Текст книги "The Goldfinch "

Автор книги: Donna Tartt

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“What?” he said, waving the smoke from his face, when he caught me staring at the crumpled packet, French, like people smoked in old movies. “Don’t tell me you want one too.”

“No thank you,” I said, after an uneasy silence. I was pretty sure he was joking although I wasn’t a hundred per cent sure.

He, in return, was blinking at me sharply through the tobacco haze with a sort of worried look, as though he had just realized some crucial fact about me.

“It’s you, isn’t it?” he said unexpectedly.

“Excuse me?”

“You’re the boy, aren’t you? Whose mother died in there?”

I was too stunned to say anything for a moment.

“What,” I said, meaning how do you know, but I couldn’t quite get it out.

Uncomfortably, he rubbed an eye and sat back suddenly, with the fluster of a man who’s spilled a drink on the table. “Sorry. I don’t—I mean—that didn’t come out right. God. I’m—” vaguely he gestured as if to say I’m exhausted, not thinking straight.

Not very politely, I looked away—blindsided by a queasy, unwelcome swell of emotion. Since my mother’s death, I had cried hardly at all and certainly not in front of anyone—not even at her memorial service, where people who barely knew her (and one or two who had made her life Hell, such as Mathilde) were sobbing and blowing their noses all around me.

He saw I was upset; started to say something; reconsidered.

“Have you eaten?” he said unexpectedly.

I was too surprised to answer. Food was the last thing on my mind.

“Ah, I thought not,” he said, rising creakily to his big feet. “Let’s go rustle up something.”

“I’m not hungry,” I said, so rudely I was sorry. Since my mother’s death, all anyone seemed to think of was shovelling food down my throat.

“No, no, of course not.” With his free hand he fanned away a cloud of smoke. “But come along, please. Humor me. You’re not vegetarian, are you?”

“No!” I said, offended. “Why would you think that?”

He laughed—short, sharp. “Easy! Lots of her friends are veg, so is she.”

“Oh,” I said faintly, and he looked down at me with a sort of lively, unhurried amusement.

“Well, just so you know, I’m not a vegetarian either,” he said. “I’ll eat any old sort of ridiculous thing. So I suppose we’ll manage all right.”

He pushed open a door, and I followed him down a crowded hallway lined with tarnished mirrors and old pictures. Though he was walking ahead of me fast, I was anxious to linger and look: family groupings, white columns, verandahs and palm trees. A tennis court; a Persian carpet spread on a lawn. Male servants in white pyjamas, solemnly abreast. My eye landed on Mr. Blackwell—beaky and personable, dapperly dressed in white, back hunched even in youth. He was lounging by a seaside retaining wall in some palmy locale; beside him—atop the wall, hand on his shoulder and standing a head taller—smiled a kindergarten-aged Pippa. As tiny as she was, the resemblance sounded: her coloring, her eyes, her head cocked at the same angle and hair as red as his.

“That’s her, isn’t it?” I said—at the same instant I realized it couldn’t possibly be her. This photo, with its faded colors and outmoded clothes, had been taken long before I was born.

Hobie turned, came back to look. “No,” he said quietly, hands behind his back. “That’s Juliet. Pippa’s mother.”

“Where is she?”

“Juliet—? Dead. Cancer. Six years last May.” And then, seeming to realize he’d spoken too curtly: “Welty was Juliet’s big brother. Half brother, rather. Same father—different wives—thirty years apart. But he brought her up like his own child.”

I stepped in for a closer look. She was leaning against him, cheek inclined sweetly against the sleeve of his jacket.

Hobie cleared his throat. “She was born when their father was in his sixties,” he said quietly. “Far too old to interest himself in a small child, particularly since he’d had no weakness for children to start with.”

A door in the opposite side of the hallway stood ajar; he pushed it open and stood looking into darkness. On tiptoe, I craned behind, but almost immediately he backed away and clicked the door shut.

“Is that her?” Though it had been too dark to see very much, I had caught the unfriendly glow of animal eyes, an unnerving greenish sheen from across the room.

“Not now.” His voice was so low I could barely hear him.

“What’s that in there with her?” I whispered—lingering by the doorway, reluctant to move along. “A cat?”

“Dog. The nurse doesn’t approve, but she wants him in the bed with her and honestly, I can’t keep him out—he scratches at the door and whines—Here, this way.”

Moving slowly, creakily, with an old person’s forward-leaning quality, he pushed open a door into a crowded kitchen with a ceiling skylight and a curvaceous old stove: tomato red, with svelte lines like a 1950s spaceship. Books stacked on the floor—cookbooks, dictionaries, old novels, encyclopedias; shelves closely packed with antique china in half a dozen patterns. Near the window, by the fire escape, a faded wooden saint held up a palm in benediction; on the sideboard alongside a silver tea set, painted animals straggled two by two into a Noah’s Ark. But the sink was piled with dishes, and on the countertops and windowsills stood medicine bottles, dirty cups, alarming drifts of unopened mail, and plants from the florist’s dry and brown in their pots.

He sat me down at the table, pushing away Con Ed bills and back issues of Antiques magazine. “Tea,” he said, as if remembering an item on a grocery list.

As he busied himself at the stove, I stared at the coffee rings on the tablecloth. Restlessly, I pushed back in my chair and looked around.

“Er—” I said.

“Yes?”

“Can I see her later?”

“Maybe,” he said, with his back to me. Whisk beat against blue china bowl: tap tap tap. “If she’s awake. She’s in a good deal of pain and the medicine makes her sleepy.”

“What happened to her?”

“Well—” His tone was both brisk and subdued and I recognized it at once since it was much the tone I employed when people asked about my mother. “She’s had a bad crack on the head, a skull fracture, to tell you the truth she was in a coma for a while and her left leg was broken in so many pieces she came near to losing it. ‘Marbles in a sock,’ ” he said, with a mirthless laugh. “That’s what the doctor said when he looked at the x-ray. Twelve breaks. Five surgeries. Last week,” he said, half-turning, “she had the pins out, and she begged so to come home they said she could. As long as we had a nurse part time.”

“Is she walking yet?”

“Goodness, no,” he said, bringing his cigarette up for a drag; he was somehow managing to cook with one hand and smoke with the other, like some tugboat captain or lumber camp cook in an old movie. “She can hardly sit up more than half an hour.”

“But she’ll be fine.”

“Well, that’s what we hope,” he said, in what did not seem an overly hopeful tone. You know,” he said, glancing back at me, “if you were in there too, it’s remarkable that you’re okay.”

“Well.” I never knew how to respond when people commented, as they often did, on my being “okay.”

Hobie coughed, and put out the cigarette. “Well.” I could see, from his expression, that he knew he’d disturbed me, and was sorry. “I suppose they spoke to you too? The investigators?”

I looked at the tablecloth. “Yes.” The less said about this, I felt, the better.

“Well, I don’t know about you, but I found them very decent—very informed. This one Irishman—he’d seen a lot of these things, he was telling me about suitcase bombs in England and in the Paris airport, some sidewalk café thing in Tangier, you know, dozens dead and the person right next to the bomb isn’t hurt at all. He said they see some pretty strange effects, you know, in older buildings especially. Enclosed spaces, uneven surfaces, reflective materials—very unpredictable. Just like acoustics, he said. The blast waves are like sound waves—they bounce and deflect. Sometimes you have shop windows broken miles off. Or—” he pushed the hair out of his eyes with his wrist—“sometimes, closer to hand, there’s what he called a shielding effect. Things very close to the detonation remain intact—the unbroken teacup in the blown-out IRA cottage or what have you. It’s the flying glass and debris that kills most people, you know, often at pretty far range. A pebble or a piece of glass at that speed is as good as a bullet.”

I traced my thumb along the flower pattern of the tablecloth. “I—”

“Sorry. Maybe not the right thing to talk about.”

“No no,” I said hurriedly; it was actually a huge relief to hear someone speak directly, and in an informed way, about what most people tied themselves in knots to avoid. “That’s not it. It’s just—”

“Yes?”

“I was wondering. How’d she get out?”

“Well, it was a stroke of luck. She was trapped under a lot of rubbish—the firemen wouldn’t have found her if one of the dogs hadn’t alerted. They worked partway in, jacked up the beam—I mean, the amazing thing too, she was awake, talked to them the whole time, though she doesn’t remember a bit of it. The miracle of it was they got her out before the call came to evacuate—how long were you knocked out, did you say?”

“I don’t remember.”

“Well, you were lucky. If they’d had to go off and leave her there, still pinned, which I understand did happen to some people—Ah, here we go,” he said as the kettle whistled.

The plate of food, when he set it before me, was nothing to look at—puffy yellow stuff on toast. But it smelled good. Cautiously, I tasted it. It was melted cheese, with chopped-up tomato and cayenne pepper and some other things I couldn’t figure out, and it was delicious.

“Sorry, what is this?” I said, taking another careful bite.

He looked a bit embarrassed. “Well, it doesn’t really have a name.”

“It’s good,” I said, slightly astonished how hungry I really was. My mother had made a cheese-on-toast very similar which we ate sometimes on Sunday nights in winter.

“You like cheese? I should have thought to ask.”

I nodded, mouth too full to answer. Even though Mrs. Barbour was always pressing ice cream and sweets on me, somehow it felt as if I’d hardly eaten a normal meal since my mother died—at least, not the kind of meals that had been normal for us, stir fry or scrambled eggs or macaroni and cheese from the box, while I sat on the kitchen step-ladder and told her about my day.

As I ate, he sat across the table with his chin in his big white hands. “What are you good at?” he asked rather suddenly. “Sports?”

“Sorry?”

“What are you interested in? Games and all that?”

“Well—video games. Like Age of Conquest? Yakuza Freakout?”

He seemed nonplussed. “What about school, then? Favorite subjects?”

“History, I guess. English too,” I said when he didn’t answer. “But English is going to be really boring for the next six weeks—we stopped doing literature and went back to the grammar book and now we’re diagramming sentences.”

“Literature? English or American?”

“American. Right now. Or we were. American history too, this year. Although it’s been really boring lately. We’re just getting off the Great Depression but it’ll be good again once we get to World War II.”

It was the most enjoyable conversation I’d had in a while. He asked me all kinds of interesting questions, like what I’d read in literature and how middle school was different from elementary school; what was my hardest subject (Spanish) and what was my favorite historical period (I wasn’t sure, anything but Eugene Debs and the History of Labor, which we’d spent way too much time on) and what did I want to be when I grew up? (no clue)—normal stuff, but still it was refreshing to converse with a grown-up who seemed interested in me apart from my misfortune, not prying for information or running down a checklist of Things to Say to Troubled Kids.

We’d gotten off on the subject of writers—from T. H. White and Tolkien to Edgar Allan Poe, another favorite. “My dad says Poe’s a second-rate writer,” I said. “That he’s the Vincent Price of American Letters. But I don’t think that’s fair.”

“No, it isn’t,” said Hobie, seriously, pouring himself a cup of tea. “Even if you don’t like Poe—he invented the detective story. And science fiction. In essence, he invented a huge part of the twentieth century. I mean—honestly, I don’t care as much for him as I did when I was a boy, but even if you don’t like him you can’t dismiss him as a crank.”

“My dad did. He used to go around reciting ‘Annabel Lee’ in a stupid voice, to make me mad. Because he knew I liked it.”

“Your dad’s a writer then.”

“No.” I didn’t know where he’d gotten that. “An actor. Or he was.” Before I was born, he’d played guest roles on several TV shows, never the star but the star’s spoiled playboy friend or corrupt business partner who gets killed.

“Would I have heard of him?”

“No. Now he works in an office. Or he did.”

“And what’s he doing now, then?” he asked. He had slipped the ring over his little finger, and from time to time he twisted it between thumb and forefinger of his other hand, as if to make sure it was still there.

“Who knows? He ditched us.”

To my surprise, he laughed. “Good riddance?”

“Well—” I shrugged—“I don’t know. Sometimes he was okay. We’d watch sports and cop shows and he’d tell me how they did the special effects with the blood and all. But, it’s like—I don’t know. Like, sometimes he was drunk when he came to pick me up from school?” I hadn’t really talked about this with Dave the Shrink or Mrs. Swanson or anyone. “I was scared to tell my mother but then one of the other mothers told her. And then—” it was a long story, I was feeling embarrassed, I wanted to cut it short—“he got his hand broken in a bar, he was fighting somebody in a bar, he had this bar he liked to go to every day only we didn’t know that’s where he was because he said he was working late, and he had this whole set of friends we didn’t know about and they sent him postcards when they went on vacation to places like the Virgin Islands? to our home address? which was how we found out about it? and my mother tried to make him go to AA but he wouldn’t go. Sometimes the doormen used to come and stand in the hall outside the apartment and make a lot of noise so he could hear them—so he knew they were out there, you know? So he didn’t get too out of hand.”

“Out of hand?”

“There was a lot of yelling and stuff. It was mostly him doing it. But—” uncomfortably aware that I’d said more than I meant to—“it was mainly him making a bunch of noise. Like—oh, I don’t know, like when he had to stay with me, when she had to work? He was always in a really bad mood. I couldn’t talk to him when he was watching news or sports, that was the rule. I mean—” I paused, unhappily, feeling I’d talked myself into a corner. “Anyway. That was a long time ago.”

He sat back in his chair and looked at me: a big, self-contained, guarded man, though his eyes were the worried blue of boyishness.

“And now?” he said. “Do you like the people you’re staying with?”

“Um—” I paused, with full mouth, at a loss how to explain the Barbours. “They’re nice, I guess.”

“I’m glad. I mean, I can’t say I know Samantha Barbour, although I’ve done some work for her family in the past. She has a good eye.”

At this, I stopped eating. “You know the Barbours?”

“Not him. Her. Though his mother was quite a collector—I gather it all went to the brother, though, due to some family quarrel. Welty would have been able to tell you more about it. Not that he was a gossip,” he added hastily, “Welty was very discreet, buttoned up to here, but people confided in him, he was that sort, you know? Strangers opened up to him—clients, people he hardly knew, he was the kind of man people liked to entrust with their sadnesses.

“But yes.” He folded his hands. “Every art dealer and antiquario in New York knows Samantha Barbour. She was a Van der Pleyn before she married. Not a great buyer, though Welty saw her at auction sometimes, and she certainly has some pretty things.”

“Who told you I was staying with the Barbours?”

He blinked, rapidly. “It was in the paper,” he said. “You didn’t see it?”

“The paper?”

“The Times. You didn’t read it? No?”

“There was something in the paper about me?”

“No, no,” he said quickly. “Not about you. About children who had lost family members in the museum. Most of them were tourists. There was one little girl… a baby, really… diplomat’s child from South America—”

“What did they say about me in the paper?”

He made a face. “Oh, an orphan’s plight… charity-minded socialite steps in… that kind of thing. You can imagine.”

I stared into my plate, feeling embarrassed. Orphan? Charity?

“It was a very nice piece. I gather you protected one of her sons from bullies?” he said, lowering his large gray head to catch my eye. “At school? The other gifted boy who was put ahead?”

I shook my head. “Sorry?”

“Samantha’s son? Whom you defended from a group of older boys at school? Took beatings for him—that kind of thing?”

Again I shook my head—completely bewildered.

He laughed. “Such modesty! You shouldn’t be embarrassed.”

“But—it wasn’t like that,” I said, baffled. “We both got picked on and beaten up. Every day.”

“So the story said. Which made it all the more remarkable that you stood up for him. A broken bottle?” he said, when I didn’t respond. “Someone was trying to cut Samantha Barbour’s son with a broken bottle, and you—”

“Oh, that,” I said, embarrassed. “That was nothing.”

“You were cut yourself. When you tried to help him.”

“That’s not how it happened! Cavanaugh jumped on both of us! There was a piece of broken glass on the sidewalk.”

Again he laughed—a big man’s laugh, rich and rough and at odds with his carefully cultivated voice. “Well, however it happened,” he said, “you’ve certainly tipped up in an interesting family.” Standing, he went to the cupboard, where he retrieved a bottle of whiskey and poured a couple of fingers in a not-very-clean glass.

“Samantha Barbour doesn’t seem the warmest and most welcoming of hearts—at least that’s not the impression,” he said. “Yet she seems to do an awful lot of good in the world with the foundations and fundraising, doesn’t she?”

I kept quiet as he put the bottle back in the cupboard. Above, through the skylight, the light was gray and opalescent; a fine rain peppered at the glass.

“Are you going to open the shop again?” I said.

“Well—” he sighed. “Welty handled all that end of it—the clients, the sales. Me—I’m a cabinet maker, not a businessman. Brocanteur, bricoleur. Barely set foot up there—I’m always below stairs, sanding and polishing. Now he’s gone—well, it’s still very new. People calling for things he sold, things still being delivered I never knew he bought, don’t know where the paperwork is, don’t know who any of it’s for… there are a million things I need to ask him, I’d give anything if I could talk to him for five minutes. Particularly—well, particularly as regards Pippa. Her medical care and—well.”

“Right,” I said, aware how lame I sounded. We were heading into the clumsy territory of my mother’s funeral, stretched-out silences, wrong smiles, the place where words didn’t work.

“He was a lovely man. Not many like him. Gentle, charming. People always felt sorry for him because of his back, though I’ve never met anyone so naturally gifted with a happy disposition, and of course the customers loved him… outgoing fellow, very sociable, always was… ‘the world won’t come to me,’ he used to say, ‘so I must go to it’—”

Quite suddenly, Andy’s iPhone chimed: text message coming in.

Hobie—glass halfway to his mouth—started, violently. “What was that?”

“Wait a second,” I said, digging in my pocket. The text was from Phil Lefkow, one of the kids in Andy’s Japanese class: Hi Theo, Andy here, are you ok? Hastily, I switched the phone off and stuck it back in my pocket.

“Sorry?” I said. “What were you saying?”

“I forget.” He stared into space for a moment or two, then shook his head. “I never thought I’d see this again,” he said, looking down at the ring. “So like him to ask you to bring it here—to put it in my hand. I—well, I didn’t say anything but I thought for sure someone had pocketed it at the morgue—”

Again the phone chimed its annoying, high-pitched note. “Gosh, sorry!” I said, scrambling for it. Andy’s text read:

Just making sure your not being killed!!!!

“Sorry,” I said—holding the button down, just to make sure—“it really is off this time.”

But he only smiled, and looked into his glass. Rain tapped and dripped at the skylight, casting watery shadows that streamed down the wall. Too shy to say anything, I waited for him to pick up the thread again—and when he didn’t, we sat there peacefully, while I sipped my cooling tea (Lapsang Souchong, smoky and peculiar) and felt the strangeness of my life, and where I was.

I pushed my plate aside. “Thank you,” I said dutifully, eyes wandering round the room, “that was really good”—speaking (as had become my habit) for my mother’s benefit, in case she was listening.

“Oh, how polite!” he said—laughing at me but not unkindly, in a way that felt friendly. “Do you like it?”

“What?”

“My Noah’s Ark.” He nodded at the shelf. “You were looking at it over there, I thought.” The worn wooden animals (elephants, tigers, oxen, zebras, all the way down to a tiny pair of mice) stood patiently in line, waiting to board.

“Is it hers?” I asked, after a fascinated silence; for the animals were so lovingly positioned (the big cats ignoring each other; the male peacock turned away from his hen to admire his reflection in the toaster) I could imagine her spending hours arranging them and trying to get them exactly right.

“No—” his hands came together on the table—“it was one of the first antiques I ever bought, thirty years ago. In an American Folk sale. I’m not a great one for the folk art, never have been—this piece, not of the first quality, doesn’t fit with anything else I own, and yet isn’t it always the inappropriate thing, the thing that doesn’t quite work, that’s oddly the dearest?”

I pushed back in my chair, unable to keep my feet still. “Can I see her now?” I said.

“If she’s awake—” he pursed his lips—“well, don’t see the harm. But only for a minute, mind.” When he stood, his bulky, stoop-shouldered height took me by surprise all over again. “I warn you, though—she’s a bit muddled. Oh—” he turned in the doorway—“and best not to bring up Welty if you can help it.”

“She doesn’t know?”

“Oh yes—” his voice was brisk—“she knows, but sometimes when she hears it she gets upset all over again. Asks when it happened and why nobody told her.”

ii.

WHEN HE OPENED THE door, the shades were down, and it took my eyes a moment to adjust to the dark, which was aromatic and perfume-smelling, with an undertone of sickness and medicine. Over the bed hung a framed poster from the movie The Wizard of Oz. A scented candle guttered in a red glass, among trinkets and rosaries, sheet music, tissue-paper flowers and old valentines—along with what looked like hundreds of get-well cards strung up on ribbons, and a bunch of silver balloons hovering ominously at the ceiling, metallic strings hanging down like jellyfish stingers.

“Someone here to see you, Pip,” said Hobie, in a loud and cheerful tone.

I saw the coverlet stir. An elbow went up. “Umn?” said a sleepy voice.

“It’s so dark, my dear. Won’t you let me open the curtains?”

“No, please don’t, the light hurts my eyes.”

She was smaller than I remembered, and her face—a blur in the gloom—was very white. Head shaven, all but a single lock in front. As I drew closer, a bit fearfully, I saw a glint of metal at her temple—a barrette or hairpin, I thought, before I made out the steel medical staples in a vicious coil above one ear.

“I heard you in the hallway,” she said, in a small, raspy voice, looking from me to Hobie.

“Heard what, pigeon?” said Hobie.

“Heard you talking. Cosmo did too.”

At first I didn’t see the dog, and then I did—a gray terrier curled alongside her, amidst the pillows and stuffed toys. When he raised his head, I saw from his grizzled face and cataract-clouded eyes that he was very old.

“I thought you were asleep, pigeon,” Hobie was saying, reaching out to scratch the dog’s chin.

“You always say that, but I’m always awake. Hi,” she said, looking up at me.

“Hi.”

“Who are you?”

“My name’s Theo.”

“What’s your favorite piece of music?”

“I don’t know,” I said, and then, so as not to appear stupid: “Beethoven.”

“That’s great. You look like somebody who would like Beethoven.”

“I do?” I said, feeling overwhelmed.

“I meant that in a nice way. I can’t listen to music. Because of my head. It’s completely horrible. No,” she said to Hobie, who was clearing books and gauze and Kleenex packets out of the bedside chair so I could sit down in it, “let him sit here. You can sit here,” she said to me, shifting over slightly in the bed to make room.

After a glance back at Hobie to make sure it was okay, I sat down, gingerly, with one hip, careful not to disturb the dog, who raised his head and glared.

“Don’t worry, he won’t bite. Well, sometimes he bites.” She looked at me with drowsy eyes. “I know you.”

“You remember me?”

“Are we friends?”

“Yes,” I said without thinking, and then glanced back at Hobie, embarrassed I’d lied.

“I forgot your name, I’m sorry. I remember your face though.” Then—stroking the dog’s head—she said: “I didn’t remember my room when I came home. I remembered my bed, and all my stuff, but the room was different.”

Now that my eyes had adjusted to the dark, I saw the wheelchair in the corner, the bottles of medicine on the table by her bed.

“What Beethoven do you like?”

“Uh—” I was staring at her arm, resting atop the coverlet, the tender skin on the inside of her arm with a Band-Aid in the crook of the elbow.

She was pushing up in bed—looking past me, to Hobie, silhouetted in the bright doorway. “I’m not supposed to talk too much, am I?” she said.

“No, pigeon.”

“I don’t think I’m too tired. But I can’t tell. Do you get tired during the day?” she asked me.

“Sometimes.” After my mother’s death, I had developed a tendency to fall asleep in class and conk out in Andy’s room after school. “I never used to.”

“I do, too. I feel sleepy all the time now. I wonder why? I think it’s so boring.”

Hobie—I noticed, looking back at the lighted doorway—had stepped away for a moment. Although it was very unlike me, for some strange reason I had been itching to reach out and take her hand, and now that we were alone, I did.

“You don’t mind, do you?” I asked her. Everything seemed slow like I was moving through deep water. It was very strange to be holding somebody’s hand—a girl’s hand—and yet oddly normal. I had never done anything of the sort before.

“Not at all. I think it’s nice.” Then, after a brief pause—during which I could hear the little terrier snoring—she said: “You don’t mind if I close my eyes for a few seconds, do you?”

“No,” I said, running a thumb over her knuckles, tracing the bones.

“I know it’s rude, but I just absolutely have to.”

I looked down at her shaded eyelids, chapped lips, pallor and bruises, the ugly hashmark of metal over one ear. The strange combination of what was exciting about her, and what wasn’t supposed to be, made me feel light-headed and confused.

Guilty, I glanced back, and noticed Hobie standing in the door. After tiptoeing out to the hall again, I closed the door quietly behind me, grateful that the hall was so dark.

Together, we walked back through to the parlor. “How does she seem to you?” he said, in a voice so low I could hardly hear him.

What was I supposed to say to that? “Okay, I guess.”

“She’s not herself.” He paused, unhappily, with his hands dug deep into the pockets of the bathrobe. “That is—she is, and she isn’t. She doesn’t recognize a lot of people who were close to her, speaks to them very formally, and yet sometimes she’s very open with strangers, very chatty and familiar, people she’s never seen before, treats them like old friends. Quite common, I’m told.”

“Why isn’t she supposed to listen to music?”

He raised an eyebrow. “Oh, she does, sometimes. But sometimes, late in the day especially, it tends to upset her—she thinks she has to practice, that she has to prepare a piece for school, she gets distraught. Very difficult. As far as playing on some amateur level, that’s perfectly possible someday, or so they tell me—”

Quite suddenly, the doorbell rang, startling us both.

“Ah,” said Hobie—looking distressed, glancing at what I noticed was an extremely beautiful old wristwatch, “that’ll be her nurse.”

We looked at each other. We weren’t finished talking; there was so much still to say.

Again the doorbell rang. Down the hall, the dog was barking. “She’s early,” said Hobie—hurrying through, looking a bit desperate.

“Can I come back? To see her?”

He stopped. He seemed appalled that I had even asked. “But of course you can come back,” he said. “Please come back—”

Again the doorbell.

“Any time you like,” said Hobie. “Please. We’re always glad to see you.”

iii.

“SO, WHAT HAPPENED DOWN there?” said Andy as we were dressing for dinner. “Was it weird?” Platt had left to catch the train back to school; Mrs. Barbour had a supper with the board of some charity; and Mr. Barbour was taking the rest of us out to dinner at the Yacht Club (where we only went on nights when Mrs. Barbour had something else to do).

“He knew your mother, the guy.”

Andy, knotting his necktie, made a face: everybody knew his mother.

“It was a little weird,” I said. “But it’s good I went. Here,” I said, fishing in my jacket pocket, “thanks for your phone.”

Andy checked it for messages, then switched it off and slipped it in his pocket. Pausing, with his hand still in the pocket, he looked up, not straight at me.

“I know things are bad,” he said unexpectedly. “I’m sorry everything is so fucked up for you now.”

His voice—as flat as the robot voice on an answering machine—kept me for a moment from realizing quite what he’d said.

“She was awfully nice,” he said, still without looking at me. “I mean—”

“Yeah, well,” I muttered, not anxious to continue the conversation.

“I mean, I miss her,” Andy said, meeting my eye with a sort of half-terrified look. “I never knew anybody that died before. Well, my grandpa Van der Pleyn. Never anybody I liked.”