Earlier I had realized that we’d been so enthralled by the show that we hadn’t gone to lunch. Now I looked at my watch and said, “We didn’t eat. It’s two o’clock. I’m starving, I guess. That’s what it is. I’m way hungry. Let’s go find a street vendor. I need a hot dog.”
“What does the painting mean to you?” Malcolm asked as I turned away from The Goldfinch.
“I don’t know yet. I’ll have to see it again. Figure it out when I’m not starving like this. Aren’t you guys starving?”
Room after room of white marble floors, down wide white marble steps, across more glossy floors … I didn’t think we’d come this far, and I wondered if Amalia truly remembered the way out or whether we were in a maze, going around and around in some episode of The Twilight Zone. But then we came to the cashier windows, where we’d bought our tickets, and the doors were beyond.
I was sweating before we left the air-conditioned Pinakotheke, and though the day was warm, it wasn’t blazing hot enough to explain the perspiration on my face.
As we walked in search of food vendors with street carts, Amalia said, “Are you sure it’s just hunger, Jonah? I’m not sure it is.”
“No, it is. It really is. I just need to eat.”
Malcolm said, “Our tickets are date-stamped. We can go back in after we’ve grabbed some lunch.”
I’d had enough art for the day, but I didn’t say as much.
We found a hot-dog vendor and got two each, and Pepsi. By then we were close to the courthouse, beside which lay a pocket park. We sat side by side on a bench in the park and ate lunch. Hoping for dropped crumbs, pigeons strutted back and forth, eyeing us with less intensity than the goldfinch had studied me.
My shakes and sweats went away, as if hunger really had been the only cause of them, and that made Amalia happy.
I pretended to be fascinated by the courthouse and asked if it was like those on TV. She said it was huge and worth seeing for its splendid architecture. By the time we explored all the public spaces, we had to run to catch the 3:20 bus at the corner of National Avenue and 52nd Street.
All the way home, I worried and wondered when the axe would fall, by which I didn’t mean Malcolm’s saxophone.
65
Mrs. Nozawa called Mr. Yabu Tamazaki at the Daily News morgue, but he had gone for the day. She didn’t leave a message, because he had suggested that his investigation was sensitive. He’d said that when she called, if she got someone other than him, she should leave no message. She called him at his apartment, letting it ring and ring, but he didn’t pick up and evidently had no answering machine there.
Just then she received a call about a boiler failure at the apartment house that she and her husband owned, and when she phoned Mr. Nozawa at the car wash, she discovered he was already dealing with a major problem involving the drain in Bay 2. The boiler would have to be her baby.
Mr. Nozawa got home at 9:10, bringing with him a medium-size pepperoni-and-cheese and a family-size salad pack from a pizza joint. When Mrs. Nozawa arrived twenty minutes later, she first gave the most patient dog his late dinner and took him into the backyard to toilet. By the time she had wiped Toshiro Mifune’s paws with a wet cloth before letting him back in the house, she felt it had gotten too late to ring Mr. Tamazaki. Besides, she desperately wanted some pizza—and good red wine.
As they ate at the kitchen table, they told each other about their day. Mr. Nozawa agreed with his wife when she said that the following evening she would telephone their younger daughter at Northwestern, their older daughter at Yale, and their son at UCLA to insist that if they had professors who wore rumpled khakis with patch-pocket jackets and T-shirts emblazoned with inscrutable groups of letters, they should drop those classes and find alternatives.
66
Since we had moved in with Grandpa Teddy, I had kept the Lucite heart, with its captive feather, in the La Florentine box instead of carrying it everywhere in a pants pocket. I suppose for a while I had felt safer in my grandfather’s house than in the apartment. I’d had the same experience before: When all threats seemed to recede at least somewhat, I tended to regard the pendant as merely a curiosity, jewelry that a boy would never wear and that cluttered my pocket, but when I felt myself in great jeopardy, the pendant appeared magical once more, offering ultimate protection against the many kinds of darkness that can overcome us in this world.
That Thursday night, with the experience of the Pinakotheke so fresh in mind, and considering all that had happened since the anti-war demonstration and bombings at City College on Monday, including the visit by Miss Pearl and her warning to me on Wednesday, I thought of Albert Solomon Gluck, the taxi driver and would-be comedian, and of the pendant that he had given to my mother, that she had given to me. I got the La Florentine box from my nightstand, opened it, and fished the pendant from among the other items.
As I dangled it by the silver chain, I thought my eyes deceived me. The tiny white feather had turned golden brown, the very shade of the bird in the painting that had so powerfully affected me. Holding the Lucite heart in the palm of my hand, I thrust it under the shade of the bedside lamp, but the greater light revealed a feather of an even brighter gold than it had first appeared. Indeed, when I took it out of the direct light and held it before my eyes, it retained the more intense color that it had acquired under the lamp, and it even seemed to glow.
Wondering, I put the chain around my neck, whether it might be girl’s jewelry or not. The heart hung low on my chest, heavy but not uncomfortable. I tucked it under my pajama top, half expecting a faint golden light to penetrate the fabric, though none did.
I didn’t know what to make of this development, but I knew that it must be of enormous significance.
I never gave more than a passing thought to the possibility that the glue cementing the two halves of Lucite into a single heart had darkened with age. For one thing, if that had been the case, not only the feather but the entire plane between the two half hearts would have yellowed; but it had not. Furthermore, the vanes of the feather, fanning out from both sides of the shaft, were as soft-looking as before, as though they had not ever been glued there but existed in a shallow void at the center of the heart, where the glue hadn’t been applied.
The taxi driver’s gift had seemed magical on the day that I received it, also on certain occasions since, including in the moment when I first saw that the white feather had been transformed to gold. Now, however, but two minutes later, listening to my heart beating under the still and clearer heart on the chain, I sensed that the word magical, although it evoked myriad thoughts of things wondrous and mysterious, might be inadequate or even
wrong. I felt that this pendant must be something more than magical, though what else it might be, I couldn’t say. I was quick for a boy of ten, agile of mind, but some things eluded me. The jewelry, Miss Pearl, so much that had happened during the past two years, the experience of The Goldfinch that very day, and even to a lesser extent Vermeer’s Girl with the Red Hat and Jacob van Ruisdael’s Wheatfields, all of it had something akin to magic in it, but something immeasurably deeper and stranger than magic: even the mundane moments like breakfast with Mom at The Royal and a game of cards with her at the kitchen table, the immense room of busy tailors at Metropolitan Suits, Mr. Yoshioka and the security chain that in memory shone like gold instead of brass, the ivory carving of the court lady in her nineteen-layer ceremonial kimono, Grandpa Teddy with the pack of Juicy Fruit gum as the crows danced on the sidewalk.…
Although I felt safer with the pendant around my neck, though I knew in my bones that it wasn’t just useless juju, I didn’t feel entirely secure. I couldn’t help but think that the transformation of the feather from white to gold signified the approach of a moment, an event, a crisis toward which I had been moving since the day I’d been given eight names—not including Kirk—that I could never live up to even if I grew as old as Methuselah.
Although the warm room wanted ventilation on that July evening, though the pale face I’d thought I’d seen at the window the previous night had most likely been imaginary, I got out of bed and pulled shut the lower sash. Locked it. Drew shut the draperies.
67