Motherless Brooklyn by Jonathan Lethem

neighborhood women with too much housework or single men, young and elderly, bocce players who’d take her plates to the park with them, racing bettors who’d eat her food standing up outside the OTB, barbers and butchers and contractors who’d sit on crates in the backs of their shops and wolf her cutlets, folding them with their fingers like waffles. How her prices and schedules were conveyed I never understood—perhaps telepathically. She truly worked an old stove, too, a tiny enamel four-burner crusted with ancient sauces and on which three or four pots invariably bubbled. The oven of this herculean appliance was never cool; the whole kitchen glowed with heat like a kiln. Mrs. Minna herself seemed to have been baked, her whole face dark and furrowed like the edges of an overdone calzone. We never arrived without nudging aside some buyers from her door, nor without packing off with plateloads of food, though how she could spare it was a mystery, since she never seemed to make more than she needed, never wasted a scrap. When we were in her presence Minna bubbled himself, with talk, all directed at his mother, banking cheery insults off anyone else in the apartment, delivery boys, customers, strangers (if there was such a thing to Minna then), tasting everything she had cooking and makingsuggestions on every dish, poking and pinching every raw ingredient or ball of unfinished dough and also his mother herself, her earlobes and chin, wiping flour off her dark arms with his open hand. She rarely—that I saw, anyway—acknowledged his attentions, or even directly acknowledged his presence. And she never once in my presence uttered so much as a single word.
    That Christmas Minna had us all up to Carlotta’s apartment, and for once we ate at her table, first nudging aside sauce-glazed stirring spoons and unlabeled baby-food jars of spices to clear spots for our plates. Minna stood at the stove, sampling her broth, and Carlotta hovered over us as we devoured her meatballs, running her floury fingers over the backs of our chairs, then gently touching our heads, the napes of our necks. We pretended not to notice, ashamed in front of one another and ourselves to show that we drank in her nurturance as eagerly as her meat sauce. But we drank it. It was Christmas, after all. We splashed, gobbled, kneed one another under the table. Privately, I polished the handle of my spoon, quietly aping the motions of her fingers on my nape, and fought not to twist in my seat and jump at her. I focused on my plate—eating was for me already by then a reliable balm. All the while she went on caressing, with hands that would have horrified us if we’d looked close.
    Minna spotted her and said, “This is exciting for you, Ma? I got all of Motherless Brooklyn up here for you. Merry Christmas.”
    Minna’s mother only produced a sort of high, keening sigh. We stuck to the food.
    “Motherless Brooklyn,”
repeated a voice we didn’t know.
    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