The Goldfinch

I looked at my dad. “So there’s no way you could, say, wire me sixty-five thousand dollars,” I said. “If I needed it right this minute.”

“No! Absolutely not! So just put that out of your mind.” His ma

“Er—” I glanced at my dad, who had a hand over his eyes. Shit, I thought, and then realized I’d said it out loud.

“Well, no matter,” said Mr. Bracegirdle silkily. “It’s simply not possible.”

“No way?”

“No way, no how.”

“Okay, fine—” I tried hard to think, but my mind was ru

“No. It would all have to be arranged directly with the college or school of your choice. In other words, I’m going to need to see bills, and pay bills. There’s a lot of paperwork, as well. And in the unlikely event you decide not to attend college…”

As he talked on, confusingly, about various ins and outs of the funds my mother had set up for me (all of which were fairly restrictive, as far as either my father or me getting our hands immediately on actual, spendable cash) my dad, holding the phone out from his ear, had something very like an expression of horror on his face.

“Well, uh, that’s good to know, thank you sir,” I said, trying hard to wrap up the conversation.

“There are tax advantages of course. Setting it up like this. But what she really wanted was to make sure your father would never be able to touch it.”

“Oh?” I said, uncertainly, in the overly long silence that followed. Something in his tone had made me suspect that he knew my father might be the Lord Vader-ish presence breathing audibly (audibly to me—whether audibly to him I don’t know) on the other line.

“There are other considerations, as well. I mean—” decorous silence—“I don’t know if I ought to tell you this, but an unauthorized party has twice tried to make a large withdrawal on the account.”

“What?” I said, after a sick pause.

“You see,” said Mr. Bracegirdle, his voice as distant as if it were coming from the bottom of the sea, “I’m the custodian on the account. And about two months after your mother died, someone walked in the bank in Manhattan during business hours and tried to forge my signature on the papers. Well, they know me at the main branch, and they called me right away, but while they were still on the phone with me the man slipped out the door, before the security guard was able to approach and ask for ID. That was, my goodness, nearly two years ago. But then—only last week—did you get the letter I wrote you about this?”

“No,” I said, when at last I realized I needed to say something.

“Well, without going into it too much, there was a peculiar phone call. From someone purporting to be your attorney out there, requesting a transfer of funds. And then—checking into it—we found out that some party with access to your Social Security number had applied for, and received, a rather large line of credit in your name. Do you happen to know anything about that?

“Well, not to worry,” he continued, when I didn’t say anything. “I have a copy of your birth certificate here, and I faxed it to the issuing bank and had the line shut down immediately. And I’ve alerted Equifax and all the credit agencies. Even though you’re a minor, and legally unable to enter into such a contract, you could be responsible for any such debts incurred in your name once you come of age. At any rate, I urge you to be very careful with your Social Security number in future. It’s possible to have a new Social issued, in theory, although the red tape is such a headache that I don’t suggest it…”

I was in a cold sweat when I hung up the telephone—and completely unprepared for the howl that my father let out. I thought he was angry—angry at me—but when he just stood there with the phone still in his hand, I looked at him a little closer and realized he was crying.

It was horrible. I had no idea what to do. He sounded like he’d had boiling water poured over him—like he was turning into a werewolf—like he was being tortured. I left him there and—Popchik hurrying up the stairs ahead of me; clearly he didn’t want any part of this howling, either—went in my room and locked the door and sat on the side of my bed with my head in my hands, wanting aspirin but not wanting to go down to the bathroom to get it, wishing Xandra would hurry up and come home. The screams from downstairs were ungodly, like he was being burned with a blow torch. I got my iPod, tried to find some loud-ish music that wasn’t upsetting (Shostakovich’s Fourth, which though classical actually was a bit upsetting) and lay on my bed with the earbuds in and stared at the ceiling, while Popper stood with his ears up and stared at the closed door, the hairs on his neck erect and bristling.

xv.

“HE TOLD ME YOU had a fortune,” said Boris, later that night at the playground, while we were sitting around waiting for the drugs to work. I slightly wished we had picked another night to take them, but Boris had insisted it would make me feel better.

“You believed I had a fortune, and wouldn’t tell you?” We’d been sitting on the swings for what seemed like forever, waiting for just what I didn’t know.

Boris shrugged. “I don’t know. There are a lot of things you don’t tell me. I would have told you. It’s all right, though.”

“I don’t know what to do.” Though it was very subtle, I’d begun to notice glittering gray kaleidoscope patterns turning sluggishly in the gravel by my foot—dirty ice, diamonds, sparkles of broken glass. “Things are getting scary.”

Boris nudged me. “There’s something I didn’t tell you either, Potter.”

“What?”

“My dad has to leave. For his job. He’s going back to Australia in a few months. Then on, I think, to Russia.”

There was a silence that maybe lasted five seconds, but felt like it lasted an hour. Boris? Gone? Everything seemed frozen, like the planet had stopped.

“Well, I’m not going,” said Boris serenely. His face in the moonlight had taken on an u

“Where?”

“Du

“Yes,” I said, without thinking, and then: “Is Kotku going?”

He grimaced. “I don’t know.” The filmic quality had become so stage-lit and stark that all semblance of real life had vanished; we’d been neutralized, fictionalized, flattened; my field of vision was bordered by a black rectangle; I could see the subtitles ru

Boris was still talking, and I realized if I didn’t want to be lost forever in this grainy Nosferatu world, sharp shadows and achromatism, it was important to listen to him and not get so hung up on the artificial texture of things.

“… I mean, I guess I understand,” he was saying mournfully, as speckles and raindrops of decay danced all around him. “With her it’s not even ru

“Kotku lived on the street?” I felt an unexpected surge of compassion for her—orchestrated somehow, with a cinematic music swell almost, although the sadness itself was perfectly real.

“Well, I have too, in Ukraine. But I would be with my friends Maks and Seryozha—never more than few days at a time. Sometimes it was good fun. We’d kip in basement of abandoned buildings—drink, take butorphanol, build campfires even. But I always went home when my dad sobered up. With Kotku though, it was different. This one boyfriend of her mother’s—he was doing stuff to her. So she left. Slept in doorways. Begged for change—blew guys for money. Was out of school for a while—she was brave to come back, to try and finish, after what happened. Because, I mean, people say stuff. You know.”