So where was the architectural sculpture I was supposed to take? The most obvious choice to yield up its treasures was the church itself, whose heavy stone entrance was richly framed with carved crowns and shepherd’s crooks and all sorts of other God paraphernalia. But it seemed unlikely that the number 590 had been hanging on the wall inside as a prescription for pilfering the carvings on the church itself, so I ventured across the street to take a look at the iron-and-granite fence that ran around the courtyard of the Cooper Hewitt Museum. The fence did have a blocky sort of column at its corner, but the big urn-like stone ornament at its top had to be a good eighteen feet above the street, and way too huge to remove.
This was frustrating. The wind was beginning to find its way up my pant legs and between the folds of my scarf to my throat. I started working up to feeling good and sorry for myself, noting how each of my breaths wafting toward Central Park was clear evidence of how horribly cold I was, when I realized I was looking right at what I’d come for.
Across the asphalt moat of Fifth Avenue stood the two stone pillars of the Engineers’ Gate, one on each side of the park entrance. I closed my eyes tight and made a quick deal with myself not to contemplate what a stupid idea it was to get any closer to the park, which everyone knew teemed with muggers and rapists and every other sort of criminal you could imagine. When I opened my eyes again, I was pleasantly surprised to find that no one had lurched from the shadows and jumped me. I crossed Fifth Avenue on the red and stood at the base of the uptown gate pillar. Some vandal had knocked out the light of the streetlamp above it with a rock, but you could still see quite clearly that an elaborate—and, frankly, quite freaky—coat of arms had been carved into the pillar’s front panel. It looked like a psychedelic Peter Max poster wrought in stone, or the sort of fever dream a court sculptor might come up with if someone had planted a tab of acid in his morning crumpet. At the carving’s center was the head of a pompous-looking cougar or lion wearing a wackadoodle pharaonic headdress and surrounded by a junk closet’s worth of regal bric-a-brac: garlands and wreaths and so forth. What it all meant I hadn’t the slightest clue. This was how grown-up power encoded itself.
I looked around to make sure I wasn’t being watched. Here on the park side of Fifth, the empty street beside the curb was decorated, at regular intervals, with piles of moonlit glass shards, where some previous night’s marauder had gone along and smashed the passenger window of each car to get at its radio.
I rested the violin case on the curved stone bench at the base of the gate pillar and took out a hammer and chisel. The pillar was made of stacked stone blocks, like a built-in ladder, with large grooves in between, so climbing up to the really good details of the carved panel was pretty easy.
The moment I got up there, I zeroed in on a little stone eaglet about the size of a grown man’s hand. He was really the only part of the carving that stuck out enough for me to get at; even his wings were pretty flat against the panel. But it was no problem to get the chisel edge behind the bird’s rounded shoulder. I gripped the pillar with my knees, made sure the angle of the chisel was right, and began hammering the round red top of its handle.
The noise the eaglet and I made was rhythmic, and seemed to get swallowed up in the textured darkness of Central Park. After I’d chipped away behind half of the little eagle’s body, I shifted the chisel to the bird’s other shoulder and went at it from the opposite side. When I could feel that he was only held on by a sliver of remaining stone along his spine, I let the hammer drop to the sidewalk, cupped the creature gently in my left hand, and worked the edge of the chisel behind his back again. A violent jerk of my right wrist was all it took. The eagle popped loose into my palm, leaving his wings behind.
High above Fifth Avenue, I opened and closed my fingers around the bird’s little breastbone and beak, admiring his solid fragility.
13
MOM WAS STILL OUT when I got home. I had no idea where. Though she was supposed to be the one who hadn’t left, it somehow felt as if I saw even less of her than of Dad.
She had always needed time away from us, time to herself. “I’m off duty,” she would announce, sighing with theatrical exhaustion, and she’d disappear for a morning, an afternoon. Quig and I would trade rueful one-liners about how she was never really much on duty, so how could you tell the difference?
But you could. When I was little, maybe four or five, she had taken a class in wood-block printing. Each week she brought her new knowledge home to me like a birthday present in colored tissue paper. She let me handle the Japanese carving tools, the gleaming new-moon blade my favorite. She showed me how to approach the wood at an angle, how to pressure the narrow handle with my thumb. Together we gouged out a sliver of sky, a skeptical eyebrow, a zebra’s haunch. I liked the feeling of her cool-ringed hand over mine, the comforting bite of its ornament.
“Mommy,” I told her one day, the words popping out of my mouth without forethought, “I love you more than the leading cough drop.”
I helped her make a few woodcuts for my room: A rendering of my three-wheeler, which she called The Princeling’s Tricycle. A portrait of my green-breasted parakeet, Pistachio, before her grumpy black cat, Mencken, got him. I loved the sweetly toxic smell of the oil paint, its sticky resistance as you spread it over the carved boards with the rubber roller. I appreciated that my mother was an original. My friends’ moms smelled like purply hand soaps; mine stunk of turpentine. That was quite all right by me.
I certainly didn’t do arts-and-crafts with her anymore—no thirteen-year-old boy wants to hang out with his mom too much—but I had never stopped visiting her studio. She liked to hear my take on her work, called me her best critic. I even let her drag me to an art exhibit in the neighborhood now and then. For years we’d observed a pretty straightforward quid pro quo: if I let her show me some wacky paintings at the Whitney or the Guggenheim, she’d take me for hot dogs at Papaya King when we were done. Quig, who hated museums, sometimes met us afterward for ice cream sodas at Agora, that antiquey place on Third with the stained-glass windows and the long ice cream spoons.
But all of this camaraderie had slipped away since our parents’ breakup. Mom had become preoccupied, evanescent, hard to see in certain light. She no longer announced her departures; she just went. She always came back, and that was something, but you could tell her heart wasn’t in it.
I wasn’t sure the situation was reversible. Her days off from us were really just a progression of what she’d done for ages. It was no secret that she’d always wanted to travel, to live abroad. She’d abandoned that ambition after Quig showed up, but that didn’t mean she was staying put. If New York was to be her world, then her ports of call would be people. She went straight at them whenever she could, and once she had identified a man or woman or couple who interested her, they tended to remain on her itinerary indefinitely. She dropped in on them unannounced at home, at work. Stopped by to bring them a straw-cloaked bottle of Chianti or an unusual oyster plate she’d spotted at an antiques shop. One evening her destination might be the rangy tai chi instructor who rented the servants’ quarters atop the Duke mansion on Fifth Avenue. Another it was the Czech oboist shacked up in a SoHo loft with a puppeteer who had once operated the Cookie Monster’s arms.
Her impulsive gregariousness had always put her at odds with my father. Dad hated parties, feared the unfamiliar, was forever accusing her of collecting acquaintances. “Why do you need new people all the time?” he would complain. “What’s wrong with the ones you already have?”
But it wasn’t so much others she was collecting; it was herself. She sailed out into the city to discover parts unknown within herself. Parts that could only be revealed, or created, with the help of others. “It’s so surprising sometimes to see how you are with them,” she told me, “who you turn out to be.”
She liked to decorate herself: patterned shawls, translucent silk headscarves, jostling bracelets of bone or onyx or mother-of-pearl. More lush than
luxurious. At her hips she wore a clothesline belt, knotted below her navel in looping, Escher-like infinity. Its frayed ends she had cauterized with a borrowed Gauloise cigarette.
Mom had a way about her, a bemused openness, that strangers responded to: bus drivers, doormen, maître d’s. Once, when she and I paused on a sidewalk to watch two pigeons tussling over a bialy, a white-haired man in a straw boater, thinking we looked lost, left his Buick running with the door open in the middle of Third Avenue to come offer us directions.
I hated when her room was dark, her many-pillowed bed empty. There had been a time, before Mencken died, when she always left her bedside light on, so he could warm his fur beneath it, and her radio playing QXR, so he wouldn’t grow lonely in her absence. Now all was charcoal silence.
I stood in the doorway of her room. There was a cabinet under her cushionless window seat that had always been my secret hiding place, ever since I was little. My body was growing too ungainly for its confines, but I still liked to retreat in there to visit all the knickknacks that had accumulated over the years: a stack of Mad magazines, supermarket machine toys, a worn copy of Watership Down, a joy buzzer. It was cold in the cabinet, but private. I curled up in the dark in there, my head on one of her faded taffeta throw pillows, and told myself I was too old to miss my mother.
14
MY FATHER WAS IN NO MOOD for company when I turned up at his studio a couple days later. I heard him barking at one of his workers as I came down the fourth-floor hall, and he left me standing in the doorway a good long while before he finally looked up from the crate he and Zev were packing and said, “Not the best time, big guy. What’s up?”
The room was a mess. There were wooden crates everywhere, and packing materials all over the floor. Zev was hammering a strip of wood inside one of the crates.
“Send that one ahead to the Laing place, too,” Dad told him. “It can go out with the others.”
“You sure? Don’t you even wanna give Crowley a taste? He’s been after me all month about these.”
“No, Laing gets ’em all. They’ll be a great fit, trust me.”
Leaning against a workbench not far from Dad’s boot stood an eye-poppingly colorful terra-cotta medallion almost as tall as me. King Neptune glared out from its center, wearing a golden crown and gripping a burnt-orange trident. His stormy green hair and beard surged from his head with roiling fury, a swollen sea overspilling the medallion’s edges.
“Where’d he come from?” I asked.
“Coney Island,” Dad answered. “City knocked down the Washington Baths—well, their Annex, actually—on the boardwalk last year, where old Neptune had been gazing out at the ocean for God knows how long. A guy Curtis knows, works the Tunnel of Laffs out there, pulled it out of the rubble with some friends. We made him an offer.”
I leaned in to inspect Neptune, his glazed face crazed with cracks.
“You have someone who’ll buy it off you?” I asked. “More than you paid?”
“Of course more than I paid,” Dad said irritably. “Look, I gotta get back to shipping all this stuff. What do you want?”
I took from my inside pocket a small object wrapped in chamois and put it in his palm.
“What? What is this?”
He began unwrapping it impatiently, but when the little eagle poked its beak from the fabric, Dad suddenly became very gentle, pulling back the edges of the cloth with extreme tenderness, as if helping a baby chick hatch out of its egg.
“Oh! Now isn’t this a sweet one?” he said, running his finger over its feather-etched breastbone. He looked up. “Thank you, son. Thank you.”
The gift seemed to cheer him right up. He held it at arm’s length and grinned at it.
“Now let me guess where you got it,” he said. “I can practically see it in my mind’s eye: it came from a kind of tableau or pediment.” He closed his eyes tight, then sprung them open: “Was it the National Arts Club, on Gramercy Park South—the old Tilden house? No, no, this one is granite, not sandstone…”
He thought awhile more and then poked the air with his index finger. “Got it! Engineers’ Gate. Central Park, across from the Carnegie Mansion.” He gave a laugh. That’s why it was so familiar to him. He’d passed it practically every morning for years on his way to jog around the reservoir.
“You’re right about the gate, Dad, but it’s across from the Cooper Hewitt, not the place you said.”
“I said the Carnegie Mansion. Same thing. The Cooper Hewitt is the Carnegie Mansion. Andrew Carnegie lived there with his family.”
“A family lived in a museum?”
“No, they turned the family’s home into a museum after the family was gone.”
That rubbed me the wrong way. Anybody rich enough to build himself a palace on Fifth Avenue ought to be able to hang on to his home and not have fat midwestern tourists with Instamatics rambling around the bedrooms gawking at all the stuff.
“Did he have a son?” I asked.
“I don’t remember. But never mind that.” He gripped the little carved bird and poked its tail at me for emphasis, the way black-and-white movie fathers did with their pipes. “You did a good job here, son. There’s certainly a little market for fragments like this, especially if they’ve got the provenance this one has.”
—
So we made a game of it, the two of us: part scavenger hunt, part quiz show. I’d bring the artifacts in from all over town, and Dad would guess where I’d gotten them. It was remarkable how well he knew the city, or at least the ornamental creatures that populated it. Quite a few times he nailed the exact façade. Even when he didn’t, he could almost always tell me the building type and neighborhood.
His favorite carvings were those that made his own past present.
“I’m guessing this is a gryphon talon from a sandstone plaque on one of those brownstone tenements in Little Italy,” he’d say. “Right around Mott Street. I noticed those the first time I took your mother to the San Gennaro festival. The generator for the Ferris wheel was making the street vibrate, and I told her that all that seismic shaking was because they’d built the street over the San Gennaro Fault.”
As pleased as my father was with the gargoyle fragments I brought him, I was a bit disappointed with his reaction when I gave him the Laing folder I’d worked so hard to steal from Dani’s father. “Oh yeah, thanks,” he said, setting it down on top of a DECARLO FUNERAL HOME & CREMATORY cooler. “Forgot I asked you about that.”
—
Over the next couple of months, I kept Dad’s spirits up by bringing him scraps of streetscape I’d hunted down, delivering them to his downtown studio with the predatory neediness of a cat laying a parade of dead mice at his master’s doorstep. Every Monday a new batch of numbers would appear on the church wall, guiding me to particular street corners. There wasn’t always a façade ornament at every intersection, and even when there was, a lot of the time the carving or casting was too high for me to reach or too flat to chisel off. But in every batch of numbers lay the coordinates of at least one treasure.
Since most of the pieces were far too big to remove in their entirety, I had to satisfy myself with fragments. As a result, the jumble of riches I brought Dad was a bit of a witches’ brew. There was no eye of newt, but I did manage to snag the ear of a mare from an old stable on Sixty-Third and Third (633), the snout of a bulldog from a tenement on Fifty-Sixth and Ninth (569), the nipple of a demigoddess from a bank on Fifty-First and Sixth (516), and the horn of a Viking from a brownstone on Forty-Seventh and Eighth (478). All of these Dad assembled into a cluttered ensemble of partialness he displayed in a waist-high glass case.
When he was feeling voluble, he gazed back across the bridge of time and told me what he saw: The harried architect conjuring tenement after tenement to house the grubby multitudes disembarking at the piers and jostling uptown on the clattering new Els. The bellowing construction foreman, seeing again that the architect hadn’t bothered to sketch any ornament on the bluep
rint, pointing curbside to a blank block of stone destined to crown a window arch (“Hey you! Carve me a Moses or a Mary or something!”). The sore-thumbed carver, free to invent in a way rarely permitted in Europe, incising his imagination into our city. Trotting from job to job with chisel and apron, transforming our streets into fantastically quirky public art galleries.
15
SOMETIME BETWEEN VALENTINE’S DAY and St. Paddy’s Day, Mom took in another stray. This one was different, though. He was his own center of gravity; he wasn’t looking for my mother, or our home, to provide one. He had interests, friends, a closet full of finely tailored suits and elegant neckties. He cut his own angles through the city, striding, even when dressed informally, like a man wearing a cape with a top hat and cane. This courtliness he wore not as a barrier but as an overture. He had an easy smile, one incisor turned slightly inward as if it were a tad shy.
His name was Shelby Forsythe, he’d grown up near New Orleans, and Mom, needing the money, had emptied out her top-floor studio for him to live in. He was the first boarder Quig had ever been able to stand. He showed her card tricks, wiggled his ears for her. He stood against a door, slyly rapping on it with his hidden left hand while knocking on the thigh of his trousers with his right to “prove” he had a wooden leg. Quig pretended to fall for it, punched him playfully in his gabardine shoulder, taught him how to tie a knot in a cherry stem with his tongue.
Mom had met Shelby at Hurley’s, the Time-Life hangout a block down Sixth Avenue from Radio City. He was a failed actor—that’s how he introduced himself—who wrote promotional copy for Fortune and other Time-Life magazines. He liked to sit, his long legs crossed, in the upholstered chair Mom kept near her bed, laughing and sipping vodka gimlets, discussing Tennessee Williams and Noël Coward late into the night. Though normally a Bushmills gal, Mom always had what he was having.
The Gargoyle Hunters Page 13