The Goldfinch

Hobie’s large, pale face appeared at the foot of the stairs. “What’s that?” he said, still in his work trance, not quite there, wiping his hands and leaving white handprints on his black apron—and then his expression changed when he saw the envelope. “Is that what I think it is?”

Without a word I handed it to him. He looked at it, then at me—then laughed what I thought of as his Irish laugh, harsh and surprised at itself.

“Well done you!” he said, untying his apron and slinging it across the railing of the stairs. “I’m glad about it, I won’t lie to you. I hated to think of packing you up there all on your own. And when were you going to mention it? Your first day of school?”

It made me feel terrible, how pleased he was. At our celebratory di

“Cheers!” said Hobie. “The tough part is over. You can breathe a little easier now.”

“You must be so pleased,” said Mrs. DeFrees, who all night long had been linking her arm through mine and giving little squeezes and chirrups of delight. (“You look bien élégante,” Hobie had said to her when he kissed her on the cheek: gray hair piled atop her head, and velvet ribbons threaded through the links of her diamond bracelet.)

“Model of dedication!” said Hobie to her. It made me feel even worse about myself, hearing him tell his friends how hard I’d worked and what an excellent student I was.

“Well, it’s wonderful. Aren’t you pleased? And on such short notice, too! Do try to look a bit happier, my dear. When does he start?” she said to Hobie.

ii.

THE PLEASANT SURPRISE WAS that after the trauma of getting in, the early-college program wasn’t nearly as rigorous as I’d feared. In certain respects it was the least demanding school I’d ever attended: no AP classes, no hectoring about SATs and Ivy League admissions, no back-breaking math and language requirements—in fact, no requirements at all. With increasing bewilderment, I looked around at the geeky academic paradise I’d tumbled into and realized why so many gifted and talented high school kids in five boroughs had been knocking themselves senseless to get into this place. There were no tests, no exams, no grades. There were classes where you built solar panels and had seminars with Nobel-wi

I could do what I had to. I’d done it before: gone blank, pushed forward. Four mornings a week I rose at eight, showered in the claw-foot tub in the bath off Pippa’s bedroom (dandelion shower curtain, the smell of her strawberry shampoo wafting me up into a mocking vapor where her presence smiled all around me). Then—abrupt plunge to earth—I exited the cloud of steam and dressed silently in my room and—after dragging Popchik around the block, where he darted to and fro and screamed in terror—ducked my head into the workshop, said goodbye to Hobie, hoisted my backpack over my shoulder, and took the train two stops downtown.

Most kids were taking five or six courses but I went for the minimum, four: Studio art, French, Intro to European Cinema, Russian literature in translation. I’d wanted to take conversational Russian but Russian 101—the introductory level—wasn’t available until the fall. With knee-jerk coldness I showed up for class, spoke when spoken to, completed my assignments, and walked back home. Sometimes after class I ate in cheap Mexican and Italian places around NYU with pinball machines and plastic plants, sports on the wide screen television and dollar beer at Happy Hour (though no beer for me: it was weird readjusting to my life as a minor, like going back to crayons and kindergarten). Afterwards, all sugared-up from unlimited-refill Sprites, I walked back to Hobie’s through Washington Square Park with my head down and my iPod turned up loud. Because of anxiety (the recovered Rembrandt was still all over the news) I was having big problems sleeping and whenever the doorbell at Hobie’s rang unexpectedly I jumped as if at a five-alarm fire.

“You’re missing out, Theo,” said Susa

“Well—” She was right: school was lonely. The eighteen and nineteen year olds didn’t socialize with the younger kids, and though there were plenty of students my age and younger (even one spindly twelve year old rumored to have an IQ of 260) their lives were so cloistered and their concerns so foolish and foreign-seeming that it was as if they spoke some lost middle-school tongue I’d forgotten. They lived at home with their parents; they worried about things like grade curves and Italian Abroad and summer internships at the UN; they freaked out if you lit a cigarette in front of them; they were earnest, well-meaning, undamaged, clueless. For all I had in common with any of them, I might as well have tried to go down and hang out with the eight year olds at PS 41.

“I see you’re taking French. The French Club meets once a week, in a French restaurant on University Place. And on Tuesdays they go up to the Alliance Française and watch French-language movies. That seems like something you might enjoy.”

“Maybe.” The head of the French department, an elderly Algerian, had already approached me (shockingly—at his large firm hand on my shoulder, I’d jumped like I was being mugged) and told me without preamble that he was teaching a seminar that I might like to sit in on, the roots of modern terrorism starting with the FLN and the Guerre d’Algérie—I hated how all the teachers in the program seemed to know who I was, addressing me with apparent foreknowledge of “the tragedy,” as my cinema teacher, Mrs. Lebowitz (“Call me Ruthie”) had termed it. She too—Mrs. Lebowitz—had been after me to join the Cinema club after reading an essay I’d written about The Bicycle Thief; she’d suggested as well that I might also enjoy the Philosophy Club, which entailed weekly discussion of what she called The Big Questions. “Um, maybe,” I said politely.

“Well, from your essay, it seems as if you are drawn to what I’ll call for lack of a better term, the metaphysical territory. Such as why do good people suffer,” she said, when I continued to look at her blankly. “And is fate random. What your essay deals with is really not so much the cinematic aspect of De Sica as the fundamental chaos and uncertainty of the world we live in.”

“I don’t know,” I said, in the uneasy pause that fell. Was my essay really about these things? I hadn’t even liked The Bicycle Thief (or Kes, or La Mouette, or Lacombe Lucien, or any of the other extremely depressing foreign films we had watched in Mrs. Lebowitz’s class).

Mrs. Lebowitz looked at me so long I felt uncomfortable. Then she adjusted her bright red eyeglasses and said: “Well, most of what we do in European Cinema is pretty heavy. Which is why I’m thinking maybe you’d like to sit in on one of my seminars for film majors. ‘Screwball Comedies of the Thirties’ or maybe even ‘Silent Cinema.’ We do Dr. Caligari but also a lot of Buster Keaton, a lot of Charlie Chaplin—chaos, you know, but in a non-threatening framework. Life-affirming stuff.”