Motherless Brooklyn

I hung up the phone. Then I memorized the numbers, all three of them. In the years that followed I would never once step across the line I’d drawn with Murray or the other telephone Essrogs-never show up at their homes, never accuse them of being related to a free human freak show, never even properly introduce myself-but I made a ritual out of dialing their numbers and hanging up after a tic or two, or listening, just long enough to hear another Essrog breathe.

A true story, not a joke, though it was repeated as often, tugboated relentlessly, was of the beat cop from Court Street who routinely dislodged clumps of teenagers clustered at night on stoops or in front of bars and who, if met with excuses, would cut them off with “Yeah, yeah. Tell your story walking.” More than anything, this somehow encapsulated my sense of Minna-his impatience, his pleasure in compression, in ordinary things made more expressive, more hilarious or vivid by their conflation. He loved talk but despised explanations. An endearment was flat unless folded into an insult. An insult was better if it was also self-deprecation, and ideally should also serve as a slice of street philosophy, or as resumption of some dormant debate. And all talk was finer on the fly, out on the pavement, between beats of action: We learned to tell our story walking.

Though Gerard Minna’s name was printed on the L &L business card, we met him only twice, and never on a moving job. The first time was Christmas Day, 1982, at Minna’s mother’s apartment.

Carlotta Minna was an Old Stove. That was the Brooklyn term for it, according to Minna. She was a cook who worked in her own apartment, making plates of sautéed squid and stuffed peppers and jars of tripe soup that were purchased at her door by a constant parade of buyers, mostly neighborhood women with too much housework or single men, young and elderly, bocce players who’d take her plates to the park with them, racing bettors who’d eat her food standing up outside the OTB, barbers and butchers and contractors who’d sit on crates in the backs of their shops and wolf her cutlets, folding them with their fingers like waffles. How her prices and schedules were conveyed I never understood-perhaps telepathically. She truly worked an old stove, too, a tiny enamel four-burner crusted with ancient sauces and on which three or four pots invariably bubbled. The oven of this herculean appliance was never cool; the whole kitchen glowed with heat like a kiln. Mrs. Minna herself seemed to have been baked, her whole face dark and furrowed like the edges of an overdone calzone. We never arrived without nudging aside some buyers from her door, nor without packing off with plateloads of food, though how she could spare it was a mystery, since she never seemed to make more than she needed, never wasted a scrap. When we were in her presence Minna bubbled himself, with talk, all directed at his mother, banking cheery insults off anyone else in the apartment, delivery boys, customers, strangers (if there was such a thing to Minna then), tasting everything she had cooking and making suggestions on every dish, poking and pinching every raw ingredient or ball of unfinished dough and also his mother herself, her earlobes and chin, wiping flour off her dark arms with his open hand. She rarely-that I saw, anyway-acknowledged his attentions, or even directly acknowledged his presence. And she never once in my presence uttered so much as a single word.

That Christmas Minna had us all up to Carlotta’s apartment, and for once we ate at her table, first nudging aside sauce-glazed stirring spoons and unlabeled baby-food jars of spices to clear spots for our plates. Minna stood at the stove, sampling her broth, and Carlotta hovered over us as we devoured her meatballs, running her floury fingers over the backs of our chairs, then gently touching our heads, the napes of our necks. We pretended not to notice, ashamed in front of one another and ourselves to show that we drank in her nurturance as eagerly as her meat sauce. But we drank it. It was Christmas, after all. We splashed, gobbled, kneed one another under the table. Privately, I polished the handle of my spoon, quietly aping the motions of her fingers on my nape, and fought not to twist in my seat and jump at her. I focused on my plate-eating was for me already by then a reliable balm. All the while she went on caressing, with hands that would have horrified us if we’d looked close.

Minna spotted her and said, “This is exciting for you, Ma? I got all of Motherless Brooklyn up here for you. Merry Christmas.”

Minna’s mother only produced a sort of high, keening sigh. We stuck to the food.

“Motherless Brooklyn,” repeated a voice we didn’t know.