The Goldfinch

“Um—” I turned to the shop window to compose myself, and my transparent ghost turned to meet me, crowds passing behind me in the glass.

“Gosh,” I said. “I can’t believe it. I don’t know what to say.”

“Sorry to blurt it on the street like that,” said Platt, rubbing his jaw. “You look a bit green around the gills.”

Green around the gills: a phrase of Mr. Barbour’s. With a pang, I remembered Mr. Barbour searching through the drawers in Platt’s room, offering to build me a fire. Hell of a thing that’s happened, good Lord.

“Your dad, too?” I said, blinking as if someone had just shaken me awake from a sound sleep. “Is that what you just said?”

He looked around, with a lift of the chin that brought back for a moment the arrogant old Platt I remembered, then glanced at his watch.

“Come on, have you got a minute?” he said.

“Well—”

“Let’s get a drink,” he said, pounding a hand on my shoulder so heavily I flinched. “I know a quiet place on Third Avenue. What do you say?”

ii.

WE SAT IN THE nearly empty bar—a once-famous oak-panelled joint smelling of hamburger grease, Ivy League pe

“Daddy,” he said, looking down into his gin and lime: Mrs. Barbour’s drink. “We all shrank from talking about it—but. Chemical imbalance is how our grandmother spoke of it. Bipolar disorder. He had his first episode, or attack, or whatever you call it, at Harvard Law—1L, never made it to the second year. All these wild plans and enthusiasms… combative in class, talking out of turn, had set out writing some epic book-length poem about the whaling ship Essex which was just a bunch of nonsense and then his roommate, who was apparently more of a stabilizing influence than anyone knew, left for a semester abroad in Germany and—well. My grandfather had to take the train up to Boston to fetch him. He’d been arrested for starting a fire out in front of the statue of Samuel Eliot Morison on Commonwealth Avenue and he resisted arrest when the policeman tried to take him in.”

“I knew he’d had problems. I never knew it was like that.”

“Well.” Platt stared into his drink, and then knocked it back. “That was well before I came along. Things changed after he married Mommy and he’d been on his medicine for a while, although our grandmother never really trusted him after all that.”

“All what?”

“Oh, of course we got on with her quite well, the grandchildren,” he said hastily. “But you can’t imagine the trouble Daddy caused when he was younger… tore through worlds of money, terrible rows and rages, some awful problems with underage girls… he’d weep and apologize, and then it would happen all over again.… Gaga always blamed him for our grandfather’s heart attack, the two of them were quarreling at my grandfather’s office and boom. Once on the medicine, though, he was a lamb. Wonderful father—well—you know. Wonderful with us children.”

“He was lovely. When I knew him.”

“Yes.” Platt shrugged. “He could be. After he married Mommy, he was on an even keel for a while. Then—I don’t know what happened. He made some terribly unsound investments—that was the first sign. Embarrassing late-night phone calls to acquaintances, that sort of thing. Became romantically obsessed with a college girl interning in his office—girl whose family Mommy knew. It was terribly hard.”

For some reason, I was incredibly touched by hearing him call Mrs. Barbour ‘Mommy.’ “I never knew any of this,” I said.

Platt frowned: a hopeless, resigned expression that brought out sharply his resemblance to Andy. “We hardly knew it ourselves—we children,” he said bitterly, drawing his thumb across the tablecloth. “ ‘Daddy’s ill’—that’s all we were told. I was off at school, see, when they sent him to the hospital, they never let me talk to him on the phone, they said he was too sick and for weeks and weeks I thought he was dead and they didn’t want to tell me.”

“I remember all that. It was awful.”

“All what?”

“The, uh, nervous trouble.”

“Yeah, well—” I was startled by the snap of anger in his eyes—“and how was I supposed to know if it was ‘nervous trouble’ or terminal cancer or what the fuck? ‘Andy’s so sensitive… Andy’s better off in the city… we don’t think Andy would thrive with boarding…’ well, all I can say is Mommy and Daddy packed me off pretty much the second I could tie my shoes, stupid fucking equestrian school called Prince George’s, completely third-rate but oh, wow, such a character-building experience, such a great preparation for Groton, and they took really young kids, seven through thirteens. You should have seen the brochure, Virginia hunt country and all that, except it wasn’t all green hills and riding habits like the pictures. I got trampled in a stall and broke my shoulder and there I was in the infirmary with this view of the empty driveway and no car coming up it. Not one fucking person came to visit me, not even Gaga. Plus the doctor was a drunk and set the shoulder wrong, I still have problems with it. I hate horses to this motherfucking day.

“Any how—” self-conscious change of tone—“they’d yanked me out of that place and got me into Groton by the time things really came to a head with Daddy and he was sent away. Apparently there was an incident on the subway… conflicting stories there, Daddy said one thing and the cops said another but—” he lifted his eyebrows, with a sort of ma

“So—” I thought of my ugly run-in with Mr. Barbour on the street, decided not to bring it up—“what happened?”

“Well, who knows. He started having problems again a few years ago and had to go back in.”

“What kind of problems?”

“Oh—” Platt exhaled noisily—“much the same, embarrassing phone calls, public outbursts, et cetera. Nothing was wrong with him, of course, he was perfectly fine, it all started when they were doing some renovations on the building, which he was against, constant hammers and saws and all these corporations destroying the city, nothing that wasn’t true to start with, and then it just sort of snowballed, to the point where he thought he was being followed and photographed and spied on all the time. Wrote some pretty crazy letters to people, including some clients at his firm… made a terrible nuisance of himself at the Yacht Club… quite a few of the members complained, even some very old friends of his, and who can blame them?

“Anyway, when Daddy got back from the hospital that second time—he was never quite the same. The swings were less extreme, but he couldn’t concentrate and he was very irritable all the time. About six months ago he switched doctors and took a leave of absence from work and went up to Maine—our uncle Harry has a place on a little island up there, no one was there except the caretaker, and Daddy said the sea air did him good. All of us took turns going up to be with him… Andy was in Boston then, at MIT, the last thing he wanted was to be saddled with Daddy but unfortunately since he was closer than us, he got stuck with it a bit.”

“He didn’t go back to the, er—” I didn’t want to say ding farm—“where he went before?”

“Well, how was anyone to make him? It’s not an easy matter to send someone away against their will, especially when they won’t admit anything is wrong with them which at that point he wouldn’t, and besides we were led to believe it was all a matter of medication, that he would be right as rain as soon as the new dose kicked in. The caretaker checked in with us, made sure he ate well and took his medicine, Daddy spoke on the phone to his shrink every day—I mean, the doctor said it was all right,” he said defensively. “Fine for Daddy to drive, to swim, to sail if he felt like it. Probably it wasn’t a terrific idea to go out quite so late in the day but the conditions weren’t so bad when we set out and of course you know Daddy. Dauntless seaman and all that. Heroics and derring-do.”