The Goldfinch(76)

Andy straightened his glasses, in the fussy, old-womanish way he had. Although my hair was dark and his was light, I was only too aware how the identical eyeglasses Mrs. Barbour had chosen for us made me look like Andy’s egghead twin—especially since I’d overheard some girl at school calling us “the Goofus Brothers” (or maybe “the Doofus brothers”—whatever, it wasn’t a compliment).

“Let’s walk over to Serendipity and get a hamburger,” he said. “I’d really rather not be here when Daddy gets home.”

“Take me, too,” said Kitsey unexpectedly, galloping in and stopping just short of us, flushed and breathless.

Andy and I looked at each other. Kitsey didn’t even like to be seen standing in line next to us at the bus stop.

“Please,” she wailed, looking back and forth between us. “Toddy’s doing soccer practice, I have my own money, I don’t want to be by myself with them, please.”

“Oh, come on,” I said to Andy, and she flashed me a grateful look.

Andy put his hands in his pockets. “All right, then,” he said to her expressionlessly. They were a pair of white mice, I thought—only Kitsey was a spun-sugar, fairy-princess mouse whereas Andy was more the kind of luckless, anemic, pet-shop mouse you might feed to your boa constrictor.

“Get your stuff. Go,” he said, when she still stood there staring. “I’m not waiting for you. And don’t forget your money because I’m not paying for you either.”



xiii.



I DIDN’T GO DOWN to Hobie’s for the next few days, out of loyalty to Andy, although I was greatly tempted in the atmosphere of tension that hung over the household. Andy was right: it was impossible to figure out what Platt had done, since Mr. and Mrs. Barbour behaved as if absolutely nothing were wrong (only you could tell that something was) and Platt himself wouldn’t say a word, only sat sullenly at meals with his hair hanging in his face.

“Believe me,” said Andy, “it’s better when you’re around. They talk, and make more of an effort to be normal.”

“What do you think he did?”

“Honestly, I don’t know. I don’t want to know.”

“Sure you do.”

“Well, yes,” said Andy, relenting. “But I really don’t have the foggiest.”

“Do you think he cheated? Stole? Chewed gum in chapel?”

Andy shrugged. “The last time he was in trouble, it was for hitting somebody in the face with a lacrosse stick. But that wasn’t like this.” And then, out of the blue: “Mother loves Platt the best.”

“You think?” I said evasively, though I knew very well this was true.

“Daddy loves Kitsey best. And Mother loves Platt.”

“She loves Toddy a lot too,” I said, before realizing quite how this sounded.

Andy grimaced. “I would think I’d been switched at birth,” he said. “If I didn’t look so much like Mother.”



xiv.



FOR SOME REASON, DURING this strained interlude (possibly because Platt’s mysterious trouble reminded me of my own) it occurred to me that maybe I ought to tell Hobie about the painting, or—at the very least—broach the subject in some oblique manner, to see what his reaction would be. The difficulty was how to bring it up. It was still in the apartment, exactly where I’d left it, in the bag I’d brought out of the museum. When I’d seen it leaning against the sofa in the front room, on the dreadful afternoon I’d gone back in to get some school things I needed, I’d walked right past it, skirting it as assiduously as I would have a grasping bum on the sidewalk, and all the time feeling Mrs. Barbour’s cool pale eye on my back, on our apartment, on my mother’s things, as she stood in the door with her arms folded.

It was complicated. Every time I thought of it my stomach squirmed, so that my first instinct was to slam the lid down hard and think of something else. Unfortunately, I’d waited so long to say anything to anybody that it was starting to feel like it was too late to say anything at all. And the more time I spent with Hobie—with his crippled Hepplewhites and Chippendales, the old things he took such diligent care of—the more I felt it was wrong to keep silent. What if someone found the picture? What would happen to me? For all I knew, the landlord might have gone into the apartment—he had a key—but even if he did go in, I didn’t think he would necessarily happen upon it. Yet I knew I was tempting fate by leaving it there while I put off deciding what to do.

It wasn’t that I minded giving it back; if I could have returned it magically, by wishing, I would have done it in a second. It was just that I couldn’t think how to return it in a way that wouldn’t endanger either me or the painting. Since the museum bombing, there were notices all over the city saying that packages left unattended for any reason would be destroyed, which did away with most of my brilliant ideas for returning it anonymously. Any suspicious suitcase or parcel would be blown up, no questions asked.