The Goldfinch (30 page)

“How’d you learn how to do all this?” I said, after a timid pause.

He laughed. “The same way you’re learning it now! Standing around and watching. Making myself useful.”

“Welty taught you?”

“Oh, no. He understood it—knew how it was done. You have to in this business. He had a very reliable eye and often I’d bob up and fetch him when I wanted a second opinion. But before I joined the enterprise usually he’d pass on a piece that needed restoration. It’s time-consuming work—takes a certain mind-set—he didn’t have the temperament nor the physical hardiness for it. He much preferred the acquisitions end—you know, going to auction—or being in the shop and chatting up the customers. Every afternoon around five, I’d pop up for a cup of tea.
‘Scourged from your dungeons.’ It really was pretty foul down here in the old days with the mold and damp. When I came to work for Welty—” he laughed—“he had this old fellow named Abner Mossbank. Bad legs, arthritis in his fingers, could barely see. It would take him a year sometimes to finish a piece. But I stood at his back and watched him work. He was like a surgeon. Couldn’t ask questions. Utter silence! But he knew absolutely everything—work that other people didn’t know how to do or care to learn any more—it hangs by a thread, this trade, generation to generation.”

“Your dad never gave you the money you earned?”

He laughed, warmly. “Not a penny! Never spoke to me again, either. He was a bitter old sod—fell down dead of a heart attack in the middle of firing one of his oldest employees. One of the most poorly attended funerals you’d ever care to see. Three black umbrellas in the sleet. Hard not to think of Ebenezer Scrooge.”

“You never went back to college?”

“No. Didn’t want to. I’d found what I liked to do. So—” he put both hands in the small of his back, and stretched; his out-at-elbows jacket, loose and a bit dirty, made him look like a good-natured groom on his way to the stables—“moral of the story is, who knows where it all will take you?”

“All what?”

He laughed. “Your sailing holiday,” he said, moving to the shelf where the jars of pigment were arrayed like potions in an apothecary; ocherous earths, poisonous greens, powders of charcoal and burnt bone. “Might be the decisive moment. It takes some people that way, the sea.”

“Andy gets seasick. He has to carry a baggie on the boat to throw up in.”

“Well—” reaching for a jar of lampblack—“must admit, it never took
me
that way. When I was a kid—‘Rime of the Ancient Mariner,’ those Doré illustrations—no, the ocean gives me the shivers but then I’ve never been on an adventure like yours. You never know. Because—” brow furrowed, tapping out a bit of soft black powder on his palette—“I never dreamed that all that old furniture of Mrs. De Peyster’s would be the thing that decided my future. Maybe you’ll get fascinated by hermit crabs and study marine biology. Or decide you want to build boats, or be a marine painter, or write the definitive book about the
Lusitania.
”

“Maybe,” I said, hands behind my back. But what I really hoped I
didn’t dare articulate. Even to think of it practically made me tremble. Because, the thing was: Kitsey and Toddy had started being much, much nicer to me, as if someone had drawn them aside; and I’d seen glances, subtle cues, between Mr. and Mrs. Barbour that made me hopeful—more than hopeful. In fact, it was Andy who’d put the thought in my head. “They think being around you is good for me,” he’d said on the way to school the other day. “That you’re drawing me out of my shell and making me more social. I’m thinking they might make a family announcement once we get up to Maine.”

“Announcement?”

“Don’t be a dunce. They’ve grown quite fond of you—Mother, especially. But Daddy, too. I believe they may want to keep you.”

xvii.

I
RODE UPTOWN ON
the bus, slightly drowsy, swaying comfortably back and forth and watching the wet Saturday streets flash by. When I stepped inside the apartment—chilled from walking home in the rain—Kitsey ran into the foyer to stare at me, wild-eyed and fascinated, as if I were an ostrich who had wandered into the apartment. Then, after a few blank seconds, she darted off into the living room, sandals clattering on the parquet floor, crying: “Mum? He’s here!”

Mrs. Barbour appeared. “Hello, Theo,” she said. She was perfectly composed but there was something constrained in her manner, though I couldn’t quite put my finger on it. “Come in here. I’ve got a surprise for you.”

I followed her into Mr. Barbour’s study, gloomy in the overcast afternoon, where the framed nautical charts and the rain streaming down the gray windowpanes were like a theatrical set of a ship’s cabin on a storm-tossed sea. Across the room, a figure rose from a leather club chair. “Hi, buddy,” he said. “Long time no see.”

I stood frozen in the doorway. The voice was unmistakable: my father.

He stepped forward into the weak light from the window. It was him, all right, though he’d changed since I’d seen him: he was heavier, tanned, puffy in the face, with a new suit and a haircut that made him look like a downtown bartender. In my dismay, I glanced back to Mrs. Barbour, and
she gave me a bright but helpless smile as if to say:
I know, but what can I do?

While I still stood speechless with shock, another figure rose and elbowed forward, in front of my father. “Hi, I’m Xandra,” said a throaty voice.

I found myself confronted by a strange woman, tan and very fit-looking: flat gray eyes, lined coppery skin, and teeth that went in, with a split between them. Although she was older than my mother, or at any rate older-looking, she was dressed like someone younger: red platform sandals; low-slung jeans; wide belt; lots of gold jewelry. Her hair, the color of caramel straw, was very straight and tattered at the ends; she was chewing gum and a strong smell of Juicy Fruit was coming off her.

“It’s Xandra with an X,” she said in a gravelly undertone. Her eyes were clear and colorless, with spikes of dark mascara around them, and her gaze was powerful, confident, unwavering. “Not Sandra. And,
God
knows, not Sandy. I get that one a lot, and it drives me up the wall.”

As she spoke, my astonishment was growing by the moment. I couldn’t quite take her in: her whiskey voice, her muscular arms; the Chinese character tattooed on her big toe; her long square fingernails with the white tips painted on; her earrings shaped like starfish.

“Um, we just got into LaGuardia about two hours ago,” said my dad, clearing his throat, as if this explained everything.

Was this who my dad had left us for? In stupefaction, I looked back to Mrs. Barbour again—only to see that she had vanished.

“Theo, I’m out in Las Vegas now,” my father said, looking at the wall somewhere over my head. He still had the controlled, assertive voice of his actorly training but though he sounded as authoritative as ever, I could see that he wasn’t any more comfortable than I was. “I guess I should have called, but I thought it would be easier if we just came on out to get you.”

“Get me?” I said, after a long pause.

“Tell him, Larry,” said Xandra, and then, to me: “You should be proud of your Pops. He’s on the wagon. How many days’ sobriety now? Fifty-one? Did it all on his own too—didn’t even check himself into the joint—detoxed on the sofa with a basket of Easter candy and a bottle of Valium.”

Because I was too embarrassed to look at her, or my father, I looked back at the doorway again—and saw Kitsey Barbour standing in the hall listening to all this with big round eyes.

“Because, I mean,
I
just couldn’t put up with it,” said Xandra, in a tone
suggesting that my mother had condoned, and encouraged, my dad’s alcoholism. “I mean—my Moms was the kind of lush who would throw up in her glass of Canadian Club and then drink it anyway. And one night I said to him: Larry, I’m not going to say to you ‘never drink again,’ and frankly I think that AA is way too much for the level of problem you have—”

My father cleared his throat and turned to me with a genial face he usually reserved for strangers. Maybe he
had
stopped drinking; but still he had a bloated, shiny, slightly stunned look, as if he’d been living for the past eight months off rum drinks and Hawaiian party platters.

“Um, son,” he said, “we’re right off the plane, and we came over because—we wanted to see you right away, of course…”

I waited.

“… we need the key to the apartment.”

This was all moving a little too fast for me. “The key?” I said.

“We can’t get in over there,” said Xandra bluntly. “We tried already.”

“The thing is, Theo,” my dad said, his tone clear and cordial, running a businesslike hand over his hair, “I need to get in over at Sutton Place and see what’s what. I’m sure things are a mess over there, and somebody needs to get in and start taking care of stuff.”

If you didn’t leave things such a goddamned mess
… These were words I’d heard my father scream at my mother when—about two weeks before he vanished—they’d had the biggest fight I ever heard them have, when the diamond-and-emerald earrings that belonged to her mother vanished from the dish on her bedside table. My father (red in the face, mocking her in a sarcastic falsetto) had said it was
her
fault, Cinzia had probably taken them or who the hell knew, it wasn’t a good idea to leave jewelry lying out like that, and maybe this would teach her to look after her things better. But my mother—ash-white with anger—had pointed out in a cold still voice that she’d taken the earrings off on Friday night, and that Cinzia hadn’t been in to work since.

What the hell are you trying to say?
bellowed my father.

Silence.

So I’m a thief now, is that it? You’re accusing your own husband of stealing jewelry from you? What the hell kind of sick irrational thing is that? You need help, you know that? You really need professional help—

Only it wasn’t just the earrings that had vanished. After he vanished
himself, it turned out that some other things including cash and some antique coins belonging to her father had vanished as well; and my mother had changed the locks and warned Cinzia and the doormen not to let him in if he showed up when she was at work. And of course now everything was different, and there was nothing to stop him from going in the apartment and going through her belongings and doing with them what he liked; but as I stood looking at him and trying to think what the hell to say, half a dozen things were running through my mind and chief among them was the painting. Every day, for weeks, I’d told myself that I would go over and take care of it, figure it out somehow, but I’d kept putting it off and putting it off and now here he was.

My dad was still smiling at me fixedly. “Okay, buddy? Think you might want to help us out?” Maybe he wasn’t drinking any more, but all the old late afternoon wanting-a-drink edge was still there, scratchy as sandpaper.

“I don’t have the key,” I said.

“That’s okay,” my dad returned swiftly. “We can call a locksmith. Xandra, give me the phone.”

I thought fast. I didn’t want them to go in the apartment without me. “Jose or Goldie might let us in,” I said. “If I go over there with you.”

“Fine then,” said my dad, “let’s go.” From his tone, I suspected he knew I was lying about the key (safely hidden, in Andy’s room). I knew too he didn’t like the sound of involving the doormen, as most of the guys who worked in the building didn’t care that much for my father, having seen him the worse for drink a few too many times. But I met his eye as blankly as I could until he shrugged and turned away.

xviii.

“
¡H
OLA
, J
OSE
!
”

“
¡Bomba!
” cried Jose, doing a happy step backward when he saw me on the sidewalk; he was the youngest and most buoyant of the doormen, always trying to sneak away before his shift was over to play soccer in the park. “Theo!
¿Qué lo que, manito?
”

His uncomplicated smile threw me back hard to the past. Everything was the same: green awning, sallow shade, same furry brown puddle collecting
in the sunken place in the sidewalk. Standing before the art-deco doors—nickel-bright, rayed with abstract sunbursts, doors that urgent news guys in fedoras might push through in a 1930s movie—I remembered all the times I’d stepped inside to find my mother sorting the mail, waiting for the elevator. Fresh from work, heels and briefcase, with the flowers I’d sent for her birthday.
Well what do you know. My secret admirer has struck again.