The Goldfinch (27 page)

“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, 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.

D
AVE THE
S
HRINK 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 lathe. 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.