The Goldfinch(3)

“Ah, he’s full, my lady,” Goldie called over the roar of the street, stepping out of the way as a taxi splashed round the corner and shut its light off. He was the smallest of the doormen: a wan, thin, lively little guy, light-skinned Puerto Rican, a former featherweight boxer. Though he was pouchy in the face from drinking (sometimes he turned up on the night shift smelling of J&B), still he was wiry and muscular and quick—always kidding around, always having a cigarette break on the corner, shifting from foot to foot and blowing on his white-gloved hands when it was cold, telling jokes in Spanish and cracking the other doormen up.

“You in a big hurry this morning?” he asked my mother. His nametag said BURT D. but everyone called him Goldie because of his gold tooth and because his last name, de Oro, meant “gold” in Spanish.

“No, plenty of time, we’re fine.” But she looked exhausted and her hands were shaky as she re-tied her scarf, which snapped and fluttered in the wind.

Goldie must have noticed this himself, because he glanced over at me (backed up evasively against the concrete planter in front of the building, looking anywhere but at her) with an air of slight disapproval.

“You’re not taking the train?” he said to me.

“Oh, we’ve got some errands,” said my mother, without much conviction, when she realized I didn’t know what to say. Normally I didn’t pay much attention to her clothes, but what she had on that morning (white trenchcoat, filmy pink scarf, black and white two-tone loafers) is so firmly burned into my memory that now it’s difficult for me to remember her any other way.

I was thirteen. I hate to remember how awkward we were with each other that last morning, stiff enough for the doorman to notice; any other time we would have been talking companionably enough, but that morning we didn’t have much to say to each other because I’d been suspended from school. They’d called her at her office the day before; she’d come home silent and furious; and the awful thing was that I didn’t even know what I’d been suspended for, although I was about seventy-five percent sure that Mr. Beeman (en route from his office to the teachers’ lounge) had looked out the window of the second-floor landing at exactly the wrong moment and seen me smoking on school property. (Or, rather, seen me standing around with Tom Cable while he smoked, which at my school amounted to practically the same offense.) My mother hated smoking. Her parents—whom I loved hearing stories about, and who had unfairly died before I’d had the chance to know them—had been affable horse trainers who travelled around the west and raised Morgan horses for a living: cocktail-drinking, canasta-playing livelies who went to the Kentucky Derby every year and kept cigarettes in silver boxes around the house. Then my grandmother doubled over and started coughing blood one day when she came in from the stables; and for the rest of my mother’s teenage years, there had been oxygen tanks on the front porch and bedroom shades that stayed pulled down.

But—as I feared, and not without reason—Tom’s cigarette was only the tip of the iceberg. I’d been in trouble at school for a while. It had all started, or begun to snowball rather, when my father had run off and left my mother and me some months before; we’d never liked him much, and my mother and I were generally much happier without him, but other people seemed shocked and distressed at the abrupt way he’d abandoned us (without money, child support, or forwarding address), and the teachers at my school on the Upper West Side had been so sorry for me, so eager to extend their understanding and support, that they’d given me—a scholarship student—all sorts of special allowances and delayed deadlines and second and third chances: feeding out the rope, over a matter of months, until I’d managed to lower myself into a very deep hole.

So the two of us—my mother and I—had been called in for a conference at school. The meeting wasn’t until eleven-thirty but since my mother had been forced to take the morning off, we were heading to the West Side early—for breakfast (and, I expected, a serious talk) and so she could buy a birthday present for someone she worked with. She’d been up until two-thirty the night before, her face tense in the glow of the computer, writing emails and trying to clear the decks for her morning out of the office.

“I don’t know about you,” Goldie was saying to my mother, rather fiercely, “but I say enough with all this spring and damp already. Rain, rain—” He shivered, pulled his collar closer in pantomime and glanced at the sky.

“I think it’s supposed to clear up this afternoon.”