Motherless Brooklyn: Motherless Brooklyn Summary & Analysis

Lionel Essrog looks back on his childhood in the St. Vincent’s Home for Boys, an orphanage located next to the Brooklyn Bridge, surrounded by the loud, bustling chaos of downtown Brooklyn. Until Frank Minna rescued him from the home, Lionel recalls, he practically lived in the orphanage’s library. His obsession with reading reflected his fear; his boredom; and his burgeoning Tourettic compulsions for inspection, processing, and investigation. The young Lionel didn’t yet understand his condition, and he struggled to “find the language” he needed to express himself.

Lionel met Minna when a teacher at St. Vincent’s who knew Frank offered to let Minna “borrow” a group of orphans for the afternoon to help with a moving job for a client. The teacher brought Lionel and three other boys to Minna. The first boy was Tony Vermonte, a confident 15-year-old Italian boy revered as the “God of Experience” at St. Vincent’s. The second was Gilbert Coney, Tony’s stocky right hand who was, some years ago, responsible for teaching Lionel how to masturbate, creating a bond between them. The third boy was Danny Fantl, a light-skinned, white-passing Black teenager who, unlike the other boys, never expressed any sadness or anxiety about being an orphan. Minna, Lionel realizes now, was only 25 and hardly an adult himself on the day that he, Danny, Tony, and Gilbert first met him.

Lionel recalls an anecdote about sitting on an Atlantic Avenue bus in front of a man with a horrible belching tic in order to illustrate the idea that Tourette’s is a way of finding out what people are willing to overlook. Though everyone on the bus—himself included—was repulsed by the man’s belching, Lionel knew that after getting off the bus and arriving at their destinations, few people would remember the belching man. The belching man, however, must live forever with his own awful noises.

Lionel wonders now if the boys who joined him in becoming Minna Men—Tony, Danny, and Gilbert—even recall his kissing tic, which, over the years, Lionel began to layer behind other behaviors such as tapping and touching things. In order to shunt his own attention away from his kissing tic, Lionel allowed the simmering language within him to boil over. Rearranging words and creating echolalia, or meaningless repetitions of words heard in conversation or on television, became his primary tic. Still, however, Lionel remained ashamed of his speech-based tics, afraid that saying something was the same as meaning it, and that to reveal the depths of his oddness to his peers would make him even more of a target than he already was.

Lionel goes back to recalling his first day working for Minna. Minna drove Lionel, Tony, Danny, and Gilbert to a large warehouse in Red Hook, where he instructed them to carry moving boxes from the inside of a large truck into the warehouse. The four young boys ran the crates inside hurriedly in spite of the summer heat. When the job was done, Minna drove the boys to a bodega for some cold beers. There, Frank at last asked the boys their names. They introduced themselves one by one. Lionel was so excited he could not stop tapping things. When Tony called Lionel a “freak,” Minna retorted that all of the boys were freaks.

The next week, Minna came back to the orphanage to collect the boys for yet another moving job at the same warehouse space. As the boys worked, Minna asked them if they knew what they were doing. Tony replied that they were moving boxes. Frank urged them all to only ever refer to their tasks as moving work. At the end of the job, Frank gave each boy a $20 bill and a business card for “L&L MOVERS,” an enterprise run by Frank and Gerard Minna—Frank’s older brother.

The boys asked what L&L stood for, but Minna refused to tell them. Lionel immediately began to perform tics, coming up with combinations of words such as Least Lonely, Liking Lionel, and Lois Lane—and then devolving into nonsense words like Lunchylooper and Lockystuff. Minna ordered Lionel not to tug the boat—from then on, to “tugboat” would be slang for trying Minna’s patience. Minna, Lionel recalls, diagnosed him as a “Terminal Tugboater” long before Lionel or any of the other Minna Men knew the word for Tourette’s.

From then on, Minna gathered the boys frequently to take them to jobs in remote yards in Red Hook or up and down Court Street storefronts. Twenty dollars a day was always the boys’ pay. Some jobs seemed legitimate. Others, however, were shady deals sealed with a shared cigar between Minna and whomever he was doing the work for. The boys developed a sense of camaraderie—they stuck up for one another at St. Vincent’s and at Sarah J. Hale, the rough-and-tumble high school where they attended classes together. The boys could not wait to graduate school and begin their lives in Minna’s world. 

Tony soon became the clear leader of the group—and Minna’s favorite. Minna often came to the orphanage just for Tony, collecting him for help on a secret job or for driving lessons in a vacant lot. Gilbert was most often stuck with grunt work, such as sitting in double-parked cars or repainting Minna’s moving vans. Lionel became the lookout and often accompanied Minna into negotiation rooms. Minna often sought Lionel’s opinions on clients and urged Lionel to “spit it out.” Minna’s encouragement of Lionel’s speech and echolalia freed Lionel, whom Minna began to use as an unnerving force or wild card in meetings with clients.

Lionel recalls being introduced to two of Minna’s prominent clients: a pair of Italian men named Matricardi and Rockaforte who owned a brownstone on Degraw Street. Four or five months after Minna started using the boys for moving jobs, he brought them to an abandoned dock near Fulton Street. Two small vans drove up, and Minna instructed the boys to unload them into his own. Lionel was shocked to find that the vans were full of musical instruments, sound equipment, and concert gear. Once the van was full, Minna drove it and the boys back to Brooklyn to Degraw Street, where they unloaded the equipment inside the house. The interior of the home, Lionel recalls, was stripped and gutted—only the front parlor was left decorated and looking like a home.

While moving the equipment into an empty room upstairs, Lionel discovered a cache of fancy silverware—he stole a fork for himself to carry as a talisman. Minna brought the boys downstairs to meet the clients, Matricardi and Rockaforte, two old men in fine suits. In the room with the two men, Lionel immediately sensed fear and tension radiating from Minna. Rockaforte asked Frank if the four boys did whatever he asked of them; Lionel could sense a heavy weight behind the question. Minna casually replied that the boys were “good kids.” Matricardi said the word “orphans” aloud thoughtfully.

Rockaforte explained that the house they were in once belonged to Matricardi’s mother—they kept her parlor intact, exactly as it was when she lived in it. The two men explained they had been friends since childhood. Lionel, anxious, rubbed the fork in his pocket to calm himself. Rockaforte asked Lionel and the other boys what “kind of men” they wanted to grow up to be. Without hesitation, Tony answered that he wanted to be like Frank. Rockaforte asked Tony if he wanted to be a musician. Minna immediately told Rockaforte that he could not accept their gift. Matricardi offered the orphans musical instruments again—and again, Minna refused. Rockaforte told Minna that the instruments were due to be burned anyway. After a tense moment, Matricardi told Minna to forget the offer. Instead, Matricardi gave Tony, Lionel, Gilbert, and Danny each a $100 bill. 

Minna hurried the boys out of the brownstone and into the van, urging them to forget the names of the men they just met and refer to them only as “The Clients.” Gilbert, however, kept asking about the men. Minna told him that they didn’t live in the brownstone, but in Jersey. Lionel performed a tic, calling out “Garden State Brickface and Stucco”—a renovation firm that played ads on local stations. Minna laughed, and Lionel was grateful to make Minna happy. Minna, again, urged the boys to forget the names Rockaforte and Matricardi.

Lionel recalls a time when Minna remarked upon the uniqueness of his last name, Essrog, and suggested that Lionel look up the name Essrog in the phone book. Lionel did so and found three families with the name. Once, he dialed the Essrogs from a warehouse where he was waiting for instructions from Minna on a job—when a man named Essrog finally picked up, Lionel began to verbally tic, invoking “Bailey” before hanging up. Over the years, Lionel says, he would call the Essrogs’ numbers many other times—but he would never introduce himself.

Lionel describes how he, Tony, Gilbert, and Danny came to see the world filtered through Minna’s likes, dislikes, and prejudices. For example, Minna found hippies threatening yet pathetic; he thought that homosexual men were harmless but often called the boys “half a fag” as an insult. Minna liked some minorities but detested others—yet found pointing out stupidity, anxiety, or strangeness in others oddly endearing no matter their race. Lionel felt that as an “Overt Freak Supreme,” he himself was a kind of mascot to the prejudiced but easygoing Minna. Minna enjoyed endearments only when folded into insults and appreciated talk only on the fly.

Lionel says that in all the years he knew Minna, he only met Frank’s brother Gerard twice. The first time was on Christmas Day of 1982, when Frank brought Lionel, Tony, Danny, and Gilbert to dinner at his mother’s house. Carlotta, an “Old Stove,” cooked and sold old Italian recipes out of her kitchen. During Christmas dinner, Lionel was grateful for the soothing effects of the food—he was so excited to be nurtured by Carlotta that he was barely able to hold back his tics. Lionel remembers Minna watching the boys wolfing their meatballs and telling his mother that he’d brought “all of motherless Brooklyn” to eat at her table. Minna’s brother Gerard entered, chuckling at the phrase. Gerard explained he’d been upstate but had brought Frank a “present”—a large white envelope which he instructed Frank to open in private before abruptly leaving.

Lionel recalls a popular phrase Minna used to say: “Wheels within wheels.” Wheels within wheels, for Minna, referred to coincidences or conspiracies, the secret “wheels” that turned the world. Lionel and the other boys felt that Minna knew the secret systems that ran not only Court Street but the world—and Lionel can never remember a time at which he wasn’t certain that Minna knew who Lionel’s parents truly were.

Lionel recalls one April day when Minna drove up to the orphanage to collect them—his van was busted, its windows smashed and its sides covered in graffiti. As the boys piled into the van, Tony remarked that someone must have been sending Frank a message—a statement that infuriated Minna. In response, Minna called Tony a “dickweed” for wanting to be a gangster like Scarface. Minna forced Tony and the other boys out of the van and made them walk back to the orphanage. Lionel, anxious, became trapped in a “loop of self,” performing tics by endlessly replicating “dickweed” and making plays on words—restrictaweed, detectorwood, vindictaphone. Tony, hurt and incensed, attacked Lionel with a piece of plywood smeared with dog feces he picked up off the ground, spreading the mess across Lionel’s face before turning away in shame.

Five weeks later, when Frank came to pick the boys up for the first time in over a month, he had Gerard with him again. The two brothers joined the orphans in the yard or the orphanage where they bounced a basketball around a few times before Minna announced that he would be leaving town for a little while, heading upstate to a place Gerard frequently went—and that he didn’t know when he’d be back. Minna turned to the frightened Lionel and pulled from his pocket a book called Understanding Tourette’s Syndrome. He handed it to Lionel, apologizing for not getting it to him sooner. Gerard quickly took Minna by the arm and hurried him away. Several days later, Tony rounded up the boys and led them to the van, which was parked off a nearby highway—someone had set it on fire and hollowed it out.

Over the next two years, Lionel grew up and discovered more about Tourette’s. All the information he found, however, only confused him more—the disorder’s spectrum was intimidatingly vast, and the medications Lionel took to ease his tics left him feeling hollowed-out and slow. Danny and Gilbert made their way through school, too, but Tony essentially dropped out and spend his last two years of high school working odd jobs up and down Court Street.

Near graduation, Minna returned. He showed up one day to pick up Lionel, Gilbert, and Danny—he already had Tony in his car. Minna greeted Lionel warmly—but Lionel soon realized the Minna who’d come back to Brooklyn was not the same as the one who’d left. Minna packed the boys into his new car, handed them new business cards for L&L Car Service, and drove them to a small vacant storefront nearby. The boys, he explained, were all to receive learner’s permits and driving lessons starting the next day. As the boys toured the new space, Frank spoke about his dreams for creating a car service. He also informed the boys that Carlotta had died—and that he’d gotten married. Breathlessly, at last, Frank told the boys his big secret: the car service was to be a front for a detective agency.

Lionel tells the joke that Minna wanted to hear on the night he died. In the joke, a Jewish mother, Mrs. Gushman, walks into a travel agency, asking for a ticket to Tibet. The travel agent sells her one. In Tibet, Mrs. Gushman asks to be taken to see the High Lama. Everyone she meets tells her that the Lama lives on a mountain in total seclusion, and that those who wish to meet him must first study at a monastery for many years. Mrs. Gushman, however, travels to the mountain and hires Sherpas to take her to the top. All the way up, the Sherpas explain that the Lama will never see her. At the monastery, however, Mrs. Gushman pushes her way in and demands an audience with the Lama. Soon, the Lama emerges. As Mrs. Gushman spots him, she says, “Irving, when are you coming home? Your father’s worried!”