Fin & Lady: A Novel (12 page)

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 uncomfortable. “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.”

“Hey, here’s a man who fought in the Spanish-American War,” Fin said, going back to the obituaries.

“Too old for us,” Lady said.

“
William H. Hands
,” said Fin. “And his son is named H. William Hands!”

“Good grief,” said Lady. “And all because the
Times
has no funnies.”

*   *   *

That summer, Fin read the
Post
and the
Daily News
as well as the
Times
. He checked the sports section of the
Daily News
in the morning at the newsstand, then bought the
Post
in the afternoon and brought it home to examine the box scores, study the standings, read the sports features, then skim through the rest of the paper, through the stories about students from New York going to Mississippi to register voters, stories about the two students who never came back. The riots in Harlem that summer were in the newspaper, too, and Fin read about them, but Harlem was so far away from Charles Street it might as well have been Mississippi. It wasn’t the Long Hot Summer for him. It was long and it was hot, but when you’re eleven, you’re eleven, and that’s just the way it was, though even an eleven-year-old knew something was happening. You could feel it in the air, even in the air of Lady’s house in Greenwich Village.

On the day Flannery O’Connor died, which he always remembered because she lived on a dairy farm like him and because someone enthusiastically referred to her in the obit as a “white witch,” a “literary white witch,” but still, Lady was having a dinner party for which she seriously considered using her mother’s finger bowls.

“Don’t they know how to use napkins?” Fin asked.

Lady sighed. No finger bowls. “But they used to look so pretty. A lemon slice floating on top…”

Mabel cooked all day in preparation. Pounds of shrimp, an entire salmon.

“We’ll serve it cold,” Lady said. “No one could eat a hot dish. Not in this heat.”

“No one eats dishes, even cold ones,” Fin said. “Ha ha.”

“Ha ha.”

“Food’s got to cook,” Mabel said. “It’s got to get hot before it cools off.”

“What a terrific slogan, Mabel. Like something the Freedom Riders would say,” said Lady.

“Not a slogan,” said Mabel. “A fact.”

In the kitchen, Fin helped Mabel. He dumped slippery gray shrimp into the sink and shelled them, the stink of the ocean overwhelming the sweltering kitchen. Steam rolled from the pot on the stove, almost indistinguishable from the hot moist air. “I used to think they started out pink,” Fin said, watching the shrimp when Mabel dropped them in the pot.

“Color, color, color,” Mabel muttered, wiping sweat from her face with a dishcloth, “that’s all I hear these days. Now look at all those shrimps. Why’d Miss Lady go to all this expense, anyhow? Same old riffraff with their sandal feet…”

“Nope, she’s having rich people tonight.”

“Don’t call Miss Lady ‘she.’”

“Even Mirna and Joan aren’t invited. It’s to raise money.”

“First I heard.” Mabel dumped the shrimp into a colander in the sink.

“She thought you’d get mad,” Fin said. “It’s to raise money for Negroes.”

“Oh Lord,” said Mabel, scowling just before a fog of fishy steam obscured her face. “Lord save us from Miss Lady and her whims.”

When Fin came downstairs later in his navy wool funeral suit, Lady took one look at him and said, “Good God, Fin, what have you done?”

Fin stood at the bottom of the stairs, his wrists poking three inches from his jacket cuffs, his pants high above his shoes. He had grown, that’s what he’d done.

Lady tapped her lips thoughtfully, a gesture Fin remembered from his father.

“Daddy used to do that,” he said, tapping his own lips.

“Nonsense.”

“I could wear Levi’s.”

“Nonsense again. Here’s ten dollars. Go buy yourself some decent pants, for God’s sake.” She handed him a few more bills. “And a couple of shirts. Good grief.”

Fin went to a children’s clothing store he’d spotted on one of his walks, and though the proprietor of the establishment looked surprised when no one but a big collie dog followed the eleven-year-old in, he was nevertheless able to produce a pair of chinos and several long-sleeved button-down shirts.

“Your mother will be proud,” the man said when Fin came out of the dressing room. Fin rolled the cuffs back and admired himself in the mirror.

“My mother’s dead,” Fin said. He watched the man’s face in the mirror. They all did the same thing, exactly the same thing. They glanced away, quickly, as if they’d seen the rotting corpse, then they looked back at Fin with a kind, determined smile.

“Dear, dear,” the man said softly.

Fin relented. “My guardian will be very pleased,” he said.

The relieved proprietor gave him a lollipop, a red one, which Fin stuck in the corner of his mouth. He wore his new pants and a new blue oxford shirt out of the store.

At dinner, he was seated beside a very old lady with powdery white skin and frail birdlike hands that trembled as she reached for her glass of wine. On his other side sat a woman of about forty. Her dress was pale green silk. There were dark half-moons beneath each pale green silk arm. She insisted Fin call her Cee Cee. The old lady was named Mrs. Holbright.

“And what’s your name, young man?” Cee Cee asked.

“Fin. It means ‘the end’ in French. My father wanted me to be the last of his children.”

“Sounds like Hugo,” said old Mrs. Holbright. Her mouth made a clicking sound when she spoke, as if she were a mechanical toy. “He’s Hugo’s boy,” she said to Cee Cee. “Same eyes. Is Lady good to you? I’m sure she is. Excellent fellow, your father, up to a point. Do you have a temper, Fin?” Her mouth clicked shut, and she stared expectantly at Fin.

“I guess,” Fin said. He smiled politely.

“Ha!” Mrs. Holbright said. “I don’t believe it for a minute. You’re as sweet-tempered as a lamb, just like your poor mother. And as polite. Aren’t you? Don’t dare contradict me, young man. I enjoy being right. Most people do, you know. But you will find that I am particularly inclined in that direction.”

Cee Cee, who had been effectively silenced by the older woman, gave a tiny, demure cough in apparent agreement. She patted her décolletage with her napkin, as surreptitiously as possible, sopping up a thick film of perspiration.

Fin thought of his mother, her girlish laugh. He tried to remember his father’s eyes. He envisioned only the end of a cigar burning high above him.

“Now,” Mrs. Holbright was saying, “what do
you
make of the colored question, I wonder.”

Fin realized she was addressing him. “The Negro question,” he said automatically.

Cee Cee looked embarrassed, as if he had said a word like, say, “penis.” “What a warm night,” she said.

“Good heavens. Colored, Negro … Mabel, which is it?” Mrs. Holbright’s voice was piercing. All conversation in the room stopped. All eyes turned to Mabel.

Mabel stood holding a silver pitcher of ice water.

More silence. General, awkward silence. Cee Cee looked as though she wanted to throw her damp napkin over her head and hide. A few guests looked down. Someone coughed. Lady, who had just lifted a large shrimp to her lips, held it there like a Milk-Bone in front of a dog and smiled broadly, clearly enjoying herself. Drops of water beaded the pitcher.

Mabel looked thoughtful, considering the question.

“Well,” she said at last, “call me anything, just don’t call me late for dinner.”

Lady swallowed her shrimp like a sea lion. “Ditto.”

Fin, horrified by the entire exchange, tried to catch Mabel’s eye to somehow apologize for the guests, for his sister, for the entire Caucasian race, but Mabel deposited the pitcher on a silver dish and disappeared without a glance at him.