The Goldfinch - Donna Tartt Page 0,39

where his posters had once been. What else was there to say?

iii.

EVEN NOW, TO REMEMBER that time fills me with a choking, hopeless sensation. Everything was terrible. People offered me cold drinks, extra sweaters, food I couldn’t eat: bananas, cupcakes, club sandwiches, ice cream. I said yes and no when I was spoken to, and spent a lot of time staring at the carpet so people wouldn’t see I’d been crying.

Though the Barbours’ apartment was enormous by New York standards, it was on a low floor and practically lightless, even on the Park Avenue side. Though it was never quite night there, or exactly day, still the glow of lamplight against burnished oak gave off an air of conviviality and safety like a private club. Friends of Platt’s called it “the creepatorium” and my father, who’d come there once or twice to pick me up after sleepovers, had referred to it as “Frank E. Campbell’s” after the funeral home. But I found a solace in the massive, opulent, pre-war gloom, which was easy to retreat into if you didn’t feel like talking or being stared at.

People stopped by to see me—my social workers of course, and a pro-bono psychiatrist who’d been sent to me by the city, but also people from my mother’s work (some of whom, like Mathilde, I’d been expert at imitating in order to make her laugh), and loads of friends from NYU and her fashion days. A semi-famous actor named Jed, who sometimes spent Thanksgiving with us (“Your mother was the Queen of the Universe, as far as I was concerned”), and a slightly punked-out woman in an orange coat, named Kika, who told me how she and my mother—dead broke in the East Village—had thrown a wildly successful dinner party for twelve people for less than twenty dollars (featuring, among other things, cream and sugar packets lifted from a coffee bar, and herbs picked surreptitiously from a neighbor’s windowbox). Annette—a fireman’s widow, in her seventies, my mother’s former neighbor down on the Lower East Side—showed up with a box of cookies from the Italian bakery around where she and my mother used to live, the same butter cookies with pine nuts she always brought us when she visited at Sutton Place. Then there was Cinzia, our old housekeeper, who burst into tears when she saw me, and asked me for a picture of my mother to keep in her wallet.

Mrs. Barbour broke up these visits if they dragged on too long, on the grounds that I got tired easily, but also—I suspect—because she couldn’t handle people like Cinzia and Kika monopolizing her living room for indefinite periods of time. After forty-five minutes or so she would come and stand quietly in the door. And if they didn’t take the hint, she would speak up and thank them for coming—perfectly polite, but in such a way that people realized that the time was getting on and rose to their feet. (Her voice, like Andy’s, was hollow and infinitely far away; even when she was standing right next to you she sounded as if she were relaying transmissions from Alpha Centauri.)

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