Fin & Lady: A Novel Read online

  Lady’s friends also came to the house every other Sunday morning. Mirna brought bagels and lox, and Joan brought coffee cake. It was their girls’ ritual, they said. But Fin noticed they talked mostly about men. When he left the room, they talked about sex, but in voices too soft for him to make out the words, even when he sat on the new stairs between the kitchen and the floor above. Quiet, whispery words, peals of laughter, the pop of the percolator. It got boring there in the hot stairwell. Fin would take himself outside and sit on the front steps, snapping his ball into his mitt, waiting for something to happen.

  And then, one Sunday in August, something did happen. A girl, about his own age, ran down the steps of a brownstone across the street.

  “Hello,” she said.

  “Hello.”

  “I just got home from camp. I live here. Why are you just sitting there?”

  “I can’t think of anything else to do, I guess.”

  She was taller than Fin and very tan. She wore dark green shorts and a short-sleeved white shirt.

  “This is my uniform,” she said, seeing his glance.

  “Okay.”

  “You look really hot.”

  Fin looked down at his heavy jeans, his old sneakers. He had on a brown plaid short-sleeved shirt that was too small.

  “Where did you go?” the girl in uniform asked. “Treetops or something?”

  “What’s Treetops?”

  “A camp where they have farming, stupid.”

  Fin felt himself coloring. “I don’t need a camp,” he said. “I have my own farm.” And he raced up the steps and slammed the door.

  “Do you know the people who live across the street?” he asked Lady that night.

  She was applying pale polish to her fingernails. He watched the brush, watched it dip into the glass bottle, watched the pink polish cling to it, watched it spread, smooth and shining, across the nail.

  “Which people?”

  “I don’t know. The ones with a kid.”

  “The shrinks?”

  “Do Mr. and Mrs. Shrink have a daughter? Like my age?”

  “They’re both shrinks, I think. Poor kid. Diamond? Is that their name? Ruby? Raising a kid according to its bowel movements—I wouldn’t know where to start.”

  “You’re disgusting.”

  “I didn’t write the book, Fin. In fact, I didn’t even read it. So don’t blame me.”

  The next morning Fin sat on the stoop untangling a knot in the dog’s ruff, hoping the girl would reappear. And, yes, the door of the brownstone across the street opened and there she was, the girl whose parents raised her according to a book about bowel movements.

  “’Ello again,” she said. She didn’t have her camp uniform on. But why was she speaking with an odd, stilted Liverpudlian accent? “I’m practicing my Beatles accent,” she said, sitting beside him. “What do you think, mate?”

  “I really do have a farm, you know. A dairy farm. I’m renting it out until I get old enough to go back and take over.”

  “Groovy,” she said.

  She petted Gus. “Is this your dog, mate? What’s ’is name, then? You live ’ere now?”

  The girl’s name was Phoebe and she was in the grade above his. “But that’s all right,” she said, obviously referring to Fin’s lesser status. “I don’t mind.” She was allowed to charge any books she wanted at the bookstore on Eighth Street, any records at the record store. “No clothes, though,” she said. Her accent had returned to normal. “No posters, either. Just books and records. My parents think they’re educational.”

  They browsed through bins of records, leaving with an album of Dave Van Ronk and one of Herman’s Hermits. They bought a copy of the Tao Te Ching. Gus waited patiently outside, then followed them back to Phoebe’s house, a brownstone furnished rather more formally than Lady’s.

  “My parents are really old,” Phoebe said. “Like, really old. I was a mistake. I’m not supposed to know.”

  “I just moved here. I live with my sister,” Fin said, trying to do his part. “I’m an orphan.”

  He felt slightly sick, as if he were bragging about his parents’ deaths.

  Phoebe was looking at him thoughtfully.

  “I used to want to be an orphan,” she said. “And a nun.”

  They were quiet for a moment.

  “Now I wish I was a spy.”

  “Ian Fleming just died.”

  “Yeah, so?” Phoebe said, and Fin could tell she didn’t know who Ian Fleming was.

  “He wrote James Bond,” he said. “The books.”

  “Oh.”

  “I’m sort of a spy.”

  “Sure you are. And a farmer.”

  Then Fin told her about his mission to find Lady a good husband. “I really like Biffi. I wish they would stop fighting. Then she could marry him. Because what if Tyler comes back? He’ll send me away. She makes me call him Uncle Ty.”

  “She can’t marry her brother, Fin.”

  “He’s not her brother. I’m her brother. Her only brother.”

  “Why should she get married to anyone? She’s rich. She doesn’t need any husband at all. Not like that finky Jane.”

  “Who?”

  “Jane Eyre. She’s a character in a book. Who is so stupid. Why doesn’t she just live with Mr. Rochester? But no, she has to wait until he’s ruined and blind. And, listen, you can’t be too good at finding someone, because then she won’t need you to find someone. Mate,” she added in her English accent. Her bed had photographs of the Beatles, torn from magazines, taped to the canopy. She disappeared behind the curtain of the Fab Four, then reappeared with a copy of 16 Magazine.

  “She doesn’t want to be a spinster,” Fin said.

  “How old is she?”

  “Twenty-three-and-a-half,” he lied.

  “Well, I don’t know…”

  “No, okay, she’s twenty-four.”

  “Oh. Well, yeah, then.”

  “Anyway, I like Biffi,” Fin said.

  “So you marry him.”

  “No, you marry him.”

  “I’m never getting married,” Phoebe said. She looked up from her magazine. “I want to be a bachelorette.”

  * * *

  That week was cool and crisp. The silver haze gave way to a blue sky, to white clouds riding a soft breeze. Lady flirted at her parties. With a musician. With a Spaniard. But she flirted everywhere, with everyone, Fin told me. The Good Humor man. The waitress at the coffee shop. The bus driver. It was how she steered her little boat through the rocks and cliffs and sandbars. Fin said he had never realized how many people there were on a street until he walked down a street with Lady. “Flirting was like sonar for her,” he said. “She was like a bat, flitting around in the dark.”

  So Fin didn’t make too much of the appearance of Jack Jordan at the house on Charles Street.

  Jack appeared on a Saturday morning. Fin was in back of the house, throwing a ball methodically against the brick garden wall. Gus sat beside him, not even looking. Fin was Jim Bunning, the Phillies’ pitcher; it was Father’s Day, he was throwing a perfect game, pitch after pitch—stee-rike. The guys swinging so helplessly were the Mets, which was sad, but it was a perfect game. He couldn’t help himself. He hurled the famous sliders, his knuckles nearly scraping the ground. Jim Bunning would fall apart with the rest of the Phillies at the end of September. He would later become Senator Bunning from Kentucky, a right-hander who turned into a right-winger. But how was I to know that? Fin would ask years later. And even if he had, he’d say, why would he have cared in 1964? The guy pitched a perfect game.

  In the radiant light of a late-summer morning, he lifted his leg and moved into his motion. The pink rubber ball snapped smartly from his fingers. It made its precise, unpredictable arc. Just over the plate. Just catching the inside corner. Then, thwack, it hit the redbrick garden wall and flew obediently back to his glove.

  Lady had never mentioned it, but he knew he had to start school soon. A New York City school
. A Greenwich Village school. The other kids would holler or they would squeal when they caught sight of one another, they would talk about what they had done over the summer, it would be just like going back to school in Connecticut—except every detail would be off. The slang would be different. The shoes would be different. The book bags, the notebooks, the names. They would think he went to farm camp. Friends would drift into small groups, laughing and talking, but they would not be his friends. He would greet no one, and no one would greet him.

  Fin worried about school and threw Jim Bunning’s strikes. The rubber ball bounced obediently back. And then, suddenly, the ball smacked not against the wall but against a man’s cheek, and the man was chasing Fin, and Fin was running, into the house, up the stairs, screaming, “Help! Help!”

  Jack Jordan had rung the doorbell, but he’d been too impatient to wait for Mabel or Lady to open it. Or, just as likely, Lady had told Mabel not to answer the bell. Whatever the reason, Jack Jordan, athlete, former college football player, vaulted over the gate at the side of the house. He landed in the garden, where, with what seemed at the time to be the force of one of the real Jim Bunning’s deceptive fastballs, a Spaldeen smacked him in the face.

  He spluttered, as if he’d been splashed by an ocean wave. The veins stood out on his forehead. The stain left by the ball on his cheek was bright red. Then he caught sight of Fin.

  “Hey! You!” He held his arms out as if to catch a football. But it was no football he was after.

  Fin took off. “Help! Police!” he yelled, as if he were in a cartoon, up the stairs, the crazy man behind him; in front of him, Mabel. He smashed into her. The crazy man smashed into Fin, a tackle that brought all three of them down. Mabel screamed. Fin, on the bottom, struggled to get free, Gus standing over them barking as if they were renegade sheep.

  When a sudden calm descended.

  They all simultaneously caught sight of a pair of shapely legs and pretty bare feet, one of which moved forward in a gentle nudging kick.

  “Who’s hiding in this pile of wrinkly laundry?” Lady said pleasantly. Her toe inserted itself between Fin’s elbow and Mabel’s face. “Mabel?”

  “I warned you,” Mabel said. She stood, smoothed her blue cotton uniform dress, straightened her wig, and stalked off.

  “What bullies men are,” Lady said.

  “I’m not a man,” Fin muttered. “I’m just a boy.”

  “Get up, Finino mio. Jack, I’d like you to meet my brother, Fin. Fin, this is my dear, dear friend Jack … Jordan, right? Jack Jordan. He’s come to take us golfing.”

  Fin and Jack stood up and sullenly shook hands.

  “You can call him Uncle Jack.”

  “Another uncle?”

  “Shut up, Fin,” Lady said, laughing.

  Jack did not seem very happy about being an uncle, or about taking Fin along. “Oh come on, Lady. Golf is no fun for kids.”

  “He’s brilliant at miniature golf.”

  Uncle Jack was strong, strapping. His hair was silky and stylishly long. But it looked pasted to his big square rugged face, as if he were a paper doll.

  “What are your interests?” Fin asked.

  “My what?”

  When he was older, Fin tried to picture that day from Jack’s point of view. Jack, twenty-two years old, football star at Yale, soon-to-be vice president of something at his father’s business selling something, still living in the enormous, gracious seaside house in Sands Point, Long Island, with his doting parents. Jack hops in his car to make the trip into town to Charles Street in Greenwich Village, invited there by a mystifyingly beautiful girl he’s met at a party, Twilly Chandler’s party—“Quite a donkey roast, isn’t it?” the beautiful girl had said. “Who are you, anyway? I feel absolutely crapulous. Will you take me inside like the well-brought-up young man you undoubtedly want me to think you are?” And she had collapsed decorously into his arms, smiling, murmuring, “Bravo ragazzo…”

  And so, a few days later, enchanted by her eccentricity, her pale skin and wide dazzling smile, by the sense that she would do absolutely anything and probably already had, he sets off with visions of exotic positions and wild gasps of uncontrolled, uncontrollable pleasure, and he arrives at her street, such a promising street, so small and unlikely and bohemian, and he leaps out of his car, rushes up the steps, rings the bell, rings it again and then again, and then, full of his memory of that slender body relaxing into his own at Twilly Chandler’s donkey roast, of the lemony scent and the odd, arousing pale lipstick on those delicious lips murmuring their anachronistic and incomprehensible slang, he runs down the steps, two, three at a time, sees the gate, leaps over in a great gazelle-like motion—if only Lady could see him—and finds … Fin. Finds a younger brother, a skinny, weedy kid who whacks him in the face with a pink rubber ball, who runs away and leads him into a pile up with the old Negro maid, who makes him look like a jerk.

  Golf was fun. Even tearing up the grass when you missed was fun. Fin got to steer the golf cart.

  The next day Jack sent Lady flowers, a long box of roses wrapped in tissue, like something out of a movie. Even then, Fin didn’t worry. Corny flowers? Lady had gotten flowers before. You didn’t make your way into Lady’s heart with flowers. Fin didn’t worry the first time Jack took Lady out to dinner, either. Jack was a dumb jock. Not Lady’s type at all. The guy could barely speak. Jack wasn’t even as old as Lady. He was just out of college. He was no match for Biffi, worldly, cosmopolitan, bearded, funny Biffi. No match at all.

  Jack did emanate a strong, athletic energy. That was true. But so what?

  Fin opened the front door and said, “Hello. Lady will be down in a minute.” Fin was the gatekeeper. He was the sentry. Enter. Your audience with Lady has been arranged. She will receive you … and then toss you out on your ear. “Please sit down and wait.”

  He followed Jack into the living room. He wondered if Jack used hair tonic to keep his light brown hair in place. Or spray. His boots were polished to a mirrorlike sheen.

  “In Victorian England, men used to polish their boots so they could see up ladies’ dresses. In the reflection,” Fin said. It was one of the scattered odds and ends of information Lady occasionally came out with.

  “Yeah, well, this isn’t Victorian England, is it?”

  But when Lady came downstairs looking ravishingly beautiful in her very short skirt and coltish legs, Fin was gratified to notice that Jack glanced down self-consciously at his shiny boots, frowned, and blushed.

  It was only a few days later that Fin began to worry about Jack. It was only when Biffi phoned and Lady told Fin to say she was out.

  “She said to say she’s out, but she’s not,” Fin said.

  “Ach.”

  “Yeah, ach. There’s this guy, and he’s a jerk.”

  “We will get hamburgers,” Biffi said. “You and I.” He liked to get hamburgers. He believed they were the secret of America’s health and prosperity. “Not the hot dogs,” he would say. “That is nonsense.”

  “So that’s the story. Pretty bad, huh?” Fin said as they sat in the coffee shop.

  “Love,” said Biffi, “is bondage.”

  “Lady likes freedom.”

  Biffi put his chin in his hands.

  Fin did the same. “Do you want to go to the World’s Fair again? Or something?”

  “The world,” Biffi said, “is not a fair.”

  “No, the World’s Fair is a fair.”

  “You are very young, Fin.”

  “God, you’re as bad as her.”

  “No one can compete with Lady,” Biffi said.

  After the hamburgers, they walked back to the house and sat on the stoop.

  “If your sister finds me here on her doorstep, I am a dead duck.”

  He sighed. He took out his pipe, rubbed the bowl on his nose, then pulled out a yellowing tobacco pouch. “Here,” he said, handing both to Fin. Fin filled the pipe, used Biffi’s little tool to tamp it down the way Biffi had taught him, the
n watched the flame of the lighter sucked down into the bowl as Biffi puffed. The smell of the smoke was sweet and dark. Biffi’s hands were large. How long had it been since Fin had held his father’s hand?

  “Sometimes I miss my father,” he said. “Although I guess he wasn’t such a nice man.”

  “I miss my father every day, and he was a terrible and selfish man.”

  Biffi puffed on the pipe. Fin closed his eyes.

  “You’ll tell me what goes on with this unworthy uncle?”

  Fin opened his eyes. “Like a spy,” he said.

  “Like a friend,” said Biffi.

  Spies

  He asked Phoebe if she would help, and she immediately produced a pair of binoculars from a closet. She positioned herself at her window, which faced Lady’s window across the street.

  “I don’t want to look in Lady’s window,” Fin said. “What if she’s getting dressed or something?”

  “You’re such a pervert.”

  “No, I said I don’t want to…”

  “Only a pervert would even think of that.”

  Fin said, “Just aim them downstairs, okay?”

  And they looked through the living-room windows and watched Mabel emptying ashtrays.

  “This guy has got to be removed from the picture. We have less than a year. Our mission is clear.”

  “We will not fail,” Phoebe said.

  That night, they met in the space beneath Phoebe’s stairway where the door to the kitchen was.

  “They just left,” Fin said. “They went to the Café Au Go Go. Can we get in there?”

  “What did you do all summer, Fin?” It was a coffeehouse, of course they could get in, Phoebe went all the time. Sometimes she just listened from outside, sometimes she had ice cream inside.

  They stood outside this time. Stan Getz and Astrud Gilberto were performing. “The Girl from Ipanema,” soft and seductive, floated out to them. At about ten o’clock, when Fin and Phoebe sat sleepily on the sidewalk, backs against the wall of the building, Lady and Jack walked out. Jack had his hand on the small of Lady’s back. As if he owned her. Phoebe put her finger to her lips. Fin watched Lady put her head on Jack’s shoulder.

  “Criminy Dutch,” he whispered to Phoebe when Jack and Lady had turned the corner.