The Goldfinch Page 16

  mysterious tools I didn’t know the names of, and the sharp, intriguing smells of varnish and beeswax. Even the chair he’d been working on—which had goat’s legs in front, with cloven hooves—had seemed less like a piece of furniture than a creature under enchantment, like it might up-end itself and hop down from his work bench and trot away down the street.

  Hobie reached for his smock and put it back on. For all his gentleness, his quiet manner, he was built like a man who moved refrigerators or loaded trucks for a living.

  “So,” he said, leading me downstairs. “The shop-behind-the-shop.”

  “Sorry?”

  He laughed. “The arrière-boutique. What the customers see is a stage set—the face that’s displayed to the public—but down here is where the important work happens.”

  “Right,” I said, looking down at the labyrinth at the foot of the stairs, blond wood like honey, dark wood like poured molasses, gleams of brass and gilt and silver in the weak light. As with the Noah’s Ark, each species of furniture was ranked with its own kind: chairs with chairs, settees with settees; clocks with clocks, desks and cabinets and highboys standing in stiff ranks opposite. Dining tables, in the middle, formed narrow, mazelike paths to be edged around. At the back of the room a wall of tarnished old mirrors, hung frame to frame, glowed with the silvered light of old ballrooms and candlelit salons.

  Hobie looked back at me. He could see how pleased I was. “You like old things?”

  I nodded—it was true, I did like old things, though it was something I’d never realized about myself before.

  “It must be interesting for you at the Barbours’, then. I expect that some of their Queen Anne and Chippendale is as good as anything you’ll see in a museum.”

  “Yes,” I said, hesitantly. “But here it’s different. Nicer,” I added, in case he didn’t understand.

  “How so?”

  “I mean—” I squeezed my eyes shut, trying to collect my thoughts—“down here, it’s great, so many chairs with so many other chairs… you see the different personalities, you know? I mean, that one’s kind of—” I didn’t know the word—“well, silly almost, but in a good way—a comfortable way. And that one’s more nervous sort of, with those long spindly legs—”

  “You have a good eye for furniture.”

  “Well—” compliments threw me, I was never sure how to respond except to act like I hadn’t heard—“when they’re lined up together you see how they’re made. At the Barbours’—” I wasn’t sure how to explain it—“I don’t know, it’s more like those scenes with the taxidermy animals at the Natural History Museum.”

  When he laughed, his air of gloom and anxiety evaporated; you could feel his good-nature, it radiated off him.

  “No, I mean it,” I said, determined to plow on and make my point. “The way she has it set up, a table on its own with a light on it, and all the stuff arranged so you’re not supposed to touch it—it’s like those dioramas they place around the yak or whatever, to show its habitat. It’s nice, but I mean—” I gestured at the chair backs lined against the wall. “That one’s a harp, that one’s like a spoon, that one—” I imitated the sweep with my hand.

  “Shield back. Although, I’ll tell you, the nicest detail on that one is the tasselled splats. You may not realize it,” he said, before I could ask what a splat was, “but it’s an education in itself seeing that furniture of hers every day—seeing it in different lights, able to run your hand along it when you like.” He fogged his glasses with his breath, wiped them with a corner of his apron. “Do you need to head back uptown?”

  “Not really,” I said, though it was getting late.

  “Come along then,” he said. “Let’s put you to work. I could use a hand with this little chair down here.”

  “The goat foot?”

  “Yes, the goat’s foot. There’s another apron on the peg—I know, it’s too big, but I just coated this thing with linseed oil and I don’t want you to spoil your clothes.”

  xii.

  DAVE THE SHRINK HAD mentioned more than once that he wished I would develop a hobby—advice I resented, as the hobbies he suggested (racquetball, table tennis, bowling) all seemed incredibly lame. If he thought a game or two of table tennis was going to help me get over my mother, he was completely out to lunch. But—as evidenced by the blank journal I’d been given by Mr. Neuspeil, my English teacher; Mrs. Swanson’s suggestion that I start attending art classes after school; Enrique’s offer to take me down to watch basketball at the courts on Sixth Avenue; and even Mr. Barbour’s sporadic attempts to interest me in chart markers and nautical flags—a lot of adults had the same idea.

  “But what do you like to do in your spare time?” Mrs. Swanson had asked me in her spooky, pale gray office that smelled like herb tea and sagebrush, issues of Seventeen and Teen People stacked high on the reading table and some kind of silvery Asian chime music floating in the background.

  “I don’t know. I like to read. Watch movies. Play Age of Conquest II and Age of Conquest: Platinum Edition. I don’t know,” I said again, when she kept on looking at me.

  “Well, all those things are fine, Theo,” she said, looking concerned. “But it would be nice if we could find some group activity for you. Something with teamwork, something you could do with other kids. Have you ever thought about taking up a sport?”

  “No.”

  “I practice a martial art called Aikido. I don’t know if you’ve heard of it. It’s a way of using the opponent’s own movements as a form of self-defense.”

  I looked away from her and at the weathered-looking panel board of Our Lady of Guadalupe hanging behind her head.

  “Or perhaps photography.” She folded her turquoise-ringed hands on her desk. “If you’re not interested in art classes. Although I have to say, Mrs. Sheinkopf showed me some of the drawings you did last year—that series of rooftops, you know, water towers, the views from the studio window? Very observant—I know that view and you caught some really interesting line and energy, I think kinetic was the word she used, really nice quickness about it, all those intersecting planes and the angle of the fire escapes. What I’m trying to say is that it’s not so much what you do—I just wish that we could find a way for you to be more connected.”

  “Connected to what?” I said, in a voice that came out sounding far too nasty.

  She looked nonplussed. “To other people! And—” she gestured at the window—“the world around you! Listen,” she said, in her gentlest, most hypnotically-soothing voice, “I know that you and your mother had an incredibly close bond. I spoke to her. I saw the two of you together. And I know exactly how much you must miss her.”

  No you don’t, I thought, staring her insolently in the eye.

  She gave me an odd look. “You’d be surprised, Theo,” she said, leaning back in her shawl-draped chair, “what small, everyday things can lift us out of despair. But nobody can do it for you. You’re the one who has to watch for the open door.”

  Though I knew she meant well, I’d left her office head down, tears of anger stinging my eyes. What the hell did she know about it, the old bat? Mrs. Swanson had a gigantic family—about ten kids and thirty grandkids, to judge from the photos on her wall; Mrs. Swanson had a huge apartment on Central Park West and a house in Connecticut and zero idea what it was like for a plank to snap so it was all gone in a minute. Easy enough for her to sit back comfortably in her hippie armchair and ramble about extracurricular activities and open doors.

  And yet, unexpectedly, a door had opened, and in a most unlikely quarter: Hobie’s workshop. “Helping” with the chair (which had basically involved me standing by while Hobie ripped the seat up to show me the worm damage, slapdash repairs, and other hidden horrors under the upholstery) had rapidly turned into two or three oddly absorbing afternoons a week, after school: labeling jars, mixing rabbit-skin glue, sorting through boxes of drawer fittings (“the fiddly bits”) or sometimes just watching him turn chair legs on the lat
he. Though the upstairs shop stayed dark, with the metal gates down, still, in the shop-behind-the-shop, the tall-case clocks ticked, the mahogany glowed, the light filtered in a golden pool on the dining room tables, the life of the downstairs menagerie went on.

  Auction houses all over the city called him, as well as private clients; he restored furniture for Sotheby’s, for Christie’s, for Tepper, for Doyle. After school, amidst the drowsy tick of the tall-case clocks, he taught me the pore and luster of different woods, their colors, the ripple and gloss of tiger maple and the frothed grain of burled walnut, their weights in my hand and even their different scents—“sometimes, when you’re not sure what you have, it’s easiest just to take a sniff”—spicy mahogany, dusty-smelling oak, black cherry with its characteristic tang and the flowery, amber-resin smell of rosewood. Saws and counter-sinks, rasps and rifflers, bent blades and spoon blades, braces and mitre-blocks. I learned about veneers and gilding, what a mortise and tenon was, the difference between ebonized wood and true ebony, between Newport and Connecticut and Philadelphia crest rails, how the blocky design and close-cropped top of one Chippendale bureau rendered it inferior to another bracket-foot of the same vintage with its fluted quarter columns and what he liked to call the “exalted” proportions of the drawer ratio.

  Downstairs—weak light, wood shavings on the floor—there was something of the feel of a stable, great beasts standing patiently in the dim. Hobie made me see the creaturely quality of good furniture, in how he talked of pieces as “he” and “she,” in the muscular, almost animal quality that distinguished great pieces from their stiff, boxy, more mannered peers and in the affectionate way he ran his hand along the dark, glowing flanks of his sideboards and lowboys, like pets. He was a good teacher and very soon, by walking me through the process of examination and comparison, he’d taught me how to identify a reproduction: by wear that was too even (antiques were always worn asymmetrically); by edges that were machine-cut instead of hand-planed (a sensitive fingertip could feel a machine edge, even in poor light); but more than that by a flat, dead quality of wood, lacking a certain glow: the magic that came from centuries of being touched and used and passed through human hands. To contemplate the lives of these dignified old highboys and secretaries—lives longer and gentler than human life—sank me into calm like a stone in deep water, so that when it was time to go I walked out stunned and blinking into the blare of Sixth Avenue, hardly knowing where I was.

  More than the workshop (or the “hospital,” as Hobie called it) I enjoyed Hobie: his tired smile, his elegant big-man’s slouch, his rolled sleeves and his easy, joking manner, his workman’s habit of rubbing his forehead with the inside of his wrist, his patient good humor and his steady good sense. But though our talk was casual and sporadic there was never anything simple about it. Even a light “How are you” was a nuanced question, without it seeming to be; and my invariable answer (“Fine”) he could read easily enough without my having to spell anything out. And though he seldom pried, or questioned, I felt he had a better sense of me than the various adults whose job it was to “get inside my head” as Enrique liked to put it.

  But—more than anything—I liked him because he treated me as a companion and conversationalist in my own right. It didn’t matter that sometimes he wanted to talk about his neighbor who had a knee replacement or a concert of early music he’d seen uptown. If I told him something funny that happened at school, he was an attentive and appreciative audience; unlike Mrs. Swanson (who froze and looked startled when I made a joke) or Dave (who chuckled, but awkwardly, and always a beat too late), he liked to laugh, and I loved it when he told me stories of his own life: raucous late-marrying uncles and busybody nuns of his childhood, the third-rate boarding school on the Canadian border where his teachers had all been drunks, the big house upstate that his father kept so cold there was ice on the inside of the windows, gray December afternoons reading Tacitus or Motley’s Rise of the Dutch Republic. (“I loved history, always. The road not taken! My grandest boyhood ambition was to be a professor of history at Notre Dame. Although what I do now is just a different way of working with history, I suppose.”) He told me about his blind-in-one-eye canary rescued from a Woolworth’s who woke him singing every morning of his boyhood; the bout of rheumatic fever that kept him in bed for six months; and the queer little antique neighborhood library with frescoed ceilings (“torn down now, alas”) where he’d gone to get away from his house. About Mrs. De Peyster, the lonely old heiress he’d visited after school, a former Belle of Albany and local historian who clucked over Hobie and fed him Dundee cake ordered from England in tins, who was happy to stand for hours explaining to Hobie every single item in her china cabinet and who had owned, among other things, the mahogany sofa—rumored to have belonged to General Herkimer—that got him interested in furniture in the first place. (“Although I can’t quite picture General Herkimer lounging on that decadent old Grecian-looking article.”) About his mother, who had died shortly after his three-days-old sister, leaving Hobie an only child; and about the young Jesuit father, a football coach, who—telephoned by a panicky Irish housemaid when Hobie’s father was beating Hobie “to flinders practically” with a belt—had dashed to the house, rolled up his sleeves, and punched Hobie’s father to the ground. (“Father Keegan! He was the one who came to the house that time when I had rheumatic fever, to give me communion. I was his altar boy—he knew what the story was, he’d seen the stripes on my back. There’ve been so many priests lately naughty with the boys, but he was so good to me—I always wonder what happened to him, I’ve tried to find him and I can’t. My father telephoned the archbishop and next thing you knew, done and dusted, they’d shipped him off to Uruguay.”) It was all very different from the Barbours’, where—despite the general atmosphere of kindness—I was either lost in the throng or else the uncomfortable subject of formal inquiry. I felt better knowing he was only a bus ride away, a straight shot down Fifth Avenue; and in the night when I woke up jarred and panicked, the explosion plunging through me all over again, sometimes I could lull myself back to sleep by thinking of his house, where without even realizing it you slipped away sometimes into 1850, a world of ticking clocks and creaking floorboards, copper pots and baskets of turnips and onions in the kitchen, candle flames leaning all to the left in the draft of an opened door and tall parlor windows billowing and swagged like ball gowns, cool quiet rooms where old things slept.

  It was becoming increasingly difficult to explain my absences, however (dinnertime absences, often), and Andy’s powers of invention were being taxed. “Shall I go up there with you and talk to her?” said Hobie one afternoon when we were in the kitchen eating a cherry tart he’d bought at the farmers’ market. “I’m happy to go up and meet her. Or maybe you’d like to ask her here.”

  “Maybe,” I said, after thinking about it.

  “She might be interested to see that Chippendale chest-on-chest—you know, the Philadelphia, the scroll-top. Not to buy—just to look at. Or, if you’d like, we could invite her out to lunch at La Grenouille—” he laughed “—or even some little joint down here that might amuse her.”

  “Let me think about it,” I said; and went home early on the bus, brooding. Quite apart from my chronic duplicity with Mrs. Barbour—constant late nights at the library, a nonexistent history project—it would be embarrassing to admit to Hobie that I’d claimed Mr. Blackwell’s ring was a family heirloom. Yet, if Mrs. Barbour and Hobie were to meet, my lie was sure to emerge, one way or another. There seemed no way around it.

  “Where have you been?” said Mrs. Barbour sharply, dressed for dinner but without her shoes on, emerging from the back of the apartment with her gin and lime in her hand.

  Something in her manner made me sense a trap. “Actually,” I said, “I was downtown visiting a friend of my mother’s.”

  Andy turned to stare at me blankly.

  “Oh yes?” said Mrs. Barbour suspiciously, with a sideways glance at Andy. “Andy was
just telling me that you were working at the library again.”

  “Not tonight,” I said, so easily that it surprised me.

  “Well, I must say I’m relieved to hear that,” said Mrs. Barbour coolly. “Since the main branch is closed on Mondays.”

  “I didn’t say he was at the main branch, Mother.”

  “I think you might actually know him,” I said, anxious to draw fire from Andy. “Know of him, anyway.”

  “Who?” said Mrs. Barbour, her gaze coming back to me.

  “The friend I was visiting. His name is James Hobart. He runs a furniture shop downtown—well, doesn’t run it. He does the restorations.”

  She brought her eyebrows down. “Hobart?”

  “He works for lots of people in the city. Sotheby’s, sometimes.”

  “You wouldn’t mind if I gave him a call, then?”

  “No,” I said defensively. “He said we should all go out to lunch. Or maybe you’d like to come down to his shop sometime.”

  “Oh,” said Mrs. Barbour, after a beat or two of surprise. Now she was the one thrown off-balance. If Mrs. Barbour ever went south of Fourteenth Street, for any reason whatsoever, I didn’t know about it. “Well. We’ll see.”

  “Not to buy anything. Just to look. He has some nice things.”

  She blinked. “Of course,” she said. She seemed strangely disoriented—something fixed and distracted about the eyes. “Well, lovely. I’m sure I would enjoy meeting him. Have I met him?”

  “No, I don’t think so.”

  “In any case. Andy, I’m sorry. I owe you an apology. You too, Theo.”

  Me? I didn’t know what to say. Andy—sucking furtively at the side of his thumb—gave a one-shouldered shrug as she spun out of the room.

  “What’s the matter?” I asked him quietly.

  “She’s upset. It’s nothing to do with you. Platt’s home,” he added.

  Now that he mentioned it, I was aware of muffled music emanating from the rear of the apartment, a deep, subliminal thump. “Why?” I said. “What’s wrong?”

  “Something happened at school.”

  “Something bad?”

  “God knows,” he said tonelessly.

  “He’s in trouble?”

  “I assume so. No one will talk about it.”

  “But what happened?”

  Andy made a face: who knows. “He was here when we got home from school—we heard his music. Kitsey was excited and ran back to tell him hello but he screamed and slammed the door in her face.”

  I winced. Kitsey idolized Platt.

  “Then Mother came home. She’s been back in his room. Then she was on the telephone for a while. I slightly think Daddy’s on his way home now. They were supposed to have dinner with the Ticknors tonight but I think that’s been cancelled.”

  “What about supper?” I said, after a brief pause. Normally on school nights we ate in front of the television while doing our homework—but with Platt home, Mr. Barbour on his way, and the evening’s plans abandoned, it was starting to look more like a family dinner in the dining room.

  Andy straightened his glasses, in the fussy, old-womanish way he had. Although my hair was dark and his was light, I was only too aware how the identical eyeglasses Mrs. Barbour had chosen for us made me look like Andy’s egghead twin—especially since I’d overheard some girl at school calling us “the Goofus Brothers” (or maybe “the Doofus brothers”—whatever, it wasn’t a compliment).

  “Let’s walk over to Serendipity and get a hamburger,” he said. “I’d really rather not be here when Daddy gets home.”

  “Take me, too,” said Kitsey unexpectedly, galloping in and stopping just short of us, flushed and breathless.

  Andy and I looked at each other. Kitsey didn’t even like to be seen standing in line next to us at the bus stop.

  “Please,” she wailed, looking back and forth between us. “Toddy’s doing soccer practice, I have my own money, I don’t want to be by myself with them, please.”

  “Oh, come on,” I said to Andy, and she flashed me a grateful look.

  Andy put his hands in his pockets. “All right, then,” he said to her expressionlessly. They were a pair of white mice, I thought—only Kitsey was a spun-sugar, fairy-princess mouse whereas Andy was more the kind of luckless, anemic, pet-shop mouse you might feed to your boa constrictor.

  “Get your stuff. Go,” he said, when she still stood there staring. “I’m not waiting for you. And don’t forget your money because I’m not paying for you either.”

  xiii.

  I DIDN’T GO DOWN to Hobie’s for the next few days, out of loyalty to Andy, although I was greatly tempted in the atmosphere of tension that hung over the household. Andy was right: it was impossible to figure out what Platt had done, since Mr. and Mrs. Barbour behaved as if absolutely nothing were wrong (only you could tell that something was) and Platt himself wouldn’t say a word, only sat sullenly at meals with his hair hanging in his face.

  “Believe me,” said Andy, “it’s better when you’re around. They talk, and make more of an effort to be normal.”

  “What do you think he did?”

  “Honestly, I don’t know. I don’t want to know.”

  “Sure you do.”

  “Well, yes,” said Andy, relenting. “But I really don’t have the foggiest.”

  “Do you think he cheated? Stole? Chewed gum in chapel?”

  Andy shrugged. “The last time he was in trouble, it was for hitting somebody in the face with a lacrosse stick. But that wasn’t like this.” And then, out of the blue: “Mother loves Platt the best.”

  “You think?” I said evasively, though I knew very well this was true.

  “Daddy loves Kitsey best. And Mother loves Platt.”

  “She loves Toddy a lot too,” I said, before realizing quite how this sounded.

  Andy grimaced. “I would think I’d been switched at birth,” he said. “If I didn’t look so much like Mother.”

  xiv.

  FOR SOME REASON, DURING this strained interlude (possibly because Platt’s mysterious trouble reminded me of my own) it occurred to me that maybe I ought to