Motherless Brooklyn

“But this is a thing upon which we must insist,” said the doctor.

“You really don’t wanna insist,” said Coney, turning on him furiously. “You ain’t got the insistence required, you know what I mean?”

“I’m not sure I do,” said the doctor quietly.

“Well, just chew it over,” said Coney. “There’s no big hurry. C’mon, Lionel.”

MOTHERLESS BROOKLYN

I grew up in the library of St. Vincent’s Home for Boys, in the part of downtown Brooklyn no developer yet wishes to claim for some upscale, renovated neighborhood; not quite Brooklyn Heights, nor Cobble Hill, not even Boerum Hill. The Home is essentially set on the off-ramp to the Brooklyn Bridge, but out of sight of Manhattan or the bridge itself, on eight lanes of traffic lined with faceless, monolithic civil courts, which, gray and distant though they seemed, some of us Boys had seen the insides of, by Brooklyn’s central sorting annex for the post office, a building that hummed and blinked all through the night, its gates groaning open to admit trucks bearing mountains of those mysterious items called letters, by the Burton Trade School for Automechanics, where hardened students attempting to set their lives dully straight spilled out twice a day for sandwich-and-beer breaks, overwhelming the cramped bodega next door, intimidating passersby and thrilling us Boys in their morose thuggish glory, by a desolate strip of park benches beneath a granite bust of Lafayette, indicating his point of entry into the Battle of Brooklyn, by a car lot surrounded by a high fence topped with wide curls of barbed wire and wind-whipped fluorescent flags, and by a redbrick Quaker Meetinghouse that had presumably been there when the rest was farmland. In short, this jumble of stuff at the clotted entrance to the ancient, battered borough was officially Nowhere, a place strenuously ignored in passing through to Somewhere Else. Until rescued by Frank Minna I lived, as I said, in the library.

I set out to read every book in that tomblike library, every miserable dead donation ever indexed and forgotten there-a mark of my profound fear and boredom at St. Vincent’s and as well an early sign of my Tourettic compulsions for counting, processing, and inspection. Huddled there in the windowsill, turning dry pages and watching dust motes pinball through beams of sunlight, I sought signs of my odd dawning self in Theodore Dreiser, Kenneth Roberts, J. B. Priestley, and back issues of PopulMechanics and failed, couldn’t find the language of myself, as I failed to in watching television, those endless reruns of Bewitched and I Dream of Jeannie and I Love Lucy and Gilligan and Brady Bunch by which we nerdish unathletic Boys pounded our way through countless afternoons, leaning in close to the screen to study the antics of the women-women! exotic as letters, as phone calls, as forests, all things we orphans were denied-and the coping of their husbands, but I didn’t find myself there, Desi Arnaz and Dick York and Larry Hagman, those harried earthbound astronauts, weren’t showing me what I needed to see, weren’t helping me find the language. I was closer on Saturday mornings, Daffy Duck especially gave me something, if I could bear to imagine growing up a dynamited, beak-shattered duck. Art Carney on The Honeymooners gave me something too, something in the way he jerked his neck, when we were allowed to stay up late enough to see him. But it was Minna who brought me the language, Minna and Court Street that let me speak.

We four were selected that day because we were four of the five white boys at St. Vincent’s, and the fifth was Steven Grossman, fat as his name. If Steven had been thinner, Mr. Kassel would have left me in the stacks. As it was I was undersold goods, a twitcher and nose-picker retrieved from the library instead of the schoolyard, probably a retard of some type, certainly a regrettable, inferior offering. Mr. Kassel was a teacher at St. Vincent’s who knew Frank Minna from the neighborhood, and his invitation to Minna to borrow us for the afternoon was a first glimpse of the glittering halo of favors and favoritism that extended around Minna-“knowing somebody” as a life condition. Minna was our exact reverse, we who knew no one and benefited nothing from it when we did.