The Goldfinch

  “There was something in the paper about me?”

  “No, no,” he said quickly. “Not about you. About children who had lost family members in the museum. Most of them were tourists. There was one little girl… a baby, really… diplomat’s child from South America—”

  “What did they say about me in the paper?”

  He made a face. “Oh, an orphan’s plight… charity-minded socialite steps in… that kind of thing. You can imagine.”

  I stared into my plate, feeling embarrassed. Orphan? Charity?

  “It was a very nice piece. I gather you protected one of her sons from bullies?” he said, lowering his large gray head to catch my eye. “At school? The other gifted boy who was put ahead?”

  I shook my head. “Sorry?”

  “Samantha’s son? Whom you defended from a group of older boys at school? Took beatings for him—that kind of thing?”

  Again I shook my head—completely bewildered.

  He laughed. “Such modesty! You shouldn’t be embarrassed.”

  “But—it wasn’t like that,” I said, baffled. “We both got picked on and beaten up. Every day.”

  “So the story said. Which made it all the more remarkable that you stood up for him. A broken bottle?” he said, when I didn’t respond. “Someone was trying to cut Samantha Barbour’s son with a broken bottle, and you—”

  “Oh, that,” I said, embarrassed. “That was nothing.”

  “You were cut yourself. When you tried to help him.”

  “That’s not how it happened! Cavanaugh jumped on both of us! There was a piece of broken glass on the sidewalk.”

  Again he laughed—a big man’s laugh, rich and rough and at odds with his carefully cultivated voice. “Well, however it happened,” he said, “you’ve certainly tipped up in an interesting family.” Standing, he went to the cupboard, where he retrieved a bottle of whiskey and poured a couple of fingers in a not-very-clean glass.

  “Samantha Barbour doesn’t seem the warmest and most welcoming of hearts—at least that’s not the impression,” he said. “Yet she seems to do an awful lot of good in the world with the foundations and fundraising, doesn’t she?”

  I kept quiet as he put the bottle back in the cupboard. Above, through the skylight, the light was gray and opalescent; a fine rain peppered at the glass.

  “Are you going to open the shop again?” I said.

  “Well—” he sighed. “Welty handled all that end of it—the clients, the sales. Me—I’m a cabinet maker, not a businessman. Brocanteur, bricoleur. Barely set foot up there—I’m always below stairs, sanding and polishing. Now he’s gone—well, it’s still very new. People calling for things he sold, things still being delivered I never knew he bought, don’t know where the paperwork is, don’t know who any of it’s for… there are a million things I need to ask him, I’d give anything if I could talk to him for five minutes. Particularly—well, particularly as regards Pippa. Her medical care and—well.”

  “Right,” I said, aware how lame I sounded. We were heading into the clumsy territory of my mother’s funeral, stretched-out silences, wrong smiles, the place where words didn’t work.

  “He was a lovely man. Not many like him. Gentle, charming. People always felt sorry for him because of his back, though I’ve never met anyone so naturally gifted with a happy disposition, and of course the customers loved him… outgoing fellow, very sociable, always was… ‘the world won’t come to me,’ he used to say, ‘so I must go to it’—”

  Quite suddenly, Andy’s iPhone chimed: text message coming in.

  Hobie—glass halfway to his mouth—started, violently. “What was that?”

  “Wait a second,” I said, digging in my pocket. The text was from Phil Lefkow, one of the kids in Andy’s Japanese class: Hi Theo, Andy here, are you ok? Hastily, I switched the phone off and stuck it back in my pocket.

  “Sorry?” I said. “What were you saying?”

  “I forget.” He stared into space for a moment or two, then shook his head. “I never thought I’d see this again,” he said, looking down at the ring. “So like him to ask you to bring it here—to put it in my hand. I—well, I didn’t say anything but I thought for sure someone had pocketed it at the morgue—”

  Again the phone chimed its annoying, high-pitched note. “Gosh, sorry!” I said, scrambling for it. Andy’s text read:

  Just making sure your not being killed!!!!

  “Sorry,” I said—holding the button down, just to make sure—“it really is off this time.”

  But he only smiled, and looked into his glass. Rain tapped and dripped at the skylight, casting watery shadows that streamed down the wall. Too shy to say anything, I waited for him to pick up the thread again—and when he didn’t, we sat there peacefully, while I sipped my cooling tea (Lapsang Souchong, smoky and peculiar) and felt the strangeness of my life, and where I was.

  I pushed my plate aside. “Thank you,” I said dutifully, eyes wandering round the room, “that was really good”—speaking (as had become my habit) for my mother’s benefit, in case she was listening.

  “Oh, how polite!” he said—laughing at me but not unkindly, in a way that felt friendly. “Do you like it?”

  “What?”

  “My Noah’s Ark.” He nodded at the shelf. “You were looking at it over there, I thought.” The worn wooden animals (elephants, tigers, oxen, zebras, all the way down to a tiny pair of mice) stood patiently in line, waiting to board.

  “Is it hers?” I asked, after a fascinated silence; for the animals were so lovingly positioned (the big cats ignoring each other; the male peacock turned away from his hen to admire his reflection in the toaster) I could imagine her spending hours arranging them and trying to get them exactly right.

  “No—” his hands came together on the table—“it was one of the first antiques I ever bought, thirty years ago. In an American Folk sale. I’m not a great one for the folk art, never have been—this piece, not of the first quality, doesn’t fit with anything else I own, and yet isn’t it always the inappropriate thing, the thing that doesn’t quite work, that’s oddly the dearest?”

  I pushed back in my chair, unable to keep my feet still. “Can I see her now?” I said.

  “If she’s awake—” he pursed his lips—“well, don’t see the harm. But only for a minute, mind.” When he stood, his bulky, stoop-shouldered height took me by surprise all over again. “I warn you, though—she’s a bit muddled. Oh—” he turned in the doorway—“and best not to bring up Welty if you can help it.”

  “She doesn’t know?”

  “Oh yes—” his voice was brisk—“she knows, but sometimes when she hears it she gets upset all over again. Asks when it happened and why nobody told her.”

  ii.

  WHEN HE OPENED THE door, the shades were down, and it took my eyes a moment to adjust to the dark, which was aromatic and perfume-smelling, with an undertone of sickness and medicine. Over the bed hung a framed poster from the movie The Wizard of Oz. A scented candle guttered in a red glass, among trinkets and rosaries, sheet music, tissue-paper flowers and old valentines—along with what looked like hundreds of get-well cards strung up on ribbons, and a bunch of silver balloons hovering ominously at the ceiling, metallic strings hanging down like jellyfish stingers.

  “Someone here to see you, Pip,” said Hobie, in a loud and cheerful tone.

  I saw the coverlet stir. An elbow went up. “Umn?” said a sleepy voice.

  “It’s so dark, my dear. Won’t you let me open the curtains?”

  “No, please don’t, the light hurts my eyes.”

  She was smaller than I remembered, and her face—a blur in the gloom—was very white. Head shaven, all but a single lock in front. As I drew closer, a bit fearfully, I saw a glint of metal at her temple—a barrette or hairpin, I thought, before I made out the steel medical staples in a vicious coil above one ear.

  “I heard you in the hallway,” she said, in a small, raspy voice, looking from me to Hobi
e.

  “Heard what, pigeon?” said Hobie.

  “Heard you talking. Cosmo did too.”

  At first I didn’t see the dog, and then I did—a gray terrier curled alongside her, amidst the pillows and stuffed toys. When he raised his head, I saw from his grizzled face and cataract-clouded eyes that he was very old.

  “I thought you were asleep, pigeon,” Hobie was saying, reaching out to scratch the dog’s chin.

  “You always say that, but I’m always awake. Hi,” she said, looking up at me.

  “Hi.”

  “Who are you?”

  “My name’s Theo.”

  “What’s your favorite piece of music?”

  “I don’t know,” I said, and then, so as not to appear stupid: “Beethoven.”

  “That’s great. You look like somebody who would like Beethoven.”

  “I do?” I said, feeling overwhelmed.

  “I meant that in a nice way. I can’t listen to music. Because of my head. It’s completely horrible. No,” she said to Hobie, who was clearing books and gauze and Kleenex packets out of the bedside chair so I could sit down in it, “let him sit here. You can sit here,” she said to me, shifting over slightly in the bed to make room.

  After a glance back at Hobie to make sure it was okay, I sat down, gingerly, with one hip, careful not to disturb the dog, who raised his head and glared.

  “Don’t worry, he won’t bite. Well, sometimes he bites.” She looked at me with drowsy eyes. “I know you.”

  “You remember me?”

  “Are we friends?”

  “Yes,” I said without thinking, and then glanced back at Hobie, embarrassed I’d lied.

  “I forgot your name, I’m sorry. I remember your face though.” Then—stroking the dog’s head—she said: “I didn’t remember my room when I came home. I remembered my bed, and all my stuff, but the room was different.”

  Now that my eyes had adjusted to the dark, I saw the wheelchair in the corner, the bottles of medicine on the table by her bed.

  “What Beethoven do you like?”

  “Uh—” I was staring at her arm, resting atop the coverlet, the tender skin on the inside of her arm with a Band-Aid in the crook of the elbow.

  She was pushing up in bed—looking past me, to Hobie, silhouetted in the bright doorway. “I’m not supposed to talk too much, am I?” she said.

  “No, pigeon.”

  “I don’t think I’m too tired. But I can’t tell. Do you get tired during the day?” she asked me.

  “Sometimes.” After my mother’s death, I had developed a tendency to fall asleep in class and conk out in Andy’s room after school. “I never used to.”

  “I do, too. I feel sleepy all the time now. I wonder why? I think it’s so boring.”

  Hobie—I noticed, looking back at the lighted doorway—had stepped away for a moment. Although it was very unlike me, for some strange reason I had been itching to reach out and take her hand, and now that we were alone, I did.

  “You don’t mind, do you?” I asked her. Everything seemed slow like I was moving through deep water. It was very strange to be holding somebody’s hand—a girl’s hand—and yet oddly normal. I had never done anything of the sort before.

  “Not at all. I think it’s nice.” Then, after a brief pause—during which I could hear the little terrier snoring—she said: “You don’t mind if I close my eyes for a few seconds, do you?”

  “No,” I said, running a thumb over her knuckles, tracing the bones.

  “I know it’s rude, but I just absolutely have to.”

  I looked down at her shaded eyelids, chapped lips, pallor and bruises, the ugly hashmark of metal over one ear. The strange combination of what was exciting about her, and what wasn’t supposed to be, made me feel light-headed and confused.

  Guilty, I glanced back, and noticed Hobie standing in the door. After tiptoeing out to the hall again, I closed the door quietly behind me, grateful that the hall was so dark.

  Together, we walked back through to the parlor. “How does she seem to you?” he said, in a voice so low I could hardly hear him.

  What was I supposed to say to that? “Okay, I guess.”

  “She’s not herself.” He paused, unhappily, with his hands dug deep into the pockets of the bathrobe. “That is—she is, and she isn’t. She doesn’t recognize a lot of people who were close to her, speaks to them very formally, and yet sometimes she’s very open with strangers, very chatty and familiar, people she’s never seen before, treats them like old friends. Quite common, I’m told.”

  “Why isn’t she supposed to listen to music?”

  He raised an eyebrow. “Oh, she does, sometimes. But sometimes, late in the day especially, it tends to upset her—she thinks she has to practice, that she has to prepare a piece for school, she gets distraught. Very difficult. As far as playing on some amateur level, that’s perfectly possible someday, or so they tell me—”

  Quite suddenly, the doorbell rang, startling us both.

  “Ah,” said Hobie—looking distressed, glancing at what I noticed was an extremely beautiful old wristwatch, “that’ll be her nurse.”

  We looked at each other. We weren’t finished talking; there was so much still to say.

  Again the doorbell rang. Down the hall, the dog was barking. “She’s early,” said Hobie—hurrying through, looking a bit desperate.

  “Can I come back? To see her?”

  He stopped. He seemed appalled that I had even asked. “But of course you can come back,” he said. “Please come back—”

  Again the doorbell.

  “Any time you like,” said Hobie. “Please. We’re always glad to see you.”

  iii.

  “SO, WHAT HAPPENED DOWN there?” said Andy as we were dressing for dinner. “Was it weird?” Platt had left to catch the train back to school; Mrs. Barbour had a supper with the board of some charity; and Mr. Barbour was taking the rest of us out to dinner at the Yacht Club (where we only went on nights when Mrs. Barbour had something else to do).

  “He knew your mother, the guy.”

  Andy, knotting his necktie, made a face: everybody knew his mother.

  “It was a little weird,” I said. “But it’s good I went. Here,” I said, fishing in my jacket pocket, “thanks for your phone.”

  Andy checked it for messages, then switched it off and slipped it in his pocket. Pausing, with his hand still in the pocket, he looked up, not straight at me.

  “I know things are bad,” he said unexpectedly. “I’m sorry everything is so fucked up for you now.”

  His voice—as flat as the robot voice on an answering machine—kept me for a moment from realizing quite what he’d said.

  “She was awfully nice,” he said, still without looking at me. “I mean—”

  “Yeah, well,” I muttered, not anxious to continue the conversation.

  “I mean, I miss her,” Andy said, meeting my eye with a sort of half-terrified look. “I never knew anybody that died before. Well, my grandpa Van der Pleyn. Never anybody I liked.”

  I said nothing. My mother had always had a soft spot for Andy, patiently drawing him out about his home weather station, teasing him about his Galactic Battlegrounds scores until he went bright red with pleasure. Young, playful, fun-loving, affectionate, she had been everything his own mother wasn’t: a mother who threw Frisbees with us in the park and discussed zombie movies with us and let us lie around in her bed on Saturday mornings to eat Lucky Charms and watch cartoons; and it had annoyed me sometimes, a little, how goofy and exhilarated he was in her presence, trotting behind her babbling about Level 4 of whatever game he was on, unable to tear his eyes from her rear end when she was bending to get something from the fridge.

  “She was the coolest,” said Andy, in his faraway voice. “Do you remember when she took us on the bus to that horror-fan convention way out in New Jersey? And that creep named Rip who kept following us around trying to get her to be in his vampire movie?”

&nbs
p; He meant well, I knew. But it was almost unbearable for me to talk about anything to do with my mother, or Before, and I turned my head away.

  “I don’t think he was even a horror person,” Andy said, in his faint, annoying voice. “I think he was some kind of fetishist. All that dungeon stuff with the girls strapped to the laboratory tables was pretty much straight-up bondage porn. Do you remember him begging her to try on those vampire teeth?”

  “Yeah. That was when she went up to talk to the security guard.”

  “Leather pants. All those piercings. I mean, who knows, maybe he really was making a vampire film but he was definitely a huge perv, did you notice that? Like, that sneaky smile? And the way he kept trying to look down her top?”

  I gave him the finger. “Come on, let’s go,” I said. “I’m hungry.”

  “Oh, yes?” I’d lost nine or ten pounds since my mother died—enough weight that Mrs. Swanson (embarrassingly) had started weighing me in her office, on the scale she used for girls with eating disorders.

  “What, you’re not?”

  “Yeah, but I thought you were watching your weight. So you’d fit in your prom dress.”

  “Fuck you,” I said good-naturedly as I opened the door—and walked straight into Mr. Barbour, who had been standing right outside, whether eavesdropping or about to knock it was hard to say.

  Mortified, I began to stammer—swearing was seriously against the rules at the Barbours’ house—but Mr. Barbour didn’t seem greatly perturbed.

  “Well, Theo,” he said dryly, looking over my head, “I’m certainly glad to hear that you’re feeling better. Come along now, and let’s go get a table.”

  iv.

  DURING THE NEXT WEEK, everyone noticed that my appetite had improved, even Toddy. “Are you done with your hunger strike?” he asked me curiously, one morning.

  “Toddy, eat your breakfast.”

  “But I thought that was what it was called. When people don’t eat.”

  “No, a hunger strike is for people in prison,” Kitsey said coolly.

  “Kitten,” said Mr. Barbour, in a warning tone.

  “Yes, but he ate three waffles yesterday,” said Toddy, looking eagerly between his uninterested parents in an attempt to engage them. “I only ate two waffles. And this morning he ate a bowl of cereal and six pieces of bacon, but you said five pieces of bacon was too much for me. Why can’t I have five pieces, too?”

  v.

  “WELL, HELLO THERE, GREETINGS,” said Dave the psychiatrist as he closed the door and took a seat across from me in his office: kilim rugs, shelves filled with old textbooks (Drugs and Society; Child Psychology: A Different Approach); and beige draperies that parted with a hum when you pushed a button.

  I smiled, awkwardly, eyes going all around the room, potted palm tree, bronze statue of the Buddha, everywhere but him.

  “So.” The faint traffic drone floating up from First Avenue made the silence between us seem vast, intergalactic. “How’s everything today?”

  “Well—” I dreaded my sessions with Dave, a twice-weekly ordeal not incomparable to dental surgery; I felt guilty for not liking him more since he made such an effort, always asking what movies I enjoyed, what books, burning me CDs, clipping articles from Game Pro he thought I’d be interested in—sometimes he even took me over to EJ’s Luncheonette for a hamburger—and yet whenever he started with the questions I froze stiff, as if I’d been pushed onstage in a play where I didn’t know the lines.

  “You seem a little distracted today.”