The Goldfinch - Donna Tartt Page 0,87

back for my first two years of college. He hadn’t set aside anything at all.”

“That’s awful!” I said, after a shocked pause. I didn’t see how he could laugh about something so unfair.

“Well—” he rolled his eyes—“I was still a bit green, but I realized at that rate I’d be perishing of old age before I ever got out of there. But—no money, nowhere to live—what was I to do? I was trying hard to figure something out when lo and behold, Welty happened into the office one day while my father was going off at me. He loved to berate me in front of his men, my dad—swaggering around like a Mafia boss, saying I owed him money for this and that, taking it out of my quote unquote ‘salary.’ Withholding my alleged paycheck for some imaginary infraction. That kind of thing.

“Welty—it wasn’t the first time I’d seen him. He’d been in the office to arrange for shipping from estate sales—he always claimed that with his back he had to work harder to make a good impression, make people see past the deformity and all that, but I liked him from the start. Most people did—my father even, who shall I say wasn’t a man who took kindly to people. At any rate, Welty, having witnessed this outburst, telephoned my father the next day and said he could use my help packing the furniture for a house he’d bought the contents of. I was a big strong kid, hard worker, just the ticket. Well—” Hobie stood and stretched his arms over his head—“Welty was a good customer. And my father, for whatever reason, said yes.

“The house I helped him pack was the old De Peyster mansion. And as it happened I’d known old Mrs. De Peyster quite well. From the time I was a kid I’d liked to wander down and visit her—funny old woman in a bright yellow wig, font of information, papers everywhere, knew everything about local history, incredibly entertaining storyteller—anyway, it was quite a house, packed with Tiffany glass and some very good furniture from the 1800s, and I was able to help with the provenance of a lot of the pieces, better than Mrs. De Peyster’s daughter, who hadn’t the slightest interest in the chair President McKinley had sat in or any of that.

“The day I finished helping him with the house—it was about six o’clock in the afternoon, I was head-to-toe with dust—Welty opened a bottle of wine and we sat around on the packing cases and drank it, you know, bare floors and that empty house echo. I was exhausted—he’d paid me directly, cash, leaving my father out of it—and when I thanked him and asked if he knew of any more work, he said: Look, I’ve just opened a shop in New York, and if you want a job, you’ve got it. So we clinked glasses on it, and I went home, packed a suitcase full of books mostly, said goodbye to the housekeeper, and hitched a ride on the truck to New York the next day. Never looked back.”

A lull ensued. We were still sorting through the veneer: clicking fragments, paper-thin, like counters in some ancient game from China maybe, an eerie lightness in the sound which made you feel lost in some much larger silence.

“Hey,” I said, spotting a piece and snatching it up, passing it to him triumphantly: exact color match, closer than any of the pieces he’d set aside in his pile.

He took it from me, looked at it under the lamp. “It’s all right.”

“What’s wrong with it?”

“Well, you see—” he put the veneer up to the clock’s apron—“this kind of work, it’s the grain of the wood you really have to match. That’s the trick of it. Variations in tone are easier to fudge. Now this—” he held up a different piece, visibly several shades off—“with a little beeswax and a bit of the right coloring—maybe. Bichromate of potash, touch of Vandyke brown—sometimes, with a grain really difficult to match, certain kinds of walnut especially, I’ve used ammonia to darken a bit of new wood. But only when I was desperate. It’s always best to use wood of the same vintage as the piece you’re repairing, if you have it.”

“How’d you learn how to do all this?” I said, after a timid pause.

He laughed. “The same way you’re learning it now! Standing around and watching. Making myself useful.”

“Welty taught you?”

“Oh, no. He understood it—knew how it was