The Goldfinch

x.

BECAUSE, APPARENTLY, SOMETIMES I woke Andy by thrashing and crying out in my sleep, Mrs. Barbour had started giving me a little green pill called Elavil that she explained would keep me from being scared at night. This was embarrassing, especially since my dreams weren’t even full-blown nightmares but only troubled interludes where my mother was working late and stranded without a ride—sometimes upstate, in some burned-out area with junked cars and chained dogs barking in the yards. Uneasily I searched for her in service elevators and abandoned buildings, waited for her in the dark at strange bus stops, glimpsed women who looked like her in the windows of passing trains and just missed grabbing up the telephone when she called me at the Barbours’ house—disappointments and near-misses that thumped me around and woke me with a sharp hiss of breath, lying queasy and sweaty in the morning light. The bad part wasn’t trying to find her, but waking up and remembering she was dead.

With the green pills, even these dreams faded into airless murk. (It strikes me now, though it didn’t then, that Mrs. Barbour was well out of line by giving me unprescribed medication on top of the yellow capsules and tiny orange footballs Dave the Shrink had prescribed me.) Sleep, when it came, was like tumbling into a pit, and often I had a hard time waking up in the morning.

“Black tea, that’s the ticket,” said Mr. Barbour one morning when I was nodding off at breakfast, pouring me a cup from his own well-stewed pot. “Assam Supreme. As strong as Mother makes it. It’ll flush the medication right out of your system. Judy Garland? Before shows? Well, my grandmother told me that Sid Luft used to always phone down to the Chinese restaurant for a big pot of tea to knock all the barbs out of her system, this was London, I believe, the Palladium, and strong tea was the only thing that did the trick, sometimes they’d have a hard time waking her up, you know, just getting her out of bed and dressed—”

“He can’t drink that, it’s like battery acid,” said Mrs. Barbour, dropping in two sugar cubes and pouring in a heavy slug of cream before she handed the cup over to me. “Theo, I hate to keep harping on this, but you really must eat something.”

“Okay,” I said sleepily, but without moving to take a bite of my blueberry muffin. Food tasted like cardboard; I hadn’t been hungry in weeks.

“Would you rather have ci

“It’s completely ridiculous that you won’t let us have coffee,” said Andy, who was in the habit of buying himself a huge Starbucks on the way to school and on the way home every afternoon, without his parents’ knowledge. “You’re very behind the times on this.”

“Possibly,” Mrs. Barbour said coldly.

“Even half a cup would help. It’s unreasonable for you to expect me to go into Advanced Placement Chemistry at 8:45 in the morning with no caffeine.”

“Sob, sob,” said Mr. Barbour, without looking up from the paper.

“Your attitude is very unhelpful. Everyone else is allowed to drink it.”

“I happen to know that’s not true,” said Mrs. Barbour. “Betsy Ingersoll told me—”

“Maybe Mrs. Ingersoll doesn’t let Sabine drink coffee, but it would take a whole lot more than a cup of coffee to get Sabine Ingersoll into Advanced Placement anything.”

“That’s uncalled for, Andy, and very unkind.”

“Well, it’s only the truth,” said Andy coolly. “Sabine is as dumb as a post. I suppose she may as well safeguard her health since she has so little else going for her.”

“Brains aren’t everything, darling. Would you eat an egg if Etta poached you one?” Mrs. Barbour said, turning to me. “Or fried? Or scrambled? Or whatever you like?”

“I like scrambled eggs!” Toddy said. “I can eat four!”

“No you can’t, pal,” said Mr. Barbour.

“Yes I can! I can eat six! I can eat the whole box!”

“It’s not as if I’m asking for Dexedrine,” Andy said. “Although I could get it at school if I felt like it.”

“Theo?” said Mrs. Barbour. Etta the cook, I noticed, was standing in the door. “What about that egg?”

“Nobody ever asks us what we want for breakfast,” Kitsey said; and even though she said it in a very loud voice, everyone pretended not to hear.

xi.

ONE SUNDAY MORNING, I climbed up to the light from a weighty and complicated dream, nothing of it left but a ringing in my ears and the ache of something slipped from my grasp and fallen into a crevasse where I would not see it again. Yet somehow—in the midst of this profound sinking, snapped threads, fragments lost and untrackable—a sentence stood out, ticking across the darkness like a news crawler at the bottom of a TV screen: Hobart and Blackwell. Ring the green bell.

I lay staring at the ceiling, not wanting to stir. The words were as clear and crisp as if someone had handed them to me typed on a slip of paper. And yet—most wonderfully—an expanse of forgotten memory had opened up and floated to the surface with them, like one of those paper pellets from Chinatown that bloom and swell into flowers when dropped into a glass of water.

Adrift in an air of charged significance, doubt struck me: was it a real memory, had he really spoken those words to me, or was I dreaming? Not long before my mother died, I’d woken convinced that a (nonexistent) schoolteacher named Mrs. Malt had put ground glass in my food because I had no discipline—in the world of my dream, a perfectly logical series of events—and I’d lain in a muddle of worry for two or three minutes before I came to my senses.

“Andy?” I said, and then leaned over and peered at the lower bunk, which was empty.

After lying wide-eyed for several moments, staring at the ceiling, I climbed down and retrieved the ring from the pocket of my school jacket and held it up to the light to look at the inscription. Then, quickly, I put it away and dressed. Andy was already up with the rest of the Barbours, at breakfast—Sunday breakfast was a big deal for them, I could hear them all in the dining room, Mr. Barbour rambling on indistinctly as he sometimes did, holding forth a bit. After pausing in the hall, I walked the other way, to the family room, and got the White Pages in its needlepoint cover from the cabinet under the telephone.

Hobart and Blackwell. There it was—clearly a business, though the listing didn’t say what sort. I felt a bit dizzy. Seeing the name in black and white gave me a strange thrill, as of unseen cards falling into place.

The address was in the Village, West Tenth Street. After some hesitation, and with a great deal of anxiety, I dialed the number.

As the phone rang, I stood fiddling with a brass carriage clock on the table in the family room, chewing my lower lip, looking at the framed prints of water birds over the telephone table: Noddy Tern, Townsend’s Cormorant, Common Osprey, Least Water Rail. I wasn’t quite sure how I was going to explain who I was or ask what I needed to know.

“Theo?”

I jumped, guiltily. Mrs. Barbour—in gossamer-gray cashmere—had come in, coffee cup in hand.

“What are you doing?”

The phone was still ringing away on the other end. “Nothing,” I said.

“Well, hurry up. Your breakfast is getting cold. Etta’s made French toast.”

“Thanks,” I said, “I’ll be right there,” just as a mechanical voice from the phone company came on the line and told me to try my call again later.

I joined the Barbours, preoccupied—I had hoped that at least a machine would pick up—and was surprised to see none other than Platt Barbour (much bigger and redder in the face than the last time I’d seen him) in the place where I usually sat.