THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK
PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF
Copyright © 2017 by John Freeman Gill
All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York, and distributed in Canada by Random House of Canada, a division of Penguin Random House Canada Limited, Toronto.
www.aaknopf.com
Knopf, Borzoi Books, and the colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.
Grateful acknowledgment is made to Hal Leonard LLC for permission to reprint an excerpt from “Any Major Dude Will Tell You,” words and music by Walter Becker and Donald Fagen. Copyright © 1974 by Universal Music Corp. and copyright renewed. All rights reserved.
“Gargoyles and Grotesques” images courtesy of Dover Publications.
“Antique Woman Mask” image courtesy of Shutterstock.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Gill, John Freeman, author.
Title: The gargoyle hunters / by John Freeman Gill.
Description: New York : Alfred A. Knopf, 2017. | “This Is a Borzoi Book”—Verso title page.
Identifiers: LCCN 2016012828 (print) | LCCN 2016032580 (ebook) | ISBN 9781101946886 (hardcover) | ISBN 9781101946893 (ebook) | ISBN 978152471139 (open market)
Subjects: LCSH: Fathers and sons—Fiction. | Gargoyles—Fiction. | Decoration and ornament, Architectural—Fiction. | Business enterprises—Corrupt practices—Fiction. | Self-actualization (Psychology) in adolescence—Fiction. | New York (N. Y.)—Fiction. | Psychological fiction. | Domestic fiction.
Classification: LCC PS3606.R44547 G37 2017 (print) | LCC PS3606.R44547 (ebook) | DDC 813/.6—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016012828
Ebook ISBN 9781101946893
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Cover photograph by Francesco Bittichesu/Gallery Stock
Cover design by Gabriele Wilson
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Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Epigraph
Prologue: Ghosts of New York
Part One: The City We Have Lost
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Part Two: The Gargoyle Hunters
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Part Three: We Took Manhattan
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Part Four: Salvage
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Acknowledgments
A Note About the Author
Reading Group Guide
For Julina, who believed
New York, thy name is irreverence and hyperbole. And grandeur.
—Ada Louise Huxtable
It’ll be a great place if they ever finish it.
—O. Henry
PROLOGUE
GHOSTS OF NEW YORK
WHY DO WE STAY? Why do we members of this oddball tribe known as native New Yorkers stick around, decade upon decade, as so much of the city we love, the city that shaped us in all of our wiseacre, top-of-the-heap eccentricity, is razed and made unrecognizable around us?
We are inured to so much bedlam here, so many exotic daily distractions, yet are somehow inexplicably surprised and pained every time a new wound opens up in the streetscape. We barely notice the shrieking ambulance whizzing past or the man in the octopus suit struggling to get all his arms through the turnstile, but let them tear down the Times Square Howard Johnson’s or the Cedar Tavern or Rizzoli, let them shutter H&H Bagels or CBGB or the Ziegfeld, and we wince as if our own limb has been severed.
“Every block, it’s just one goddamn ghost after another,” my big sister, Quigley, told me last year when she’d finally had enough and decided to move away for good. “I’m tired of being homesick in my own hometown.”
So why do I, whose ghosts are at least as obstreperous as hers, stay on? Why is this maddening, heartbreaking, self-cannibalizing city the only place where I feel like I’m me?
And what about you? If you’ve lived in New York long enough to resent some gleaming new condo that pulled a Godzilla vs. Bambi on a favorite restaurant or deli or bookstore, then this is your city, too, teeming with your own bespoke ghosts.
As for me and mine, most of the things I need to tell you about happened in the seventies. But it was in late 1965, when I was about to turn five, that I first sensed what it is to love a city that never loves you back.
—
We were not even in New York at the time. We were in our VW Bug, taking a predawn road trip to a mystery destination my father refused to reveal. It was the sharp left turn at the slaughterhouse that awakened me, the momentum burrowing my head deeper into the ribbed warmth of his corduroy armpit. Out the window of our little car, in a now-you-see-it-now-you-don’t pocket of yellow light, men in blood-smeared smocks hosed down the pavement, clouds of steam rising into the night. On a wide brick wall, our headlights gliding across it, the faded image of a grinning cartoon cow, its speech bubble saying, “Pleased to Meet You! Meat to Please You!”
We drove on another few minutes, the world still more dark than light. Mom and Quigley murmured groggily in the backseat. When we reached an enchanted point along the highway that looked exactly the same to me as every other part of the highway, Dad pulled off decisively and parked in a marshy softness. Another few cars, three or four, followed his lead, but Dad headed off on foot without hailing or waiting for the others. He preferred to make people keep up with him.
The marsh grasses were just the right height to keep hitting me in the face as we walked, and I didn’t much like the way the soggy ground sucked at my Keds. So Dad hoisted me up and let me doze on his shoulder, slobbering contentedly on the rise of muscle beneath his shirt. I was part of him, my whole limp body lifting and subsiding with his breaths. When I opened my eyes again, the darkness had thinned and we were moving through a shadow landscape strewn with hulking oblong shapes. They loomed all around us, tilting this way and that, one across the other like gargantuan pick-up sticks. The ground crunched beneath Dad’s feet as he picked his way carefully over the treacherous terrain, his broad hand flat against my back. The air smelled burnt.
Daylight was seeping into the sky now from the marsh’s edge, faster every moment, until at last the colossal tilted shadows around us resolved themselves into the grand ruined forms of classical columns, doz
ens of them, toppled and smashed and abandoned here in an empire of rubble. Dad put me down. We were standing amid the wreckage of some magnificent lost civilization—even I, the runt of the party, could see that. And we were going to have a picnic.
Dad set a wicker basket on the ground, and Mom pulled out a red-and-white-checked tablecloth, which she spread on a broken cylinder of stone, a column section only a bit higher than our round kitchen table back in the city. Their friends, the rest of our extended clan, were beginning to straggle up now, picking their way across the majestic junkyard, huge goofy smiles on their faces as they took in their surroundings.
There was a lot to see, crushed bricks and tortured iron railings and enormous fragments of pink-white stone carved in the shapes of leaves and scrolls. Here and there, the place was smoldering, ribbons of smoke curling skyward from the debris. Poking diagonally from a rubble pile, not far from Mom’s makeshift picnic table, was a woman’s white, intricately veined stone arm, its middle and ring fingers snapped off at the second knuckle.
It was a terrific party. Quig and a couple of other big kids ran around and hopped from column to column, their arms outstretched for balance. A lanky bearded guy plucked at a guitar with silver claws. Mom, dark-eyed and grinning, wearing a short white sweater-dress cinched at the waist with a yellow scarf, handed round mismatched cups—some old freebie Mets glasses from the Polo Grounds and a bunch of those little mugs her favorite mustard came in. At the center of it all was Dad, the unmistakable leader of the expedition, pouring out the red wine, slicing hunks of chorizo, tossing people astonishingly sweet figs he’d found in Little Italy.
It was really something being his little guy. I was the smallest one here by far, but I was the princeling, sitting right beside him, basking in his reflected glow and helping him open wine bottles with a corkscrew that looked like a man doing jumping jacks. Everyone looked our way, vied for his attention. People ruffled my hair.
Something important had been left behind in one of the cars, a casserole or a cooler. Mom headed back to get it. The silver-claw guy put down his guitar to go help. Someone started tossing around a Frisbee.
The grown-ups had a lot to talk about. They wandered among the ruins in groups of two or three, prodding half-buried objects with their shoe tips and venturing opinions. Dad was the only one who’d been here before. He led me and a married couple with matching curly hair along a road rutted with truck tracks, left and then right and then left, until he found what he was looking for: the biggest clockface I’d ever seen, jutting slantwise from a rubble heap like a crash-landed flying saucer. It was a great white disc with elegant black metal letters around its edge in the places the numbers should have been: the letter I mostly, with a few Vs and Xs mixed in. It had no hands.
Dad climbed up the rubble slope to the clock and took from his back pocket a vise grip, a pair of shiny locking pliers whose teeth always suggested to me the polished grin of an alligator. He adjusted its bite by turning a knob on one of the handles, then locked its teeth onto a letter I: the only one all by itself.
“See if you can’t snap that off to give to your mother,” he told me. “I can drill a hole in the top to run a chain through as a necklace.” Mom’s name was Ivy.
Half-buried along the flank of the rubble pile was what appeared to be the feathered stone wing of an eagle. Using its slant surface as a ramp, I clambered onto the clock, which was about twice my height. The clock had two black metal rings, one inside the other, running around the periphery of its face like a circular toy-train track. Suspended between these two tracks were the letters. They were cold and a little sharp in my palms, but they made pretty good handholds, so I climbed cautiously up the clock’s curved edge to the letter I on which Dad had clamped the vise grip. Up close, I could see that this I had been attached to the metal rings at top and bottom, until someone—Dad, surely, when he’d been here before—had sawed it loose at the top. All that was left to do was to wiggle the vise grip back and forth until the I snapped free at the bottom.
Holding the tool with both hands, I rotated my wrists, left-right, left-right, while Dad explained to the curly-haired couple just how tricky it had been to find this dumping ground here on the other side of the Hudson: something about how the railroad’s Jersey-based wreckers—“Lipsett’s guys,” he called them—were keeping the location on the down-low, for safety reasons. My wrists were starting to get awfully sore, and after a while I complained to Dad, who excused himself to come help me.
My hands inside his, Dad took hold of the vise grip and worked it vigorously back and forth, then pretended to get tired out so I could give it the triumphant final twist all by myself. Off popped that stubborn letter I, right into my palm. It was cool along most of its length but hot where it had just broken loose. I couldn’t wait to give it to Mom. I knew she’d love it.
Together Dad and I started making our way back, taking care not to trip over a felled black post marked TRACK 3. But we’d gone so far, and everything was so wildly disordered here, that I wasn’t sure how we would find the right route. One junk pile looked like another, and the truck roads running every which way all looked alike, too, and all the heaped debris and stone columns made it hard to see more than ten or fifteen feet in front of us. Still, Dad looked as handsome and as sure of himself as ever, and I loved roaming this broken landscape with him, no one around but us, the world’s two greatest living explorers conquering the unknown side by side.
Snatches of sound came to us now and then, the squawking of seagulls and the distant rumble of machinery layered upon the crunch of our footfalls. Dad kept up a steady pace, his usual certainty of gait, until an unfamiliar hesitation in his step, somewhere between a hitch and a stumble, caused me to stop and look up at him, at his face, where I saw at once that something had changed. He wore a look of weakness, of panic almost, that I’d never seen before. I followed his gaze, stared at the same debris he was staring at, but saw nothing, nothing but a hill of scarred rubble and several long, shiny marble rectangles—the shoe-burnished steps of a grand staircase, maybe.
Then I saw it. Amid a contortion of brass that might once have been a banister, Mom’s yellow scarf had wrapped itself around a bent post. From somewhere behind it, how far away I couldn’t tell, I thought I heard her laughter, a gasping stifled giggle. It was a joyous sound, but self-strangled somehow, shushed. I watched a long moment, hoping to spot something I could understand, but saw only my mother’s scarf wavering in the breeze, delicate and almost see-through now that it was no longer bunched at her waist.
When I looked up, to learn from my father’s face how to feel, I discovered something new. My father was no longer beside me.
PART ONE
THE CITY WE HAVE LOST
1
EVERY NEW YORKER HAS his own idiosyncratic system of cartography, his personal method of charting the points of correspondence between the external city and the landmarks of his interior streetscape. No surveyor’s equipment is necessary, just a wry acceptance of the ephemeral. For many of us, the resulting map is a distorted but truthful rendering of New York in which vanished buildings and storefronts are as present as surviving ones, often more so. Glance at your own homemade map as you walk around town and you’ll be struck by all the uncelebrated places—a rent-controlled walk-up you lived in before you knew yourself very well, or the site of a long-gone bar where you used to meet a close friend who’s since drifted away—that pop out of the mad eternal rush hour and demand your attention. But only yours. Everyone else on that street hurries past with places to go, dry cleaning to pick up, important artisanal cheese to purchase. They are oblivious to that crucial landmark of that earlier you. They have their own landmarks.
Me, too. The sacked capitol of my New York will always be the Queen Anne row house on Eighty-Ninth Street between Lex and Third where my family lived in the late 1960s and ’70s. A brick-and-brownstone confection enlivened with ironwork, a pedimented dormer, an oriel, and even a mansard roof, it w
as something of a grandly tricked-out imp, just twelve feet wide, squashed in the middle of a jostling troupe of six.
You can still go see it. Along with the rest of the row, built in 1887 by descendants of sugar baron William Rhinelander, it appears in most city architectural guidebooks (though it’s notably absent from the three I’ve written, as well as from all my magazine columns). And in one of New York’s colossal ironies, my childhood brownstone will outlive us all. After everything was over, after all the intricate destruction, the city went and designated the row of houses as historic landmarks, throwing a too-little-too-late bubble of protection over them.
If you have a taste for good architecture, you may appreciate the look of my family’s old house, may even stop a moment to take in its quirkish elegance as you pass by. But it won’t shimmer with meaning for you as it does for me, just as I can walk right by that old coffee shop—the one where you had those eggs before that big job interview all those years ago, or where that exasperating lover with the beautiful neck told you it was over—without the slightest inkling that this is the capitol of your New York.
—
Every few years, I climb the chipped steps of our old brownstone when I’m pretty sure nobody’s home. I lean over the ornate wrought-iron stoop railing, cup my hands around my eyes like horse blinders, and peer through the stained-glass window.
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