The Goldfinch (29 page)

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.

T
HIS 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.

“T
OO 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 than 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.”