The Goldfinch (71 page)
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.
It is not flesh and blood, but heart which makes us fathers and sons.
—S
CHILLER
i.
O
NE 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 like 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.
W
E 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.
