The Goldfinch (16 page)

B
UT
I
DID WEAR IT
. Or—rather—I ignored her advice to put it in a safe place, and continued to carry it around in my pocket. When I hefted it in my palm, it was very heavy; if I closed my fingers around it, the gold got warm from the heat of my hand but the carved stone stayed cool. Its weighty, antiquated quality, its mixture of sobriety and brightness, were strangely comforting; if I fixed my attention on it intensely enough, it had a strange power to anchor me in my drifting state and shut out the world around me, but for all that, I really didn’t want to think about where it had come from.

Nor did I want to think about my future—for though I had scarcely
been looking forward to a new life in rural Maryland, at the chill mercies of my Decker grandparents, I now began to seriously worry about what was going to happen to me. Everyone seemed profoundly shocked at the Holiday Inn idea, as if Grandpa Decker and Dorothy had suggested I move into a shed in their back yard, but to me it didn’t seem so bad. I’d always wanted to live in a hotel, and even if the Holiday Inn wasn’t the kind of hotel I’d imagined, certainly I would manage: room service hamburgers, pay-per-view, a pool in summer, how bad could it be?

Everyone (the social workers, Dave the shrink, Mrs. Barbour) kept telling me again and again that I could not possibly live on my own at a Holiday Inn in suburban Maryland, that no matter what, it would never actually come to that—not seeming to realize that their supposedly comforting words were only increasing my anxiety a hundredfold. “The thing to remember,” said Dave, the psychiatrist who had been assigned to me by the city, “is that you’ll be taken care of no matter what.” He was a thirtyish guy with dark clothes and trendy eyeglasses who always looked as if he’d just come from a poetry reading in the basement of some church. “Because there are tons of people looking out for you who only want what’s best for you.”

I had grown suspicious of strangers talking about what was best for me, as it was exactly what the social workers had said before the subject of the foster home came up. “But—I don’t think my grandparents are so wrong,” I said.

“Wrong about what?”

“About the Holiday Inn. It might be an okay place for me to be.”

“Are you saying that things are not okay for you at your grandparents’ home?” said Dave, without missing a beat.

“No!” I hated this about him—how he was always putting words in my mouth.

“All right then. Maybe we can phrase it another way.” He folded his hands, and thought. “Why would you rather live at a hotel than with your grandparents?”

“I didn’t say that.”

He put his head to the side. “No, but from the way you keep bringing up the Holiday Inn, like it’s a viable choice, I’m hearing you say that’s what you prefer to do.”

“It seems a lot better than going into a foster home.”

“Yes—” he leaned forward—“but please hear me say this. You’re only thirteen. And you just lost your primary caregiver. Living alone right now is really not an option for you. What I’m trying to say is that it’s too bad your grandparents are dealing with these health issues, but believe me, I’m sure we can work out something much better once your grandmother is up and around.”

I said nothing. Clearly he had never met Grandpa Decker and Dorothy. Though I hadn’t been around them very much myself, the main thing I remembered was the complete absence of blood feeling between us, the opaque way they looked at me as if I was some random kid who’d wandered over from the mall. The prospect of going to live with them was almost literally unimaginable and I’d been racking my brains trying to remember what I could about my last visit to their house—which wasn’t very much, as I’d been only seven or eight years old. There had been handstitched sayings framed and hanging on the walls, a plastic countertop contraption that Dorothy used to dehydrate foods in. At some point—after Grandpa Decker had yelled at me to keep my sticky little mitts off his train set—my dad had gone outside for a cigarette (it was winter) and not come back inside the house. “Jesus God,” my mother had said, once we were out in the car (it had been her idea that I should get to know my father’s family), and after that we never went back.

Several days after the Holiday Inn offer, a greeting card arrived for me at the Barbours’. (An aside: is it wrong to think that Bob and Dorothy, as they signed themselves, should have picked up the telephone and called me? Or got in their car and driven to the city to see about me themselves? But they did neither of these things—not that I exactly expected them to rush to my side with wails of sympathy, but still, it would have been nice if they’d surprised me with some small, if uncharacteristic, gesture of affection.)

Actually, the card was from Dorothy (the “Bob,” plainly in her hand, had been squeezed in alongside her own signature as an afterthought). The envelope, interestingly, had the look of having been steamed open and resealed—by Mrs. Barbour? Social Services?—although the card itself was definitely in Dorothy’s stiff up-and-down European handwriting that appeared exactly once a year on our Christmas cards, writing that—as my father had once commented—looked as if it ought to be on the chalkboard at La Goulue listing the daily fish specials. On the front of
the card was a drooping tulip, and—underneath—a printed slogan:
There are no endings.

Dorothy, from the very little I remembered of her, was not one to waste words, and this card was no exception. After a perfectly cordial opening—sorry for my tragic loss, thinking of me in this time of sorrow—she offered to send me a bus ticket to Woodbriar, MD, while simultaneously alluding to vague medical conditions that made it difficult for her and Grandpa Decker to “meet the demands” for my care.

“Demands?” said Andy. “She makes it sound as if you’re asking for ten million in unmarked notes.”

I was silent. Oddly, it was the picture on the greeting card that had troubled me. It was the kind of thing you’d see in a drugstore card rack, perfectly normal, but still a photograph of a wilted flower—no matter how artistically done—didn’t seem quite the thing to send to somebody whose mother had just died.

“I thought she was supposed to be so sick. Why’s she the one writing?”

“Search me.” I had wondered the same thing; it did seem weird that my actual grandfather hadn’t included a message or even bothered to sign his own name.

“Maybe,” said Andy gloomily, “your grandfather has Alzheimer’s and she’s holding him prisoner in his own home. To get his money. That happens quite frequently with the younger wives, you know.”

“I don’t think he has that much money.”

“Possibly not,” said Andy, clearing his throat ostentatiously. “But one can never rule out the thirst for power. ‘Nature red in tooth and claw.’ Perhaps she doesn’t want you edging in on the inheritance.”

“Chum,” said Andy’s father, looking up rather suddenly from the
Financial Times,
“I don’t think this is a terribly productive line of conversation.”

“Well, quite honestly, I don’t see why Theo can’t stay on with us,” said Andy, voicing my own thoughts. “I enjoy the company and there’s plenty of space in my room.”

“Well certainly we’d all like to keep him for ourselves,” said Mr. Barbour, with a heartiness not as full or convincing as I would have liked. “But what would his family think? The last I heard, kidnapping was still against the law.”

“Well, I mean, Daddy, that hardly seems to be the situation here,” said Andy, in his irritating, faraway voice.

Abruptly Mr. Barbour got up, with his club soda in his hand. He wasn’t allowed to drink because of the medicine he took. “Theo, I forget. Do you know how to sail?”

It took me a moment to realize what he’d asked me. “No.”

“Oh, that’s too bad. Andy had
the
most outstanding time at his sailing camp up in Maine last year, didn’t you?”

Andy was silent. He had told me, many times, that it was the worst two weeks of his life.

“Do you know how to read nautical flags?” Mr. Barbour asked me.

“Sorry?” I said.

“There’s an excellent chart in my study I’d be happy to show you. Don’t make that face, Andy. It’s a perfectly handy skill for any boy to know.”

“Certainly it is, if he needs to hail a passing tugboat.”

“These smart remarks of yours are very tiresome,” said Mr. Barbour, although he looked more distracted than annoyed. “Besides,” he said, turning to me, “I think you’d be surprised how often nautical flags pop up in parades and movies and, I don’t know, on the stage.”

Andy pulled a face. “
The stage,
” he said derisively.

Mr. Barbour turned to look at him. “Yes,
the stage.
Do you find the term amusing?”

“Pompous is a lot more like it.”

“Well, I’m afraid I fail to see what you find so pompous about it. Certainly it’s the very word your great-grandmother would have used.” (Mr. Barbour’s grandfather had been dropped from the Social Register for marrying Olga Osgood, a minor movie actress.)

“My point exactly.”

“Then what would you have me call it?”

“Actually, Daddy, what I would really like to know is the last time you saw nautical flags showcased in
any
theatrical production.”

“
South Pacific,
” said Mr. Barbour swiftly.

“Besides
South Pacific.
”

“I rest my case.”

“I don’t believe you and Mother even saw
South Pacific.
”

“For God’s sake, Andy.”

“Well, even if you did. One example doesn’t sufficiently establish your case.”

“I refuse to continue this absurd conversation. Come along, Theo.”

vii.

F
ROM THIS POINT ON,
I began trying especially hard to be a good guest: to make my bed in the mornings; to always say thank you and please, and to do everything I knew my mother would want me to do. Unfortunately the Barbours didn’t exactly have the kind of household where you could show your appreciation by babysitting the younger siblings or pitching in with the dishes. Between the woman who came to look after the plants—a depressing job, since there was so little light in the apartment the plants mostly died—and Mrs. Barbour’s assistant, whose main job seemed to be rearranging the closets and the china collection—they had somewhere in the neighborhood of eight people working for them. (When I’d asked Mrs. Barbour where the washing machine was, she’d looked at me as if I’d asked for lye and lard to boil up for soap.)

But though nothing was required of me, still the effort to blend into their polished and complicated household was an immense strain. I was desperate to vanish into the background—to slip invisibly among the Chinoiserie patterns like a fish in a coral reef—and yet it seemed I drew unwanted attention to myself hundreds of times a day: by having to ask for every little item, whether a wash cloth or the Band-Aids or the pencil sharpener; by not having a key, always having to ring when I came and went—even by my well-intentioned efforts to make my own bed in the morning (it was better just to let Irenka or Esperenza do it, Mrs. Barbour explained, as they were used to doing it and did a better job with the corners). I broke off a finial on an antique coat stand by throwing open a door; twice managed to set off the burglar alarm by mistake; and even blundered into Mr. and Mrs. Barbour’s room one night when I was looking for the bathroom.

Luckily, Andy’s parents were around so little that my presence didn’t seem to inconvenience them very much. Unless Mrs. Barbour was entertaining, she was out of the apartment from about eleven a.m.—popping in for a couple of hours before dinner, for a gin and lime and what she
called “a bit of a tub”—and then not home again until we were in bed. Of Mr. Barbour I saw even less, except on weekends and when he was sitting around after work with his napkin-wrapped glass of club soda, waiting for Mrs. Barbour to dress for their evening out.

By far the biggest issue I faced was Andy’s siblings. Though Platt, luckily, was off terrorizing younger children at Groton, still Kitsey and the youngest brother, Toddy, who was only seven, clearly resented having me around to usurp what minor attention they got from their parents. There were a lot of tantrums and pouting, a lot of eye rolling and hostile giggling on Kitsey’s part, as well as a baffling (to me) upset—never fully resolved—where she complained to her friends and the housekeepers and anyone who would listen that I’d been going in her room and messing around with the piggy-bank collection on the shelf above her desk. As for Toddy, he grew more and more disturbed as the weeks went by and still I was there; at breakfast, he gaped at me unashamed and frequently asked questions that made his mother reach under the table and pinch him. Where did I live? How much longer was I going to stay with them? Did I have a dad? Then where was he?

“Good question,” I said, provoking horrified laughter from Kitsey, who was popular at school and—at nine—as pretty in her white-blonde way as Andy was plain.

viii.