Fin & Lady: A Novel Read online

  “That was close.”

  “Come on,” he said. “We have to follow them.”

  They kept at least a block behind Lady and Jack. They followed them home, home to the house on Charles Street. Watched them stop abruptly. Heard Lady’s voice: “What the hell are you doing here?” Heard a male voice: “Thought I’d stop by.” It was a drunk male voice.

  “That’s him,” Fin said.

  “Who?”

  “Uncle Ty.”

  “I thought it was Uncle Jack.”

  “No, the other one.”

  “You broke my heart,” Uncle Ty was saying. Loudly. “Do you know that?”

  “Yes, of course I know.”

  “It’s still broken. I bet you didn’t know that.”

  “Of course I know that, Ty. Am I blind? Now, come on, let’s get you home.”

  “I hope someone breaks your heart, Lady,” Uncle Ty said.

  “I don’t have a heart.”

  “True, true…”

  “Jack!” Lady said, as Tyler collapsed against her. “Help me, for God’s sake.”

  “Who is he?” Jack said.

  “Just someone.”

  Jack put Ty’s arm around his neck and hauled him away from Lady.

  “Who are you?” Tyler asked Jack.

  “He’s no one,” Lady said.

  “Hey!” said Jack.

  “Are you going to help me or not?”

  Uncle Jack pulled Uncle Ty toward Seventh Avenue.

  “Taxi,” Lady called, and a cab stopped at her feet. She unloaded Uncle Ty into the backseat and slammed the door.

  “Taxi!” she called again, and another cab pulled up, like magic. She opened the door and motioned Jack to get in.

  “Where’re we going?” he said.

  Lady closed the door on him, too.

  “You’re going. Home.”

  “Hey!”

  “You said that already. Off you go.”

  Fin and Phoebe ran home to get there ahead of Lady, Phoebe peeling off to go up her steps, Fin bolting up his.

  “Lavender Jesus, what a night. What are you doing up, Fin?” Lady said when she came in.

  “Nothing.”

  She mixed herself a martini, and Fin got up to go to bed. His heart was still pounding from running.

  “Stick around,” Lady said. “Keep me company.”

  They sat beside each other on the couch.

  “Sometimes it gets to me,” she said.

  “What?”

  “It.”

  “Yeah,” Fin said. “Me, too.”

  “What if I really don’t have a heart?”

  “Like the Tin Man. But he really did.”

  She put an arm around him and drew him close.

  “I do love you, that’s for sure,” she said.

  “I guess you have a heart, then.”

  But how could you have a heart when everyone wanted to tear off pieces? And everyone did, until there was nothing left, that’s what she meant. Everyone tearing like wolves. Except him.

  “I’m still only twenty-four,” she said. “You know? So how am I going to do everything I want to do in one year? How?”

  Fin sleepily closed his eyes. He already had Lady’s heart. In his own heart.

  “We have half the same DNA,” he said.

  “Poor you,” she said.

  * * *

  It had gotten hot again, so hot that it seemed as though summer wouldn’t be able to end even if it tried. Fin was at Phoebe’s house, sitting as usual between her open window and a large, noisy fan. The binoculars rested on the windowsill. He and Phoebe took turns looking through them.

  “Maybe we should be out seeking clues. Instead of just sitting here,” she said.

  “We could go observe the uncles,” Fin said. “In their native habitats.”

  “Yeah, not your sister, who sleeps all day.”

  “Tyler came over again.”

  “Crap. She has a complex, I guess.”

  “She’s still seeing that dumbbell Jack, too, but she won’t even speak to Biffi.”

  Phoebe said, “Did you ever think that maybe Lady was just sowing her wild oats?”

  “That’s what guys do. Not girls.” Fin lay on the floor and stared at the ceiling, which Phoebe had painted with yellow stars. Jewish stars.

  “Those stars are sort of depressing, Phoebe. Like concentration-camp depressing.”

  “No kidding.”

  Fin went home and flipped through his sister’s address book, which she kept in the kitchen on the counter below the wall phone. Beneath the ballpoint doodles and pencil squiggles, he found Tyler Morrison; Morrison, Frost and Morrison, attorneys-at-law.

  “Do you know which bus to take?” he asked Phoebe.

  “I shall not dignify your inquiry with an answer. Of course I do.”

  They sat side by side on the bus, the window open, the air streaming in hot and heavy, almost solid. The night before, Tyler had come over and told Fin if you wanted to get ahead you needed to go to prep school. “You want to get ahead, right?” he said.

  “Ahead of what?”

  “Ahead of this,” Tyler said, raising a fist, laughing.

  Then Lady came downstairs and Tyler handed Fin a wrapped box. It was a G.I. Joe doll. “You like toy soldiers, right?” he said.

  “He doesn’t know the difference between a toy soldier and a doll,” Fin said to Phoebe.

  When he’d asked Lady what Uncle Ty was doing skulking around again, she said it had just happened, the way things do. “I don’t know, Fin. Tyler is a part of my past. Sometimes history makes you feel more…”

  “Historical?”

  She laughed. “Wretched child. Young. It makes you feel young. No, that’s not it, either. Secure? No. What am I trying to say? I guess it’s that I remember him. Which is okay, until he reminds me of Hugo Hadley, Esquire. History can only take you so far, I suppose.”

  “To the present,” Fin said to Phoebe. “Which Tyler Morrison occupies too much of.”

  “This has something to do with an Electra complex,” Phoebe said. “But don’t worry too much. Lady is a drifter.”

  Would Lady just drift and drift, he wondered, down the stream, merrily, merrily, merrily, bumping one shore, then the opposite shore, with another little leaf following in her wake, floating past her on its way to boarding school? Fin used to place the curled leaves of a tulip tree in the stream near his grandparents’ house and watch them navigate. Until they sank. He remembered the dappled shade for a moment, the sound of the stream. It was a treat, sometimes, to look back, to savor the loss, as if it were something sweet to eat. The sadness. His mother’s voice. The smack of a cow’s tail against its side, swatting away flies. Even the flies. Flies were different in the country. Lazy. Slow. Maybe that’s what Lady meant about history.

  “Tyler didn’t really do anything yet, did he?” Phoebe’s voice interrupted his thoughts. “He didn’t sell your livestock.”

  “They’re not livestock. They’re cows.”

  “They’re alive. And they’re stock.”

  “They’re cows.”

  And no, Tyler hadn’t sold them. Yet. Fin called Mr. Cornelius, the music teacher renting the property, every two weeks to make sure, no matter what Lady said trying to reassure him. Mr. Cornelius said the cows were all doing beautifully, though they missed Fin.

  “How can you tell?” Fin asked.

  “A mournful moo,” said Mr. Cornelius, who was considered artistic and therefore, pardonably, eccentric.

  “Let’s wait till Tyler comes down for lunch,” Phoebe said. “They go to lunch and drink martinis.”

  “Who?”

  “Lawyers. My father told me. Then they’re too tired to do any work in the afternoon. So they go see my father. Because they can lie down. Because he’s a shrink.”

  “Sure.”

  “Well, the martini part is true.”

  “Sure.”

  Tyler appeared and left the building with two other me
n. Five blocks later, the three men went into a restaurant. Fin and Phoebe stood uncertainly outside, watching through the plate glass as the trio sat down.

  “See?” Phoebe said when martinis arrived.

  “Are you children lost?” a woman asked them. Several lavender shopping bags hung from her arms. She carried a large pocketbook, too. She stopped and placed her packages on the sidewalk, obviously glad for a break.

  “Oh no,” Phoebe said. She pulled a compass out of her pocket. “See?”

  “We’re waiting for our mother,” Fin said. Why had he said that?

  “She’s in the ladies’ room,” said Phoebe.

  “Would you like me to wait with you until she comes out?”

  You will have a long, long wait, Fin thought.

  “I’ll go tell her to hurry up.” Phoebe disappeared into the restaurant.

  Fin looked down at the sidewalk. Splotches of ancient chewing gum, cigarette butts, spit, heat. I’m sorry, he thought to his mother, to have used you in a lie.

  “You’re very nice to wait,” he said to the woman. “But you really don’t have to. I see my mother coming.” He pointed to a woman walking through the restaurant. “But thank you very much.” He lifted the woman’s bags and handed them to her. A funeral phrase drifted through his mind. “For your concern,” he said.

  “You have very nice manners, young man. Tell your mother that.”

  Fin nodded and watched the woman walk on, lavender shopping bags banging against wide thighs.

  The sun beat down, and the woman who was not his mother exited the restaurant and walked north, leaving behind a quick air-conditioned breeze before the restaurant door swung closed. He stood on one leg for a while. Then the other leg.

  Phoebe came out a few minutes later trailing the same air-conditioner chill wind.

  Fin said, “What took you so long, anyway?”

  “Ladies’ room,” she said. “They’re talking about baseball, by the way, if you’re interested, since that was the whole reason we came here.” She looked disgusted.

  “So?”

  “Yankee fans.”

  They walked over to the bank where Jack Jordan worked. Two blocks. The suitors were conveniently concentrated in a small area. Even Biffi’s gallery was close by. If someone wanted to surround them, to lay siege, someone could. The suitors would slowly starve. Eat their own children. If they had children. Which the suitors did not. So they would kill each other, feed on their own freshly slaughtered flesh, and disappear.

  “We’ll wait here.” Phoebe stood behind a tall potted plant. She gestured for Fin to join her.

  When Uncle Jack returned from his lunch, his seersucker suit coat was slung over his shoulder. His tie was loose. He said, “Richard! Poker tonight,” to a man who had come in just after him. “Jim’s place.”

  “Bring your wallet,” said Richard.

  “Yeah.” Jack laughed. “But tonight I’ll win back every cent. My wallet will be bulging.”

  And they both were whisked upstairs by the elevator.

  * * *

  “Uncle Ty is a Yankee fan,” Fin told Lady.

  “I’m sorry, Fin.”

  “And Uncle Jack is a gambler.”

  “What is it you want me to do, Finny? Send them to bed without any supper?”

  Yes, Fin thought. Why not? “Perché no? You said I should help you find the lemons.”

  “But I didn’t say you should spoil all my fun.”

  Fun was important to Lady. It was one of the seven virtues. She never mentioned what the other six were.

  One night Fin followed Lady and Uncle Ty to a Spanish restaurant. Phoebe didn’t want to come. She had decided that spying was dull. “And babyish.” And it was too hot. “I’m going to write some ‘Embarrassing Moments’ and ‘Bright Sayings’ and send them to the Daily News and get five dollars instead.”

  Fin didn’t blame her. Even the dog had elected to stay home, lying on the marble slab in front of the living-room fireplace.

  When Lady and Ty came out of the restaurant, they did not look happy. Fun? Lady wasn’t having any fun that night.

  “You’re making a huge mistake,” Uncle Ty said. “Huge.”

  “Maybe I am. But I get to make it. It’s mine.”

  “You belong to me, Lady.”

  “This is 1964. I don’t belong to anyone.”

  “Yeah, yeah, yeah. What’re you going to do, Lady? Be a lawyer?”

  “Maybe.”

  “You never even finished college, for Christ’s sake.”

  “Thanks to you.”

  Uncle Ty said something Fin couldn’t hear. Lady said, “Fuck you, Ty.” They were home by now, and she marched up the steps and in the door without looking back.

  Ty turned and walked away, in Fin’s direction.

  “Jesus!” He jumped when he saw Fin. “What are you doing here? Shouldn’t you be in bed?”

  “Indubitably.”

  “You’re an even bigger pain in the ass than your sister, you know that?”

  “I’ll tell her you said so.”

  “I wouldn’t if I were you.” Ty gave Fin a long look, then said, “Moo, mooo.” Then: “You know why Lady likes you so much?”

  “Because I’m her brother. I’m her only brother. She loves me.”

  “Yeah, you’re her brother. But you know what else? You’re the kid she never has to have. You know what I mean?”

  “No.”

  “Sure you do,” said Ty, and he gave Fin a mock sock to the gut and continued on his way.

  “All because the Times has no funnies”

  There was a lot more going on in the world than Lady’s love life, even at the house on Charles Street. Fin read the newspaper every day. The New York Times obituary section had been his grandfather’s favorite. Fin’s, too. He would sit on his grandfather’s lap pointing to names, Hatfield, Jerome, O’Connor, and sounding them out.

  “Two Warner s today,” he said one Sunday morning, bent over the obit page he’d spread out on the kitchen floor. “Natalie and William S. Jr.”

  “Isn’t it a little morbid?” Mirna said. “Reading the obits?” She said it hopefully, as if she’d given him a piece of pie—Isn’t it delicious?

  “You’re reading the wedding announcements,” Fin said.

  “Well, that’s to see what’s going on, what my friends are up to.”

  “Well, same here,” Fin said. He grinned.

  “Anyway, our friends got married a long time ago,” Joan said. “There are no holdouts but us.”

  “Holdouts,” Lady said. She gave a sarcastic grunt.

  Fin made a series of little pig grunts.

  “Basta, Finino,” Lady said. “Tell us how the Mets are doing. They’re alive.”

  Fin snorted again. “Barely.”

  He watched them sipping from their coffee cups. Sip, sip, sip. The cups clattered back into their saucers. They each put a chin on a fist and stared at nothing. Fin gulped some orange juice and listened to the sound, loud but somehow private, internal. What did they hear when he gulped? What did they hear when he sipped? The same thing he heard when they sipped? He sipped. It sounded almost as loud as the gulping. But it did sound like the word “sip.” He sipped again.

  “What on earth are you doing?” Lady asked.

  “Sipping.”

  She turned back to the wedding announcement page. “Oh, look! Misty Cardiff got married.”

  “That anti-Semitic bitch.”

  There was silence as they all seemed to remember some incident.

  Lady said, “Well, somehow I’m getting married by the time I’m twenty-five. Period.” She tapped the wedding announcement page.

  “You already had a wedding announcement,” said Fin. “Are you allowed to have another?”

  Mirna, momentarily silenced by the first bite of a bagel, looked at Fin over the pile of pink salmon and red onion and white cream cheese with her troubled, knowing look.

  “I saw it,” Fin said, suddenly very un
comfortable. “I saw the picture in the newspaper. When I was little. That’s all.”

  “Did you?” Lady asked, smiling at him. “I didn’t know that.”

  You were so beautiful, he wanted to say. You looked like a pearl. And a horse. He licked cream cheese off his fingers.

  “Just for the record,” Mirna said, “I am not technically a holdout. I am technically unlucky. And I will clearly never find anybody to marry.”

  “Me either,” said Joan.

  “Me either,” said Lady. “Who am I kidding?”

  “Come off it, Lady. You have guys proposing right and left.”

  “Why can’t I just fall in love, then? Just the thought of living with any of them for the rest of my life…” She shuddered. “What’s wrong with me?”

  “Well, I do have a career, at least,” said Joan.

  “I have one of those, too,” said Mirna, “and you know what? Your career doesn’t give a shit about you, Joan. Does it take you out to a nice dinner? It never even takes you out to lunch. It certainly doesn’t take you to bed…”

  “Enough,” said Lady.

  Mirna glanced at Fin, then pointed to the plate of smoked salmon. “You have to actually watch them slice it. Or they give you the tail.”

  “Well, I happen to love my work,” said Joan.

  “Except for the children,” Mirna said.

  “Oh, them.” Lady started laughing.

  “I love the children.” Joan was a kindergarten teacher.

  “Miss Cooper, look at my picture; Miss Cooper, she pushed me; Miss Cooper, Miss Cooper … You can’t stand the brats,” Mirna said. “You’re always complaining about them.”

  “And you sure won’t meet a guy at that girls’ school, Miss Cooper,” Lady said.

  Lady met people everywhere, of course. She stopped to chat with strangers on the street. She jumped into taxis with strangers and asked if they could drop her. She admired a stranger’s handbag on the bus or pointed out a sunset shimmering between the buildings to a stranger passing by.

  “She’ll meet lots of little girls,” said Fin.

  Mirna gave him a look. “Read about your dead playmates, Fin … Now,” she said, addressing Joan, “Helen Gurley Brown is married. Even Hannah Arendt got married. So why not us?”

  “Yeah,” said Fin. “Even Jane Eyre.”

  Joan had been piling a bagel half with lox. She frowned at Fin, pushing the plate over to him. “Here. Shut up, okay?” Then: “Yeah, I really am sick of kids.”