Motherless Brooklyn

It was Minna’s brother, Gerard. He’d come in without our noticing. A fleshier, taller Minna. His eyes and hair were as dark, his mouth as wry, lips deep-indented at the corners. He wore a brown-and-tan leather coat, which he left buttoned, his hands pushed into the fake-patch pockets.

“So this is your little moving company,” he said.

“Hey, Gerard,” said Minna.

“Christmas, Frank,” said Gerard Minna absently, not looking at his brother. Instead he was making short work of the four of us with his eyes, his hard gaze snapping us each in two like bolt cutters on inferior padlocks. It didn’t take long before he was done with us forever-that was how it felt.

“Yeah, Christmas to you,” said Minna. “Where you been?”

“Upstate,” said Gerard.

“What, with Ralph and them?” I detected something new in Minna’s voice, a yearning, sycophantic strain.

“More or less.”

“What, just for the holidays you’re gonna go talkative on me? Between you and Ma it’s like the Cloisters up here.”

“I brought you a present.” He handed Minna a white legal envelope, stuffed fat. Minna began to tear at the end and Gerard said, in a voice low and full of ancient sibling authority, “Put it away.”

Now we understood we’d all been staring. All except Carlotta, who was at her stove, piling together an improbable, cornucopic holiday plate for her older son.

“Make it to go, Mother.”

Carlotta moaned again, closed her eyes.

“I’ll be back,” said Gerard. He stepped over and put his hands on her, much as Minna had. “I’ve got a few people to see today, that’s all. I’ll be back tonight. Enjoy your little orphan party.”

He took the foil-wrapped plate and was gone.

Minna said, “What’re you staring Eat your food!” He stuffed the white envelope into his jacket. The envelope made me think of Matricardi and Rockaforte, their pristine hundred-dollar bills. Brickface and Stucco, I corrected silently. Then Minna cuffed us, a bit too hard, the bulging gold ring on his middle finger clipping our crowns in more or less the same place his mother had fondled.

Minna’s behavior with his mother oddly echoed what we knew of his style with women. I’d say girlfriends, but he never called them that, and we rarely saw him with the same one twice. They were Court Street girls, decorating poolrooms and movie-theater lounges, getting off work from the bakery still wearing disposable paper hats, applying lipstick without missing a chew of their gum, slanting their heavily elegant bodies through car windows and across pizza counters, staring over our heads as if we were four feet tall, and he’d apparently gone to junior high school with each and every one of them. “Sadie and me were in the sixth grade,” he’d say, mussing her hair, disarranging her clothes. “This is Lisa-she used to beat up my best friend in gym.” He’d angle jokes off them like a handball off a low wall, circle them with words like a banner flapping around a pole, tease their brassieres out of whack with pinching fingers, hold them by the two points of their hips and lean, as if he were trying to affect the course of a pinball in motion, risking tilt. They never laughed, just rolled their eyes and slapped him away, or didn’t. We studied it all, soaked up their indifferent femaleness, that rare essence we yearned to take for granted. Minna had that gift, and we studied his moves, filed them away with silent, almost unconscious prayers.

“It’s not that I only like women with large breasts,” he told me once, years later, long after he’d traded the Court Street girls for his strange, chilly marriage. We were walking down Atlantic Avenue together, I think, and a woman passing had caused his head to turn. I’d jerked my head too, of course, my actions as exaggerated and secondhand as a marionette’s. “That’s a very common misunderstanding,” he said, as if he were an idol and I his public, a mass audience devoted to puzzling him out. “Thing is, for me a woman has to have a certain amount of muffling, you know what I mean? Something between you, in the way of insulation. Otherwise, you’re right up against her naked soul.”

Wheels within wheels was another of Minna’s phrases, used exclusively to sneer at our notions of coincidence or conspiracy. If we Boys ever dabbled in astonishment at, say, his running into three girls he knew from high school in a row on Court Street, two of whom he’d dated behind each other’s backs, he’d bug his eyes and intone, wheels within wheels. No Met had ever pitched a no-hitter, but Tom Seaver and Nolan Ryan both pitched them after being traded away-wheels within wheels. The barber, the cheese man, and the bookie were all named Carmine-oh yeah, wheels within wheels, big time. You’re onto something there, Sherlock.