Donna Tartt - The Goldfinch

The interesting thing, in the photograph, was how the fragile little knock-kneed boy—smiling sweetly, pristine in his sailor suit—was also the old man who’d clasped my hand while he was dying: two separate frames, superimposed upon each other, of the same soul. And the painting, above his head, was the still point where it all hinged: dreams and signs, past and future, luck and fate. There wasn’t a single meaning. There were many meanings. It was a riddle expanding out and out and out.

Hobie cleared his throat. “Ask you something?”

“Of course.”

“How’d you store it?”

“In a pillowcase.”

“Cotton?”

“Well—is percale cotton?”

“No padding? Nothing to protect it?”

“Just paper and tape. Yep,” I said, when his eyes blurred with alarm.

“You should have used glassine and bubble wrap!”

“I know that now.”

“Sorry.” Wincing; putting a hand to his temple. “Still trying to get my head around it. You flew with that painting in checked baggage on Continental Airlines?”

“Like I said. I was thirteen.”

“Why didn’t you just tell me? You could have done,” he said, when I shook my head.

“Oh, sure,” I said, a little too quickly, though I was remembering the isolation and terror of that time: my constant fear of Social Services; the soap-heavy smell of my un-lockable bedroom, the drastic chill of the stone-gray reception area where I waited to see Mr. Bracegirdle, my fear of being sent away.

“I’d have figured out something. Although, when you tipped up here homeless like you did… well, I hope you don’t mind my saying so but even your own lawyer—well, you know it as well as I do, the situation made him nervous, he was pretty anxious to get you out of here and then on my end, as well, several very old friends said, ‘James, this is absolutely too much for you…’ well you can understand why they’d think it,” he added hastily, when he saw the look on my face.

“Oh, sure, of course.” The Vogels, the Grossmans, the Mildebergers, while always polite, had always managed to silently convey (to me, anyway) their Hobie-has-quite-enough-to-deal-with philosophy.

“On some level it was mad. I know how it looked. And yet—well—it seemed a plain message, how Welty had sent you here, and then there you were, like a little insect, coming back and coming back—” He thought a moment, brow furrowed, a deeper version of his perpetual worried expression—“I’ll tell you what I’m trying a bit clumsily to say, after my mother died I’d walk and walk, that awful dragging summer. Walk all the way from Albany to Troy sometimes. Standing under awnings of hardware stores in the rain. Anything to keep from going home to that house without her in it. Floating around like a ghost. I’d stay in the library until they kicked me out and then get on the Watervliet bus and ride and then wander some more. I was a big kid, twelve years old and tall as a man, people thought I was a tramp, housewives chased me with brooms from their doorsteps. But that’s how I ended up at Mrs. De Peyster’s—she opened the door when I was sitting on her porch and said: You must be thirsty, would you like to come in? Portraits, miniatures, daguerreotypes, old Aunt This, old Uncle Thus and So. That spiral staircase coming down. And there I was—in my lifeboat. I’d found it. You had to pinch yourself in that house sometimes to remind yourself it wasn’t 1909. Some of the most beautiful American Classical pieces I’ve ever seen to this day, and, my God, that Tiffany glass—this was in the days before Tiffany was so special, people didn’t care for it, it wasn’t the thing, probably it was already commanding big prices in the city but back then you could find it in upstate junk shops for next to nothing. Soon enough I started prowling those junk shops myself. But this—this had all come down in her family. Every piece had a story. And she was delighted to show you just where to stand, at what hour, to catch each piece in the best light. In the late afternoon, when the sun wheeled round the room—” he splayed his fingers, pop, pop! —“they’d fire up one by one like firecrackers on a string.”

From my chair I had a clear view of Hobie’s Noah’s Ark: paired elephants, zebras, carven beasts marching two by two, clear down to tiny hen and rooster and the bunnies and mice bringing up the rear. And the memory was located there, beyond words, a coded message from that first afternoon: rain streaming down the skylights, the homely file of creatures lined on the kitchen counter waiting to be saved. Noah: the great conservator, the great caretaker.

“And—” he’d gotten up to make some coffee—“I suppose it’s ignoble to spend your life caring so much for objects —”

“Who says?”

“Well—” turning from the stove—“it’s not as if we’re running a hospital for sick children down here, let’s put it that way. Where’s the nobility in patching up a bunch of old tables and chairs? Corrosive to the soul, quite possibly. I’ve seen too many estates not to know that. Idolatry! Caring too much for objects can destroy you. Only—if you care for a thing enough, it takes on a life of its own, doesn’t it? And isn’t the whole point of things—beautiful things—that they connect you to some larger beauty? Those first images that crack your heart wide open and you spend the rest of your life chasing, or trying to recapture, in one way or another? Because, I mean—mending old things, preserving them, looking after them—on some level there’s no rational grounds for it—”

“There’s no ‘rational grounds’ for anything I care about.”

“Well, no, nor me either,” he said reasonably. “But”—peering nearsightedly into the coffee jar, spooning ground coffee into the pot—“well, sorry to maunder on, but from here, from where I’m standing, it looks like a bit of a fix, doesn’t it?”

“What?”

He laughed. “What’s to say? Great paintings—people flock to see them, they draw crowds, they’re reproduced endlessly on coffee mugs and mouse pads and anything-you-like. And, I count myself in the following, you can have a lifetime of perfectly sincere museum-going where you traipse around enjoying everything and then go out and have some lunch. But—” crossing back to the table to sit again “—if a painting really works down in your heart and changes the way you see, and think, and feel, you don’t think, ‘oh, I love this picture because it’s universal.’ ‘I love this painting because it speaks to all mankind.’ That’s not the reason anyone loves a piece of art. It’s a secret whisper from an alleyway. Psst, you. Hey kid. Yes you. ” Fingertip gliding over the faded-out photo—the conservator’s touch, a touch-without-touching, a communion wafer’s space between the surface and his forefinger. “An individual heart-shock. Your dream, Welty’s dream, Vermeer’s dream. You see one painting, I see another, the art book puts it at another remove still, the lady buying the greeting card at the museum gift shop sees something else entire, and that’s not even to mention the people separated from us by time—four hundred years before us, four hundred years after we’re gone—it’ll never strike anybody the same way and the great majority of people it’ll never strike in any deep way at all but—a really great painting is fluid enough to work its way into the mind and heart through all kinds of different angles, in ways that are unique and very particular. Yours, yours. I was painted for you. And—oh, I don’t know, stop me if I’m rambling…” passing a hand over his forehead.… “but Welty himself used to talk about fateful objects. Every dealer and antiquaire recognizes them. The pieces that occur and recur. Maybe for someone else, not a dealer, it wouldn’t be an object. It’d be a city, a color, a time of day. The nail where your fate is liable to catch and snag.”