Donna Tartt - The Goldfinch

“Would I have heard of him?”

“No. Now he works in an office. Or he did.”

“And what’s he doing now, then?” he asked. He had slipped the ring over his little finger, and from time to time he twisted it between thumb and forefinger of his other hand, as if to make sure it was still there.

“Who knows? He ditched us.”

To my surprise, he laughed. “Good riddance?”

“Well—” I shrugged—“I don’t know. Sometimes he was okay. We’d watch sports and cop shows and he’d tell me how they did the special effects with the blood and all. But, it’s like—I don’t know. Like, sometimes he was drunk when he came to pick me up from school?” I hadn’t really talked about this with Dave the Shrink or Mrs. Swanson or anyone. “I was scared to tell my mother but then one of the other mothers told her. And then—” it was a long story, I was feeling embarrassed, I wanted to cut it short—“he got his hand broken in a bar, he was fighting somebody in a bar, he had this bar he liked to go to every day only we didn’t know that’s where he was because he said he was working late, and he had this whole set of friends we didn’t know about and they sent him postcards when they went on vacation to places like the Virgin Islands? to our home address? which was how we found out about it? and my mother tried to make him go to AA but he wouldn’t go. Sometimes the doormen used to come and stand in the hall outside the apartment and make a lot of noise so he could hear them—so he knew they were out there, you know? So he didn’t get too out of hand.”

“Out of hand?”

“There was a lot of yelling and stuff. It was mostly him doing it. But—” uncomfortably aware that I’d said more than I meant to—“it was mainly him making a bunch of noise. Like—oh, I don’t know, like when he had to stay with me, when she had to work? He was always in a really bad mood. I couldn’t talk to him when he was watching news or sports, that was the rule. I mean—” I paused, unhappily, feeling I’d talked myself into a corner. “Anyway. That was a long time ago.”

He sat back in his chair and looked at me: a big, self-contained, guarded man, though his eyes were the worried blue of boyishness.

“And now?” he said. “Do you like the people you’re staying with?”

“Um—” I paused, with full mouth, at a loss how to explain the Barbours. “They’re nice, I guess.”

“I’m glad. I mean, I can’t say I know Samantha Barbour, although I’ve done some work for her family in the past. She has a good eye.”

At this, I stopped eating. “You know the Barbours?”

“Not him. Her. Though his mother was quite a collector—I gather it all went to the brother, though, due to some family quarrel. Welty would have been able to tell you more about it. Not that he was a gossip,” he added hastily, “Welty was very discreet, buttoned up to here, but people confided in him, he was that sort, you know? Strangers opened up to him—clients, people he hardly knew, he was the kind of man people liked to entrust with their sadnesses.

“But yes.” He folded his hands. “Every art dealer and antiquario in New York knows Samantha Barbour. She was a Van der Pleyn before she married. Not a great buyer, though Welty saw her at auction sometimes, and she certainly has some pretty things.”

“Who told you I was staying with the Barbours?”

He blinked, rapidly. “It was in the paper,” he said. “You didn’t see it?”

“The paper?”

“The Times. You didn’t read it? No?”

“There was something in the paper about me?”

“No, no,” he said quickly. “Not about you. About children who had lost family members in the museum. Most of them were tourists. There was one little girl… a baby, really… diplomat’s child from South America—”

“What did they say about me in the paper?”

He made a face. “Oh, an orphan’s plight… charity-minded socialite steps in… that kind of thing. You can imagine.”

I stared into my plate, feeling embarrassed. Orphan? Charity?

“It was a very nice piece. I gather you protected one of her sons from bullies?” he said, lowering his large gray head to catch my eye. “At school? The other gifted boy who was put ahead?”

I shook my head. “Sorry?”

“Samantha’s son? Whom you defended from a group of older boys at school? Took beatings for him—that kind of thing?”

Again I shook my head—completely bewildered.

He laughed. “Such modesty! You shouldn’t be embarrassed.”

“But—it wasn’t like that,” I said, baffled. “We both got picked on and beaten up. Every day.”

“So the story said. Which made it all the more remarkable that you stood up for him. A broken bottle?” he said, when I didn’t respond. “Someone was trying to cut Samantha Barbour’s son with a broken bottle, and you—”

“Oh, that,” I said, embarrassed. “That was nothing.”

“You were cut yourself. When you tried to help him.”

“That’s not how it happened! Cavanaugh jumped on both of us! There was a piece of broken glass on the sidewalk.”

Again he laughed—a big man’s laugh, rich and rough and at odds with his carefully cultivated voice. “Well, however it happened,” he said, “you’ve certainly tipped up in an interesting family.” Standing, he went to the cupboard, where he retrieved a bottle of whiskey and poured a couple of fingers in a not-very-clean glass.

“Samantha Barbour doesn’t seem the warmest and most welcoming of hearts—at least that’s not the impression,” he said. “Yet she seems to do an awful lot of good in the world with the foundations and fundraising, doesn’t she?”

I kept quiet as he put the bottle back in the cupboard. Above, through the skylight, the light was gray and opalescent; a fine rain peppered at the glass.

“Are you going to open the shop again?” I said.

“Well—” he sighed. “Welty handled all that end of it—the clients, the sales. Me—I’m a cabinet maker, not a businessman. Brocanteur, bricoleur. Barely set foot up there—I’m always below stairs, sanding and polishing. Now he’s gone—well, it’s still very new. People calling for things he sold, things still being delivered I never knew he bought, don’t know where the paperwork is, don’t know who any of it’s for… there are a million things I need to ask him, I’d give anything if I could talk to him for five minutes. Particularly—well, particularly as regards Pippa. Her medical care and—well.”

“Right,” I said, aware how lame I sounded. We were heading into the clumsy territory of my mother’s funeral, stretched-out silences, wrong smiles, the place where words didn’t work.

“He was a lovely man. Not many like him. Gentle, charming. People always felt sorry for him because of his back, though I’ve never met anyone so naturally gifted with a happy disposition, and of course the customers loved him… outgoing fellow, very sociable, always was… ‘the world won’t come to me,’ he used to say, ‘so I must go to it’—”

Quite suddenly, Andy’s iPhone chimed: text message coming in.

Hobie—glass halfway to his mouth—started, violently. “What was that?”

“Wait a second,” I said, digging in my pocket. The text was from Phil Lefkow, one of the kids in Andy’s Japanese class: Hi Theo, Andy here, are you ok? Hastily, I switched the phone off and stuck it back in my pocket.

“Sorry?” I said. “What were you saying?”

“I forget.” He stared into space for a moment or two, then shook his head. “I never thought I’d see this again,” he said, looking down at the ring. “So like him to ask you to bring it here—to put it in my hand. I—well, I didn’t say anything but I thought for sure someone had pocketed it at the morgue—”