The Goldfinch Page 15

  “That should be fun.”

  She blinked, in confusion. “Maybe.”

  “Do you ride?”

  “No.”

  “Me neither. My mother did though. She loved horses. She always stopped to talk to the carriage horses on Central Park South. Like—” I didn’t know how to say it—“it was almost like they’d talk to her. Like, they’d try to turn their heads, even with their blinkers on, to where she was walking.”

  “Is your mother dead too?” she said timidly.

  “Yes.”

  “My mother’s been dead for—” she stopped and thought—“I can’t remember. She died after my spring holidays from school one year, so I had spring holidays off and the week after spring holidays too. And there was a field trip we were supposed to go on, to the Botanical Gardens, and I didn’t get to go. I miss her.”

  “What’d she die of?”

  “She got sick. Was your mother sick too?”

  “No. It was an accident.” And then—not wanting to venture more upon this subject: “Anyway, she loved horses a lot, my mother. When she was growing up she had a horse she said got lonely sometimes? and he liked to come right up to the house and put his head in at the window to see what was going on.”

  “What was his name?”

  “Paintbox.” I’d loved it when my mother told me about the stables back in Kansas: owls and bats in the rafters, horses nickering and blowing. I knew the names of all her childhood horses and dogs.

  “Paintbox! Was he all different colors?”

  “He was spotted, sort of. I’ve seen pictures of him. Sometimes—in the summer—he’d come and look in on her while she was having her afternoon nap. She could hear him breathing, you know, just inside the curtains.”

  “That’s so nice! I like horses. It’s just—”

  “What?”

  “I’d rather stay here!” All at once she seemed close to tears. “I don’t know why I have to go.”

  “You should tell them you want to stay.” When did our hands start touching? Why was her hand so hot?

  “I did tell them! Except everyone thinks it’ll be better there.”

  “Why?”

  “I don’t know,” she said fretfully. “Quieter, they said. But I don’t like the quiet, I like it when there’s lots of stuff to hear.”

  “They’re going to make me leave, too.”

  She pushed up on her elbow. “No!” she said, looking alarmed. “When?”

  “I don’t know. Soon, I guess. I have to go live with my grandparents.”

  “Oh,” she said longingly, falling back on the pillow. “I don’t have any grandparents.”

  I threaded my fingers through hers. “Mine aren’t very nice.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “That’s okay,” I said, in as normal a voice as I could, though my heart was pounding so hard that I could feel my pulse jumping in my finger-tips. Her hand, in mine, was velvety and fever-hot, just the slightest bit sticky.

  “Don’t you have any other family?” Her eyes were so dark in the wan light from the window that they looked black.

  “No. Well—” Did my father count? “No.”

  There followed a long silence. We were still connected by the earbuds: one in her ear, one in mine. Seashells singing. Angel choirs and pearls. Things had gotten way too slow all of a sudden; it was as if I’d forgotten how to breathe properly; over and over I found myself holding my breath, then exhaling raggedly and too loud.

  “What did you say this music was?” I asked, just for something to say.

  She smiled sleepily, and reached for a pointed, unappetizing-looking lollipop that lay atop a foil wrapper on her nightstand.

  “Palestrina,” she said, around the stick in her mouth. “High mass. Or something. They’re all a lot alike.”

  “Do you like her?” I said. “Your aunt?”

  She looked at me for several long beats. Then she put the lollipop carefully back on the wrapper and said: “She seems nice. I guess. Only I don’t really know her. It’s weird.”

  “Why do you? Have to go?”

  “It’s about money. Hobie can’t do anything—he isn’t my real uncle. My pretend uncle, she calls him.”

  “I wish he was your real uncle,” I said. “I want you to stay.”

  Suddenly she sat up, and put her arms around me, and kissed me; and all the blood rushed from my head, a long sweep, like I was falling off a cliff.

  “I—” Terror struck me. In a daze, by reflex, I reached to wipe the kiss away—only this wasn’t soggy, or gross, I could feel a trace of it glowing all along the back of my hand.

  “I don’t want you to go.”

  “I don’t want to, either.”

  “Do you remember seeing me?”

  “When?”

  “Right before.”

  “No.”

  “I remember you,” I said. Somehow my hand had found its way to her cheek, and clumsily I pulled it back and forced it to my side, making a fist, practically sitting on it. “I was there.” It was then I realized that Hobie was in the door.

  “Hello, old love.” And though the warmth in the voice was mostly for her, I could tell a little was for me. “I told you he’d be back.”

  “You did!” she said, pushing herself up. “He’s here.”

  “Well, will you listen to me next time?”

  “I was listening to you. I just didn’t believe you.”

  The hem of a sheer curtain brushed a windowsill. Faintly, I heard traffic singing on the street. Sitting there on the edge of her bed, it felt like the waking-up moment between dream and daylight where everything merged and mingled just as it was about to change, all in the same, fluid, euphoric slide: rainy light, Pippa sitting up with Hobie in the doorway, and her kiss (with the peculiar flavor of what I now believe to have been a morphine lollipop) still sticky on my lips. Yet I’m not sure that even morphine would account for how lightheaded I felt at that moment, how smilingly wrapped-up in happiness and beauty. Half-dazed, we said our goodbyes (there were no promises to write; it seemed she was too ill for that) and then I was in the hallway, with the nurse there, Aunt Margaret talking loud and bewilderingly and Hobie’s reassuring hand on my shoulder, a strong, comforting pressure, like an anchor letting me know that everything was okay. I hadn’t felt a touch like that since my mother died—friendly, steadying in the midst of confusing events—and, like a stray dog hungry for affection, I felt some profound shift in allegiance, blood-deep, a sudden, humiliating, eyewatering conviction of this place is good, this person is safe, I can trust him, nobody will hurt me here.

  “Ah,” cried Aunt Margaret, “are you crying? Do you see that?” she said to the young nurse (nodding, smiling, eager to please, clearly under her spell). “How sweet he is! You’ll miss her, won’t you?” Her smile was wide and assured of itself, of its own rightness. “You’ll have to come down and visit, absolutely you will. I’m always happy to have guests. My parents… they had one of the biggest Tudor houses in Texas…”

  On she prattled, friendly as a parrot. But my loyalties were elsewhere. And the flavor of Pippa’s kiss—bittersweet and strange—stayed with me all the way back uptown, swaying and sleepy as I sailed home on the bus, melting with sorrow and loveliness, a starry ache that lifted me up above the windswept city like a kite: my head in the rainclouds, my heart in the sky.

  ix.

  I HATED TO THINK of her leaving. I couldn’t stand thinking of it. On the day she was going, I woke feeling heartsick. Looking at the sky over Park Avenue, blue-black and threatening, a roiling sky straight from a painting of Calvary, I imagined her looking out at the same dark sky from her airplane window; and—as Andy and I walked to the bus stop, the downcast eyes and the sober mood on the street seemed to reflect and magnify my sadness at her departure.

  “Well, Texas is boring, all right,” said Andy, between sneezes; his eyes were pink and streaming from pollen so he looked even more like a lab rat than usual.

  “
You went there?”

  “Yes—Dallas. Uncle Harry and Aunt Tess lived there for a while. There’s nothing to do but go to the movies and you can’t walk anywhere, people have to drive you. Also they have rattlesnakes, and the death penalty, which I think is primitive and unethical in ninety-eight per cent of cases. But it’ll probably be better for her there.”

  “Why?”

  “The climate, primarily,” said Andy, swiping his nose with one of the pressed cotton handkerchiefs he plucked every morning from the stack in his drawer. “Convalescents do better in warm weather. That’s why my grandpa Van der Pleyn moved to Palm Beach.”

  I was silent. Andy, I knew, was loyal; I trusted him, I valued his opinion, and yet his conversation sometimes made me feel as though I was talking to one of those computer programs that mimic human response.

  “If she’s in Dallas she should definitely go to the Nature and Science Museum. Although I think she’ll find it small and somewhat dated. The IMAX I saw there wasn’t even 3-D. Also they ask for extra money to get into the planetarium, which is ridiculous considering how inferior it is to Hayden.”

  “Huh.” Sometimes I wondered exactly what it might take to break Andy out of his math-nerd turret: a tidal wave? Decepticon invasion? Godzilla tromping down Fifth Avenue? He was a planet without an atmosphere.

  x.

  HAD ANYONE EVER FELT so lonely? Back at the Barbours’, amidst the clamor and plenitude of a family that wasn’t mine, I now felt even more alone than usual—especially since, as the end of the school year neared, it wasn’t clear to me (or Andy either, for that matter) if I would be accompanying them to their summer house in Maine. Mrs. Barbour, with her characteristic delicacy, managed to skirt the topic even in the midst of the cardboard boxes and open suitcases that were appearing all over the house; Mr. Barbour and the younger siblings all seemed excited but Andy regarded the prospect with frank horror. “Sun and fun,” he said contemptuously, pushing his glasses (like mine, only a lot thicker) up on the bridge of his nose. “At least with your grandparents you’ll be on dry land. With hot water. An Internet connection.”

  “I don’t feel sorry for you.”

  “Well, if you do have to go with us, see how you like it. It’s like Kidnapped. The part where they sell him into slavery on that boat.”

  “What about the part where he has to go to his creepy relative in the middle of nowhere that he doesn’t even know?”

  “Yes, I was thinking that,” said Andy seriously, turning in his desk chair to look at me. “Although at least they aren’t scheming to kill you—it’s not as if there’s an inheritance at stake.”

  “No, there’s certainly not.”

  “Do you know what my advice to you is?”

  “No, what?”

  “My advice,” said Andy, scratching his nose with the eraser of his pencil, “is to work as hard as you possibly can when you get to your new school in Maryland. You’ve got an advantage—you’re ahead a year. That means you’ll graduate when you’re seventeen. If you apply yourself, you can be out of there in four years, maybe even three, with a scholarship anywhere you want to go.”

  “My grades aren’t that good.”

  “No,” said Andy seriously, “but only because you don’t work. Also I think it fair to assume that your new school, wherever it is, won’t be quite as demanding.”

  “I pray to God not.”

  “I mean—public school,” said Andy. “Maryland. No disrespect to Maryland. I mean, they do have the Applied Physics Laboratory and the Space Telescope Science Institute at Johns Hopkins, to say nothing of the Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt. Definitely it’s a state with some serious NASA commitment. You tested in what percentile back in junior high?”

  “I don’t remember.”

  “Well, it’s fine if you don’t want to tell me. My point is, you can finish with good marks when you’re seventeen—maybe sixteen, if you bear down hard—and then you can go to college wherever you want.”

  “Three years is a long time.”

  “It is to us. But in the scheme of things—not at all. I mean,” said Andy reasonably, “look at some poor dumb bunny like Sabine Ingersoll or that idiot James Villiers. Forrest fucking Longstreet.”

  “Those people aren’t poor. I saw Villiers’s father on the cover of the Economist.”

  “No, but they’re as dumb as a set of sofa cushions. I mean—Sabine can barely put one foot in front of the other. If her family didn’t have money and she had to manage on her own, she’d have to be, I don’t know, a prostitute. Longstreet—he’d probably just crawl in the corner and starve. Like a hamster you forgot to feed.”

  “You’re depressing me.”

  “All I’m saying is—you’re smart. And grownups like you.”

  “What?” I said doubtfully.

  “Sure,” said Andy, in his wan, irritating voice. “You remember names, do the eye-contact stuff, shake hands when you’re supposed to. At school they all tie themselves in knots for you.”

  “Yeah, but—” I didn’t want to say it was because my mother was dead.

  “Don’t be stupid. You get away with murder. You’re smart enough to figure it out on your own.”

  “Why haven’t you figured out this sailing business then?”

  “Oh, I’ve figured it out, all right,” said Andy grimly, returning to his hiragana workbook. “I’ve figured that I have four summers of Hell, at absolute worst. Three if Daddy lets me go to early college when I’m sixteen. Two if I bite the bullet junior year and go to that summer program at the Mountain School and learn organic farming. And after that, I’m never setting foot on a boat again.”

  xi.

  “IT’S DIFFICULT TO TALK to her on the phone, alas,” said Hobie. “I wasn’t anticipating that. She doesn’t do well at all.”

  “Doesn’t do well?” I said. Scarcely a week had passed, and though I’d had no thought of returning to see Hobie somehow I was down there again: sitting at his kitchen table and eating my second dish of what had, upon first glance, appeared to be a black lump of flowerpot mud but was actually some delicious mess of ginger and figs, with whipped cream and tiny, bitter slivers of orange peel on top.

  Hobie rubbed his eye. He’d been repairing a chair in the basement when I’d arrived. “It’s all very frustrating,” he said. His hair was tied back from his face; his glasses were around his neck on a chain. Under his black work smock, which he’d removed and hung on a peg, he was wearing old corduroys stained with mineral spirit and beeswax, and a thin-washed cotton shirt with the sleeves rolled above the elbow. “Margaret said she cried for three hours after she got off the telephone with me on Sunday night.”

  “Why can’t she just come back?”

  “Honestly, I wish I knew how to make things better,” said Hobie. Capable-looking and morose, his knobbly white hand flat on the table, there was something in the set of his shoulder that suggested a good-natured draft horse, or maybe a workman in the pub at the end of a long day. “I’d thought I might fly down and see about her, but Margaret says no. That she won’t settle in properly if I’m hovering about.”

  “I think you should go anyway.”

  Hobie raised his eyebrows. “Margaret’s hired a therapist—someone famous, apparently, who uses horses to work with injured children. And yes, Pippa loves animals, but even if she was perfectly well she wouldn’t want to be outdoors and riding horses the whole time. She’s spent most of her life in music lessons and practice halls. Margaret’s full of enthusiasm about the music program at her church but an amateur children’s choir can hardly hold much interest for her.”

  I pushed the glass dish—scraped clean—aside. “Why did Pippa not know her before?” I said timidly, and then, when he didn’t answer: “Is it about money?”

  “Not so much. Although—yes. You’re right. Money always has something to do with it. You see,” he said, leaning forward with his big, expressive hands on the table, “Welty’s father had three children. Welty, Mar
garet, and Pippa’s mother, Juliet. All with different mothers.”

  “Oh.”

  “Welty—the eldest. And I mean—eldest son, you’d think, wouldn’t you? But he contracted a tuberculosis of the spine when he was about six, when his parents were up in Aswan—the nanny didn’t recognize how serious it was, he was taken to the hospital too late—he was a very bright boy, so I understand, personable too, but old Mr. Blackwell wasn’t a man tolerant of weakness or infirmity. Sent him to America to live with relatives and barely gave him another thought.”

  “That’s awful,” I said, shocked at the unfairness of this.

  “Yes. I mean—you’ll get quite a different picture from Margaret, of course—but he was a hard man, Welty’s father. At any rate, after the Blackwells were expelled from Cairo—expelled isn’t the best term, perhaps. When Nasser came in, all the foreigners had to leave Egypt—Welty’s father was in the oil business, luckily for him he had money and property elsewhere. Foreigners weren’t allowed to take money or anything of much value out of the country.

  “At any rate.” He reached for another cigarette. “I’ve gone off track a little. The point is that Welty scarcely knew Margaret, who was a good twelve years younger. Margaret’s mother was Texan, an heiress, with plenty of money of her own. That was the last and longest of old Mr. Blackwell’s marriages—the great love affair, to hear Margaret tell it. Prominent couple in Houston—lots of drinking and chartered airplanes, African safaris—Welty’s father loved Africa, even after he had to leave Cairo, he could never stay away.

  “At any rate—” The match flared up, and he coughed as he exhaled a cloud of smoke. “Margaret was their father’s princess, apple of his eye, all that. But still and all, throughout the marriage, he carried on with coat check girls, waitresses, the daughters of friends—and at some point, when he was in his sixties, he fathered a baby with a girl who cut his hair. And that baby was Pippa’s mother.”

  I said nothing. In second grade there had been a huge fuss (documented, daily, in the gossip pages of the New York Post) when the father of one of my classmates had a baby with a woman not Eli’s mother, which had meant that a lot of the mothers took sides and stopped speaking to each other out in front of school while they were waiting to pick us up in the afternoons.

  “Margaret was in college, at Vassar,” said Hobie fitfully. Though he was speaking to me as if I were a grownup (which I liked), he didn’t seem particularly comfortable with the subject. “I think she didn’t speak to her father for a couple of years. Old Mr. Blackwell tried to pay the hairdresser off but his cheapness got the better of him, his cheapness where his dependents were concerned, anyway. And so you see Margaret—Margaret and Pippa’s mother Juliet never even met, except in the courtroom, when Juliet was practically still a babe in arms. Welty’s father had grown to hate the hairdresser so much that he’d made it plain in the will that neither she nor Juliet was to get a cent, apart from whatever mingy child support was required by law. But Welty—” Hobie stubbed out his cigarette—“Old Mr. Blackwell had some second thoughts where Welty was concerned, and did the right thing by him in the will. And throughout all this legal fracas, which went on for years, Welty grew to be terribly disturbed by how the baby was shunted off and neglected. Juliet’s mother didn’t want her; none of the mother’s relatives wanted her; old Mr. Blackwell had certainly never wanted her, and Margaret and her mother, frankly, would have been happy enough to see her on the street. And, in the meantime, there was the hairdresser, leaving Juliet alone in the apartment when she went to work… bad situation all around.

  “Welty had no obligation to put his foot in but he was an affectionate man, without family, and he liked children. He invited Juliet here for a holiday when she was six years old, or ‘JuleeAnn’ as she was then—”

  “Here? In this house?”

  “Yes, here. And when the summer was over and it was time to send her back and she was crying about having to leave and the mother wasn’t answering her telephone, he cancelled the plane tickets and phoned around to see about enrolling her in first grade. It was never an official arrangement—he was afraid to rock the boat, as they say—but most people assumed she was his child without inquiring too deeply. He was in his mid-thirties, plenty old enough to be her father. Which, in all the essential respects, he was.

  “But, no matter,” he said, looking up, in an altered tone. “You said you wanted to look around the workshop. Would you like to go down?”

  “Please,” I said. “That would be great.” When I’d found him down there working on his up-ended chair, he’d stood and stretched and said he was ready for a break but I hadn’t wanted to come upstairs at all, the workshop was so rich and magical: a treasure cave, bigger on the inside than it looked on the outside, with the light filtering down from the high windows, fretwork and filigree,