The Goldfinch (69 page)

Hobie laughed. “Hair spray. Decades of. Can you believe it?” he said, scratching at an edge with his thumbnail so that a curl of black peeled
away. “The old beauty was using it as a dressing table. Over the years it builds up like lacquer. I don’t know what they put in it but it’s a nightmare to get off, especially the stuff from the fifties and sixties. It’d be a really interesting piece if she hadn’t wrecked the finish. All we can do is clean it up, on top, so you can see the wood again, maybe give it a light wax. It’s a beautiful old thing, though, isn’t it?” he said, with warmth, trailing a finger down the side. “Look at the turn of the leg and this graining, the figure of it—see that bloom, here and here, how carefully it’s matched?”

“Are you going to take it apart?” Though Hobie viewed it as an undesirable step I loved the surgical drama of dismembering a piece and re-assembling it from scratch—working fast before the glue set, like doctors rushing through a shipboard appendectomy.

“No—” knocking it with his knuckles, ear to the wood—“seems pretty sound, but we’ve got some damage to the rail,” he said, pulling a drawer which screeched and stuck. “That’s what comes from keeping a drawer crammed too full with junk. We’ll refit these—” tugging the drawer out, wincing at the shriek of wood on wood—“plane down the spots where it binds. See, the rounding? Best way to fix this is square out the groove—that’ll make it wider, but I don’t think we’ll have to prize the old runners out of the dovetails—you remember what we did on the oak piece, right? But—” running a fingertip along the edge—“mahogany’s a little different. So’s walnut. Surprising how often wood is taken from spots that aren’t actually causing the trouble. With mahogany in particular, it’s so tightly grained, mahogany of this age especially, you really don’t want to plane except where you absolutely have to. A little paraffin on the rails and she’ll be as good as new.”

iv.

A
ND SO THE TIME
slipped by. The days were so much alike I barely noticed the months pass. Spring turned to summer, humidity and garbage smells, the streets full of people and the ailanthus trees leafing out dark and full; and then summer to autumn, forlorn and chilled. Nights, I spent reading
Eugene Onegin
or else poring over one of Welty’s many furniture books (my favorite: an ancient two-volume work called
Chippendale Furniture: Genuine and Spurious
) or Janson’s fat and satisfying
History of Art.
Though sometimes I worked down in the basement with Hobie for six or seven hours at a time, barely a word spoken, I never felt lonely in the beam of his attention: that an adult not my mother could be so sympathetic and attuned, so fully there, astonished me. Our large age difference made us shy with each other; there was a formality, a generational reserve; and yet we’d also grown to have sort of a telepathy in the shop so that I would hand him the correct plane or chisel before he even asked for it. “Epoxy-glued” was his short-hand for shoddy work, and cheap things generally; he’d shown me a number of original pieces where the joints had held undisturbed for two hundred years or more, whereas the problem with a lot of modern work was that it held too tight, bonded too hard with the wood and cracked it and didn’t let it breathe. “Always remember, the person we’re really working for is the person who’s restoring the piece a hundred years from now. He’s the one we want to impress.” Whenever he was gluing up a piece of furniture it was my job to set out all the right cramps, each at the right opening, while he lay out the pieces in precise mortise-to-tenon order—painstaking preparation for the actual gluing-and-cramping when we had to work frantically in the few minutes open to us before the glue set, Hobie’s hands sure as a surgeon’s, snatching up the right piece when I fumbled, my job mostly to hold the pieces together when he got the cramps on (not just the usual G-cramps and F-cramps but also an eccentric array of items he kept to hand for the purpose, such as mattress springs, clothes pins, old embroidery hoops, bicycle inner tubes, and—for weights—colorful sandbags stitched out of calico and various snatched-up objects such as old leaden door stops and cast-iron piggy banks). When he didn’t require an extra pair of hands, I swept sawdust and replaced tools on the peg, and—when there was nothing else to do—was happy enough to sit and watch him sharpening chisels or steam-bending wood with a bowl of water on the hot plate. OMG it stinks down there texted Pippa. The fumes are awful how can u stand it? But I loved the smell—bracingly toxic—and the feel of old wood under my hands.

v.

D
URING ALL THIS TIME,
I had carefully followed the news about my fellow art thieves in the Bronx. They had all pleaded guilty—the
mother-in-law too—and had received the most severe sentences allowed by law: fines in the hundreds of thousands, and prison sentences ranging from five to fifteen without parole. The general view seemed to be that they would all still be living happily out in Morris Heights and eating big Italian dinners at Mom’s house had they not made the dumb move of trying to sell the Wybrand Hendriks to a dealer who phoned the cops.

But this did not assuage my anxiety. There had been the day when I’d returned from school to find the upstairs thick with smoke and firemen trooping around the hall outside my bedroom—“mice,” said Hobie, looking wild-eyed and pale, roaming the house in his workman’s smock and his safety goggles atop his head like a mad scientist, “I can’t abide glue traps, they’re cruel, and I’ve put off having an exterminator in but good Lord, this is outrageous, I can’t have them chewing through the electrical wires, if not for the alarm the place could have gone up like
that,
here”—(to the fireman) “is it all right if I bring him over here?” sidestepping equipment, “you have to see this.…” standing well back to point out a tangle of charred mouse skeletons smouldering in the baseboard. “Look at that! A whole nest of them!” Though Hobie’s house was alarmed to the nines—not just for fire, but burglary—and the fire had done no real damage apart from a section of floorboard in the hall, still the incident had shaken me badly (what if Hobie hadn’t been home? what if the fire had started in my room?) and deducing that so many mice in a two-foot section of baseboard only meant more mice (and more chewed wires) elsewhere, I wondered if despite Hobie’s aversion to mousetraps I should set out some myself. My suggestion that he get a cat—though welcomed enthusiastically by Hobie and cat-loving Mrs. DeFrees—was discussed with approval but not acted upon and soon sank from view. Then, only a few weeks later, just as I was wondering if I should broach the cat issue again, I’d almost fainted from the cardiac plunge of coming in my room to find him kneeling on the rug near my bed—reaching
under
the bed, as I thought, but in fact reaching for the putty knife on the floor; he was replacing a cracked pane in the bottom of the bedroom window.

“Oh, hi,” said Hobie, standing to brush off his trouser leg. “Sorry! Didn’t mean to give you a jump! Been intending to get this new pane in ever since you arrived. Of course, I like to use wavy glass in these old windows, the Bendheim, but if you throw in a few clear pieces it really doesn’t matter—say, careful there,” he said, “are you all right?” as I dropped my
school bag and sank in an armchair like some shellshocked first lieutenant stumbling in from the field.

It was crackers, as my mother would have said. I didn’t know what to do. Though I was only too aware how strangely Hobie looked at me at times, how crazy I must seem to him, still I existed in a low-grade fog of internal clangor: starting up every time someone came to the door; jumping as if scalded when the phone rang; jolted by electric-shock “premonitions” that—mid class—would compel me to rise from my desk and rush straight home to make sure that the painting was still in the pillowcase, that no one had disturbed the wrapping or tried to scratch up the tape. On my computer, I scoured the Internet for laws dealing with art theft but the fragments I turned up were all over the map, and did not provide any kind of relevant or cohesive view. Then, after I’d been at Hobie’s for an otherwise uneventful eight months, an unexpected solution presented itself.

I was on good terms with all Hobie’s moving-and-storage guys. Most of them were New York City Irish, lumbering, good-natured guys who hadn’t quite made it into the police force or the fire department—Mike, Sean, Patrick, Little Frank (who was not little at all, the size of a refrigerator)—but there were also a couple of Israeli guys named Raviv and Avi, and—my favorite—a Russian Jew named Grisha. (“ ‘Russian Jew’ contradiction in terms,” he explained, in a lavish plume of menthol smoke. “To Russian mind anyway. Since ‘Jew’ to antisemite mind is not the same as true Russian—Russia is notorious of this fact.”) Grisha had been born in Sevastopol, which he claimed to remember (“black water, salt”) though his parents had emigrated when he was two. Fair-haired, brick red in the face with startling robin’s-egg eyes, he was paunchy from drinking and so careless about his clothes that sometimes the lower buttons of his shirt gaped open, yet from the easy, arrogant way he carried himself, he clearly believed himself to be good-looking (as who knew, maybe he had been, once). Unlike stone-faced Mr. Pavlikovsky he was quite talkative, full of jokes or
anekdoty
as he called them, which he told in a droll, rapid-fire monotone. “You think you can curse,
mazhor?
” he’d said goodnaturedly, from the chessboard set up in a corner of the workshop where he and Hobie sometimes played in the afternoon. “Go then. Burn my ears off.” And I had let rip such an eyewatering torrent of filth that even Hobie—not understanding a word—had leaned back laughing with his hands over his ears.

One gloomy afternoon, not long after my first fall term in school had begun, I happened to be alone in the house when Grisha stopped by to drop off some furniture. “Here,
mazhor,
” he said, flicking the butt of his cigarette away between scarred thumb and forefinger.
Mazhor
—one of his several derisive nicknames for me—meant “Major” in Russian. “Make yourself useful. Come help with this garbage in the truck.” All furniture, for Grisha, was “garbage.”

I looked past him, to the truck. “What have you got? Is it heavy?”

“If it was heavy,
poprygountchik,
would I ask you?”

We brought in the furniture—gilt-edged mirror, wrapped in padding; a candle stand; a set of dining room chairs—and as soon as it was unwrapped, Grisha leaned against a sideboard Hobie was working on (after first touching it with a fingertip, to make sure it wasn’t sticky) and lit himself a Kool. “Want one?”

“No thanks.” In fact, I did, but I was afraid Hobie would smell it on me.

Grisha fanned away the cigarette smoke with one dirty-nailed hand. “So what are you doing?” he said. “Want to help me out this afternoon?”

“Help you how?”

“Put down your naked-lady book” (Janson’s
History of Art
) “and ride out to Brooklyn with me.”

“What for?”

“I have to take some of this garbage out to storage, could use an extra hand. Mike was supposed to help but
sick
today. Ha! Giants played last night, they lost, he had a lot of rocks on the game. Bet he is home in bed up in Inwood with a hangover and a black eye.”

vi.