Fin & Lady: A Novel (17 page)

“Moo!” he said, turning to Lady.

Gus jumped out of the car and Fin followed. The dog rolled in the grass, his legs sticking up, kicking. Fin wished he could roll in the grass and kick his legs. But here came Mr. Cornelius, the music teacher.

“Welcome home, my liege,” said Mr. Cornelius, who always was a little weird. He bowed.

Fin bowed back. Then—he didn’t mean to, he just did it—Fin hugged Mr. Cornelius. Then, and again he didn’t mean to, he burst into tears.

Mr. Cornelius, who might have been odd but was used to children, said, “You’re as tall as I am.” Which wasn’t saying much, as he couldn’t have been more than five foot six, but was saying it at exactly the right time and in exactly the right tone of voice.

Lady took Fin to the cemetery. He had picked wild roses, three bunches, one for his grandfather, one for his grandmother, and one for his mother. The blossoms were small, fragrant and white, except for one rose that had a faint pink blush. He put that, last and alone, on his mother’s headstone. He cried and didn’t care if Lady saw.

They had dinner that evening in his grandparents’ dining room, which Mr. Cornelius had not changed in any way. Fin half expected his mother to come in from the kitchen with dessert. He half expected her at every turn he took, expecting his grandparents with the other half. And knowing, with the whole of himself, that they were gone, absent, missing, that the house full of their possessions and memories was empty.

The cows were just the same: cows. Their nostrils were wet. They chewed rhythmically, like machines with hot, grassy breath. You could lean your head against their flanks and hear their breathing and internal rumbling. Their tails flicked at the flies. Their eyes rolled as they followed your movements. He sat in the barn and marveled at their shifting feet, their calm.

Lady found him there, sitting on a bale of straw. “Do you miss them?” she said. She pushed him a little, made room, and sat next to him. “Do you miss all this a lot?”

“Every day,” Fin said. “Well, every day I remember to. But sometimes I forget, which is worse.”

“Do you want us to move back? To live here?”

Fin thought, Yes! Yes, I want to go back. But then he realized he couldn’t, not really. There was no back to go to. The only ones left were Darlington, Daisy, Burgo, and Fleur, the cows. Not his mother or grandmother or grandfather. Just a house, a barn, and four cows chewing their endless cud. Anyway, what would Lady do here? He tried to imagine her on the little farm in the little town. She would run around and around until she turned into butter, like the tigers in “Little Black Sambo,” which was prejudiced, anyway.

“No,” he said. “Then I would miss New York.”

“Thank God,” Lady said. “This town is for the birds.”

He slept in his old bed in his old room. There was nothing of his in it anymore. It was just a small bare room at the back of the house. But he could close his eyes and hear the mockingbird and picture the raccoon staring at the garbage can, trying to outwit it, and there was the creak of a floorboard, the flush of the toilet, and the soft panting of the big dog asleep on the floor beside his bed. Fin was home in a home that was immediate and real, in a home that did not really exist.

The next day he went around on his old bicycle, the one he had long since outgrown, and looked for his friends. He found some on the school baseball field. When he told them about New York, about his house there, about his bizarre school, about his friends Henry and James and Phoebe, they laughed and exclaimed at the right parts, and they told him about the boy who cut off his finger in shop and the teenager who died diving into the pond. It was as if he had just slipped back into his old life. Like getting on his old bike.

By the time he got back to the house, Mr. Cornelius had fallen in love with Lady, and Lady was bored and ready to return to the city.

“Thank you for taking care of everything, Mr. Cornelius,” Fin said.

“You don’t have to worry about this place, Fin. I love it like it was my own.” He must have noticed Fin’s expression. “Which of course it is not. I see myself as the caretaker, you might say.”

Fin nodded. “Yes.” The caretaker. He liked that. The caretaker who would take care. “Thank you.”

“The guardian of the place, you could call it.”

“Guardian angel,” Lady said.

“Come back soon!” said the guardian angel.

Fin thought about the house and the pastures and cows for weeks, for months, afterward, but he never worried about the place. Mr. Cornelius had confided that, sometimes, he brought his guitar out to the barn and sang to the cows.

“It really has been quite a year,” Lady said on the drive back.

“It feels long and also short.”

“It does.”

The traffic came to a halt, and two ambulances passed them in the emergency lane.

“I have an announcement to make,” Lady said. “You know, since it’s been a year.”

In the car in front of them, a little girl stuck her tongue out, then pushed her face against the back window until she looked like a small pig. An announcement. Fin did not want to hear an announcement. He tried to breathe normally, but he was sure no air was really getting in. Or out. An announcement.

“You know how I said I have to get married before I turn twenty-five?”

Fin nodded. Yes, he knew, but her birthday had come and gone last month with no mention of the deadline and he had thought he was home free. The little girl in the car ahead pulled her ears to the sides and flapped them, then stuck her tongue out again. Another ambulance screamed by.

“Well, I’ve thought about it a lot,” she continued, “and I’ve thought about you, too, and what would be best for you.”

Why was she bringing this up now? What had happened?

The car in front of them jerked forward an inch, then a hand appeared and yanked the little girl away from the window and down to the seat. A police car passed them, its siren blaring. Gus began whimpering and slid through the bucket seats onto Fin’s lap. Fin could not look at Lady. But he blurted out, “You’re best for me.”

“It has been an adventure, hasn’t it?”

The sun was red and glaring over the long line of cars. The ambulance and police cars must have gotten where they were going—there was no sound of sirens now, though the lights still flashed, far ahead, beneath the fiery sun.

“I thought we were a family,” Fin said. “Not an adventure. A family.” The dog was panting, his breath hot. He licked Fin’s hand. He looked up at Fin the way dogs do, full of sympathy, baffled. “I like things just the way they are. Exactly, perfectly the way they are…” Fin was babbling, he knew it, but he couldn’t stop. “Nothing could be better in any way … I don’t care how old you are. Everything is perfect.”

“Really?” Lady said. She sounded surprised. She put her hand out and turned his head to face her. She looked so serious. “Thank you for saying that, Fin.” She turned back to the road as the traffic inched forward. “I mean, I always hope you’re happy. But how can anyone be sure of how anyone else feels?”

Fin never quite remembered what else she said. He hardly heard her. The sun was lower and the sky was streaked with lavender and orange. He remembered that. The blood rang in his ears. He remembered that. The fluff from the dog stuck to his lips as he leaned down to bury his face in Gus’s heavy coat. He remembered all of that. He heard Lady say, “I vowed I would be married by twenty-five, and I am a girl of my word,” and he sank lower in the seat. Which one would it be? It almost didn’t matter at this point. It sounded as if she were paying a bill.

But then he heard her say, “Well, vows are made to be broken, I always say. So I have decided to give myself an extension.”

Fin did not know the word “exultant” at that time. But if he had, he told me, that’s how he would have felt. “An extension!”

“An extension. Of one year. Which is pushing it. But if you don’t push it, what’s the point, right?”

The Three Musketeers

Did you know Evelyn Waugh’s first wife was also named Evelyn? Did you know the proofs of
Brideshead Revisited
were air-dropped to Evelyn Waugh in a cave in Yugoslavia during World War II? Did you know Evelyn Waugh parted his hair on the left? Fin did. He knew a lot of things from reading the obituary page. Yugoslavia, for example. He had not really known of Yugoslavia’s existence, much less that it was a place a British soldier might be stationed in World War II.

“But Yugoslavia does
not
actually exist,” Biffi told him.

“But…”

“The Balkans,” Biffi said. He shook his head sadly.

Another year had passed, and Lady, without too much fanfare, had given herself another extension on her deadline for matrimony. The three suitors now existed as an entity not unlike the Balkans, together, brooding, and suspicious. Biffi, Jack & Tyler, a trio of singers waiting to defect.

Biffi was both resigned and patient, as if he were back in Hungary waiting for the Russians to chase out the Germans, then waiting for someone, anyone, to please chase out the Russians. To Fin, he sometimes seemed to be besieging a walled city, the walled city of Lady, waiting and waiting until it ran out of food and water.

Jack was neither resigned nor patient. He was hearty and gung-ho. “He thinks I’m exotic,” Lady said. “And I’m a way to shock his parents.” He showed Lady off, which she had enjoyed at first. He liked to be with her in public, to be with her in the daytime when people could see her slender beauty in the sunlight. He played golf with her and tennis and took her riding and sailing and skiing.

“You make him sound like a gym class,” Fin said. But he understood that Jack was a relief for Lady, a physical being who asked nothing more than to be physically near her.

And then there was Tyler. His attentions seemed almost like revenge, and maybe it was as simple as that, maybe that turned Lady on, his almost open hostility, the danger of Tyler, the threat of his somehow outsmarting Lady, after all these years.

“He wants to own her,” Fin said.

“That’s what all men want,” Phoebe said.

“But what does Lady want?” he asked.

Phoebe chewed on a fingernail for a bit, then said, “Probably an orgasm.”

*   *   *

Lady became obsessed with Leonard Bernstein that year. She met him at a party in September, and went to hear the New York Philharmonic as often as possible. Mahler, Schönberg, Copland. The Verdi
Requiem
. Jacqueline du Pré. She tried to take Fin to the Young People’s Concerts on Sundays, but to his intense regret in later years, he refused, so Lady simply went to them alone. She knew everything about
The Magic Flute
.

Lady’s Bernstein Period, not surprisingly, overlapped with her politics, and on May 29, 1966, Fin, who refused to go to the Young People’s Concerts, happily joined Lady at her first sit-in. It was in the lobby of Dow Chemical’s sales office at Rockefeller Center. Fin wore a new corduroy jacket. One of the organizers, walking in an overly important way beside Lady, also wore a corduroy jacket. He wasn’t a boyfriend, yet. Lady had met him at a teach-in where everyone sat on the floor in a circle.

“Blech,” said Fin. “Sounds like my school.”

Joel. He looked young, and his light brown hair stood out like an afro. Fin asked him his age. He was twenty-two, young enough to be a student, but he was actually a dropout, a political activist, he said. And a journalist. “Alternative stuff,” he said vaguely.

“For
The Village Voice
?”

Joel shrugged a noncommital shrug.

“Did you know Edward R. Murrow died last year?” Fin asked.

“No.”

“Did you know he changed his name to Edward from Egbert in his sophomore year of college?”

“Are you a Fed or something?” Joel asked.

The sit-in was not very big. Fin had expected a huge crowd, but he counted twenty, twenty-one, including himself. There was a television camera, however, and reporters. He had counted a reporter as a demonstrator before he noticed the microphone. So, back to twenty.

The reporter, from a local news station, WPIX, put his microphone in front of Fin’s face and asked, “What brings you here, son?” The camera was on a tripod operated by a large man behind it.

“I read about napalm,” Fin said. The reporter’s eyes lit up. He hadn’t been expecting this. “It’s liquid fire. It sticks to you.”

Lady and Joel walked into the lobby and sat down on the shining marble floor. Lady patted the floor next to her, as if it were the sofa, and called, “Come on, Fin.”

“What’s your name, son?” the reporter asked.

“Fin Hadley.”

The police came, huge policemen, and offered to let everyone leave. A few people did get up, but not Joel, not Lady, and not Fin.

“Just go limp,” Lady said to Fin. “We’re nonviolent,” she said to the policeman who began to drag her away. “This is civil disobedience! Napalm kills!”

Fin waited to be dragged off himself, to let himself go limp as a policeman grabbed his arms and pulled him across the shiny floor. For a minute he thought it wouldn’t happen, that he was too young, that he would be ignored.

“Napalm kills!” he yelled.

An annoyed-looking policeman dutifully came and dragged him to the door. There he realized that the policeman would also have to drag him down the steps and over the rough sidewalk. He turned his head, looking for Lady. He did not want to be dragged down the marble steps, bump, bump, bump, like Winnie-the-Pooh. He twisted around now, wildly. Where was Lady? Or even Joel?

“I’m with my sister,” he called up to the policeman who held his arms.

“I don’t care if you’re with the Virgin Mary,” the policeman said, and Fin realized that the look on his face was not boredom at all but rage, controlled, simmering rage.

Inside the police station Fin still did not see Lady. He was being separated from the others, the policeman behind the desk said, because of his age. Was it that policeman who led him to a cell that was clammy and cold? And locked the cell? Or was it another? Was it the one who asked him the names of his parents? He didn’t know which policeman was which. He couldn’t tell. They were all big and all gruff. He tried to explain, to tell them he couldn’t call his mother or his father, that the only family he had was also dragged out of the Dow Chemical Building lobby. But that’s when he began to cry.