The Gargoyle Hunters

by John Freeman Gill

  He led me out of the kitchen area and into the back of the factory, where dozens of tenement and row house doors were laid out flat on the floor in a vast grid, almost like a model of the city, and piled high with a displaced populace of New York architectural sculpture: huddled masses of gods, grotesques, and dragons; angels, admirals, and gryphons; bartenders, Vikings, and poets; schoolboys, queens, and cops; presidents, mailmen, and pelicans. They were keystones and friezes, medallions and plaques, spandrels and pediments. They were cornices. They were carved from sandstone, limestone, marble, and granite. They were cast in terra cotta. They were pressed into zinc and tin. And they were all New Yorkers.

  We hunkered down among them, my father and I, and waited for what was to come, the tarps pulled over us for shelter. Rain was coursing down the walls of the factory, streaming through a hundred holes in the roof.

  The water kept rising. It topped the first level of keystones, so we clambered up the highest pile we could find: the stacked sections of a monumental sculpture of a drowsing woman, sliced into ravishing fragments. She looked an awful lot like the nocturnal half of the missing Night and Day pairing that had stood above the old Penn Station entrance on one of Dad’s antique postcards—“Shushh!” he hissed when I started to ask about that. “Can’t you see I’m thinking?”

  Emma wasn’t messing around. I don’t know how long we were under those tarps, but I know it was no fun. Every so often, I’d hazard a faceful of windblown rain to poke my head out. And every time, the destruction was more severe than I could have imagined. The wind made short work of the factory’s roof, peeling it away section by section until there was nothing left up there but a dark striped cage, clouds racing past above it. The sea poured through the twin loading bays, knocking loose first the feeble patchwork of tenement doors and then the lower panels of that whole broad wall of corrugated steel. The oak pulpit tore loose from Dad’s sleeping platform and washed into the caryatids, bringing the whole thing crashing down.

  The waves rolling in at us from the Great Bay were as big as anything I’d ever seen in the ocean. Wind battered the factory, inside and out. The sheet-metal walls were shaking loose. But the worst part was the sound. A horrible shrieking of metal, a great twisting ache, as if the Bogardus were wrenching itself apart at the seams. It was hard to tell exactly what was happening, but the magnificent iron façade was unmistakably on the move, its wall above us leaning inward, its other wall outward, all of it placing impossible stress on the thousands of little bolts holding the antique structure together.

  The wind plucked off my tarp, then Dad’s, and hurled them, flapping manically, high across the factory, two mismatched wings of a single grounded moth. Dad’s eyes grew wide.

  “We can’t stay here,” he said, stating the obvious. He paused, just a moment, to gain his footing on a partly submerged terra-cotta grotesque, then stepped all the way down to the ground, into water that came up to his knees. He helped me down after him—my first steps so achingly cold it felt like I was barefoot—and helped me wade across the factory to the top of the basement stairwell, where water poured steadily over the edges and swirled down the steps as if into a big sink drain.

  “We can’t go down there!” I protested. “That’s crazy!”

  “I know. But I think it’ll be okay. Trust me.”

  The water’s chaotic circulation had pushed one of the iron Vanderbilt doors closed and the other open. Dad made his way carefully down a couple of steps and looked back at me. “Just take it one step at a time. Hold tight to the railing.”

  I watched as he eased himself down the twisting hole and out of sight. Unable to bear being alone in the storm up here for even a second, I quickly followed, though I was certain it meant I would be drowned within minutes. The moment my second foot hit the top step, the sloshing water knocked my legs out from under me and I slid down the staircase on my ass, my arm raised to protect my head from smashing into the wall. As I twisted down and around, I caught up with Dad and knocked him over, too. The two of us rode the sluicing waterfall the rest of the way down, banging into each other, until we were spit out into the dark enclosed pool of the basement.

  Dad didn’t even yell at me. We got up on our feet, and though the water came up to my thighs down here, it was quite a bit calmer once you got away from the stairwell. He led me over to some kind of tall cylindrical cistern built along a side wall and gave me a boost onto its lip. After a couple of failed attempts, he managed to haul himself up, too.

  The water rose a bit more in the next hour, wooden pallets and empty fish-scrap bags floating around on its surface. But we rode out the storm okay in that spot, huddled together in the wet shadows. When Dad noticed me shivering, he laid a corduroy arm around my shoulder and pulled me into his big warm body, pretending it was he who needed the warmth.

  —

  There was a postapocalyptic feel to things when we climbed back up to the factory from the basement, overcoming the weakened current of seawater spilling down the stairs. The violence of the storm had given way to a dead calm, but the devastation was vast. The Bogardus, all 150 tons of it, was torqued almost beyond recognition, its heavy iron sections accordioning in on one another; it seemed it might collapse at any moment. Tenement doors and debris floated about. The architectural sculptures were scattered, many of them swallowed up by the bay. Outside was inside. Charred driftwood from the old dock was lodged in the decorative ironwork of a contorted Vanderbilt door.

  Dad was frantic. He splashed this way and that in his big boots, unsure what to do, how to begin salvaging his salvage. An ornamental bronze lamppost, probably one of the pair stolen from the Riverside Drive Firemen’s Memorial, lay athwart the steel doorframe of the nearest loading bay, its glass globes smashed. Dad stepped over it and stood on one of the slant slabs of the loading area out front, which had collapsed onto the beach, providing a ramp directly into the bay for countless of his prized possessions. I thought he might cry.

  As he looked desperately this way and that, the realization dawning that much of the island lay underwater, something partway down the tilted slab caught his eye: the haughty head, hooked beak, and regal plumage of a spectacularly grumpy marble eagle. It was half-submerged in dark water, one of its wings caught beneath the shaft of an antique bishop’s crook streetlamp. Dad hurried down to inspect the bird.

  “This is good,” he murmured, trying to reassure himself. “This is a good thing. We can do this.” I didn’t like the way his voice sounded. Or the word we.

  Swinging into action, he splashed back inside and rummaged around in the soggy debris until he found a tangle of yellow nylon strapping that seemed to satisfy him.

  “Go get the hook!” he called to me. “From the crane. Go get the hook!”

  I hadn’t seen him so agitated since the night he made me save the last Woolworth gargoyle.

  Outside, he hurried back down the slab and trussed up the eagle, looping the nylon wildly all around its wings and across its breast. His hands were shaking. Only once did he pause, looking up from his knots just long enough to observe me standing in the doorway, spent and overwrought, making no move to help him. I couldn’t stop shivering.

  When he was done rigging, he gave me an irritated look and rushed over to the toppled crane arm, which lay at an angle on the smashed landing below the cupola it had fallen from. He picked up the heavy ball-and-hook assembly and tugged it along the edge of the factory, the cable unspooling behind him. For extra leverage, I guess, or to direct the eagle’s return path up into the factory, he passed the hook around a vertical steel support in what was left of the factory wall, then walked it straight down the slab to the eagle. He hooked it into the bird’s rigging.

  “Come on, son!” he called up to me urgently. “Get over to that crane already! I need your help.”

  His desperation made me sorry for him, but I was tired and freezing and I just didn’t have the energy for any more of this.

  “Why?” I asked, almost in a whisp
er.

  “Why?” Dad cried. “WHY? This is one of the lost eagles from McKim, Mead and White’s Penn Station, for Chrissakes! I took my first steps into New York under it when I was a kid, on vacation with my parents. Everyone did! I passed under it as an adult every time I went to get a slice of pie at the Savarin coffee shop inside!”

  I didn’t know what to say to that.

  “Now come on, son, please! Get over to the crane! This is a two-man job!”

  I looked up at the destroyed, roofless factory, the buckling Bogardus, the whole crazy mess. I looked down at Dad on the tilted slab, kneeling alone in the water with his hands grasping the marble eagle’s wings. If ever there were a one-man job, this was it.

  “Dad,” I said quietly. “This is crazy. I don’t think I can do this anymore.”

  “Nonsense! All you need to do is get over to the crane and give the hoist a turn every time I count to three.”

  “But you’re not thinking straight,” I said to him. “Isn’t this the eye of the storm? Aren’t we just about to get walloped by the back end of the hurricane? We have to find somewhere safe!”

  “It’s your mother, isn’t it? She told you not to help me!”

  “No! She doesn’t even know I’m here. She doesn’t even know you’re here.”

  “Well, you’re doing her bidding anyhow!”

  “I’m not doing anyone’s bidding, Dad. I just missed you. I just needed to know where you were.”

  He seemed not to hear me. “She never supported me on any of this. She grew up in the city, always took it for granted.” He was talking very fast, too fast. “Well, you tell her—you go home and you tell her—”

  “No, Dad! Tell her yourself if you’ve got something to say to her. I’m tired of being in the middle.”

  I was, too. I was sick of being caught in between. I didn’t want to be the bridge anymore: between one parent and the other, between a messy present and an irretrievable past, between my father and whatever part of him was missing, would always be missing.

  “The middle?” Dad asked, genuinely taken aback. He let go of the eagle and stood up. “It’s being in the middle that upsets you?”

  “Yeah. Sometimes I’d just like to crawl to the side of things and be my own middle for a while, without having to worry all the time about where I fit in between you and Mom, whether I’m holding you guys together or pushing you apart. That shouldn’t be my problem, but you’ve made it my problem. You both have.”

  Dad stood up and thought this over. He seemed to soften. He walked up the slab to where I stood just inside the loading bay.

  “But you’re missing the whole point, son,” he said gently. “Don’t you see that? The middle is where all the really interesting stuff happens.”

  “Oh, please.”

  “No, I’m serious. In architecture, the space between things is the point of greatest vulnerability but also of greatest possibility. An architect I once knew told me that ‘the joint is the beginning of ornament,’ and whatever he meant by that, I always took it to mean that the design challenges posed by the joint between two elements—the middle, as you call it—can force an architect into greater creativity.”

  I told him that all sounded way too abstract for me.

  “No, it’s the most concrete, practical thing in the world. C’mere.”

  Dad stepped back inside and led me to where one of the walls of the accordioned Bogardus loomed above us. The wind moving through its twisted members made a whining, screaking sound.

  “You remember when I explained to you earlier how cast-iron buildings have a line of horizontal beams, one bolted to the next, resting on top of a row of columns? And how the next row of columns rests, in turn, atop those beams?”

  “Yeah?”

  He pointed up. “So what do you see above every column, laid right over the surface of those horizontal beams?”

  I told him I saw decoration: a bunch of fancy leaves and stuff swirling all around, and at the center, the head of that beetle-browed lady with her roiling, snaky hair.

  “Exactly. And what don’t you see?”

  “I dunno. I can’t see it.”

  “The joint!” Dad said. “Where the two beams meet. That’s where water can get in, rust away the bolts. So what did clever Mr. Bogardus do? He made that fiercely beautiful casting of the woman’s head—the best thing on the whole façade, by the way—and he used it to cover the joint, to protect it from the rain. Simple as that: the scarring over, the concealment of separation, is where the most imaginative, marvelously surprising things happen.”

  Someone’s apartment door had washed through a ground-floor window of the Bogardus and deposited a stone ornament between the iron front and the steel factory wall behind it. Dad wrapped his long arms around the snark-lipped gargoyle, trying to dislodge it, but it was wedged in too tightly back there. He let go and turned back to me.

  “You know, even gargoyles evolved out of need, if you think about it,” he said. “When you see a really quirky gargoyle leering down from above a brownstone doorway, it might look like it was put there just for decoration—but without that gargoyle keystone, the whole arch would collapse.”

  “I know. I know that. But what does any of this have to do with me?”

  Dad sighed. “All I’m saying is that I know your mother and I have put you in a tough spot, but there’s no point in regretting that. Being stuck in the middle—negotiating the gap between us—is how you’ve become you. It’s a big part of why you’re such a terrifically peculiar kid.”

  I eyed him cautiously. “Peculiar is good?”

  “Hell yeah. Do you aspire to be ordinary? Let someone else’s kid do that.”

  This was the first moment I was ever sure he liked me. Peculiar was good.

  I gave him a nod, a very faint one, but I know he understood his words had hit home, because he lost no time leaning hard on me again: “So you’ll help me hoist my eagle back inside?”

  The wind was picking up sharply. It sent a fresh shiver through my wet body, stirred up the water we were standing in.

  “No, Dad. I think you should leave it and come with me, I really do. I know a safe place.”

  “But it’s from Penn Station! Carved by Adolph Weinman!”

  “Dad, please. You don’t need all this stuff. I mean it. Can’t just coming home with me, just being my dad, be enough?”

  He turned and looked with longing at the stricken eagle, the broken beauty all around him. Then he turned back, arms at his sides, palms open, and gazed appraisingly down at himself: his thin, sodden legs submerged in water, his empty, flood-wrinkled hands. He shook his head, unable to conceal his disappointment at how little he saw. “Enough?”

  “It is for me,” I said.

  He blinked at me a few moments—disbelieving, or maybe just uncomprehending—before raising a hand and swatting away all I had said.

  “It’s from Penn Station, don’t you get it? The city’s greatest civic masterwork!” His voice was breaking. “We have to put that eagle back in my collection! We have to put it back!”

  I thought about telling him that maybe some things couldn’t be put back. That maybe loss is the only thing no one can ever take away from you. But he wasn’t a man you could talk to—not anymore, anyway—so instead I just looked down at the water, at the concentric rings rippling out from my legs as I jiggled them for warmth. I don’t know what expression was playing across Dad’s face while we stood there together, what he thought as he stared across the flooded factory floor and out across the Great Bay at the wall of weather bearing down on us. I never got a chance to find out. When I looked up again, to learn from his face how this would all turn out, I discovered something that I understood was permanent this time. My father was no longer beside me.

  —

  It’s not a comfortable feeling, climbing into a furnace. No matter how much you reassure yourself that it’s an antique, that nothing has been burned in here for decades, it’s hard not to think of Hanse
l and Gretel when you willingly yank open a rectangular metal hatch and crawl inside.

  As soon as I got in there, though, I was pretty sure it was the safest place to be. Those three furnaces were built like brick shithouses, enormous brick shithouses. I’d chosen the middle one, figuring that its neighbors on either side might protect it further. Just inside the hatchway, the bottom several feet of the furnace were cluttered with an apparatus of looping, element-like metal tubes, maybe to hold or distribute heat. I climbed up and through those tubes, then pulled myself up to an arched brick alcove with a metal hatch closed from the outside. There I holed up, hugging my legs to my chest and burying my face between my knees until I stopped shivering. Though it wasn’t exactly cozy, it was much warmer in there, protected from the wind. The brick walls and the confined space of the alcove reminded me of my old hideout beneath Mom’s window seat.

  I think watching the storm hammer the island might have been less disturbing than drowning in its sound, as I did. The furnace was basically a big brick shaft, roofed over but with lots of square apertures near the top, through which the wind roared and echoed, a raging static without letup. The crashing of the surf was relentless, too, so all-around-me that it sounded not just like being near the waves but inside them. Seawater rushed in through the ground-level hatch, climbing the shaft below me. Most agonizing, though, was the piercing metallic shriek of convulsing iron, a lurching, derailing subway wreck of a sound.

  —

  Dad never gave up on that eagle. He’d left me standing alone in the flooded factory and had splashed down to wrangle with the great bird, his back hunched against the rising wind, the waves rolling in and exploding against the slab all around him. I shouted at him to leave the eagle behind, to hurry with me to the safety of the brick furnace. But he either didn’t hear me or pretended not to, his every faculty bent to this one impossible task.

  I reached the far corner of the factory and stood there watching longer than was safe, delaying my sprint to the furnace. With the help of the surging seawater, Dad managed to shove the streetlamp off the eagle’s pinioned wing, and I watched as he heaved the stone creature up a few inches and raced to deny the bay his treasure, running back and forth, eagle to hoist, hoist to eagle, shoving impediments out of the way and laboriously winching the sculpture back up the slab. The winds were growing dangerous, battering the factory, stinging my face with raindrops and sea spray. The Bogardus swayed and groaned. But I’ll be damned—and this was the last thing I saw before bolting for the furnace—if Dad didn’t winch that unwieldy marble hunk of lost New York all the way up the slab and back inside to his collection. I never saw him again.