The Goldfinch

Dear Mr. Hobart,

Hello, how are you? Well, I hope. I have never written to thank you for your kindness during my last weeks in New York. I hope that you and Cosmo are okay, though I know you both miss Pippa. How is she? I hope she’s been able to go back to her music. I hope too

But I didn’t send that one either. Hence I was delighted when a letter arrived—a long letter, on real paper—from none other than Hobie.

“What’ve you got there?” said my father suspiciously—spotting the New York postmark, snatching the letter from my hand.

“What?”

But my dad had already torn the envelope open. He sca

The letter itself was beautiful, as a physical artifact: rich paper, careful penmanship, a whisper of quiet rooms and money.

Dear Theo,

I’ve wanted to hear how you are and yet I’m glad I haven’t, as I hope this means you are happy and busy. Here, the leaves have turned, Washington Square is sodden and yellow, and it’s getting cold. On Saturday mornings, Cosmo and I mooch around the Village—I pick him up and carry him into the cheese shop—not sure that’s entirely legal but the girls behind the counter save him bits and bobs of cheese. He misses Pippa as much as I do but—like me—still enjoys his meals. Sometimes we eat by the fireplace now that Jack Frost is on us.

I hope that you’re settling in there a bit and have made some friends. When I talk to Pippa on the telephone she doesn’t seem very happy where she is, though her health is certainly better. I am going to fly down there for Thanksgiving. I don’t know how pleased Margaret will be to have me, but Pippa wants me so I’ll go. If they allow me to carry Cosmo on the plane I might bring him, too.

I’m enclosing a photo that I thought you might enjoy—of a Chippendale bureau that has just arrived, very bad repair, I was told it was stored in an unheated shed up around Watervliet, New York. Very scarred, very nicked, and the top’s in two pieces—but—look at those swept-back, weight-bearing talons on that ball-and-claw! the feet don’t come out well in the photo, but you can really see the pressure of the claws digging in. It’s a masterpiece, and I only wish it had been better looked after. I don’t know if you can see the remarkable graining on the top—extraordinary.

As for the shop: I open it a few times a week by appointment, but mostly I keep myself busy below stairs with things sent to me by private clients. Mrs. Skolnik and several people in the neighborhood have asked about you—everything’s much the same here, except Mrs. Cho at the Korean market had a little stroke (very little, she’s back at work now). Also that coffee shop on Hudson that I liked so much has gone out of business—very sad. I walked by this morning and it looks as if they’re turning it into a—well, I don’t know what you’d call it. Some sort of Japanese novelty store.

I see that as usual I’ve gone on too long and that I’m ru

xv.

THAT NIGHT, AT BORIS’S—lying drunk on my half of the batik-draped mattress—I tried to remember what Pippa had looked like. But the moon was so large and clear through the uncurtained window that it made me think instead of a story my mother had told me, about driving to horse shows with her mother and father in the back seat of their old Buick when she was little. “It was a lot of travelling—ten hours sometimes through hard country. Ferris wheels, rodeo rings with sawdust, everything smelled like popcorn and horse manure. One night we were in San Antonio, and I was having a bit of a melt-down—wanting my own room, you know, my dog, my own bed—and Daddy lifted me up on the fairgrounds and told me to look at the moon. ‘When you feel homesick,’ he said, ‘just look up. Because the moon is the same wherever you go.’ So after he died, and I had to go to Aunt Bess—I mean, even now, in the city, when I see a full moon, it’s like he’s telling me not to look back or feel sad about things, that home is wherever I am.” She kissed me on the nose. “Or where you are, puppy. The center of my earth is you.”

A rustle, next to me. “Potter?” said Boris. “You awake?”

“Can I ask you something?” I said. “What does the moon look like in Indonesia?”

“What are you on about?”

“Or, I don’t know, Russia? Is it just the same as here?”

He rapped me lightly on the side of the head with his knuckles—a gesture of his that I had come to know, meaning idiot. “Same everywhere,” he said, yawning, propping himself up on his scrawny braceleted wrist. “And why?”

“Du

A door had slammed. “What’s that?” I said, rolling to face him. We looked at each other, listening. Voices downstairs—laughter, people knocking around, a crash like something had been knocked over.

“Is that your dad?” I said, sitting up—and then I heard a woman’s voice, drunken and shrill.

Boris sat up too, bony and sickly-pale in the light through the window. Downstairs, it sounded like they were throwing things and pushing furniture around.

“What are they saying?” I whispered.

Boris listened. I could see all the bolts and hollows in his neck. “Bullshit,” he said. “They’re drunk.”

The two of us sat there, listening—Boris more intently than me.

“Who’s that with him then?” I said.

“Some whore.” He listened for a moment, brow furrowed, his profile sharp in the moonlight, and then lay back down. “Two of them.”

I rolled over, and checked my iPod. It was 3:17 in the morning.

“Fuck,” groaned Boris, scratching his stomach. “Why don’t they shut up?”

“I’m thirsty,” I said, after a timid pause.

He snorted. “Ha! You don’t want to go out there now, trust me.”

“What are they doing?” I asked. One of the women had just screamed—whether in laughter or fright, I couldn’t tell.

We lay there, stiff as boards, staring at the ceiling, listening to the ominous crashing and bumping-around.

“Ukrainian?” I said, after a bit. Though I couldn’t understand a word of what they were saying, I’d been around Boris enough that I was begi

“Top marks, Potter.” Then: “Light me a cigarette.”

We passed it back and forth, in the dark, until another door slammed somewhere and the voices died down. At last, Boris exhaled, a final smoky sigh, and rolled over to stub it out in the overflowing ashtray beside the bed. “Good night,” he whispered.

“Good night.”

He fell asleep almost immediately—I could tell from his breathing—but I lay awake a lot longer, with a scratchy throat, feeling light-headed and sick from the cigarette. How had I fetched up into this strange new life, where drunk foreigners shouted around me in the night, and all my clothes were dirty, and nobody loved me? Boris—oblivious—snored beside me. At last, towards dawn, when I finally fell asleep, I dreamed of my mother: sitting across from me on the 6 train, swaying slightly, her face calm in the flickering artificial lights.

What are you doing here? she said. Go home! Right now! I’ll meet you at the apartment. Only the voice wasn’t quite right; and when I looked more closely I saw it wasn’t her at all, only someone pretending to be her. And with a gasp and a start, I woke up.