The Goldfinch

Chapter 4 | Part 11

"IT'S DIFFICULT TO TALK to her on the phone, alas," said Hobie. "I wasn't anticipating that. She doesn't do well at all."
"Doesn't do well?" I said. Scarcely a week had passed, and though I'd had no thought of returning to see Hobie somehow I was down there again: sitting at his kitchen table and eating my second dish of what had, upon first glance, appeared to be a black lump of flowerpot mud but was actually some delicious mess of ginger and figs, with whipped cream and tiny, bitter slivers of orange peel on top.
Hobie rubbed his eye. He'd been repairing a chair in the basement when I'd arrived. "It's all very frustrating," he said. His hair was tied back from his face; his glasses were around his neck on a chain. Under his black work smock, which he'd removed and hung on a peg, he was wearing old corduroys stained with mineral spirit and beeswax, and a thin-washed cotton shirt with the sleeves rolled above the elbow. "Margaret said she cried for three hours after she got off the telephone with me on Sunday night."
"Why can't she just come back?"

"Honestly, I wish I knew how to make things better," said Hobie. Capable-looking and morose, his knobbly white hand flat on the table, there was something in the set of his shoulder that suggested a good-natured draft horse, or maybe a workman in the pub at the end of a long day. "I'd thought I might fly down and see about her, but Margaret says no. That she won't settle in properly if I'm hovering about."
"I think you should go anyway."
Hobie raised his eyebrows. "Margaret's hired a therapist—someone famous, apparently, who uses horses to work with injured children. And yes, Pippa loves animals, but even if she was perfectly well she wouldn't want to be outdoors and riding horses the whole time. She's spent most of her life in music lessons and practice halls. Margaret's full of enthusiasm about the music program at her church but an amateur children's choir can hardly hold much interest for her."
I pushed the glass dish—scraped clean—aside. "Why did Pippa not know her before?" I said timidly, and then, when he didn't answer: "Is it about money?"
"Not so much. Although—yes. You're right. Money always has something to do with it. You see," he said, leaning forward with his big, expressive hands on the table, "Welty's father had three children. Welty, Margaret, and Pippa's mother, Juliet. All with different mothers."
"Oh."
"Welty—the eldest. And I mean—eldest son, you'd think, wouldn't you? But he contracted a tuberculosis of the spine when he was about six, when his parents were up in Aswan—the nanny didn't recognize how serious it was, he was taken to the hospital too late—he was a very bright boy, so I understand, personable too, but old Mr. Blackwell wasn't a man tolerant of weakness or infirmity. Sent him to America to live with relatives and barely gave him another thought."
"That's awful," I said, shocked at the unfairness of this.
"Yes. I mean—you'll get quite a different picture from Margaret, of course—but he was a hard man, Welty's father. At any rate, after the Blackwells were expelled from Cairo—expelled isn't the best term, perhaps. When Nasser came in, all the foreigners had to leave Egypt— Welty's father was in the oil business, luckily for him he had money and

property elsewhere. Foreigners weren't allowed to take money or anything of much value out of the country.
"At any rate." He reached for another cigarette. "I've gone off track a little. The point is that Welty scarcely knew Margaret, who was a good twelve years younger. Margaret's mother was Texan, an heiress, with plenty of money of her own. That was the last and longest of old Mr. Blackwell's marriages—the great love affair, to hear Margaret tell it. Prominent couple in Houston—lots of drinking and chartered airplanes, African safaris— Welty's father loved Africa, even after he had to leave Cairo, he could never stay away.
"At any rate—" The match flared up, and he coughed as he exhaled a cloud of smoke. "Margaret was their father's princess, apple of his eye, all that. But still and all, throughout the marriage, he carried on with coat check girls, waitresses, the daughters of friends—and at some point, when he was in his sixties, he fathered a baby with a girl who cut his hair. And that baby was Pippa's mother."
I said nothing. In second grade there had been a huge fuss (documented, daily, in the gossip pages of the New York Post) when the father of one of my classmates had a baby with a woman not Eli's mother, which had meant that a lot of the mothers took sides and stopped speaking to each other out in front of school while they were waiting to pick us up in the afternoons.
"Margaret was in college, at Vassar," said Hobie fitfully. Though he was speaking to me as if I were a grownup (which I liked), he didn't seem particularly comfortable with the subject. "I think she didn't speak to her father for a couple of years. Old Mr. Blackwell tried to pay the hairdresser off but his cheapness got the better of him, his cheapness where his dependents were concerned, anyway. And so you see Margaret—Margaret and Pippa's mother Juliet never even met, except in the courtroom, when Juliet was practically still a babe in arms. Welty's father had grown to hate the hairdresser so much that he'd made it plain in the will that neither she nor Juliet was to get a cent, apart from whatever mingy child support was required by law. But Welty—" Hobie stubbed out his cigarette—"Old Mr. Blackwell had some second thoughts where Welty was concerned, and did the right thing by him in the will. And throughout all this legal fracas, which went on for years, Welty grew to be terribly disturbed by how the

baby was shunted off and neglected. Juliet's mother didn't want her; none of the mother's relatives wanted her; old Mr. Blackwell had certainly never wanted her, and Margaret and her mother, frankly, would have been happy enough to see her on the street. And, in the meantime, there was the hairdresser, leaving Juliet alone in the apartment when she went to work... bad situation all around.
"Welty had no obligation to put his foot in but he was an affectionate man, without family, and he liked children. He invited Juliet here for a holiday when she was six years old, or 'JuleeAnn' as she was then—"
"Here? In this house?"
"Yes, here. And when the summer was over and it was time to send her back and she was crying about having to leave and the mother wasn't answering her telephone, he cancelled the plane tickets and phoned around to see about enrolling her in first grade. It was never an official arrangement —he was afraid to rock the boat, as they say—but most people assumed she was his child without inquiring too deeply. He was in his mid-thirties, plenty old enough to be her father. Which, in all the essential respects, he was.
"But, no matter," he said, looking up, in an altered tone. "You said you wanted to look around the workshop. Would you like to go down?"
"Please," I said. "That would be great." When I'd found him down there working on his up-ended chair, he'd stood and stretched and said he was ready for a break but I hadn't wanted to come upstairs at all, the workshop was so rich and magical: a treasure cave, bigger on the inside than it looked on the outside, with the light filtering down from the high windows, fretwork and filigree, mysterious tools I didn't know the names of, and the sharp, intriguing smells of varnish and beeswax. Even the chair he'd been working on—which had goat's legs in front, with cloven hooves —had seemed less like a piece of furniture than a creature under enchantment, like it might up-end itself and hop down from his work bench and trot away down the street.
Hobie reached for his smock and put it back on. For all his gentleness, his quiet manner, he was built like a man who moved refrigerators or loaded trucks for a living.
"So," he said, leading me downstairs. "The shop-behind-the-shop." "Sorry?"

He laughed. "The arrière-boutique. What the customers see is a stage set—the face that's displayed to the public—but down here is where the important work happens."
"Right," I said, looking down at the labyrinth at the foot of the stairs, blond wood like honey, dark wood like poured molasses, gleams of brass and gilt and silver in the weak light. As with the Noah's Ark, each species of furniture was ranked with its own kind: chairs with chairs, settees with settees; clocks with clocks, desks and cabinets and highboys standing in stiff ranks opposite. Dining tables, in the middle, formed narrow, mazelike paths to be edged around. At the back of the room a wall of tarnished old mirrors, hung frame to frame, glowed with the silvered light of old ballrooms and candlelit salons.
Hobie looked back at me. He could see how pleased I was. "You like old things?"
I nodded—it was true, I did like old things, though it was something I'd never realized about myself before.
"It must be interesting for you at the Barbours', then. I expect that some of their Queen Anne and Chippendale is as good as anything you'll see in a museum."
"Yes," I said, hesitantly. "But here it's different. Nicer," I added, in case he didn't understand.
"How so?"
"I mean—" I squeezed my eyes shut, trying to collect my thoughts —"down here, it's great, so many chairs with so many other chairs... you see the different personalities, you know? I mean, that one's kind of—" I didn't know the word—"well, silly almost, but in a good way—a comfortable way. And that one's more nervous sort of, with those long spindly legs—"
"You have a good eye for furniture."
"Well—" compliments threw me, I was never sure how to respond except to act like I hadn't heard—"when they're lined up together you see how they're made. At the Barbours'—" I wasn't sure how to explain it—"I don't know, it's more like those scenes with the taxidermy animals at the Natural History Museum."
When he laughed, his air of gloom and anxiety evaporated; you could feel his good-nature, it radiated off him.

"No, I mean it," I said, determined to plow on and make my point. "The way she has it set up, a table on its own with a light on it, and all the stuff arranged so you're not supposed to touch it—it's like those dioramas they place around the yak or whatever, to show its habitat. It's nice, but I mean—" I gestured at the chair backs lined against the wall. "That one's a harp, that one's like a spoon, that one—" I imitated the sweep with my hand.
"Shield back. Although, I'll tell you, the nicest detail on that one is the tasselled splats. You may not realize it," he said, before I could ask what a splat was, "but it's an education in itself seeing that furniture of hers every day—seeing it in different lights, able to run your hand along it when you like." He fogged his glasses with his breath, wiped them with a corner of his apron. "Do you need to head back uptown?"
"Not really," I said, though it was getting late.
"Come along then," he said. "Let's put you to work. I could use a hand with this little chair down here."
"The goat foot?"
"Yes, the goat's foot. There's another apron on the peg—I know, it's too big, but I just coated this thing with linseed oil and I don't want you to spoil your clothes."