The Goldfinch

“I don’t remember.”

“Well, it’s fine if you don’t want to tell me. My point is, you can finish with good marks when you’re seventeen—maybe sixteen, if you bear down hard—and then you can go to college wherever you want.”

“Three years is a long time.”

“It is to us. But in the scheme of things—not at all. I mean,” said Andy reasonably, “look at some poor dumb bu

“Those people aren’t poor. I saw Villiers’s father on the cover of the Economist.”

“No, but they’re as dumb as a set of sofa cushions. I mean—Sabine can barely put one foot in front of the other. If her family didn’t have money and she had to manage on her own, she’d have to be, I don’t know, a prostitute. Longstreet—he’d probably just crawl in the corner and starve. Like a hamster you forgot to feed.”

“You’re depressing me.”

“All I’m saying is—you’re smart. And grownups like you.”

“What?” I said doubtfully.

“Sure,” said Andy, in his wan, irritating voice. “You remember names, do the eye-contact stuff, shake hands when you’re supposed to. At school they all tie themselves in knots for you.”

“Yeah, but—” I didn’t want to say it was because my mother was dead.

“Don’t be stupid. You get away with murder. You’re smart enough to figure it out on your own.”

“Why haven’t you figured out this sailing business then?”

“Oh, I’ve figured it out, all right,” said Andy grimly, returning to his hiragana workbook. “I’ve figured that I have four summers of Hell, at absolute worst. Three if Daddy lets me go to early college when I’m sixteen. Two if I bite the bullet junior year and go to that summer program at the Mountain School and learn organic farming. And after that, I’m never setting foot on a boat again.”

xi.

“IT’S DIFFICULT TO TALK to her on the phone, alas,” said Hobie. “I wasn’t anticipating that. She doesn’t do well at all.”

“Doesn’t do well?” I said. Scarcely a week had passed, and though I’d had no thought of returning to see Hobie somehow I was down there again: sitting at his kitchen table and eating my second dish of what had, upon first glance, appeared to be a black lump of flowerpot mud but was actually some delicious mess of ginger and figs, with whipped cream and tiny, bitter slivers of orange peel on top.

Hobie rubbed his eye. He’d been repairing a chair in the basement when I’d arrived. “It’s all very frustrating,” he said. His hair was tied back from his face; his glasses were around his neck on a chain. Under his black work smock, which he’d removed and hung on a peg, he was wearing old corduroys stained with mineral spirit and beeswax, and a thin-washed cotton shirt with the sleeves rolled above the elbow. “Margaret said she cried for three hours after she got off the telephone with me on Sunday night.”

“Why can’t she just come back?”

“Honestly, I wish I knew how to make things better,” said Hobie. Capable-looking and morose, his knobbly white hand flat on the table, there was something in the set of his shoulder that suggested a good-natured draft horse, or maybe a workman in the pub at the end of a long day. “I’d thought I might fly down and see about her, but Margaret says no. That she won’t settle in properly if I’m hovering about.”

“I think you should go anyway.”

Hobie raised his eyebrows. “Margaret’s hired a therapist—someone famous, apparently, who uses horses to work with injured children. And yes, Pippa loves animals, but even if she was perfectly well she wouldn’t want to be outdoors and riding horses the whole time. She’s spent most of her life in music lessons and practice halls. Margaret’s full of enthusiasm about the music program at her church but an amateur children’s choir can hardly hold much interest for her.”

I pushed the glass dish—scraped clean—aside. “Why did Pippa not know her before?” I said timidly, and then, when he didn’t answer: “Is it about money?”

“Not so much. Although—yes. You’re right. Money always has something to do with it. You see,” he said, leaning forward with his big, expressive hands on the table, “Welty’s father had three children. Welty, Margaret, and Pippa’s mother, Juliet. All with different mothers.”

“Oh.”

“Welty—the eldest. And I mean—eldest son, you’d think, wouldn’t you? But he contracted a tuberculosis of the spine when he was about six, when his parents were up in Aswan—the na

“That’s awful,” I said, shocked at the unfairness of this.

“Yes. I mean—you’ll get quite a different picture from Margaret, of course—but he was a hard man, Welty’s father. At any rate, after the Blackwells were expelled from Cairo—expelled isn’t the best term, perhaps. When Nasser came in, all the foreigners had to leave Egypt—Welty’s father was in the oil business, luckily for him he had money and property elsewhere. Foreigners weren’t allowed to take money or anything of much value out of the country.

“At any rate.” He reached for another cigarette. “I’ve gone off track a little. The point is that Welty scarcely knew Margaret, who was a good twelve years younger. Margaret’s mother was Texan, an heiress, with plenty of money of her own. That was the last and longest of old Mr. Blackwell’s marriages—the great love affair, to hear Margaret tell it. Prominent couple in Houston—lots of drinking and chartered airplanes, African safaris—Welty’s father loved Africa, even after he had to leave Cairo, he could never stay away.

“At any rate—” The match flared up, and he coughed as he exhaled a cloud of smoke. “Margaret was their father’s princess, apple of his eye, all that. But still and all, throughout the marriage, he carried on with coat check girls, waitresses, the daughters of friends—and at some point, when he was in his sixties, he fathered a baby with a girl who cut his hair. And that baby was Pippa’s mother.”

I said nothing. In second grade there had been a huge fuss (documented, daily, in the gossip pages of the New York Post) when the father of one of my classmates had a baby with a woman not Eli’s mother, which had meant that a lot of the mothers took sides and stopped speaking to each other out in front of school while they were waiting to pick us up in the afternoons.

“Margaret was in college, at Vassar,” said Hobie fitfully. Though he was speaking to me as if I were a grownup (which I liked), he didn’t seem particularly comfortable with the subject. “I think she didn’t speak to her father for a couple of years. Old Mr. Blackwell tried to pay the hairdresser off but his cheapness got the better of him, his cheapness where his dependents were concerned, anyway. And so you see Margaret—Margaret and Pippa’s mother Juliet never even met, except in the courtroom, when Juliet was practically still a babe in arms. Welty’s father had grown to hate the hairdresser so much that he’d made it plain in the will that neither she nor Juliet was to get a cent, apart from whatever mingy child support was required by law. But Welty—” Hobie stubbed out his cigarette—“Old Mr. Blackwell had some second thoughts where Welty was concerned, and did the right thing by him in the will. And throughout all this legal fracas, which went on for years, Welty grew to be terribly disturbed by how the baby was shunted off and neglected. Juliet’s mother didn’t want her; none of the mother’s relatives wanted her; old Mr. Blackwell had certainly never wanted her, and Margaret and her mother, frankly, would have been happy enough to see her on the street. And, in the meantime, there was the hairdresser, leaving Juliet alone in the apartment when she went to work… bad situation all around.