Fin & Lady: A Novel Read online

  “If you say so,” his father said.

  Fin was never bored on those eight days aboard ship. The waves rose up like snow-topped mountains, so close he could almost have touched them, if he’d been a giant. He was reading a Tintin comic book, the only hardcover comic book he had ever seen. At least, not exactly reading it, but looking at it, frame after frame of smooth color and comic adventure. In a rocket ship, a tipsy, weightless Capitano Haddock chases his whiskey. Milu the dog is in a spacesuit. Tintin, too. On the moon! Eleven years later, when men in spacesuits did land on the moon, Fin thought of Tintin climbing down the rungs of the ladder, stepping off the red-and-white-checkered rocket ship, and he thought of Lady. The comic was all in Italian. Lady had given it to him, and sometimes she sat him on her lap and translated. He carried it with him everywhere. When he sat beside the lifeboat where no one could see him, he would open the book, look at the pictures, and listen to passing adults exclaim at the beauty of the sea or the clouds, the prelude to gossip about the other passengers: those two were snobs, that one a lush, this family rather vulgar, that one Israelites without a doubt; now that gentleman, on the other hand, and his lovely wife were charming, they must be quite wealthy, mustn’t they, what piercing eyes, so sad about the brother, if it was even true, which was doubtful, although where there was smoke …

  The engines were loud and exciting. The wind rattled the tarpaulins, the lines, the magazines and books the travelers were reading. And always, trailing the Cristoforo Colombo was their own pale, foaming wake.

  Fin would rush from one end of the boat to the other, from one deck to another, from the first-class dining room to the swimming pool, always empty of swimmers, its turquoise water sloshing along to its own rhythm, different from the rhythm of the waves in the sea below. Up and down he went, fore and aft, inside and out, sliding his hands along varnished rails and thickly painted white metal studs, along silk wall panels and velvet chair backs. Outside, the air was fresh and cool and whipped by the wind; inside, it was stale and still and sweetened by careful flower arrangements. There were officers in uniform, waiters in uniform, maids in uniform. Sitting on the deck, he watched the legs of passengers promenading by, their shoes, their pant legs, their ankles above sneakers and white wool socks, their painted toenails in delicate sandals. Once, he dreamily dug his hands down between the cushions of a banquette in the lounge and discovered a small but engaging cache of girlie magazines.

  “Eight days,” his father was saying. “If we’d flown like everyone else, we could have been home in eight hours.”

  “I think it’s lovely taking a ship,” said Fin’s mother. She patted Lady’s hand.

  “I didn’t ask you to come, Daddy.”

  Fin’s mother sighed. “Your father doesn’t really understand fear of flying.”

  “He doesn’t understand anything else about me, so why should he understand that?”

  “Your father’s just a little old-fashioned…”

  “That’s it, goddamn it,” Hugo said. “A conspiracy of fools.” He stood up and stormed away.

  Lady snorted.

  The magazines had pictures of naked women.

  “Woo woo!” Fin said, flipping through them.

  “What have you got there, Fin?” his mother asked. Then, seeing the magazines, she gave a characteristic girlish giggle and said, “Oh good golly!”

  “Dirty magazines?” Lady let out a laugh, too, the wonderful, coveted horsey laugh.

  Fin stuffed the magazines back between the cushions. When he went to retrieve them later, they were gone.

  * * *

  Lady’s dresses were crisp and pale during the day, dark and breathy at night, always cinched in tightly around the middle.

  “Look at you, Scarlett O’Hara!” Lydia said, wrapping her hands around Lady’s tiny waist.

  “Scarlett O’Hara was a tramp, too,” Hugo said.

  “You can try it on later, if you like,” Lady said to Fin’s mother.

  “Over my dead body,” said Hugo.

  Fin suddenly pictured his father’s dead body, cold, waxen, laid out on a slab of marble like Frankenstein’s monster, Lady standing over it, like Dr. Frankenstein. And beside her? There was Fin.

  He shivered, pressed himself against his father, reached for his hand.

  “Over my dead body,” Hugo Hadley repeated, looking very much alive and rather smug because of it.

  “That will be the day,” Lady said. And she turned back to her dinner.

  “Hugo, please take it easy on the poor girl. After all…”

  But Lady, again, laughed.

  Lady laughed at Hugo Hadley. Nobody laughed at Hugo Hadley. Not his wife, certainly. Not his law partners. Not Fin. No one laughed at Hugo but Lady.

  Fin stared at her, open-mouthed, awed.

  “Close your mouth before you catch a fly,” Lady said.

  * * *

  When the Hadleys got home, Fin came down with chicken pox, and his memories of the trip were jumbled together with feverish dreams and the long, drowsy hours of daydreams that followed in his darkened bedroom. Lady figured in both. And so he wondered: Did she sing “Whatever Lola Wants” while standing on the piano in the lounge of the Cristoforo Colombo or did he dream it? Did she throw a glass of champagne at their father when he called her heartless, a disgrace to womanhood? Did she appear beside Fin’s bunk one morning and stroke his hair? Did she cry and hold his hand to her lips and kiss it? Or had he dreamed it all?

  “Isn’t it terrific?”

  Six years later, when their paths crossed again so fatefully, Fin asked Lady: Was it all a feverish dream? The singing? The dawn visit? The thrown drink? Even the kiss on the hand?

  He asked her in the car on the drive from Pomfret to Manhattan, the drive from his old life to his new life. He stared straight ahead, afraid of this quick, herky-jerky young woman who was all the family he had left: a herky-jerky family, chain-smoking, driving with one hand into the setting sun. Then Lady said, “Finny, remember our voyage?” and Fin blurted out, “Did you really throw a drink at Daddy? Did you sing on the piano? On the ship?”

  Lady glanced his way, laughed, looked back at the road, said, “Who the hell knows? I was schnockered, Finny. Across the Atlantic and back again, drunk as a boiled owl.”

  Fin said, “I had a fever.”

  But Lady was already on to the next topic. “Now, a trip I would like to take with you would be India. I would like to go to India someday. Find a guru. Perché no, eh, Finino?”

  “Okay.”

  “Okay? That’s all? India, Fin.”

  The drive was long, and once they pulled onto the thruway, conversation in the convertible was pretty much impossible. Wind blew Fin’s hair back sometimes, sometimes blew it in his face. He had fought with his grandparents about his hair. They remembered bowl cuts from the Depression.

  “We can afford a barber,” they said.

  “I don’t want a haircut,” Fin said. “From anyone.”

  “He looks like Prince Charles,” Fin’s mother said fondly, petting his wavy hair as if he were a spaniel.

  “Princess Charles is more like it,” his grandmother said.

  The dog sat on Fin’s lap during the first part of the long drive. Fin’s legs fell asleep, but he wouldn’t disturb Gus.

  “Quite a lap dog you’ve got there, Fin.”

  Ha ha. Very funny. He held the dog closer, rested his face on top of Gus’s silky head, closed his eyes into the wind.

  After they pulled into a rest stop to use the bathroom, the dog moved on his own to the backseat. Lady put the radio on, but the noise on the thruway was so loud they couldn’t hear anything, and she turned it off. A truck driver pulled up next to them and honked his horn, pointing at Lady’s legs. She gave him the finger. She smoked—nonstop. But near Bridgeport, she flicked her cigarette out the window and reached over and took Fin’s hand. The day was fading, and to their left a large power plant sparkled with lights.

  “Family is family
,” Lady said. Yelled, actually, above the wind and traffic noise.

  “Yup,” Fin yelled back. And mine is gone. Except for you. He held her hand tighter.

  He must have fallen asleep. The radio was blasting Peter and Gordon. It was dark, though not a true dark, not the kind of dark they had at home. But this was home, he reminded himself. New York was home now, not Pomfret. This was the dimly remembered city dark, the deep black of night washed in daubs of colored light—the streetlamps and banks of windows, the traffic lights, the blinking restaurant signs and glaring storefronts. A world without love—the song was being sung directly to him. Yet there was Lady, her face lit by streetlights. Would Lady love him? She was singing along. She swayed to the music.

  When she noticed Fin was awake, she smiled, a large warm smile. She put a hand out, took his hand again. But this time, she brought it to her lips and gently kissed it. Just like the dream on the ship. The schnockered dream that was real.

  Fin never forgot that moment. It was when he realized he loved Lady, whether Lady loved him or not he loved her, that he would always love her.

  Lady turned the car onto a quieter street and then an even quieter one. Fin remembered the elevator in his old building. The wood panels. The brass, shining. Lady pulled her car to the curb and stopped. The buildings were low, skinny—brick houses really, three stories, sometimes only two, steep steps leading up to the front door. No elevators here.

  “Greenwich Village,” Lady said.

  Fin looked up and down the street. Greenwich Village was where Bob Dylan lived.

  “That’s the house.” Lady pointed to one of the high, slender houses. “Our house.” The yard in front of their house was the size of a bathmat. A thick, beautiful wisteria grew up from the patch of dirt and clung to the building, purple flowers hanging dramatically over the stairs. Gus went right for the base of the vine and peed luxuriantly.

  Inside, Lady switched on a light. The room was long and narrow, two large windows facing the street. A wide doorway led to another room with two large windows at the back, facing what would turn out to be a garden.

  “Isn’t it terrific?” Lady said. “Isn’t it perfect?”

  With the exception of a chandelier in each, the rooms were completely empty.

  “Home sweet home,” Lady said.

  Fin looked around him uncertainly. Lady beamed. The place was stuffy and smelled of new paint.

  “Home sweet home,” he said. Furniture or no furniture, this was apparently where he was going to live. Our house. He liked the sound of that, at least. He walked back to the front door and opened it.

  “Wait!” Lady cried. “What are you doing?”

  “I’m going to get my suitcase.”

  “Oh.” She looked relieved. “Christ, I thought you were running away. Already.” She hustled Fin and the dog back into the car. “Come on, come on, let’s split.”

  “But what about our house?”

  Lady seemed not to have heard him. She had turned the radio back on and Louis Armstrong was singing “Hello, Dolly!”

  Fin realized how hungry he was. He’d eaten nothing today, nothing at all. He put his head back and stared up at the night sky. No stars in New York City. Just him and Lady. Who cared about being hungry, anyway?

  “That house will be our new life,” she said after a while. Her eyes were bright beneath the streetlights. She pushed her hair back from her face. She drove quickly through every green light and every red one. “You and me,” she said. “Our house.”

  The lights of the city flashed and blinked. She patted his head with her unfamiliar, lovely hand. You and me, she had said. He gazed at the city. It was all around them. It blocked the sky. It was the sky.

  “Our house,” he repeated. “You and me.”

  They parked in front of a tall apartment building, twelve stories—Fin counted. He and Lady lugged his suitcase and cardboard box into an elevator run by a sleepy man dressed like Captain Kangaroo. Gus stuck close to Fin’s side, looking up at his face every few seconds.

  “It’s all right, boy,” Fin said.

  “It is, you know,” Lady said.

  When they entered an apartment, huge and well appointed, it reminded Fin of his parents’ old apartment, what he could remember of it. The furniture was ornate. The paintings were large, dim landscapes in curling gold frames. The thick carpet practically bounced beneath his feet. He leaned against the wall, and the cool of the thick plaster, even the faint plaster smell, reminded him of when he was little.

  “We’ll crash here until our house is ready, okay?”

  “Okay.”

  Fin remembered toddling purposefully from room to room of his old apartment, dragging his small, dirty blanket behind him. He remembered pointing at things and naming them. (“Like God,” he would say later. “There is power in names. Things without names don’t really exist, do they?”) He remembered sitting on the floor while his mother had coffee with her friends, writing his name, FIN, in the carpet with his finger. He remembered a day when she bought daffodils and tulips at the florist, and he held her hand, and the soft pale blue wool of her spring coat brushed his cheek.

  “You must never go down to the end of the town without consulting me,” he told her.

  “Your first literary allusion,” she said.

  When asked to recite the words to his father, Fin stared up at the figure towering above him. A cigar obscured his father’s face, the end a smoldering orange disk. He watched the fiery glow wax and wane, in and out, with the breath of his father. He watched the smoke, a slow, silver cloud.

  “Cat got your tongue again?” his father said. He hung up his hat and coat, leaving behind, in the front hall, the familiar wafting smell of tobacco and cold.

  “Did I live near here?” Fin asked Lady now. “When I was little?” But it was a huge city with hundreds of buildings just like this one. “No, that’s stupid. Forget it.”

  “Pretty close, though. Anyway, don’t worry, we won’t be here long.” She handed Fin the ice tray. His fingers stuck to it, to the lever, as he pulled and loosened the ice cubes. Lady threw some in a glass, then poured a clear liquid from a bottle. There was a tiger on the label. For a second, Fin thought it said “Fin,” but it said “Gin.” “My special water,” Lady said, grinning. “God, what a long day.”

  Fin was really hungry now. He had never had to prompt an adult to feed him before. That was what they did, whether you wanted to eat or not. They made you come to the table, they made you stay at the table, they made you eat what was on your plate at the table.

  “I should probably feed Gus,” he said, hoping she would get the point.

  She smiled at the large dog lying at his feet. “Gus.” Gus thumped his tail silently on the carpet. “Good grief! Dinner! You probably want dinner, too.”

  “Don’t you?” Fin asked.

  “I don’t eat,” she said, as if she were a vampire or something. “Good grief. I’d be as big as a house.”

  She opened a can of sardines and a can of tuna fish, which Gus and Fin shared while she recited the nursery rhyme about Jack Sprat and stubbed cigarettes out in the empty cans. There were crackers, too. And an apple.

  “Thank you,” Fin said. Be polite. His mother would want him to be polite. “We don’t want your wife to curse me,” she would say in her girlish, bell-like voice, and she would laugh and let him go out to play with dirty fingernails or an unmade bed. Now he felt tears coming, again. He pulled the damp handkerchief out of his pocket. It had been his father’s. His mother had given it to him.

  “Oh Lord,” Lady said. “What have we here? What have we here?”

  “I’ll stop. I promise. You don’t have to yank my arm again,” Fin said through his tears.

  She put her arm around him. “No, no. Cry away.”

  Which he did.

  “There, there,” Lady said awkwardly.

  Someone holding him close as his mother had done, someone who was not his mother; he pulled away, then threw his
arms around her.

  “We’re both orphans now, I guess,” Lady said softly.

  Fin had not thought about being an orphan. He looked up. “You’re an orphan?” But he was thinking: I’m an orphan? “I met your mother,” he said. “She came to our house when I was little. Before we went to Europe.”

  Lady laughed. “I’ll bet she did, poor old girl. We didn’t get along that badly, you know? I mean, compared to Daddy, she was a saint. I miss her.”

  “I miss my mother.”

  She pulled him close, but he could tell she wasn’t really listening.

  “And after all the shit I put her through, she left me everything. I really thought she’d leave it all to the Whitney. She thought they’d never finish it, but there it is, and here we are.” She looked at Fin, expectantly.

  “Yeah,” he said. What was the Whitney? “So now you’re rich?”

  “You’re not supposed to ask people about money. It’s considered déclassé.”

  “Sorry, Lady.” What did déclassé mean? It sounded like a dessert.

  “I am pretty rich, though. Half of it is in some kind of trust, my mother wasn’t an idiot, but we’ll make do, you and I.”

  “You bet,” Fin said. He nodded vigorously. He had stopped crying.

  Lady took his handkerchief and wiped the tears from his face.

  “You got out of school a month early.”

  “Two months.”

  “Do you mind?”

  “Ha ha.”

  “I told them I’d enroll you here. But for two months it hardly seems worth it.” She kissed his forehead. “Right?”

  Fin could only nod. She was the strangest person he’d ever met. Even now, years after he’d met her.

  “Well, look at that,” she said, tracing the monogram on Fin’s handkerchief with a finger. “H.H.H.” She laughed.

  Fin remembered that laugh—the laugh from the deck of the ship when he was five.

  “It’s Daddy’s,” he said.

  “Yes, Fin. I see that.”

  The sarcasm, the set jaw—he remembered that, too, remembered the quick, violent change of mood: a change in the weather, her face clouded over, her voice cold. “I never liked Daddy much. What about you?”