Motherless Brooklyn

“Out,” he said. He waved his hand, a Caesar gesturing to the heavens through the dented roof of his refitted postal van.

“What?” said Tony. “Right here?”

“Out,” he said again, equably. “Walk home, you muffin asses.” We sat gaping, though his meaning was clear enough. We weren’t more than five or six blocks from the Home anyway. But we hadn’t been paid, hadn’t gone for beers or slices or a bag of hot, clingy zeppole. I could taste the disappointment-the flavor of powdered sugar’s absence. Tony slid open the door, dislodging more glass, and we obediently filed out of the van and onto the sidewalk, into the day’s glare, the suddenly formless afternoon.

Minna drove off, leaving us there to bob together awkwardly before the drinkers on the stoop. They shook their heads at us, stupid-looking white boys a block from the projects. But we were in no danger there, nor were we dangerous ourselves. There was something so primally humiliating in our ejection that Hoyt Street itself seemed to ridicule us, humble row of brownstones, sleeping bodega. We were inexcusable to ourselves. Others clotted street corners, not us, not anymore. We rode with Minna. The effect was deliberate: Minna knew the value of the gift he’d withdrawn.

“Muffin ass,” I said forcefully, measuring the shape of the words in my mouth, auditioning them for tic-richness. Then I sneezed, induced by the sunlight.

Gilbert and Danny looked at me with disgust, Tony with something worse.

“Shut up,” he said. There was cold fury in his teeth-clenched smile.

“Tellmetodoit, muffinass,” I croaked.

“Be quiet now,” warned Tony. He plucked a piece of wood from the gutter and took a step toward me.

Gilbert and Danny drifted away from us warily. I would have followed them, but Tony had me cornered against a parked car. The men on the stoop stretched back on their elbows, slurped their malt liquor thoughtfully.

“Dickweed,” I said. I tried to mask it in another sneeze, which made something in my neck pop. I twitched and spoke again. “Dickyweed! Dicketywood!” I was trapped in a loop of self, one already too familiar, that of refining a verbal tic to free myself from its grip (not yet knowing how tenacious would be the grip of those particular syllables). Certainly I didn’t mean to be replying to Tony. Yet dickweed was the name Minna had called him, and I was throwing it in his face.

Tony held the stick he’d found, a discarded scrap of lath with clumps of plaster stuck to it. I stared, anticipating my own pain as I’d anticipated Tony’s, at Minna’s hand, a minute before. Instead Tony moved close, stick at his side, and grabbed my collar.

“Open your mouth again,” he said.

“Restrictaweed, detectorwood, vindictaphone,” said I, prisoner of my syndrome. I grabbed Tony back, my hands exploring his collar, fingers running inside it like an anxious, fumbling lover.

Gilbert and Danny had started up Hoyt Street, in the direction of the Home. “C’mon, Tony,” said Gilbert, tilting his head. Tony ignored them. He scraped his stick in the gutter, and came up with a smear of dog shit, mustard-yellow and pungent.

“Open,” he said.

Now Gilbert and Danny were just slinking away, heads bowed. The street was brightly, absurdly empty. Nobody but the black men on the stoop, impassive witnesses. I jerked my head as Tony jabbed with his stick-tic as evasive maneuver-and he only managed to paint my cheek. I could smell it, though, powdered sugar’s opposite made tangible, married to my face.

“Stickmebailey!” I shouted. Falling back against the car behind me, I turned my head again, and again, twitching away, enshrining the moment in ticceography. The stain followed me, adamant, on fire. Or maybe it was my cheek that was on fire.

Our witnesses crinkled their paper bag, offered ruminative sighs.

Tony dropped his stick and turned from me. He’d disgusted himself, couldn’t meet my eye. About to speak, he thought better of it, instead jogged to catch Gilbert and Danny as they shrugged away up Hoyt Street, leaving the scene.

We didn’t see Minna again until five weeks later, Sunday morning at the Home’s yard, late May. He had his brother Gerard with him; it was the second time we’d ever laid eyes on him.

None of us had seen Frank in the intervening weeks, though I know that the others, like myself, had each wandered down Court Street, nosed at a few of his usual haunts, the barbershop, the beverage outlet, the arcade. He wasn’t in them. It meant nothing, it meant everything. He might never reappear, but if he turned up and didn’t speak of it we wouldn’t think twice. We didn’t speak of it to one another, but a pensiveness hung over us, tinged with orphan’s melancholy, our resignation to permanent injury. A part of each of us still stood astonished on the corner of Hoyt and Bergen, where we’d been ejected from Minna’s van, where we’d fallen when our inadequate wings melted in the sun.