Motherless Brooklyn (11 page)

The band’s equipment tucked neatly into one corner of the apartment, on wooden pallets apparently set out for that purpose. The upper floors of the building were empty apart from a few crates here and there and a single oak dining table heaped with silverware: forks, spoons in two sizes, and butter knives, hundreds of each, ornate and heavy, gleaming, bundled in disordered piles, no sense to them except that the handles all faced in one direction. I’d never seen so much silverware in one place, even in St. Vincent’s institutional kitchen—anyway, those St. Vincent’s forks were flat cutouts of dingy steel bent this way to make tines, that way to make a handle, barely better than the plastic “sporks” we were issued with our school lunches. These forks were little masterpieces of sculpture in comparison. I wandered away from the others and obsessed on the mountain of forks, knives and spoons, but especially those forks, as rich in their contours as tiny thumbless hands, or the paws of a silver animal.

The others shifted the last of the amplifiers up the stairs. Minna reparked the van. I stood e table, trying to look casual. Jerking your head was good cover for jerking your head, I discovered. Nobody watched me. I pocketed one of the forks, trembling with lust and anticipation, joy in my fear, as I did it. I only just got away with it, too: Minna was back.

“The clients want to meet you,” he said.

“Who’s that?” said Tony.

“Just shut up when they talk, okay?” said Minna.

“Okay, but who are they?” said Tony.

“Practice shutting up now so you’ll be good at it when you meet them,” said Minna. “They’re downstairs.”

Behind that clean, seamless wall on the parlor floor lay hidden the brownstone’s next surprise, a sort of double-reverse: The front room’s old architecture was intact. Through the single door we stepped into a perfectly elegant, lavishly fitted brownstone parlor, with gold leaf on the ceiling’s plaster scrollwork, antique chairs and desks and a marble-topped side table, a six-foot mirror-lined grandfather clock, and a vase with fresh flowers. Under our feet was an ancient carpet, layered with color, a dream map of the past. The walls were crowded with framed photographs, none more recent than the invention of color film. It was more like a museum diorama of Old Brooklyn than a contemporary room. Seated in two of the plush chairs were two old men, dressed in matching brown suits.

“So these are your boys,” said the first of the two men.

“Say hello to Mr. Matricardi,” said Minna.

“Yo,” said Danny. Minna punched him on the arm.

“I said say hello to Mr. Matricardi.”

“Hello,” said Danny sulkily. Minna had never required politeness. Our jobs with him had never taken such a drab turn. We were used to sauntering with him through the neighborhood, riffing, honing our insults.

But we felt the change in Minna, the fear and tension. We would try to comply, though servility lay outside our range of skills.

The two old men sat with their legs crossed, fingers templed together, watching us closely. They were both trim in their suits, their skin white and soft wherever it showed, their faces soft, too, without being fat. The one called Mr. Matricardi had a nick in the top ridge of his large nose, a smooth indented scar like a slot in molded plastic.

“Say hello,” Minna told me and Gilbert.

I thought
mister catch your body mixture bath retardy whistlecop’s birthday
and didn’t dare open my mouth. Instead I fondled the tines of my marvelous stolen fork, which barely fit the length of my corduroy’s front pocket.

“It’s okay,” said Matricardi. His smile was pursed, all lips and no teeth. His thick glasses doubled the intensity of his stare. “You all work for Frank?”

What were we supposed to say?

“Sure,” volunteered Tony. Matricardi was an Italian name.

“You do what he tells?”

“Sure.”

The second man leaned forward. “Listen,” he said. “Frank Minna is a good man.”

Again we were bewildered. Were we expected to disagree? I counted the tines in my pocket, one-two-three-four, one-two-three-four.

“Tell us what you want to do,” said the second man. “Be what? What kind of work? What kind of men?” He didn’t hide his teeth, which were bright yellow, like the van we’d unloaded.

“Talk to Mr. Rockaforte,” urged Minna.

“They do what you tell them, Frank?” said Rockaforte to Minna. It wasn’t small talk, somehow, despite the repetitions. This was an intense speculative interest. Far too much rested on Minna’s reply. Matricardi and Rockaforte were like that, the few times I glimpsed them: purveyors of banal remarks with terrifying weight behind them.

“Yeah, they’re good kids,” said Minna. I heard the hurry in his voice. We’d overstayed our welcome already.

“Orphans,”
said Matricardi to Rockaforte. He was repeating something he’d been told, rehearsing its value.

“You like this house?” said Rockaforte, gesturing upward at the ceiling. He’d caught me staring at the scrollwork.

“Yes,” I said carefully.

“This is his mother’s parlor,” said Rockaforte, nodding at Matricardi.

“Exactly as she kept it,” said Matricardi proudly. “We never changed a thing.”

“When Mr. Matricardi and I were children like yourselves I would come to see his family and we would sit in this room.” Rockaforte smiled at Matricardi. Matricardi smiled back. “His mother believe me would rip our ears if we spilled on this carpet, even a drop. Now we sit and remember.”

“Everything exactly as she kept it,” said Matricardi. “She would see it and know. If she were here, bless her sweet pathetic soul.”

They fell silent. Minna was silent too, though I imagined I could feel his anxiety to be out of there. I thought I heard him gulp, actually.

My throat was calm. Instead I worked at my stolen fork. It now seemed so potent a charm, I imagined that if I had it in my pocket I might never need to tic aloud again.

“So tell us,” said Rockaforte. “Tell us what you’re going to be. What kind of men.”

“Like Frank,” said Ty, confident he was speaking for us all, and right to be.

This answer made Matricardi chuckle, still toothlessly. Rockaforte waited patiently until his friend was finished. Then he asked Tony, “You want to make music?”

“What?”

“You want to make music?” His tone was sincere.

Tony shrugged. We all held our breath, waiting to understand. Minna shifted his weight, nervous, watching this encounter ramble on beyond his control.

“The belongings you moved for us today,” said Rockaforte. “You recognize what those things are?”

“Sure.”

“No, no,” said Minna suddenly. “You can’t do that.”

“Please don’t refuse our gift,” said Rockaforte.

“No, really, we can’t. With respect.” I could see this was imperative for Minna. The gift, worth thousands if not tens of thousands, must absolutely be denied. I shouldn’t bother to form nutty fantasies about the electric guitars and keyboards and amplifiers. Too late, though: My brain had begun to bubble with names for our band, all stolen from Minna:
You Fucking Mooks, The Chocolate Cheeseballs, Tony and the Tugboats
.

“Why, Frank?” Matricardi. “Let us bring a little joy. For orphans to make music is a good thing.”

“No, please.”

Jerks From Nowhere. Free Human Freakshow
. I pictured these in place of the band’s logo on the skin of the bass drum, and stenciled onto the amplifiers.

“Nobody else will be permitted to take pleasure in that garbage,” said Rockaforte, shrugging. “We can give it to your orphans, or a fire can be created with a can of gasoline—it would be no different.”

Rockaforte’s tone made me understand two things. First, that the offer truly meant nothing to him, nothing at all, and so it could be turned away. They wouldn’t force Minna to allow us to take the instruments.

And second, that Rockaforte’s strange comparison involving a can of gasoline wasn’t strange at all to him. That was now exactly what would happen to the band’s equipment.

Minna heard it too, and exhaled deeply. The danger was past. But at the same moment I turned a corner in the opposite direction. My magic fork failed. I began to want to pronounce a measure of the nonsense that danced in my head.
Bucky Dent and the Stale Doughnuts
—

“Here,” said Matricardi. He raised his hand, a gentle referee. “We can see it displeases, so forget.” He fished in the interior pocket of his suit jacket. “But we insist on a measure of gratitude for these orphan boys who have done us such a favor.”

He came out with hundred-dollar bills, four of them. He passed them to Frank and nodded at us, smiling munificently, and why not? The gesture was unmistakably the source for Frank’s trick of spreading twenties everywhere, and it instantly made Frank seem somehow childish and cheap that he would bother to grease palms with anything less than a hundred.

“All right,” said Minna. “That’s great, you’ll spoil them. They don’t know what to do with it.” He was able to josh now, the end in sight. “Say thanks, you peanutheads.”

The other three were dazzled, I was fighting my syndrome.

“Thanks.”

“Thanks.”

“Thanks, Mr. Matricardi.”

“Arf!”

After that Minna got us out of there, hustled us through the brownstone’s odd hallway too fast even to glance back. Matricardi and Rockaforte had never moved from their chairs, just smiled at us and one another until we were gone. Minna put us all in the back of the van, where we compared hundred-dollar bills—they were fresh, and the serial numbers ran in sequence—and Tony immediately tried to persuade us he should caretake ours, that they weren’t safe in the Home. We didn’t bite.

Minna parked us on Smith Street, near Pacific, in front of an all-night market called Zeod’s, after the Arab who ran it. We sat and waited until Minna came around the back of the van with a beer.

“You jerks know about forgetting?” he said.

“Forgetting what?”

“The names of those guys you just met. They’re not good for you to go around saying.”

“What should we call them?”

“Call them nothing. That’s a part of my work you need to learn about. Sometimes the clients are just the clients. No names.”

“Who are they?”

“They’re nobody,” said Minna. “That’s the point. Forget you ever saw them.”

“They live there?” said Gilbert.

“Nope. They just keep that place. They moved to Jersey.”

“Gardenstate,”
I said. “Yeah, the Garden State.”

“Garden State Brickface and Stucco!”
I shouted. Garden State Brickface and Stucco was a renovation firm whose crummy homemade television ads came on channels 9 and 11 during Mets and Yankees games and during reruns of
The Twilight Zone
. The weird name of the firm was already an occasional tic. Now it seemed to me that Brickface and Stucco might actually be Matricardi and Rockaforte’s secret names.

“What’s that?”

“Garden State Bricco and Stuckface!”

I’d made Minna laugh again. Like a lover, I loved to make Minna laugh.

“Yeah,” he said. “That’s good. Call them Bricco and Stuckface, you goddamn beautiful freak.” He took another slug of beer.

And if memory serves we never heard him speak their real names again.

“Makes you think you’re Italian?” said Minna one day, as we all rode together in his Impala.

“What do I look like to you?” said Tony.

“I don’t know, I was thinking maybe Greek,” said Minna. “I used to know this Greek guy went around knocking up the Italian girls down Union Street, until a couple their older brothers took him out under the bridge. You remind me of him, you know? Got that dusky tinge. I’d say half Greek. Or maybe Puerto Rican, or Syrian.”

“Fuck you.”

“Probably know all your parents, if you think about it. We’re not talking the international jet set here—bunch of teen mothers, probably live in a five-mile radius, need to know the goddamn truth.”

So it was, with this casual jaunt against Tony’s boasts, that Minna appeared to announce what we already half suspected—that it was not only his life that was laced with structures of meaning but our own, that these master plots were transparent to him and that he held the power to reveal them, that he did know our parents and at any moment might present them to us.

Other times he taunted us, playing at knowledge or ignorance—we couldn’t know which it was. He and I were alone when he said, “Essrog, Essrog. That name.” He crunched up his mouth and squinted, as if trying to remember, or perhaps to read a name inscribed on the distant Manhattan skyline.

“You know an Essrog?” I said, my breath short, heart pounding.
“Edgehog!”

“No. It’s just—You ever look it up in the phone book? Can’t be more than three or four Essrogs, for chrissakes. Such a weird name.” Later, at the Home, I looked. There were three.