“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.
T EMPORARY 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 park
ing 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. Lo
ved 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 s
ome 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