Around me, over my head, the life of the household went on. Every day, the doorbell rang many times: housekeepers, nannies, caterers, tutors, the piano instructor, social-pages ladies and tassel-loafer business guys connected with Mrs. Barbour’s charities. Andy’s younger siblings, Toddy and Kitsey, raced through the gloomy halls with their school friends. Often, in the afternoons, perfume-smelling women with shopping bags dropped by for coffee and tea; in the evenings, couples dressed for dinner congregated over wine and fizzy water in the living room, where the flower arrangements were delivered every week from a swanky Madison Avenue florist and the newest issues of Architectural Digest and the New Yorker were fanned just so on the coffee table.
If Mr. and Mrs. Barbour were terribly inconvenienced to have an extra kid dumped on them, at scarcely a moment’s notice, they were graceful enough not to show it. Andy’s mother, with her understated jewelry and her not-quite-interested smile—the kind of woman who could get on the phone with the mayor if she needed a favor—seemed to operate somehow above the constraints of New York City bureaucracy. Even in my confusion and grief, I had a sense that she was managing things behind the scenes, making it all easier for me, shielding me from the rougher aspects of the Social Services machinery—and, I’m now fairly sure, the press. Calls were forwarded from the insistently ringing telephone directly to her cell phone. There were conversations in low voices, instructions to the doormen. After coming in on one of Enrique’s many tireless interrogations about my father’s whereabouts—interrogations that often brought me close to tears; he might as well have been grilling me about the location of missile sites in Pakistan—she sent me out of the room and then in a controlled monotone put a stop to it (“Well I mean, obviously the boy doesn’t know where he is, the mother didn’t know either… yes, I know you’d like to find him but clearly the man doesn’t want to be found, he’s taken measures not to be found… he wasn’t paying child support, he left a lot of debts, he more or less flew town without a word so frankly I’m not quite sure what you mean to accomplish by contacting this stellar parent and fine citizen and… yes, yes, all well and good, but if the man’s creditors can’t run him down and your agency can’t either then I’m not sure what’s to be gained from continuing to badger the child, are you? Can we agree to put a stop to this?”)
Certain elements of the martial law imposed since my arrival had inconvenienced the household: no longer, for instance, were the housemaids permitted to listen to Ten Ten WINS, the news station, while they worked (“No, no,” said Etta the cook, with a warning glance at me, when one of the cleaners tried to turn the radio on) and in the mornings, the Times was taken immediately to Mr. Barbour and not left out for the rest of the family to read. Clearly, this was not the usual custom—“Somebody’s carried the paper off again,” Andy’s little sister Kitsey would wail before falling into guilty silence after a look from her mother—and I soon gathered that the newspaper had begun vanishing into Mr. Barbour’s study because there were things in it that it was thought preferable for me not to see.
Thankfully Andy, who had been my companion in adversity before, understood that the last thing I wanted was to talk. Those first few days, they let him stay home from school with me. In his musty plaid room with the bunk beds, where I had spent many a Saturday night in elementary school, we sat over the chessboard, Andy playing for both of us, since in my fog I scarcely remembered how to move the pieces. “Okay,” he said, pushing his glasses up on the bridge of his nose. “Right. Are you absolutely sure you want to do that?”
“Do what?”
“Yes, I see,” said Andy, in the wispy, irritating voice which had driven so many bullies to shove him to the sidewalk out in front of our school over the years. “Your rook is in danger, that’s perfectly correct, but I would suggest you take a closer look at your queen—no, no, your queen. D5.”
He had to say my name to get my attention. Over and over, I was reliving the moment where my mother and I had run up the museum steps. Her striped umbrella. Rain peppering and driving in our faces. What had happened, I knew, was irrevocable, yet at the same time it seemed there had to be some way I could go back to the rainy street and make it all happen differently.
“The other day,” said Andy, “somebody, I really believe it was Malcolm whats-his-name or some other supposedly respected writer—anyway, he made a big production the other day in the Science Times of pointing out that there are more potential games of chess than there are grains of sand in the entire world. It’s ridiculous that a science writer for a major newspaper would feel compelled to belabor a fact so obvious.”