The angel statue on the top of the courthouse was his undoing, in the end.
He might have argued that she wasn’t on top of the courthouse. She was a relief carving set into the stonework on the south face of the building. She gave him the impression that someone had made a perfectly good statue and plastered the rear of it into the building to get it to stick. It looked like the way a child might stick a toy to the wall with bubblegum to keep it away from a dog. He would, incidentally, have never considered this analogy, being a man who pointedly despised both dogs and children.
And, would the pedantic argument continue, she wasn’t a statue, she was a frieze. The relief carving stopped at the building face. She had no rear end, only the chaste and disappointing front. He felt a statue without a breast exposed (for liberté, maybe?) was a waste of a statue. The vogue in the 1920s often included an exposed bosom. He was excited by the prospect, but ultimately disappointed.
The argument wouldn’t end there, of course. She wasn’t an angel. She was a relief carving of some kind of lady justice, although she did carry a flaming sword in her off hand, and had more wings than you might expect from a non-angel. One of the boring people at the historical society tried to explain why it was interesting, and it was some kind of dusty joke, being both Raguel, some kind of Jewish angel person, and also some lady who had two kids who were famous, which was why there were two babies in the carving. It looked like a lot of complicated junk to him. They said it was a rare example from some Art Deco artist, and the famous people were Rachel, Joseph, and Benjamin. When he asked “Rachel who,” and what movies she was in, they just turned into a room full of surprised stuffed owls. He got the impression they were laughing behind his back.
Not that he had anything agains the Jews, understand. He revered Abraham and William Levitt, and thought of himself as the modern heir to their great work. He spread the joyous and necessary work and honored Levittown in his heart and tried to keep it all the year, even in this internet-conscientious era of pearl clutching.
And then the last, it wasn’t a courthouse. It was being used as an administrative building when he bought it, and he was turning it into apartments. Housing is important, and housing was his business, and he had the uncanny knack to see housing possibilities where other people saw less-good things. Like this old, ugly building.
When the Modern Art Museum asked him for the angel, he agreed, if it wouldn’t cost him much. When a momentary pause for removal would have turned into a delay of two weeks, he had to cut shank. He ordered his men to cut the angel from the building with acetylene torches. It was supposed to fall into the building, where they could use hammers to be sure the “accident” was complete.
Instead, the angel of justice, if you want to call it that, fell out toward the sidewalk. The marble carving was the last thing he saw when the workers shouted and could not stop the descent. So, finally, the angel was not his undoing, really, but the incompetence of his staff.
He would have picked the nits out of that statement, but his feeling will not change the facts, sadly. The non-angel non-statue near (but not on) the top of the building-that-was-not-a-courthouse had only contributed to and been the instrument of his undoing by outside forces. And that was not entirely the end, either.
With this dedication of a tower of apartments with his name on them, as he would have wanted, we remember him. As we remember him now, let us remember him always, quibbling with his inevitable demise.
Read by Ruth Gibbs
Music Present and Accounted For