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Alice Mattison is the award-winning author of four story collections and five novels, including Nothing Is Quite Forgotten in Brooklyn. She teaches fiction in the graduate writing program at Bennington College in Vermont and lives in New Haven, Connecticut.

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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.

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Nothing Is Quite Forgotten in Brooklyn

HarperCollins Publishers, Inc.

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; she had 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.

Excerpted from Nothing Is Quite Forgotten in Brooklynby Alice Mattison Copyright © 2008 by Alice Mattison. Excerpted by permission.
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