The Goldfinch, Page 41

  tape measure around his neck, down on his knees pinning up my mother’s skirt.

  I was only a few blocks from our old building: and looking down towards Fifty-Seventh Street, that bright familiar alley with the sun striking it just right and bouncing gold off the windows I thought: Goldie! Jose!

  At the thought, my step quickened. It was morning; one or both of them should be on duty. I’d never sent the postcard from Vegas like I’d promised: they’d be thrilled to see me, clustering round, hugging me and slapping me on the back, interested to hear about everything that had happened, including the death of my dad. They’d invite me back to the package room, maybe call up Henderson the manager, fill me in on all the building gossip. But when I turned the corner, amidst stalled traffic and car horns, I saw from halfway down the block that the building was cicatriced with scaffolding and the windows slapped shut with official notices.

  I stopped, dismayed. Then—disbelieving—I walked closer and stood, appalled. The art-deco doors were gone, and—in place of the cool dim lobby, with its polished floors, its sunburst panelling—gaped a cavern of gravel and concrete hunks and workmen in hard hats were coming out with wheelbarrows of rubble.

  “What happened here?” I said to a dirt-ingrained guy with a hard hat standing back a bit, hunched and slurping guiltily at his coffee.

  “Whaddaya mean, what happened?”

  “I—” Standing back, looking up, I saw it wasn’t just the lobby; they had gutted the entire building, so you could see straight through to the courtyard in back; glazed mosaic on the façade still intact but the windows dusty and blank, nothing behind them. “I used to live here. What’s going on?”

  “Owners sold.” He was shouting over jackhammers in the lobby. “Got the last tenants out a few months ago.”

  “But—” I looked up at the empty shell, then peered inside at the dusty, floodlit rubblehouse—men shouting, wires dangling. “What are they doing?”

  “Upscale condos. Five mil plus—swimming pool on the roof—can you believe it?”

  “Oh my God.”

  “Yeah, you’d think it’d be protected wouldn’t you? Nice old place—yesterday had to jackhammer up the marble stairs in the lobby, remember those stairs? Real shame. Wish we coulda got ’em out whole. You don’t see that quality marble so much like you used to, the nice old marble like that. Still—” He shrugged. “That’s the city for you.”

  He was shouting to someone above—a man lowering a bucket of sand on a rope—and I walked along, feeling sick, right under our old living room window or the bombed-out shell of it rather, too disturbed to look up. Out of the way, baby, Jose had said, hoisting my suitcase up on the shelf of the package room. Some of the tenants, like old Mr. Leopold, had lived in the building for seventy-plus years. What had happened to him? Or to Goldie, or Jose? Or—for that matter: Cinzia—? Cinzia, who at any given time had a dozen or more part-time cleaning jobs, worked only a few hours a week in the building, not that I’d even been thinking about Cinzia until the moment before, but it had all seemed so solid, so immutable, the whole social system of the building, a nexus where I could always stop in and see people, say hello, find out what was going on. People who had known my mother. People who had known my dad.

  And the farther I walked away, the more upset I got, at the loss of one of the few stable and unchanging docking-points in the world that I’d taken for granted: familiar faces, glad greetings: hey manito! For I had thought that this last touchstone of the past, at least, would be where I’d left it. It was weird to think I’d never be able to thank Jose and Goldie for the money they’d given me—or, even weirder, that I’d never be able to tell them my father had died: because who else did I know who had known him? Or would care? Even the sidewalk felt like it might break under my feet and I might drop through Fifty-Seventh Street into some pit where I never stopped falling.

  IV.

  It is not flesh and blood, but heart which makes us fathers and sons.

  —S

  CHILLER

  Chapter 9.

  Everything of Possibility

  i.

  ONE AFTERNOON EIGHT YEARS later—after I’d left school and gone to work for Hobie—I’d just come out of Bank of New York and was walking up Madison upset and preoccupied when I heard my name.

  I turned. The voice was familiar but I didn’t recognize the man: thirtyish, bigger than me, with morose gray eyes and colorless blond hair to his shoulders. His clothes—shaggy tweeds; rough shawl-collared sweater—were more suited for a muddy country lane than a city street; and he had an indefinable look of privilege gone wrong, like someone who’d slept on some friends’ couches, done some drugs, wasted a good bit of his parents’ money.

  “It’s Platt,” he said. “Platt Barbour.”

  “Platt,” I said, after a stunned pause. “Long time. Good Lord.” It was difficult to recognize the lacrosse thug of old in this sobered and attentive-looking pedestrian. The insolence was gone, the old aggressive glint; now he looked worn out and there was an anxious, fatalistic quality in his eyes. He might have been an unhappy husband up from the suburbs, worried about an unfaithful wife, or maybe a disgraced teacher at some second-rate school.

  “Well. So. Platt. How are you?” I said after an uncomfortable silence, stepping backwards. “Are you still in the city?”

  “Yes,” he said, clasping the back of his neck with one hand, seeming highly ill at ease. “Just started a new job, actually.” He had not aged well; in the old days he’d been the blondest and best-looking of the brothers, but he’d grown thick in the jaw and around the middle and his face had coarsened away from its perverse old Jungvolk beauty. “I’m working for an academic publisher. Blake-Barrows. They’re based in Cambridge but they’ve got an office here?”

  “Great,” I said, as if I’d heard of the publisher, though I hadn’t—nodding, fiddling with the change in my pocket, already planning my getaway. “Well, fantastic to see you. How’s Andy?”

  His face seemed to grow very still. “You don’t know?”

  “Well—” faltering—“I heard he was at MIT. I ran into Win Temple on the street a year or two back—he said Andy had a fellowship—astrophysics? I mean,” I said nervously, discomfited by Platt’s stare, “I really don’t keep in touch with the crowd from school very much.…”

  Platt ran his hand down the back of his head. “I’m sorry. I’m not sure we knew how to get in touch with you. Things are still very confused. But I certainly thought you would have heard by now.”

  “Heard what?”

  “He’s dead.”

  “Andy?” I said, and then, when he didn’t react: “No.”

  Fleeting grimace—gone almost the moment I saw it. “Yes. It was pretty bad, I’m sorry to say. Andy and Daddy too.”

  “What?”

  “Five months ago. He and Daddy drowned.”

  “No.” I looked at the sidewalk.

  “The boat capsized. Off Northeast Harbor. We really weren’t out so far, maybe we shouldn’t have been out there at all, but Daddy—you know how he was—”

  “Oh my God.” Standing there, in the uncertain spring afternoon with children just out of school running all around me, I felt pole-axed and confused as if at an un-funny practical joke. Though I had thought of Andy often over the years, and just missed seeing him once or twice, we’d never gotten back in touch after I returned to New York. I’d felt sure I’d run into him at some point—as I had Win, and James Villiers, and Martina Lichtblau, and a few other people from my school. But though I’d often considered picking up the phone to say hello, somehow I never had.

  “Are you okay?” said Platt—massaging the back of his neck, looking as uneasy as I felt.

  “Um—” I turned to the shop window to compose myself, and my transparent ghost turned to meet me, crowds passing behind me in the glass.

  “Gosh,” I said. “I can’t believe it. I don’t know what to say.”

  “Sorry to blurt it on the street li
ke that,” said Platt, rubbing his jaw. “You look a bit green around the gills.”

  Green around the gills: a phrase of Mr. Barbour’s. With a pang, I remembered Mr. Barbour searching through the drawers in Platt’s room, offering to build me a fire. Hell of a thing that’s happened, good Lord.

  “Your dad, too?” I said, blinking as if someone had just shaken me awake from a sound sleep. “Is that what you just said?”

  He looked around, with a lift of the chin that brought back for a moment the arrogant old Platt I remembered, then glanced at his watch.

  “Come on, have you got a minute?” he said.

  “Well—”

  “Let’s get a drink,” he said, pounding a hand on my shoulder so heavily I flinched. “I know a quiet place on Third Avenue. What do you say?”

  ii.

  WE SAT IN THE nearly empty bar—a once-famous oak-panelled joint smelling of hamburger grease, Ivy League pennants on the walls, while Platt talked in a rambling, uneasy monotone so quietly I had to strain to follow.

  “Daddy,” he said, looking down into his gin and lime: Mrs. Barbour’s drink. “We all shrank from talking about it—but. Chemical imbalance is how our grandmother spoke of it. Bipolar disorder. He had his first episode, or attack, or whatever you call it, at Harvard Law—1L, never made it to the second year. All these wild plans and enthusiasms… combative in class, talking out of turn, had set out writing some epic book-length poem about the whaling ship Essex which was just a bunch of nonsense and then his roommate, who was apparently more of a stabilizing influence than anyone knew, left for a semester abroad in Germany and—well. My grandfather had to take the train up to Boston to fetch him. He’d been arrested for starting a fire out in front of the statue of Samuel Eliot Morison on Commonwealth Avenue and he resisted arrest when the policeman tried to take him in.”

  “I knew he’d had problems. I never knew it was like that.”

  “Well.” Platt stared into his drink, and then knocked it back. “That was well before I came along. Things changed after he married Mommy and he’d been on his medicine for a while, although our grandmother never really trusted him after all that.”

  “All what?”

  “Oh, of course we got on with her quite well, the grandchildren,” he said hastily. “But you can’t imagine the trouble Daddy caused when he was younger… tore through worlds of money, terrible rows and rages, some awful problems with underage girls… he’d weep and apologize, and then it would happen all over again.… Gaga always blamed him for our grandfather’s heart attack, the two of them were quarreling at my grandfather’s office and boom. Once on the medicine, though, he was a lamb. Wonderful father—well—you know. Wonderful with us children.”

  “He was lovely. When I knew him.”

  “Yes.” Platt shrugged. “He could be. After he married Mommy, he was on an even keel for a while. Then—I don’t know what happened. He made some terribly unsound investments—that was the first sign. Embarrassing late-night phone calls to acquaintances, that sort of thing. Became romantically obsessed with a college girl interning in his office—girl whose family Mommy knew. It was terribly hard.”

  For some reason, I was incredibly touched by hearing him call Mrs. Barbour ‘Mommy.’ “I never knew any of this,” I said.

  Platt frowned: a hopeless, resigned expression that brought out sharply his resemblance to Andy. “We hardly knew it ourselves—we children,” he said bitterly, drawing his thumb across the tablecloth. “ ‘Daddy’s ill’—that’s all we were told. I was off at school, see, when they sent him to the hospital, they never let me talk to him on the phone, they said he was too sick and for weeks and weeks I thought he was dead and they didn’t want to tell me.”

  “I remember all that. It was awful.”

  “All what?”

  “The, uh, nervous trouble.”

  “Yeah, well—” I was startled by the snap of anger in his eyes—“and how was I supposed to know if it was ‘nervous trouble’ or terminal cancer or what the fuck? ‘Andy’s so sensitive… Andy’s better off in the city… we don’t think Andy would thrive with boarding…’ well, all I can say is Mommy and Daddy packed me off pretty much the second I could tie my shoes, stupid fucking equestrian school called Prince George’s, completely third-rate but oh, wow, such a character-building experience, such a great preparation for Groton, and they took really young kids, seven through thirteens. You should have seen the brochure, Virginia hunt country and all that, except it wasn’t all green hills and riding habits like the pictures. I got trampled in a stall and broke my shoulder and there I was in the infirmary with this view of the empty driveway and no car coming up it. Not one fucking person came to visit me, not even Gaga. Plus the doctor was a drunk and set the shoulder wrong, I still have problems with it. I hate horses to this motherfucking day.

  “Any how—” self-conscious change of tone—“they’d yanked me out of that place and got me into Groton by the time things really came to a head with Daddy and he was sent away. Apparently there was an incident on the subway… conflicting stories there, Daddy said one thing and the cops said another but—” he lifted his eyebrows, with a sort of mannered, black-humored whimsy—“off went Daddy to the ding farm! Eight weeks. No belt, no shoelaces, no sharps. But they gave him shock treatments in there, and they really seemed to work because when he came out again he was an all-new person. Well—you remember. Father of the Year, practically.”

  “So—” I thought of my ugly run-in with Mr. Barbour on the street, decided not to bring it up—“what happened?”

  “Well, who knows. He started having problems again a few years ago and had to go back in.”

  “What kind of problems?”

  “Oh—” Platt exhaled noisily—“much the same, embarrassing phone calls, public outbursts, et cetera. Nothing was wrong with him, of course, he was perfectly fine, it all started when they were doing some renovations on the building, which he was against, constant hammers and saws and all these corporations destroying the city, nothing that wasn’t true to start with, and then it just sort of snowballed, to the point where he thought he was being followed and photographed and spied on all the time. Wrote some pretty crazy letters to people, including some clients at his firm… made a terrible nuisance of himself at the Yacht Club… quite a few of the members complained, even some very old friends of his, and who can blame them?

  “Anyway, when Daddy got back from the hospital that second time—he was never quite the same. The swings were less extreme, but he couldn’t concentrate and he was very irritable all the time. About six months ago he switched doctors and took a leave of absence from work and went up to Maine—our uncle Harry has a place on a little island up there, no one was there except the caretaker, and Daddy said the sea air did him good. All of us took turns going up to be with him… Andy was in Boston then, at MIT, the last thing he wanted was to be saddled with Daddy but unfortunately since he was closer than us, he got stuck with it a bit.”

  “He didn’t go back to the, er—” I didn’t want to say ding farm—“where he went before?”

  “Well, how was anyone to make him? It’s not an easy matter to send someone away against their will, especially when they won’t admit anything is wrong with them which at that point he wouldn’t, and besides we were led to believe it was all a matter of medication, that he would be right as rain as soon as the new dose kicked in. The caretaker checked in with us, made sure he ate well and took his medicine, Daddy spoke on the phone to his shrink every day—I mean, the doctor said it was all right,” he said defensively. “Fine for Daddy to drive, to swim, to sail if he felt like it. Probably it wasn’t a terrific idea to go out quite so late in the day but the conditions weren’t so bad when we set out and of course you know Daddy. Dauntless seaman and all that. Heroics and derring-do.”

  “Right.” I’d heard many, many stories of Mr. Barbour sailing off into “snappy waters” that turned out to be nor’easters, State of Emergency declared in th
ree states and power knocked out along the Atlantic Coast, Andy seasick and vomiting as he bailed salt water out of the boat. Nights tilted sideways, run aground upon sandbars, in darkness and torrential rain. Mr. Barbour himself—laughing uproariously over his Virgin Mary and his Sunday morning bacon and eggs—had more than once told the story how he and the children were blown out to sea off Long Island Sound during a hurricane, radio knocked out, how Mrs. Barbour had phoned a priest at St. Ignatius Loyola on Park and Eighty-Fourth and sat up all night praying (Mrs. Barbour!) until the ship-to-shore call from the Coast Guard came in. (“First strong wind, and she hightails it to Rome, didn’t you, my dear? Ha!”)

  “Daddy—” Platt shook his head sadly. “Mommy used to say that if Manhattan wasn’t an island, he could never have lived here one minute. Inland he was miserable—always pining for the water—had to see it, had to smell it—I remember driving from Connecticut with him when I was a boy, instead of going straight up 84 to Boston we had to go miles out of the way and up the coast. Always looking to the Atlantic—really really sensitive to it, how the clouds changed the closer you got to the ocean.” Platt closed his cement-gray eyes for a moment, then re-opened them. “You knew Daddy’s little sister drowned herself, didn’t you,” he said, in so flat a voice that for a moment I thought I’d misheard.

  I blinked, not knowing what to say. “No. I didn’t know that.”

  “Well, she did,” said Platt tonelessly. “Kitsey’s named after her. Jumped off a boat in the East River during a party—a lark supposedly, that’s what they all said, ‘accident,’ but I mean anyone knows not to do that, the currents were crazy, pulled her right under. Another kid died too, jumping in trying to save her. And then there was Daddy’s uncle Wendell back in the sixties, half-crocked, tried to swim to the mainland one night on a dare—I mean, Daddy, he used to yammer on how the water was the source of life itself for him, fountain of youth and all that and—sure, it was. But it wasn’t just life for him. It was death.”

  I didn’t reply. Mr. Barbour’s boating stories, never particularly cogent, or focused, or informative about the actual sport, had always vibrated with a majestic urgency all their own, an appealing tingle of disaster.

  “And—” Platt’s mouth was a tight line—“of course the hell of it was, he thought he was immortal as far as the water was concerned. Son of Poseidon! Unsinkable! And as far as he was concerned, the rougher the water, the better. He used to get very storm-giddy, you know? Lowered barometric pressure for him was like laughing gas. Although that particular day… it was choppy but warm, one of those bright sunny days in fall when all you want is to get out on the water. Andy was annoyed at having to go, he was coming down with a cold and in the middle of doing something complicated on the computer, but neither of us thought there was any actual danger. The plan was to take him out, get him calmed down, and hopefully hop over to the restaurant on the pier and try to get some food down him. See—” restlessly he crossed his legs—“it was just the two of us there with him, Andy and me, and to be quite frank Daddy was a bit off his rocker. He had been keyed up since the day before, talking a little wildly, really on the boil—Andy called Mommy because he had work to do and didn’t feel able to cope, and Mommy called me. By the time I got up there and took the ferry out, Daddy was in the wild blue yonder. Raving about the flung spray and the blown fume and all that—the wild green Atlantic—absolutely flying. Andy was never able to tolerate Daddy in those moods, he was up in his room with the door locked. I suppose he’d had a party-sized dose of Daddy before I arrived.

  “In hindsight, I know, it seems poorly considered, but—you see, I could have sailed it single-handed. Daddy was going stir-crazy in the house and what was I to do, wrestle him down and lock him up? and then too, you know Andy, he never thought about food, the cupboard was bare, nothing in the fridge but some frozen pizzas… short hop, something to eat on the pier, it seemed like a good plan, you know? ‘Feed him,’ Mommy always used to say when Daddy started getting a little too exhilarated. ‘Get some food down him.’ That was always the first line of defense. Sit him down—make him eat a big steak. Often that’s all it took to get him back on keel. And I mean—it was in the back of my mind that if his spirits didn’t settle once we were on the mainland we could forget about the steakhouse and take him in to the emergency room if need be. I only made Andy come to be on the safe side. I thought I could use an extra hand—quite frankly I’d been out late the night before, I was feeling a little less than all a-taunto, as Daddy used to say.” He paused, rubbing the palms of his hands on the thighs of his tweed trousers. “Well. Andy never liked the water much. As you know.”

  “I remember.”

  Platt winced. “I’ve seen cats that swam better than Andy. I mean, quite frankly, Andy was just about the clumsiest kid I ever saw that wasn’t out-and-out spastic or retarded… good God, you ought to have seen him on the tennis court, we used to joke about entering him in the Special Olympics, he would have swept every event. Still he’d put in enough hours on the boat, God knows—it seemed smart to have an extra man aboard, and Daddy less than his best, you know? We could easily have handled the boat—I mean it was fine, it would have been perfectly fine except I hadn’t been keeping my eye on the sky like I should, the wind blew up, we were trying to reef the mainsail and Daddy was waving his arms around and shouting about the empty spaces between the stars, really just all kinds of nutty stuff, and he lost his balance on a swell and fell overboard. We were trying to haul him back aboard, Andy and me—and then we got broadsided at just the wrong angle, huge wave, just one of these steep cresting things that pops up and slaps you out of nowhere, and boom, we capsized. Not even that it was so cold out but fifty-three-degree water is enough to send you into hypothermia if you’re out there long enough, which unfortunately we were, and I mean to say Daddy, he was soaring, off in the stratosphere—”

  Our chummy college-girl waitress was approaching behind Platt’s back, about to ask if we wanted another round—I caught her eye, shook my head slightly, warning her away.

  “It was the hypothermia that got Daddy. He’d gotten so thin, no body fat on him at all, an hour and a half in the water was enough to do it, floundering around at those temperatures. You lose heat faster if you’re not perfectly still. Andy—” Platt, seeming to sense that the waitress was there, turned and held up two fingers, another round—“Andy’s jacket, well, they found it trailing behind the boat still attached to the line.”

  “Oh God.”

  “It must have come up over his head when he went over. There’s a strap that goes around the crotch—a bit uncomfortable, nobody likes to wear it—anyway, there was Andy’s jacket, still shackled to the life-line, but apparently he wasn’t buckled in all the way, the little shit. Well, I mean,” he said, his voice rising, “the most typical thing. You know? Couldn’t be bothered to fasten the thing properly? He was always such a goddamned klutz—”