Fin & Lady: A Novel (16 page)

“That’s my boy,” she said, inhaling deeply, exhaling, the smoke spiraling above her. She waved the cigarette around like a stick of incense.

Fin pictured the two swollen eyes beneath the washcloth, pink like rabbit eyes, and her nose swollen and red. She sneezed, making the edge of the heavy wet washcloth jump. “I’m so miserable.”

Fin went into the living room and put on a record. Lady’s record collection had grown since they moved to the Village. There had been pop and rock uptown, which in a chronologically backward migration had journeyed into jazz and then blues and folk when they first moved into the house on Charles Street. Down all those uneven coffeehouse steps she went to hear old black men and young white men rasping out songs accompanied by their big, booming guitars. Lady had gotten a guitar herself, but had yet to play it. Sometimes Fin would stretch his hand around the shiny wood neck, the frets and metal strings tearing into his fingers.

He put
Bringing It All Back Home
on the spindle, stacked on an Ian and Sylvia. Mississippi John Hurt, the Rolling Stones. He turned the volume down low.

“Lie down on the couch,” he said. “Just pretend it’s a hangover.”

Fin sat in the low lounge chair, his legs out, his head back. It was so peaceful, just him and the sniffling Lady and “Subterranean Homesick Blues.” He could see the sky above the brownstones. He could see the soft, quick clouds. No Tyler, no Jack, no Biffi, no uncles or suitors of any kind.

“We want the old Bob Dylan,” Lady chanted halfheartedly from behind her washcloth. The song changed. “She Belongs to Me.” Gentle. Liquid. “And the new Bob Dylan,” she said.

You will start out standing proud to steal her anything she sees
 …

Yes, Fin thought. He looked at Lady, her terry-cloth death mask turned to the ceiling.

She never stumbles / She got no place to fall …

Lady pulled the washcloth from her face and stared at Fin. Her face was sullen, swollen, blotched. “Nothing,” she said, as if he’d asked her what was wrong. She put the damp washcloth back on her face. Her hand patted the coffee table, a search, here, over there.

“They’re in the kitchen,” Fin said.

As he went to fetch Lady’s cigarettes, Fin walked past the small guest bathroom. He remembered Mrs. Holbright, remembered walking her to the powder room the summer before, waiting outside the closed door trying not to hear the tinkling sounds on the other side, walking her back to the table, to her daughter, Cee Cee.
You do look like your father
, she’d said
. Handsome man
, she’d said.
And don’t mind Lady about that, you know. She was fond of him.

“Why do you hate Daddy so much?” he asked Lady when he came back into the living room.

“Who said I hate him?”

Fin shrugged. “Anyway, you never talk about him.”

“I don’t hate him,” Lady said. “I don’t hate ‘Daddy.’”

Fin was sorry now that he had brought up the subject. The way she said “Daddy.” The way she sat up, holding the washcloth on her face like a bandage, a World War I bandage.

“I didn’t hate him,” she said. “He hated me.”

“He did not.” But Fin thought of his father on the ship, thought of how he glared at Lady, how he spoke to her. Was that hate? You can’t hate your daughter, though. It’s unnatural. “He didn’t hate you. He was concerned about you.”

Lady laughed. “After a while I figured out how to protect myself from his ‘concern.’”

“How?”

“Stop hearing him. Stop seeing him. Stop caring about him. Like those three monkeys.”

“Yeah, exactly like the monkeys. Except the speak-no-evil part.”

Lady turned the washcloth over. “Oh, Finny.”

“Anyway, why? Why would he hate you?”

“Because I grew up.”

“Would he have hated me when I grow up?”

“No.”

“Why not?”

“Because you’re a boy.”

“So what?”

“Maybe you’re right. Boys grow up, too. Boys come in late from parties. Boys wear clothes their fathers don’t like. Boys go on dates…” She trailed off and was silent for a moment. “Just one difference,” she said then. “Boys don’t have babies.”

Boys don’t have babies. But Lady had never had a baby, either. “But neither did you,” he said.

“No,” Lady said.

There was an uncomfortable silence.

“Lady?”

She did not answer.

“Lady?”

These dreamy states would come upon her sometimes. Fin hated them. She was too far away. “Lady, Lady, Lady,” he chanted. She absentmindedly stroked his hand, as if it were a kitten. “Finny,” she murmured, but nothing else.

He thought of the Pounds’ baby in Connecticut, round and sticky and eager.

“I hate babies,” he said.

He was the baby Lady would never have to have. That was what Tyler said. Fin stood up, startling the dog, who had been asleep on the floor at his feet. “Tyler said I was the child you’d never have to have.”

Silence. Then: “That fucker.”

“That fucker,” Fin agreed, seizing at the opportunity to say the word “fucker.”

Lady usually drew the line right about there. But she said nothing.

“But why did that fucker say that?” Fin said.

“Never mind, Fin. And stop saying ‘fucker.’”

“Okay. Well, I guess I’ll go do my homework,” he said.

The washcloth said nothing.

“Will you help me with my homework? It’s a science project,” he said after a while.

“Another fucking fruit-fly poster?” asked the washcloth, and suddenly, like a seething, roaring cyclone, Lady flew to her feet, ripped the cloth from her face, her blotchy, crimson, carmine face, and began to yell at Fin. “Homework?” she yelled, as if homework were Hitler. Or Fin were Hitler. Or she were Hitler. “
Homework?
At that pitiful excuse for a school, that overblown kindergarten?” Her eyes were slits in her swollen face. Lady had never yelled at him before. She looked like a monster. She sounded like a witch.

“So what’d you even send me there for?” he yelled back. She had startled him, scared him. And the dog. “Why’d you send me to that kindergarten?” She’d insulted him, too. “Huh? Why?” he yelled over Gus’s high hysterical yelps.

“So you would never, ever have to do science homework on a beautiful spring afternoon.” Her voice and the dog’s voice rang together like ugly, jangling bells. “So you could do the things that are really important … So you could be fucking
free
.”

Fin knelt to hold the dog, to calm him down. To calm himself down. To make Lady stop yelling.

“Sorry,” said Lady. Quietly. “Sorry, Fin.”

“You’re nuts,” he said.

“I know,” she said. “But he really is a fucker.” And she went upstairs to her room.

Fin sat on the floor with his arms around Gus. Babies. Hateful, babbling babies. They wore dirty diapers and smelled and could not say what they wanted. They made Lady angry. And she didn’t even have one. “I will never have a baby,” he said softly to Gus. Boys don’t. Boys are free. And he thought of the stray dog he and Gus had seen on one of their walks by the river. He had tried to pet it, to catch it and take it home to feed it. When he told Lady about the dog, she said, “At least he’s free.”

*   *   *

The Saturday after Lady yelled, she suggested she and Fin go to a museum together. “Just the two of us.”

“What about your allergies?”

“Pills and sunglasses. The answer to many of life’s challenges.”

Fin usually played baseball with Henry James on the weekends, going uptown to their apartments, one or the other’s. They lived a few blocks from each other on Park Avenue. They would meet, then march off to the baseball field in Central Park and play, a three-man team matched against itself. But that Saturday he and Lady took the bus up to the Museum of Modern Art, to the Op Art exhibit.

Lady kept her sunglasses on in the museum. “And I thank my lucky stars I’ve got them. Good Lord. It’s an assault.”

Fin spun around in a circle. He loved it. It was tricky art. Glossy. Impersonal. Fast. Black-and-white. Clean and glaring.

“Showy,” Lady said. “By show-offs. Let’s go get doughnuts.”

They went to Chock full o’Nuts, where a man who would have been handsome if he hadn’t had that odd roll of flesh on the back of his neck between his shirt collar and his hairline flipped open his lighter and held the flame up to Lady’s cigarette.

Fin stared at his neck roll uncontrollably.

“I saw you at the museum,” the man said to Lady. “I’m a painter, you see.”

Oh, we see, thought Fin. He tried to catch Lady’s eye. But the sunglasses, the huge sunglasses, kept her distant.

“You probably know Biffi,” Fin said. “Biffi Deutsch. He’s a dealer.”

“I have no use for dealers,” said the artist.

A fraud, a complete phony, as suspected. Though his shoes were freckled with paint. Maybe he was a housepainter.

“Biffi specializes in illuminated manuscripts,” Fin said.

“The past,” said the “artist.” Did he sneer?

Lady hadn’t said a word. She sipped her coffee.

“What are your interests?” Fin asked the housepainter.

“The present,” said the man.

He ignored Fin then. Sat on Lady’s other side, asked what she thought of the exhibit. She stubbed out her cigarette, slowly.

Just get it over with, Fin thought. He’ll ask you for your number and you’ll look surprised. In fact, you’ll be surprised. Why? I’m never surprised. But you are. Genuinely. Every time.

Lady spoke at last. She found the exhibit simplistic but entertaining.

The housepainter said, on the contrary, the show was revolutionary.

And Lady sighed wearily and said, “Oh, that again.”

Fin ate his doughnut placidly now. No need to participate further. No phone numbers would be exchanged. Not after “revolutionary.”

The housepainter eventually came to the same conclusion and went on his way, never having ordered so much as a cup of coffee, to the annoyance of the girl behind the counter, who said, “What a drip.”

Lady laughed, said, “Ain’t it the truth,” and gave the girl an extra half dollar.

“‘What am I to do?’”
she sang gaily in her Marlene Dietrich voice.
“‘I can’t help it.’”

But she could help it. Fin knew it. He wondered why Lady didn’t know it, too. Men clustered to her like moths around a flame. And the flame wanted them there, needed them there. They were a kind of fuel. They singed their poor, battered white wings. And Lady glowed and shone.

“Ha ha,” he said.

He took Lady’s hand in his and squeezed it. He looked at her and smiled. He was as tall as she was now. When had that happened?

He said, “I’m as tall as you are.”

He loved her so much, loved even her cruelty, which was not cruelty at all, really. Just fear and confusion. He could see it in her eyes sometimes. No one knew but him. And Mabel, maybe. What was she afraid of? Getting old? Getting married? Not getting married? Losing her glowing looks or her fiery freedom? Which? Maybe all of them.

“When I grow up…” he said.

But Lady interrupted him. “No, God, don’t ever do that, Fin. Not ever.”

What, like Peter Pan? Played by a woman hauled around the stage on wires? He had watched it every year on TV with his mother.

“When I grow up…” he said again.

“I forbid it!” said Lady. She was laughing, holding his hand, swinging her arm so that he had to swing his, too. She began to run. The sidewalk on Fifty-first Street was crowded. People stared at them. People always stared at them.

“Where are we running?” Fin said, running beside her. He was laughing, too.

“Away,” said Lady. “Where else?”

They ended up running home, or at least walking there. Whenever Fin complained that he was tired, Lady would grab his hand and start running again.

He lay in bed that night replaying the day, the flashy art, the man with the neck roll, the waitress, the doughnut, the journey downtown. Lady was never the same. How did it feel to be never the same? Yet a day with her was as predictable as a calendar. How could that be? He thought, Because I know how people react to her, but I never know how she will react, to anything.

“If you don’t push it, what’s the point?”

It had been one year since Fin’s mother died, one year since coming to New York City to live with Lady. He’d been an orphan for one year. It felt like ten.

They went back home to Connecticut on the anniversary of Lydia Hadley’s death, a lovely, gentle Saturday in May. Fin sat in the same seat, in the same little Karmann Ghia convertible, the same Lady beside him at the wheel, darting from lane to lane, honking back at the truck drivers who honked at her, the same Gus in the backseat, his head poking out, his ears pushed back by the wind.

Just a different direction. Everything turned around. A turned-around Fin.

Lady was always happy when she was driving. “It makes me feel as though I actually have someplace to go,” she once said. She pulled across two lanes and whipped off the thruway at exit 18. “Ice cream for lunch,” Lady said. “Carvel!”

They had cones dipped in chocolate, Brown Bonnets.

“Who would wear a brown bonnet, though?” Lady said when they were back on the road. “What a sad bonnet that would be.”

Fin didn’t have much to say. He was looking at the sumac that grew along the thruway. It was so familiar. He didn’t sit in his room on Charles Street or walk along Eighth Street or stare out the window in school and think, I miss the stalks of sumac that grow alongside the New England Thruway. But he had missed the sumac, anyway. Just hadn’t realized it.

They pulled into his driveway. What else had he missed that he didn’t know he missed? The apple blossoms were out and perfumed the air. And there was that other smell of spring, the wet, green smell. And the sound of the peepers. And a red-winged blackbird. He was almost dizzy with the sounds around him, with the scent of hay, with the dry, hot dirt in the driveway and the warm animal presence of the cows. Moo, moo, that’s what Tyler had taunted him with, a drunk Tyler. Moo, moo. He laughed suddenly. Moo, moo. The cows were mooing. Tyler could stagger down the street and taunt him all he wanted, but cows still said moo, moo, and no one could ever change that.