The Goldfinch Page 17

  tell Hobie about the painting, or—at the very least—broach the subject in some oblique manner, to see what his reaction would be. The difficulty was how to bring it up. It was still in the apartment, exactly where I’d left it, in the bag I’d brought out of the museum. When I’d seen it leaning against the sofa in the front room, on the dreadful afternoon I’d gone back in to get some school things I needed, I’d walked right past it, skirting it as assiduously as I would have a grasping bum on the sidewalk, and all the time feeling Mrs. Barbour’s cool pale eye on my back, on our apartment, on my mother’s things, as she stood in the door with her arms folded.

  It was complicated. Every time I thought of it my stomach squirmed, so that my first instinct was to slam the lid down hard and think of something else. Unfortunately, I’d waited so long to say anything to anybody that it was starting to feel like it was too late to say anything at all. And the more time I spent with Hobie—with his crippled Hepplewhites and Chippendales, the old things he took such diligent care of—the more I felt it was wrong to keep silent. What if someone found the picture? What would happen to me? For all I knew, the landlord might have gone into the apartment—he had a key—but even if he did go in, I didn’t think he would necessarily happen upon it. Yet I knew I was tempting fate by leaving it there while I put off deciding what to do.

  It wasn’t that I minded giving it back; if I could have returned it magically, by wishing, I would have done it in a second. It was just that I couldn’t think how to return it in a way that wouldn’t endanger either me or the painting. Since the museum bombing, there were notices all over the city saying that packages left unattended for any reason would be destroyed, which did away with most of my brilliant ideas for returning it anonymously. Any suspicious suitcase or parcel would be blown up, no questions asked.

  Of all the adults I knew, there were only two I considered taking into my confidence: Hobie, or Mrs. Barbour. Of these, Hobie seemed by far the more sympathetic and less terrifying prospect. It would be much easier to explain to Hobie how I had happened to take the painting out of the museum in the first place. That it was a mistake, sort of. That I’d been following Welty’s instruction; that I’d had a concussion. That I hadn’t fully considered what I was doing. That I hadn’t meant to let it sit around so long. Yet in my homeless limbo, it seemed insane to step up and admit to what I knew a lot of people were going to view as very serious wrongdoing. Then, by coincidence—just as I was realizing I really couldn’t wait much longer before I did something—I happened to see a tiny black and white photo of the painting in the business section of the Times.

  Due perhaps to the unease that had overtaken the household in the wake of Platt’s disgrace, the newspaper now occasionally found its way out of Mr. Barbour’s study, where it dis-assembled itself and re-appeared a page or two at a time. These pages, awkwardly folded, were scattered near a napkin-wrapped glass of club soda (Mr. Barbour’s calling card) on the coffee table in the living room. It was a long, boring article, toward the back of the section, having to do with the insurance industry—about the financial difficulties of mounting big art shows in a troubled economy, and especially the difficulty in insuring travelling artworks. But what had caught my eye was the caption under the photo: The Goldfinch, Carel Fabritius’s 1654 masterpiece, destroyed.

  Without thinking, I sat down in Mr. Barbour’s chair and began scanning the dense text for any further mention of my painting (already I’d begun to think of it as mine; the thought slid into my head as if I’d owned it all my life)

  Questions of international law come into play in cultural terrorism such as this, which has sent a chill through the financial community as well as the artistic world. “The loss of even one of these pieces is impossible to quantify,” said Murray Twitchell, a London-based insurance-risk analyst. “Along with the twelve pieces lost and presumed destroyed, another 27 works were badly damaged, although restoration, for some, is possible.” In what may seem a futile gesture to many, the Art Loss Database

  The story was continued on the next page; but just then Mrs. Barbour came into the room and I had to put the newspaper down.

  “Theo,” she said. “I have a proposal for you.”

  “Yes?” I said, warily.

  “Would you like to come up to Maine with us this year?”

  For a moment I was so overjoyed that I went completely blank. “Yes!” I said. “Wow. That’d be great!”

  Even she couldn’t help but smile, a bit. “Well,” she said, “Chance will certainly be happy to put you to work on the boat. It seems that we’re going out somewhat earlier this year—well, Chance and the children will be going early. I’ll be staying in the city to take care of some things, but I’ll be up in a week or two.”

  I was so happy I couldn’t think of a single thing to say.

  “We’ll see how you like sailing. Perhaps you’ll like it better than Andy does. Let us hope so, at any rate.”

  “You think it’s going to be fun,” said Andy gloomily, when I ran back to the bedroom (ran, not walked) to give him the good news. “But it’s not. You’ll hate it.” All the same, I could tell exactly how pleased he was. And that night—before bed—he sat down with me on the edge of the bottom bunk to talk about what books we would bring, what games, and what the symptoms of seasickness were, so that I could get out of helping on deck, if I felt like it.

  xv.

  THIS TWO-FOLD NEWS—good on both fronts—left me limp and dazed with relief. If my painting was destroyed—if that was the official story—there was plenty of time to decide what to do. By the same magic, Mrs. Barbour’s invitation seemed to extend beyond the summer and far into the horizon, as if the entire Atlantic Ocean lay between me and Grandpa Decker; the lift was dizzying, and all I could do was exult in my reprieve. I knew that I should give the painting to either Hobie or Mrs. Barbour, throw myself on their mercy, tell them everything, beg them to help me—in some bleak, lucid corner of my mind I knew I would be sorry if I didn’t—but my mind was too full of Maine and sailing to think about anything else; and it was starting to occur to me that it might even be smart to keep the painting for a while, as a sort of insurance for the next three years, against having to go live with Grandpa Decker and Dorothy. It is a hallmark of my stunning naïveté that I thought I might even be able to sell it, if I had to. So I kept quiet, looked at maps and chart markers with Mr. Barbour, and let Mrs. Barbour take me to Brooks Brothers to buy some deck shoes and some light cotton sweaters to wear on the water when it got cool at night. And said nothing.

  xvi.

  “TOO MUCH EDUCATION, WAS my problem,” said Hobie. “Or so my father thought.” I was in the workshop with him and helping sort through endless pieces of old cherry-wood, some redder, some browner, all salvaged from old furniture, to get the exact shade he needed to patch the apron of the tall-case clock he was working on. “My father had a trucking company” (this I already knew; the name was so famous that even I was familiar with it), “and in the summers and over Christmas vacation he had me loading trucks—I’d have to work up to driving one, he said. The men on the loading docks all went dead silent the moment I walked out there. Boss’s son, you know. Not their fault, because my father was a holy bastard to work for. Anyway he had me doing that from fourteen, after school and on weekends—loading boxes in the rain. Sometimes I worked in the office too—dismal, dingy place. Freezing in winter and hot as blazes in summer. Shouting over the exhaust fans. At first, it was only in the summers and over Christmas vacation. But then, after my second year of college, he announced he wasn’t paying my tuition any more.”

  I had found a piece of wood that looked like a good match for the broken piece, and I slid it over to him. “Did you have bad grades?”

  “No—I did all right,” he said, picking up the wood and holding it to the light, then putting it in the stack with possible matches. “The thing was, he hadn’t gone to college himself and he’d done fine, hadn’t he? Did I think I was better tha
n him? But more than that—well, he was the kind of man who had to bully everyone around him, you know the type, and I think it must have dawned on him, what better way to keep me under his thumb and working for free? At first—” he deliberated several moments over another piece of veneer, then put it in the maybe pile—“at first he told me I’d have to take a year off—four years, five, however long it took—and earn the rest of my college money the hard way. Never saw a penny I made. I lived at home, and he was putting it all into a special account, you see, for my own good. Rough enough but fair, I thought. But then—after I’d worked full-time for him for about three years—the game changed. Suddenly—” he laughed—“well, hadn’t I understood the deal? I was paying him back for my first two years of college. He hadn’t set aside anything at all.”

  “That’s awful!” I said, after a shocked pause. I didn’t see how he could laugh about something so unfair.

  “Well—” he rolled his eyes—“I was still a bit green, but I realized at that rate I’d be perishing of old age before I ever got out of there. But—no money, nowhere to live—what was I to do? I was trying hard to figure something out when lo and behold, Welty happened into the office one day while my father was going off at me. He loved to berate me in front of his men, my dad—swaggering around like a Mafia boss, saying I owed him money for this and that, taking it out of my quote unquote ‘salary.’ Withholding my alleged paycheck for some imaginary infraction. That kind of thing.

  “Welty—it wasn’t the first time I’d seen him. He’d been in the office to arrange for shipping from estate sales—he always claimed that with his back he had to work harder to make a good impression, make people see past the deformity and all that, but I liked him from the start. Most people did—my father even, who shall I say wasn’t a man who took kindly to people. At any rate, Welty, having witnessed this outburst, telephoned my father the next day and said he could use my help packing the furniture for a house he’d bought the contents of. I was a big strong kid, hard worker, just the ticket. Well—” Hobie stood and stretched his arms over his head—“Welty was a good customer. And my father, for whatever reason, said yes.

  “The house I helped him pack was the old De Peyster mansion. And as it happened I’d known old Mrs. De Peyster quite well. From the time I was a kid I’d liked to wander down and visit her—funny old woman in a bright yellow wig, font of information, papers everywhere, knew everything about local history, incredibly entertaining storyteller—anyway, it was quite a house, packed with Tiffany glass and some very good furniture from the 1800s, and I was able to help with the provenance of a lot of the pieces, better than Mrs. De Peyster’s daughter, who hadn’t the slightest interest in the chair President McKinley had sat in or any of that.

  “The day I finished helping him with the house—it was about six o’clock in the afternoon, I was head-to-toe with dust—Welty opened a bottle of wine and we sat around on the packing cases and drank it, you know, bare floors and that empty house echo. I was exhausted—he’d paid me directly, cash, leaving my father out of it—and when I thanked him and asked if he knew of any more work, he said: Look, I’ve just opened a shop in New York, and if you want a job, you’ve got it. So we clinked glasses on it, and I went home, packed a suitcase full of books mostly, said goodbye to the housekeeper, and hitched a ride on the truck to New York the next day. Never looked back.”

  A lull ensued. We were still sorting through the veneer: clicking fragments, paper-thin, like counters in some ancient game from China maybe, an eerie lightness in the sound which made you feel lost in some much larger silence.

  “Hey,” I said, spotting a piece and snatching it up, passing it to him triumphantly: exact color match, closer than any of the pieces he’d set aside in his pile.

  He took it from me, looked at it under the lamp. “It’s all right.”

  “What’s wrong with it?”

  “Well, you see—” he put the veneer up to the clock’s apron—“this kind of work, it’s the grain of the wood you really have to match. That’s the trick of it. Variations in tone are easier to fudge. Now this—” he held up a different piece, visibly several shades off—“with a little beeswax and a bit of the right coloring—maybe. Bichromate of potash, touch of Vandyke brown—sometimes, with a grain really difficult to match, certain kinds of walnut especially, I’ve used ammonia to darken a bit of new wood. But only when I was desperate. It’s always best to use wood of the same vintage as the piece you’re repairing, if you have it.”

  “How’d you learn how to do all this?” I said, after a timid pause.

  He laughed. “The same way you’re learning it now! Standing around and watching. Making myself useful.”

  “Welty taught you?”

  “Oh, no. He understood it—knew how it was done. You have to in this business. He had a very reliable eye and often I’d bob up and fetch him when I wanted a second opinion. But before I joined the enterprise usually he’d pass on a piece that needed restoration. It’s time-consuming work—takes a certain mind-set—he didn’t have the temperament nor the physical hardiness for it. He much preferred the acquisitions end—you know, going to auction—or being in the shop and chatting up the customers. Every afternoon around five, I’d pop up for a cup of tea. ‘Scourged from your dungeons.’ It really was pretty foul down here in the old days with the mold and damp. When I came to work for Welty—” he laughed—“he had this old fellow named Abner Mossbank. Bad legs, arthritis in his fingers, could barely see. It would take him a year sometimes to finish a piece. But I stood at his back and watched him work. He was like a surgeon. Couldn’t ask questions. Utter silence! But he knew absolutely everything—work that other people didn’t know how to do or care to learn any more—it hangs by a thread, this trade, generation to generation.”

  “Your dad never gave you the money you earned?”

  He laughed, warmly. “Not a penny! Never spoke to me again, either. He was a bitter old sod—fell down dead of a heart attack in the middle of firing one of his oldest employees. One of the most poorly attended funerals you’d ever care to see. Three black umbrellas in the sleet. Hard not to think of Ebenezer Scrooge.”

  “You never went back to college?”

  “No. Didn’t want to. I’d found what I liked to do. So—” he put both hands in the small of his back, and stretched; his out-at-elbows jacket, loose and a bit dirty, made him look like a good-natured groom on his way to the stables—“moral of the story is, who knows where it all will take you?”

  “All what?”

  He laughed. “Your sailing holiday,” he said, moving to the shelf where the jars of pigment were arrayed like potions in an apothecary; ocherous earths, poisonous greens, powders of charcoal and burnt bone. “Might be the decisive moment. It takes some people that way, the sea.”

  “Andy gets seasick. He has to carry a baggie on the boat to throw up in.”

  “Well—” reaching for a jar of lampblack—“must admit, it never took me that way. When I was a kid—‘Rime of the Ancient Mariner,’ those Doré illustrations—no, the ocean gives me the shivers but then I’ve never been on an adventure like yours. You never know. Because—” brow furrowed, tapping out a bit of soft black powder on his palette—“I never dreamed that all that old furniture of Mrs. De Peyster’s would be the thing that decided my future. Maybe you’ll get fascinated by hermit crabs and study marine biology. Or decide you want to build boats, or be a marine painter, or write the definitive book about the Lusitania.”

  “Maybe,” I said, hands behind my back. But what I really hoped I didn’t dare articulate. Even to think of it practically made me tremble. Because, the thing was: Kitsey and Toddy had started being much, much nicer to me, as if someone had drawn them aside; and I’d seen glances, subtle cues, between Mr. and Mrs. Barbour that made me hopeful—more than hopeful. In fact, it was Andy who’d put the thought in my head. “They think being around you is good for me,” he’d said on the way to school the other day. “That you’
re drawing me out of my shell and making me more social. I’m thinking they might make a family announcement once we get up to Maine.”

  “Announcement?”

  “Don’t be a dunce. They’ve grown quite fond of you—Mother, especially. But Daddy, too. I believe they may want to keep you.”

  xvii.

  I RODE UPTOWN ON the bus, slightly drowsy, swaying comfortably back and forth and watching the wet Saturday streets flash by. When I stepped inside the apartment—chilled from walking home in the rain—Kitsey ran into the foyer to stare at me, wild-eyed and fascinated, as if I were an ostrich who had wandered into the apartment. Then, after a few blank seconds, she darted off into the living room, sandals clattering on the parquet floor, crying: “Mum? He’s here!”

  Mrs. Barbour appeared. “Hello, Theo,” she said. She was perfectly composed but there was something constrained in her manner, though I couldn’t quite put my finger on it. “Come in here. I’ve got a surprise for you.”

  I followed her into Mr. Barbour’s study, gloomy in the overcast afternoon, where the framed nautical charts and the rain streaming down the gray windowpanes were like a theatrical set of a ship’s cabin on a storm-tossed sea. Across the room, a figure rose from a leather club chair. “Hi, buddy,” he said. “Long time no see.”

  I stood frozen in the doorway. The voice was unmistakable: my father.

  He stepped forward into the weak light from the window. It was him, all right, though he’d changed since I’d seen him: he was heavier, tanned, puffy in the face, with a new suit and a haircut that made him look like a downtown bartender. In my dismay, I glanced back to Mrs. Barbour, and she gave me a bright but helpless smile as if to say: I know, but what can I do?

  While I still stood speechless with shock, another figure rose and elbowed forward, in front of my father. “Hi, I’m Xandra,” said a throaty voice.

  I found myself confronted by a strange woman, tan and very fit-looking: flat gray eyes, lined coppery skin, and teeth that went in, with a split between them. Although she was older than my mother, or at any rate older-looking, she was dressed like someone younger: red platform sandals; low-slung jeans; wide belt; lots of gold jewelry. Her hair, the color of caramel straw, was very straight and tattered at the ends; she was chewing gum and a strong smell of Juicy Fruit was coming off her.

  “It’s Xandra with an X,” she said in a gravelly undertone. Her eyes were clear and colorless, with spikes of dark mascara around them, and her gaze was powerful, confident, unwavering. “Not Sandra. And, God knows, not Sandy. I get that one a lot, and it drives me up the wall.”

  As she spoke, my astonishment was growing by the moment. I couldn’t quite take her in: her whiskey voice, her muscular arms; the Chinese character tattooed on her big toe; her long square fingernails with the white tips painted on; her earrings shaped like starfish.

  “Um, we just got into LaGuardia about two hours ago,” said my dad, clearing his throat, as if this explained everything.

  Was this who my dad had left us for? In stupefaction, I looked back to Mrs. Barbour again—only to see that she had vanished.

  “Theo, I’m out in Las Vegas now,” my father said, looking at the wall somewhere over my head. He still had the controlled, assertive voice of his actorly training but though he sounded as authoritative as ever, I could see that he wasn’t any more comfortable than I was. “I guess I should have called, but I thought it would be easier if we just came on out to get you.”

  “Get me?” I said, after a long pause.

  “Tell him, Larry,” said Xandra, and then, to me: “You should be proud of your Pops. He’s on the wagon. How many days’ sobriety now? Fifty-one? Did it all on his own too—didn’t even check himself into the joint—detoxed on the sofa with a basket of Easter candy and a bottle of Valium.”

  Because I was too embarrassed to look at her, or my father, I looked back at the doorway again—and saw Kitsey Barbour standing in the hall listening to all this with big round eyes.

  “Because, I mean, I just couldn’t put up with it,” said Xandra, in a tone suggesting that my mother had condoned, and encouraged, my dad’s alcoholism. “I mean—my Moms was the kind of lush who would throw up in her glass of Canadian Club and then drink it anyway. And one night I said to him: Larry, I’m not going to say to you ‘never drink again,’ and frankly I think that AA is way too much for the level of problem you have—”

  My father cleared his throat and turned to me with a genial face he usually reserved for strangers. Maybe he had stopped drinking; but still he had a bloated, shiny, slightly stunned look, as if he’d been living for the past eight months off rum drinks and Hawaiian party platters.

  “Um, son,” he said, “we’re right off the plane, and we came over because—we wanted to see you right away, of course…”

  I waited.

  “… we need the key to the apartment.”

  This was all moving a little too fast for me. “The key?” I said.

  “We can’t get in over there,” said Xandra bluntly. “We tried already.”

  “The thing is, Theo,” my dad said, his tone clear and cordial, running a businesslike hand over his hair, “I need to get in over at Sutton Place and see what’s what. I’m sure things are a mess over there, and somebody needs to get in and start taking care of stuff.”

  If you didn’t leave things such a goddamned mess… These were words I’d heard my father scream at my mother when—about two weeks before he vanished—they’d had the biggest fight I ever heard them have, when the diamond-and-emerald earrings that belonged to her mother vanished from the dish on her bedside table. My father (red in the face, mocking her in a sarcastic falsetto) had said it was her fault, Cinzia had probably taken them or who the hell knew, it wasn’t a good idea to leave jewelry lying out like that, and maybe this would teach her to look after her things better. But my mother—ash-white with anger—had pointed out in a cold still voice that she’d taken the earrings off on Friday night, and that Cinzia hadn’t been in to work since.

  What the hell are you trying to say? bellowed my father.

  Silence.

  So I’m a thief now, is that it? You’re accusing your own husband of stealing jewelry from you? What the hell kind of sick irrational thing is that? You need help, you know that? You really need professional help—

  Only it wasn’t just the earrings that had vanished. After he vanished himself, it turned out that some other things including cash and some antique coins belonging to her father had vanished as well; and my mother had changed the locks and warned Cinzia and the doormen not to let him in if he showed up when she was at work. And of course now everything was different, and there was nothing to stop him from going in the apartment and going through her belongings and doing with them what he liked; but as I stood looking at him and trying to think what the hell to say, half a dozen things were running through my mind and chief among them was the painting. Every day, for weeks, I’d told myself that I would go over and take care of it, figure it out somehow, but I’d kept putting it off and putting it off and now here he was.

  My dad was still smiling at me fixedly. “Okay, buddy? Think you might want to help us out?” Maybe he wasn’t drinking any more, but all the old late afternoon wanting-a-drink edge was still there, scratchy as sandpaper.

  “I don’t have the key,” I said.

  “That’s okay,” my dad returned swiftly. “We can call a locksmith. Xandra, give me the phone.”

  I thought fast. I didn’t want them to go in the apartment without me. “Jose or Goldie might let us in,” I said. “If I go over there with you.”

  “Fine then,” said my dad, “let’s go.” From his tone, I suspected he knew I was lying about the key (safely hidden, in Andy’s room). I knew too he didn’t