Jonathan Lethem - Motherless Brooklyn

I wasn’t sure we could fit the whole contents of the two trucks into the van but Minna only egged us to shut up and work faster. The men in the trucks never spoke or got out of the cabs, just smoked and waited. No one ever appeared from the corrugated shack. At the end there was barely room for Gilbert and me to crowd in behind the doors to ride with the band’s calamitously piled equipment while Tony and Danny shared a spot up front with Minna.

We crossed the bridge back to Brooklyn like that, Gilbert and I fearing for our lives if the load shifted or toppled. After a few breathless turns and sudden stops Minna double-parked the van and freed us from the back. The destination was a brownstone in a row of brownstones on Degraw Street, red brick, stone detailing flaking to powder, genteel curtained windows. Some canny salesman had ten or twenty years before sold the entire block on defacing these hundred-year-old buildings with flimsy tin awnings over the elegant front doors; the only thing special about Matricardi and Rockaforte’s house was that it lacked one of these.

“We’re gonna have to take apart those drums,” said Tony when he saw the doors.

“Just get it inside,” said Minna. “It’ll fit.”

“Are there stairs?” said Gilbert.

“You’ll see, you chocolate cheesepuffs,” said Minna. “Just get it up the stoop already.”

Inside, we saw. The brownstone which appeared so ordinary was an anomaly just through the doors. The insides-typical narrow halls and stairs, spoked banisters, high ornate ceilings-had all been stripped and gutted, replaced with a warehouse-style stairwell into the basement apartment and upstairs. The parlor floor where we stood was sealed off on the left by a clean white wall and single closed door. We ferried the equipment into the upper-floor apartment while Minna stood guarding the rear of the van. The drums went easily.

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.