Motherless Brooklyn

wrong, however, something soured between Julia and the lawyer, and Minna dragged her back to Carlotta Minna’s old second-story apartment on Baltic Street, where she’d stayed for most of fifteen years, a sulking housewife. I could never visit without thinking of Carlotta’s plates of food being carried down the stairwell by Court Street’s assorted mugs. The old stove itself was gone, though. Julia and Frank mostly ate out.

I went to that apartment now, and knocked on the door, rolling my knuckles to get the right sound.

“Hello, Lionel,” Julia said after peering at me through the peephole. She left the door unlatched and turned her back. I ducked inside. She wore a slip, her ripe arms bared, but below it she was already in stockings and heels. The apartment was dark, except for the bedroom. I shut the door behind me and followed her in, to where a dusty suitcase lay open on the bed, surrounded by heaps of clothing. It wasn’t going to be my privilege to be first with the news anywhere, apparently. In a mass of lingerie already inside the suitcase I spotted something dark and shiny, half smothered there. A pistol.

Julia rummaged in her dresser, her back still turned. I propped myself in the closet doorframe, feeling awkward.

I could make out her labored breathing as she fumbled through the drawers.

“Who told you, Julia? Eat, eat, eat-” I ground my teeth, trying to check the impulse.

“Who do you think? I got a call from the hospital.”

“Eat, ha ha, eat-” I revved like a motor.

“You want me to eat you, Lionel?” Her tone was grimly casual. “Just come out and say it.”

“Okayeatme,” I said gratefully. “You’re packing? I mean, I don’t mean the gun.” I thought of Minna reprimanding Gilbert at the car, a few hours before. You with no gun, he’d said. That’s how I sleep at night. “Packing your clothes-”

“Did they tell you to come over here and comfort me?” she said sharply. “Is that what you’re doing?”

She turned. I saw the redness in her eyes and the heaviness and softness of the flesh around her mouth. She groped for a pack of cigarettes that lay on the dresser, and when she put one between her grief-swollen lips I checked myself for a lighter I knew I wasn’t carrying, just to make a show of it. She lit the cigarette herself, chopping at a matchbook angrily, throwing off a little curl of spark.

The scene stirred me in about twelve different ways. Somehow Frank Minna was still alive in this room, alive in Julia in her slip with her half-packed suitcase, her cigarette, her gun. The two of them were closer at this moment than they had ever been. More truly married. But she was hurrying away. I sensed that if I let her go, that essence of him that I detected would go, too.

She looked at me and flared the end of the cigarette, then blew out smoke. “You jerks killed him,” she said.

Her cigarette dangled in her fingers. I fought off a weird imagining: that she’d catch her slip on fire-it did seem flammable, practically looked aflame already-and that I’d have to put her out, drench her with a glass of water. This was an uncomfortable feature of Tourette’s-my brain would throw up ugly fantasies, glimpses of pain, disasters narrowly averted. It liked to flirt with such images, the way my twitchy fingers were drawn near the blades of a spinning fan. Perhaps I also craved a crisis I could master, now, after failing Minna. I wanted to protect someone, and Julia would do.

“It wasn’t us, Julia,” I said. “We just didn’t manage to keep him alive. He was killed by a giant, a guy the size of six guys.”

“That’s great,” she said. “That sounds great. You’ve got it down, Lionel. You sound just like them. I hate the way you all talk, you know that?” She went back to stuffing clothes anarchically into the suitcase.

I mimed her striking of the match, one long motion away from my body, more or less keeping my cool. In fact, I wanted to run my hands through the clothes on the bed, snap the suitcase latches open and shut, lick the vinyl.

“Jerktalk!” I said.

She ignored me. A police siren sounded out on Smith Street and Baltic, and I shuddered. If the hospital had phoned her, the police couldn’t be too far behind. But the sirens stopped half a block away. Just a traffic stop, a shakedown. Any given car on any given evening on Smith Street fit a profile, some profile. The cop’s red light strobed through the margin of window under the shade, to throw a glow over the bed and Julia’s glossy outline.

“You can’t go, Julia.”

“Watch.”

“We need you.”

She smirked at me. “You’ll manage.”

“No, really, Julia. Frank put L and L in your name. We work for you now.”

“Really?” said Julia, interested now, or feigning interest-she made me too nervous to tell. “All I see before me is mine? Is that what you’re telling me?”

I gulped, jerked my head to the side, as though she were looking behind me.

“You think I should come down and oversee the day-to-day business of a car service, Lionel? Have a look at the books? You think that might be a good occupation for the widow?”

“We’re-Detectapush! Octaphone!-we’re a detective agency. We’re going to catch whoever did this.” Even as I spoke, I tried to order my thoughts according to this principle: detectives, clues, investigation. I should be gathering information. I wondered for a moment if Julia were the her had lost control of, according to the insinuating voice on the wire at the Zendo.

Of course, that would mean she missed her Rama-lama-ding-dong. Whatever that was, I couldn’t really picture Julia missing it.

“That’s right,” she said. “I forgot. I’m heir to a corrupt and inept detective agency. Get out of my way, Lionel.” She set her cigarette on the edge of the dresser and pushed past me, into the closet.

Inupt and corrept, went the brain of Essrog the Idiotic. You are corrept, sir!

“God, look at these dresses,” she said as she poked through the rack of hangers. Her voice was suddenly choked. “You see these?”

I nodded.

“They’re worth more than the car service put together.”

“Julia-”

“This isn’t how I dress, really. This isn’t how I look. I don’t even like these dresses.”

“How do you look?”

“You could never imagine. I can barely remember, myself. Before Frank dressed me up.”

“Show me.”

“Ha.” She looked away. “I’m supposed to be the widow in black. You’d like that. I’d look really good. That’s what Frank kept me around for, my big moment. No thanks. Tell Tony no thanks.” She swept at the dresses, pushing them deeper into the closet. Then she abruptly pulled two out by the hangers and threw them onto the bed, where they spread over the suitcase like roosting butterflies. They weren’t black.

“Tony?” I said. I was distracted, my eagle eye watching the ash burn longer, the glowing end of the abandoned cigarette inching toward the wood of the dresser.

“That’s right, Tony. Fucking Frank Minna Junior. I’m sorry, Lionel, did you want to be Frank? Did I hurt your feelings? I’m afraid Tony has the inside track.”

“That cigarette is going to burn the wood.”

“Let it burn,” she said.

“Is that a quote from a movie? ‘Let it burn’? I feel like I remember that from some movie- Burnamum Beatme!”

She turned her back to me, moved again to the bed. Untangling the dresses from their hangers, she stuffed one into the suitcase, then held the other open and stepped into it, careful not to snag the heels of her shoes. I gripped the closet doorframe, stifling an impulse to bat like a kitten at the shimmery fabric as she slid the dress up around her hips and over her shoulders.

“Come here, Lionel,” she said, without turning around. “Zip me up.”