Fin & Lady: A Novel (21 page)

“Those are mixed metaphors.”

“Similes.”

“Luckily, Lady has gumption.”

Phoebe thought a lot of people had gumption that week. It was a word that had three consonants in a row. “What if you were French and had to learn how to pronounce ‘gumption’?” she said. “Goom-puh-tuh-ee-ow-nuh.”

Did Lady have goom-puh-tuh-ee-ow-nuh? She was quick on her feet, sure. She could dance like Muhammad Ali. She could dance and quip and defend herself against the ropes. But why was she in the ring at all? Fin had been dispatched as an eleven-year-old to find her a suitable husband. He had seen for some time now that such a thing did not exist. Not for Lady. She could fight them off too well.

“Why doesn’t she just tell them she does not love them and they should go away and leave her alone?”

“Because then,” Phoebe said, “she’d be alone.”

*   *   *

Fin told himself that Lady was trying to find love and freedom, both together, in her own eccentric way, and he had no right to say a word. He tried not to say a word. He tried hard. But the deadpan melodrama taking place in the living room never stopped, never let up, and when he found Lady alone one afternoon, before the suitors drifted in to take their places on the uncomfortable lounge chairs, he could not help himself. He said, “When normal, sane people refuse to marry other normal, sane people, they stop seeing each other.”

“How would you know?” Lady asked.

“I read books.”

“All I want is to be left alone,” Lady said.

“No, you don’t. That’s what you say. You always say you want freedom, you want to be alone, you want to get away.”

Lady was emptying ashtrays. “Slobs,” she said.

“Then you surround yourself with men you don’t love, and it’s like you keep them on a leash. But that means you’re stuck on the other end of the leash.”

“Please don’t lecture me, Fin. I’m so tired of people telling me what I want.”

“You’re scared of being on your own.”

“Seriously, Fin. Shut up.”

But Fin was just getting going. He followed her from the coffee table to the side table down the steps to the kitchen, then to the garbage can outside, where she emptied the ashes.

“You
want
to be tied down or you’ll be by yourself, and then you think you’ll just float away.
That’s
pathetic, Lady. That’s what’s pathetic. Not being single. Not being twenty-seven. But that.”

Lady slammed the lid on the garbage. “You’re just like everyone else, you know that? Just exactly like everybody else.” She said it in a normal tone of voice; she turned back to the kitchen and went inside at her normal pace, all of which infuriated Fin. Didn’t she hear him? Didn’t she get what was happening? Didn’t she want to be free at all?

“And you never go anywhere, either,” he yelled after her. “You’re a coward. And a fake. And a … an old maid to boot!”

Then he took a walk, the kind of walk he had taken when he first came to the Village. It was odd, walking along the narrow streets with Gus. He tried to retrace his steps, to find that aimless anxious curiosity, the sense that the closed-in streets were a new world, an endless one. But they were just streets now, streets filled with other kids, older kids drawn to Greenwich Village from all kinds of places, looking for whatever they were looking for and looking scruffy and a little stunned. They stared at the dog, the great white-ruffed collie prancing past, and then they glanced at Fin. Not that long ago, Fin had been one of them, a kid from somewhere. Now he was just another New Yorker.

He took a walk the next day and the next, just to get out of the house where the suitors were drinking up Lady’s liquor, eating her crackers and cheese and potato chips. He walked farther and farther, to the Bowery, to the East River, to Chinatown, to Wall Street. Lady was just the same, he thought. Not paying any attention to what he said. The days were getting longer, you could see the sun set over the river, slowly, excruciatingly slowly, hovering in the sky, turning it orange, a burning orange, threatening never to set, like Lady with her suitors. And then, suddenly, the sky would turn gray, the sun would disappear, just like that. Just like Lady.

She disappeared on her twenty-eighth birthday, April 1, 1968. I haven’t mentioned her birthday was April Fools’ Day, have I? Well, it was. And she was nowhere to be found.

Fin was in his room with Henry James that day. A lazy Monday afternoon. They were listening to the Mothers of Invention and getting high. Henry and James no longer looked alike. Henry had grown tall, and James had not. But they were always together, and the nickname stuck. They got hungry and clattered down the stairs.

“I know what you’re up to,” Mabel said. “And it’s nothing good.”

Fin looked in the freezer. Pound cake. “Are we saving this?” he asked Mabel.

“Help yourselves,” Mabel said. “Eat Miss Lady out of house and home.”

Fin was already slicing through the cake. “Where is Lady, anyway?”

“Probably burning her draft card,” Mabel said.

James started laughing, then Henry, then Fin. They couldn’t stop.

Mabel might have cracked a smile, Fin wasn’t sure. The part he did remember was going out with Henry James, walking around the Village, playing on a swing set in a school playground, walking them to the subway, coming home and knocking on Lady’s bedroom door.

No answer.

He wanted to play her a new song he’d learned on the guitar. The Carter Family’s “Single Girl, Married Girl.” There was a verse in which the single girl stays in bed till one, while the married girl has to get up with the sun. Lady would like that. He wasn’t sure about the verses with the annoying, noisy baby who interfered with the joy of living—maybe she would realize how lucky she was to have skipped the baby part and to have gotten a kid when he was already eleven years old and knew how to dress himself and eat without dribbling and who went to the toilet on his own, but maybe the song would just make her sad. There was a part of Fin that was still trying to please Lady, the same part that had tried so hard to please her when he first came to live with her. Of course, everyone tried to please Lady. There was that way she had of being so openly delighted when you succeeded, of looking so overwhelmingly happy. Joy—that was the word. She would smile her wide, horsey smile of joy. If you gave her a raspberry, the plumpest, reddest raspberry from the Jefferson Market. Or if you made her a cup of tea when she was sick with a cold, and you poured whiskey in it, and floated a slice of lemon on top. Of if you thanked her for a book. Or if you sang her a song.

Fin knocked on her door. But Lady didn’t answer.

Where was she? She should be home. They were having fried chicken, Mabel said. Mabel said Lady especially wanted fried chicken for her birthday. Fin had left his present for her on her bed. She must have seen it by now.

“Lady,” he called, knocking again.

Okay. She wasn’t home yet.

No big deal.

He went up to his room and … and what? Daydreamed, he guessed. Because there he was, sitting on the edge of the bed, and the clock said forty-five minutes had passed.

He went downstairs to the main floor. No Lady in the living room. He went down to the kitchen. “Lady come home yet?” he asked Mabel.

Mabel shook her head.

“Maybe she’s staying out tonight.”

Mabel shook her head again. She held up a chicken leg she’d been rinsing. “She’ll be here for this.”

Fin went back upstairs. He was reading
Manchild in the Promised Land
, occasionally taking time off to read
Treasure Island
. He found them oddly similar. A boy in a world of selfish, crazy, violent, colorful adults.

Back upstairs to Lady’s room, because what if she’d been asleep before? He knocked again. No answer again. “Lady,” he said, his voice sounding odd to him.

What was he worried about? He didn’t know. Just an emptiness in the house, a hollowness. Because what if she was lying in her room? Dying? Or dead. He used to think that sometimes when he was little, think that she had died and left him, the way everyone else had. He would get up out of bed sometimes, to check on her. She didn’t know, she slept like the dead, that’s what she said.
Like
the dead was okay, he used to think. Dead was not. He would stand by her bed and try to hear her breathing. He would stand there for what seemed like an hour, worrying. And then, one night, he couldn’t help it; he called her name, “Lady! Lady!” and she sat up and gathered him in her arms. Another time he opened the door and there was someone in bed with her and he never opened the door again. Just stood outside, the way Gus sometimes did.

“Lady!” he called now, and pushed open the door. Maybe someone would be in bed with her. Maybe she would be dead on the floor.

She wasn’t dead on the floor. There wasn’t anyone at all in the bed. The room was empty. The last light slanted through the window, rich and yellow. The bed was smooth, Lady’s lavender velvet bedspread undisturbed. Except for one thing. An envelope leaning against the pillows. A pale blue envelope. You couldn’t see it, but it had Lady’s name and address engraved on the back. Fin knew, because that box of pale blue envelopes and pale blue stationery was what he had given Lady for her birthday. On the front of the envelope “FIN” was written in big capital letters. In Lady’s rich purple ink. Fin had given her that, too. For Christmas. She used a fountain pen that had been her mother’s. It was silver, engraved. Sometimes she wore it on a long silver chain around her neck. Fin opened the envelope, pulling out a piece of the pale blue stationery. “Lady Hadley” said the top of the sheet of thick blue paper. “Lady Hadley” in beautiful script that Fin had picked out. “Gone to Capri,” said the bottom of the sheet of paper. In Lady’s thin, tilty purple script. “Gone to Capri.”

“Mabel,” he cried. “Mabel, Mabel…”

She ran up the stairs from the kitchen. She read the note and made soft disapproving sounds.

Fin followed her into the kitchen. The summer sun was even lower now, blocked by the brownstones across the street. The kitchen was dim. Wax paper lay across the table, a pile of flour on it.

“She ran away,” Mabel said. She absentmindedly sprinkled some pepper on the flour. “She ran away from home. Now, why did she do that? Miss Lady is not eighteen years old.”

Yes, she is, Fin thought. “She didn’t really run away,” he said. “Did she?”

Mabel looked at him across the table. Yes, said her look. And we both know it. “She’ll be back,” she said.

Lady must have gone on a ship; she would never fly, flying terrified her. Eight days on a ship. Even if she went and turned around and came back, that would be sixteen days, and she wasn’t going to turn around and come back. She would take a ferry to the isle of Capri and sit in the piazzetta, she would smoke a cigarette and drink a coffee, she would smile at an Italian woman and call out to her in Italian. He could picture it so vividly. Lady. The sun. The buildings washed by the sun. Lady lit by the sun. The sky alive with the sun. Only one thing was missing. He was missing. Fin was missing, a little boy running into her arms.

“What do we do?” he said.

“What do we do,” Mabel repeated softly, a chant, no question in her voice, and so no answer. “What do we do…”

“She ran away from the suitors,” Fin said. She ran away from me, he thought.

Mabel washed her hands and dialed Biffi’s number. “She asked me to make fried chicken. Then she left,” she said into the phone. “She didn’t come back. She left a note. It says she’s gone off to Capri in Italy. Just like the last time…”

Fin sat at the table and watched Mabel cook the chicken, watched her roll it in flour, pour corn oil into the heavy black skillet, place the pieces of chicken in it. He listened to the squeak and sizzle of the pieces of chicken frying.

“Don’t you worry,” she murmured with each movement. “I’m here. I’m not going anywhere. I’m here…”

By the time Biffi got there, the chicken was done, brown and crispy, lying, piece by piece, on paper towel spread across a platter. Fried chicken was the meal Lady and Fin liked best of all the meals Mabel cooked. Fin and Mabel were sitting at the table, the platter of chicken between them. “No one’s going to eat you tonight,” Mabel said to the chicken. “No appetite for you tonight.”

Poor chicken, Fin thought. You died for nothing.

“This is unbelievable,” Biffi said. “Even for Lady.”

“It’s my fault,” Fin said. He had lectured her. He told her she never went anywhere. He said he was sick of her, that she was a coward and an old maid.

“Certainly not,” said Biffi.

“Then it’s your fault. Why couldn’t you just let things be the way they were?”

Biffi spent the night, on the couch, as if he and Lady were married and had had a fight.

*   *   *

The next morning Biffi was still sprawled on his back on the couch in the living room, a glass of what looked like Scotch on the coffee table beside him.

“Hello,” Fin said.

Biffi turned his eyes from the ceiling to look at Fin.

He lifted the glass in an unenthusiastic salute.

“Where is She now, do you think?” Fin asked. Sometimes they liked to refer to Lady as She with a capital
S
. They both said it in conspiratorial tones, raising one eyebrow. “Which ship? Won’t She send a telegram or something?”

“Life is bitter, Fin. Remember that always.”

Fin said, “Why are you here? Don’t you have to go fight an unjust war or something?”

“That is beneath you, Fin.”

That was when the doorbell rang. Fin ran to answer it, because maybe she’d come back, without her keys, which would be just like Lady.

“Salutations.”

It was Tyler.

“She’s not here,” Fin said. “She ran away.”

“I know,” he said. He pushed past Fin.

“Salutations, brother,” he said to Biffi.

Biffi said nothing.

“I come bearing tidings from the runaway.”

“Why did she get in touch with you?” Fin said. “It makes no sense.”

“Ah,” Biffi said with a sigh. “Sense.” He shook his head. He reeked of Scotch.

Tyler took a telegram out of his pocket and read: “‘Sorry. Not good at goodbye. Pay bills.’”