The Goldfinch (19 page)

After lying wide-eyed for several moments, staring at the ceiling, I climbed down and retrieved the ring from the pocket of my school jacket and held it up to the light to look at the inscription. Then, quickly, I put it away and dressed. Andy was already up with the rest of the Barbours, at breakfast—Sunday breakfast was a big deal for them, I could hear them all in the dining room, Mr. Barbour rambling on indistinctly as he sometimes did, holding forth a bit. After pausing in the hall, I walked the other way, to the family room, and got the White Pages in its needlepoint cover from the cabinet under the telephone.

Hobart and Blackwell.
There it was—clearly a business, though the listing didn’t say what sort. I felt a bit dizzy. Seeing the name in black and white gave me a strange thrill, as of unseen cards falling into place.

The address was in the Village, West Tenth Street. After some hesitation, and with a great deal of anxiety, I dialed the number.

As the phone rang, I stood fiddling with a brass carriage clock on the table in the family room, chewing my lower lip, looking at the framed prints of water birds over the telephone table: Noddy Tern, Townsend’s Cormorant, Common Osprey, Least Water Rail. I wasn’t quite sure how I was going to explain who I was or ask what I needed to know.

“Theo?”

I jumped, guiltily. Mrs. Barbour—in gossamer-gray cashmere—had come in, coffee cup in hand.

“What are you doing?”

The phone was still ringing away on the other end. “Nothing,” I said.

“Well, hurry up. Your breakfast is getting cold. Etta’s made French toast.”

“Thanks,” I said, “I’ll be right there,” just as a mechanical voice from the phone company came on the line and told me to try my call again later.

I joined the Barbours, preoccupied—I had hoped that at least a machine would pick up—and was surprised to see none other than Platt Barbour (much bigger and redder in the face than the last time I’d seen him) in the place where I usually sat.

“Ah,” said Mr. Barbour—interrupting himself mid-sentence, blotting his lips with his napkin and jumping up—“here we are, here we are. Good morning. You remember Platt, don’t you? Platt, this is Theodore Decker—Andy’s friend, remember?” As he was speaking, he had wandered off and returned with an extra chair, which he wedged in awkwardly for me at the sharp corner of the table.

As I sat down on the outskirts of the group—three or four inches lower than everyone else, in a spindly bamboo chair that didn’t match the others—Platt met my gaze without much interest and looked away. He had come home from school for a party, and he looked hung over.

Mr. Barbour had sat down again and resumed talking about his favorite topic: sailing. “As I was saying. It all boils down to lack of confidence. You’re unsure of yourself on the keelboat, Andy,” he said, “and there’s just no darn reason you should be, except you’re short of experience on single-hand sailing.”

“No,” said Andy, in his faraway voice. “The problem essentially is that I despise boats.”

“Horsefeathers,” said Mr. Barbour, winking at me as if I were in on the joke, which I wasn’t. “I don’t buy that ho-hum attitude! Look at that picture on the wall in there, down in Sanibel two springs ago! That boy wasn’t bored by the sea and the sky and the stars, no sir.”

Andy sat contemplating the snow scene on the maple syrup bottle while his father rhapsodized in his dizzying, hard-to-follow way about how sailing built discipline and alertness in boys, and strength of character as in mariners of old. In past years, Andy had told me, he hadn’t minded going on the boat quite so much because he’d been able to stay down in the cabin, reading and playing card games with his younger siblings. But now he was old enough to help crew—which meant long, stressful, sun-blinded days toiling on deck alongside the bullying Platt: ducking beneath the boom, completely disoriented, doing his best to keep from getting tangled in the lines or knocked overboard as their father shouted orders and rejoiced in the salt spray.

“God, remember the light on that Sanibel trip?” Andy’s father pushed back in his chair and rolled his eyes at the ceiling. “Wasn’t it
glorious?
Those red and orange sunsets? Fire and embers? Atomic, almost? Pure flame just
ripping
and
pouring
out of the sky? And remember that fat, smacking moon with the blue mist around it, off Hatteras—is it Maxfield Parrish I’m thinking of, Samantha?”

“Sorry?”

“Maxfield Parrish? That artist I like? Does those very grand skies, you know—” he threw his arms out—“with the towering clouds? Excuse me there, Theo, didn’t mean to knock you in the snoot.”

“Constable does clouds.”

“No, no, that’s not who I mean, this painter is much more satisfying. Anyway—my word,
what
skies we had out on the water that night. Magical.
Arcadian.
”

“Which night was that?”

“Don’t tell me you don’t remember! It was absolutely the highlight of the trip.”

Platt—slouched back in his chair—said maliciously: “The highlight of Andy’s trip was when we stopped for lunch that time at the snack bar.”

Andy said, in a thin voice: “Mother doesn’t care for sailing either.”

“Not madly, no,” said Mrs. Barbour, reaching for another strawberry. “Theo, I really do wish you would eat at least a small bite of your breakfast. You can’t go on starving yourself like this. You’re starting to look very peaked.”

Despite Mr. Barbour’s impromptu lessons from the flag chart in his study, I had not found much to engage me in the topic of sailing, either. “Because the greatest gift my own father ever gave to me?” Mr. Barbour was saying very earnestly. “Was the sea. The love for it—the
feel.
Daddy
gave me the ocean.
And it’s a tragic loss for you, Andy—Andy, look at me, I’m talking to you—it’s a terrible loss if you’ve made up your mind to turn your back on the very thing that gave me my
freedom,
my—”

“I have tried to like it. I have a natural hatred of it.”

“
Hatred?
” Astonishment; dumbfoundment. “Hatred of what? Of the stars and the wind? Of the sky and the sun? Of
liberty?
”

“Insofar as any of those things have to do with boating, yes.”

“Well—” looking around the table, including me in the appeal—“now he’s just being pigheaded. The sea—” to Andy—“deny it all you may but it’s your
birthright,
it’s in your blood, back to the Phoenicians, the ancient
Greeks
—”

But as Mr. Barbour went on about Magellan, and celestial navigation, and
Billy Budd
(“I remember Taff the Welshman when he sank/And his cheek it was the budding pink”), I found my own thoughts drifting back to Hobart and Blackwell: wondering who Hobart and Blackwell were, and what exactly they did. The names sounded like a pair of musty old lawyers, or even stage magicians, business partners shuffling about in candle-lit darkness.

It seemed a hopeful sign that the telephone number was still in service. My own home phone had been disconnected. As soon as I could decently slip away from breakfast and my untouched plate, I went back to the telephone in the family room, with Irenka flustering around and running the vacuum and dusting the bric-a-brac all around me, and Kitsey across the room on the computer, determined not to even look at me.

“Who are you calling?” said Andy—who, in the manner of all his family, had come up behind me so quietly that I didn’t hear him.

I might not have told him anything, except I knew that I could trust him to keep his mouth shut. Andy never talked to anybody, certainly not his parents.

“These people,” I said quietly—stepping back a little bit, so I was out of the sight line of the doorway. “I know it sounds weird. But you know that ring I have?”

I explained about the old man, and I was trying to think how to explain about the girl, too, the connection I’d felt with her and how much I wanted to see her again. But Andy—predictably—had already leapt ahead, away from personal aspects to the logistics of the situation. He eyed the White Pages, open on the telephone table. “Are they in the city?”

“West Tenth.”

Andy sneezed, and blew his nose; spring allergies had hit him very hard. “If you can’t get them on the phone,” he said, folding up his handkerchief and putting it in his pocket, “why don’t you just go down there?”

“Really?” I said. It seemed creepy not to call first, just show up. “You think so?”

“That’s what I would do.”

“I don’t know,” I said. “Maybe they don’t remember me.”

“If they see you in person, they’ll be more likely to remember,” said Andy reasonably. “Otherwise you could just be any weirdo calling and pretending. Don’t worry,” he said, glancing over his shoulder, “I won’t tell anybody if you don’t want me to.”

“A weirdo?” I said. “Pretending what?”

“Well, I mean, you get lots of strange people calling you here,” said Andy flatly.

I was silent, not knowing how to absorb this.

“Besides, they’re not picking up, what else are you going to do? You won’t be able to get down there again until next weekend. Also, is this a conversation you want to have—” he cast his eyes down the hallway, where Toddy was jumping up and down in some kind of shoes that had springs on them, and Mrs. Barbour was interrogating Platt about the party at Molly Walterbeek’s.

He had a point. “Right,” I said.

Andy pushed his glasses up on the bridge of his nose. “I’ll go with you if you want.”

“No, that’s okay,” I said. Andy, I knew, was doing Japanese Experience for extra credit that afternoon—a study group at the Toraya teahouse, then on to see the new Miyazaki at Lincoln Center; not that Andy needed extra credit but class outings were as much as he had of a social life.

“Well here,” he said, digging around in his pocket and coming up with his cell phone. “Take this with you. Just in case. Here—” he was punching stuff on the screen—“I’ve taken off the security code for you. Good to go.”

“I don’t need this,” I said, looking at the sleek little phone with an anime still of Virtual Girl Aki (naked, in porny thigh-high boots) on the lock screen.

“Well, you might. Never know. Go ahead,” he said, when I hesitated. “Take it.”

xii.

A
ND SO IT WAS
that around half past eleven, I found myself riding down to the Village on the Fifth Avenue bus with the street address of Hobart and Blackwell in my pocket, written on a page from one of the monogrammed notepads Mrs. Barbour kept by the telephone.

Once I got off the bus at Washington Square, I wandered for about forty-five minutes looking for the address. The Village, with its erratic layout (triangular blocks, dead-end streets angling this way and that) was an easy place to get lost, and I had to stop and ask directions three times: in a news shop full of bongs and gay porn magazines, in a crowded bakery blasting opera, and of a girl in white undershirt and overalls who was outside washing the windows of a bookstore with a squeegee and bucket.

When finally I found West Tenth—which was deserted—I walked along, counting the numbers. I was on a slightly shabby part of the street that was mainly residential. A group of pigeons strutted ahead of me on the wet sidewalk, three abreast, like small officious pedestrians. Many of the numbers weren’t clearly posted, and just as I was wondering if I’d missed it and ought to double back, I suddenly found myself looking at the words
Hobart and Blackwell
painted in a neat, old-fashioned arch upon the window of a shop. Through the dusty windows I saw Staffordshire dogs and majolica cats, dusty crystal, tarnished silver, antique chairs and settees upholstered in sallow old brocade, an elaborate faience birdcage, miniature marble obelisks atop a marble-topped pedestal table and a pair of alabaster cockatoos. It was just the kind of shop my mother would have
liked—packed tightly, a bit dilapidated, with stacks of old books on the floor. But the gates were pulled down and the place was closed.

Most of the stores didn’t open until noon, or one. To kill some time I walked over to Greenwich Street, to the Elephant and Castle, a restaurant where my mother and I ate sometimes when we were downtown. But the instant I stepped in, I realized my mistake. The mismatched china elephants, even the ponytailed waitress in a black T-shirt who approached me, smiling: it was too overwhelming, I could see the corner table where my mother and I had eaten lunch the last time we were there, I had to mumble an excuse and back out the door.

I stood on the sidewalk, heart pounding. Pigeons flew low in the sooty sky. Greenwich Avenue was almost empty: a bleary male couple who looked like they’d been up fighting all night; a rumple-haired woman in a too-big turtleneck sweater, walking a dachshund toward Sixth Avenue. It was a little weird being in the Village on my own because it wasn’t a place where you saw many kids on the street on a weekend morning; it felt adult, sophisticated, slightly alcoholic. Everybody looked hung over or as if they had just rolled out of bed.

Because nothing much was open, because I felt a bit lost and I didn’t know what else to do, I began to wander back over in the direction of Hobart and Blackwell. To me, coming from uptown, everything in the Village looked so little and old, with ivy and vines growing on the buildings, herbs and tomato plants in barrels on the street. Even the bars had handpainted signs like rural taverns: horses and tomcats, roosters and geese and pigs. But the intimacy, the smallness, also made me feel shut out; and I found myself hurrying past the inviting little doorways with my head down, very aware of all the convivial Sunday-morning lives unrolling around me in private.