Donna Tartt - The Goldfinch

“Really?” said Mr. Bracegirdle. “I think that may be an excellent idea. Where were you thinking about going? Back east? Or somewhere out there?”

We hadn’t thought this out. I looked at my dad.

“Uh,” I said, “uh,” while my father grimaced at me and waved his hand frantically.

“There may be good boarding schools out west, though I don’t know about them,” Mr. Bracegirdle was saying. “I went to Milton, which was a wonderful experience for me. And my oldest son went there too, for a year anyway, though it wasn’t at all the right place for him—”

As he talked on—from Milton, to Kent, to various boarding schools attended by children of friends and acquaintances—my dad scribbled a note; he threw it at me. Wire me the money, it said. Down payment.

“Um,” I said, not knowing how else to introduce the subject, “did my mother leave me some money?”

“Well, not exactly,” said Mr. Bracegirdle, seeming to cool slightly at the question, or maybe it was just the awkwardness of the interruption. “She was having some financial troubles toward the end, as I’m sure you’re well aware. But you do have a 529. And she also set up a little UTMA for you right before she died.”

“What is that?” My dad—his eyes on me—was listening very closely.

“Uniform Transfer to Minors. It’s to be used for your education. But it can’t be used for anything else—not while you’re still a minor, anyway.”

“Why can’t it?” I said, after a brief pause, as he had seemed to stress the final point so much.

“Because it’s the law,” he said curtly. “But certainly something can be worked out if you want to go away to school. I know of a client who used part of her eldest son’s 529 for a fancy kindergarten for her youngest. Not that I think twenty thousand dollars a year is a prudent expenditure at that level—the most expensive crayons in Manhattan, surely—! But yes, so you understand, that’s how it works.”

I looked at my dad. “So there’s no way you could, say, wire me sixty-five thousand dollars,” I said. “If I needed it right this minute.”

“No! Absolutely not! So just put that out of your mind.” His manner had changed—clearly he’d revised his opinion of me, no longer my mother’s son and A Good Kid but a grasping little creep. “By the way, may I ask how you happened to arrive at that particular figure?”

“Er—” I glanced at my dad, who had a hand over his eyes. Shit, I thought, and then realized I’d said it out loud.

“Well, no matter,” said Mr. Bracegirdle silkily. “It’s simply not possible.”

“No way?”

“No way, no how.”

“Okay, fine—” I tried hard to think, but my mind was running in two directions at once. “Could you send me part of it, then? Like half?”

“No. It would all have to be arranged directly with the college or school of your choice. In other words, I’m going to need to see bills, and pay bills. There’s a lot of paperwork, as well. And in the unlikely event you decide not to attend college…”

As he talked on, confusingly, about various ins and outs of the funds my mother had set up for me (all of which were fairly restrictive, as far as either my father or me getting our hands immediately on actual, spendable cash) my dad, holding the phone out from his ear, had something very like an expression of horror on his face.

“Well, uh, that’s good to know, thank you sir,” I said, trying hard to wrap up the conversation.

“There are tax advantages of course. Setting it up like this. But what she really wanted was to make sure your father would never be able to touch it.”

“Oh?” I said, uncertainly, in the overly long silence that followed. Something in his tone had made me suspect that he knew my father might be the Lord Vader-ish presence breathing audibly (audibly to me—whether audibly to him I don’t know) on the other line.

“There are other considerations, as well. I mean—” decorous silence—“I don’t know if I ought to tell you this, but an unauthorized party has twice tried to make a large withdrawal on the account.”

“What?” I said, after a sick pause.

“You see,” said Mr. Bracegirdle, his voice as distant as if it were coming from the bottom of the sea, “I’m the custodian on the account. And about two months after your mother died, someone walked in the bank in Manhattan during business hours and tried to forge my signature on the papers. Well, they know me at the main branch, and they called me right away, but while they were still on the phone with me the man slipped out the door, before the security guard was able to approach and ask for ID. That was, my goodness, nearly two years ago. But then—only last week—did you get the letter I wrote you about this?”

“No,” I said, when at last I realized I needed to say something.

“Well, without going into it too much, there was a peculiar phone call. From someone purporting to be your attorney out there, requesting a transfer of funds. And then—checking into it—we found out that some party with access to your Social Security number had applied for, and received, a rather large line of credit in your name. Do you happen to know anything about that?

“Well, not to worry,” he continued, when I didn’t say anything. “I have a copy of your birth certificate here, and I faxed it to the issuing bank and had the line shut down immediately. And I’ve alerted Equifax and all the credit agencies. Even though you’re a minor, and legally unable to enter into such a contract, you could be responsible for any such debts incurred in your name once you come of age. At any rate, I urge you to be very careful with your Social Security number in future. It’s possible to have a new Social issued, in theory, although the red tape is such a headache that I don’t suggest it…”

I was in a cold sweat when I hung up the telephone—and completely unprepared for the howl that my father let out. I thought he was angry—angry at me—but when he just stood there with the phone still in his hand, I looked at him a little closer and realized he was crying.

It was horrible. I had no idea what to do. He sounded like he’d had boiling water poured over him—like he was turning into a werewolf—like he was being tortured. I left him there and—Popchik hurrying up the stairs ahead of me; clearly he didn’t want any part of this howling, either—went in my room and locked the door and sat on the side of my bed with my head in my hands, wanting aspirin but not wanting to go down to the bathroom to get it, wishing Xandra would hurry up and come home. The screams from downstairs were ungodly, like he was being burned with a blow torch. I got my iPod, tried to find some loud-ish music that wasn’t upsetting (Shostakovich’s Fourth, which though classical actually was a bit upsetting) and lay on my bed with the earbuds in and stared at the ceiling, while Popper stood with his ears up and stared at the closed door, the hairs on his neck erect and bristling.

xv.

“HE TOLD ME YOU had a fortune,” said Boris, later that night at the playground, while we were sitting around waiting for the drugs to work. I slightly wished we had picked another night to take them, but Boris had insisted it would make me feel better.

“You believed I had a fortune, and wouldn’t tell you?” We’d been sitting on the swings for what seemed like forever, waiting for just what I didn’t know.

Boris shrugged. “I don’t know. There are a lot of things you don’t tell me. I would have told you. It’s all right, though.”

“I don’t know what to do.” Though it was very subtle, I’d begun to notice glittering gray kaleidoscope patterns turning sluggishly in the gravel by my foot—dirty ice, diamonds, sparkles of broken glass. “Things are getting scary.”