Donna Tartt - The Goldfinch

Toddy (“It’s Todd now, please”) had risen to his father’s position as Captain of the Table, guiding the conversation with a slightly automatic-seeming but evidently sincere charm, although Mrs. Barbour hadn’t really been interested in talking to anyone but me—about Andy, a little, but mostly about her family’s furniture, a few pieces of which had been purchased from Israel Sack in the 1940s but most of which had come down through her family from colonial times—rising from the table at one point mid-meal and leading me off by the hand to show me a set of chairs and a mahogany lowboy—Queen Anne, Salem Massachusetts—that had been in her mother’s family since the 1760s. (Salem? I thought. Were these Phipps ancestors of hers witch-burners? Or witches themselves? Apart from Andy—cryptic, isolated, self-sufficient, incapable of dishonesty and completely lacking in both malice and charisma—the other Barbours, even Todd, all had something slightly uncanny about them, a watchful, sly amalgam of decorum and mischief that made it all too easy to imagine their forebears gathering in the forest by night, casting off their Puritan garb to frolic by the pagan bonfire.) Kitsey and I hadn’t talked much—we hadn’t been able to, thanks to Mrs. Barbour; but almost every time I’d glanced in her direction I’d been aware of her eyes on me. Platt—voice thick after five (six?) large gin and limes, pulled me aside at the bar after dinner and said: “She’s on antidepressants.”

“Oh?” I said, taken aback.

“Kitsey, I mean. Mommy won’t touch them.”

“Well—” His lowered voice made me uncomfortable, as if he were seeking my opinion or wanting me to weigh in somehow. “I hope they work better for her than they did for me.”

Platt opened his mouth and then seemed to reconsider. “Oh—” reeling back slightly—“I suppose she’s bearing up. But it’s been rough for her. Kits was very close to both of them—closer to Andy I would say than any of us.”

“Oh really?” ‘Close’ would not have been my description of their relationship in childhood, though she more than Andy’s brothers had always been in the background, if only to whine or tease.

Platt sighed—a gin-crocked blast that almost knocked me over. “Yeah. She’s on a leave of absence from Wellesley—not sure if she’ll go back, maybe she’ll take some classes at the New School, maybe she’ll get a job—too hard for her being in Massachusetts, after, you know. They saw an awful lot of each other in Cambridge—she feels rotten, of course, that she didn’t go up to see after Daddy. She was better with Daddy than anyone else but there was a party, she phoned Andy and begged him to go up instead… well.”

“Shit.” I stood appalled at the bar, ice tongs in hand, feeling sick to think of another person ruined by the same poison of why did I and if only that had wrecked my own life.

“Yep,” said Platt, pouring himself another hefty slug of gin. “Rough stuff.”

“Well, she shouldn’t blame herself. She can’t. That’s crazy. I mean,” I said, unnerved by the watery, dead-eye look Platt was giving me over the top of his drink, “if she’d been on that boat she’d be the one dead now, not him.”

“No she wouldn’t,” Platt said flatly. “Kits is a crackerjack sailor. Good reflexes, good head on her shoulders ever since she was tiny. Andy—Andy was thinking about his orbit-orbit resonances or whatever computational shite he was doing back at home on his laptop and he spazzed out in the pinch. Completely fucking typical. Anyway,” he continued calmly—not appearing to notice my astonishment at this remark—“she’s a bit at loose ends right now, as I’m sure you’ll understand. You should ask her to dinner or something, it would thrill Mommy senseless.”

ix.

BY THE TIME I left, after eleven, the rain had stopped and the streets were glassy with water and Kenneth the night man (same heavy eyes and malt-liquor smell, bigger in the stomach but otherwise unchanged) was on the door. “Don’t be a stranger, eh?” he said, which was the same thing he’d always said when I was a little kid and my mother came to pick me up after sleepovers—same torpid voice, just a half beat too slow. Even in some smoky post-catastrophe Manhattan you could imagine him swaying genially at the door in the rags of his former uniform, the Barbours up in the apartment burning old National Geographic s for warmth, living off gin and tinned crabmeat.

Though it had pervaded every aspect of the evening like a simmering toxin, Andy’s death was still too huge to grasp—though the strange thing too was how inevitable it seemed in hindsight, how weirdly predictable, almost as if he’d suffered from some fatal inborn defect. Even as a six year old—dreamy, stumbling, asthmatic, hopeless—the slur of misfortune and early demise had been perfectly visible about his rickety little person, marking him off like a cosmic kick me sign pinned to his back.

And yet it was remarkable too how his world limped on without him. Strange, I thought, as I jumped a sheet of water at the curb, how a few hours could change everything—or rather, how strange to find that the present contained such a bright shard of the living past, damaged and eroded but not destroyed. Andy had been good to me when I had no one else. The least I could do was be kind to his mother and sister. It didn’t occur to me then, though it certainly does now, that it was years since I’d roused myself from my stupor of misery and self-absorption; between anomie and trance, inertia and parenthesis and gnawing my own heart out, there were a lot of small, easy, everyday kindnesses I’d missed out on; and even the word kindness was like rising from unconsciousness into some hospital awareness of voices, and people, from a stream of digitized machines.

x.

AN EVERY-OTHER-DAY HABIT WAS still a habit, as Jerome had often reminded me, particularly when I didn’t stick too faithfully to the every-other-day part. New York was full of all kinds of daily subway-and-crowd horror; the suddenness of the explosion had never left me, I was always looking for something to happen, always expecting it just out of the corner of my eye, certain configurations of people in public places could trigger it, a wartime urgency, someone cutting in front of me the wrong way or walking too fast at a particular angle was enough to throw me into tachycardia and trip-hammer panic, the kind that made me stumble for the nearest park bench; and my dad’s painkillers, which had started as relief for my nigh-on uncontrollable anxiety, provided such a rapturous escape that soon I’d started taking them as a treat: first an only-on-weekends treat, then an after-school treat, then the purring aetherous bliss that welcomed me whenever I was unhappy or bored (which was, unfortunately, quite a lot); at which time I made the earth-shaking discovery that the tiny pills I’d ignored because they were so insignificant and weak-looking were literally ten times as strong as the Vicodins and Percocets I’d been downing by the handful—Oxycontins, 80s, strong enough to kill someone without a tolerance, which person by that point was definitely not me; and when at last my endless-seeming trove of oral narcotics ran out, shortly before my eighteenth birthday, I’d been forced to start buying on the street. Even dealers were censorious of the sums I spent, thousands of dollars every few weeks; Jack (Jerome’s predecessor) had scolded me about it repeatedly even as he sat in the filthy beanbag chair from which he conducted his business, counting my hundreds fresh from the teller’s window. “Might as well light it on fire, brah.” Heroin was cheaper—fifteen bucks a bag. Even if I didn’t bang it—Jack, laboriously, had done the math for me on the inside of a Quarter Pounder wrapper—I would be looking at a much more reasonable expenditure, something in the neighborhood of four hundred and fifty dollars a month.