Текст книги "The Goldfinch "

Автор книги: Donna Tartt

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Текущая страница: 12 (всего у книги 55 страниц)

“Well, Texas is boring, all right,” said Andy, between sneezes; his eyes were pink and streaming from pollen so he looked even more like a lab rat than usual.

“You went there?”

“Yes—Dallas. Uncle Harry and Aunt Tess lived there for a while. There’s nothing to do but go to the movies and you can’t walk anywhere, people have to drive you. Also they have rattlesnakes, and the death penalty, which I think is primitive and unethical in ninety-eight per cent of cases. But it’ll probably be better for her there.”

“Why?”

“The climate, primarily,” said Andy, swiping his nose with one of the pressed cotton handkerchiefs he plucked every morning from the stack in his drawer. “Convalescents do better in warm weather. That’s why my grandpa Van der Pleyn moved to Palm Beach.”

I was silent. Andy, I knew, was loyal; I trusted him, I valued his opinion, and yet his conversation sometimes made me feel as though I was talking to one of those computer programs that mimic human response.

“If she’s in Dallas she should definitely go to the Nature and Science Museum. Although I think she’ll find it small and somewhat dated. The IMAX I saw there wasn’t even 3-D. Also they ask for extra money to get into the planetarium, which is ridiculous considering how inferior it is to Hayden.”

“Huh.” Sometimes I wondered exactly what it might take to break Andy out of his math-nerd turret: a tidal wave? Decepticon invasion? Godzilla tromping down Fifth Avenue? He was a planet without an atmosphere.

x.

HAD ANYONE EVER FELT so lonely? Back at the Barbours’, amidst the clamor and plenitude of a family that wasn’t mine, I now felt even more alone than usual—especially since, as the end of the school year neared, it wasn’t clear to me (or Andy either, for that matter) if I would be accompanying them to their summer house in Maine. Mrs. Barbour, with her characteristic delicacy, managed to skirt the topic even in the midst of the cardboard boxes and open suitcases that were appearing all over the house; Mr. Barbour and the younger siblings all seemed excited but Andy regarded the prospect with frank horror. “Sun and fun,” he said contemptuously, pushing his glasses (like mine, only a lot thicker) up on the bridge of his nose. “At least with your grandparents you’ll be on dry land. With hot water. An Internet connection.”

“I don’t feel sorry for you.”

“Well, if you do have to go with us, see how you like it. It’s like Kidnapped. The part where they sell him into slavery on that boat.”

“What about the part where he has to go to his creepy relative in the middle of nowhere that he doesn’t even know?”

“Yes, I was thinking that,” said Andy seriously, turning in his desk chair to look at me. “Although at least they aren’t scheming to kill you—it’s not as if there’s an inheritance at stake.”

“No, there’s certainly not.”

“Do you know what my advice to you is?”

“No, what?”

“My advice,” said Andy, scratching his nose with the eraser of his pencil, “is to work as hard as you possibly can when you get to your new school in Maryland. You’ve got an advantage—you’re ahead a year. That means you’ll graduate when you’re seventeen. If you apply yourself, you can be out of there in four years, maybe even three, with a scholarship anywhere you want to go.”

“My grades aren’t that good.”

“No,” said Andy seriously, “but only because you don’t work. Also I think it fair to assume that your new school, wherever it is, won’t be quite as demanding.”

“I pray to God not.”

“I mean—public school,” said Andy. “Maryland. No disrespect to Maryland. I mean, they do have the Applied Physics Laboratory and the Space Telescope Science Institute at Johns Hopkins, to say nothing of the Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt. Definitely it’s a state with some serious NASA commitment. You tested in what percentile back in junior high?”

“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 bunny like Sabine Ingersoll or that idiot James Villiers. Forrest fucking Longstreet.”

“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 nanny didn’t recognize how serious it was, he was taken to the hospital too late—he was a very bright boy, so I understand, personable too, but old Mr. Blackwell wasn’t a man tolerant of weakness or infirmity. Sent him to America to live with relatives and barely gave him another thought.”

“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.

“Welty had no obligation to put his foot in but he was an affectionate man, without family, and he liked children. He invited Juliet here for a holiday when she was six years old, or ‘JuleeAnn’ as she was then—”

“Here? In this house?”

“Yes, here. And when the summer was over and it was time to send her back and she was crying about having to leave and the mother wasn’t answering her telephone, he cancelled the plane tickets and phoned around to see about enrolling her in first grade. It was never an official arrangement—he was afraid to rock the boat, as they say—but most people assumed she was his child without inquiring too deeply. He was in his mid-thirties, plenty old enough to be her father. Which, in all the essential respects, he was.

“But, no matter,” he said, looking up, in an altered tone. “You said you wanted to look around the workshop. Would you like to go down?”

“Please,” I said. “That would be great.” When I’d found him down there working on his up-ended chair, he’d stood and stretched and said he was ready for a break but I hadn’t wanted to come upstairs at all, the workshop was so rich and magical: a treasure cave, bigger on the inside than it looked on the outside, with the light filtering down from the high windows, fretwork and filigree, mysterious tools I didn’t know the names of, and the sharp, intriguing smells of varnish and beeswax. Even the chair he’d been working on—which had goat’s legs in front, with cloven hooves—had seemed less like a piece of furniture than a creature under enchantment, like it might up-end itself and hop down from his work bench and trot away down the street.

Hobie reached for his smock and put it back on. For all his gentleness, his quiet manner, he was built like a man who moved refrigerators or loaded trucks for a living.

“So,” he said, leading me downstairs. “The shop-behind-the-shop.”

“Sorry?”

He laughed. “The arrière-boutique. What the customers see is a stage set—the face that’s displayed to the public—but down here is where the important work happens.”

“Right,” I said, looking down at the labyrinth at the foot of the stairs, blond wood like honey, dark wood like poured molasses, gleams of brass and gilt and silver in the weak light. As with the Noah’s Ark, each species of furniture was ranked with its own kind: chairs with chairs, settees with settees; clocks with clocks, desks and cabinets and highboys standing in stiff ranks opposite. Dining tables, in the middle, formed narrow, mazelike paths to be edged around. At the back of the room a wall of tarnished old mirrors, hung frame to frame, glowed with the silvered light of old ballrooms and candlelit salons.

Hobie looked back at me. He could see how pleased I was. “You like old things?”

I nodded—it was true, I did like old things, though it was something I’d never realized about myself before.

“It must be interesting for you at the Barbours’, then. I expect that some of their Queen Anne and Chippendale is as good as anything you’ll see in a museum.”

“Yes,” I said, hesitantly. “But here it’s different. Nicer,” I added, in case he didn’t understand.

“How so?”

“I mean—” I squeezed my eyes shut, trying to collect my thoughts—“down here, it’s great, so many chairs with so many other chairs… you see the different personalities, you know? I mean, that one’s kind of—” I didn’t know the word—“well, silly almost, but in a good way—a comfortable way. And that one’s more nervous sort of, with those long spindly legs—”

“You have a good eye for furniture.”

“Well—” compliments threw me, I was never sure how to respond except to act like I hadn’t heard—“when they’re lined up together you see how they’re made. At the Barbours’—” I wasn’t sure how to explain it—“I don’t know, it’s more like those scenes with the taxidermy animals at the Natural History Museum.”

When he laughed, his air of gloom and anxiety evaporated; you could feel his good-nature, it radiated off him.

“No, I mean it,” I said, determined to plow on and make my point. “The way she has it set up, a table on its own with a light on it, and all the stuff arranged so you’re not supposed to touch it—it’s like those dioramas they place around the yak or whatever, to show its habitat. It’s nice, but I mean—” I gestured at the chair backs lined against the wall. “That one’s a harp, that one’s like a spoon, that one—” I imitated the sweep with my hand.

“Shield back. Although, I’ll tell you, the nicest detail on that one is the tasselled splats. You may not realize it,” he said, before I could ask what a splat was, “but it’s an education in itself seeing that furniture of hers every day—seeing it in different lights, able to run your hand along it when you like.” He fogged his glasses with his breath, wiped them with a corner of his apron. “Do you need to head back uptown?”

“Not really,” I said, though it was getting late.

“Come along then,” he said. “Let’s put you to work. I could use a hand with this little chair down here.”

“The goat foot?”

“Yes, the goat’s foot. There’s another apron on the peg—I know, it’s too big, but I just coated this thing with linseed oil and I don’t want you to spoil your clothes.”

xii.

DAVE THE SHRINK HAD mentioned more than once that he wished I would develop a hobby—advice I resented, as the hobbies he suggested (racquetball, table tennis, bowling) all seemed incredibly lame. If he thought a game or two of table tennis was going to help me get over my mother, he was completely out to lunch. But—as evidenced by the blank journal I’d been given by Mr. Neuspeil, my English teacher; Mrs. Swanson’s suggestion that I start attending art classes after school; Enrique’s offer to take me down to watch basketball at the courts on Sixth Avenue; and even Mr. Barbour’s sporadic attempts to interest me in chart markers and nautical flags—a lot of adults had the same idea.

“But what do you like to do in your spare time?” Mrs. Swanson had asked me in her spooky, pale gray office that smelled like herb tea and sagebrush, issues of Seventeen and Teen People stacked high on the reading table and some kind of silvery Asian chime music floating in the background.

“I don’t know. I like to read. Watch movies. Play Age of Conquest II and Age of Conquest: Platinum Edition. I don’t know,” I said again, when she kept on looking at me.

“Well, all those things are fine, Theo,” she said, looking concerned. “But it would be nice if we could find some group activity for you. Something with teamwork, something you could do with other kids. Have you ever thought about taking up a sport?”

“No.”

“I practice a martial art called Aikido. I don’t know if you’ve heard of it. It’s a way of using the opponent’s own movements as a form of self-defense.”

I looked away from her and at the weathered-looking panel board of Our Lady of Guadalupe hanging behind her head.

“Or perhaps photography.” She folded her turquoise-ringed hands on her desk. “If you’re not interested in art classes. Although I have to say, Mrs. Sheinkopf showed me some of the drawings you did last year—that series of rooftops, you know, water towers, the views from the studio window? Very observant—I know that view and you caught some really interesting line and energy, I think kinetic was the word she used, really nice quickness about it, all those intersecting planes and the angle of the fire escapes. What I’m trying to say is that it’s not so much what you do—I just wish that we could find a way for you to be more connected.”

“Connected to what?” I said, in a voice that came out sounding far too nasty.

She looked nonplussed. “To other people! And—” she gestured at the window—“the world around you! Listen,” she said, in her gentlest, most hypnotically-soothing voice, “I know that you and your mother had an incredibly close bond. I spoke to her. I saw the two of you together. And I know exactly how much you must miss her.”

No you don’t, I thought, staring her insolently in the eye.

She gave me an odd look. “You’d be surprised, Theo,” she said, leaning back in her shawl-draped chair, “what small, everyday things can lift us out of despair. But nobody can do it for you. You’re the one who has to watch for the open door.”

Though I knew she meant well, I’d left her office head down, tears of anger stinging my eyes. What the hell did she know about it, the old bat? Mrs. Swanson had a gigantic family—about ten kids and thirty grandkids, to judge from the photos on her wall; Mrs. Swanson had a huge apartment on Central Park West and a house in Connecticut and zero idea what it was like for a plank to snap so it was all gone in a minute. Easy enough for her to sit back comfortably in her hippie armchair and ramble about extracurricular activities and open doors.

And yet, unexpectedly, a door had opened, and in a most unlikely quarter: Hobie’s workshop. “Helping” with the chair (which had basically involved me standing by while Hobie ripped the seat up to show me the worm damage, slapdash repairs, and other hidden horrors under the upholstery) had rapidly turned into two or three oddly absorbing afternoons a week, after school: labeling jars, mixing rabbit-skin glue, sorting through boxes of drawer fittings (“the fiddly bits”) or sometimes just watching him turn chair legs on the lathe. Though the upstairs shop stayed dark, with the metal gates down, still, in the shop-behind-the-shop, the tall-case clocks ticked, the mahogany glowed, the light filtered in a golden pool on the dining room tables, the life of the downstairs menagerie went on.

Auction houses all over the city called him, as well as private clients; he restored furniture for Sotheby’s, for Christie’s, for Tepper, for Doyle. After school, amidst the drowsy tick of the tall-case clocks, he taught me the pore and luster of different woods, their colors, the ripple and gloss of tiger maple and the frothed grain of burled walnut, their weights in my hand and even their different scents—“sometimes, when you’re not sure what you have, it’s easiest just to take a sniff”—spicy mahogany, dusty-smelling oak, black cherry with its characteristic tang and the flowery, amber-resin smell of rosewood. Saws and counter-sinks, rasps and rifflers, bent blades and spoon blades, braces and mitre-blocks. I learned about veneers and gilding, what a mortise and tenon was, the difference between ebonized wood and true ebony, between Newport and Connecticut and Philadelphia crest rails, how the blocky design and close-cropped top of one Chippendale bureau rendered it inferior to another bracket-foot of the same vintage with its fluted quarter columns and what he liked to call the “exalted” proportions of the drawer ratio.

Downstairs—weak light, wood shavings on the floor—there was something of the feel of a stable, great beasts standing patiently in the dim. Hobie made me see the creaturely quality of good furniture, in how he talked of pieces as “he” and “she,” in the muscular, almost animal quality that distinguished great pieces from their stiff, boxy, more mannered peers and in the affectionate way he ran his hand along the dark, glowing flanks of his sideboards and lowboys, like pets. He was a good teacher and very soon, by walking me through the process of examination and comparison, he’d taught me how to identify a reproduction: by wear that was too even (antiques were always worn asymmetrically); by edges that were machine-cut instead of hand-planed (a sensitive fingertip could feel a machine edge, even in poor light); but more than that by a flat, dead quality of wood, lacking a certain glow: the magic that came from centuries of being touched and used and passed through human hands. To contemplate the lives of these dignified old highboys and secretaries—lives longer and gentler than human life—sank me into calm like a stone in deep water, so that when it was time to go I walked out stunned and blinking into the blare of Sixth Avenue, hardly knowing where I was.

More than the workshop (or the “hospital,” as Hobie called it) I enjoyed Hobie: his tired smile, his elegant big-man’s slouch, his rolled sleeves and his easy, joking manner, his workman’s habit of rubbing his forehead with the inside of his wrist, his patient good humor and his steady good sense. But though our talk was casual and sporadic there was never anything simple about it. Even a light “How are you” was a nuanced question, without it seeming to be; and my invariable answer (“Fine”) he could read easily enough without my having to spell anything out. And though he seldom pried, or questioned, I felt he had a better sense of me than the various adults whose job it was to “get inside my head” as Enrique liked to put it.

But—more than anything—I liked him because he treated me as a companion and conversationalist in my own right. It didn’t matter that sometimes he wanted to talk about his neighbor who had a knee replacement or a concert of early music he’d seen uptown. If I told him something funny that happened at school, he was an attentive and appreciative audience; unlike Mrs. Swanson (who froze and looked startled when I made a joke) or Dave (who chuckled, but awkwardly, and always a beat too late), he liked to laugh, and I loved it when he told me stories of his own life: raucous late-marrying uncles and busybody nuns of his childhood, the third-rate boarding school on the Canadian border where his teachers had all been drunks, the big house upstate that his father kept so cold there was ice on the inside of the windows, gray December afternoons reading Tacitus or Motley’s Rise of the Dutch Republic. (“I loved history, always. The road not taken! My grandest boyhood ambition was to be a professor of history at Notre Dame. Although what I do now is just a different way of working with history, I suppose.”) He told me about his blind-in-one-eye canary rescued from a Woolworth’s who woke him singing every morning of his boyhood; the bout of rheumatic fever that kept him in bed for six months; and the queer little antique neighborhood library with frescoed ceilings (“torn down now, alas”) where he’d gone to get away from his house. About Mrs. De Peyster, the lonely old heiress he’d visited after school, a former Belle of Albany and local historian who clucked over Hobie and fed him Dundee cake ordered from England in tins, who was happy to stand for hours explaining to Hobie every single item in her china cabinet and who had owned, among other things, the mahogany sofa—rumored to have belonged to General Herkimer—that got him interested in furniture in the first place. (“Although I can’t quite picture General Herkimer lounging on that decadent old Grecian-looking article.”) About his mother, who had died shortly after his three-days-old sister, leaving Hobie an only child; and about the young Jesuit father, a football coach, who—telephoned by a panicky Irish housemaid when Hobie’s father was beating Hobie “to flinders practically” with a belt—had dashed to the house, rolled up his sleeves, and punched Hobie’s father to the ground. (“Father Keegan! He was the one who came to the house that time when I had rheumatic fever, to give me communion. I was his altar boy—he knew what the story was, he’d seen the stripes on my back. There’ve been so many priests lately naughty with the boys, but he was so good to me—I always wonder what happened to him, I’ve tried to find him and I can’t. My father telephoned the archbishop and next thing you knew, done and dusted, they’d shipped him off to Uruguay.”) It was all very different from the Barbours’, where—despite the general atmosphere of kindness—I was either lost in the throng or else the uncomfortable subject of formal inquiry. I felt better knowing he was only a bus ride away, a straight shot down Fifth Avenue; and in the night when I woke up jarred and panicked, the explosion plunging through me all over again, sometimes I could lull myself back to sleep by thinking of his house, where without even realizing it you slipped away sometimes into 1850, a world of ticking clocks and creaking floorboards, copper pots and baskets of turnips and onions in the kitchen, candle flames leaning all to the left in the draft of an opened door and tall parlor windows billowing and swagged like ball gowns, cool quiet rooms where old things slept.

It was becoming increasingly difficult to explain my absences, however (dinnertime absences, often), and Andy’s powers of invention were being taxed. “Shall I go up there with you and talk to her?” said Hobie one afternoon when we were in the kitchen eating a cherry tart he’d bought at the farmers’ market. “I’m happy to go up and meet her. Or maybe you’d like to ask her here.”

“Maybe,” I said, after thinking about it.

“She might be interested to see that Chippendale chest-on-chest—you know, the Philadelphia, the scroll-top. Not to buy—just to look at. Or, if you’d like, we could invite her out to lunch at La Grenouille—” he laughed “—or even some little joint down here that might amuse her.”

“Let me think about it,” I said; and went home early on the bus, brooding. Quite apart from my chronic duplicity with Mrs. Barbour—constant late nights at the library, a nonexistent history project—it would be embarrassing to admit to Hobie that I’d claimed Mr. Blackwell’s ring was a family heirloom. Yet, if Mrs. Barbour and Hobie were to meet, my lie was sure to emerge, one way or another. There seemed no way around it.

“Where have you been?” said Mrs. Barbour sharply, dressed for dinner but without her shoes on, emerging from the back of the apartment with her gin and lime in her hand.

Something in her manner made me sense a trap. “Actually,” I said, “I was downtown visiting a friend of my mother’s.”

Andy turned to stare at me blankly.

“Oh yes?” said Mrs. Barbour suspiciously, with a sideways glance at Andy. “Andy was just telling me that you were working at the library again.”

“Not tonight,” I said, so easily that it surprised me.

“Well, I must say I’m relieved to hear that,” said Mrs. Barbour coolly. “Since the main branch is closed on Mondays.”

“I didn’t say he was at the main branch, Mother.”

“I think you might actually know him,” I said, anxious to draw fire from Andy. “Know of him, anyway.”

“Who?” said Mrs. Barbour, her gaze coming back to me.

“The friend I was visiting. His name is James Hobart. He runs a furniture shop downtown—well, doesn’t run it. He does the restorations.”