The Goldfinch

“Where is he?” Groggily, I looked in the back seat. “What’d you do with him?”

He laughed. “Now you don’t and… now you do!” With a flourish, he removed the messily-folded copy of USA Today from the canvas bag on the front seat beside him; and there, settled contentedly in a cardboard box at the bottom of the bag, crunching on some potato chips, was Popper.

“Misdirection,” he said. “The box fills out the bag so it doesn’t look dog-shaped and gives him a little more room to move around. And the newspaper—perfect prop. Covers him up, makes the bag look full, doesn’t add any weight.”

“Do you think it’ll be all right?”

“Well, I mean, he’s such a little guy—what, five pounds, six? Is he quiet?”

I looked at him doubtfully, curled at the bottom of the box. “Not always.”

J.P. wiped his mouth with the back of his hand, and gave me the package of potato chips. “Give him a couple of these suckers if he gets antsy. You’ll be stopping every few hours. Just sit as far in the back of the bus as you can, and make sure you take him away from the station a ways before you let him out to do his business.”

I put the bag over my shoulder and tucked my arm around it. “Can you tell?” I asked him.

“No. Not if I didn’t know. But can I give you a tip? Magician’s secret?”

“Sure.”

“Don’t keep looking down at the bag like that. Anywhere but the bag. The scenery, your shoelace—okay, there we go—that’s right. Confident and natural, that’s the kitty. Although klutzy and looking for a dropped contact lens will work too, if you think people are giving you the fish eye. Spill your chips—stub your toe—cough on your drink—anything.”

Wow, I thought. Clearly they didn’t call it Lucky Cab for nothing.

Again, he laughed, as if I’d spoken the thought aloud. “Hey, it’s a stupid rule, no dogs on the bus,” he said, taking another big slug of the Red Bull. “I mean, what are you supposed to do? Dump him by the side of the road?”

“Are you a magician or something?”

He laughed. “How’d ya guess? I got a gig doing card tricks in a bar over at the Orleans—if you were old enough to get in, I’d tell you to come down and check out my act sometime. Anyways, the secret is, always fix their attention away from where the slippery stuff’s going on. That’s the first law of magic, Specs. Misdirection. Never forget it.”

xxi.

UTAH. THE SAN RAFAEL SWELL, as the sun came up, unrolled in inhuman vistas like Mars: sandstone and shale, gorges and desolate rust-red mesas. I’d had a hard time sleeping, partly because of the drugs, partly for fear that Popper might fidget or whine, but he was perfectly quiet as we drove the twisted mountain roads, sitting silently inside his bag on the seat beside me, on the side closest to the window. As it happened my suitcase had been small enough to bring aboard, which I was happy about for any number of reasons: my sweater, Wind, Sand and Stars, but most of all my painting, which felt like an article of protection even wrapped up and out of view, like a holy icon carried by a crusader into battle. There were no other passengers in the back except a shy-looking Hispanic couple with a bunch of plastic food containers on their laps, and an old drunk talking to himself, and we made it fine on the winding roads all the way through Utah and into Grand Junction, Colorado, where we had a fifty-minute rest stop. After locking my suitcase in a coin-op locker, I walked Popper out behind the bus station, well out of the driver’s sight, bought us a couple of hamburgers from Burger King and gave him water from the plastic top of an old carry-out container I found in the trash. From Grand Junction, I slept, until our layover in Denver, an hour and sixteen minutes, just as the sun was going down—where Popper and I ran and ran, for sheer relief of being off the bus, ran so far down shadowy unknown streets that I was almost afraid of getting lost, although I was pleased to find a hippie coffee shop where the clerks were young and friendly (“Bring him in!” said the purple-haired girl at the counter when she saw Popper tied out front, “we love dogs!”) and where I bought not only two turkey sandwiches (one for me, one for him) but a vegan brownie and a greasy paper bag of home-made vegetarian dog biscuits.

I read late, creamy paper yellowed in a circle of weak lights, as the unknown darkness sped past, over the Continental Divide and out of the Rockies, Popper content after his romp around Denver and snoozing happily in his bag.

At some point, I slept, then woke and read some more. At two a.m., just as Saint-Exupéry was telling the story of his plane crash in the desert, we came into Salina, Kansas (“Crossroads of America”)—twenty minute rest stop, under a moth-beaten sodium lamp, where Popper and I ran around a deserted gas station parking lot in the dark, my head still full of the book while also exulting in the strangeness of being in my mother’s state for the first time in my life—had she, on her rounds with her father, ever driven through this town, cars rushing past on the Ninth Street Interstate Exit, lighted grain silos like starships looming in the emptiness for miles away? Back on the bus—sleepy, dirty, tired-out, cold—Popchik and I slept from Salina to Topeka, and from Topeka to Kansas City, Missouri, where we pulled in just at sunrise.

My mother had often told me how flat it was where she’d grown up—so flat you could see cyclones spinning across the prairies for miles—but still I couldn’t quite believe the vastness of it, the unrelieved sky, so huge that you felt crushed and oppressed by the infinite. In St. Louis, around noon, we had an hour and a half layover (plenty of time for Popper’s walk, and an awful roast beef sandwich for lunch, although the neighborhood was too dicey to venture far) and—back at the station—a transfer to an entirely different bus. Then—only an hour or two along—I woke, with the bus stopped, to find Popper sitting quietly with the tip of his nose poking out of the bag and a middle aged black lady with bright pink lipstick standing over me, thundering: “You can’t have that dog on the bus.”

I stared at her, disoriented. Then, much to my horror, I realized she was no random passenger but the driver herself, in cap and uniform.

“Do you hear what I said?” she repeated, with an aggressive side-to-side head tic. She was as wide as a prizefighter; the nametag, atop her impressive bosom, read Denese. “You can’t have that dog on this bus.” Then—impatiently—she made a flapping hand gesture as if to say: get him the hell back in that bag!

I covered his head up—he didn’t seem to mind—and sat with rapidly shrinking insides. We were stopped at a town called Effingham, Illinois: Edward Hopper houses, stage-set courthouse, a hand-lettered banner that said Crossroads of Opportunity!

The driver swept her finger around. “Do any of you people back here have objections to this animal?”

The other passengers in back—(unkempt handlebar-moustache guy; grown woman with braces; anxious black mom with elementary-school girl; W. C. Fields–looking oldster with nose tubes and oxygen canister—all seemed too surprised to talk, though the little girl, eyes round, shook her head almost imperceptibly: no.

The driver waited. She looked around. Then she turned back to me. “Okay. That’s good news for you and the pooch, honey. But if any—” she wagged her finger at me—“if any these other passengers back here complains about you having an animal on board, at any point, I’m going to have to make you get off. Understand?”

She wasn’t throwing me off? I blinked at her, afraid to move or speak a word.

“You understand?” she repeated, more ominously.

“Thank you—”

A bit belligerently, she shook her head. “Oh, no. Don’t thank me, honey. Because I am putting you off this bus if there is one single complaint. One.”

I sat in a tremble as she strode down the aisle and started the bus. As we swung out of the parking lot I was afraid to even glance at the other passengers, though I could feel them all looking at me.

By my knee, Popper let out a tiny huff and resettled. As much as I liked Popper, and felt sorry for him, I’d never thought that as dogs went he was particularly interesting or intelligent. Instead I’d spent a lot of time wishing he was a cooler dog, a border collie or a Lab or a rescue maybe, some smart and haunted pit mix from the shelter, a scrappy little mutt that chased balls and bit people—in fact almost anything but what he actually was: a girl’s dog, a toy, completely gay, a dog I felt embarrassed to walk on the street. Not that Popper wasn’t cute; in fact, he was exactly the kind of tiny, prancing fluffball that a lot of people liked—maybe not me but surely some little girl like the one across the aisle would find him by the road and take him home and tie ribbons in his hair?

Rigidly I sat there, re-living the bolt of fear again and again: the driver’s face, my shock. What really scared me was that I now knew if she made me put Popper off the bus that I would have to get off with him, too (and do what?) even in the middle of Illinois nowhere. Rain, cornfields: standing by the side of the road. How had I become attached to such a ridiculous animal? A lapdog that Xandra had chosen?

Throughout Illinois and Indiana, I sat swaying and vigilant: too afraid to go to sleep. The trees were bare, rotted-out Halloween pumpkins on the porches. Across the aisle, the mother had her arm around the little girl and was singing, very quietly: You are my sunshine. I had nothing to eat but leftover crumbs of the potato chips the cab driver had given me; and—ugly salt taste in my mouth, industrial plains, little nowhere towns rolling past—I felt chilled and forlorn, looking out at the bleak farmland and thinking of songs my mother had sung to me, way back when. Toot toot tootsie goodbye, toot toot tootsie, don’t cry. At last—in Ohio, when it was dark, and the lights in the sad little far-apart houses were coming on—I felt safe enough to drowse off, nodding back and forth in my sleep, until Cleveland, cold white-lit city where I changed buses at two in the morning. I was afraid to give Popper the long walk I knew he needed, for fear that someone might see us (because what would we do, if we were found out? Stay in Cleveland forever?). But he seemed frightened too; and we stood shivering on a street corner for ten minutes before I gave him some water, put him in the bag, and walked back to the station to board.

It was the middle of the night and everyone seemed half asleep, which made the transfer easier; and we transferred again at noon the next day, in Buffalo, where the bus crunched out through piled-up sleet in the station. The wind was biting, with a sharp wet edge; after two years in the desert I’d forgotten what real winter—aching and raw—was like. Boris had not returned any of my texts, which was perhaps understandable since I was sending them to Kotku’s phone, but I sent another one anyway: BFALO NY NYC 2NIT. HPE UR OK HAV U HERD FRM X?

Buffalo is a long way from New York City; but apart from a dreamlike, feverish stop in Syracuse, where I walked and watered Popper and bought us a couple of cheese danishes because there wasn’t anything else—I managed to sleep almost the whole way, through Batavia and Rochester and Syracuse and Binghamton, with my cheek against the window and cold air coming through at the crack, the vibration taking me back to Wind, Sand and Stars and a lonely cockpit high above the desert.

I think I must have been getting quietly sick ever since the stop in Cleveland, but by the time I finally got off the bus, in Port Authority, it was evening and I was burning up with fever. I was chilled, wobbly on my legs and the city—which I’d longed for so fiercely—seemed foreign and noisy and cold, exhaust fumes and garbage and strangers rushing past in every direction.

The terminal was packed with cops. Everywhere I looked there were signs for runaway shelters, runaway hotlines, and one lady cop in particular gave me the fish-eye as I was hurrying outside—after sixty-plus hours on the bus, I was dirty and tired and knew I didn’t really pass muster—but nobody stopped me and I didn’t look behind me until I was out the door, and well away. Several men of varying age and nationality called out to me on the street, soft voices coming from several directions (hey, little brother! where you headed? need a ride?) but though one red-haired guy in particular seemed nice and normal and not much older than me, almost like someone I might be friends with, I was enough of a New Yorker to ignore his cheerful hello and keep walking like I knew where I was going.

I’d thought Popper would be overjoyed to get out and walk, but when I put him down on the sidewalk Eighth Avenue was too much for him and he was too scared to go more than a block or so; he’d never been on a city street before, everything terrified him (cars, car horns, people’s legs, empty plastic bags blowing down the sidewalk) and he kept jerking forward, darting toward the crosswalk, jumping this way and that, dashing behind me in terror and winding the leash around my legs so I tripped and nearly fell in front of a van rushing to beat the light.

After I picked him up, paddling, and stuck him back in his bag (where he scrabbled and huffed in exasperation before he got quiet), I stood in the middle of the rush-hour crowd trying to get my bearings. Everything seemed so much dirtier and unfriendlier than I’d remembered—colder too, streets gray like old newspaper. Que faire? as my mother had liked to say. I could almost hear her saying it, in her light, careless voice.

I’d often wondered, when my father prowled around banging the kitchen cabinets and complaining that he wanted a drink, what “wanting a drink” felt like—what it felt like to want alcohol and nothing but, not water or Pepsi or anything else. Now, I thought bleakly, I know. I was dying for a beer but I knew better than to go in a deli and try to buy one without ID. Longingly I thought of Mr. Pavlikovsky’s vodka, the daily blast of warmth I’d come to take for granted.

More to the point: I was starving. I was a few doors down from a fancy cupcake place, and I was so hungry I turned right in and bought the first one that caught my eye (green tea flavored, as it turned out, with some kind of vanilla filling, weird but still delicious). Almost at once the sugar made me feel better; and while I ate, licking the custard off my fingers, I stared in amazement at the purposeful mob. Leaving Vegas I’d somehow felt a lot more confident about how all this would play out. Would Mrs. Barbour phone Social Services to tell them I’d turned up? I’d thought not; but now I wondered. There was also the not-so-insignificant question of Popper, since (along with dairy and tree nuts and adhesive tape and sandwich mustard and about twenty-five other commonly-found household items) Andy was violently allergic to dogs—not just dogs, but also cats and horses and circus animals and the class guinea pig (“Pig Newton”) that we’d had way back in second grade, which was why there were no pets at the Barbours’ house. Somehow this had not seemed such an insurmountable problem back in Vegas, but—standing out on Eighth Avenue when it was cold and getting dark—it did.

Not knowing what else to do, I started walking east toward Park Avenue. The wind hit raw in my face and the smell of rain in the air made me nervous. The skies in New York seemed a lot lower and heavier than out west—dirty clouds, eraser-smudged, like pencil on rough paper. It was as if the desert, its openness, had retrained my distance vision. Everything seemed dank and closed-in.

Walking helped me work out the roll in my legs. I walked east to the library (the lions! I stood still for a moment, like a returning soldier catching my first glimpse of home) and then I turned up Fifth Avenue—streetlamps on, still fairly busy, though it was emptying out for the night—up to Central Park South. As tired as I was, and cold, still my heart stiffened to see the Park, and I ran across Fifty-Seventh (Street of Joy!) to the leafy darkness. The smells, the shadows, even the dappled pale trunks of the plane trees lifted my spirits but yet it was as if I was seeing another Park beneath the tangible one, a map to the past, a ghost Park dark with memory, school outings and zoo visits of long ago. I was walking along the sidewalk on the Fifth Avenue side, looking in, and the paths were tree-shadowed, haloed with streetlamps, mysterious and inviting like the woods from The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe. If I turned and walked down one of those lighted paths, would I walk out again into a different year, maybe even a different future, where my mother—just out of work—would be waiting for me slightly wind-blown on the bench (our bench) by the Pond: putting her cell phone away, standing to kiss me, Hi, Puppy, how was school, what do you want to eat for dinner?

Then—suddenly—I stopped. A familiar presence in a business suit had shouldered past and was striding down the sidewalk ahead of me. The shock of white hair stood out in the darkness, white hair that looked as if it ought to be worn long and tied back with a ribbon; he was preoccupied, more rumpled than usual, but still I recognized him immediately, the angle of his head with its faint echo of Andy: Mr. Barbour, briefcase and all, on his way home from work.

I ran to catch up with him. “Mr. Barbour?” I called. He was talking to himself, though I couldn’t hear what he was saying. “Mr. Barbour, it’s Theo,” I said loudly, catching him by his sleeve.

With shocking violence, he turned and threw my hand off. It was Mr. Barbour all right; I would have known him anywhere. But his eyes, on mine, were a stranger’s—bright and hard and contemptuous.

“No more handouts!” he cried, in a high voice. “Get lost!”

I ought to have known mania when I saw it. It was an amped-up version of the look my dad had sometimes on Game Day—or, for that matter, when he’d hauled off and hit me. I’d never been around Mr. Barbour when he was off his medicine (Andy, typically, had been restrained in describing his father’s “enthusiasms,” I didn’t then know about the episodes where he’d tried to telephone the Secretary of State or wear his pyjamas to work); and his rage was so out of character for the bemused and inattentive Mr. Barbour I knew that all I could do was fall back, in shame. He glared at me for a long moment and then brushed his arm off (as if I were dirty, as if I’d contaminated him by touching him) and stalked away.

“Were you asking that man for money?” said another man who had sidled up out of nowhere as I stood on the sidewalk, astonished. “Were you?” he said, more insistently, when I turned away. His build was pudgy, his suit blandly corporate and married-with-kids-looking; and his sad-sack demeanor gave me the creeps. As I tried to step around him, he stepped in my path and dropped a heavy hand on my shoulder, and in a panic I dodged him and ran off into the park.

I headed down to the Pond, down paths yellow and sodden with fallen leaves, where I went by instinct straight to the Rendezvous Point (as my mother and I called our bench) and sat shivering. It had seemed the most incredible, unbelievable luck, spotting Mr. Barbour on the street; I’d thought, for maybe five seconds, that after the first awkwardness and puzzlement he would greet me happily, ask a few questions, oh, never mind, never mind, there’s time for that later, and walk with me up to the apartment. My goodness, what an adventure. Won’t Andy be pleased to see you!

Jesus, I thought—running my hand through my hair, still feeling shaken. In an ideal world, Mr. Barbour would have been the member of the family I would most have wanted to meet on the street—more than Andy, certainly more than Andy’s siblings, more than even Mrs. Barbour, with her frozen pauses, her social niceties and her codes of behavior unknown to me, her chilling and unreadable gaze.

Out of habit, I checked my phone for texts for what seemed like the ten thousandth time—and was cheered despite myself to find at long last a message—number I didn’t recognize, but it had to be Boris. HEY! OPE U2 ROK. NOT 2 MAD. RING XNR OK SHE HZ BEN BUGEN ME

I tried calling him back—I’d texted him about fifty times from the road—but no one picked up at that number and Kotku’s phone took me straight to voice mail. Xandra could wait. Walking back to Central Park South, with Popper, I bought three hot dogs from a vendor who was just shutting up for the day (one for Popper, two for me) and while we ate, on an out-of-the-way bench inside the Scholars’ Gate, considered my options. In my desert fantasias of New York I’d sometimes entertained perverse images of Boris and me living on the street, around St. Mark’s Place or Tompkins Square, quite possibly standing around rattling our change cups with the very skate rats who’d once jeered at Andy and me in our school uniforms. But the real prospect of sleeping on the street was a whole lot less appealing alone and feverish in the November cold.

The hell of it was: I was only about five blocks from Andy’s. I thought about phoning him—maybe asking him to meet me—and then decided against it. Certainly I could call him if I got desperate; he would gladly sneak out, bring me a change of clothes and money snitched from his mother’s purse and—who knows—maybe a bunch of leftover crabmeat canapés or those cocktail peanuts that the Barbours always ate. But the word handout still scalded. As much as I liked Andy, it had been almost two years. And I couldn’t forget the way that Mr. Barbour had looked at me. Clearly something had gone wrong, badly, only I wasn’t quite sure what—apart from knowing that I was responsible somehow, in the generalized miasma of shame and unworthiness and being-a-burden that never quite left me.

Without meaning to—I’d been staring into space—I’d made accidental eye contact with a man on a bench across from me. Quickly I looked away but it was too late; he was standing up, walking over.

“Cute mutt,” he said, stooping to pat Popper, and then, when I didn’t answer: “What’s your name? Mind if I sit down?” He was a wiry guy, small but strong-looking; and he smelled. I got up, avoiding his eyes, but as I turned to leave he shot his arm out and caught me by the wrist.

“What’s the matter,” he said, in an ugly voice, “don’t you like me?”

I twisted free and ran—Popper running after me, out to the street, too fast, he wasn’t used to city traffic, cars were coming—I grabbed him up just in time, and ran across Fifth Avenue, over to the Pierre. My pursuer—trapped on the other side by the changed light—was attracting some glances from pedestrians but when I looked back again, safe in the circle of light pouring from the warm, well-lighted entrance of the hotel—well-dressed couples; doormen hailing cabs—I saw that he had faded back into the park.

The streets were much louder than I remembered—smellier, too. Standing on the corner by A La Vieille Russie I found myself overpowered with the familiar old Midtown stench: carriage horses, bus exhaust, perfume, and urine. For so long I’d thought of Vegas as something temporary—my real life was New York—but was it? Not any more, I thought, dismally, surveying the thinned-out trickle of pedestrians hurrying past Bergdorf’s.

Though I was aching and chilled with fever again, I walked for ten blocks or so, still trying to work the hum and lightness out of my legs, the pervasive vibration of the bus. But at last the cold was too much for me, and I hailed a cab; it would have been an easy bus ride, half an hour maybe, straight shot down Fifth to the Village, only after three solid days on the bus I couldn’t bear the thought of jolting around on another bus for even a minute more.

I wasn’t that comfortable at the notion of turning up at Hobie’s house cold—not comfortable about it at all, since we hadn’t been in touch for a while, my fault, not his; at some point, I’d just stopped writing back. On one level, it was the natural course of things; on another Boris’s casual speculation (“old poofter?”) had put me off him, subtly, and his last two or three letters had gone unanswered.

I felt bad; I felt awful. Even though it was a short ride I must have nodded off in the back seat because when the cabbie stopped and said: “This all right?” I came to with a jolt, and for a moment sat stunned, fighting to remember where I was.

The shop—I noticed, as the cabbie drove away—was closed-up and dark, as if it had never been opened again in all my time away from New York. The windows were furred with grime and—looking inside—I saw that some of the furniture was draped with sheets. Nothing else had changed at all, except that all the old books and bric-a-brac—the marble cockatoos, the obelisks—were covered with an additional layer of dust.

My heart sank. I stood on the street for a long minute or two before I worked up my nerve to ring the bell. It seemed that I stood for ages listening to the faraway echo, though it was probably no time at all; I’d almost talked myself into believing that no one was at home (and what would I do? Hike back to Times Square, try to find a cheap hotel somewhere or turn myself in to the runaway cops?) when the door opened very suddenly and I found myself looking not at Hobie, but a girl my own age.

It was her—Pippa. Still tiny (I’d grown much taller than her) and thin, though much healthier-looking than the last time I’d seen her, fuller in the face; lots of freckles; different hair too, it seemed to have grown back in with a different color and texture, not red-blonde but a darker, rust color and a bit straggly, like her aunt Margaret’s. She was dressed like a boy, in sock feet and old corduroys, a too-big sweater, only with a crazy pink-and-orange striped scarf that a daffy grandmother would wear. Brow furrowed, polite but reticent, she looked at me blankly with the golden-brown eyes: a stranger. “Can I help you?” she said.

She’s forgotten me, I thought, dismayed. How could I have expected her to remember? It had been a long time; I knew I looked different too. It was like seeing somebody I’d thought was dead.

And then—thumping down the stairs, coming up behind her, in paint-stained chinos and an out-at-elbows cardigan—was Hobie. He’s cut his hair, was my first thought; it was close to his head and much whiter than I remembered. His expression was slightly irritated; for a heartsinking moment I thought he didn’t recognize me either, and then: “Dear God,” he said, stepping back suddenly.

“It’s me,” I said quickly. I was afraid he was going to shut the door in my face. “Theodore Decker. Remember?”

Quickly, Pippa looked up at him—clearly she recognized my name, even if she didn’t recognize me—and the friendly surprise on their faces was such an astonishment that I began to cry.

“Theo.” His hug was strong and parental, and so fierce that it made me cry even harder. Then his hand was on my shoulder, heavy anchoring hand that was security and authority itself; he was leading me in, into the workshop, dim gilt and rich wood smells I’d dreamed of, up the stairs into the long-lost parlor, with its velvets and urns and bronzes. “It’s wonderful to see you,” he was saying; and “you look knackered” and “When did you get back?” and “Are you hungry?” and “My goodness, you’ve grown!” and “that hair! Like Mowgli the Jungle Boy!” and (worried now)—“does it seem close in here to you? should I open a window?”—and, when Popper stuck his head out of the bag: “And ha! who is this?”

Pippa—laughing—lifted him up and cuddled him in her arms. I felt light-headed with fever—glowing red and radiant, like the bars in an electric heater, and so unmoored that I didn’t even feel embarrassed for crying. I was conscious of nothing but the relief of being there, and my aching and over-full heart.

Back in the kitchen there was mushroom soup, which I wasn’t hungry for, but it was warm, and I was freezing to death—and as I ate (Pippa cross-legged on the floor, playing with Popchik, dangling the pom-pom from her granny scarf in his face, Popper/Pippa, how had I never noticed the kinship in their names?) I told him, a little, in a garbled way, about my father’s death and what had happened. Hobie, as he listened, arms folded, had an extremely worried look on his face, his mulish brow furrowing deeper as I talked.

“You need to call her,” he said. “Your father’s wife.”

“But she’s not his wife! She’s just his girlfriend! She doesn’t care anything about me.”

Firmly, he shook his head. “Doesn’t matter. You have to ring her up and tell her that you’re all right. Yes, yes you do,” he said, speaking over me as I tried to object. “No buts. Right now. This instant. Pips—” there was an old-fashioned wall phone in the kitchen—“come along and let’s clear out of here for a minute.”

Though Xandra was just about the last person in the world I wanted to talk to—especially after I’d ransacked her bedroom and stolen her tip money—I was so relieved to be there that I would have done anything he asked. Dialing the number, I tried to tell myself she probably wouldn’t pick up (so many solicitors and bill collectors phoned us, all the time, that she seldom took calls from numbers she didn’t recognize). Hence I was surprised when she answered on the first ring.

“You left the door open,” she said almost immediately, in an accusing voice.

“What?”

“You let the dog out. He’s run off—I can’t find him anywhere. He probably got hit by a car or something.”

“No.” I was gazing fixedly at the blackness of the brick courtyard. It was raining, drops pounding hard on the windowpanes, the first real rain I’d seen in almost two years. “He’s with me.”

“Oh.” She sounded relieved. Then, more sharply: “Where are you? With Boris somewhere?”

“No.”

“I spoke to him—wired out of his mind, it sounded like. He wouldn’t tell me where you were. I know he knows.” Though it was still early out there, her voice was gravelly like she’d been drinking, or crying. “I ought to call the cops on you, Theo. I know it was you two who stole that money and stuff.”

“Yeah, just like you stole my mom’s earrings.”

“What—”

“Those emerald ones. They belonged to my grandmother.”

“I didn’t steal them.” She was angry now. “How dare you. Larry gave those to me, he gave them to me after—”

“Yeah. After he stole them from my mother.”

“Um, excuse me, but your mom’s dead.”

“Yes, but she wasn’t when he stole them. That was like a year before she died. She contacted the insurance company,” I said, raising my voice over hers. “And filed a police report.” I didn’t know if the police part was true, but it might as well have been.

“Um, I guess you’ve never heard of a little something called marital property.”

“Right. And I guess you never heard of something called a family heirloom. You and my dad weren’t even married. He had no right to give those to you.”

Silence. I could hear the click of her cigarette lighter on the other end, a weary inhale. “Look, kid. Can I say something? Not about the money, honest. Or the blow. Although, I can tell you for damn sure, I wasn’t doing anything like that when I was your age. You think you’re pretty smart and all, and I guess you are, but you’re headed down a bad road, you and whats-his-name too. Yeah, yeah,” she said, raising her voice over mine, “I like him too, but he’s bad news, that kid.”

“You should know.”

She laughed, bleakly. “Well, kid, guess what? I’ve been around the track a few times—I do know. He’s going to end up in jail by the time he’s eighteen, that one, and dollars to doughnuts you’ll be right there with him. I mean, I can’t blame you,” she said, raising her voice again, “I loved your dad, but he sure wasn’t worth much, and from what he told me, your mother wasn’t worth much either.”

“Okay. That’s it. Fuck you.” I was so mad I was trembling. “I’m hanging up now.”

“No—wait. Wait. I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have said that about your mother. That’s not why I wanted to talk to you. Please. Will you wait a second?”

“I’m waiting.”

“First off—assuming you care—I’m having your dad cremated. That all right with you?”

“Do what you want.”

“You never did have much use for him, did you?”

“Is that it?”

“One more thing. I don’t care where you are, quite frankly. But I need an address where I can get in touch with you.”

“And why is that?”

“Don’t be a wise ass. At some point somebody’s going to call from your school or something—”

“I wouldn’t count on it.”

“—and I’m going to need, I don’t know, some kind of explanation of where you are. Unless you want the cops to put you on the side of a milk carton or something.”

“I think that’s fairly unlikely.”

“Fairly unlikely,” she repeated, in a cruel, drawling imitation of my voice. “Well, may be. But give it to me, all the same, and we’ll call it even. I mean,” she said, when I didn’t answer, “let me make it plain, it makes no difference to me where you are. I just don’t want to be left holding the bag out here in case there’s some problem and I need to get in touch with you.”

“There’s a lawyer in New York. His name’s Bracegirdle. George Bracegirdle.”

“Do you have a number?”

“Look it up,” I said. Pippa had come into the room to get the dog a bowl of water, and, awkwardly, so I wouldn’t have to look at her, I turned to face the wall.

“Brace Girdle?” Xandra was saying. “Is that the way it sounds? What the hell kind of name is that?”

“Look, I’m sure you’ll be able to find him.”

There was a silence. Then Xandra said: “You know what?”

“What?”

“That was your father that died. Your own father. And you act like it was, I don’t know, I’d say the dog, but not even the dog. Because I know you’d care if it was the dog got hit by a car, at least I think you would.”

“Let’s say I cared about him exactly as much as he did about me.”

“Well, let me tell you something. You and your dad are a whole lot more alike than you might think. You’re his kid, all right, through and through.”

“Well, you’re full of shit,” I said, after a brief, contemptuous pause—a retort that seemed, to me, to sum up the situation pretty nicely. But—long after I’d hung up the phone, when I sat sneezing and shivering in a hot bath, and in the bright fog after (swallowing the aspirins Hobie gave me, following him down the hall to the musty spare room, you look packed in, extra blankets in the trunk, no, no more talking, I’ll leave you to it now) her parting shot rang again and again in my mind, as I turned my face into the heavy, foreign-smelling pillow. It wasn’t true—no more than what she’d said about my mother was true. Even her raspy dry voice coming through the line, the memory of it, made me feel dirty. Fuck her, I thought sleepily. Forget about it. She was a million miles away. But though I was dead tired—more than dead tired—and the rickety brass bed was the softest bed I’d ever slept in, her words were an ugly thread running all night long through my dreams.

III.

We are so accustomed to disguise ourselves to others, that in the end, we become disguised to ourselves.

—F

RANÇOIS DE

L

A

R

OCHEFOUCAULD

Chapter 7.

The Shop-Behind-the-Shop

i.

WHEN I WOKE TO the clatter of garbage trucks, it was as if I’d parachuted into a different universe. My throat hurt. Lying very still under the eiderdown, I breathed the dark air of dried-out potpourri and burnt fireplace wood and—very faint—the evergreen tang of turpentine, resin, and varnish.

For some time I lay there. Popper—who’d been curled by my feet—was nowhere in evidence. I’d slept in my clothes, which were filthy. At last—propelled by a sneezing fit—I sat up, pulled my sweater over my shirt and grappled under the bed to make sure the pillowcase was still there, then trudged on cold floors to the bathroom. My hair had dried in knots too tangled to yank the comb through, and even after I doused it in water and started over, one chunk was so matted I finally gave up and sawed it out, laboriously, with a pair of rusted nail scissors from the drawer.

Christ, I thought, turning from the mirror to sneeze. I hadn’t been around a mirror in a while and I barely recognized myself: bruised jaw, spattering of chin acne, face blotched and swollen from my cold—eyes swollen too, lidded and sleepy, giving me a sort of dumb, shifty, homeschooled look. I looked like some cult-raised kid just rescued by local law enforcement, brought blinking from some basement stocked with firearms and powdered milk.

It was late: nine. Stepping out of my room, I could hear the morning classical program on WNYC, a dream familiarity in the announcer’s voice, Köchel numbers, a drugged calm, the same warm public-radio purr I’d woken up to so many mornings back at Sutton Place. In the kitchen, I found Hobie at the table with a book.

But he wasn’t reading; he was staring across the room. When he saw me he started.

“Well, there you are,” he said as he rose to messily sweep aside a pile of mail and bills so I could sit. He was dressed for the workshop, knee-sprung corduroys and an old peat-brown sweater, ragged and eaten with moth holes, and his receding hairline and new short-cropped hair gave him the ponderous, bald-templed look of the marble senator on the cover of Hadley’s Latin book. “How’s the form?”

“Fine, thanks.” Voice gravelled and croaking.

Down came the brows again and he looked at me hard. “Good heavens!” he said. “You sound like a raven this morning.”

What did that mean? Ablaze with shame, I slid into the chair he scraped out for me and—too embarrassed to meet his eye—stared at his book: cracked leather, Life and Letters of Lord Somebody, an old volume that had probably come from one of his estate sales, old Mrs. So-and-So up in Poughkeepsie, broken hip, no children, all very sad.

He was pouring me tea, pushing a plate my way. In an attempt to hide my discomfort I put my head down and plowed into the toast—and nearly choked, since my throat was too raw for me to swallow. Too quickly I reached for the tea, so I sloshed it on the tablecloth and had to scramble to blot it up.

“No—no, it doesn’t matter—here—”

My napkin was sopping wet; I didn’t know what to do with it; in my confusion I dropped it on top of my toast and reached under my glasses to rub my eyes. “I’m sorry,” I blurted.

“Sorry?” He was looking at me as if I’d asked him for directions to a place he wasn’t sure how to get to. “Oh, come now—”

“Please don’t make me go.”

“What’s that? Make you go? Go where?” He pulled his half-moon glasses low and looked at me over the tops of them. “Don’t be ridiculous,” he said, in a playful, half-irritated voice. “Tell you where I ought to make you go is straight back to bed. You sound like you’re down with the Black Death.”

But his manner failed to reassure me. Paralyzed with embarrassment, determined not to start crying, I found myself staring hard at the forlorn spot by the stove where once upon a time Cosmo’s basket had stood.

“Ah,” said Hobie, when he saw me looking at the empty corner. “Yes. There you go. Deaf as a haddock, having three and four seizures a week but still we wanted him to live forever. I blubbed like a baby. If you’d told me Welty was going to go before Cosmo—he spent half his life carrying that dog back and forth to the vet—Look here,” he said in an altered voice, leaning forward and trying to catch my eye when still I sat speechless and miserable. “Come on. I know you’ve been through a lot but there’s no need in the world to fuss about it now. You look very shook—now, now, yes you do,” he said crisply. “Very shook indeed and—bless you!”—flinching a bit—“bad dose of something, for sure. Don’t fret—everything’s all right. Go back to bed, why don’t you, and we’ll hash it out later.”

“I know but—” I turned my head away to stifle a wet, burbling sneeze. “I don’t have any place to go.”

He leaned back in his chair: courteous, careful, something a little dusty about him. “Theo—” tapping at his lower lip—“how old are you?”

“Fifteen. Fifteen and a half.”

“And—” he seemed to be working out how to ask it—“what about your grandfather?”

“Oh,” I said, helplessly, after a pause.

“You’ve spoken to him? He knows that you’ve nowhere to go?”

“Well, shit—” it had just slipped out; Hobie put up a hand to reassure me—“you don’t understand. I mean—I don’t know if he has Alzheimer’s or what, but when they called him he didn’t even ask to speak to me.”

“So—” Hobie leaned his chin heavily in his hand and eyed me like a skeptical schoolteacher—“you didn’t speak to him.”

“No—I mean not personally—this lady was there, helping out—” Xandra’s friend Lisa (solicitous, following me around, voicing gentle but increasingly urgent concerns that “the family” be notified) had retreated to a corner at some point to dial the number I gave her—and got off the phone with such a look that it had elicited, from Xandra, the only laugh of the evening.

“This lady?” said Hobie, in the silence that had fallen, in a voice you might employ with a mental patient.

“Right. I mean—” I scrubbed a hand over my face; the colors in the kitchen were too intense; I felt lightheaded, out of control—“I guess Dorothy answered the phone and Lisa said she was like ‘okay, wait,’—not even ‘Oh no!’ or ‘what happened?’ or ‘how terrible!’—just ‘hang on, let me get him,’ and then my granddad came on and Lisa told him about the wreck and he listened, and then he said well, he was sorry to hear it, but in this sort of tone, Lisa said. Not ‘what can I do’ or ‘when is the funeral’ or anything. Just, like, thank you for calling, we appreciate it, bye. I mean—I could have told her,” I added nervously when Hobie didn’t answer. “Because, I mean, they really didn’t like my dad—really didn’t like him—Dorothy is his stepmother and they hated each other from Day One but he never got along with Grandpa Decker either—”

“All right, all right. Steady on—”

“—and, I mean, my dad was in some trouble when he was a kid, that might have had something to do with it—he was arrested but I don’t know what for—honestly I don’t know why, but they never wanted anything to do with him for as long as I remember and they never wanted anything to do with me either—”

“Calm down! I’m not trying to—”

“—because, I swear, I hardly ever met them, I really don’t know them at all but there’s no reason for them to hate me—not that my grandpa is such a great guy, he was pretty abusive to my dad actually—”

“Ssh—no carrying on! I’m not trying to put the screws on you, I just want to know—no now, listen,” he said as I tried to talk over him, batting away my words as if he were shooing a fly from the table.

“My mother’s lawyer is here. In the city. Will you come with me to see him? No,” I said in confusion as his eyebrows came together, “not a lawyer lawyer, but that handles money? I talked to him on the phone? Before I left?”

“Okay,” said Pippa—laughing, pink-cheeked from the cold—“what’s wrong with this dog? Has he never seen a car?”

Bright red hair; green wool hat; the shock of seeing her in broad daylight was a dash of cold water. She had a hitch in her walk, probably from the accident but there was a grasshopper lightness to it like the odd, graceful preliminary to a dance step; and she was wrapped in so many layers against the cold that she looked like a colorful little cocoon, with feet.

“He was yowling like a cat,” she said, unwinding one of her many patterned scarves as Popchyk danced at her feet with the end of his leash in his mouth. “Does he always make that weird noise? I mean, a cab would go by and—whoo! in the air! I was flying him like a kite! People were laughing their heads off. Yes—” stooping to speak to the dog, rubbing the top of his head with her knuckles—“you, you need a bath, don’t you? Is he a Maltese?” she said, glancing up.

Furiously I nodded, back of my hand to my mouth, trying to choke back a sneeze.

“I love dogs.” I could hardly hear what she was saying, so dazzled was I by her eyes on mine. “I have a dog book and I memorized every breed there is. If I had a big dog I’d have a Newfoundland like Nana in Peter Pan, and if I had a small dog—well, I change my mind all the time. I like all the little terriers—Jack Russells especially, they’re always so funny and friendly on the street. But I know a wonderful Basenji too. And I met a really great Pekingese the other day. Really really tiny and really intelligent. Only royalty could have them in China. They’re a very ancient breed.”

“Maltese are ancient, too,” I croaked, glad to have an interesting fact to contribute. “They date back to ancient Greece.”

“That’s why you picked a Maltese? Because it was ancient?”

“Um—” Stifling a cough.

She was saying something else—to the dog, not me—but I’d fallen into another fit of sneezing. Quickly, Hobie scrabbled for the closest thing at hand—a table napkin—and passed it over to me.

“All right, enough,” he said. “Back to bed. No, no,” he said as I tried to hand the napkin back to him, “you keep it. Now tell me—” eyeing my wrecked plate, spilled tea and soggy toast—“what can I bring you for breakfast?”

Caught between sneezes, I gave a bright, Russian-accented shrug I’d picked up from Boris: anything.

“All right then, if you don’t mind it, I’ll make you some oatmeal. Easy on the throat. Don’t you have any socks?”

“Um—” She was busy with the dog, mustard-yellow sweater and hair like an autumn leaf, and her colors were mixed up and confused with the bright colors of the kitchen: striped apples glowing in a yellow bowl, the sharp ding of silver glinting from the coffee can where Hobie kept his paintbrushes.

“Pyjamas?” Hobie was saying. “No? I’ll see what I can find of Welty’s. And when you get out of those things I’ll throw them in the wash. Now, off with you,” he said, clapping his hand on my shoulder so suddenly I jumped.

“I—”

“You can stay. As long as however you like. And don’t worry, I’ll go with you to see your solicitor, it’ll all be fine.”

ii.

GROGGY, SHIVERING, I MADE my way down the dark hall and eased between the covers, which were heavy and ice-cold. The room smelled damp, and though there were many interesting things to look at—a pair of terra-cotta griffins, Victorian beadwork pictures, even a crystal ball—the dark brown walls, their deep dry texture like cocoa powder, soaked me through and through with a sense of Hobie’s voice and also of Welty’s, a friendly brown that saturated me to the core and spoke in warm old-fashioned tones, so that drifting in a lurid stream of fever I felt wrapped and reassured by their presence whereas Pippa had cast a shifting, colored nimbus of her own, I was thinking in a mixed-up way about scarlet leaves and bonfire sparks flying up in darkness and also my painting, how it would look against such a rich, dark, light-absorbing ground. Yellow feathers. Flash of crimson. Bright black eyes.

I woke with a jolt—terrified, flailing, back on the bus again with someone lifting the painting from my knapsack—to find Pippa lifting up the sleepy dog, her hair brighter than everything else in the room.

“Sorry, but he needs to go out,” she said. “Don’t sneeze on me.”

I scrambled up on my elbows. “Sorry, hi,” I said idiotically, smearing an arm across my face; and then: “I’m feeling better.”

Her unsettling golden-brown eyes went around the room. “Are you bored? Do you want me to bring you some colored pencils?”

“Colored pencils?” I was baffled. “Why?”

“Uh, to draw with—?”

“Well—”

“Not a big deal,” she said. “All you had to say was no.”

Out she whisked, Popchik trotting after her, leaving behind her a smell of cinnamon gum, and I turned my face into the pillow feeling crushed by my stupidity. Though I would have died rather than told anyone, I was worried that my exuberant drug use had damaged my brain and my nervous system and maybe even my soul in some irreparable and perhaps not readily apparent way.

While I was lying there worrying, my cell phone beeped: GES WR I AM? POOL @ MGM GRAND!!!!!

I blinked. BORIS? I texted in reply.

YES, IS ME!

What was he doing there? RUOK? I texted back.

YES BT V SLEEPY! WE BIN DOIN THOS 8BALS OMG :-)

And then, another ding:

* GREAT * FUN. PARTY PARTY. U? LIVING UNDER UNDRPASS?

NYC, I texted back. SICK IN BED. WHY RU AT MGMGR

HERE W KT AND AMBER & THOSE GUYS!!! ;-)

then, coming in a second later: DO U NO OF DRINK CALLED WITE RUSIAN? V NICE TASTNG NOT V GOOD NAME 4 DRNK THO

A knock. “Are you all right?” said Hobie, sticking his head in the door. “Can I bring you anything?”

I put the phone aside. “No, thank you.”

“Well, tell me when you’re hungry, please. There’s loads of food, the fridge is so stuffed I can hardly get the door closed, we had people in for Thanksgiving—what is that racket?” he said, looking around.

“Just my phone.” Boris had texted: U CANT BELIEVE THE LAST FEW DAZE!!!

“Well, I’ll leave you to it. Let me know if you need something.”

Once he was gone, I rolled to face the wall and texted back: MGMGR? W/ KT BEARMAN?!

The answer came almost immediately: YES! ALSO AMBER & MIMI & JESICA & KT’S SISTR JORDAN WHO IS IN *COLEGE* :-D

WTF???

U LEFT AT A BAD TIME!!! :-D

then, almost immediately, before I could reply: G2GO, AMBR NEEDS HER PHONE

CALL ME L8R, I texted back. But there was no reply—and it would be a long, long time before I heard anything from Boris again.

iii.

THAT DAY, AND THE next day or two, flopping around in a bewilderingly soft pair of Welty’s old pyjamas, were so topsy-turvy and deranged with fever that repeatedly I found myself back at Port Authority running away from people, dodging through crowds and ducking into tunnels with oily water dripping on me or else in Las Vegas again on the CAT bus, riding through windwhipped industrial plazas with blown sand hitting the windows and no money to pay my fare. Time slid from under me in drifts like ice skids on the highway, punctuated by sudden sharp flashes where my wheels caught and I was flung into ordinary time: Hobie bringing me aspirins and ginger ale with ice, Popchik—freshly bathed, fluffy and snow-white—hopping up on the foot of the bed to march back and forth across my feet.

“Here,” said Pippa, coming over to the bed and poking me in the side so she could sit down. “Move over.”

I sat up, fumbling for my glasses. I’d been dreaming about the painting—I’d had it out, looking at it, or had I?—and found myself glancing around anxiously to make sure I’d put it away before I went to sleep.

“What’s the matter?”

I forced myself to turn my gaze to her face. “Nothing.” I’d crawled under the bed several times just to put my hands on the pillowcase, and I couldn’t help wondering if I’d been careless and left it poking from under the bed. Don’t look down there, I told myself. Look at her.

“Here,” Pippa was saying. “Made you something. Hold out your hand.”

“Wow,” I said, staring at the spiked, kelly-green origami in my palm. “Thanks.”

“Do you know what it is?”

“Uh—” Deer? Crow? Gazelle? Panicked, I glanced up at her.

“Give up? A frog! Can’t you tell? Here, put it on the nightstand. It’s supposed to hop when you press on it like this, see?”

As I fooled around with it, awkwardly, I was aware of her eyes on me—eyes that had a light and wildness to them, a careless power like the eyes of a kitten.

“Can I look at this?” She’d snatched up my iPod and was busily scrolling through it. “Hmn,” she said. “Nice! Magnetic Fields, Mazzy Star, Nico, Nirvana, Oscar Peterson. No classical?”

“Well, there’s some,” I said, feeling embarrassed. Everything she’d mentioned except the Nirvana had actually been my mom’s, and even some of that was hers.

“I’d make you some CDs. Except I left my computer at school. I guess I could mail you some—I’ve been listening to a lot of Arvo Pärt lately, don’t ask me why, I have to listen on my headphones because it drives my roommates nuts.”

Terrified she was going to catch me staring, unable to wrench my eyes away, I watched her studying my iPod with bent head: ears rosy-pink, raised line of scar tissue slightly puckered underneath the scalding-red hair. In profile her downcast eyes were long, heavy-lidded, with a tenderness that reminded me of the angels and page boys in the Northern European Masterworks book I’d checked and re-checked from the library.

“Hey—” Words drying up in my mouth.

“Yes?”

“Um—” Why wasn’t it like before? Why couldn’t I think of anything to say?

“Oooh—” she’d glanced up at me, and then was laughing again, laughing too hard to talk.

“What is it?”

“Why are you looking at me like that?”

“Like what?” I said, alarmed.

“Like—” I wasn’t sure how to interpret the pop-eyed face she made at me. Choking person? Mongoloid? Fish?

“Dont be mad. You’re just so serious. It’s just—” she glanced down at the iPod, and broke out laughing again. “Ooh,” she said, “Shostakovich, intense.”

How much did she remember? I wondered, afire with humiliation yet unable to tear my eyes from her. It wasn’t the kind of thing you could ask but still I wanted to know. Did she have nightmares too? Crowd fears? Sweats and panics? Did she ever have the sense of observing herself from afar, as I often did, as if the explosion had knocked my body and my soul into two separate entities that remained about six feet apart from one another? Her gust of laughter had a self-propelling recklessness I knew all too well from wild nights with Boris, an edge of giddiness and hysteria that I associated (in myself, anyway) with having narrowly missed death. There had been nights in the desert where I was so sick with laughter, convulsed and doubled over with aching stomach for hours on end, I would happily have thrown myself in front of a car to make it stop.

iv.

ON MONDAY MORNING, THOUGH I was far from well, I roused myself from my fog of aches and dozes and trudged dutifully into the kitchen and telephoned Mr. Bracegirdle’s office. But when I asked for him, his secretary (after putting me on hold, and then returning a bit too swiftly) informed me that Mr. Bracegirdle was out of the office and no, she didn’t have a number where he could be reached and no, she was afraid she couldn’t say when he might be in. Was there anything else?

“Well—” I left Hobie’s number with her and was regretting that I’d been too slow on the draw to go ahead and schedule the appointment when the phone rang.

“212, eh?” said the rich, clever voice.

“I left,” I said stupidly; the cold in my head made me sound nasal and block-witted. “I’m in the city.”

“Yes, I gathered.” His tone was friendly but cool. “What can I do for you?”

When I told him about my father, there was a deep breath. “Well,” he said carefully. “I’m sorry to hear it. When did this happen?”

“Last week.”

He listened without interrupting; in the five minutes or so it took me to fill him in, I heard him turn away at least two other calls. “Crikey,” he said, when I’d finished talking. “That’s quite a story, Theodore.”

Crikey: in a different mood, I might have smiled. This was definitely a person my mother had known and liked.

“It must have been dreadful for you out there,” he was saying. “Of course, I’m terribly sorry for your loss. It’s all very sad. Though quite frankly—and I feel more comfortable saying this to you now—when he turned up, no one knew what to do. Your mother had of course confided some things—even Samantha had expressed concerns—well, as you know, it was a difficult situation. But I don’t think anyone expected this. Thugs with baseball bats.”

“Well—” thugs with baseball bats, I hadn’t really meant for him to seize on that detail. “He was just standing there holding it. It’s not like he hit me or anything.”

“Well—” he laughed, an easy laugh that broke the tension—“sixty-five thousand dollars did seem like a very specific sum. I have to say too—I went a bit beyond my authority as your counsel when we spoke on the phone, though under the circumstances I hope you’ll forgive me. It was just that I smelled a bit of a rat.”

“Sorry?” I said, after a sick pause.

“Over the phone. The money. You can withdraw it, from the 529 anyway. Large tax penalty, but it’s possible.”

Possible? I could have taken it? An alternate future was flashing through my mind: Mr. Silver paid, Dad in his bathrobe checking the sports scores on his BlackBerry, me in Spirsetskaya’s class with Boris lazing across the aisle from me.

“Although I do need to tell you that the money in the fund is actually a bit short of that,” Mr. Bracegirdle was saying. “Socked away and growing all the time, though! Not that we can’t arrange for you to use some of it now, given your circumstances, but your mother was absolutely determined not to dip into it even with her financial troubles. The last thing she would have wanted was for your dad to get his hands on it. And yes, just between the two of us, I do think you were very smart to come back to the city on your own recognizance. Sorry—” muffled conversation—“I’ve got an eleven o’clock, I’ve got to run—you’re staying at Samantha’s now, I gather?”

The question threw me for a loop. “No,” I said, “with some friends in the Village.”

“Well, splendid. Just so long as you’re comfortable. At any rate, I’m afraid I have to dash now. What do you say we continue this discussion in my office? I’ll put you back through to Patsy so she can schedule an appointment.”

“Great,” I said, “thank you,” but when I got off the phone, I felt sick—like someone had just reached a hand in my chest and wrenched loose a lot of ugly wet stuff around my heart.

“Everything okay?” said Hobie—crossing through the kitchen, stopping suddenly to see the look on my face.

“Sure.” But it was a long walk down the hall to my room—and once I closed the door and climbed back in bed I began to cry, or half-cry, ugly dry wheezes with my face pressed in the pillow, while Popchik pawed at my shirt and snuffled anxiously against the back of my neck.

v.

BEFORE THIS, I’D BEEN feeling better, but somehow it was like this news made me ill all over again. As the day wore on and my fever climbed to its former dizzying wobble, I could think of nothing but my dad: I have to call him, I thought, starting again and again from bed just as I was drifting off; it was as if his death weren’t real but only a rehearsal, a trial run; the real death (the permanent one) was yet to happen and there was time to stop it if only I found him, if only he was answering his cell phone, if Xandra could reach him from work, I have to get hold of him, I have to let him know. Then, later—the day was over, it was dark—I had fallen into a troubled half dream where my dad was excoriating me for screwing up some air travel reservations when I became aware of lights in the hallway, a tiny backlit shadow—Pippa, coming suddenly into the room with stumbling step almost like someone had pushed her, looking doubtfully behind her, saying: “Should I wake him?”

“Wait,” I said—half to her and half to my dad, who was falling back rapidly into the darkness, some violent stadium crowd on the other side of a tall, arched gate. When I got my glasses on, I saw she had her coat on like she was going out.

“Sorry?” I said, arm over my eyes, confused in the glare from the lamp.

“No, I’m sorry. It’s just—I mean—” pushing a strand of hair out of her face—“I’m leaving and I wanted to say goodbye.”

“Goodbye?”

“Oh.” Her pale brows drew together; she looked in the doorway to Hobie (who had vanished) and back to me. “Right. Well.” Her voice seemed slightly panicked. “I’m going back. Tonight. Anyway, it was nice to see you. I hope everything works out for you okay.”

“Tonight?”

“Yeah, I’m flying out now. She has me in boarding school?” she said when I continued to goggle at her. “I’m here for Thanksgiving? Here to see the doctor? Remember?”

“Oh. Right.” I was staring at her very hard and hoping that I was still asleep. Boarding school rang a vague bell but I thought it was something I’d dreamed.

“Yeah—” she seemed uneasy too—“too bad you didn’t get here earlier, it was fun. Hobie cooked—we had tons of people over. Anyway I was lucky I got to come at all—I had to get permission from Dr. Camenzind. We don’t have Thanksgiving off at my school.”

“What do they do?”

“They don’t celebrate it. Well—I think maybe they make turkey or something for the people who do.”

“What school is this?”

When she told me the name—with a half-humorous quirk of her mouth—I was shocked. Institut Mont-Haefeli was a school in Switzerland—barely accredited, according to Andy—where only the very dumbest and most disturbed girls went.

“Mont-Haefeli? Really? I thought it was very”—the word psychiatric was wrong—“wow.”

“Well. Aunt Margaret says I’ll get used to it.” She was fooling around with the origami frog on the nightstand, trying to make it jump, only it was bent and tipping to one side. “And the view is like the mountain on the Caran d’Ache box. Snowcaps and flower meadow and all that. Otherwise it’s like one of those dull Euro horror movies where nothing much happens.”

“But—” I felt like I was missing something, or maybe still asleep. The only person I’d ever known who went to Mont-Haefeli was James Villiers’s sister, Dorit Villiers, and the story was she’d been sent there because she stabbed her boyfriend in the hand with a knife.

“Yeah, it’s a weird place,” she said, bored eyes flickering around the room. “A school for loonies. Not many places I could get in with my head injury though. They have a clinic attached,” she said, shrugging. “Doctors on staff. Bigger deal than you’d think. I mean, I have problems since I got hit on the head, but it’s not like I’m nuts or a shoplifter.”

“Yeah, but—” I was still trying to get horror movie out of my mind—“Switzerland? That’s pretty cool.”

“If you say so.”

“I knew this girl Lallie Foulkes who went to Le Rosey. She said they had a chocolate break every morning.”

“Well, we don’t even get jam on our toast.” Her hand was speckled and pale against the black of her coat. “Only the eating-disorder girls get it. If you want sugar in your tea you have to steal the packets from the nurses’ station.”

“Um—” Worse and worse. “Do you know a girl named Dorit Villiers?”

“No. She was there but then they sent her someplace else. I think she tried to scratch somebody in the face. They had her in lock-up for a while.”

“What?”

“That’s not what they call it,” she said, rubbing her nose. “It’s a farm-looking building they call La Grange—you know, all milkmaid and fake rustic. Nicer than the residence houses. But the doors are alarmed and they have guards and stuff.”

“Well, I mean—” I thought of Dorit Villiers—frizzy gold hair; blank blue eyes like a loopy Christmas tree angel—and didn’t know what to say.

“That’s only where they put the really crazy girls. La Grange. I’m in Bessonet, with a bunch of French-speaking girls. It’s supposed to be so I learn French better but all it means is nobody talks to me.”

“You should tell her you don’t like it! Your aunt.”

She grimaced. “I do. But then she starts telling me how much it costs. Or else says I’m hurting her feelings. Anyway,” she said, uneasily, in an I’ve got to go voice, looking over her shoulder.

“Huh,” I said, at last, after a woozy pause. Day and night, my delirium had been colored with an awareness of her in the house, recurring energy-surges of happiness at the sound of her voice in the hallway, her footsteps: we were going to make a blanket tent, she would be waiting for me at the ice rink, bright hum of excitement at all the things we were going to do when I got better—in fact it seemed we had been doing things, such as stringing necklaces of rainbow-colored candy while the radio played Belle and Sebastian and then, later on, wandering through a non-existent casino arcade in Washington Square.

Hobie, I noticed, was standing discreetly in the hall. “Sorry,” he said, glancing at his wristwatch. “I really hate to rush you—”

“Sure,” she said. To me she said: “Goodbye then. Hope you feel better.”

“Wait!”

“What?” she said, half turning.

“You’ll be back for Christmas, right?”

“Nope, Aunt Margaret’s.”

“When are you coming back, then?”

“Well—” one-shouldered shrug. “Dunno. Spring holidays maybe.”

“Pips—” said Hobie, though he was really speaking to me instead of her.

“Right,” she said, brushing her hair from her eyes.

I waited until I heard the front door shut. Then I got out of bed and pulled aside the curtain. Through the dusty glass, I watched them going together down the front steps, Pippa in her pink scarf and hat hurrying slightly alongside Hobie’s large, well-dressed form.

For a while after they turned the corner, I stood at the window looking out at the empty street. Then, feeling light-headed and forlorn, I trudged to her bedroom and—unable to resist—cracked the door a sliver.

It was the same as two years before, except emptier. Wizard of Oz and Save Tibet posters. No wheelchair. Window piled with white pebbles of sleet on the sill. But it smelled like her, it was still warm and alive with her presence, and as I stood breathing in her atmosphere I felt a huge happy smile on my face just to be standing there with her fairy tale books, her perfume bottles, her sparkly tray of barrettes and her valentine collection: paper lace, cupids and columbines, Edwardian suitors with rose bouquets pressed to their hearts. Quietly, tiptoeing even though I was barefoot, I walked over to the silver-framed photographs on the dresser—Welty and Cosmo, Welty and Pippa, Pippa and her mother (same hair, same eyes) with a younger and thinner Hobie—

Low buzzing noise, inside the room. Guiltily I turned—someone coming? No: only Popchik, cotton white after his bath, nestled amongst the pillows of her unmade bed and snoring with a drooling, blissful, half-purring sound. And though there was something pathetic about it—taking comfort in her left-behind things like a puppy snuggled in an old coat—I crawled in under the sheets and nestled down beside him, smiling foolishly at the smell of her comforter and the silky feel of it on my cheek.

vi.

“WELL WELL,” SAID Mr. Bracegirdle as he shook Hobie’s hand and then mine. “Theodore—I do have to say—you’re growing up to look a great deal like your mother. I wish she could see you now.”

I tried to meet his eye and not seem embarrassed. The truth was: though I had my mother’s straight hair, and something of her light-and-dark coloring, I looked a whole lot more like my father, a likeness so strong that no chatty bystander, no waitress in any coffee shop had allowed it to pass unremarked—not that I’d ever been happy about it, resembling the parent I couldn’t stand, but to see a younger version of his sulky, drunk-driving face in the mirror was particularly upsetting now that he was dead.

Hobie and Mr. Bracegirdle were chatting in a subdued way—Mr. Bracegirdle was telling Hobie how he’d met my mother, dawning remembrance from Hobie: “Yes! I remember—a foot in less than an hour! My God, I came out of my auction and nothing was moving, I was uptown at the old Parke-Bernet—”

“On Madison across from the Carlyle?”

“Yes—quite a long hoof home.”

“You deal antiques? Down in the Village, Theo says?”

Politely, I sat and listened to their conversation: friends in common, gallery owners and art collectors, the Rakers and the Rehnbergs, the Fawcetts and the Vogels and the Mildebergers and Depews, on to vanished New York landmarks, the closing of Lutèce, La Caravelle, Café des Artistes, what would your mother have thought, Theodore, she loved Café des Artistes. (How did he know that? I wondered.) While I didn’t for an instant believe some of the things my dad, in moments of meanness, had insinuated about my mother, it did appear that Mr. Bracegirdle had known my mother a good deal better than I would have thought. Even the non-legal books on his shelf seemed to suggest a correspondence, an echo of interests between them. Art books: Agnes Martin, Edwin Dickinson. Poetry too, first editions: Ted Berrigan. Frank O’Hara, Meditations in an Emergency. I remembered the day she’d turned up flushed and happy with the exact same edition of Frank O’Hara—which I assumed she’d found at the Strand, since we didn’t have the money for something like that. But when I thought about it, I realized she hadn’t told me where she’d got it.

“Well, Theodore,” said Mr. Bracegirdle, calling me back to myself. Though elderly, he had the calm, well-tanned look of someone who spent a lot of his spare time on the tennis court; the dark pouches under his eyes gave him a genial panda-bear aspect. “You’re old enough that a judge would consider your wishes above all in this matter,” he was saying. “Especially since your guardianship would be uncontested—of course,” he said to Hobie, “we could seek a temporary guardianship for the upcoming interlude, but I don’t think that will be necessary. Clearly this arrangement is in the minor’s best interests, as long as it’s all right with you?”

“That and more,” said Hobie. “I’m happy if he’s happy.”

“You’re fully prepared to act in an informal capacity as Theodore’s adult custodian for the time being?”

“Informal, black tie, whatever’s called for.”

“There’s your schooling to look after as well. We’d spoken of boarding school, as I recall. But that seems a lot to think of now, doesn’t it?” he said, noting the stricken look on my face. “Shipping out as you’ve just arrived, and with the holidays coming up? No need to make any decisions at all at the moment, I shouldn’t think,” he said, with a glance at Hobie. “I should think it would be fine if you just sat out the rest of this term and we can sort it out later. And you know that you can of course call upon me at any time. Day or night.” He was writing a phone number on a business card. “This is my home number, and this is my cell—my, my, that’s a nasty cough you have there!” he said, glancing up—“quite a cough, are you having that looked after, yes? and this is my number out in Bridgehampton. I hope you won’t hesitate to call me for any reason, if you need anything.”

Trying hard, doing my best, to swallow another cough. “Thank you—”

“This is definitely what you want?” He was looking at me keenly with an expression that made me feel like I was on the witness stand. “To be at Mr. Hobart’s for the next few weeks?”

I didn’t like the sound of the next few weeks. “Yes,” I said into my fist, “but—”

“Because—boarding school.” He folded his hands and leaned back in his chair and regarded me. “Almost certainly the best thing for you in the long term but quite frankly, given the situation, I believe I could telephone my friend Sam Ungerer at Buckfield and we could get you up there right now. Something could be arranged. It’s an excellent school. And I think it would be possible to arrange for you to stay in the home of the headmaster or one of the teachers rather than the dormitory, so you could be in more of a family setting, if you thought that would be something you’d like.”

He and Hobie were both looking at me, encouragingly as I thought. I stared at my shoes, not wanting to seem ungrateful but wishing that this line of suggestion would go away.

“Well.” Mr. Bracegirdle and Hobie exchanged a glance—was I wrong to see a hint of resignation and/or disappointment in Hobie’s expression? “As long as this is what you want, and Mr. Hobart’s amenable, I see nothing wrong with this arrangement for the time being. But I do urge you to think about where you’d like to be, Theodore, so we can go ahead and work out something for the next school term or maybe even summer school, if you’d like.”

vii.

TEMPORARY GUARDIANSHIP. IN THE next weeks, I did my best to buckle down and not think too much about what temporary might mean. I’d applied to an early-college program in the city—my reasoning being that it would keep me from being shipped out to the sticks if for some reason things at Hobie’s didn’t work. All day in my room, under a weak lamp, as Popchik snoozed on the carpet by my feet, I spent hunched over test preparation booklets, memorizing dates, proofs, theorems, Latin vocabulary words, so many irregular verbs in Spanish that even in my dreams I looked down the lines of long tables and despaired of keeping them straight.

It was as if I was trying to punish myself—maybe even make things up to my mother—by setting my sights so high. I’d fallen out of the habit of doing schoolwork; it wasn’t exactly as if I’d kept up my studies in Vegas and the sheer amount of material to memorize gave me a feeling of torture, lights turned in the face, not knowing the correct answer, catastrophe if I failed. Rubbing my eyes, trying to keep myself awake with cold showers and iced coffee, I goaded myself on by reminding myself what a good thing I was doing, though my endless cramming felt a lot more like self destruction than any glue-sniffing I’d ever done; and at some bleary point, the work itself became a kind of drug that left me so drained that I could hardly take in my surroundings.

And yet I was grateful for the work because it kept me too mentally bludgeoned to think. The shame that tormented me was all the more corrosive for having no very clear origin: I didn’t know why I felt so tainted, and worthless, and wrong—only that I did, and whenever I looked up from my books I was swamped by slimy waters rushing in from all sides.

Part of it had to do with the painting. I knew nothing good would come of keeping it, and yet I also knew I’d kept it too long to speak up. Confiding in Mr. Bracegirdle was foolhardy. My position was too precarious; he was already champing at the bit to send me to boarding school. And when I thought, as I often did, of confiding in Hobie, I found myself drifting into various theoretical scenarios none of which seemed any more or less probable than the others.

I would give the painting to Hobie and he would say, ‘oh, no big deal’ and somehow (I had problems with this part, the logistics of it) he would take care of it, or phone some people he knew, or have a great idea about what to do, or something, and not care, or be mad, and somehow it would all be fine?

Or: I would give the painting to Hobie and he would call the police.

Or: I would give the painting to Hobie and he would take the painting for himself and then say, ‘what, are you crazy? Painting? I don’t know what you’re talking about.’

Or: I would give the painting to Hobie and he would nod and look sympathetic and tell me I’d done the right thing but then as soon as I was out of the room he would phone his own lawyer and I would be dispatched to boarding school or a juvenile home (which, painting or not, was where most of my scenarios ended up anyway).

But by far the greater part of unease had to do with my father. I knew that his death wasn’t my fault, and yet on a bone-deep, irrational, completely unshakable level I also knew that it was. Given how coldly I’d walked away from him in his final despair, the fact that he’d lied was beside the point. Maybe he’d known that it was in my power to pay his debt—a fact which had haunted me since Mr. Bracegirdle had so lightly let it slip. In the shadows beyond the desk lamp, Hobie’s terra-cotta griffins stared at me with beady glass eyes. Did he think I’d stiffed him on purpose? That I wanted him to die? At night, I dreamed of him beaten and chased through casino parking lots, and more than once awoke with a jolt to him sitting in the chair by my bed and observing me quietly, the coal of his cigarette glowing in the dark. But they told me you died, I said aloud, before realizing he wasn’t there.

Without Pippa, the house was deathly quiet. The closed-off formal rooms smelled faint and damp, like dead leaves. I mooned about looking at her things, wondering where she was and what she was doing and trying hard to feel connected to her by such tenuous threads as a red hair in the bathtub drain or a balled-up sock under the sofa. But as much as I missed the nervous tingle of her presence, I was soothed by the house, its sense of safety and enclosure: old portraits and poorly lit hallways, loudly ticking clocks. It was as if I’d signed on as a cabin boy on the Marie Céleste. As I moved about through the stagnant silences, the pools of shadow and deep sun, the old floors creaked underfoot like the deck of a ship, the wash of traffic out on Sixth Avenue breaking just audibly against the ear. Upstairs, puzzling light-headed over differential equations, Newton’s Law of Cooling, independent variables, we have used the fact that tau is constant to eliminate its derivative, Hobie’s presence below stairs was an anchor, a friendly weight: I was comforted to hear the tap of his mallet floating up from below and to know that he was down there pottering quietly with his tools and his spirit gums and varicolored woods.

With the Barbours, my lack of pocket money had been a continual worry; having always to hit Mrs. Barbour up for lunch money, lab fees at school, and other small expenses had occasioned dread and anxiety quite out of proportion to the sums she carelessly disbursed. But my living stipend from Mr. Bracegirdle made me feel a lot less awkward about throwing myself down in Hobie’s household, unannounced. I was able to pay Popchik’s vet bills, a small fortune, since he had bad teeth and a mild case of heartworm—Xandra to my knowledge never having given him a pill or taken him for shots my whole time in Vegas. I was also able to pay my own dentist bills, which were considerable (six fillings, ten hellish hours in the dentist’s chair) and buy myself a laptop and an iPhone, as well as the shoes and winter clothes I needed. And—though Hobie wouldn’t accept grocery money—still I went out and got groceries for him all the same, groceries I paid for: milk and sugar and washing powder from Grand Union, but more often fresh produce from the farmers’ market at Union Square, wild mushrooms and winesap apples, raisin bread, small luxuries which seemed to please him, unlike the large containers of Tide which he looked at sadly and took to the pantry without a word.

It was all very different from the crowded, complicated, and overly formal atmosphere of the Barbours’, where everything was rehearsed and scheduled like a Broadway production, an airless perfection from which Andy had been in constant retreat, scuttling to his bedroom like a frightened squid. By contrast Hobie lived and wafted like some great sea mammal in his own mild atmosphere, the dark brown of tea stains and tobacco, where every clock in the house said something different and time didn’t actually correspond to the standard measure but instead meandered along at its own sedate tick-tock, obeying the pace of his antique-crowded backwater, far from the factory-built, epoxy-glued version of the world. Though he enjoyed going out to the movies, there was no television; he read old novels with marbled end papers; he didn’t own a cell phone; his computer, a prehistoric IBM, was the size of a suitcase and useless. In blameless quiet, he buried himself in his work, steam-bending veneers or hand-threading table legs with a chisel, and his happy absorption floated up from the workshop and diffused through the house with the warmth of a wood-burning stove in winter. He was absent-minded and kind; he was neglectful and muddle-headed and self-deprecating and gentle; often he didn’t hear the first time you spoke to him, or even the second time; he lost his glasses, mislaid his wallet, his keys, his dry-cleaning tickets, and was always calling me downstairs to get on my hands and knees with him to help him search for some minuscule fitting or piece of hardware he’d dropped on the floor. Occasionally he opened the store by appointment, for an hour or two at a time, but—as far as I could tell—this was little more than an excuse to bring out the bottle of sherry and visit with friends and acquaintances; and if he showed a piece of furniture, opening and shutting drawers to oohs and aahs, it seemed to be mostly in the spirit in which Andy and I, once upon a time, had dragged out our toys for show and tell.

If he ever actually sold a piece, I never saw him do it. His bailiwick (as he called it) was the workshop, or the ‘hospital’ rather, where the crippled chairs and tables stood stacked awaiting his care. Like a gardener occupied with greenhouse specimens, brushing aphids from individual plant leaves, he absorbed himself in the texture and grain of individual pieces, the hidden drawers, the scars and marvels. Though he owned a few items of modern woodworking equipment—a router, a cordless drill and a circular saw—he seldom used them. (“If it requires earplugs, I haven’t much call for it.”) He went down there early and sometimes, if he had a project, stayed down there after dark, but generally when the light started to go he came upstairs and—before washing up for dinner—poured himself the same inch of whiskey, neat, in a small tumbler: tired, congenial, lamp-black on his hands, something rough and soldierly in his fatigue. Has he takn u out to dinner, Pippa texted me.

Yes like 3 or 4x

He only likes 2go 2 3mpty rstrnts where nobody goes.

Thats right the place he took me last week was like king tuts tomb

Yes he only goes places where he feels sorry for the owners! because he is scared they will go out of business and then he will feel guilty

I like it better when he cooks

Ask him to make gingerbread for u I wish i had some now

Dinner was the time of day I looked forward to most. In Vegas—especially after Boris had taken up with Kotku—I’d never gotten used to the sadness of having to scrabble around to feed myself at night, sitting on the side of my bed with a bag of potato chips or maybe a dried-up container of rice left over from my dad’s carry out. By happy contrast, Hobie’s whole day revolved around dinner. Where shall we eat? Who’s coming over? What shall I cook? Do you like pot-au-feu? No? Never had it? Lemon rice or saffron? Fig preserves or apricot? Do you want to walk over to Jefferson Market with me? Sometimes on Sundays there were guests, who among New School and Columbia professors, opera-orchestra and preservation-society ladies, and various old dears from up and down the street also included a great many dealers and collectors of all stripes, from batty old ladies in fingerless gloves who sold Georgian jewelry at the flea market to rich people who wouldn’t have been out of place at the Barbours (Welty, I learned, had helped many of these people build their collections, by advising them what pieces to buy). Most of the conversation left me wholly at sea (St-Simon? Munich Opera Festival? Coomaraswamy? The villa at Pau?). But even when the rooms were formal and the company was “smart” his lunches were the sort where people didn’t seem to mind serving themselves or eating from plates in their laps, as opposed to the rigidly catered parties always tinkling frostily away at the Barbours’ house.

In fact, at these dinners, as agreeable and interesting as Hobie’s guests were, I constantly worried that somebody who knew me from the Barbours was going to turn up. I felt guilty for not calling Andy; and yet, after what had happened with his dad on the street, I felt even more ashamed for him to know that I’d washed up in the city again with no place of my own to live.

And—though it was a small matter enough—I was still bothered by how I’d turned up at Hobie’s in the first place. Though he never told the story in front of me, how I’d showed up on the doorstep, mainly because he could see how uncomfortable it made me, still he’d told people—not that I blamed him; it was too good a story not to tell. “It’s so fitting if you knew Welty,” said Hobie’s great friend Mrs. DeFrees, a dealer in nineteenth-century watercolors who for all her stiff clothes and strong perfumes was a hugger and a cuddler, with the old-ladyish habit of liking to hold your arm or pat your hand as she talked. “Because, my dear, Welty was an agoramaniac. Loved people, you know, loved the marketplace. The to and the fro of it. Deals, goods, conversation, exchange. It was that eeny bit of Cairo from his boyhood, I always said he would have been perfectly happy padding around in slippers and showing carpets in the souk. He had the antiquaire’s gift, you know—he knew what belonged with whom. Someone would come in the shop never intending to buy a thing, ducking in out of the rain maybe, and he’d offer them a cup of tea and they’d end up having a dining room table shipped to Des Moines. Or a student would wander in to admire, and he’d bring out just the little inexpensive print. Everyone was happy, do you know. He knew everybody wasn’t in the position to come in and buy some big important piece—it was all about matchmaking, finding the right home.”

“Well, and people trusted him,” said Hobie, coming in with Mrs. DeFrees’s thimble of sherry and a glass of whiskey for himself. “He always said his handicap was what made him a good salesman and I think there’s something to that. ‘The sympathetic cripple.’ No axe to grind. Always on the outside, looking in.”

“Ah, Welty was never on the outside of anything,” said Mrs. DeFrees, accepting her glass of sherry and patting Hobie affectionately on the sleeve, her little paper-skinned hand glittering with rose-cut diamonds. “He was always right in the thick of it, bless him, laughing that laugh, never a word of complaint. Anyway, my dear,” she said, turning back to me, “make no mistake about it. Welty knew exactly what he was doing by giving you that ring. Because by giving it to you, he brought you straight here to Hobie, you see?”

“Right,” I said—and then I’d had to get up and walk in the kitchen, so troubled was I by this detail. Because, of course, it wasn’t just the ring he had given me.

viii.

AT NIGHT, IN WELTY’S old room, which was now my room, his old reading glasses and fountain pens still in the desk drawers, I lay awake listening to the street noise and fretting. It had crossed my mind in Vegas that if my dad or Xandra found the painting they might not know what it was, at least not right away. But Hobie would know. Over and over I found myself envisioning scenarios where I came home to discover Hobie waiting for me with the painting in his hands—“what’s this?”—for there was no flim-flam, no excuse, no pre-emptive line with which to meet such a catastrophe; and when I got on my knees and reached under the bed to put my hands on the pillowcase (as I did, blindly and at erratic interludes, to make sure it was still there) it was a quick feint and drop like grabbing at a too-hot microwave dinner.

A house fire. An exterminator visit. Big red INTERPOL on the Missing Art Database. If anyone cared to make the connection, Welty’s ring was proof positive that I’d been in the gallery with the painting. The door to my room was so old and uneven on its hinges that it didn’t even catch properly; I had to prop it shut with an iron doorstop. What if, driven by some unanticipated impulse, he took it in his head to come upstairs and clean? Admittedly this seemed out of character for the absent-minded and not-particularly-tidy Hobie I knew—No he dosn’t care if U R messy he never goes in my room except to change sheets & dust Pippa had texted, prompting me to strip my bed immediately and spend forty-five frantic minutes dusting every surface in my room—the griffons, the crystal ball, the headboard of the bed—with a clean T-shirt. Dusting soon became an obsessive habit—enough that I went out and bought my own dust cloths, even though Hobie had a house full of them; I didn’t want him to see me dusting, my only hope was that the word dust would never occur to him if he happened to poke his head in my room.

For this reason, because I was really only comfortable leaving the house in his company, I spent most of my days in my room, at my desk, with scarcely a break for meals. And when he went out, I tagged along with him to galleries, estate sales, showrooms, auctions where I stood with him in the very back (“no, no,” he said, when I pointed out the empty chairs in front, “we want to be where we can see the paddles”)—exciting at first, just like the movies, though after a couple of hours as tedious as anything in Calculus: Concepts and Connections.

But though I tried (with some success) to act blasé, trailing him indifferently around Manhattan as if I didn’t care one way or another, in truth I stuck to him in much the same anxious spirit that Popchik—desperately lonely—had followed along constantly behind Boris and me in Vegas. I went with him to snooty lunches. I went with him on appraisals. I went with him to his tailor. I went with him to poorly attended lectures on obscure Philadelphia cabinet-makers of the 1770s. I went with him to the Opera Orchestra, even though the programs were so boring and dragged on so long that I feared I might actually black out and topple into the aisle. I went with him to dinner with the Amstisses (on Park Avenue, uncomfortably close to the Barbours’) and the Vogels, and the Krasnows, and the Mildebergers, where the conversation was either a.) so eye-crossingly dull or b.) so far over my head that I could never manage much more than hmn. (“Poor boy, we must be hopelessly uninteresting to you,” said Mrs. Mildeberger brightly, not appearing to realize how truly she spoke.) Other friends, like Mr. Abernathy—my dad’s age, with some ill-articulated scandal or disgrace in his past—were so mercurial and articulate, so utterly dismissive of me (“And where did you say you obtained this child, James?”) that I sat dumbfounded among the Chinese antiquities and Greek vases, wanting to say something clever while at the same time terrified of attracting attention in any way, feeling tongue-tied and completely at sea. At least once or twice a week we went to Mrs. DeFrees in her antique-packed townhouse (the uptown analogue of Hobie’s) on East Sixty-Third, where I sat on the edge of a spindly chair and tried to ignore her frightening Bengal cats digging their claws in my knees. (“He’s a socially alert little creature, isn’t he?” I heard her remark not so sotto voce when they were across the room fussing over some Edward Lear watercolors.) Sometimes she accompanied us to the showings at Christie’s and Sotheby’s, Hobie poring over every piece, opening and shutting drawers, showing me various points of workmanship, marking up his catalogue with a pencil—and then, after a stop or two at a gallery along the way, she went back to Sixty-Third Street and we went to Sant Ambrœus, where Hobie, in his smart suit, stood at the counter and drank an espresso while I ate a chocolate croissant and looked at the kids with book bags coming in and hoped I didn’t see anyone I knew from my old school.

“Would your dad like another espresso?” the counterman asked when Hobie excused himself to go to the gents’.

“No thanks, I think just the check.” It thrilled me, deplorably, when people mistook Hobie for my parent. Though he was old enough to be my grandfather, he projected a vigor more in keeping with older European dads you saw on the East Side—polished, portly, self-possessed dads on their second marriages who’d had kids at fifty and sixty. In his gallery-going clothes, sipping his espresso and looking out peacefully at the street, he might have been a Swiss industrial magnate or a restaurateur with a Michelin star or two: substantial, late-married, prosperous. Why, I thought sadly, as he returned with his topcoat over his arm, why hadn’t my mother married someone like him—? Or Mr. Bracegirdle? somebody she actually had something in common with—older maybe but personable, someone who enjoyed galleries and string quartets and poking around used book stores, someone attentive, cultivated, kind? Who would have appreciated her, and bought her pretty clothes and taken her to Paris for her birthday, and given her the life she deserved? It wouldn’t have been hard for her to find someone like that, if she’d tried. Men had loved her: from the doormen to my schoolteachers to the fathers of my friends right on up to her boss Sergio at work (who had called her, for reasons unknown to me, Dollybird), and even Mr. Barbour had always been quick to jump up and greet her when she came to pick me up from sleepovers, quick with the smiles and quick to touch her elbow as he steered her to the sofa, voice low and companionable, won’t you sit down? would you like a drink, a cup of tea, anything? I did not think it was my imagination—not quite—how closely Mr. Bracegirdle had looked at me: almost as if he were looking at her, or looking for some trace of her ghost in me. Yet even in death my dad was ineradicable, no matter how hard I tried to wish him out of the picture—for there he always was, in my hands and my voice and my walk, in my darting sideways glance as I left the restaurant with Hobie, the very set of my head recalling his old, preening habit of checking himself out in any mirror-like surface.

ix.

IN JANUARY, I HAD my tests: the easy one and the hard one. The easy one was in a high school classroom in the Bronx: pregnant moms, assorted cabdrivers, and a raucous gaggle of Grand Concourse homegirls with short fur jackets and sparkle fingernails. But the test was not actually so easy as I thought it would be, with a lot more questions about arcane matters of New York State government than I’d anticipated (how many months of the year was the legislature in Albany in session? How the hell was I supposed to know?), and I came home on the subway preoccupied and depressed. And the hard test (locked classroom, uptight parents pacing the hallways, the strained atmosphere of a chess tournament) seemed to have been designed with some twitching, MIT-bred recluse in mind, with many of the multiple-choice answers so similar that I came away with literally no idea how I’d done.

So what, I told myself, walking up to Canal Street to catch the train with my hands shoved deep in my pockets and my armpits rank with anxious classroom perspiration. Maybe I wouldn’t get into the early-college program—and what if I didn’t? I had to do well, very well, in the top thirty per cent, if I stood any chance at all.

Hubris: a vocabulary word that had featured prominently on my pre-tests though it hadn’t shown up on the tests proper. I was competing with five thousand applicants for something like three hundred places—if I didn’t make the cut, I wasn’t sure what would happen; I didn’t think I could bear it if I had to go to Massachusetts and stay with these Ungerer people Mr. Bracegirdle kept talking about, this good-guy headmaster and his “crew,” as Mr. Bracegirdle called them, mom and three boys, whom I imagined as a slab-like, stair-stepped, whitely smiling line of the same prep-school hoods who with cheerful punctuality in the bad old days had beaten up Andy and me and made us eat dust balls off the floor. But if I failed the test (or, more accurately, didn’t do quite well enough to make the early-college program), how would I be able to work things so I could stay in New York? Certainly I should have aimed for a more achievable goal, some decent high school in the city where I would have at least had a chance of getting in. Yet Mr. Bracegirdle had been so adamant about boarding school, about fresh air and autumn color and starry skies and the many joys of country life (“Stuyvesant. Why would you stay here and go to Stuyvesant when you could get out of New York? Stretch your legs, breathe a bit easier? Be in a family situation?”) that I’d stayed away from high schools altogether, even the very best ones.

“I know what your mother would have wanted for you, Theodore,” he’d said repeatedly. “She would have wanted a fresh start for you. Out of the city.” He was right. But how could I explain to him, in the chain of disorder and senselessness that had followed her death, exactly how irrelevant those old wishes were?

Still lost in thought as I turned the corner to the station, fishing in my pocket for my MetroCard, I passed a newsstand where I saw a headline reading:

MUSEUM MASTERWORKS RECOVERED IN BRONX MILLIONS IN STOLEN ART

I stopped on the sidewalk, commuters streaming past me on either side. Then—stiffly, feeling observed, heart pounding—I walked back and bought a copy (certainly buying a newspaper was a less suspicious thing for a kid my age to do than it seemed to be—?) and ran across the street to the benches on Sixth Avenue to read it.

Police, acting on a tip, had recovered three paintings—a George van der Mijn; a Wybrand Hendriks; and a Rembrandt, all missing from the museum since the explosion—from a Bronx home. The paintings had been found in an attic storage area, wrapped in tinfoil and stacked amidst a bunch of spare filters for the building’s central air-conditioning unit. The thief, his brother, and the brother’s mother-in-law—owner of the premises—were in custody pending bail; if convicted on all charges, they faced combined sentences of up to twenty years.

It was a pages-long article, complete with timelines and diagram. The thief—a paramedic—had lingered after the call to evacuate, removed the paintings from the wall, draped them with a sheet, concealed them beneath a folded-up portable stretcher, and walked with them from the museum unobserved. “Chosen with no eye to value,” said the FBI investigator interviewed for the article. “Snatch and grab. The guy didn’t know a thing about art. Once he got the paintings home he didn’t know what to do with them so he consulted with his brother and together they hid the works at the mother-in-law’s, without her knowledge according to her.” After a little Internet research, the brothers had apparently realized that the Rembrandt was too famous to sell, and it was their efforts to sell one of the lesser-known works that led investigators to the cache in the attic.

But the final paragraph of the article leaped out as if it had been printed in red.

As for other art still missing, the hopes of investigators have been revived, and authorities are now looking into several local leads. “The more you shake the trees, the more falls out of them,” said Richard Nunnally, city police liaison with the FBI art crimes unit. “Generally, with art theft, the pattern is for pieces to be whisked out of the country very quickly, but this find in the Bronx only goes to confirm that we probably have quite a few amateurs at work, inexperienced parties who stole on impulse and don’t have the know-how to sell or conceal these objects.” According to Nunnally, a number of people present at the scene are being questioned, contacted, and reinvestigated: “Obviously, now, the thinking is that a lot of these missing pictures may be here in the city right under our noses.”

I felt sick. I got up and dumped the paper in the nearest trash can, and—instead of getting on the subway—wandered back down Canal Street and roamed around Chinatown for an hour in the freezing cold, cheap electronics and blood red carpets in the dim sum parlors, staring in fogged windows at mahogany racks of rotisseried Peking duck and thinking: shit, shit. Red-cheeked street vendors, bundled like Mongolians, shouting above smoky braziers. District Attorney. FBI. New information. We are determined to prosecute these cases to the fullest extent of the law. We have full confidence that other missing works will surface soon. Interpol, UNESCO and other federal and international agencies are cooperating with local authorities in the case.

It was everywhere. All the newspapers had it: even the Mandarin newspapers, the recovered Rembrandt portrait amid streams of Chinese print, peeping out from bins of unidentifiable vegetables and eels on ice.

“Really disturbing,” said Hobie later that night at dinner with the Amstisses, brow knitted with anxiety. The recovered paintings were all he’d been able to talk about. “Wounded people everywhere, people bleeding to death, and here’s this fellow snatching paintings off the walls. Carrying them around outside in the rain.”

“Well, can’t say I’m surprised,” said Mr. Amstiss, who was on his fourth scotch on the rocks. “After that second heart attack of Mother’s? You can’t believe the mess these goons from Beth Israel left. Black footprints all over the carpet. We were finding plastic needle caps all over the floor for weeks, the dog almost swallowed one. And they broke something too, Martha, something in the china cabinet, what was it?”

“Listen, you won’t catch me complaining about paramedics,” said Hobie. “I was really impressed with the ones we had when Juliet was ill. I’m just glad they found the paintings before they were too badly damaged, it could have been a real—Theo?” he said to me, rather suddenly, causing me to glance up quickly from my plate. “Everything all right?”

“Sorry. I’m just tired.”

“No wonder,” said Mrs. Amstiss kindly. She taught American history at Columbia; she, of the pair, was the one Hobie liked and was friends with, Mr. Amstiss being the unfortunate half of the package. “You’ve had a tough day. Worried about your test?”

“No, not really, “ I said without thinking, and then was sorry.

“Oh, I’m sure he’ll get in,” said Mr. Amstiss. “You’ll get in,” he said to me, in a tone implying that any idiot could expect to do so, and then, turning back to Hobie: “Most of these early-college programs don’t deserve the name, isn’t that right, Martha? Glorified high school. Tough pull to get in but then a doddle once you’ve made it. That’s the way it is these days with the kids—participate, show up, and they expect a prize. Everybody wins. Do you know what one of Martha’s students said to her the other day? Tell them, Martha. This kid comes up after class, wants to talk. Shouldn’t say kid—graduate student. And you know what he says?”

“Harold,” said Mrs. Amstiss.

“Says he’s worried about his test performance, wants her advice. Because he has a hard time remembering things. Does that take the cake, or what? Graduate student in American history? Hard time remembering things?”

“Well, God knows, I have a hard time remembering things too,” said Hobie affably, and rising with the dishes, steered the conversation into other channels.

But late that night, after the Amstisses had left and Hobie was asleep, I sat up in my room staring out the window at the street, listening to the distant two a.m. grindings of trucks over on Sixth Avenue and doing my best to talk myself down from my panic.

Yet what could I do? I’d spent hours on my laptop, clicking rapidly through what seemed like hundreds of articles—Le Monde, Daily Telegraph, Times of India, La Repubblica, languages I couldn’t read, every paper in the world was covering it. The fines, in addition to the prison sentences, were ruinous: two hundred thousand, half a million dollars. Worse: the woman who owned the house was being charged because the paintings had been found on her property. And what this meant, very likely, was that Hobie would be in trouble too—much worse trouble than me. The woman, a retired beautician, claimed she’d had no idea the paintings were in her house. But Hobie? An antiques dealer? Never mind that he’d taken me in innocently, out of the goodness of his heart. Who would believe he hadn’t known about it?

Up, down and around my thoughts plunged, like a bad carnival ride. Though these thieves acted impulsively and have no prior criminal records, their inexperience will not deter us from prosecuting this case to the letter of the law. One commentator, in London, had mentioned my painting in the same breath with the recovered Rembrandt:… has drawn attention to more valuable works still missing, most particularly Carel Fabritius’s Goldfinch of 1654, unique in the annals of art and therefore priceless…

I reset the computer for the third or fourth time and shut it down, and then, a bit stiffly, climbed in bed and turned out the light. I still had the baggie of pills I’d stolen from Xandra—hundreds of them, all different colors and sizes, all painkillers according to Boris, but though sometimes they knocked my dad out cold I’d also heard him complaining how sometimes they kept him awake at night, so—after lying paralyzed with discomfort and indecision for an hour or more, seasick and tossing, staring at the spokes of car lights wheeling across the ceiling—I snapped on the light again and scrabbled around in the nightstand drawer for the bag and selected two different colored pills, a blue and a yellow, my reasoning being that if one didn’t put me to sleep, the other might.

Priceless. I rolled to face the wall. The recovered Rembrandt had been valued at forty million. But forty million was still a price.

Out on the avenue, a fire engine screamed high and hard before trailing into the distance. Cars, trucks, loudly-laughing couples coming out of the bars. As I lay awake trying to think of calming things like snow, and stars in the desert, hoping I hadn’t swallowed the wrong mix and accidentally killed myself, I did my best to hold tight to the one helpful or comforting fact I’d gleaned from my online reading: stolen paintings were almost impossible to trace unless people tried to sell them, or move them, which was why only twenty per cent of art thieves were ever caught.

Chapter 8.

The Shop-Behind-the-Shop, continued

i.

SUCH WAS MY TERROR and anxiety about the painting that it overshadowed, somewhat, the arrival of the letter: I’d been accepted for the spring term of my early college program. The news was so shocking that I put the envelope in a desk drawer, where it sat alongside a stack of Welty’s monogrammed letter paper for two days, until I worked up the nerve to go to the head of the stairs (brisk scratch of handsaw floating up from the shop) and say: “Hobie?”

The saw stopped.

“I got in.”

Hobie’s large, pale face appeared at the foot of the stairs. “What’s that?” he said, still in his work trance, not quite there, wiping his hands and leaving white handprints on his black apron—and then his expression changed when he saw the envelope. “Is that what I think it is?”

Without a word I handed it to him. He looked at it, then at me—then laughed what I thought of as his Irish laugh, harsh and surprised at itself.

“Well done you!” he said, untying his apron and slinging it across the railing of the stairs. “I’m glad about it, I won’t lie to you. I hated to think of packing you up there all on your own. And when were you going to mention it? Your first day of school?”

It made me feel terrible, how pleased he was. At our celebratory dinner—me, Hobie, and Mrs. DeFrees at a struggling little neighborhood Italian—I looked at the couple drinking wine at the only other occupied table besides our own; and—instead of being happy, as I’d hoped—felt only irritated and numb.

“Cheers!” said Hobie. “The tough part is over. You can breathe a little easier now.”

“You must be so pleased,” said Mrs. DeFrees, who all night long had been linking her arm through mine and giving little squeezes and chirrups of delight. (“You look bien élégante,” Hobie had said to her when he kissed her on the cheek: gray hair piled atop her head, and velvet ribbons threaded through the links of her diamond bracelet.)

“Model of dedication!” said Hobie to her. It made me feel even worse about myself, hearing him tell his friends how hard I’d worked and what an excellent student I was.

“Well, it’s wonderful. Aren’t you pleased? And on such short notice, too! Do try to look a bit happier, my dear. When does he start?” she said to Hobie.

ii.

THE PLEASANT SURPRISE WAS that after the trauma of getting in, the early-college program wasn’t nearly as rigorous as I’d feared. In certain respects it was the least demanding school I’d ever attended: no AP classes, no hectoring about SATs and Ivy League admissions, no back-breaking math and language requirements—in fact, no requirements at all. With increasing bewilderment, I looked around at the geeky academic paradise I’d tumbled into and realized why so many gifted and talented high school kids in five boroughs had been knocking themselves senseless to get into this place. There were no tests, no exams, no grades. There were classes where you built solar panels and had seminars with Nobel-winning economists, and classes where all you did was listen to Tupac records or watch old episodes of Twin Peaks. Students were free to concoct their own Robotics or History of Gaming tutorials if they so chose. I was free to pick and choose among interesting electives with only some take-home essay questions at midterm and a project at the end. But though I knew just how lucky I was, still it was impossible to feel happy or even grateful for my good fortune. It was as if I’d suffered a chemical change of the spirit: as if the acid balance of my psyche had shifted and leached the life out of me in aspects impossible to repair, or reverse, like a frond of living coral hardened to bone.

I could do what I had to. I’d done it before: gone blank, pushed forward. Four mornings a week I rose at eight, showered in the claw-foot tub in the bath off Pippa’s bedroom (dandelion shower curtain, the smell of her strawberry shampoo wafting me up into a mocking vapor where her presence smiled all around me). Then—abrupt plunge to earth—I exited the cloud of steam and dressed silently in my room and—after dragging Popchik around the block, where he darted to and fro and screamed in terror—ducked my head into the workshop, said goodbye to Hobie, hoisted my backpack over my shoulder, and took the train two stops downtown.

Most kids were taking five or six courses but I went for the minimum, four: Studio art, French, Intro to European Cinema, Russian literature in translation. I’d wanted to take conversational Russian but Russian 101—the introductory level—wasn’t available until the fall. With knee-jerk coldness I showed up for class, spoke when spoken to, completed my assignments, and walked back home. Sometimes after class I ate in cheap Mexican and Italian places around NYU with pinball machines and plastic plants, sports on the wide screen television and dollar beer at Happy Hour (though no beer for me: it was weird readjusting to my life as a minor, like going back to crayons and kindergarten). Afterwards, all sugared-up from unlimited-refill Sprites, I walked back to Hobie’s through Washington Square Park with my head down and my iPod turned up loud. Because of anxiety (the recovered Rembrandt was still all over the news) I was having big problems sleeping and whenever the doorbell at Hobie’s rang unexpectedly I jumped as if at a five-alarm fire.

“You’re missing out, Theo,” said Susanna my counselor (first names only: all pals), “extracurricular activities are what anchor our students in an urban campus. Our younger students especially. It can be easy to get lost.”

“Well—” She was right: school was lonely. The eighteen and nineteen year olds didn’t socialize with the younger kids, and though there were plenty of students my age and younger (even one spindly twelve year old rumored to have an IQ of 260) their lives were so cloistered and their concerns so foolish and foreign-seeming that it was as if they spoke some lost middle-school tongue I’d forgotten. They lived at home with their parents; they worried about things like grade curves and Italian Abroad and summer internships at the UN; they freaked out if you lit a cigarette in front of them; they were earnest, well-meaning, undamaged, clueless. For all I had in common with any of them, I might as well have tried to go down and hang out with the eight year olds at PS 41.

“I see you’re taking French. The French Club meets once a week, in a French restaurant on University Place. And on Tuesdays they go up to the Alliance Française and watch French-language movies. That seems like something you might enjoy.”

“Maybe.” The head of the French department, an elderly Algerian, had already approached me (shockingly—at his large firm hand on my shoulder, I’d jumped like I was being mugged) and told me without preamble that he was teaching a seminar that I might like to sit in on, the roots of modern terrorism starting with the FLN and the Guerre d’Algérie—I hated how all the teachers in the program seemed to know who I was, addressing me with apparent foreknowledge of “the tragedy,” as my cinema teacher, Mrs. Lebowitz (“Call me Ruthie”) had termed it. She too—Mrs. Lebowitz—had been after me to join the Cinema club after reading an essay I’d written about The Bicycle Thief; she’d suggested as well that I might also enjoy the Philosophy Club, which entailed weekly discussion of what she called The Big Questions. “Um, maybe,” I said politely.

“Well, from your essay, it seems as if you are drawn to what I’ll call for lack of a better term, the metaphysical territory. Such as why do good people suffer,” she said, when I continued to look at her blankly. “And is fate random. What your essay deals with is really not so much the cinematic aspect of De Sica as the fundamental chaos and uncertainty of the world we live in.”

“I don’t know,” I said, in the uneasy pause that fell. Was my essay really about these things? I hadn’t even liked The Bicycle Thief (or Kes, or La Mouette, or Lacombe Lucien, or any of the other extremely depressing foreign films we had watched in Mrs. Lebowitz’s class).

Mrs. Lebowitz looked at me so long I felt uncomfortable. Then she adjusted her bright red eyeglasses and said: “Well, most of what we do in European Cinema is pretty heavy. Which is why I’m thinking maybe you’d like to sit in on one of my seminars for film majors. ‘Screwball Comedies of the Thirties’ or maybe even ‘Silent Cinema.’ We do Dr. Caligari but also a lot of Buster Keaton, a lot of Charlie Chaplin—chaos, you know, but in a non-threatening framework. Life-affirming stuff.”

“Maybe,” I said. But I had no intention of burdening myself with even one scrap of extra work, no matter how life-affirming in nature. For—from almost the moment I’d gotten in the door—the deceptive burst of energy by which I had clawed my way into the Early College program had collapsed. Its lavish offerings left me unmoved; I had no desire to exert myself one bit more than I absolutely had to. All I wanted was to scrape by.

Consequently, the enthusiastic welcome of my teachers soon began to wane into resignation and a sort of vague, impersonal regret. I was not seeking out challenges, developing my skills, expanding my horizons, utilizing the many resources available to me. I was not, as Susanna had delicately put it, adjusting to the program. In fact—increasingly as the term wore on, as my teachers slowly distanced themselves and a more resentful note began to surface (“the academic opportunities offered do not seem to spur Theodore to greater efforts, on any front”) I grew more and more suspicious that the only reason I’d been allowed into the program at all was because of “the tragedy.” Someone had flagged my application in the admissions office, passed it to an administrator, my God, this poor kid, victim of terrorism, blah blah blah, school has a responsibility, how many places do we have left, do you think we can fit him in? Almost certainly I had ruined the life of some deserving brainiac out in the Bronx—some poor clarinet-playing loser in the projects who was still getting beaten up for his algebra homework, who was going to end up punching tickets in a tollbooth instead of teaching fluid mechanics at Cal Tech because I’d taken his or her rightful place.

Clearly a mistake had been made. “Theodore participates very little in class and appears to have no desire to expend any more attention on his studies than absolutely necessary,” wrote my French professor, in a scathing midterm report that—in the absence of any closely supervising adult—no one saw but me. “It is to be hoped that his failures will drive him to prove himself so that he may profit from his situation in the second half of the term.”

But I had no desire to profit from my situation, even less to prove myself. Like an amnesiac I roamed the streets and (instead of doing my homework, or attending my language lab, or joining any of the clubs to which I had been invited) rode the subway out to purgatorial end-of-the-line neighborhoods where I wandered alone among bodegas and hair-weave emporiums. But soon I lost interest even in my newfound mobility—hundreds of miles of track, riding just for the hell of it—and instead, like a stone sinking soundlessly into deep water, lost myself in idlework down in Hobie’s basement, a welcoming drowsiness beneath the sidewalk where I was insulated from the city blare and all the airborne bristle of office towers and skyscrapers, where I was happy to polish table-tops and listen to classical music on WNYC for hours on end.

After all: what did I care about passé composé or the works of Turgenev? Was it wrong, wanting to sleep late with the covers over my head and wander around a peaceful house with old seashells in drawers and wicker baskets of folded upholstery fabric stored under the parlor secretary, sunset falling in drastic coral spokes through the fanlight over the front door? Before long, between school and workshop, I had slipped into a sort of forgetful doze, a skewed, dreamlike version of my former life where I walked familiar streets yet lived in unfamiliar circumstances, among different faces; and though often walking to school I thought of my old, lost life with my mother—Canal Street Station, lighted bins of flowers at the Korean market, anything could trigger it—it was as if a black curtain had come down on my life in Vegas.

Only sometimes, in unguarded moments, it struck through in such mutinous bursts that I stopped mid-step on the sidewalk, amazed. Somehow the present had shrunk into a smaller and much less interesting place. Maybe it was just I’d sobered up a bit, no longer the chronic waste and splendor of those blazing adolescent drunks, our own little warrior tribe of two rampaging in the desert; maybe this was just how it was when you got older, although it was impossible to imagine Boris (in Warsaw, Karmeywallag, New Guinea, wherever) living a sedate prelude-to-adulthood life such as the one I’d fallen into. Andy and I—even Tom Cable and I—had always talked obsessively about what we were going to be when we grew up, but with Boris, the future had never appeared to enter his head any further than his next meal. I could not envision him preparing in any way to earn a living or to be a productive member of society. And yet to be with Boris was to know that life was full of great, ridiculous possibilities—far bigger than anything they taught in school. I’d long ago given up trying to text him or call; messages to Kotku’s phone went unanswered, his home number in Vegas had been disconnected. I could not imagine—given his wide sphere of movement—that I would ever see him again. And yet I thought of him almost every day. The Russian novels I had to read for school reminded me of him; Russian novels, and Seven Pillars of Wisdom, and so too the Lower East Side—tattoo parlors and pierogi shops, pot in the air, old Polish ladies swaying side to side with grocery bags and kids smoking in the doorways of bars along Second Avenue.

And—sometimes, unexpectedly, with a sharpness that was almost pain—I remembered my father. Chinatown made me think of him in its flash and seediness, its slippery unreadable moods: mirrors and fishtanks, shop windows with plastic flowers and pots of lucky bamboo. Sometimes when I walked down to Canal Street for Hobie, to buy rottenstone and Venice turpentine at Pearl Paint, I ended up drifting over to Mulberry Street to a restaurant my dad had liked, not far from the E train, eight stairs down to a basement with stained Formica tables where I bought crispy scallion pancakes, spicy pork, dishes I had to point at because the menu was in Chinese. The first time I’d shown up at Hobie’s laden with greasy paper bags his blank expression had stopped me cold, and I stood in the middle of the floor like a sleepwalker awakened mid-dream wondering what exactly I’d been thinking—not of Hobie, certainly; he wasn’t the person who craved Chinese food all hours of the day and night.

“Oh, I do like it,” said Hobie hastily, “only I never think of it.” And we ate downstairs in the shop straight from the cartons, Hobie seated atop a stool in his black work apron and sleeves rolled to the elbow, the chopsticks oddly small-looking in his large fingers.

iii.

THE INFORMAL NATURE OF my stay at Hobie’s worried me too. Though Hobie himself, in his foggy beneficence, didn’t appear to mind me at his house, Mr. Bracegirdle clearly viewed it as a temporary arrangement and both he and my counselor at school had taken great pains to explain that though the dormitories at my college were reserved for older students, something could be worked out in my case. But whenever the topic of living arrangements came up, I fell silent and stared at my shoes. The residence halls were crowded, fly-specked, with a graffiti-scrawled cage lift that clanked like a prison elevator: walls papered with band flyers, floors sticky with spilled beer, zombified mob of blanket-wrapped hulks drowsing on the sofas in the TV room and wasted-looking guys with facial hair—grown men in my view, big scary guys in their twenties—throwing empty forty-ounce cans at each other in the hall. “Well, you’re still a bit young,” said Mr. Bracegirdle, when—cornered—I expressed my reservations, although the true reason for my reservations was something I couldn’t discuss: how—given my circumstances—could I possibly live with a roommate? What about security? Sprinkler systems? Theft? The school is not responsible for the personal property of students, said the handbook I’d been given. We recommend that students take out a dorm insurance policy on any valuable objects that may be accompanying them to school.

In a trance of anxiety, I threw myself into the task of being indispensable to Hobie: running errands, cleaning brushes, helping him inventory his restorations and sort through fittings and old pieces of cabinet wood. While he carved splats and turned new chair legs to match old, I melted beeswax and resin on the hot plate for furniture polish: 16 parts beeswax, 4 parts resin, 1 part Venice turpentine, a fragrant butterscotch gloss that was thick like candy and satisfying to stir in the pan. Soon he was teaching me how to lay down the red on white ground for gilding: always a little of the gold rubbed down at the point where the hand would naturally touch, then a little dark wash with lampblack rubbed in interstices and backing. (“Patination is always one of the biggest problems in a piece. With new wood, if you’re going for an effect of age, a gilded patina is always easiest to fudge.”) And if, post-lampblack, the gilt was still too bright and raw-looking, he taught me to scar it with a pinpoint—light, irregular scratches of different depth—and then to ding it lightly with a ring of old keys before reversing the vacuum cleaner over it to dull it down. “Heavily restored pieces—where there are no worn bits or honorable scars, you have to hand out a few ancients and honorables yourself. The trick of it,” he explained, wiping his forehead with the back of his wrist, “is never to be too nice about it.” By nice he meant ‘regular.’ Anything too evenly worn was a dead giveaway; real age, as I came to see from the genuine pieces that passed through my hands, was variable, crooked, capricious, singing here and sullen there, warm asymmetrical streaks on a rosewood cabinet from where a slant of sun had struck it while the other side was as dark as the day it was cut. “What ages wood? Anything you like. Heat and cold, fireplace soot, too many cats—or that,” he said, stepping back as I ran my finger along the rough, muddied top of a mahogany chest. “What do you suppose wrecked that surface?”

“Gosh—” I squatted on my heels to where the finish—black and sticky, like the burnt-on crust of some Easy-Bake Oven item you didn’t want to eat—feathered out to a clear, rich shine.

Hobie laughed. “Hair spray. Decades of. Can you believe it?” he said, scratching at an edge with his thumbnail so that a curl of black peeled away. “The old beauty was using it as a dressing table. Over the years it builds up like lacquer. I don’t know what they put in it but it’s a nightmare to get off, especially the stuff from the fifties and sixties. It’d be a really interesting piece if she hadn’t wrecked the finish. All we can do is clean it up, on top, so you can see the wood again, maybe give it a light wax. It’s a beautiful old thing, though, isn’t it?” he said, with warmth, trailing a finger down the side. “Look at the turn of the leg and this graining, the figure of it—see that bloom, here and here, how carefully it’s matched?”

“Are you going to take it apart?” Though Hobie viewed it as an undesirable step I loved the surgical drama of dismembering a piece and re-assembling it from scratch—working fast before the glue set, like doctors rushing through a shipboard appendectomy.

“No—” knocking it with his knuckles, ear to the wood—“seems pretty sound, but we’ve got some damage to the rail,” he said, pulling a drawer which screeched and stuck. “That’s what comes from keeping a drawer crammed too full with junk. We’ll refit these—” tugging the drawer out, wincing at the shriek of wood on wood—“plane down the spots where it binds. See, the rounding? Best way to fix this is square out the groove—that’ll make it wider, but I don’t think we’ll have to prize the old runners out of the dovetails—you remember what we did on the oak piece, right? But—” running a fingertip along the edge—“mahogany’s a little different. So’s walnut. Surprising how often wood is taken from spots that aren’t actually causing the trouble. With mahogany in particular, it’s so tightly grained, mahogany of this age especially, you really don’t want to plane except where you absolutely have to. A little paraffin on the rails and she’ll be as good as new.”

iv.

AND SO THE TIME slipped by. The days were so much alike I barely noticed the months pass. Spring turned to summer, humidity and garbage smells, the streets full of people and the ailanthus trees leafing out dark and full; and then summer to autumn, forlorn and chilled. Nights, I spent reading Eugene Onegin or else poring over one of Welty’s many furniture books (my favorite: an ancient two-volume work called Chippendale Furniture: Genuine and Spurious) or Janson’s fat and satisfying History of Art. Though sometimes I worked down in the basement with Hobie for six or seven hours at a time, barely a word spoken, I never felt lonely in the beam of his attention: that an adult not my mother could be so sympathetic and attuned, so fully there, astonished me. Our large age difference made us shy with each other; there was a formality, a generational reserve; and yet we’d also grown to have sort of a telepathy in the shop so that I would hand him the correct plane or chisel before he even asked for it. “Epoxy-glued” was his short-hand for shoddy work, and cheap things generally; he’d shown me a number of original pieces where the joints had held undisturbed for two hundred years or more, whereas the problem with a lot of modern work was that it held too tight, bonded too hard with the wood and cracked it and didn’t let it breathe. “Always remember, the person we’re really working for is the person who’s restoring the piece a hundred years from now. He’s the one we want to impress.” Whenever he was gluing up a piece of furniture it was my job to set out all the right cramps, each at the right opening, while he lay out the pieces in precise mortise-to-tenon order—painstaking preparation for the actual gluing-and-cramping when we had to work frantically in the few minutes open to us before the glue set, Hobie’s hands sure as a surgeon’s, snatching up the right piece when I fumbled, my job mostly to hold the pieces together when he got the cramps on (not just the usual G-cramps and F-cramps but also an eccentric array of items he kept to hand for the purpose, such as mattress springs, clothes pins, old embroidery hoops, bicycle inner tubes, and—for weights—colorful sandbags stitched out of calico and various snatched-up objects such as old leaden door stops and cast-iron piggy banks). When he didn’t require an extra pair of hands, I swept sawdust and replaced tools on the peg, and—when there was nothing else to do—was happy enough to sit and watch him sharpening chisels or steam-bending wood with a bowl of water on the hot plate. OMG it stinks down there texted Pippa. The fumes are awful how can u stand it? But I loved the smell—bracingly toxic—and the feel of old wood under my hands.

v.

DURING ALL THIS TIME, I had carefully followed the news about my fellow art thieves in the Bronx. They had all pleaded guilty—the mother-in-law too—and had received the most severe sentences allowed by law: fines in the hundreds of thousands, and prison sentences ranging from five to fifteen without parole. The general view seemed to be that they would all still be living happily out in Morris Heights and eating big Italian dinners at Mom’s house had they not made the dumb move of trying to sell the Wybrand Hendriks to a dealer who phoned the cops.

But this did not assuage my anxiety. There had been the day when I’d returned from school to find the upstairs thick with smoke and firemen trooping around the hall outside my bedroom—“mice,” said Hobie, looking wild-eyed and pale, roaming the house in his workman’s smock and his safety goggles atop his head like a mad scientist, “I can’t abide glue traps, they’re cruel, and I’ve put off having an exterminator in but good Lord, this is outrageous, I can’t have them chewing through the electrical wires, if not for the alarm the place could have gone up like that, here”—(to the fireman) “is it all right if I bring him over here?” sidestepping equipment, “you have to see this.…” standing well back to point out a tangle of charred mouse skeletons smouldering in the baseboard. “Look at that! A whole nest of them!” Though Hobie’s house was alarmed to the nines—not just for fire, but burglary—and the fire had done no real damage apart from a section of floorboard in the hall, still the incident had shaken me badly (what if Hobie hadn’t been home? what if the fire had started in my room?) and deducing that so many mice in a two-foot section of baseboard only meant more mice (and more chewed wires) elsewhere, I wondered if despite Hobie’s aversion to mousetraps I should set out some myself. My suggestion that he get a cat—though welcomed enthusiastically by Hobie and cat-loving Mrs. DeFrees—was discussed with approval but not acted upon and soon sank from view. Then, only a few weeks later, just as I was wondering if I should broach the cat issue again, I’d almost fainted from the cardiac plunge of coming in my room to find him kneeling on the rug near my bed—reaching under the bed, as I thought, but in fact reaching for the putty knife on the floor; he was replacing a cracked pane in the bottom of the bedroom window.

“Oh, hi,” said Hobie, standing to brush off his trouser leg. “Sorry! Didn’t mean to give you a jump! Been intending to get this new pane in ever since you arrived. Of course, I like to use wavy glass in these old windows, the Bendheim, but if you throw in a few clear pieces it really doesn’t matter—say, careful there,” he said, “are you all right?” as I dropped my school bag and sank in an armchair like some shellshocked first lieutenant stumbling in from the field.

It was crackers, as my mother would have said. I didn’t know what to do. Though I was only too aware how strangely Hobie looked at me at times, how crazy I must seem to him, still I existed in a low-grade fog of internal clangor: starting up every time someone came to the door; jumping as if scalded when the phone rang; jolted by electric-shock “premonitions” that—mid class—would compel me to rise from my desk and rush straight home to make sure that the painting was still in the pillowcase, that no one had disturbed the wrapping or tried to scratch up the tape. On my computer, I scoured the Internet for laws dealing with art theft but the fragments I turned up were all over the map, and did not provide any kind of relevant or cohesive view. Then, after I’d been at Hobie’s for an otherwise uneventful eight months, an unexpected solution presented itself.

I was on good terms with all Hobie’s moving-and-storage guys. Most of them were New York City Irish, lumbering, good-natured guys who hadn’t quite made it into the police force or the fire department—Mike, Sean, Patrick, Little Frank (who was not little at all, the size of a refrigerator)—but there were also a couple of Israeli guys named Raviv and Avi, and—my favorite—a Russian Jew named Grisha. (“ ‘Russian Jew’ contradiction in terms,” he explained, in a lavish plume of menthol smoke. “To Russian mind anyway. Since ‘Jew’ to antisemite mind is not the same as true Russian—Russia is notorious of this fact.”) Grisha had been born in Sevastopol, which he claimed to remember (“black water, salt”) though his parents had emigrated when he was two. Fair-haired, brick red in the face with startling robin’s-egg eyes, he was paunchy from drinking and so careless about his clothes that sometimes the lower buttons of his shirt gaped open, yet from the easy, arrogant way he carried himself, he clearly believed himself to be good-looking (as who knew, maybe he had been, once). Unlike stone-faced Mr. Pavlikovsky he was quite talkative, full of jokes or anekdoty as he called them, which he told in a droll, rapid-fire monotone. “You think you can curse, mazhor?” he’d said goodnaturedly, from the chessboard set up in a corner of the workshop where he and Hobie sometimes played in the afternoon. “Go then. Burn my ears off.” And I had let rip such an eyewatering torrent of filth that even Hobie—not understanding a word—had leaned back laughing with his hands over his ears.

One gloomy afternoon, not long after my first fall term in school had begun, I happened to be alone in the house when Grisha stopped by to drop off some furniture. “Here, mazhor,” he said, flicking the butt of his cigarette away between scarred thumb and forefinger. Mazhor—one of his several derisive nicknames for me—meant “Major” in Russian. “Make yourself useful. Come help with this garbage in the truck.” All furniture, for Grisha, was “garbage.”

I looked past him, to the truck. “What have you got? Is it heavy?”

“If it was heavy, poprygountchik, would I ask you?”

We brought in the furniture—gilt-edged mirror, wrapped in padding; a candle stand; a set of dining room chairs—and as soon as it was unwrapped, Grisha leaned against a sideboard Hobie was working on (after first touching it with a fingertip, to make sure it wasn’t sticky) and lit himself a Kool. “Want one?”

“No thanks.” In fact, I did, but I was afraid Hobie would smell it on me.

Grisha fanned away the cigarette smoke with one dirty-nailed hand. “So what are you doing?” he said. “Want to help me out this afternoon?”

“Help you how?”

“Put down your naked-lady book” (Janson’s History of Art) “and ride out to Brooklyn with me.”

“What for?”

“I have to take some of this garbage out to storage, could use an extra hand. Mike was supposed to help but sick today. Ha! Giants played last night, they lost, he had a lot of rocks on the game. Bet he is home in bed up in Inwood with a hangover and a black eye.”

vi.

ON THE WAY OUT to Brooklyn with a van full of furniture, Grisha kept up a steady monologue about on the one hand Hobie’s fine qualities and on the other how he was running Welty’s business into the ground. “Honest man, in dishonest world? Living in reclusion? It hurts me right here, in my heart, to see him throwing his moneys out the window every day. No no,” he said, holding up a grimy palm as I tried to speak, “takes time what he does, the restorations, working by hand like the Old Masters—I understand. He is artist—not businessman. But explain for me, please, why he is paying for storage out at Brooklyn Navy Yard instead of moving inventorys and getting bills paid? I mean—just look, the junk in basement! Things Welty bought at auction—more coming in every week. Upstairs, store is packed tight! He is sitting on a fortune—would take hundred years to sell it all! People looking in the window—cash in hand—wanting to buy—sorry, lady! Fuck off! Store is closed! And there he is downstairs with his carpenter tools spending ten hours to carve this-small” (thumb and forefinger) “—piece of wood for some piece-of-shit old lady chair.”

“Yeah, but he has clients in too. He sold a whole bunch of stuff just last week.”

“What?” said Grisha angrily, whipping his head from the road to glare at me. “Sold? To who?”

“The Vogels. He opened the store for them—they bought a bookcase, a games table—”

Grisha scowled. “Those people. His friends, so called. You know why they buy from him? Because they know they can get low price from him—‘open by appointment,’ ha! Better for him if he keeps the place shut from those vultures. I mean—” fist on breastbone—“you know my heart. Hobie is family to me. But—” he rubbed three fingers together, an old gesture of Boris’s, money! money!—“unwise in business dealing. He gives away his last matchstick, scrap of food, whatever, to any phony and con man. You watch and see—soon, in four-five years, he will be broke on the street unless he finds someone to run the shop for him.”

“Such as who?”

“Well—” he shrugged—“some person like maybe my cousin Lidiya. That woman can sell water to drowning man.”

“You should tell him. I know he wants to find somebody.”

Grisha laughed cynically. “Lidiya? Work in that dump? Listen—Lidiya sells gold, Rolex, diamonds from Sierra Leone. Gets picked up from home in Lincoln Town Car. White leather pants… floor length sable.… nails out to here. No way is woman like that going to sit in junk shop with a bunch of dust and old garbage all day.”

He stopped the van and shut off the engine. We were in front of a blocky, ash-gray building in a desolate waterfront area, empty lots and auto-body shops, the sort of neighborhood where gangsters in the movies always drive the guy they’re going to kill.

“Lidiya—Lidiya is sexy woman,” he said contemplatively. “Long legs—bazooms—good looking. Big zest for life. But this business—you don’t want big flash, like her.”

“Then what?”

“Someone like Welty. There was innocent about him, you know? Like scholar. Or priest. He was grandfather to everyone. But very smart businessman all the same. Fine to be nice, kind, good friends with everyone, but once you have your customer trusting and believing lowest price is from you, you’ve got to take your profit, ha! That’s retail, mazhor. Way of the fucking world.”

Inside, after we were buzzed in, there was a desk with a lone Italian guy reading a newspaper. As Grisha was signed in, I examined a brochure on a rack beside the display of bubble wrap and packing tape:

ARISTON FINE ARTS STORAGE

STATE-OF-THE-ART FACILITY

FIRE SUPPRESSION, CLIMATE CONTROL, 24 HOUR SECURITY

INTEGRITY—QUALITY—SAFETY

FOR ALL YOUR FINE ARTS NEEDS

KEEPING YOUR VALUABLES SAFE SINCE 1968

Apart from the desk clerk, the place was deserted. We loaded the service elevator and—with the aid of a key card and a punched-in code—took the elevator up to the sixth floor. Down corridor after long, faceless corridor we walked, ceiling-mounted cameras and anonymous numbered doors, Aisle D, Aisle E, windowless Death Star walls that seemed to stretch into infinity, a feel of underground military archives or maybe columbarium walls in some futuristic cemetery.

Hobie had one of the larger spaces—double doors, wide enough to drive a truck through. “Here we go,” said Grisha, rattling the key in the padlock and throwing the door open with a crash of metal. “Just look at all this shit he has in here.” It was jammed so full of furniture and other items (lamps, books, china, little bronzes; old B. Altman bags full of papers and moldy shoes) that at first confused glance I wanted to back off and shut the door, as if we’d stumbled into the apartment of some old hoarder who had just died.

“Two thousand a month he pays for this,” he said gloomily as we took the padding off the chairs and stacked them, precariously, atop a cherrywood desk. “Twenty-four thousand dollars a year! He should rather be using those moneys to light his cigarettes than pay rents for this shithole.”

“What about these smaller units?” Some of the doors were quite tiny—suitcase-sized.

“People are crazy,” said Grisha resignedly. “For space the size of car trunk? Hundreds of dollars a month?”

“I mean—” I didn’t know how to ask it—“what keeps people from putting illegal stuff here?”

“Illegal?” Grisha blotted the sweat from his brow with a dirty handkerchief and then reached around and mopped the inside of his collar. “You mean like, what, guns?”

“Right. Or, you know, stolen stuff.”

“What keeps them? I will tell you. Nothing is what keeps them. Bury something here and no one will find it, unless you get bumped off or sent to the can and don’t pay the fee. Ninety per cent of this stuff—old baby pictures, junk from Bubbe’s attic. But—if walls could talk, you know? Probably millions of dollars hidden away if you knew where to look. All kind of secrets. Guns, jewels, murder victim bodies—crazy things. Here—” he’d slammed the door with a crash, was fumbling with the slide bolt—“help me with this fucker. I hate this place, my God. Is like death, you know?” He gestured down the sterile, endless-looking corridor. “Everything shut up, sealed away from life! Whenever I’m coming here, I get a feeling like hard to breathe. Worse than a fucking library.”

vii.

THAT NIGHT, I GOT the Yellow Pages from Hobie’s kitchen and carried it back to my room and looked under Storage: Fine Arts. There were dozens of places in Manhattan and the outer boroughs, many with stately print ads detailing their services: white gloves, from our door to yours! A cartoon butler proffered a business card on a silver tray: BLINGEN AND TARKWELL, SINCE 1928. We provide discreet and confidential State-of-the-Art storage solutions for a wide range of businesses and private clients. ArtTech. Heritage Works. Archival Solutions. Facilities monitored by hygrothermograph recording equipment. We maintain custom temperature control to AAM (American Association of Museums) requirements of 70 degrees and 50 percent relative humidity.

But all this was much too elaborate. The last thing I wanted was to draw attention to the fact that I was storing a piece of art. What I needed was something safe and inconspicuous. One of the biggest and most popular chains had twenty locations in Manhattan—including one in the East Sixties by the river, my old neighborhood, only a few streets away from where my mother and I had lived. Our premises are secured by our custom 24-hour manned security command center and feature the latest technology in smoke and fire detection.

Hobie was asking me something from the hallway. “What?” I said hoarsely, my voice loud and false, shutting the phone book on my finger.

“Moira’s here. Want to run down to the local with us for a hamburger?” The Local was what he called the White Horse.

“Sounds great, be there in a minute.” I went back to the ad in the Yellow Pages. Make Space for Summer Funtime! Easy solutions for your sports and hobby equipment! How simple they made it sound: no credit card required, cash deposit and off you went.

The next day, instead of going to class, I retrieved the pillowcase from under my bed, taped it shut with duct tape, put it in a brown bag from Bloomingdale’s, and took a cab to the sporting goods store in Union Square, where after a bit of dithering I purchased a cheap pup tent and then caught a cab back up to Sixtieth Street.

At the space-age, glassed-in office of the storage facility, I was the only customer; and though I’d prepared a cover story (ardent camper; neatfreak mom) the men at the desk seemed completely uninterested in my large, well-labeled sporting goods bag with the tag of the pup tent dangling artfully outside. Nor did anyone seem to find it at all noteworthy or unusual that I wanted to pay for the locker a year in advance, in cash—or two years maybe? Was that all right? “ATM right out there,” said the Puerto Rican at the cash register, pointing without looking away from his bacon and egg sandwich.

That easy? I thought, in the elevator on the way down. “Write your locker number down,” the guy at the register said, “and your combination too, and keep it in a safe place,” but I’d already memorized both—I’d seen enough James Bond movies that I knew the drill—and the minute I was outside tossed the paper in the trash.

Walking out of the building, its vaultlike hush and the stale breezelet humming evenly from the air vents, I felt giddy, unblinkered, and the blue sky and trumpeting sunlight, familiar morning exhaust haze and the call and cry of car horns all seemed to stretch down the avenue into a larger, better scheme of things: a sunny realm of crowds and luck. It was the first time I’d been anywhere near Sutton Place since returning to New York and it was like falling back in a friendly old dream, crossfade between past and present, pocked texture of the sidewalks and even the same old cracks I’d always jumped over when I was running home, leaning in, imagining myself in an airplane, tilt of an airplane’s wings, I’m coming in, that final stretch, strafing in fast towards home—lots of the same places still in business, the deli, the Greek diner, the wine shop, all the forgotten neighborhood faces muddling through my mind, Sal the florist and Mrs. Battaglina from the Italian restaurant and Vinnie from the dry cleaner’s with his tape measure around his neck, down on his knees pinning up my mother’s skirt.

I was only a few blocks from our old building: and looking down towards Fifty-Seventh Street, that bright familiar alley with the sun striking it just right and bouncing gold off the windows I thought: Goldie! Jose!

At the thought, my step quickened. It was morning; one or both of them should be on duty. I’d never sent the postcard from Vegas like I’d promised: they’d be thrilled to see me, clustering round, hugging me and slapping me on the back, interested to hear about everything that had happened, including the death of my dad. They’d invite me back to the package room, maybe call up Henderson the manager, fill me in on all the building gossip. But when I turned the corner, amidst stalled traffic and car horns, I saw from halfway down the block that the building was cicatriced with scaffolding and the windows slapped shut with official notices.

I stopped, dismayed. Then—disbelieving—I walked closer and stood, appalled. The art-deco doors were gone, and—in place of the cool dim lobby, with its polished floors, its sunburst panelling—gaped a cavern of gravel and concrete hunks and workmen in hard hats were coming out with wheelbarrows of rubble.

“What happened here?” I said to a dirt-ingrained guy with a hard hat standing back a bit, hunched and slurping guiltily at his coffee.

“Whaddaya mean, what happened?”

“I—” Standing back, looking up, I saw it wasn’t just the lobby; they had gutted the entire building, so you could see straight through to the courtyard in back; glazed mosaic on the façade still intact but the windows dusty and blank, nothing behind them. “I used to live here. What’s going on?”

“Owners sold.” He was shouting over jackhammers in the lobby. “Got the last tenants out a few months ago.”

“But—” I looked up at the empty shell, then peered inside at the dusty, floodlit rubblehouse—men shouting, wires dangling. “What are they doing?”

“Upscale condos. Five mil plus—swimming pool on the roof—can you believe it?”

“Oh my God.”

“Yeah, you’d think it’d be protected wouldn’t you? Nice old place—yesterday had to jackhammer up the marble stairs in the lobby, remember those stairs? Real shame. Wish we coulda got ’em out whole. You don’t see that quality marble so much like you used to, the nice old marble like that. Still—” He shrugged. “That’s the city for you.”

He was shouting to someone above—a man lowering a bucket of sand on a rope—and I walked along, feeling sick, right under our old living room window or the bombed-out shell of it rather, too disturbed to look up. Out of the way, baby, Jose had said, hoisting my suitcase up on the shelf of the package room. Some of the tenants, like old Mr. Leopold, had lived in the building for seventy-plus years. What had happened to him? Or to Goldie, or Jose? Or—for that matter: Cinzia—? Cinzia, who at any given time had a dozen or more part-time cleaning jobs, worked only a few hours a week in the building, not that I’d even been thinking about Cinzia until the moment before, but it had all seemed so solid, so immutable, the whole social system of the building, a nexus where I could always stop in and see people, say hello, find out what was going on. People who had known my mother. People who had known my dad.

And the farther I walked away, the more upset I got, at the loss of one of the few stable and unchanging docking-points in the world that I’d taken for granted: familiar faces, glad greetings: hey manito! For I had thought that this last touchstone of the past, at least, would be where I’d left it. It was weird to think I’d never be able to thank Jose and Goldie for the money they’d given me—or, even weirder, that I’d never be able to tell them my father had died: because who else did I know who had known him? Or would care? Even the sidewalk felt like it might break under my feet and I might drop through Fifty-Seventh Street into some pit where I never stopped falling.

IV.

It is not flesh and blood, but heart which makes us fathers and sons.

—S

CHILLER

Chapter 9.

Everything of Possibility

i.

ONE AFTERNOON EIGHT YEARS later—after I’d left school and gone to work for Hobie—I’d just come out of Bank of New York and was walking up Madison upset and preoccupied when I heard my name.

I turned. The voice was familiar but I didn’t recognize the man: thirtyish, bigger than me, with morose gray eyes and colorless blond hair to his shoulders. His clothes—shaggy tweeds; rough shawl-collared sweater—were more suited for a muddy country lane than a city street; and he had an indefinable look of privilege gone wrong, like someone who’d slept on some friends’ couches, done some drugs, wasted a good bit of his parents’ money.

“It’s Platt,” he said. “Platt Barbour.”

“Platt,” I said, after a stunned pause. “Long time. Good Lord.” It was difficult to recognize the lacrosse thug of old in this sobered and attentive-looking pedestrian. The insolence was gone, the old aggressive glint; now he looked worn out and there was an anxious, fatalistic quality in his eyes. He might have been an unhappy husband up from the suburbs, worried about an unfaithful wife, or maybe a disgraced teacher at some second-rate school.

“Well. So. Platt. How are you?” I said after an uncomfortable silence, stepping backwards. “Are you still in the city?”

“Yes,” he said, clasping the back of his neck with one hand, seeming highly ill at ease. “Just started a new job, actually.” He had not aged well; in the old days he’d been the blondest and best-looking of the brothers, but he’d grown thick in the jaw and around the middle and his face had coarsened away from its perverse old Jungvolk beauty. “I’m working for an academic publisher. Blake-Barrows. They’re based in Cambridge but they’ve got an office here?”

“Great,” I said, as if I’d heard of the publisher, though I hadn’t—nodding, fiddling with the change in my pocket, already planning my getaway. “Well, fantastic to see you. How’s Andy?”

His face seemed to grow very still. “You don’t know?”

“Well—” faltering—“I heard he was at MIT. I ran into Win Temple on the street a year or two back—he said Andy had a fellowship—astrophysics? I mean,” I said nervously, discomfited by Platt’s stare, “I really don’t keep in touch with the crowd from school very much.…”

Platt ran his hand down the back of his head. “I’m sorry. I’m not sure we knew how to get in touch with you. Things are still very confused. But I certainly thought you would have heard by now.”

“Heard what?”

“He’s dead.”

“Andy?” I said, and then, when he didn’t react: “No.”

Fleeting grimace—gone almost the moment I saw it. “Yes. It was pretty bad, I’m sorry to say. Andy and Daddy too.”

“What?”

“Five months ago. He and Daddy drowned.”

“No.” I looked at the sidewalk.

“The boat capsized. Off Northeast Harbor. We really weren’t out so far, maybe we shouldn’t have been out there at all, but Daddy—you know how he was—”

“Oh my God.” Standing there, in the uncertain spring afternoon with children just out of school running all around me, I felt pole-axed and confused as if at an un-funny practical joke. Though I had thought of Andy often over the years, and just missed seeing him once or twice, we’d never gotten back in touch after I returned to New York. I’d felt sure I’d run into him at some point—as I had Win, and James Villiers, and Martina Lichtblau, and a few other people from my school. But though I’d often considered picking up the phone to say hello, somehow I never had.

“Are you okay?” said Platt—massaging the back of his neck, looking as uneasy as I felt.

“Um—” I turned to the shop window to compose myself, and my transparent ghost turned to meet me, crowds passing behind me in the glass.

“Gosh,” I said. “I can’t believe it. I don’t know what to say.”

“Sorry to blurt it on the street like that,” said Platt, rubbing his jaw. “You look a bit green around the gills.”

Green around the gills: a phrase of Mr. Barbour’s. With a pang, I remembered Mr. Barbour searching through the drawers in Platt’s room, offering to build me a fire. Hell of a thing that’s happened, good Lord.

“Your dad, too?” I said, blinking as if someone had just shaken me awake from a sound sleep. “Is that what you just said?”

He looked around, with a lift of the chin that brought back for a moment the arrogant old Platt I remembered, then glanced at his watch.

“Come on, have you got a minute?” he said.

“Well—”

“Let’s get a drink,” he said, pounding a hand on my shoulder so heavily I flinched. “I know a quiet place on Third Avenue. What do you say?”

ii.

WE SAT IN THE nearly empty bar—a once-famous oak-panelled joint smelling of hamburger grease, Ivy League pennants on the walls, while Platt talked in a rambling, uneasy monotone so quietly I had to strain to follow.

“Daddy,” he said, looking down into his gin and lime: Mrs. Barbour’s drink. “We all shrank from talking about it—but. Chemical imbalance is how our grandmother spoke of it. Bipolar disorder. He had his first episode, or attack, or whatever you call it, at Harvard Law—1L, never made it to the second year. All these wild plans and enthusiasms… combative in class, talking out of turn, had set out writing some epic book-length poem about the whaling ship Essex which was just a bunch of nonsense and then his roommate, who was apparently more of a stabilizing influence than anyone knew, left for a semester abroad in Germany and—well. My grandfather had to take the train up to Boston to fetch him. He’d been arrested for starting a fire out in front of the statue of Samuel Eliot Morison on Commonwealth Avenue and he resisted arrest when the policeman tried to take him in.”

“I knew he’d had problems. I never knew it was like that.”

“Well.” Platt stared into his drink, and then knocked it back. “That was well before I came along. Things changed after he married Mommy and he’d been on his medicine for a while, although our grandmother never really trusted him after all that.”

“All what?”

“Oh, of course we got on with her quite well, the grandchildren,” he said hastily. “But you can’t imagine the trouble Daddy caused when he was younger… tore through worlds of money, terrible rows and rages, some awful problems with underage girls… he’d weep and apologize, and then it would happen all over again.… Gaga always blamed him for our grandfather’s heart attack, the two of them were quarreling at my grandfather’s office and boom. Once on the medicine, though, he was a lamb. Wonderful father—well—you know. Wonderful with us children.”

“He was lovely. When I knew him.”

“Yes.” Platt shrugged. “He could be. After he married Mommy, he was on an even keel for a while. Then—I don’t know what happened. He made some terribly unsound investments—that was the first sign. Embarrassing late-night phone calls to acquaintances, that sort of thing. Became romantically obsessed with a college girl interning in his office—girl whose family Mommy knew. It was terribly hard.”

For some reason, I was incredibly touched by hearing him call Mrs. Barbour ‘Mommy.’ “I never knew any of this,” I said.

Platt frowned: a hopeless, resigned expression that brought out sharply his resemblance to Andy. “We hardly knew it ourselves—we children,” he said bitterly, drawing his thumb across the tablecloth. “ ‘Daddy’s ill’—that’s all we were told. I was off at school, see, when they sent him to the hospital, they never let me talk to him on the phone, they said he was too sick and for weeks and weeks I thought he was dead and they didn’t want to tell me.”

“I remember all that. It was awful.”

“All what?”

“The, uh, nervous trouble.”

“Yeah, well—” I was startled by the snap of anger in his eyes—“and how was I supposed to know if it was ‘nervous trouble’ or terminal cancer or what the fuck? ‘Andy’s so sensitive… Andy’s better off in the city… we don’t think Andy would thrive with boarding…’ well, all I can say is Mommy and Daddy packed me off pretty much the second I could tie my shoes, stupid fucking equestrian school called Prince George’s, completely third-rate but oh, wow, such a character-building experience, such a great preparation for Groton, and they took really young kids, seven through thirteens. You should have seen the brochure, Virginia hunt country and all that, except it wasn’t all green hills and riding habits like the pictures. I got trampled in a stall and broke my shoulder and there I was in the infirmary with this view of the empty driveway and no car coming up it. Not one fucking person came to visit me, not even Gaga. Plus the doctor was a drunk and set the shoulder wrong, I still have problems with it. I hate horses to this motherfucking day.

“Any how—” self-conscious change of tone—“they’d yanked me out of that place and got me into Groton by the time things really came to a head with Daddy and he was sent away. Apparently there was an incident on the subway… conflicting stories there, Daddy said one thing and the cops said another but—” he lifted his eyebrows, with a sort of mannered, black-humored whimsy—“off went Daddy to the ding farm! Eight weeks. No belt, no shoelaces, no sharps. But they gave him shock treatments in there, and they really seemed to work because when he came out again he was an all-new person. Well—you remember. Father of the Year, practically.”

“So—” I thought of my ugly run-in with Mr. Barbour on the street, decided not to bring it up—“what happened?”

“Well, who knows. He started having problems again a few years ago and had to go back in.”

“What kind of problems?”

“Oh—” Platt exhaled noisily—“much the same, embarrassing phone calls, public outbursts, et cetera. Nothing was wrong with him, of course, he was perfectly fine, it all started when they were doing some renovations on the building, which he was against, constant hammers and saws and all these corporations destroying the city, nothing that wasn’t true to start with, and then it just sort of snowballed, to the point where he thought he was being followed and photographed and spied on all the time. Wrote some pretty crazy letters to people, including some clients at his firm… made a terrible nuisance of himself at the Yacht Club… quite a few of the members complained, even some very old friends of his, and who can blame them?

“Anyway, when Daddy got back from the hospital that second time—he was never quite the same. The swings were less extreme, but he couldn’t concentrate and he was very irritable all the time. About six months ago he switched doctors and took a leave of absence from work and went up to Maine—our uncle Harry has a place on a little island up there, no one was there except the caretaker, and Daddy said the sea air did him good. All of us took turns going up to be with him… Andy was in Boston then, at MIT, the last thing he wanted was to be saddled with Daddy but unfortunately since he was closer than us, he got stuck with it a bit.”

“He didn’t go back to the, er—” I didn’t want to say ding farm—“where he went before?”

“Well, how was anyone to make him? It’s not an easy matter to send someone away against their will, especially when they won’t admit anything is wrong with them which at that point he wouldn’t, and besides we were led to believe it was all a matter of medication, that he would be right as rain as soon as the new dose kicked in. The caretaker checked in with us, made sure he ate well and took his medicine, Daddy spoke on the phone to his shrink every day—I mean, the doctor said it was all right,” he said defensively. “Fine for Daddy to drive, to swim, to sail if he felt like it. Probably it wasn’t a terrific idea to go out quite so late in the day but the conditions weren’t so bad when we set out and of course you know Daddy. Dauntless seaman and all that. Heroics and derring-do.”

“Right.” I’d heard many, many stories of Mr. Barbour sailing off into “snappy waters” that turned out to be nor’easters, State of Emergency declared in three states and power knocked out along the Atlantic Coast, Andy seasick and vomiting as he bailed salt water out of the boat. Nights tilted sideways, run aground upon sandbars, in darkness and torrential rain. Mr. Barbour himself—laughing uproariously over his Virgin Mary and his Sunday morning bacon and eggs—had more than once told the story how he and the children were blown out to sea off Long Island Sound during a hurricane, radio knocked out, how Mrs. Barbour had phoned a priest at St. Ignatius Loyola on Park and Eighty-Fourth and sat up all night praying (Mrs. Barbour!) until the ship-to-shore call from the Coast Guard came in. (“First strong wind, and she hightails it to Rome, didn’t you, my dear? Ha!”)

“Daddy—” Platt shook his head sadly. “Mommy used to say that if Manhattan wasn’t an island, he could never have lived here one minute. Inland he was miserable—always pining for the water—had to see it, had to smell it—I remember driving from Connecticut with him when I was a boy, instead of going straight up 84 to Boston we had to go miles out of the way and up the coast. Always looking to the Atlantic—really really sensitive to it, how the clouds changed the closer you got to the ocean.” Platt closed his cement-gray eyes for a moment, then re-opened them. “You knew Daddy’s little sister drowned herself, didn’t you,” he said, in so flat a voice that for a moment I thought I’d misheard.

I blinked, not knowing what to say. “No. I didn’t know that.”

“Well, she did,” said Platt tonelessly. “Kitsey’s named after her. Jumped off a boat in the East River during a party—a lark supposedly, that’s what they all said, ‘accident,’ but I mean anyone knows not to do that, the currents were crazy, pulled her right under. Another kid died too, jumping in trying to save her. And then there was Daddy’s uncle Wendell back in the sixties, half-crocked, tried to swim to the mainland one night on a dare—I mean, Daddy, he used to yammer on how the water was the source of life itself for him, fountain of youth and all that and—sure, it was. But it wasn’t just life for him. It was death.”

I didn’t reply. Mr. Barbour’s boating stories, never particularly cogent, or focused, or informative about the actual sport, had always vibrated with a majestic urgency all their own, an appealing tingle of disaster.

“And—” Platt’s mouth was a tight line—“of course the hell of it was, he thought he was immortal as far as the water was concerned. Son of Poseidon! Unsinkable! And as far as he was concerned, the rougher the water, the better. He used to get very storm-giddy, you know? Lowered barometric pressure for him was like laughing gas. Although that particular day… it was choppy but warm, one of those bright sunny days in fall when all you want is to get out on the water. Andy was annoyed at having to go, he was coming down with a cold and in the middle of doing something complicated on the computer, but neither of us thought there was any actual danger. The plan was to take him out, get him calmed down, and hopefully hop over to the restaurant on the pier and try to get some food down him. See—” restlessly he crossed his legs—“it was just the two of us there with him, Andy and me, and to be quite frank Daddy was a bit off his rocker. He had been keyed up since the day before, talking a little wildly, really on the boil—Andy called Mommy because he had work to do and didn’t feel able to cope, and Mommy called me. By the time I got up there and took the ferry out, Daddy was in the wild blue yonder. Raving about the flung spray and the blown fume and all that—the wild green Atlantic—absolutely flying. Andy was never able to tolerate Daddy in those moods, he was up in his room with the door locked. I suppose he’d had a party-sized dose of Daddy before I arrived.

“In hindsight, I know, it seems poorly considered, but—you see, I could have sailed it single-handed. Daddy was going stir-crazy in the house and what was I to do, wrestle him down and lock him up? and then too, you know Andy, he never thought about food, the cupboard was bare, nothing in the fridge but some frozen pizzas… short hop, something to eat on the pier, it seemed like a good plan, you know? ‘Feed him,’ Mommy always used to say when Daddy started getting a little too exhilarated. ‘Get some food down him.’ That was always the first line of defense. Sit him down—make him eat a big steak. Often that’s all it took to get him back on keel. And I mean—it was in the back of my mind that if his spirits didn’t settle once we were on the mainland we could forget about the steakhouse and take him in to the emergency room if need be. I only made Andy come to be on the safe side. I thought I could use an extra hand—quite frankly I’d been out late the night before, I was feeling a little less than all a-taunto, as Daddy used to say.” He paused, rubbing the palms of his hands on the thighs of his tweed trousers. “Well. Andy never liked the water much. As you know.”

“I remember.”

Platt winced. “I’ve seen cats that swam better than Andy. I mean, quite frankly, Andy was just about the clumsiest kid I ever saw that wasn’t out-and-out spastic or retarded… good God, you ought to have seen him on the tennis court, we used to joke about entering him in the Special Olympics, he would have swept every event. Still he’d put in enough hours on the boat, God knows—it seemed smart to have an extra man aboard, and Daddy less than his best, you know? We could easily have handled the boat—I mean it was fine, it would have been perfectly fine except I hadn’t been keeping my eye on the sky like I should, the wind blew up, we were trying to reef the mainsail and Daddy was waving his arms around and shouting about the empty spaces between the stars, really just all kinds of nutty stuff, and he lost his balance on a swell and fell overboard. We were trying to haul him back aboard, Andy and me—and then we got broadsided at just the wrong angle, huge wave, just one of these steep cresting things that pops up and slaps you out of nowhere, and boom, we capsized. Not even that it was so cold out but fifty-three-degree water is enough to send you into hypothermia if you’re out there long enough, which unfortunately we were, and I mean to say Daddy, he was soaring, off in the stratosphere—”

Our chummy college-girl waitress was approaching behind Platt’s back, about to ask if we wanted another round—I caught her eye, shook my head slightly, warning her away.

“It was the hypothermia that got Daddy. He’d gotten so thin, no body fat on him at all, an hour and a half in the water was enough to do it, floundering around at those temperatures. You lose heat faster if you’re not perfectly still. Andy—” Platt, seeming to sense that the waitress was there, turned and held up two fingers, another round—“Andy’s jacket, well, they found it trailing behind the boat still attached to the line.”

“Oh God.”

“It must have come up over his head when he went over. There’s a strap that goes around the crotch—a bit uncomfortable, nobody likes to wear it—anyway, there was Andy’s jacket, still shackled to the life-line, but apparently he wasn’t buckled in all the way, the little shit. Well, I mean,” he said, his voice rising, “the most typical thing. You know? Couldn’t be bothered to fasten the thing properly? He was always such a goddamned klutz—”

Nervously, I glanced at the waitress, conscious how loud Platt had gotten.

“God.” Platt pushed himself back from the table very suddenly. “I was always so hateful to Andy. An absolute bastard.”

“Platt.” I wanted to say No you weren’t only it wasn’t true.

He glanced up at me, shook his head. “I mean, my God.” His eyes were blown-out and empty looking, like the Huey pilots in a computer game (Air Cav II: Cambodian Invasion) that Andy and I had liked to play. “When I think of some of the things I did to him. I’ll never forgive myself, never.”

“Wow,” I said, after an uncomfortable pause, looking at Platt’s big-knuckled hands resting palms down on the table—hands that after all these years still had a blunt, brutal look, a residue of old cruelty about them. Although we had both endured our share of bullying at school, Platt’s persecution of Andy—inventive, joyous, sadistic—had verged on outright torture: spitting in Andy’s food, yes, tearing up his toys, but also leaving dead guppies from the fish tank and autopsy photos from the Internet on his pillow, throwing back the covers and peeing on him while he was asleep (and then crying Android’s wet the bed!); pushing his head under in the bathtub Abu Ghraib style; forcing his face down in the playground sandbox as he cried and fought to breathe. Holding his inhaler over his head as he wheezed and pleaded: want it? want it? Some hideous story too about Platt and a belt, an attic room in some country house, bound hands, a makeshift noose: ugliness. He’d have killed me, I remembered Andy saying, in his remote, emotionless voice, if the sitter hadn’t heard me kicking on the floor.

A light spring rain was tapping at the windows of the bar. Platt looked down at his empty glass, then up.

“Come see Mother,” he said. “I know she really wants to see you.”

“Now?” I said, when I realized he meant that instant.

“Oh, do please come. If not now, later. Don’t just promise like we all do on the street. It would mean so much to her.”

“Well—” Now it was my turn to look at my watch. I’d had some errands to do, in fact I had a lot on my mind and several very pressing worries of my own but it was getting late, the vodka had made me foggy, the afternoon had slipped away.

“Please,” he said. He signalled for the check. “She’ll never forgive me if she knows I ran into you and let you get away. Won’t you walk over for just a minute?”

iii.

STEPPING INTO THE FOYER was like stepping into a portal back to childhood: Chinese porcelains, lighted landscape paintings, silk-shaded lamps burning low, everything exactly as when Mr. Barbour had opened the door to me the night my mother died.

“No, no,” said Platt, when by habit I walked toward the bull’s-eye mirror and through to the living room. “Back here.” He was heading to the rear of the apartment. “We’re very informal now—Mommy usually sees people back here, if she sees anybody at all.…”

Back in the day, I had never been anywhere near Mrs. Barbour’s inner sanctum, but as we approached the smell of her perfume—unmistakable, white blossoms with a powdery strangeness at the heart—was like a blown curtain over an open window.

“She doesn’t go out the way she once did,” Platt was saying quietly. “None of these big dinners and events—maybe once a week she’ll have someone over for tea, or go for dinner with a friend. But that’s it.”

Platt knocked; he listened. “Mommy?” he called, and—at the indistinct reply—opened the door a crack. “I’ve got a guest for you. You’ll never guess who I found on the street.…”

It was an enormous room, done up in an old-ladyish, 1980s peach. Directly off the entrance was a seating area with a sofa and slipper chairs—lots of knickknacks, needlepoint cushions, nine or ten Old Master drawings: the flight into Egypt, Jacob and the Angel, circle of Rembrandt mostly though there was a tiny pen-and-brown-ink of Christ washing the feet of St. Peter that was so deftly done (the weary slump and drape of Christ’s back; the blank, complicated sadness on St. Peter’s face) it might have been from Rembrandt’s own hand.

I leaned forward for a closer look; and on the far side of the room, a lamp with a pagoda-shaped shade popped on. “Theo?” I heard her say, and there she was, propped on piles of pillows in an outlandishly large bed.

“You! I can’t believe it!” she said, holding out her arms to me. “You’re all grown up! Where in the world have you been? Are you in the city now?”

“Yes. I’ve been back for a while. You look wonderful,” I added dutifully, though she didn’t.

“And you!” She put both hands over mine. “How handsome you are! I’m quite overcome.” She looked both older and younger than I remembered: very pale, no lipstick, lines at the corner of her eyes but her skin still white and smooth. Her silver-blonde hair (had it always been quite that silver, or had she gone gray?) fell loose and uncombed about her shoulders; she was wearing half-moon glasses and a satin bed jacket pinned with a huge diamond brooch in the shape of a snowflake.

“And here you find me, in my bed, with my needlework, like an old sailor’s widow,” she said, gesturing at the unfinished needlepoint canvas across her knees. A pair of tiny dogs—Yorkshire terriers—were asleep on a pale cashmere throw at her feet, and the smaller of the two, spotting me, sprang up and began to bark furiously.

Uneasily I smiled as she tried to quiet him—the other dog had set up a racket as well—and looked around. The bed was modern—king-sized, with a fabric covered headboard—but she had a lot of interesting old things back there that I wouldn’t have known to pay attention to when I was a kid. Clearly, it was the Sargasso Sea of the apartment, where objects banished from the carefully decorated public rooms washed up: mismatched end tables; Asian bric-a-brac; a knockout collection of silver table bells. A mahogany games table that from where I stood looked like it might be Duncan Phyfe and atop it (amongst cheap cloisonné ashtrays and endless coasters) a taxidermied cardinal: moth-eaten, fragile, feathers faded to rust, its head cocked sharply and its eye a dusty black bead of horror.

“Ting-a-Ling, ssh, please be quiet, I can’t bear it. This is Ting-a-Ling,” said Mrs. Barbour, catching the struggling dog up in her arms, “he’s the naughty one, aren’t you darling, never a moment’s peace, and the other, with the pink ribbon, is Clementine. Platt,” she called, over the barking, “Platt, will you take him in the kitchen? He’s really a bit of a nuisance with guests,” she said to me, “I ought to have a trainer in…”

While Mrs. Barbour rolled up her needlework and put it in an oval basket with a piece of scrimshaw set in the lid, I sat down in the armchair by her bed. The upholstery was worn, and the subdued stripe was familiar to me—a former living-room chair exiled to the bedroom, the same chair I’d found my mother sitting in when she’d come to the Barbours’ many years ago to pick me up after a sleepover. I drew a finger over the cloth. All at once I saw my mother standing to greet me, in the bright green peacoat she’d been wearing that day—fashionable enough that people were always stopping her on the street to ask her where she got it, yet all wrong for the Barbours’ house.

“Theo?” said Mrs. Barbour. “Would you like something to drink? A cup of tea? Or something stronger?”

“No, thank you.”

She patted the brocade coverlet of the bed. “Come sit next to me. Please. I want to be able to see you.”

“I—” At her tone, at once intimate and formal, a terrible sadness came over me, and when we looked at each other it seemed that the whole past was redefined and brought into focus by this moment, clear as glass, a complexity of stillness that was rainy afternoons in spring, a dark chair in the hallway, the light-as-air touch of her hand on the back of my head.

“I’m so glad you came.”

“Mrs. Barbour,” I said, moving to the bed, sitting down gingerly with one hip, “my God. I can’t believe it. I didn’t find out till just now. I’m so sorry.”

She pressed her lips together like a child trying not to cry. “Yes,” she said, “well,” and there issued between us an awful and seemingly unbreakable silence.

“I’m so sorry,” I repeated, more urgently, aware just how clumsy I sounded, as if by speaking more loudly I might convey my acuity of sorrow.

Unhappily she blinked; and, not knowing what to do, I reached out and put my hand on top of hers and we sat for an uncomfortably long time.

In the end, it was she who spoke first. “At any rate.” Resolutely she dashed a tear from her eye while I flailed about for something to say. “He had mentioned you not three days before he died. He was engaged to be married. To a Japanese girl.”

“No kidding. Really?” Sad as I was, I couldn’t help smiling, a little: Andy had chosen Japanese as his second language precisely because he had such a thing for fanservice miko and slutty manga girls in sailor uniform. “Japanese from Japan?”

“Indeed. Tiny little thing with a squeaky voice and a pocketbook shaped like a stuffed animal. Oh yes, I met her,” she said with a raised eyebrow. “Andy translating over tea sandwiches at the Pierre. She was at the funeral, of course—the girl—her name was Miyako—well. Different cultures and all that, but it’s true what they say about the Japanese being undemonstrative.”

The little dog, Clementine, had crawled up to curl around Mrs. Barbour’s shoulder like a fur collar. “I have to admit, I’m thinking of getting a third,” she said, reaching over to stroke her. “What do you think?”

“I don’t know,” I said, disconcerted. It was extremely unlike Mrs. Barbour to solicit opinions from anyone at all on any subject, certainly not from me.

“I must say, they’ve been an enormous comfort, the pair of them. My old friend Maria Mercedes de la Pereyra turned up with them a week after the funeral, quite unexpected, two pups in a basket with ribbons on, and I have to say I wasn’t sure at first, but actually I don’t think I’ve ever received a more thoughtful gift. We could never have dogs before because of Andy. He was so terribly allergic. You remember.”

“I do.”

Platt—still in his tweed gamekeeper’s jacket, with big sagged-out pockets for dead birds and shotgun shells—had come back in. He pulled up a chair. “So, Mommy,” he said, biting his lower lip.

“So, Platypus.” A formal silence. “Good day at work?”

“Great.” He nodded, as if trying to reassure himself of the fact. “Yeah. Really really busy.”

“I’m so glad to hear it.”

“New books. One on the Congress of Vienna.”

“Another one?” She turned to me. “And you, Theo?”

“Sorry?” I’d been looking at the scrimshaw (a whaling ship) set in the lid of her sewing basket, and thinking of poor Andy: black water, salt in his throat, nausea and flailing. The horror and cruelty of dying in his most hated element. The problem essentially is that I despise boats.

“Tell me. What are you doing with yourself these days?”

“Um, dealing antiques. American furniture, mostly.”

“No!” She was rapturous. “But how perfect!”

“Yes—down in the Village. I run the shop and manage the sales end. My partner—” it was still so new I wasn’t used to saying it—“my partner in the business, James Hobart, he’s the craftsman, takes care of restorations. You should come down and visit sometime.”

“Oh, delicious. Antiques!” She sighed. “Well—you know how I love old things. I wish my children had shown an interest. I’d always hoped at least one of them would.”

“Well, there’s always Kitsey,” said Platt.

“It’s curious,” Mrs. Barbour continued, as if she hadn’t heard this. “Not one of my children had an artistic bone in their bodies. Isn’t that extraordinary? Little philistines, all four of them.”

“Oh, please,” I said, in as playful a tone as I could manage. “I remember Toddy and Kitsey with all those piano lessons. Andy with his Suzuki violin.”

She made a dismissive gesture. “Oh, you know what I mean. None of my children have any visual sense. No appreciation whatever for painting or interiors or any of that. Now—” again she took my hand—“when you were a child, I used to catch you in the hallway studying my paintings. You’d always go straight to the very best ones. The Frederic Church landscape, my Fitz Henry Lane and my Raphaelle Peale, or the John Singleton Copley—you know, the oval portrait, the tiny one, girl in the bonnet?”

“That was a Copley?”

“Indeed. And I saw you with the little Rembrandt just now.”

“So it is Rembrandt, then?”

“Yes. Only the one, the washing-of-the-feet. The rest are all school-of. My own children have lived with those drawings their whole lives and never displayed the slightest particle of interest, isn’t that right, Platt?”

“I like to think that some of us have excelled at other things.”

I cleared my throat. “You know, I really did just stop in to say hello,” I said. “It’s wonderful to see you—to see you both—” turning to include Platt in this. “I wish it were under happier circumstances.”

“Will you stay and have dinner?”

“I’m sorry,” I said, feeling cornered. “I can’t, not tonight. But I did want to run up for a minute and see you.”

“Then will you come back for dinner? Or lunch? Or drinks?” She laughed. “Or whatever you will.”

“Dinner, sure.”

She held up her cheek for a kiss, as she had never done when I was a child, not even with her own children.

“How lovely to have you here again!” she said, catching my hand and pressing it to her face. “Like old times.”

iv.

ON MY WAY OUT the door, Platt threw out some kind of weird handshake—part gang member, part fraternity boy, part International Sign Language—that I wasn’t sure how to return. In confusion I withdrew my hand and—not knowing what else to do—bumped fists with him, feeling stupid.

“So, hey. Glad we ran into each other,” I said, in the awkward silence. “Give me a call.”

“About dinner? Oh, yes. We’ll probably eat in if that’s all right, Mommy really doesn’t like to go out that much.” He dug his hands into the pockets of his jacket. Then, shockingly: “I’ve seen a good bit of your old friend Cable lately. Bit more than I care to, actually. He’ll be interested to know I’ve seen you.”

“Tom Cable?” I laughed, incredulously, although it wasn’t much of a laugh; the bad old memory of how we’d been suspended from school together and how he’d blown me off when my mother died still made me uneasy. “You’re in touch with him?” I said, when Platt didn’t respond. “I haven’t thought of Tom in years.”

Platt smirked. “I have to admit, back in the day, I thought it was weird that any friend of that kid’s would put up with a drip like Andy,” he said quietly, slouching against the door frame. “Not that I minded. God knows Andy needed somebody to take him out and get him stoned or something.”

Andrip. Android. One-nut. Pimple Face. Sponge Bob Shit Pants.

“No?” said Platt casually, misreading my blank stare. “I thought you were into that. Cable was certainly quite the little pothead in his day.”

“That must have been after I left.”

“Well, maybe.” Platt looked at me, in a way I wasn’t sure I liked. “Mommy certainly thought butter wouldn’t melt in your mouth, but I knew you were pals with Cable. And Cable was a little thief.” Sharply—in a way that brought the old, unpleasant Platt ringing back—he laughed. “I told Kitsey and Toddy to keep their rooms locked when you were here so you wouldn’t steal anything.”

“That’s what all that was about?” I had not thought of the piggy-bank incident in years.

“Well, I mean, Cable”—he glanced at the ceiling. “See, I used to date Tom’s sister Joey, holy Hell, she was a piece of work too.”

“Right.” I remembered all too well Joey Cable—sixteen, and stacked—brushing by twelve-year-old me in the hallway of the Hamptons house in tiny T-shirt and black thong panties.

“Sloppy Jo! What an ass she had on her. Remember how she used to parade around naked by the hot tub out there? Anyway, Cable. Out in the Hamptons at Daddy’s club he got caught rifling lockers in the men’s changing rooms, couldn’t have been more than twelve or thirteen. That was after you left, eh?”

“Must have been.”

“That sort of thing happened at several clubs out there. Like during big tournaments and stuff—he’d sneak into the locker room and steal whatever he could get his hands on. Then, maybe college by then—oh, darn, where was it, not Maidstone but—anyway, Cable had a summer job in the clubhouse helping out at the bar, ferrying home old folks too blotto to drive. Personable guy, good talker—well, you know. He’d get the old fellows talking about their war stories or whatever. Light their cigarettes, laugh at their jokes. Except sometimes he’d help the old fellows up to the door and the next day their wallets would be missing.”