavy red drapes, her back to the room, eyeing the jagged, crisscrossed Brooklyn sky, which darkened as they spoke. It almost seemed that Marlene had called to speak to Con, not to her mother.

"Did you watch that program about the camps?" Marlene might ask. Con knew which camps Marlene meant.

"No," she'd have to say. They watched Sid Caesar. They watched Lucille Ball. Then Constance would begin to feel jealous, and soon—as if jealousy caused what happened next—Marlene would say, "Well, let me talk to Gert." Con's mother was a little dull, and it puzzled Con that Marlene preferred Gert anyway. Con's father died suddenly when she was twelve, and after that—maybe even before that—Marlene called to be of use: Gert was not a particularly sad or helpless widow, but she worried, and she didn't understand money. Marlene knew what called for worry and what didn't. And Marlene understood money.

Maybe there's always someone whose company is a delight and who can hurt by withholding it. Con grew up, didn't see Marlene for long periods, found new sources of love and pain. She married and moved to Philadelphia; shehad a daughter. Marlene's interest and approval still counted. This story takes place at two times in Con's life, fourteen and a half years apart. I want to tell it this way—shifting back and forth in time—for reasons that will become obvious, but also because what interests me most about Con is not exactly that she could remember and learn—who can do that?—but that when she discovered, in middle age, that more than fourteen years earlier she'd failed to pay attention, she tried to find out what she needed to know, even though she didn't want to.

Morning sun—speckled during its passage through a dirty windowpane—laid a parallelogram of brighter color across the stripes of a tablecloth belonging to Gertrude Tepper, who was not home. The parallelogram was observed by her daughter Con, age forty-five, who was spending a week in her mother's Brooklyn apartment (while Gert visited her old friend Marlene Silverman in Rochester) to look after the cat, a big orange beast—similar in color to one of the stripes on the tablecloth—now heavily asleep, circled by his tail, on the table, which held scatterings of his hairs. The orange stripe—pinkish orange; apricot? mango?—was the color of unhurried time, Con decided. She liked a dark red stripe, too. Con believed—drinking her mother's coffee and eating a bagel—that she had time, time to gaze at the striped tablecloth, trying to remember how long she'd known it. Something almost caught Con's eye, something off to the side on the floor. Without knowing what it was, she preferred not to look at it. Surely it didn't matter.

The parallelogram of sun came to a point on the oak floor. A faded blue rug, fluffy with orange fur, covered the space between table and sofa. Past the table in the other direction was an open kitchen and a back door with an elaborate bolt; it led to a dark staircase. Gert never went down the stairs but she had an agreement with the super: she left her garbage outside that door, and he ascended the three flights and picked it up. In return, Gert tipped him lavishly and often, or thought she did.

Her mother and Marlene had figured out together, Con suspected, that she could stay with the cat, though she'd have to leave both her work and her child—a tall and confident sixteen-year-old daughter. "Joanna's an adult," Marlene would have said. "And Connie told me her job is flexible." The work was flexible, but within limits. In truth, Con was glad to be where she was, in her mother's sunny, dusty apartment without her mother. Con would have preferred to live in New York, maybe alone. Her daughter could be her difficult self at home. Con's husband, Jerry Elias, was on one of his trips. "Oh, fuck you," Con had said when he announced this one. She'd said it in the past with more energy. Jerry left several times a year, for two or three weeks at a time. He always had. It was not part of his job (he owned a lamp store in downtown Philadelphia) nor was it vacation. He studied historical topics that made him curious. She'd agreed to it when they married, as he sometimes reminded her, and it was hard to explain to her friends why the trips angered her now. Jerry did nothing with the notes he took, which were on yellow three-by-five cards everywhere in their Philadelphia apartment, disarmingly legible and so full of excitement that Con was sure he took these trips in just the way and for the reasons he said he did.

Con's bagel was gone, but a little coffee remained. She pushed her chair back. Later, she'd go for a run. Now as her eye played with the blur of cat into tablecloth and room into room, she allowed her gaze, at last, to shift to the kitchen floor. On the gray tiles was an object that did not belong: a yellow three-by-five index card, one of Jerry's cards. In her purse was just such a card, on which she had written the name and phone number of the director of a house for former women prisoners; she couldn't completely forget work this week. She didn't know how the card could have found its way to the kitchen floor. Con was barefoot, still in her pajamas. She wanted to hold on to her pleasure in the lazy morning; she delayed standing up. She merely had to remember why she might have carried her purse, which was too full, into the kitchen. If she had opened it there, the card could have fallen out.