The Goldfinch (73 page)

“No, no,” said Platt, when by habit I walked toward the bull’s-eye mirror and through to the living room. “Back here.” He was heading to the rear of the apartment. “We’re very informal now—Mommy usually sees people back here, if she sees anybody at all.…”

Back in the day, I had never been anywhere near Mrs. Barbour’s inner sanctum, but as we approached the smell of her perfume—unmistakable, white blossoms with a powdery strangeness at the heart—was like a blown curtain over an open window.

“She doesn’t go out the way she once did,” Platt was saying quietly. “None of these big dinners and events—maybe once a week she’ll have someone over for tea, or go for dinner with a friend. But that’s it.”

Platt knocked; he listened. “Mommy?” he called, and—at the indistinct reply—opened the door a crack. “I’ve got a guest for you. You’ll never guess who I found on the street.…”

It was an enormous room, done up in an old-ladyish, 1980s peach. Directly off the entrance was a seating area with a sofa and slipper chairs—lots of knickknacks, needlepoint cushions, nine or ten Old Master drawings: the flight into Egypt, Jacob and the Angel, circle of Rembrandt mostly though there was a tiny pen-and-brown-ink of Christ washing the feet of St. Peter that was so deftly done (the weary slump and drape of Christ’s back; the blank, complicated sadness on St. Peter’s face) it might have been from Rembrandt’s own hand.

I leaned forward for a closer look; and on the far side of the room, a lamp with a pagoda-shaped shade popped on. “Theo?” I heard her say, and there she was, propped on piles of pillows in an outlandishly large bed.

“You! I can’t believe it!” she said, holding out her arms to me. “You’re all grown up! Where in the world have you been? Are you in the city now?”

“Yes. I’ve been back for a while. You look wonderful,” I added dutifully, though she didn’t.

“And you!” She put both hands over mine. “How handsome you are! I’m quite overcome.” She looked both older and younger than I remembered: very pale, no lipstick, lines at the corner of her eyes but her skin still white and smooth. Her silver-blonde hair (had it always been quite that silver, or had she gone gray?) fell loose and uncombed about her shoulders; she was wearing half-moon glasses and a satin bed jacket pinned with a huge diamond brooch in the shape of a snowflake.

“And here you find me, in my bed, with my needlework, like an old sailor’s widow,” she said, gesturing at the unfinished needlepoint canvas across her knees. A pair of tiny dogs—Yorkshire terriers—were asleep on a pale cashmere throw at her feet, and the smaller of the two, spotting me, sprang up and began to bark furiously.

Uneasily I smiled as she tried to quiet him—the other dog had set up a racket as well—and looked around. The bed was modern—king-sized, with a fabric covered headboard—but she had a lot of interesting old things back there that I wouldn’t have known to pay attention to when I was a kid. Clearly, it was the Sargasso Sea of the apartment, where objects banished from the carefully decorated public rooms washed up:
mismatched end tables; Asian bric-a-brac; a knockout collection of silver table bells. A mahogany games table that from where I stood looked like it might be Duncan Phyfe and atop it (amongst cheap cloisonné ashtrays and endless coasters) a taxidermied cardinal: moth-eaten, fragile, feathers faded to rust, its head cocked sharply and its eye a dusty black bead of horror.

“Ting-a-Ling, ssh, please be quiet, I can’t bear it. This is Ting-a-Ling,” said Mrs. Barbour, catching the struggling dog up in her arms, “he’s the naughty one, aren’t you darling, never a moment’s peace, and the other, with the pink ribbon, is Clementine. Platt,” she called, over the barking, “Platt, will you take him in the kitchen? He’s really a bit of a nuisance with guests,” she said to me, “I ought to have a trainer in…”

While Mrs. Barbour rolled up her needlework and put it in an oval basket with a piece of scrimshaw set in the lid, I sat down in the armchair by her bed. The upholstery was worn, and the subdued stripe was familiar to me—a former living-room chair exiled to the bedroom, the same chair I’d found my mother sitting in when she’d come to the Barbours’ many years ago to pick me up after a sleepover. I drew a finger over the cloth. All at once I saw my mother standing to greet me, in the bright green peacoat she’d been wearing that day—fashionable enough that people were always stopping her on the street to ask her where she got it, yet all wrong for the Barbours’ house.

“Theo?” said Mrs. Barbour. “Would you like something to drink? A cup of tea? Or something stronger?”

“No, thank you.”

She patted the brocade coverlet of the bed. “Come sit next to me. Please. I want to be able to see you.”

“I—” At her tone, at once intimate and formal, a terrible sadness came over me, and when we looked at each other it seemed that the whole past was redefined and brought into focus by this moment, clear as glass, a complexity of stillness that was rainy afternoons in spring, a dark chair in the hallway, the light-as-air touch of her hand on the back of my head.

“I’m so glad you came.”

“Mrs. Barbour,” I said, moving to the bed, sitting down gingerly with one hip, “my God. I can’t believe it. I didn’t find out till just now. I’m so sorry.”

She pressed her lips together like a child trying not to cry. “Yes,” she said, “well,” and there issued between us an awful and seemingly unbreakable silence.

“I’m so sorry,” I repeated, more urgently, aware just how clumsy I sounded, as if by speaking more loudly I might convey my acuity of sorrow.

Unhappily she blinked; and, not knowing what to do, I reached out and put my hand on top of hers and we sat for an uncomfortably long time.

In the end, it was she who spoke first. “At any rate.” Resolutely she dashed a tear from her eye while I flailed about for something to say. “He had mentioned you not three days before he died. He was engaged to be married. To a Japanese girl.”

“No kidding. Really?” Sad as I was, I couldn’t help smiling, a little: Andy had chosen Japanese as his second language precisely because he had such a thing for fanservice
miko
and slutty manga girls in sailor uniform. “Japanese from Japan?”

“Indeed. Tiny little thing with a squeaky voice and a pocketbook shaped like a stuffed animal. Oh yes, I met her,” she said with a raised eyebrow. “Andy translating over tea sandwiches at the Pierre. She was at the funeral, of course—the girl—her name was Miyako—well. Different cultures and all that, but it’s true what they say about the Japanese being undemonstrative.”

The little dog, Clementine, had crawled up to curl around Mrs. Barbour’s shoulder like a fur collar. “I have to admit, I’m thinking of getting a third,” she said, reaching over to stroke her. “What do you think?”

“I don’t know,” I said, disconcerted. It was extremely unlike Mrs. Barbour to solicit opinions from anyone at all on any subject, certainly not from me.

“I must say, they’ve been an enormous comfort, the pair of them. My old friend Maria Mercedes de la Pereyra turned up with them a week after the funeral, quite unexpected, two pups in a basket with ribbons on, and I have to say I wasn’t sure at first, but actually I don’t think I’ve ever received a more thoughtful gift. We could never have dogs before because of Andy. He was so terribly allergic. You remember.”

“I do.”

Platt—still in his tweed gamekeeper’s jacket, with big sagged-out pockets for dead birds and shotgun shells—had come back in. He pulled up a chair. “So, Mommy,” he said, biting his lower lip.

“So, Platypus.” A formal silence. “Good day at work?”

“Great.” He nodded, as if trying to reassure himself of the fact. “Yeah. Really really busy.”

“I’m so glad to hear it.”

“New books. One on the Congress of Vienna.”

“Another one?” She turned to me. “And you, Theo?”

“Sorry?” I’d been looking at the scrimshaw (a whaling ship) set in the lid of her sewing basket, and thinking of poor Andy: black water, salt in his throat, nausea and flailing. The horror and cruelty of dying in his most hated element.
The problem essentially is that I despise boats.

“Tell me. What are you doing with yourself these days?”

“Um, dealing antiques. American furniture, mostly.”

“No!” She was rapturous. “But
how
perfect!”

“Yes—down in the Village. I run the shop and manage the sales end. My partner—” it was still so new I wasn’t used to saying it—“my partner in the business, James Hobart, he’s the craftsman, takes care of restorations. You should come down and visit sometime.”

“Oh, delicious. Antiques!” She sighed. “Well—you know how I love old things. I wish my children had shown an interest. I’d always hoped at least one of them would.”

“Well, there’s always Kitsey,” said Platt.

“It’s curious,” Mrs. Barbour continued, as if she hadn’t heard this. “Not one of my children had an artistic bone in their bodies. Isn’t that extraordinary? Little philistines, all four of them.”

“Oh, please,” I said, in as playful a tone as I could manage. “I remember Toddy and Kitsey with all those piano lessons. Andy with his Suzuki violin.”

She made a dismissive gesture. “Oh, you know what I mean. None of my children have any
visual
sense. No appreciation whatever for painting or interiors or any of that. Now—” again she took my hand—“when
you
were a child, I used to catch you in the hallway studying my paintings. You’d always go straight to the very best ones. The Frederic Church landscape, my Fitz Henry Lane and my Raphaelle Peale, or the John Singleton Copley—you know, the oval portrait, the tiny one, girl in the bonnet?”

“That was a Copley?”

“Indeed. And I saw you with the little Rembrandt just now.”

“So it
is
Rembrandt, then?”

“Yes. Only the one, the washing-of-the-feet. The rest are all school-of. My own children have lived with those drawings their whole lives and never displayed the slightest particle of interest, isn’t that right, Platt?”

“I like to think that some of us have excelled at other things.”

I cleared my throat. “You know, I really did just stop in to say hello,” I said. “It’s wonderful to see you—to see you both—” turning to include Platt in this. “I wish it were under happier circumstances.”

“Will you stay and have dinner?”

“I’m sorry,” I said, feeling cornered. “I can’t, not tonight. But I did want to run up for a minute and see you.”

“Then will you come back for dinner? Or lunch? Or drinks?” She laughed. “Or whatever you will.”

“Dinner, sure.”

She held up her cheek for a kiss, as she had never done when I was a child, not even with her own children.

“How lovely to have you here again!” she said, catching my hand and pressing it to her face. “Like old times.”

iv.

O
N MY WAY OUT
the door, Platt threw out some kind of weird handshake—part gang member, part fraternity boy, part International Sign Language—that I wasn’t sure how to return. In confusion I withdrew my hand and—not knowing what else to do—bumped fists with him, feeling stupid.

“So, hey. Glad we ran into each other,” I said, in the awkward silence. “Give me a call.”

“About dinner? Oh, yes. We’ll probably eat in if that’s all right, Mommy really doesn’t like to go out that much.” He dug his hands into the pockets of his jacket. Then, shockingly: “I’ve seen a good bit of your old friend Cable lately. Bit more than I care to, actually. He’ll be interested to know I’ve seen you.”

“
Tom
Cable?” I laughed, incredulously, although it wasn’t much of a laugh; the bad old memory of how we’d been suspended from school together and how he’d blown me off when my mother died still made me uneasy. “You’re in touch with him?” I said, when Platt didn’t respond. “I haven’t thought of Tom in years.”

Platt smirked. “I have to admit, back in the day, I thought it was weird that any friend of that kid’s would put up with a drip like Andy,” he said
quietly, slouching against the door frame. “Not that I minded. God knows Andy needed somebody to take him out and get him stoned or something.”

Andrip. Android. One-nut. Pimple Face. Sponge Bob Shit Pants.

“No?” said Platt casually, misreading my blank stare. “I thought you were into that. Cable was certainly quite the little pothead in his day.”

“That must have been after I left.”

“Well, maybe.” Platt looked at me, in a way I wasn’t sure I liked. “Mommy certainly thought butter wouldn’t melt in your mouth, but I knew you were pals with Cable. And Cable was a little thief.” Sharply—in a way that brought the old, unpleasant Platt ringing back—he laughed. “I told Kitsey and Toddy to keep their rooms locked when you were here so you wouldn’t steal anything.”

“That’s what all that was about?” I had not thought of the piggy-bank incident in years.

“Well, I mean, Cable”—he glanced at the ceiling. “See, I used to date Tom’s sister Joey, holy Hell, she was a piece of work too.”

“Right.” I remembered all too well Joey Cable—sixteen, and stacked—brushing by twelve-year-old me in the hallway of the Hamptons house in tiny T-shirt and black thong panties.