Sometimes the doormen used to come and stand in the hall outside the apartment and make a lot of noise so he could hear them—so he knew they were out there, you know? So he didn’t get too out of hand.”
“Out of hand?”
“There was a lot of yelling and stuff. It was mostly him doing it. But—” uncomfortably aware that I’d said more than I meant to—“it was mainly him making a bunch of noise. Like—oh, I don’t know, like when he had to stay with me, when she had to work? He was always in a really bad mood. I couldn’t talk to him when he was watching news or sports, that was the rule. I mean—” I paused, unhappily, feeling I’d talked myself into a corner. “Anyway. That was a long time ago.”
He sat back in his chair and looked at me: a big, self-contained, guarded man, though his eyes were the worried blue of boyishness.
“And now?” he said. “Do you like the people you’re staying with?”
“Um—” I paused, with full mouth, at a loss how to explain the Barbours. “They’re nice, I guess.”
“I’m glad. I mean, I can’t say I know Samantha Barbour, although I’ve done some work for her family in the past. She has a good eye.”
At this, I stopped eating. “You know the Barbours?”
“Not him. Her. Though his mother was quite a collector—I gather it all went to the brother, though, due to some family quarrel. Welty would have been able to tell you more about it. Not that he was a gossip,” he added hastily, “Welty was very discreet, buttoned up to here, but people confided in him, he was that sort, you know? Strangers opened up to him—clients, people he hardly knew, he was the kind of man people liked to entrust with their sadnesses.
“But yes.” He folded his hands. “Every art dealer and antiquario in New York knows Samantha Barbour. She was a Van der Pleyn before she married. Not a great buyer, though Welty saw her at auction sometimes, and she certainly has some pretty things.”
“Who told you I was staying with the Barbours?”
He blinked, rapidly. “It was in the paper,” he said. “You didn’t see it?”
“The paper?”
“The Times. You didn’t read it? No?”
“There was something in the paper about me?”
“No, no,” he said quickly. “Not about you. About children who had lost family members in the museum. Most of them were tourists. There was one little girl… a baby, really… diplomat’s child from South America—”
“What did they say about me in the paper?”
He made a face. “Oh, an orphan’s plight… charity-minded socialite steps in… that kind of thing. You can imagine.”
I stared into my plate, feeling embarrassed. Orphan? Charity?
“It was a very nice piece. I gather you protected one of her sons from bullies?” he said, lowering his large gray head to catch my eye. “At school? The other gifted boy who was put ahead?”
I shook my head. “Sorry?”
“Samantha’s son? Whom you defended from a group of older boys at school? Took beatings for him—that kind of thing?”
Again I shook my head—completely bewildered.
He laughed. “Such modesty! You shouldn’t be embarrassed.”
“But—it wasn’t like that,” I said, baffled. “We both got picked on and beaten up. Every day.”
“So the story said. Which made it all the more remarkable that you stood up for him. A broken bottle?” he said, when I didn’t respond. “Someone was trying to cut Samantha Barbour’s son with a broken bottle, and you—”
“Oh, that,” I said, embarrassed. “That was nothing.”
“You were cut yourself. When you tried to help him.”
“That’s not how it happened! Cavanaugh jumped on both of us! There was a piece of broken glass on the sidewalk.”
Again he laughed—a big man’s laugh, rich and rough and at odds with his carefully cultivated voice. “Well, however it happened,” he said, “you’ve certainly tipped up in an interesting family.” Standing, he went to the cupboard, where he retrieved a bottle of whiskey and poured a couple of fingers in a not-very-clean glass.
“Samantha Barbour doesn’t seem the warmest and most welcoming of hearts—at least that’s not the impression,” he said. “Yet she seems to do an awful lot of good in the world with the foundations and fundraising, doesn’t she?”
I kept quiet as he put the bottle back in the cupboard. Above, through the skylight, the light was gray and opalescent; a fine rain peppered at the glass.
“Are you going to open the shop again?” I said.
“Well—” he sighed. “Welty handled all that end of it—the clients, the