The Gargoyle Hunters

by John Freeman Gill

  “Where’s Quig?” I asked.

  “An audition, maybe? She was wearing some kind of cocktail dress with shoes that didn’t match.”

  I nodded, and we sorted eggshells in silence for a bit.

  —

  It was the eggs, in all their subtle variety, that had brought my parents together in the first place. That’s how they always explained it to us, anyway. This was back in the fifties. Dad had a restoration studio down near the old Washington Market, below the butter-and-egg district, and he spotted Mom at dawn while coasting home down Greenwich Street in his pickup truck, bleary-eyed after an all-night drive with a load of antique furniture from a Maine estate sale.

  At the curb by Duane Park, he idled his engine, then hopped out and followed her at a distance as she went from one egg wholesaler to the next, from Fortgang to Wils to Weiss, questioning the vendors, turning the eggs over in the gathering sunlight, seeking out variations in color, shade, even texture. She herself was a variation in color and texture, an earthy figure in a lavender dress and patterned shawl moving among the pallid egg men in their white smocks and cuffed trousers.

  “You take much longer to choose, lady, and those eggs are gonna be chickens,” grumbled an exasperated merchant with a stub of pencil behind his ear.

  She used the eggshells, crushed into fragments, to create intricate mosaic seascapes and landscapes: a single moored sailboat on a bay of shattered light; a cloud-bullying mountain peak reduced to its thousand facets. She had remarkable eyesight—20/10 like Ted Williams—and was so precise with her tweezers that you could scarcely see the gaps between the shards. One of her teachers at Pratt told her she was onto something, that he didn’t always like her work but that he found it hard to stop looking at it. She had ideas about going to Italy to study art, to learn what she could do, to eat prosciutto-and-butter sandwiches on the lip of a fountain glittering with coins. But Quigley—and this is so Quigley—elbowed her way into the frame before my mother had been out of school six months, and when Mom next looked up she found herself in the very position she had always promised herself to avoid: pinned down in a one-bedroom Hell’s Kitchen apartment with a handsome husband and a needy daughter and very little room to maneuver.

  The thought that she was becoming her mother gnawed at her. Nourished daily, her self-loathing grew.

  But Mom rallied. It dawned on her that the fact of Quigley, squalling and red-faced as she was, did not have to keep her—keep any of them—from making a move. She could get a part-time job during the hours Quig was in preschool. She and Dad could pool their earnings and rent a tumbledown farmhouse in the Italian countryside, maybe get another pair of young marrieds to join them. Quig could dash down the leaf-fringed corridors of a neighboring vineyard while Mom made art and had an experience or two.

  Dad would have none of it, however. No way his wife was working. No way he was leaving New York after fighting so hard to make a life here, to put his Depression-era rural childhood behind him.

  She let the subject drop. She knew better than to stir up his temper. She had no wish to see his face change, those blazing eyes of thunderbolt green.

  That, in any event, was how Mom told me her story. She always talked to me like a peer, a confidant, spilling out intimate details of her resentments that most mothers had the good sense to save for their friends. It wasn’t propaganda; she wasn’t trying to turn me against Dad. It was just an unfiltered account of how she was feeling at any given moment, without any consideration of how hearing about it might make me feel. By turns she trashed my father and told me how exceptional he was, how much more interesting than any other man she’d ever known.

  She did not leave Dad after the aborted trip to Italy—there was nowhere to go—but I’m not sure she ever forgave him.

  Her art took a turn. For the next several weeks she worked late into the night painting the big wall of Quigley’s nursery with a rollicking, cartoonish mural of the Trevi Fountain, water cascading and spraying, winged horses with fish tails pulling a mighty sea god’s chariot amid the spume. It was a nice thing to do for Quig, who spent much of her childhood gazing up at this wondrous scene, her little bed pushed against the sparkling aquamarine pool in the precise spot, I realized years later, where Anita Ekberg and Marcello Mastroianni had stood together in La Dolce Vita, knee-deep in the ephemeral.

  Mom returned to her eggshell mosaics. The pastoral scenes were gone, the seaside idylls. She thought of her childhood. She was an only child, the brooding, button-nosed kewpie doll her parents dressed up in ribboned dresses to complete their image of themselves as a handsome couple. Her father, who ran a small hardware store on Second Avenue, had a tremendous reverence for famous men. Every Sunday, when the weather was fine, he would dress to the nines in one of the tailored suits he got wholesale from his uncle Hiram, and he would take his wife and daughter to a different city park and tell them all the facts he had memorized about whichever great man was cast in bronze up on the pedestal there. His wife, the deputy spouse, would stroll alongside him without speaking, her arm looped possessively through his. Neither paid much attention to their daughter.

  Now my mother revisited those bronze men on those high pedestals. She hadn’t really planned to, she told me, but one day she found herself going around town taking snapshots of their proud, impersonal heads, the lordly expressions that as a girl had made her feel judged, scorned for a run in her tights that only they could see. She put her eggshell fragments to work, creating new portraits of these bronze personages, revealing the fault lines in their self-certainty, the hundred unacknowledged fissures, the veins of emotional absence that held them together as surely as the lead mullions in any stained-glass window. I was too young to follow fully when she explained her work to me in this way, and sometimes I got tired of hearing about it, but I did like those mosaic portraits, their spotlight on the invisible. They made me think of Rice Krispies, how that big blue box contains as much air as nourishment.

  Every October, as far back as I could remember, Mom would have a big art show at the brownstone. She’d order up gallons of Gallo wine in green glass jugs, set me and Quig behind a card table as underage barkeeps, and invite the city in. Crowds of her arty friends would come, and hangabouts from the neighborhood looking for free eats, and antiques people Dad knew. They’d get hammered, gobble up the olives and deviled eggs, grind crackers into the carpets, stay too late. Sometime after midnight, someone, usually the same lumpish Irishman, would produce a steel guitar, pluck at it with overlong fingernails, and begin singing too loudly. This would inevitably inspire several other men, usually with no musical ability, to pull copper pots off the walls and press them into service as drums, banging them arrhythmically with serving spoons and ice tongs. Everyone sung himself hoarse.

  It was my job, when a mosaic portrait was sold, to affix a little red polka-dot sticker to its lower right corner. This never happened more than once or twice a show, if at all. But we were pretty low on stickers by then, anyway. Quig and I usually got bored and stuck them on our foreheads, individually as bindis, or in bunches as zits.

  —

  After I finished sorting my first bag of eggshells, Mom took the bag and a few other empties into the kitchen and threw them away. When she came back, she gave a big yawn and started in on another Baggie. Her bangles—bone and Bakelite and tortoiseshell, wood and turquoise and silver—clacked on her wrists as she worked.

  “Mom,” I asked quietly, as if it was no big deal. “What’s that lady’s face in the basement? The half lady’s face, I mean.”

  She frowned, two vertical lines appearing between her eyebrows. “Oh, that. Nice of your father to leave that behind, huh?”

  “What do you mean? Is she his? Is she related to us?”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “She looked like a death mask,” I said. “Or what’s that other thing they make by sticking straws up your nose so you can breathe while they smoosh plaster on your face?”

&nb
sp; “A life mask?”

  “Yeah, a life mask.”

  “No, no. She’s not a real person. She’s a terra-cotta ornament from a tenement façade. Terra cotta’s a fired clay, and they always made those ornaments hollow so they wouldn’t explode. You can’t fire a solid object that big or it’ll blow up in the kiln.”

  “What’s a façade?”

  “A face. The building’s face.”

  “So she’s a face from a face?”

  “Yeah, I guess you could say that.”

  “Where’d she come from?”

  “Your father brought the damn thing home when Quig was a baby. I just about throttled him on the spot.”

  I asked her why the woman’s face had upset her so much, and recounting the story made her so mad all over again that I was taken aback. I wasn’t old enough to grasp what now seems obvious to me: that you could never fully understand the situation without knowing firsthand what it was to be a sleep-deprived first-time mom left alone night and day to care for a diabolically foul-tempered infant.

  Quig was about six months old, a pissy, colicky, red-faced monster known up and down the block for her fiery orange hair and her world-beating tantrums. Mom had finally given up nursing her the month before, at which point Quig seemed to discover an even higher gear of baby-rage, more or less refusing to sleep or stop shrieking ever again. Through it all, Dad did what dads were expected to do back then: nothing. At dinner parties, he liked to amuse himself by urging the other husbands to follow what he called Watts’s Law of Child-Rearing: “Whatever you do, fathers, never change that first diaper!”

  One winter day at dawn, when Quig was entering what seemed like the sixth straight hour of a crying jag, Mom simply couldn’t take it anymore. She stormed upstairs, hauled Dad out of bed, and basically threw him and his demon spawn out of the house.

  “I don’t give a flying fuck what you do with her,” she told him. “You can give her a shot of whiskey for all I care. Just get her the hell out of the house and don’t come back before nine! I’m going to bed!”

  Dad did as he was told, bundling Quig up and taking her out into the stirring, yawning city in her little molded-plastic stroller. The cold air and movement seemed to pacify her, and she soon nodded off. (Who said life was fair?)

  Third Avenue in the upper Eighties was a kind of borderland back then, east of which things got abruptly poorer, dirtier, and more tenementy. Though I never knew it as a child, this division was a legacy of the Third Avenue El, which had once rumbled down the avenue’s center, creating a right and wrong side of the tracks that persisted decades after the hulking overhead structure had been smashed apart and removed. It’s not that life east of Third was all muggings and break-ins or anything, just that things got more run-down and dicey once you passed the old Puerto Rican men in their sleeveless undershirts playing dominos and arguing in Spanish out front of the little grocery on our side of Third.

  But on this morning, Dad headed right across Third and down the steep hill toward Second, Quigley’s stroller leading the way by force of gravity. Somewhere in this grungy district, Dad and his snoozing bundle came across a corner demolition site surrounded by blue plywood marked POST NO BILLS. A tenement had been torn down there over the past week, and at the end of the previous afternoon’s destruction the workers and their yellow bulldozers had all but finished the job, leaving a hazardous moonscape of rubble where several dozen families had once made their homes.

  Did Dad leave Quig alone outside on the sidewalk? Did he carry her stroller in his arms as he picked his way among the heaps of smashed brick and splintered joists? All Mom could tell me for sure was that she had been awakened from a deep sleep by the sound of Quigley screaming bloody murder, and when she ran downstairs barefoot to see what was causing all that yowling, she saw that Dad had ousted Quig from her stroller to make way for an unwieldy, burnt-red terra-cotta fragment of a woman’s face, her hair a tangle of flowering vines.

  Dad was just shutting the front door behind him, exhausted from pushing the laden stroller with one hand while balancing atop it the Elmhurst Dairy milk crate in which Quig sat wriggling and shrieking.

  “Jesus Christ, Nick!” Mom screamed at him, scooping up her filthy, terrorized baby girl. “This is your daughter! Your daughter! What kind of a person does this?”

  “She’s fine,” Dad protested. “She’ll be fine. She didn’t even cry that much until she saw the house. And just look how gorgeous this sculpture is—look at that aloof brow. She’s a goddess, this one, or a queen. Let me tell you, even with half her forehead and one of her eyes gone, she commanded that demolition site with her gaze—commanded the whole damn street. And believe me, she had nothing but disdain for the cretins who pried her off that façade and hurled her down into the rubble.”

  That was the moment my mother first got a glimmer that her husband—her charismatic, self-absorbed, keenly observant husband—was in the thrall of something bigger, and stranger, than she would ever understand. He was in a kind of daze, staring down at his broken rescued goddess, until—abruptly—he looked up at my mother and said, with real alarm: “Good God! Do you think this is going on all over the city?”

  —

  The next week he showed up at the brownstone with another façade ornament, this one a massive mustard-yellow terra-cotta medallion from whose center protruded a cantankerous ox with flared nostrils and a ring on his right horn. Although Dad had left Quigley at home this time, he had again transported his scavenged treasure in her stroller, which, as he was bump-bumping its wheels up the brownstone steps, collapsed under the weight of its historical responsibility.

  When my mother accused Dad point-blank of theft, he swore up and down that no, he had rescued that ox head from another doomed city building.

  —

  Mom stood up and walked around our dining room table to the giant mayo jars, which she began jiggling, one at a time, so that the thousands of eggshell fragments inside would settle and make room for more.

  “It’s just perverse to strip off a part of the cityscape and take it home with you,” she said. “It doesn’t belong to you—or actually it does, by virtue of the fact that you’re a New Yorker, and it’s your city, and by simply walking past that façade and looking up and appreciating it you’ve possessed it as fully as it can be possessed.”

  She stopped what she was doing.

  “And so you are really just stealing from yourself,” she said, peering at me closely over the mayo jars. “Why, I’d like to know, would a person do that?”

  7

  I WAS PERFORMING my Beak of Doom fingertip exercises in my room when I felt someone watching me and looked up to see Quigley loitering in the doorway. She looked like the orange-haired girl-monster from Where the Wild Things Are, the one with the pointy teeth and pigtails whose guilty smirk suggested a certain embarrassment about the outsize pleasure she took in monstering.

  “Gimme your baseball,” she said. “The hard one.”

  “It’s in my closet. Get it yourself.”

  She did.

  I was glad to get rid of her so quickly. A lot of my training equipment was out in the open—the Mott’s apple juice jug, the seven-pound bag of Klean Kitty, the way-too-old-to-eat boiled ham—and I didn’t want Quig to learn any of my Beak of Doom trade secrets. Dani’s party was tomorrow, and though I was pretty sure I didn’t have the nerve to crash it, I at least wanted to be able to peck a snippet of skin from her forearm or something if she got sassy with me in the hall at school.

  I’d hefted that juice jug with my fingertips about ten minutes every day over the past week, adding another quarter inch of kitty litter each session. Now had come the moment to test my martial arts prowess.

  Slowly, earnestly, with as much reverence as I could muster for the act of assaulting a boiled ham, I beaked my fingertips together and let them float menacingly above the slab of cooked pig, circling, looking for an opening—until suddenly, with the coldhearted precision that marks the t
rue warrior, I struck, my deadly beaked fingertips darting forward, attacking the helpless cured meat and…

  Nothing. No luck. My fingertips returned from their violent descent without even a sliver of ham to show for their efforts—not even enough to make a decent canapé.

  Beak of Doom, my ass.

  —

  Something clattered loudly against the outside of my window frame.

  I ran over and stuck out my head, scanning Eighty-Ninth Street below for the source of the disturbance. On our side of the street, I spotted Quigley bent over by the curb, dislodging my baseball from behind the wheel of a parked car. She was wearing a bunchy-necked sweater under that hideous gold lamé warm-up jacket of hers, the Adidas knockoff with the two glittery silver stripes down the arms.

  “Hey!” I cried down at her. “What the hell’re you doing?”

  Quig, who was a lefty, ambled to the middle of the street, squared up like a chubby, freckled Jerry Koosman, and let fly a fastball straight toward my third-floor window. I ducked inside, but I needn’t have, as the ball died at the last moment, plummeting harmlessly back to the sidewalk.

  “What the hell?” I yelled down. “What are you doing?”

  “Breaking your window!” Quig yelled back cheerfully.

  “Why?” I was indignant. “Why?”

  “Because,” she hollered, squaring up southpaw in the middle of the street again, “if it’s broken, Dad has to come fix it.”

  Now I understood. This was another of Quigley’s delusional schemes to try to get our parents back together.

  This time, Quig’s aim was true. The moment my baseball left her pudgy fingers, I saw it winging straight toward me, could even make out the rotating red stitches growing larger as they approached, knew at once it was going to be a direct hit. I tried frantically to slide the window’s bottom half all the way up and out of harm’s way, but the damned thing wouldn’t budge, and when the ball slammed into one of the panes, it showered the sill and my floor with shards of glass. I was lucky to get my face out of the way in time.