Fin & Lady: A Novel Read online

  “Really?” Lady said. She sounded surprised. She put her hand out and turned his head to face her. She looked so serious. “Thank you for saying that, Fin.” She turned back to the road as the traffic inched forward. “I mean, I always hope you’re happy. But how can anyone be sure of how anyone else feels?”

  Fin never quite remembered what else she said. He hardly heard her. The sun was lower and the sky was streaked with lavender and orange. He remembered that. The blood rang in his ears. He remembered that. The fluff from the dog stuck to his lips as he leaned down to bury his face in Gus’s heavy coat. He remembered all of that. He heard Lady say, “I vowed I would be married by twenty-five, and I am a girl of my word,” and he sank lower in the seat. Which one would it be? It almost didn’t matter at this point. It sounded as if she were paying a bill.

  But then he heard her say, “Well, vows are made to be broken, I always say. So I have decided to give myself an extension.”

  Fin did not know the word “exultant” at that time. But if he had, he told me, that’s how he would have felt. “An extension!”

  “An extension. Of one year. Which is pushing it. But if you don’t push it, what’s the point, right?”

  The Three Musketeers

  Did you know Evelyn Waugh’s first wife was also named Evelyn? Did you know the proofs of Brideshead Revisited were air-dropped to Evelyn Waugh in a cave in Yugoslavia during World War II? Did you know Evelyn Waugh parted his hair on the left? Fin did. He knew a lot of things from reading the obituary page. Yugoslavia, for example. He had not really known of Yugoslavia’s existence, much less that it was a place a British soldier might be stationed in World War II.

  “But Yugoslavia does not actually exist,” Biffi told him.

  “But…”

  “The Balkans,” Biffi said. He shook his head sadly.

  Another year had passed, and Lady, without too much fanfare, had given herself another extension on her deadline for matrimony. The three suitors now existed as an entity not unlike the Balkans, together, brooding, and suspicious. Biffi, Jack & Tyler, a trio of singers waiting to defect.

  Biffi was both resigned and patient, as if he were back in Hungary waiting for the Russians to chase out the Germans, then waiting for someone, anyone, to please chase out the Russians. To Fin, he sometimes seemed to be besieging a walled city, the walled city of Lady, waiting and waiting until it ran out of food and water.

  Jack was neither resigned nor patient. He was hearty and gung-ho. “He thinks I’m exotic,” Lady said. “And I’m a way to shock his parents.” He showed Lady off, which she had enjoyed at first. He liked to be with her in public, to be with her in the daytime when people could see her slender beauty in the sunlight. He played golf with her and tennis and took her riding and sailing and skiing.

  “You make him sound like a gym class,” Fin said. But he understood that Jack was a relief for Lady, a physical being who asked nothing more than to be physically near her.

  And then there was Tyler. His attentions seemed almost like revenge, and maybe it was as simple as that, maybe that turned Lady on, his almost open hostility, the danger of Tyler, the threat of his somehow outsmarting Lady, after all these years.

  “He wants to own her,” Fin said.

  “That’s what all men want,” Phoebe said.

  “But what does Lady want?” he asked.

  Phoebe chewed on a fingernail for a bit, then said, “Probably an orgasm.”

  * * *

  Lady became obsessed with Leonard Bernstein that year. She met him at a party in September, and went to hear the New York Philharmonic as often as possible. Mahler, Schönberg, Copland. The Verdi Requiem. Jacqueline du Pré. She tried to take Fin to the Young People’s Concerts on Sundays, but to his intense regret in later years, he refused, so Lady simply went to them alone. She knew everything about The Magic Flute.

  Lady’s Bernstein Period, not surprisingly, overlapped with her politics, and on May 29, 1966, Fin, who refused to go to the Young People’s Concerts, happily joined Lady at her first sit-in. It was in the lobby of Dow Chemical’s sales office at Rockefeller Center. Fin wore a new corduroy jacket. One of the organizers, walking in an overly important way beside Lady, also wore a corduroy jacket. He wasn’t a boyfriend, yet. Lady had met him at a teach-in where everyone sat on the floor in a circle.

  “Blech,” said Fin. “Sounds like my school.”

  Joel. He looked young, and his light brown hair stood out like an afro. Fin asked him his age. He was twenty-two, young enough to be a student, but he was actually a dropout, a political activist, he said. And a journalist. “Alternative stuff,” he said vaguely.

  “For The Village Voice?”

  Joel shrugged a noncommital shrug.

  “Did you know Edward R. Murrow died last year?” Fin asked.

  “No.”

  “Did you know he changed his name to Edward from Egbert in his sophomore year of college?”

  “Are you a Fed or something?” Joel asked.

  The sit-in was not very big. Fin had expected a huge crowd, but he counted twenty, twenty-one, including himself. There was a television camera, however, and reporters. He had counted a reporter as a demonstrator before he noticed the microphone. So, back to twenty.

  The reporter, from a local news station, WPIX, put his microphone in front of Fin’s face and asked, “What brings you here, son?” The camera was on a tripod operated by a large man behind it.

  “I read about napalm,” Fin said. The reporter’s eyes lit up. He hadn’t been expecting this. “It’s liquid fire. It sticks to you.”

  Lady and Joel walked into the lobby and sat down on the shining marble floor. Lady patted the floor next to her, as if it were the sofa, and called, “Come on, Fin.”

  “What’s your name, son?” the reporter asked.

  “Fin Hadley.”

  The police came, huge policemen, and offered to let everyone leave. A few people did get up, but not Joel, not Lady, and not Fin.

  “Just go limp,” Lady said to Fin. “We’re nonviolent,” she said to the policeman who began to drag her away. “This is civil disobedience! Napalm kills!”

  Fin waited to be dragged off himself, to let himself go limp as a policeman grabbed his arms and pulled him across the shiny floor. For a minute he thought it wouldn’t happen, that he was too young, that he would be ignored.

  “Napalm kills!” he yelled.

  An annoyed-looking policeman dutifully came and dragged him to the door. There he realized that the policeman would also have to drag him down the steps and over the rough sidewalk. He turned his head, looking for Lady. He did not want to be dragged down the marble steps, bump, bump, bump, like Winnie-the-Pooh. He twisted around now, wildly. Where was Lady? Or even Joel?

  “I’m with my sister,” he called up to the policeman who held his arms.

  “I don’t care if you’re with the Virgin Mary,” the policeman said, and Fin realized that the look on his face was not boredom at all but rage, controlled, simmering rage.

  Inside the police station Fin still did not see Lady. He was being separated from the others, the policeman behind the desk said, because of his age. Was it that policeman who led him to a cell that was clammy and cold? And locked the cell? Or was it another? Was it the one who asked him the names of his parents? He didn’t know which policeman was which. He couldn’t tell. They were all big and all gruff. He tried to explain, to tell them he couldn’t call his mother or his father, that the only family he had was also dragged out of the Dow Chemical Building lobby. But that’s when he began to cry.

  “Goddamn Reds,” the policeman said, and left him alone.

  It was Biffi who came to bail out Lady and Fin.

  “I have seen you on the television,” Biffi said to Fin when they rode home in a cab. Biffi sat between Fin and Lady. “You were very brave. She?” he added, nodding sideways at Lady. “A fool.”

  “Fools rush in where angels fear to tread,” Lady said, not in the least o
ffended. “What an adventure!”

  “Dilettante,” Biffi muttered. “Crazy American. What if I was not there for extrication?”

  “Have you ever been in jail?” Lady asked. Her eyes were glowing.

  “We shall not talk of jail,” Biffi said. “You are hungry?” he asked Fin.

  “We stood up to Dow Chemical, to the police!” Lady said. “Who can think of food at a time like this?”

  “A boy,” said Biffi. He put his arm around Fin. “A boy from jail.”

  Lady leaned against Biffi from the other side. “You’re sweet,” she said. “In your obnoxious way.”

  “I’m not hungry, Biffi,” Fin said. He felt his eyes closing. Stay awake. Keep your eyes open. If you let yourself fall asleep, all this will vanish. There will be no Lady resting her head on Biffi’s shoulder. There will be no Biffi’s shoulder for her to lean on. There will be no Biffi and Lady, quiet, together, like a couple, like a husband and wife. There will be no Fin. Like their child.

  “I brought you a chocolate bar,” Biffi said.

  “Oh goody!” said Lady. “Three Musketeers.”

  Fin tore open the wrapper, suddenly very hungry. “I read the book,” he said to Biffi.

  “Better for your teeth,” Lady said, which he knew meant she wanted a bite, the first bite.

  “Lipstick?” he said.

  “Nope. All worn off in the pokey.”

  “All for one and one for all, then.” And he handed over the candy bar.

  “Pokey,” Biffi muttered, then spat out a barrage of enraged words that must have been Hungarian. They were, at any rate, not English.

  Lady came back at him in Italian.

  More Hungarian.

  More Italian.

  Lady did not understand Hungarian. Biffi did not understand Italian. Fin understood only that the spell was broken. They weren’t the three musketeers. They weren’t a family. They were a tower of Babel.

  “I hate you both,” he said when the taxi pulled up to the house. But they didn’t even hear him.

  Mirna called that night. Fin answered the phone in the kitchen while Biffi and Lady argued in the living room.

  “You’re a television star!” Mirna said.

  “You saw?”

  “Everyone saw!” She sounded happier than Fin had ever heard her. “Mazel tov, Fin! Today you have an FBI file! Today you are a man!”

  “Hey!” Fin said, banging into the living room. “Mirna says I have an FBI file. Isn’t that cool?”

  Biffi looked sharply at Lady.

  “Okay, okay,” she said. “Okay, you’re right, Biffi, okay?”

  “No more arrests,” Biffi said to Fin.

  “But napalm is wrong. That’s suppression of free speech,” Fin said, though he was so relieved by this news that he could hardly stand up: no more sit-ins, no more policemen, no more jail.

  “I am protecting you, the whole you, not just your talking,” said Biffi.

  “You’re not my father,” Fin said.

  He ran up to his room. He waited. He slammed a foot against the wall, then again, looking with satisfaction at the black scuff marks on the white paint.

  Still no one came.

  No one came to punish him, to ground him for the week, to take away his TV, to whack him on the seat of the pants, to wash out his mouth with soap, to holler helplessly, to stamp feet or order him to apologize. To do something. Anything. No one came up to his room. Why would they? A father would have. A mother would have. But he had neither.

  He kicked the wall again, the noise blunted by the crepe souls of his desert boots.

  * * *

  “What is wrong with you?” Lady asked the next morning. She had actually gotten up in time for breakfast. Or perhaps she had not slept. Her face was drawn and gray. “You insulted Biffi,” she said.

  “So do you. You insult everyone.”

  “Not when I need them.”

  “Fine teaching for the boy, Miss Lady,” said Mabel, pushing a plate of scrambled eggs at Fin. “You pay no attention to what Miss Lady says, Fin. Not ever.”

  Lady put her face in her hands. “I’m sorry, Fin. Mabel’s right. Mabel’s always right. I’m a terrible guardian. And a terrible person. Biffi’s right. Everyone’s right. I’m wrong.”

  This was where Fin was supposed to say, No, you’re not. You’re a wonderful guardian. For an instant, he thought of agreeing with her. You’re selfish and irresponsible and immature, he would say. Not fit to be anybody’s guardian. Not fit to be anybody’s guardian but mine, he added quickly, superstitiously.

  “No, you’re not, Lady,” he said. “You’re the best guardian.”

  Now she would look up at him and smile, tentatively.

  She looked up from her hands. She smiled. Tentatively.

  “You’re nuts,” he said. He smiled back.

  “You don’t hate me for getting you thrown in jail?”

  “Nope.”

  “You don’t hate Biffi for not wanting me to get you thrown in jail anymore?”

  “Nope.”

  “No more sit-ins, though.”

  “I know. No more.” No more policemen? No jail? Yeah, he could promise her that.

  “For the time being,” she added, to comfort him.

  “Ever.”

  “I’m glad there’s one adult in this kitchen,” Mabel said. “Besides me.”

  That afternoon, after school, Fin called Biffi at his gallery.

  “I’m sorry for what I said,” Fin said.

  “You said nothing but what was truth.”

  That’s what I’m sorry about, Fin thought, but he said, “Don’t be mad at Lady.”

  “No one can remain mad at Lady, can they?”

  “Apparently not,” Fin said, though he wished that sometimes, somehow, he could.

  * * *

  The suitors had become part of life. Like school. Like baseball. Like the movies that ran over and over on Million Dollar Movie. Like the chance of snow. That was certainly the way Lady seemed to feel. Sometimes she would make a big deal about how many places she still had to visit before she was “hooked up to the plow,” that she still had to go to Japan and to India and to Africa, that she had to get away. She did rush around, that was true. Looking back, Fin sometimes said fondly that was all she did, that rushing was the substance of her activity rather than what happened in between, that she never really went anywhere.

  So the trip with Biffi that summer was a big deal. A big deal signifying nothing, perhaps, but a big deal nevertheless. They went to a cottage in Wellfleet for two weeks. Lady took Fin with them, too. And Gus. Biffi, in retaliation, Fin thought, took his mother. Mrs. Deutsch had a big white paper bag on her lap in the car, where she sat in the tiny backseat with Fin and Gus. Grease showed through the bag in spots. Mrs. Deutsch kept opening the bag and looking in. Checking. Who could get into her paper bag to get whatever was in it out? No one. Yet she shot suspicious sideways glances, not just at Fin, but at the placid dog as well. Gus did once poke at the bag with his sharp nose, and Mrs. Deutsch let out a shrill cry. Sometimes, when she looked into the bag, she reached a hand in and rummaged around, a noisy operation, the paper bag rustling and crinkling, and what must have been other, smaller bags inside the big white bag also rustling and crinkling. When the bag was open and her hand had disappeared inside it, the smell of butter and sugar wafted from within, making Fin and Gus sniff the sweet air and stare at Mrs. Deutsch and her paper bag. She would furtively tear off a piece of whatever it was that smelled so deliciously of butter and sugar in the bag and jab it into her small, frowning mouth, lick the white powdered sugar from her fingers, close up the bag again, and clutch it, as if Fin or Gus or the man on the moon were trying to pry it out of her hands.

  “What’s in there, anyway?” Fin finally asked.

  “Medicinal.”

  When they stopped at Howard Johnson’s, she brought the bag into the restaurant with her. She held it on her lap while she ate fried clams.

  “Di
d you make them or something?” Fin asked when they were back in the car and Mrs. Deutsch was once more rummaging in the bag. “The cookies?”

  “They are digestives,” she said. “For my digestion.”

  When they arrived at their cottage on a sand dune overlooking the beach, Fin stood looking out at the ocean. It was vast and gray, and the waves that crashed so insistently on the beach came from the other side of the world. He remembered standing on the deck of the Cristoforo Columbo, the blank foaming ocean everywhere, in every direction. He remembered his mother’s hand, cool and smooth, resting on his on the railing. He remembered his father, one hand on Fin’s head. “The English call whitecaps white horses,” his father said. “They look like wild horses to me,” his mother said. Wild horses, Fin had thought. Like Lady.

  Mrs. Deutsch came up beside him and stood with him, watching the ocean from the tall, windy dune.

  “Hmmph,” she said. “In Hungary, there we had beaches.”

  The rented cottage had two bicycles, and Fin and Lady rode into town to buy fish to cook for dinner.

  “I taught Lady to ride,” Fin said to Mrs. Deutsch.

  “In Hungary I ride with no hands holding,” Mrs. Deutsch said. She grabbed Fin’s bike from him, deposited her paper bag in the basket, and demonstrated. In her large red-skirted bathing suit she looked like an aging circus performer.

  Each morning Mrs. Deutsch emerged from her room in the red bathing suit carrying her white paper bag. She spent the day on a beach chair reading Hungarian novels. When she wanted to take a “dip,” she solemnly handed the bag to Fin to guard. When she returned from the water, she wrapped herself in a towel, said, “Thank God, thank God,” as she poked in the paper bag, then fell asleep, the bag tightly grasped by both hands.

  On the third day, Fin could stand it no longer. He had to know. What was in the bag? What cookies, what cakes, what pastries or doughnuts or Danish or petits fours could be so delicious, so precious?

  He waited until Mrs. Deutsch was asleep, then asked Biffi, “What’s with the bag? What does she have in there? Hash brownies?”

  Biffi looked fondly at his sleeping mother. “My mother keeps her jewelry in the bag with the cookies,” Biffi said. “The cookies are, I think, quite stale.”