Donna Tartt - The Goldfinch

There was an unpleasant buzzing in my ears. Sitting there under her level, ice-gray gaze, I felt for some reason terribly ashamed of myself. I had dreaded the thought of going to Grandpa Decker and Dorothy so much that I’d blocked them almost completely from my mind, but it was quite another thing to know they didn’t want me.

A flicker of sympathy passed over her face. “You mustn’t feel bad about it,” she said. “And in any case you mustn’t worry. It’s been settled that you’ll stay with us for the next few weeks and at the very least, finish your year at school. Everyone agrees that’s best. By the way,” she said, leaning closer, “that’s a lovely ring. Is that a family thing?”

“Um, yes,” I said. For reasons I would have found hard to explain, I had taken to carrying the old man’s ring with me almost everywhere I went. Mostly I toyed around with it while it was in my jacket pocket, but every now and then I slipped it on my middle finger and wore it, even though it was too big and slid around a bit.

“Interesting. Your mother’s family, or your father’s?”

“My mother’s,” I said, after a slight pause, not liking the way the conversation was going.

“May I see it?”

I took it off and dropped it in her palm. She held it up to the lamp. “Lovely,” she said, “carnelian. And this intaglio. Greco-Roman? Or a family crest?”

“Um, crest. I think.”

She examined the clawed, mythological beast. “It looks like a griffin. Or maybe a winged lion.” She turned it sideways into the light and looked inside of the ring. “And this engraving?”

My expression of puzzlement made her frown. “Don’t tell me you never noticed it. Hang on.” She got up and went to the desk, which had lots of intricate drawers and cubbyholes, and returned with a magnifying glass.

“This will be better than my reading glasses,” she said, peering through it. “Still this old copperplate is hard to see.” She brought the magnifying glass close, then farther away. “Blackwell. Does that ring a bell?”

“Ah—” In fact it did, something beyond words, but the thought had blown away and vanished before it fully materialized.

“I see some Greek letters, too. Very interesting.” She dropped the ring back in my hand. “It’s an old ring,” she said. “You can tell by the patina on the stone and by the way it’s worn down—see there? Americans used to pick up these classical intaglios in Europe, back in the Henry James days, and have them set as rings. Souvenirs of the Grand Tour.”

“If they don’t want me, where am I going to go?”

For a blink, Mrs. Barbour looked taken aback. Almost immediately she recovered herself and said: “Well, I wouldn’t worry about that now. It’s probably best anyway for you to stay here a bit longer and finish out your year at school, don’t you agree? Now”—she nodded—“be careful with that ring and mind that you don’t lose it. I can see how loose it is. You might want to put it someplace safe instead of wearing it around like that.”

vi.

BUT I DID WEAR IT. Or—rather—I ignored her advice to put it in a safe place, and continued to carry it around in my pocket. When I hefted it in my palm, it was very heavy; if I closed my fingers around it, the gold got warm from the heat of my hand but the carved stone stayed cool. Its weighty, antiquated quality, its mixture of sobriety and brightness, were strangely comforting; if I fixed my attention on it intensely enough, it had a strange power to anchor me in my drifting state and shut out the world around me, but for all that, I really didn’t want to think about where it had come from.

Nor did I want to think about my future—for though I had scarcely been looking forward to a new life in rural Maryland, at the chill mercies of my Decker grandparents, I now began to seriously worry about what was going to happen to me. Everyone seemed profoundly shocked at the Holiday Inn idea, as if Grandpa Decker and Dorothy had suggested I move into a shed in their back yard, but to me it didn’t seem so bad. I’d always wanted to live in a hotel, and even if the Holiday Inn wasn’t the kind of hotel I’d imagined, certainly I would manage: room service hamburgers, pay-per-view, a pool in summer, how bad could it be?

Everyone (the social workers, Dave the shrink, Mrs. Barbour) kept telling me again and again that I could not possibly live on my own at a Holiday Inn in suburban Maryland, that no matter what, it would never actually come to that—not seeming to realize that their supposedly comforting words were only increasing my anxiety a hundredfold. “The thing to remember,” said Dave, the psychiatrist who had been assigned to me by the city, “is that you’ll be taken care of no matter what.” He was a thirtyish guy with dark clothes and trendy eyeglasses who always looked as if he’d just come from a poetry reading in the basement of some church. “Because there are tons of people looking out for you who only want what’s best for you.”

I had grown suspicious of strangers talking about what was best for me, as it was exactly what the social workers had said before the subject of the foster home came up. “But—I don’t think my grandparents are so wrong,” I said.

“Wrong about what?”

“About the Holiday Inn. It might be an okay place for me to be.”

“Are you saying that things are not okay for you at your grandparents’ home?” said Dave, without missing a beat.

“No!” I hated this about him—how he was always putting words in my mouth.

“All right then. Maybe we can phrase it another way.” He folded his hands, and thought. “Why would you rather live at a hotel than with your grandparents?”

“I didn’t say that.”

He put his head to the side. “No, but from the way you keep bringing up the Holiday Inn, like it’s a viable choice, I’m hearing you say that’s what you prefer to do.”

“It seems a lot better than going into a foster home.”

“Yes—” he leaned forward—“but please hear me say this. You’re only thirteen. And you just lost your primary caregiver. Living alone right now is really not an option for you. What I’m trying to say is that it’s too bad your grandparents are dealing with these health issues, but believe me, I’m sure we can work out something much better once your grandmother is up and around.”

I said nothing. Clearly he had never met Grandpa Decker and Dorothy. Though I hadn’t been around them very much myself, the main thing I remembered was the complete absence of blood feeling between us, the opaque way they looked at me as if I was some random kid who’d wandered over from the mall. The prospect of going to live with them was almost literally unimaginable and I’d been racking my brains trying to remember what I could about my last visit to their house—which wasn’t very much, as I’d been only seven or eight years old. There had been handstitched sayings framed and hanging on the walls, a plastic countertop contraption that Dorothy used to dehydrate foods in. At some point—after Grandpa Decker had yelled at me to keep my sticky little mitts off his train set—my dad had gone outside for a cigarette (it was winter) and not come back inside the house. “Jesus God,” my mother had said, once we were out in the car (it had been her idea that I should get to know my father’s family), and after that we never went back.

Several days after the Holiday Inn offer, a greeting card arrived for me at the Barbours’. (An aside: is it wrong to think that Bob and Dorothy, as they signed themselves, should have picked up the telephone and called me? Or got in their car and driven to the city to see about me themselves? But they did neither of these things—not that I exactly expected them to rush to my side with wails of sympathy, but still, it would have been nice if they’d surprised me with some small, if uncharacteristic, gesture of affection.)