The Goldfinch

“What?” I said, mildly surprised.

“He’s certainly turned out badly,” she said without looking up from the catalogue. “Living on credit… can’t hold a job and also some trouble with the law, I hear. Wrote some bad checks, apparently his mother had a hard time keeping the people from pressing charges. And Win Temple,” she said, looking up, before I could explain that Cable hadn’t really been a part of that aggressive-jock crowd. “He was the one who knocked Andy’s head against the wall in the showers.”

“Yes, that was him.” What I mainly remembered about the showers was not so much Andy getting concussed on the tile as Scheffernan and Cavanaugh wrestling me down and trying to shove a stick of deodorant up my ass.

Mrs. Barbour—wrapped delicately in her coat, shawl over her lap as if riding in a sleigh to a Christmas party—was still leafing through her book. “Do you know what that Temple boy said?”

“Sorry?”

“The Temple boy.” Her eyes were on the book; her voice was bright, as if she were speaking to a stranger at a cocktail party. “What his excuse was. When they asked why he knocked Andy unconscious.”

“No, I don’t know.”

“He said, ‘Because that kid gets on my nerves.’ He’s an attorney now, they tell me, I certainly hope he holds his temper a bit better in the courtroom.”

“Win wasn’t the worst of them,” I said, after a languid pause. “Not by a long shot. Now Cavanaugh and Scheffernan—”

“The mother wasn’t even listening. Texting away on her cell phone. Some terribly urgent matter with a client.”

I looked at the cuff of my shirt. I’d taken care to change into a fresh one after work—if there was one thing my opiated years had taught me (not to mention my years of antiques fraud), it was that starched shirts and suits fresh from the cleaners’ went a long, long way toward hiding a multitude of sins—but I’d been loopy and careless from the morphine tabs, drifting around my bedroom and humming to Elliott Smith as I dressed, sunshine… been keeping me up for days… and (I noticed) one of my cuffs wasn’t done up properly. Moreover the knots I’d chosen weren’t even a matched pair: one purple, the other blue.

“We could have sued,” said Mrs. Barbour absent-mindedly. “I don’t know why we didn’t. Chance said he thought it would make things harder for Andy at school.”

“Well—” There was no way I could inconspicuously do up my cuff again. It would have to wait for the cab. “That thing in the shower was really Scheffernan’s fault.”

“Yes, that’s what Andy said, and the Temple boy too, but as for the actual blow, the concussion, there was no question—”

“Scheffernan was a sneaky guy. He pushed Andy into Temple—Scheffernan was across the locker room and laughing his head off with Cavanaugh and those guys by the time the fight started.”

“Well, I don’t know about that, but David—” David was Scheffernan’s first name—“he wasn’t a bit like the others, always perfectly nice, so polite, we had him over here a good deal, and always so good about including Andy. You know how a lot of the children were, with birthday parties—”

“Yes, but Scheffernan had it in for Andy, always. Because Scheffernan’s mother was always forcing Andy down his throat. Making him ask Andy, making him come over here.”

Mrs. Barbour sighed and set down her cup. The tea was jasmine; I could smell it where I sat.

“Well, goodness knows, you knew Andy better than I did,” she said unexpectedly, drawing the embroidered collar of her wrap closer. “I never saw him for who he was and in some ways he was my favorite child. I wish I hadn’t been always trying to make him into someone else. Certainly you were able to accept him on his own terms, more than his father and I or God knows his brother. Look,” she said, in much the same tone, in the rather chilling silence that followed this. She was still leafing through the book. “Here’s St. Peter. Turning the little children away from Christ.”

Obediently I got up and circled behind. I knew the work, one of the great, stormy drypoints at the Morgan, the Hundred Guilder Print as it was called: the price that Rembrandt himself, according to legend, had been forced to pay to buy it back.

“He’s so particular, Rembrandt. Even his religious subjects—it’s as if the saints came down to model for him in the life. These two St. Peters—” she gestured to her own little pen-and-ink on the wall—“completely different works and years apart but the identical man, body and soul, you could pick him out of a line-up, couldn’t you? That balding head. Same face—dutiful, earnest. Goodness written all over him and yet always that twitch of worry and disquiet. That subtle shade of the betrayer.”

Though she was still gazing down at the book I found myself looking at the silver-framed photo of Andy and his father on the table beside us. It was only a snapshot but for a sense of foreshadowing, of transience and doom, no master of Dutch genre painting could have set up the composition more skillfully. Andy and Mr. Barbour against a dark background, snuffed candles in the wall sconces, Mr. Barbour’s hand on a model ship. The effect could have been no more allegorical, or chilling, if he’d had his hand on a skull. Above, in lieu of the hourglass beloved by the Dutch vanitas painters, a stark and slightly sinister clock with Roman numerals. Black hands: five minutes to twelve. Time ru

“Mommy—” It was Platt, barging in, stopping cold to see me.

“Don’t bother knocking dear,” said Mrs. Barbour without glancing up from her book, “you’re always welcome.”

“I—” Platt goggled at me. “Kitsey.” He seemed rattled. He dug his hands in the bellows pockets of his field coat. “She’s been held up,” he said to his mother.

Mrs. Barbour looked startled. “Oh,” she said. They looked at each other and some unspoken something seemed to pass between them.

“Held up?” I asked amiably, looking between them. “Where?”

There was no answer to this. Platt—gaze fixed on his mother—opened his mouth and shut it. Rather smoothly, Mrs. Barbour put her book aside and said, without looking at me: “Well, you know, I slightly think she’s out there playing golf today.”

“Really?” I said, mildly surprised. “Isn’t it bad weather for that?”

“There’s traffic,” Platt said eagerly, with a glance at his mother. “She’s stuck. The expressway is a mess. She’s phoned Forrest,” he said, turning to me, “they’re holding di

“Maybe,” said Mrs. Barbour, thoughtfully, after a pause, “maybe you and Theo should go out and have a drink? Yes,” she said decisively, to Platt, as if the matter had been settled, folding her hands. “I think that’s an excellent idea. You two go out and get a drink. And you!” she said, turning to me with a smile. “What an angel you are! Thank you so much for my book,” she said, reaching to clasp my hand. “The most wonderful present in the world.”

“But—”

“Yes?”

“Won’t she need to come back here and freshen up?” I said, after a slightly confused pause.

“Sorry?” Both of them were looking at me.

“If she’s been playing golf? Won’t she need to change? She won’t want to go to Forrest’s in her golfing clothes,” I added, looking back and forth between the two of them, and then—when neither of them replied—“I don’t mind waiting here.”

Thoughtfully, Mrs. Barbour pursed her lips, with heavy-looking eyes—and all at once, I got it. She was tired. She hadn’t been expecting to have to sit around and entertain me, only she was too polite to say so.

“Although,” I said, standing up, self-consciously, “it is getting on, I could use a cocktail—”

Just then, the phone in my pocket, which had been silent all day, chimed loudly: incoming text. Clumsily—I was so exhausted I could hardly figure out where my own pocket was—I fumbled for it.

Sure enough, it was Kitsey, jingling with emoji. ♥♥Hi Popsy ♥ ru