Read Online Nothing Is Quite Forgotten in Brooklyn by Alice Mattison - Free Book Online Page B

to talk to him. He admired Jerry. He’d make an excuse for Jerry.
    For years, she’d felt angry with Jerry much of the time, but her anger was based on love. Lately she’d felt weary—not surprised enough to be angry—and sometimes she realized that aweek or more had passed when she hadn’t thought about Jerry, except in practical ways, at all. At some point she’d excused him from her own mental table, whether he was present in life or not. Maybe it wasn’t fair to be shocked that he seemed to have dismissed her as well, but Con was shocked.
    Jerry was indefensible, but Joanna was safe, and Con was hungry. She had never eaten lunch, and it was now well into the afternoon. She wanted fresh vegetables, but her mother had only frozen peas and frozen broccoli. She found some rice and an onion, and cooked what she had with plenty of salt and pepper. She ate mounds of rice. By the time she was done, it was five o’clock. Five o’clock on Tuesday afternoon. Con put her dish in the sink and took the packet of Marlene’s old letters from her suitcase, where she’d put it underneath her clothes. She wanted distraction. She wanted the rest of the story about Brenda and the fire. Some letters were still in envelopes, but some were just loose sheets. Others were folded together, sometimes with pages from a different letter. Marlene wrote a large, sloppy script, always on onionskin—presumably to save postage—but with big margins, so not many words were on any one page. Some letters weren’t dated at all, others were dated “Friday.” She seemed to write often on Fridays. Some envelopes had legible postmarks, some didn’t. The letters seemed to have been sent from New York in 1943 and 1944.
    Con looked over the letters but was too tired to read them. She took a long shower. When she came out there was a message from Jerry: “You’re hard to reach, I’ll try tomorrow.” She didn’t call him back. She turned on the television and watched a little of thirtysomething , then went to bed, read Salman Rushdie for a few minutes, got hungry again, and ate toast with jam, belatedly weeping with gratitude because Joanna was safe. Then she wept with rage at Jerry. Then she slept.
    On Wednesday morning, still in bed, she reached for the letters again.
    â€œI went to Saks this morning looking for a present, but that’s silly. I can’t buy him anything there and anyway what would he do with it” a long, crumpled page began.
    Another page that seemed disconnected from everything else said only:
    When you think about it you’ll see I’m right. There is nothing wrong with it, only with what was before. I’ll write again in a couple of days if I can. I have to do a lot of things. Your loving sister-friend, Marlene.
    There was a P.S.: “Kiss baby. If she’s good.” Con might have been the baby. She had been born in January, 1944. Was she to be kissed only if she was good? Marlene had left a space at the bottom of the page. In pencil, in her mother’s handwriting, was a list:
    Evap
    Fruit Cocktail
    Bread.
    Another disconnected last page said:
    You’re not going to believe this, there was an article in the paper saying if we bring the contents of wastebaskets to donate for the war effort we should leave out the cigarette butts. I’ll tell you, Gert, they are going to have to win the war without the contents of my wastebasket, with or without cigarette butts. Wish me luck.
    Luck with what? Not with donating the contents of wastebaskets, apparently.
    As well as she could, Con arranged the letters in order and tried to link up parts of letters. It took a long time, time when she felt pleasantly suspended from problems she should have been solving. Then she put aside the fragments and began reading at the beginning.
    Dear Gert,
    Well, you can imagine that I was glad to get your address after all this time. I thought