The Goldfinch

At the silence, my heart went cold. Dead flowers stood rotting in the massive Chinese vases and a shut-up heaviness overweighed the room: the air almost too stale to breathe, the exact, suffocating feel of our apartment when Mrs. Barbour took me back to Sutton Place to get some things I needed. It was a stillness I knew; this was how a house closed in on itself when someone had died.

All at once I wished I hadn’t come. But the man—Hobie—seemed to sense my misgiving, because he turned quite suddenly. Though he wasn’t a young man he still had something of a boy’s face; his eyes, a childish blue, were clear and startled.

“What’s the matter?” he said, and then: “Are you all right?”

His concern embarrassed me. Uncomfortably I stood in the stagnant, antique-crowded gloom, not knowing what to say.

He didn’t seem to know what to say either; he opened his mouth; closed it; then shook his head as if to clear it. He seemed to be around fifty or sixty, poorly shaven, with a shy, pleasant, large-featured face neither handsome nor plain—a man who would always be bigger than most of the other men in the room, though he also seemed unhealthy in some clammy, ill-defined way, with black-circled eyes and a pallor that made me think of the Jesuit martyrs depicted in the church murals I’d seen on our school trip to Montreal: large, capable, death-pale Europeans, staked and bound in the camps of the Hurons.

“Sorry, I’m in a bit of a tip.…” He was looking around with a vague, unfocused urgency, as my mother did when she’d misplaced something. His voice was rough but educated, like Mr. O’Shea my History teacher who’d grown up in a tough Boston neighborhood and ended up going to Harvard.

“I can come back. If that’s better.”

At this he glanced at me, mildly alarmed. “No, no,” he said—his cufflinks were out, the cuff fell loose and grubby at the wrist—“just give me a moment to collect myself, sorry—here,” he said distractedly, pushing the straggle of gray hair out of his face, “here we go.”

He was leading me towards a narrow, hard-looking sofa, with scrolled arms and a carved back. But it was tossed with pillow and blankets and we both seemed to notice at the same time that the tumble of bedding made it awkward to sit.

“Ah, sorry,” he murmured, stepping back so fast we almost bumped into each other, “I’ve set up camp in here as you can see, not the best arrangement in the world but I’ve had to make do since I can’t hear properly with all the goings-on…”

Turning away (so that I missed the rest of the sentence) he sidestepped a book face-down on the carpet and a teacup ringed with brown on the inside, and ushered me instead to an ornate upholstered chair, tucked and shirred, with fringe and a complicated button-studded seat—a Turkish chair, as I later learned; he was one of the few people in New York who still knew how to upholster them.

Winged bronzes, silver trinkets. Dusty gray ostrich plumes in a silver vase. Uncertainly, I perched on the edge of the chair and looked around. I would have preferred to be on my feet, the easier to leave.

He leaned forward, clasping his hands between his knees. But instead of saying a word he only looked at me and waited.

“I’m Theo,” I said in a rush, after much too long a silence. My face was so hot I felt about to burst into flames. “Theodore Decker. Everybody calls me Theo. I live uptown,” I added doubtfully.

“Well, I’m James Hobart, but everyone calls me Hobie.” His gaze was bleak and disarming. “I live downtown.”

At a loss I glanced away, unsure if he was making fun.

“Sorry.” He closed his eyes for a moment, then opened them. “Don’t mind me. Welty—” he glanced at the ring in his palm—“was my business partner.”

Was? The moon-dial clock—whirring and cogged, chained and weighted, a Captain Nemo contraption—burred loudly in the stillness before gonging on the quarter hour.

“Oh,” I said. “I just. I thought—”

“No. I’m sorry. You didn’t know?” he added, looking at me closely.

I looked away. I had not realized how much I’d counted on seeing the old man again. Despite what I’d seen—what I knew—somehow I’d still managed to nurture a childish hope that he’d pulled through, miraculously, like a murder victim on TV who after the commercial break turns out to be alive and recovering quietly in the hospital.

“And how do you happen to have this?”

“What?” I said, startled. The clock, I noticed, was way off: ten a.m., ten p.m., nowhere even near the correct time.

“You said he gave it to you?”

I shifted uncomfortably. “Yes. I—” The shock of his death felt new, as if I’d failed him a second time and it was happening all over again from a completely different angle.

“He was conscious? He spoke to you?”

“Yes,” I began, and then fell silent. I felt miserable. Being in the old man’s world, among his things, had brought the sense of him back very strongly: the dreamy underwater mood of the room, its rusty velvets, its richness and quiet.

“I’m glad he wasn’t alone,” said Hobie. “He would have hated that.” The ring was closed in his fingers and he put his fist to his mouth and looked at me.

“My. You’re just a cub, aren’t you?” he said.

I smiled uneasily, not sure how I was meant to respond.

“Sorry,” he said, in a more businesslike tone that I could tell was meant to reassure me. “It’s just—I know it was bad. I saw. His body—” he seemed to grasp for words—“before they call you in, they clean them up as best they can and they tell you that it won’t be pleasant, which of course you know but—well. You can’t prepare yourself for something like that. We had a set of Mathew Brady photographs come through the shop a few years ago—Civil War stuff, so gruesome we had a hard time selling it.”

I said nothing. It was not my habit to contribute to adult conversation apart from a ‘yes’ or ‘no’ when pressed, but all the same I was transfixed. My mother’s friend Mark, who was a doctor, had been the one who’d gone in to identify her body and no one had had very much to say to me about it.

“I remember a story I read once, a soldier, was it at Shiloh?” He was talking to me but not with his whole attention. “Gettysburg? a soldier so mad with shock that he started burying birds and squirrels on the battlefield. You had a lot of little things killed too, in the crossfire, little animals. Many tiny graves.”

“24,000 men died at Shiloh in two days,” I blurted.

His eyes reverted to me in alarm.

“50,000 at Gettysburg. It was the new weaponry. Minié balls and repeating rifles. That was why the body count was so high. We had trench warfare in America way before World War I. Most people don’t know that.”

I could see he had no idea what to do with this.

“You’re interested in the Civil War?” he said, after a careful pause.

“Er—yes,” I said brusquely. “Kind of.” I knew a lot about Union field artillery, because I’d written a paper on it so technical and fact-jammed that the teacher had made me write it again, and I also knew about Brady’s photographs of the dead at Antietam: I’d seen the pictures online, pin-eyed boys black with blood at the nose and mouth. “Our class spent six weeks on Lincoln.”

“Brady had a photography studio not far from here. Have you ever seen it?”

“No.” There had been a trapped thought about to emerge, something essential and unspeakable, released by the mention of those blank-faced soldiers. Now it was all gone but the image: dead boys with limbs akimbo, staring at the sky.

The silence that followed this was excruciating. Neither of us seemed to know how to move forward. At last Hobie recrossed his legs. “I mean to say—I’m sorry. To press you,” he said falteringly.

I squirmed. Coming downtown, I’d been so filled with curiosity that I’d failed to anticipate that I might be expected to answer any questions myself.

“I know it must be difficult to talk about. It’s just—I never thought—”