The Goldfinch(319)

But that night, finally, I did find her. Or more accurately: she found me. It felt like a one off, although maybe some other night, some other dream, she’ll come to me like that again—maybe when I’m dying, though it seems almost too much to wish for. Certainly I would be less frightened of death (not just my own death but Welty’s death, Andy’s death, Death in general) if I thought a familiar person came to meet us at the door, because—writing this now, I’m close to tears—I think how poor Andy told me, with terror on his face, that my mother was the only person he’d known, and liked, who’d ever died. So—maybe when Andy washed up spitting and coughing into the country on the far side of the water, maybe my mother was the very one who knelt down by his side to greet him on the foreign shore. Maybe it’s stupid to even articulate such hopes. But, then again, maybe it’s more stupid not to.

Either way—one-off or not—it was a gift; and if she had only one visit, if that’s all they allowed her, she saved it for when it mattered. Because all of a sudden, there she was. I was standing in front of a mirror and looking at the room reflected behind me, which was an interior much like Hobie’s shop, or, rather, a more spacious and eternal-seeming version of the shop, cello-brown walls and an open window which was like an entry point into some much larger, unimaginable theater of sunlight. The space behind me in the frame was not so much a space in the conventional sense as a perfectly composed harmony, a wider, more real-seeming reality with a deep silence around it, beyond sound and speech; where all was stillness and clarity, and at the same time, as in a backward-run movie, you could also imagine spilled milk leaping back into the pitcher, a jumping cat flying backward to land silently upon a table, a waystation where time didn’t exist or, more accurately, existed all at once in every direction, all histories and movements occurring simultaneously.

And when I looked away for a second and then looked back, I saw her reflection behind me, in the mirror. I was speechless. Somehow I knew I wasn’t allowed to turn around—it was against the rules, whatever the rules of the place were—but we could see each other, our eyes could meet in the mirror, and she was just as glad to see me as I was to see her. She was herself. An embodied presence. There was psychic reality to her, there was depth and information. She was between me and whatever place she had stepped from, what landscape beyond. And it was all about the moment when our eyes touched in the glass, surprise and amusement, her beautiful blue eyes with the dark rings around the irises, pale blue eyes with a lot of light in them: hello! Fondness, intelligence, sadness, humor. There was motion and stillness, stillness and modulation, and all the charge and magic of a great painting. Ten seconds, eternity. It was all a circle back to her. You could grasp it in an instant, you could live in it forever: she existed only in the mirror, inside the space of the frame, and though she wasn’t alive, not exactly, she wasn’t dead either because she wasn’t yet born, and yet never not born—as somehow, oddly, neither was I. And I knew that she could tell me anything I wanted to know (life, death, past, future) even though it was already there, in her smile, the answer to all questions, the before-Christmas smile of someone with a secret too wonderful to let slip, just yet: well, you’ll just have to wait and see, won’t you? But just as she was about to speak—drawing an affectionate exasperated breath I knew very well, the sound of which I can hear even now—I woke up.



v.



WHEN I OPENED MY eyes, it was morning. All the lamps in the room were still blazing and I was under the covers with no memory of how I’d gotten under them. Everything was still bathed and saturated with her presence—higher, wider, deeper than life, a shift in optics that had produced a rainbow edge, and I remember thinking that this must be how people felt after visions of saints—not that my mother was a saint, only that her appearance had been as distinct and startling as a flame leaping up in a dark room.

Still half sleeping, I drifted in the bedclothes, buoyed by the sweetness of the dream washing quietly about me. Even the ambient morning sounds in the hallway had taken on the atmosphere and color of her presence; for if I listened hard, in my half-dreaming state, it seemed that I could hear the specific light, cheerful sound of her footsteps mixed up with the clank of the room service trays up and down the hall and the rattle of elevator cables, the opening and closing of elevator doors: a very urban sound, a sound I associated with Sutton Place, and her.

Then, suddenly, bursting into the last wisps of bioluminescence still trailing from the dream, the bells of the nearby church broke out in such violent clangor that I bolted upright in a panic, fumbling for my glasses. I had forgotten what day it was: Christmas.