I shut my eyes tight in concentration. When I opened them, I was staring right into the upside-down face of an indignant-looking bearded man, who was protruding from the cornice. He was made of metal, with a paint-spalling nose that gave him the look of an imperious leper.
The first thing I saw after Dad hauled me back up to the roof was Curtis, staring at me aghast, his dark chapped lips open in the shape of a malformed O. I saw his eyes flick to Dad in judgment, saw him start to say something, saw him think better of it.
“Who the heck was that charmer?” I asked Dad, nodding toward the front of the building. “Grizzly Adams?”
“Zeus, probably. Or maybe the building’s original owner. The really remarkable thing is that this is the only cornice in the whole neighborhood with heads on it—four of them, all the same fellow.”
“Yeah, well, whoever that bearded guy is,” I said, “he looks really ticked off.”
“What do you expect? He’s probably offended you never bothered to look up and notice him until now.”
Curtis and Zev had laid their tools on the roof in a neat row: pry bars, a circular saw, two coiled chains attached to a sort of double-pulley, and a big upside-down wooden L that resembled a hangman apparatus.
“Looks like galvanized iron to me,” Dad said of the cornice. He nodded at the circular saw. “You got the Carborundum blade on that?”
Curtis nodded.
“Okay. But please, guys. Don’t fire it up until the very last minute, and even then, only if you’re sure”—Dad looked at Zev—“really sure, that you can’t crank all those screws out using just the impact drivers. I’d be a lot more comfortable with this job if you didn’t have to use the saw at all.”
Both his men nodded.
Dad led me down the ladder back into the warmth of the buxom lady’s loft. He inspected the roof filth on his palms, wiped them on the woman’s pillowcase. It didn’t occur to me to wonder what she’d done to deserve all this violation.
“This job’s gonna be a bitch,” he said, looking back up at the roof hatch. He grinned. A winning, lopsided smile. “Rubble rousers like you and me deserve something a little more fun.”
9
NEW YORK PUTS YOU in your place. It’s bigger than you, and more important. It’s older than you, and newer, too. It’s more than you: more towering, more gutter-level; more striving, more complacent; more hurried, more arrived; more refined, more depraved; more timeless, more late for dinner reservations. It has a lot of moving parts, and countless immovable ones. And it doesn’t care if you have a relationship with it or not.
But the street walls, the miles of buildings rearing up on either side of you on any major avenue, could be reassuring, too. Something you could count on. Without giving it any thought, I’d learned to take these miles of masonry for granted, to feel them holding and even guiding me on my passage through the city, the way a river runner feels embraced by the certainty of canyon walls. Trundling down Second Avenue in the Good Humor truck with Dad—on the move again after a quick foray to the East Sixties to swipe an iron newel post from a townhouse railing—I felt at ease in the brick-and-brownstone-flanked corridor, block after block of solid, familiar New Yorkness scrolling past our windows.
And then it ended. Without warning, without transition, the street wall on our left, the buildings, simply vanished, replaced by a moonscape of devastation that made me do an actual double take of disbelief. A bunch of blocks east of Second Avenue in the Twenties had been obliterated. Instead of tenements and lofts and storefronts, instead of windows and stoops and lives, there was only a sprawling expanse of rubble. A neighborhood leveled.
“Jesus,” I said. “What happened here?”
“Urban renewal. The city decided to pretty much bulldoze seven whole blocks of Kips Bay. Booted thousands of residents.”
“Why?”
“They’re putting up a slew of ugly brick towers and things, what else do they do anymore?”
We hopped a chain-link fence and walked the graveyard of the neighborhood. The crushed, shardy remains, for all their hazardous shifting underfoot, seemed oddly undifferentiated. Wreckage was wreckage, I supposed. In the crunch and stumble of our exploration, eyes fixed cautiously on my next step, I could see no evidence that the acres of jumbled rubble had ever taken the form of anything as substantial and reassuring as homes. We were treading an aftermath.
“I never get used to it, no matter how often I come to one of these sites,” Dad said. “It’s like a firebombed city, Dresden or something. Only this time we did it to ourselves.”
“There’s really nothing left, is there?” I said.
“Well, that’s not quite true.” He frowned at the destruction around him, his features hard-edged in the light of a droopy-necked streetlamp. “The lost are still here, Griffin. You just have to know where to look for them.”
He gave a nod, strode toward a shattered slabby something slanting out of the debris. Up close, you could see it was the rounded front edge of a step made of brownstone, maybe even a stoop. I never would have spotted it on my own.
“Here you go,” he said. “The gargoyles often kind of loitered around the front entrance of tenements—not unlike some of the flesh-and-blood residents, actually.” He chuckled at his own small joke. “There’s no real rule to it, but a lot of the time you find carved keystone portraits over the doorway or above the street-level windows. Or on brownstone or terra-cotta plaques higher up.”
There was an archaeological thoroughness to the way he eyeballed the ruins, a forensic sensitivity. As I stood there blinking dumbly at the rubble, he took two unhesitating steps to his right and toe-nudged an unarticulated block of rock with his work boot. It flipped onto its back, revealing a half-smashed head of a man, hewn from a keystone the color of milk chocolate. Even with half its mouth and chin missing, the wedge-shaped face was remarkably expressive—tempestuously confident and framed by a marvelous gale of mustaches and whiskers that twisted, swirled, and tangled, transforming along the way into tendrils of ivy so finely wrought they had the grasping urgency of fingers.
“Will you look at that!” Dad cried, genuinely enchanted. “The carver must really have enjoyed making this one. I wonder how far along with it he was before he realized he was onto something spectacular?” He knelt down and ran his index finger along a storm-snarled eyebrow. It bothered me that he hadn’t looked at me once the whole time he’d been talking.
Dad scanned the strewn ruins, his head held at an angle. He took a couple of steps, toed some more debris out of his way, and kicked loose a trapezoidy stone fragment with his heel. He kneeled and flipped it over with his hands.
The fragment was a jagged surviving half, or maybe third, of a rectangular brownstone slab, intricately carved. It depicted a rancorous mythological everythingbeast in full flight—a Gorgony, lion-headed sea monster with wings and fins and fangs, with scales and horns and claws, with movement and urgency and a foul mood for the ages. Oh, and flippers. It had hellacious, slap-you-six-ways-to-Sunday flippers.
Dad was transfixed. I’m pretty sure he had never in my life looked at me with as much interest.
“This one’s a fever dream. What you’re looking at here is an immigrant carver from the British Isles or Italy or Germany—maybe influenced by the liquid he has taken—letting his fancies go wild.”
“Are you saying he was drunk?”
Dad chuckled. “Could be. These guys started work at six a.m., and got a beer ration from the foreman at ten. Must’ve needed it, too, after inhaling stone dust in the sun for four hours.”
Dad had been scanning the rubble intently while he was talking, and he now swept away a layer of it with his palms to reveal another carved keystone portrait, this one the head of a squirrel-cheeked lady wearing a crooked smile and a necklace of inelegant bulbous beads. Aside from her missing nose, she was in pretty good shape.
“Hey, this is a great one,” Dad said. “Look how transcendently ordinary she is.”
&nbs
p; “What do you mean?”
“I mean she’s a regular person. She’s not Athena or Diana or the Queen of Spades.”
“So what?” I asked, and I said it in a challenging, almost pissy voice, trying to get a rise out of him, to get him to notice me. He didn’t.
“Well, the carvers clearly got tired of doing the same old idealized classical or historical figures, so they started sculpting people they knew, barkeeps and cops and dockworkers. This gal is way too funny-looking to be a goddess. She’s probably the carver’s sweetheart, or maybe a barmaid he’s got a crush on. And he honored her, you know? He did a really loving portrait. She’s got a good smile, I think: skeptical but generous.”
I had to admit I could see what he meant. She reminded me of this one surly-sweet waitress who worked the luncheonette counter at the Eighty-Sixth Street Woolworth’s, on your far right as you came in from Third. I liked to order cheesecake from her after I was done checking out the air rifles in the toy aisle. You could tell she hated her job—she was always rushing around, and she always had loads of coffee and mustard stains on the apron of her Amelia Bedelia getup. But she treated me, when she had time, like I was her most important customer. I’d sit on the twirly chrome stool right in front of the cheesecake I had my eye on. They kept it on a little pedestal under a clear plastic cover like the Bat Phone, and she’d lift that cover up for me with as much ceremony as Commissioner Gordon when he was calling the Caped Crusader.
“The best a global shipping magnate could do was name a boat after his woman,” Dad said. “And then that ship would sail right out of the harbor, and maybe she’d see it once every few years or maybe it would sink. But a stoneworker’s homage stayed put. A stoneworker could go to work in the morning and carve his sweetheart right onto New York’s skyline.”
I wanted to believe it mattered to him that it was me he was telling all this to. I wasn’t so sure.
“Now what?” I asked.
The bottom of the chain-link fence had been pulled out and bent upward in one spot, making a little opening between the lot and the sidewalk that you could duck through. We put on work gloves and gathered together the salvaged gargoyles beside the fence there, a jagged little society of refugees. I couldn’t believe how strong Dad was. The terra-cotta ornaments were heavy enough, but at least they were hollow. The stone carvings weighed a goddamn ton.
I followed Dad back to the Good Humor truck and helped him lift out a Daitch Shopwell cart with a wonky wheel. Then we went on a little family shopping expedition, pushing the cart along the east side of Second Avenue and hefting our battered keystones and plaques into it. We had to make several trips. On the way back to the truck the last time, Dad rooted around in the rubble some more, unearthing a toothless brownstone lion and a red terra-cotta cherub demoted to boy by the loss of his wings.
—
It was a pretty long drive uptown to our next destination. On Amsterdam Avenue, the Upper West Side asnooze around us, we parked alongside another sprawling rubble field, this one spanning the block from Eighty-Seventh to Eighty-Eighth Street.
At the edge of this empty lot, maybe a third of the way toward Columbus on Eighty-Eighth, a brownstone had had the bad luck to share a wall with a tenement demolished by the city’s wrecking ball. The vibrations had destabilized the house, which was now slouching toward the rubble heap to its west, as if seeking to join it. The house’s listing brick side wall had been braced by a cluster of wooden emergency supports: nine pale upflung arms pushing back diagonally against its will to fall.
“Lucky for us,” Dad said, “they evacuated the family that lives here. They won’t let them back home till the place passes inspection.”
“Will it collapse?”
“Let’s hope not.”
Part of the troubled wall was protected by some kind of tarp or tar paper. Sensing weakness, Dad peeled back one of its lower corners and found a slanty crack and a small, street-level hole near the back of the building, where a bunch of bricks had fallen away.
He sent me through the hole with a flashlight, which I immediately trained on the inside of the wall I’d just come through. A fierce fissure, an inch wide, zigged down its plaster from the ceiling to about the height of my chest. But if you ignored that one menacing detail, it looked to be a fairly ordinary old brownstone, with a crooked spine of staircase twisting up its center and a pair of small, worn-out Wallabees left on its bottom step by some sighing mom who probably wanted them brought upstairs, for God’s sake, how many times do I have to ask you?
Dad was waiting at the back door when I opened it, his leather-edged canvas plumber’s bag in one hand.
“Do come in,” I said with a low bow. “Make yourself at home.”
“Don’t mind if I do.” He stepped in and stomped his boots on the welcome mat, a Dad-shaped aura of dust puffing from his body. “Lovely place you’ve got here.”
We were standing in a drab, old-fashioned kitchen right out of The Honeymooners. Dad pulled a caged lightbulb from his bag, hooked it onto the handle of a colander hanging above the drain board, and plugged it in. It cast a low, grudging light that I hoped wouldn’t catch the eye of anyone outside. He yanked the kerchunky chrome handle of the old icebox and leaned inside it.
“Hungry, Griff?”
I told him I was.
“Yeah, you looked like you were dragging a bit, back at the truck. Lemme whip you up a little something.”
Dad had always been the best cook in our family. He had both the obsessive attention to detail and the gift for improvisation. He was always quoting Craig Claiborne by way of criticizing Mom’s halfhearted butter deployment, and in Echo Harbor, the summer community where we’d rented a beach house when I was small, he used to doze off on the deck with a sauce-stained blue-and-green copy of The New York Times Cookbook on his chest.
“No pickles or bologna, I’m afraid,” Dad said from inside the damaged brownstone’s fridge.
It was clear why he was telling me this. Back during those Echo Harbor summers, I was small enough that I thought grilled cheese sandwiches were called girl-cheese sandwiches, and I frankly resented it. Instead of correcting me, Dad had invented a boy-cheese sandwich—strictly off-limits to Quigley or Mom—composed of several of my favorite things: Oscar Mayer bologna, Skippy extra-chunky peanut butter, sliced pickles, and pimento-stuffed olives, all held between two grilled Wonder bread slices by a glowing orange matrix of melted Kraft American cheese.
Dad now pulled a few things from the strangers’ fridge and set a big pot of water on the stove. He briefly put on the flame beneath it before changing his mind and turning it off again.
“You know what?” he said. “I think we’d better get some work under our belts before we start thinking about snacks.”
He handed me a kitchen chair to carry and led me up the stairs with his flashlight into the second-floor room facing Eighty-Eighth Street. It looked like some kid’s bedroom, probably a little boy’s. It had a bunk bed with no sheets on the top bunk, a Snuffleupagus comforter on the bottom, and a pink-plastic Big Wheel parked at its foot. A few feet away, the side wall had a long, vicious crack in its plaster, a lot like the one downstairs.
Dad found a bedside lamp and switched it on.
“There’s something here we want?” I asked.
“Sure is. Intact and everything. Much more valuable than the fragments we’ve been scavenging. But first we’ve got to build a form exactly the shape of that window frame. To support the arch.” He nodded toward the window on the left, whose enframement was a tall rectangle with a curve at the top.
What Dad nailed together next was something of a domestic collage. He cut up the kitchen chair with his circular saw, but he needed lumber of other sizes and shapes, too, so he kept sending me around the house to find whatever wood I could: bureau drawers, the footboard from the master bedroom, a pair of sink-cabinet doors from the hallway bathroom. The stroke of genius, the scavenged wood I could see made him most proud of me, was the base
of the boy’s rocking horse. I pointed out that it had almost the exact same curvature as the top of the window frame (upside-down, of course). Dad laughed with pleasure, amputated it with his circular saw, and nailed it atop the form.
“Perfect fit,” he said, when we’d hoisted our mongrel creation into the window opening. “Now that’s what I call an arch support.”
We slid the kid’s bunk bed lengthwise in front of the window to use as a scaffold. Dad climbed to the top bunk with a red Magic Marker and drew a horizontal rectangle on the plaster directly above the window. I handed up his tool bag and joined him. We sat on the top bunk side by side with our legs hanging over, chipping away at the wall with hammers and chisels. When all the plaster was removed from within the red Magic Marker rectangle, we started in on the brickwork behind it.
“What we’re after, of course, is the keystone, in the center of the arch,” Dad told me. “But to get to it, we’ve kind of gotta take the wall apart around it. Most of these brownstones were built in layers, see? Their structural walls were made of three wythes of brick.”
“When you say three widths, you mean the bricks are back-to-back-to-back?”
“Wythes, not widths: it just means layers. And yeah, they’re back-to-back-to-back, with the keystone set into the face of the building usually just two wythes deep. You and I are gonna focus right now just on the innermost wythe.”
The mortar was really crumbly, freeing up the bricks pretty easily. One by one, they fell away, landing with muffled thumps on the kid’s green carpet.
Dad told me to keep at it, and he headed downstairs.
It was messy work chiseling away the bricks, but not too difficult. In less than half an hour I’d chipped away the first brick layer from the Magic Marker rectangle above the window. Behind it waited another layer of bricks—except in the center, where I had exposed the back of a rough-hewn light brown wedge of rock. A thin metal strap protruded horizontally from its top, where it had been embedded for something like ninety years in the mortar layer I’d just chipped away.
The Gargoyle Hunters Page 9