12

EVERYTHING ABOUT THE CITY FOLLOWED hidden rules, if only you could uncover them. The subways had cryptic subterranean signals and unpublished schedules and phantom stations that rushed past you in the darkness according to some overarching logic of momentum. The water system had aqueducts and gatehouses and six thousand miles of concealed mains through which a million gallons of water sluiced each day, all following an arcane plan I imagined to be the handiwork of mustachioed engineers in belted trench coats. Even the weather could be understood, if you possessed the secret knowledge that allowed you, with an authoritative swoop of your Magic Marker, to sketch a scowling storm cloud over the Battery or Hell Gate, the way weatherman-cartoonist Tex Antoine did on Eyewitness News.

My father’s anger, like all the bewildering infrastructure governing my world, must follow some unseen pattern as well, I felt sure, its eruptions issuing from obscure yet knowable fault lines beneath the asphalt. But unlike the secrets of the transit and water systems, some of which I’d puzzled out over the years by squinting at the yellowed maps and documents that had flowed through our house en route to eventual resale, the rules behind my father’s mood swings had always defied discovery. Only by dumb luck, in fact, did I finally stumble on a system for decoding and, at least for a while, containing his temper.

The solution was hiding in plain sight. The day after my father’s blowup with my mother and Mr. Price, I crept up the stone spiral staircase that led from our school’s cinder-block basement classrooms to the church upstairs, from which the school rented space.

The Church of the Heavenly Rest was an impressively gloomy structure, a vast vaulted world of soaring stone arches and bloodred stained glass and humorless whiskered personages carved in the wall behind the altar. Since our school had no auditorium of its own, we performed all our plays and musicals up there. By sneaking up to the church after school on this afternoon, I hoped to catch a glimpse of Dani rehearsing her swordplay performance for the talent show. But I’d picked the wrong day. This was the afternoon they were setting up the stage, and before I had a chance to slip away, Mr. Krakauer, the drama teacher, spotted me.

“Watts!” he called. “Stop skulking around in the shadows and give us a hand here!”

During a little self-granted break after an hour of hauling sets, I found my eyes drawn to the group of three-digit numbers posted on the broad stone surface behind the pulpit. I’d surely seen them dozens of times over the years, but never before had it occurred to me to wonder why those numbers were there, or what their specific sequence might signify.

Prominently displayed on a massive wall of stone blocks, the numbers seemed to speak of permanence. But they were ephemeral, too, each digit printed on an eggshell-yellow card of its own and slid into a small track like the ones you sometimes saw at coffee shops announcing the special of the day.

The numerals put me in mind of the carved naked ladies on the altar down at Dad’s studio, the upper arms of which, I now recalled with a kind of tingling recognition, were also marked with three-digit numbers, in yellow chalk. I grabbed a stubby little pencil and a Join Our Parish card from the wooden shelf beneath the pew and scribbled down all five three-digit numbers from the wall. I felt certain I was on the cusp of understanding something here, something crucial.

While Mr. Krakauer was squinting at his stage diagram, I slipped to the darkened edge of the church and then out to the street.

The explosion of sunlight on Fifth Avenue was blinding after all that time in the lugubrious belly of the church. But I was too excited to mind the way it hurt my eyes. I blinked until the numbers I’d written on the card became unblurred: 592 was the first one.

592. It looked familiar.

Before I even had time to contemplate why, my feet were carrying me uptown, past the ornately textured brick-and-limestone mansion of the Cooper Hewitt Museum.

Two blocks up from school, I saw them: a pair of lushly maned lion heads, carved from rich red stone and roaring down, full-throated, from atop two columns flanking the door of a townhouse. I’d never noticed them before. The expression on the lions’ faces was so epically peevish, and the details of their open mouths so finely wrought, that you could practically smell the caribou on their breath and diagnose which pointy teeth in their jaws might be afflicted with a touch of gingivitis.

I looked up at the two yellow street signs jutting, perpendicular to each other, from the lamppost on the corner: E 92 ST and 5 AV.

92 & 5: 925.

Or flip the signs around: 5 AV and E 92 ST.

5 & 92: 592! Just like on the church wall. I’d done it! I’d cracked the code.

—

It took me more than a week, because the five three-digit church numbers referred to blocks all over town, but I scoped out all the relevant intersections, and at all but one there was a building façade with a gargoyle or some other architectural ornament that looked precious enough for Dad to want to own and sell. Here at last was the hidden system that ordered and nourished my father’s obsession with possessing the city. Here, if I knew how to use it, was a blueprint for keeping his nettling dissatisfaction at bay.

—

The next time I went to watch Dani rehearse her swordplay act—and I have to say, she looked way better in her cutoff jeans and red bandanna headband than the ordinary pretty ballet girls in their pink Danskins—the numerals above the pulpit had changed. This time, though, I was properly equipped. I carefully recorded them in a moleskine notebook I’d gotten at Blacker & Kooby: 237, 348, 590, 256.

I didn’t tell anyone about those church numbers. Not Kyle, not Quig, not Mom. I wasn’t sure what to do with the information, whether I should reveal to Dad that I knew how he decided which gargoyles to target, or if learning that his secret was out would cause him to turn his rage on me. It was important to play it right.

The matter was further complicated by the disturbing certified letter from Chase Manhattan Bank I signed for and tore open one of the many afternoons Mom wasn’t around to answer the doorbell. It was a NOTICE OF ARREARS informing my father that he was several months behind on the brownstone mortgage. I’d never seen or heard the word arrears before. It sounded like being mooned by a financial institution.

—

With Dad short of cash, I needed to take matters into my own hands. By the time it got dark, I had swiped Quigley’s old violin case and filled it with the few things I thought I might need for my mission. Mom didn’t come home all evening—she never seemed to be around much anymore—but Quig was still bustling about in the dining room and kitchen. She couldn’t stand the chaos of the house, how the boarders never cleaned up after themselves. In an effort to restore some of the order that had eroded along with our parents’ marriage, she always crept downstairs after the boarders had retired and emptied the ashtrays, pushed in the chairs, did the dishes. She couldn’t bear to start a new day with things in such disarray.

At 11:17, when Quig finally went upstairs to listen to her show tunes, I snuck out to the street. I’d had hours to choose my first target from the list of numbers in my moleskine notebook: 590.

Ninetieth and Fifth was easily the closest of the city intersections indicated by that week’s three-digit church numerals, and happened to be the location of the Church of the Heavenly Rest itself. I hoofed it over there with my tools rattling around in the violin case. There were doormen in long coats behind the glass doors of the two apartment houses facing each other across Ninetieth Street on the west side of Madison, and a broken checkerboard of lit and unlit windows above each lobby. But as I headed toward Fifth, everything residential slipped away behind me and the only light came from the jaundiced glow of the tall silver streetlamps curving their necks to peer down at my slinking progress. On Fifth Avenue and Ninetieth, only two of the four corner streetlamps were even functioning properly. A third, on the southeast corner where the hulking stone church loomed, flickered a jittery light down onto me. Nothing much worked in the city these days.

So where was the architectural sculpture I was supposed to take? The most obvious choice to yield up its treasures was the church itself, whose heavy stone entrance was richly framed with carved crowns and shepherd’s crooks and all sorts of other God paraphernalia. But it seemed unlikely that the number 590 had been hanging on the wall inside as a prescription for pilfering the carvings on the church itself, so I ventured across the street to take a look at the iron-and-granite fence that ran around the courtyard of the Cooper Hewitt Museum. The fence did have a blocky sort of column at its corner, but the big urn-like stone ornament at its top had to be a good eighteen feet above the street, and way too huge to remove.

This was frustrating. The wind was beginning to find its way up my pant legs and between the folds of my scarf to my throat. I started working up to feeling good and sorry for myself, noting how each of my breaths wafting toward Central Park was clear evidence of how horribly cold I was, when I realized I was looking right at what I’d come for.

Across the asphalt moat of Fifth Avenue stood the two stone pillars of the Engineers’ Gate, one on each side of the park entrance. I closed my eyes tight and made a quick deal with myself not to contemplate what a stupid idea it was to get any closer to the park, which everyone knew teemed with muggers and rapists and every other sort of criminal you could imagine. When I opened my eyes again, I was pleasantly surprised to find that no one had lurched from the shadows and jumped me. I crossed Fifth Avenue on the red and stood at the base of the uptown gate pillar. Some vandal had knocked out the light of the streetlamp above it with a rock, but you could still see quite clearly that an elaborate—and, frankly, quite freaky—coat of arms had been carved into the pillar’s front panel. It looked like a psychedelic Peter Max poster wrought in stone, or the sort of fever dream a court sculptor might come up with if someone had planted a tab of acid in his morning crumpet. At the carving’s center was the head of a pompous-looking cougar or lion wearing a wackadoodle pharaonic headdress and surrounded by a junk closet’s worth of regal bric-a-brac: garlands and wreaths and so forth. What it all meant I hadn’t the slightest clue. This was how grown-up power encoded itself.

I looked around to make sure I wasn’t being watched. Here on the park side of Fifth, the empty street beside the curb was decorated, at regular intervals, with piles of moonlit glass shards, where some previous night’s marauder had gone along and smashed the passenger window of each car to get at its radio.

I rested the violin case on the curved stone bench at the base of the gate pillar and took out a hammer and chisel. The pillar was made of stacked stone blocks, like a built-in ladder, with large grooves in between, so climbing up to the really good details of the carved panel was pretty easy.

The moment I got up there, I zeroed in on a little stone eaglet about the size of a grown man’s hand. He was really the only part of the carving that stuck out enough for me to get at; even his wings were pretty flat against the panel. But it was no problem to get the chisel edge behind the bird’s rounded shoulder. I gripped the pillar with my knees, made sure the angle of the chisel was right, and began hammering the round red top of its handle.

The noise the eaglet and I made was rhythmic, and seemed to get swallowed up in the textured darkness of Central Park. After I’d chipped away behind half of the little eagle’s body, I shifted the chisel to the bird’s other shoulder and went at it from the opposite side. When I could feel that he was only held on by a sliver of remaining stone along his spine, I let the hammer drop to the sidewalk, cupped the creature gently in my left hand, and worked the edge of the chisel behind his back again. A violent jerk of my right wrist was all it took. The eagle popped loose into my palm, leaving his wings behind.

High above Fifth Avenue, I opened and closed my fingers around the bird’s little breastbone and beak, admiring his solid fragility.