Papa says people used to store stoves and mattresses and other things at the warehouse before the man that used to own it got in trouble with the FBI. Now the warehouse belongs to Uncle Sam and it is in limbo, Papa says. Our upstairs neighbor, Mrs. Silberstein, told me there are probably some mob guys buried in the floor. Mother says Papa won’t mind mob guy ghosts. He grew up around them.
We will only see Papa on the weekends, until he gets to be rich and famous with his art. He says it will only be a year or two, he bets. But that feels like forever and I don’t know what we will do without him. I caught Mother crying in the kitchen (my mother NEVER cries), and she swore it was because she opened the bag of onions on the table. She pretended to beat the bag with her cane. Take that, onions, she said. I pretended to laugh.
I AM NOT GOING TO CRY, EITHER. I HAVE A MOTHER TO TAKE CARE OF.
Until last week, Papa worked for Mr. Gutzman. GOOTS MAN. Papa calls him Goots. Goots is a German. He has a big fancy garage where he fixes dents in nice cars. He says Papa is the best body man in New York State, and he is sorry to see him go, but he is sure Papa will come back as soon as the money runs out. Mother told Goots we live like Spartans and don’t need much money. We need great art and great ideas, instead, she says.
For a long time Goots let Papa use a corner of his garage to build art out of metal. Sometimes Papa took me there, and I helped him. “We’re making metal talk to us,” he said. “Telling us what it wants to be. We’re like God. We’re giving it life.” Father Aleksandr at St. Vincent’s (my school) wouldn’t like Papa talking that way, but I’ll never tell on him, not in Confession, not anywhere, even if I burn in hell. Papa is the best father and the greatest man in the world!
He made a big twisty thing out of a metal staircase once and Goots said Awk! What is THAT? It has been caught in a bad storm? A truck ran over it? What? Papa told him it was supposed to make you think of something broken and what it means to be broken, but Goots shook his big fat head and said Awk, again. Then a rich man from the Heights came in to pick up his car and he BOUGHT the sculpture for two hundred dollars!
He put it in his office waiting room.
He was a back doctor.
Papa and Mother got excited after that but Papa did not sell even ONE other sculpture for so long he almost gave up. I could tell he felt bad. He is real quiet anyway, and sometimes I am scared when I can’t get him to talk. Not like he would hit me, but like he wants to hit himself. He wouldn’t even go to museums on Sundays with us anymore. Mother hugged him all the time. She is his heart doctor, Mrs. Silberstein says.
But then last November he got a big customer for his art, and everything changed! A lady paid him five thousand dollars to make a bear for her! A BEAR. He put it on a train and sent it to the lady a couple of weeks ago. ALL THE WAY TO GEORGIA. I checked on the map.
Papa said the bear is special, and that it taught him some lessons. You can sort of tell it is a bear, and THAT’S SURE SPECIAL, because most of the time people don’t know WHAT Papa’s sculptures are trying to be. Mother says it is the spirit of life. She says it means that Papa has found his calling. It just looked like a bear with all its bones showing, to me.
This bear means Papa is going to be important, that’s what Mother says. Even if he never finished high school! She should know. She went to college! Papa doesn’t care about school, but he loves to read, so she and he get along fine. Except he hates church. He grew up in a mean church home for orphans and he has a belt scar on his shoulder, I saw it! But he made me be an altar boy, et cetera, because Mother wants me to and St. Vincent’s is a good Catholic school and I get in free since her nutty Aunt Zelda left St. Vincent’s all her money. I’m even named after an old priest who taught Latin there.
Riconnis have been trying to build something important for about 150 years now and so far, it has not gone real well. Great-grandpapa died working high up on the Brooklyn Bridge. Grandpapa died building pontoon army bridges across a French river during World War II. Riconnis die pretty easy, and don’t get too old.
So Papa wants to build art that will make people remember our name and our GRAND ideas. He has to hurry. There aren’t many of us Riconnis left in America. Just me, him, and Mother, I guess. And she started out as a Dolinski.
Now he is going away. And it’s all because of his art. Because of that five-thousand-dollar bear. That DAMN bear. It is a BIG damn fucking bear. It looked down at me at Goots’s shop like it knew I was not as big as it is. Papa says his sculptures talk to him. (He’s not crazy. We have some crazy bums on our street, so I can tell.) He says the Bear told him to Go for It. Quit his job and become a real, live sculptor.
I am having a lot of trouble understanding what this Bear thinks it is doing. This is not fair. I’m worried.
But I am not crying. Not! Crying!
I just feel like I am rusting inside.
• • •
On a bright, cold April morning, Richard Riconni threw a duffel bag of clothes into the back of his old truck, alongside welding equipment, a box of pots, utensils, and dishes, an army cot, a sleeping bag, and a box filled with his books — a much-read collection on art and sculpting. He was a tall, big-shouldered man with thickly knuckled hands, dark Italian hair, and brilliant gray eyes. He drew admiring glances from the women who walked past him on the grimy sidewalk, carrying their groceries or their laundry, hurrying to shops with bars on the windows and shabby brownstone apartments with heavy locks on the main doors. This was a tough neighborhood, and getting tougher. People walked fast, these days. If he’d had any choice, or enough money, he’d never have left Angele and Quentin there.
Richard had a love-hate relationship with his sculptures, and they mirrored his uneasy battle with life in general. He constantly tore the works apart and started over, or left many of them half-finished in disgust. The metals he used — pried from junked cars, from appliances, from corroded iron fences and ancient tin roofs, refused to conform to the shapes he imagined. Only the Iron Bear had come easy. He never forgot that.
Until that moment, when he finished packing his battered old truck, he had willed himself not to look up at the fourth-story window of the small apartment building. He knew they were watching him. Now he raised his head, slowly. His wife and lookalike young son gazed down at him, and his heart twisted. They waved, feigning smiles.
Angele Dolinski Riconni kept her hand raised, pressed her fingertips against the glass, and held him still with dark, consuming eyes behind black-rimmed glasses. Her wavy brunette hair was still tousled from his own hands. She looked taller than her medium height, more sturdy than her slender build. She always seemed larger than life to Richard, always elevating him with her deep reverence for knowledge and ideals.
Angele despised pity, self-pity or otherwise. She had had enough of that in her life. Her right leg had been crushed as a child in a car accident that killed her mother. Her father had deserted them years before. Angele had memories of painful therapies and years of lonely recuperation spent at her eccentric Aunt Zelda’s Manhattan apartment, where hundreds of porcelain dolls and antique teddy bears filled the chairs, the sofas, even the china cabinet and bathroom closets.
Angele had grown up immersed in books to escape from Aunt Zelda’s crowded, miniature world. After Aunt Zelda died, leaving Angele nothing, she moved to Brooklyn, drawn there by her job at the imposing Brooklyn Library, which Angele loved. She rented a room at a boardinghouse for Catholic women, and settled into a life that was satisfying but all too lonely.
She was straightening shelves at the library one day when she met Richard. “Miss, I gotta find a book on modern sculpture theory,” he said in a deep voice. He was looking at her through an open space between books. Dirty, muscular, and dressed in a mechanic’s jumpsuit, he hardly resembled a library patron. Yet his eyes seemed gentle to her, silver and malleable, and he also seemed sincere.
Just as she was about to answer him, a security guard walked up. “Outta here,” the guard ordered. “Get cleaned up if you
want to hang out and pester the librarians.”
Richard had straightened with the ferocious pride of the often disregarded. His eyes flashed, and his fists tightened. The guard put a hand on the club at his belt. “I’ll vouch for this patron, Charlie,” Angele said quickly. “He’s an acquaintance of mine. He’s just come from work. We’re looking for a book.”
The guard frowned, apologized, and left. Richard looked at her with searing intensity. She was not accustomed to men eyeing her that way. She wore glasses and walked with a cane. Her plain skirts and white blouses said frivolous fashion disrupted serious goals. A vivid thought or extravagant paragraph could send her lithe hands into her short brown hair excitedly, as if pulling on it opened more room in her brain, so that she always looked disheveled. Until that moment she had believed no man would ever find her sexy.
But this one looked at her as if he wanted to eat her alive and make her like the process. “Why did you stick your neck out for me?” he asked.
“You’re here to find answers. It’s my job to give them. No one should be made to leave a library.”
He walked slowly around the end of the shelves, and slowly up to her, giving her a chance to back away. She didn’t. “I can use all the answers you can give me,” he said. Her eyes never strayed from him. He handed her a sketch on notebook paper folded in his pocket. It was a wildly convoluted concept for some sculpture he hoped to build, when he had a better place to work. “I want to see if I’m only copying a Boccioni I remember. Boccioni was a sculptor, a Futurist — ”
“How fascinating!” She studied the drawing, and then him, as if she’d found a diamond. “That specific movement focused on twentieth-century technology, did it not? It was the first significant step toward total reverence for the machine age?”
He could only gaze at her with complete and instant adoration. No one had ever understood or shared his obscure passion, before. “Did you ever want to be somebody,” he asked slowly, “and suddenly you figured out who?” She caught her breath then nodded. “I’m good for a cup of coffee and a sandwich,” he went on gruffly. “If you’ve got some time.”
“Oh, yes.” She met him after work that day. Since then, they’d always been together. She would always have faith in him, and in the ideals they treasured.
Standing below the window of their apartment ten years later, Richard looked up at her and thought, She could’ve done a lot better than marrying me. He loved her because she believed she had done better by marrying him.
Perched between her and Quentin on the windowsill, the plaster copy of Picasso’s Head of a Woman gazed down at him, too. Angele had given it to him for a birthday. Head, heart, soul, and dreams, she wrote on the card. All yours. You’re the only man I know who understands the gift.
He lifted a hand and gestured for Quentin to come downstairs. He and Angele had agreed on this plan to give Quentin some time alone with him. Quentin disappeared from the window like a shot. Richard continued to hold Angele’s devoted gaze. Ten years of love, marriage, and impossible dreams — a collision of his streetwise world and her genteel one.
Quentin popped out of the apartment building’s heavy front doors and raced down the steps of its concrete stoop, then jerked to a stop and made an obvious effort to compose himself. “Papa, I’m ready,” he said firmly. “I’ve been reading about the Roman caesars. When they went off to war their kids lined up and gave ’em gifts.” He reached under his pullover sweater and retrieved a packet of postcards he’d made from index cards. Each was already addressed to Mr. Quentin Riconni, and bore a stamp. On the opposite side of each card, he’d pasted headlines from the newspaper. Surveyor Satellite Finds Safe Home on Moon. War Protesters Say Bring Soldiers Home. Star Trek TV Show Voyages Far from Home.
“So you can write to me. And to remind you of home,” Quentin said, holding out the cards.
Richard took them reverently. “These are great. Just great.” He admired them for a moment while waiting for the tightness in his throat to relax. “Come on, let’s sit in the truck for our man-to-man talk.”
They climbed inside and shut the doors. Richard carefully laid the cards on the cracked vinyl seat, then lit a cigarette and hung one hand out the open window, watching the cool spring air carry the smoke. “I want you to know which bad guys to look out for. You see that guy down there on the next block? The one hanging around that old yellow van?”
“Yes, sir.”
“He’s a junkie. Sells drugs. He’s new around here, but I think he’s not the only one.”
“I won’t talk to him.”
“What if he talks to you, first?”
“I’ll ignore him, just like Mother says to do when kids make fun of me for going to St. Vincent’s. I use my brains, not my fists. I’ve got a good mind, so I don’t need to have a big mouth.” He recited his mother’s litanies dutifully.
“What if the junkie keeps trying to talk to you? What if he tries to give you some drugs? What if he says something he shouldn’t say to your mother?” Richard looked at him grimly, and waited. Quentin hesitated, but not from lack of confidence. The kid was brilliant, a real student, and thanks to Angele he was never going to have to work in a garage or worry about money. He’d be somebody slick, maybe a doctor or a lawyer. He’d have a title and letters after his name.
If he survived the neighborhood. Richard had to make certain he did. Richard watched him and thought worriedly, Me and Angele have put the kid between a rock and a hard place. We teach him different things. He’s confused. Quentin sat silently, still thinking.
“Don’t tell me what your Mother wants to hear,” Richard ordered. “Tell me what I wanna hear. What are you gonna do to that junkie if he gets in your face?”
Quentin exhaled. His eyes narrowed and he smiled. “I’m gonna punch him in the balls.”
“That’s right. Then you go tell Alfonse Esposito, and he’ll have the bastard arrested.” Alfonse, a good neighbor, was a New York police detective. “Same rule goes for anybody who causes you and your ma trouble. Like Frank Siccone. He’s a goddamned loan shark and his kids are thieves. Don’t take any shit off ’em. Capice?”
“Capice.” Quentin nodded, and Richard watched him lift a hand to his chin. He suspected he’d been walloped a few times already by Siccone’s son, who was older and bigger.
Richard grunted. “Your ma wants you to be a good altar boy who doesn’t fight and talk trash. I know you try. You speak well, you study, you’re really smart. I’m proud of you. You keep acting the way she wants you to act, anytime you’re around her.” Richard leaned toward him. “But when you’re out here — ” he jabbed a blunt, fight-scarred hand toward the street — “you act like me, okay? You talk like your old man, you fight like your old man, and you make sure people know they can’t mess with you — or with your ma. Because these punks out here don’t care if you can speak Latin. They don’t care how smart you are. They don’t give a goddamn what the Roman caesars did. And hey, I know they give you a lot of grief over your school uniform and the tie you gotta wear, and all that. I figured.”
“Aw, they’re just a bunch of dumb schmucks,” Quentin assured him, with great disdain. “That’s what Mrs. Silberstein says.”
“Yeah, but you let ’em take advantage of you, and one day they’ll kill you.”
Quentin straightened proudly. “They won’t mess with me,” he vowed. “And they won’t kill me. And I’ll take care of Ma. I swear.”
Richard grabbed him and pulled him into a deep hug. They clung together for a long moment, then he kissed his son’s dark hair and pushed him away. “You be the worst ass-kicker on the block, all right? And the best student. And I’ll see you every other weekend. I’m getting a phone put in, so you can call me if you need me.”
“Capice.”
“Here. I’m no Roman emperor, but I got a gift for you.” He pulled a slender, gleaming object from the pocket of his wool jacket, then held it out. Quentin whistled under his breath. He gingerly picked up the lo
ng silver handle, thumbed a clasp on one side, and flicked a long, stiletto blade into place. “This beats my pocket knife all to heck,” he whispered. “Thank you, Papa.”
“Tell me how you use it.”
“Never pull it out for fun, ’cause it’s not a toy. Never show it to Father Aleksandr. Or to Ma. Never cut some guy unless he tries to hurt me first.”
Richard nodded. Quentin slowly folded the deadly blade and slipped it inside his jacket. He looked up at his father with pale misery and a clamped mouth. It was time to say goodbye. “Do you have to go way up there to work?” he asked. “It’s almost in Canada.”
“Yeah, I gotta go. It’s a free place, it’s big enough, and I got the money from the bear sculpture to finally get me started. Your old man’s not a bum. No matter what it takes, I’m gonna make you proud.”
“I’m already proud.”
He ruffled Quentin’s hair. “You’re a good kid,” he said in a gruff tone. “Now gimme a line or two of Latin then get the hell out of here and go upstairs. Be the man of the house for your ma, okay?”
Quentin got out of the truck, shut the door, then leaned against the passenger window. He took several deep breaths, and Richard saw painfully that he was disciplining himself not to cry. The kid will be all right, he prayed, if he can just walk the line between softhearted ideas and cold-blooded facts.
“Ars longa,” Quentin said, finally. “Vita brevis.” Art is long. Life is short.
Richard smiled. “Okay, smart guy. What’s that mean?”
“I want you to live forever,” Quentin said gruffly, then turned and walked away before the tears showed.
CHAPTER 2
Dozens of Mountain State students (and more than a few upstanding alumni) made midnight efforts to burn, cut up, or deface the Iron Bear, but it stood inviolable and dignified, four paws firmly on the earth, in a place of honor on a circular brick patio between the daffodil bed and the azalea hedges of the administration building.
The Tibers’ loathing of the sculpture grew stronger each year. A disgruntled employee at the Tiber plant would snipe at Mr. John, Go stick your pecker up your Iron Bear, on his way out the door. A chicken farmer who had been shorted on hatchlings might mutter, If that ain’t a double dose of Bear balls. A catty friend at the country club could be overheard saying, My house might not be as fine as the Tibers’, but at least I know the difference between art and scrap metal.