Suddenly I knew what the painting meant to me, and I thought I knew what it had meant to the painter. Many who believe in God also believe that He is not merely the creator of all nature but is in all of nature, that He is everywhere with us, in some way beyond our easy comprehension, that He is acutely aware and caring. In the right eye of the goldfinch, I saw the bird gazing at his keeper, all of nature gazing, too, but also through that moist and feeling eye, the Maker of the keeper watched. Watched and saw and loved the keeper for his potential, but mourned his cruelty. Love and sorrow informed that eye, and it regarded me as surely as it regarded the keeper of the bird, saw me and knew the good and bad of me, knew my courage but also my cowardice, knew the lies I had told. I might not have been able to put all this into words then, as a confused boy of ten, but I understood: Like the bird, I was chained, and the links in the chain were my lies, so that I was both bird and keeper, chained and endangered by my own actions.
Amalia realized that I was trembling violently. “Jonah, what’s wrong?”
“Nothing. I don’t know. Nothing. I’m okay.”
“You’re shaking like a leaf.”
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