The Goldfinch

“Wow,” I said, after an uncomfortable pause, looking at Platt’s big-knuckled hands resting palms down on the table—hands that after all these years still had a blunt, brutal look, a residue of old cruelty about them. Although we had both endured our share of bullying at school, Platt’s persecution of Andy—inventive, joyous, sadistic—had verged on outright torture: spitting in Andy’s food, yes, tearing up his toys, but also leaving dead guppies from the fish tank and autopsy photos from the Internet on his pillow, throwing back the covers and peeing on him while he was asleep (and then crying Android’s wet the bed!); pushing his head under in the bathtub Abu Ghraib style; forcing his face down in the playground sandbox as he cried and fought to breathe. Holding his inhaler over his head as he wheezed and pleaded: want it? want it? Some hideous story too about Platt and a belt, an attic room in some country house, bound hands, a makeshift noose: ugliness. He’d have killed me, I remembered Andy saying, in his remote, emotionless voice, if the sitter hadn’t heard me kicking on the floor.

A light spring rain was tapping at the windows of the bar. Platt looked down at his empty glass, then up.

“Come see Mother,” he said. “I know she really wants to see you.”

“Now?” I said, when I realized he meant that instant.

“Oh, do please come. If not now, later. Don’t just promise like we all do on the street. It would mean so much to her.”

“Well—” Now it was my turn to look at my watch. I’d had some errands to do, in fact I had a lot on my mind and several very pressing worries of my own but it was getting late, the vodka had made me foggy, the afternoon had slipped away.

“Please,” he said. He signalled for the check. “She’ll never forgive me if she knows I ran into you and let you get away. Won’t you walk over for just a minute?”

iii.

STEPPING INTO THE FOYER was like stepping into a portal back to childhood: Chinese porcelains, lighted landscape paintings, silk-shaded lamps burning low, everything exactly as when Mr. Barbour had opened the door to me the night my mother died.

“No, no,” said Platt, when by habit I walked toward the bull’s-eye mirror and through to the living room. “Back here.” He was heading to the rear of the apartment. “We’re very informal now—Mommy usually sees people back here, if she sees anybody at all.…”

Back in the day, I had never been anywhere near Mrs. Barbour’s i

“She doesn’t go out the way she once did,” Platt was saying quietly. “None of these big di

Platt knocked; he listened. “Mommy?” he called, and—at the indistinct reply—opened the door a crack. “I’ve got a guest for you. You’ll never guess who I found on the street.…”

It was an enormous room, done up in an old-ladyish, 1980s peach. Directly off the entrance was a seating area with a sofa and slipper chairs—lots of knickknacks, needlepoint cushions, nine or ten Old Master drawings: the flight into Egypt, Jacob and the Angel, circle of Rembrandt mostly though there was a tiny pen-and-brown-ink of Christ washing the feet of St. Peter that was so deftly done (the weary slump and drape of Christ’s back; the blank, complicated sadness on St. Peter’s face) it might have been from Rembrandt’s own hand.

I leaned forward for a closer look; and on the far side of the room, a lamp with a pagoda-shaped shade popped on. “Theo?” I heard her say, and there she was, propped on piles of pillows in an outlandishly large bed.

“You! I can’t believe it!” she said, holding out her arms to me. “You’re all grown up! Where in the world have you been? Are you in the city now?”

“Yes. I’ve been back for a while. You look wonderful,” I added dutifully, though she didn’t.

“And you!” She put both hands over mine. “How handsome you are! I’m quite overcome.” She looked both older and younger than I remembered: very pale, no lipstick, lines at the corner of her eyes but her skin still white and smooth. Her silver-blonde hair (had it always been quite that silver, or had she gone gray?) fell loose and uncombed about her shoulders; she was wearing half-moon glasses and a satin bed jacket pi

“And here you find me, in my bed, with my needlework, like an old sailor’s widow,” she said, gesturing at the unfinished needlepoint canvas across her knees. A pair of tiny dogs—Yorkshire terriers—were asleep on a pale cashmere throw at her feet, and the smaller of the two, spotting me, sprang up and began to bark furiously.

Uneasily I smiled as she tried to quiet him—the other dog had set up a racket as well—and looked around. The bed was modern—king-sized, with a fabric covered headboard—but she had a lot of interesting old things back there that I wouldn’t have known to pay attention to when I was a kid. Clearly, it was the Sargasso Sea of the apartment, where objects banished from the carefully decorated public rooms washed up: mismatched end tables; Asian bric-a-brac; a knockout collection of silver table bells. A mahogany games table that from where I stood looked like it might be Duncan Phyfe and atop it (amongst cheap cloiso

“Ting-a-Ling, ssh, please be quiet, I can’t bear it. This is Ting-a-Ling,” said Mrs. Barbour, catching the struggling dog up in her arms, “he’s the naughty one, aren’t you darling, never a moment’s peace, and the other, with the pink ribbon, is Clementine. Platt,” she called, over the barking, “Platt, will you take him in the kitchen? He’s really a bit of a nuisance with guests,” she said to me, “I ought to have a trainer in…”

While Mrs. Barbour rolled up her needlework and put it in an oval basket with a piece of scrimshaw set in the lid, I sat down in the armchair by her bed. The upholstery was worn, and the subdued stripe was familiar to me—a former living-room chair exiled to the bedroom, the same chair I’d found my mother sitting in when she’d come to the Barbours’ many years ago to pick me up after a sleepover. I drew a finger over the cloth. All at once I saw my mother standing to greet me, in the bright green peacoat she’d been wearing that day—fashionable enough that people were always stopping her on the street to ask her where she got it, yet all wrong for the Barbours’ house.

“Theo?” said Mrs. Barbour. “Would you like something to drink? A cup of tea? Or something stronger?”

“No, thank you.”

She patted the brocade coverlet of the bed. “Come sit next to me. Please. I want to be able to see you.”

“I—” At her tone, at once intimate and formal, a terrible sadness came over me, and when we looked at each other it seemed that the whole past was redefined and brought into focus by this moment, clear as glass, a complexity of stillness that was rainy afternoons in spring, a dark chair in the hallway, the light-as-air touch of her hand on the back of my head.

“I’m so glad you came.”

“Mrs. Barbour,” I said, moving to the bed, sitting down gingerly with one hip, “my God. I can’t believe it. I didn’t find out till just now. I’m so sorry.”

She pressed her lips together like a child trying not to cry. “Yes,” she said, “well,” and there issued between us an awful and seemingly unbreakable silence.

“I’m so sorry,” I repeated, more urgently, aware just how clumsy I sounded, as if by speaking more loudly I might convey my acuity of sorrow.