Donna Tartt - The Goldfinch

It was becoming increasingly difficult to explain my absences, however (dinnertime absences, often), and Andy’s powers of invention were being taxed. “Shall I go up there with you and talk to her?” said Hobie one afternoon when we were in the kitchen eating a cherry tart he’d bought at the farmers’ market. “I’m happy to go up and meet her. Or maybe you’d like to ask her here.”

“Maybe,” I said, after thinking about it.

“She might be interested to see that Chippendale chest-on-chest—you know, the Philadelphia, the scroll-top. Not to buy—just to look at. Or, if you’d like, we could invite her out to lunch at La Grenouille—” he laughed “—or even some little joint down here that might amuse her.”

“Let me think about it,” I said; and went home early on the bus, brooding. Quite apart from my chronic duplicity with Mrs. Barbour—constant late nights at the library, a nonexistent history project—it would be embarrassing to admit to Hobie that I’d claimed Mr. Blackwell’s ring was a family heirloom. Yet, if Mrs. Barbour and Hobie were to meet, my lie was sure to emerge, one way or another. There seemed no way around it.

“Where have you been?” said Mrs. Barbour sharply, dressed for dinner but without her shoes on, emerging from the back of the apartment with her gin and lime in her hand.

Something in her manner made me sense a trap. “Actually,” I said, “I was downtown visiting a friend of my mother’s.”

Andy turned to stare at me blankly.

“Oh yes?” said Mrs. Barbour suspiciously, with a sideways glance at Andy. “Andy was just telling me that you were working at the library again.”

“Not tonight,” I said, so easily that it surprised me.

“Well, I must say I’m relieved to hear that,” said Mrs. Barbour coolly. “Since the main branch is closed on Mondays.”

“I didn’t say he was at the main branch, Mother.”

“I think you might actually know him,” I said, anxious to draw fire from Andy. “Know of him, anyway.”

“Who?” said Mrs. Barbour, her gaze coming back to me.

“The friend I was visiting. His name is James Hobart. He runs a furniture shop downtown—well, doesn’t run it. He does the restorations.”

She brought her eyebrows down. “Hobart?”

“He works for lots of people in the city. Sotheby’s, sometimes.”

“You wouldn’t mind if I gave him a call, then?”

“No,” I said defensively. “He said we should all go out to lunch. Or maybe you’d like to come down to his shop sometime.”

“Oh,” said Mrs. Barbour, after a beat or two of surprise. Now she was the one thrown off-balance. If Mrs. Barbour ever went south of Fourteenth Street, for any reason whatsoever, I didn’t know about it. “Well. We’ll see.”

“Not to buy anything. Just to look. He has some nice things.”

She blinked. “Of course,” she said. She seemed strangely disoriented—something fixed and distracted about the eyes. “Well, lovely. I’m sure I would enjoy meeting him. Have I met him?”

“No, I don’t think so.”

“In any case. Andy, I’m sorry. I owe you an apology. You too, Theo.”

Me? I didn’t know what to say. Andy—sucking furtively at the side of his thumb—gave a one-shouldered shrug as she spun out of the room.

“What’s the matter?” I asked him quietly.

“She’s upset. It’s nothing to do with you. Platt’s home,” he added.

Now that he mentioned it, I was aware of muffled music emanating from the rear of the apartment, a deep, subliminal thump. “Why?” I said. “What’s wrong?”

“Something happened at school.”

“Something bad?”

“God knows,” he said tonelessly.

“He’s in trouble?”

“I assume so. No one will talk about it.”

“But what happened?”

Andy made a face: who knows. “He was here when we got home from school—we heard his music. Kitsey was excited and ran back to tell him hello but he screamed and slammed the door in her face.”

I winced. Kitsey idolized Platt.

“Then Mother came home. She’s been back in his room. Then she was on the telephone for a while. I slightly think Daddy’s on his way home now. They were supposed to have dinner with the Ticknors tonight but I think that’s been cancelled.”

“What about supper?” I said, after a brief pause. Normally on school nights we ate in front of the television while doing our homework—but with Platt home, Mr. Barbour on his way, and the evening’s plans abandoned, it was starting to look more like a family dinner in the dining room.

Andy straightened his glasses, in the fussy, old-womanish way he had. Although my hair was dark and his was light, I was only too aware how the identical eyeglasses Mrs. Barbour had chosen for us made me look like Andy’s egghead twin—especially since I’d overheard some girl at school calling us “the Goofus Brothers” (or maybe “the Doofus brothers”—whatever, it wasn’t a compliment).

“Let’s walk over to Serendipity and get a hamburger,” he said. “I’d really rather not be here when Daddy gets home.”

“Take me, too,” said Kitsey unexpectedly, galloping in and stopping just short of us, flushed and breathless.

Andy and I looked at each other. Kitsey didn’t even like to be seen standing in line next to us at the bus stop.

“Please,” she wailed, looking back and forth between us. “Toddy’s doing soccer practice, I have my own money, I don’t want to be by myself with them, please. ”

“Oh, come on,” I said to Andy, and she flashed me a grateful look.

Andy put his hands in his pockets. “All right, then,” he said to her expressionlessly. They were a pair of white mice, I thought—only Kitsey was a spun-sugar, fairy-princess mouse whereas Andy was more the kind of luckless, anemic, pet-shop mouse you might feed to your boa constrictor.

“Get your stuff . Go, ” he said, when she still stood there staring. “I’m not waiting for you. And don’t forget your money because I’m not paying for you either.”

xiii.

I DIDN’T GO DOWN to Hobie’s for the next few days, out of loyalty to Andy, although I was greatly tempted in the atmosphere of tension that hung over the household. Andy was right: it was impossible to figure out what Platt had done, since Mr. and Mrs. Barbour behaved as if absolutely nothing were wrong (only you could tell that something was) and Platt himself wouldn’t say a word, only sat sullenly at meals with his hair hanging in his face.

“Believe me,” said Andy, “it’s better when you’re around. They talk, and make more of an effort to be normal.”

“What do you think he did?”

“Honestly, I don’t know. I don’t want to know.”

“Sure you do.”

“Well, yes,” said Andy, relenting. “But I really don’t have the foggiest.”

“Do you think he cheated? Stole? Chewed gum in chapel?”

Andy shrugged. “The last time he was in trouble, it was for hitting somebody in the face with a lacrosse stick. But that wasn’t like this. ” And then, out of the blue: “Mother loves Platt the best.”

“You think?” I said evasively, though I knew very well this was true.

“Daddy loves Kitsey best. And Mother loves Platt.”

“She loves Toddy a lot too,” I said, before realizing quite how this sounded.

Andy grimaced. “I would think I’d been switched at birth,” he said. “If I didn’t look so much like Mother.”

xiv.

FOR SOME REASON, DURING this strained interlude (possibly because Platt’s mysterious trouble reminded me of my own) it occurred to me that maybe I ought to tell Hobie about the painting, or—at the very least—broach the subject in some oblique manner, to see what his reaction would be. The difficulty was how to bring it up. It was still in the apartment, exactly where I’d left it, in the bag I’d brought out of the museum. When I’d seen it leaning against the sofa in the front room, on the dreadful afternoon I’d gone back in to get some school things I needed, I’d walked right past it, skirting it as assiduously as I would have a grasping bum on the sidewalk, and all the time feeling Mrs. Barbour’s cool pale eye on my back, on our apartment, on my mother’s things, as she stood in the door with her arms folded.