Fin & Lady: A Novel (22 page)

“That’s it?” Fin asked.

“No. Sadly. It goes on: ‘Take Fin to see farm. Will send for Fin end of June.’”

Biffi stood up. “If telegrams are arriving, I will go home for mine.”

“She sent me one for you, too,” Tyler said.

“To you? For me? She is infuriating.” She could never remember Biffi’s address.

Tyler reached in his jacket for the square yellow telegram.

Fin watched him remove it from his inside pocket, watched him hand it to Biffi, but it all seemed unreal.

“What about Gus?” he said. A sudden panic.

“No telegram for Gus.”

“I mean, when I go there, when she sends for me. Does Gus go on the plane?”

Tyler shrugged.

Mabel had come upstairs, and Tyler gave her the first telegram. She muttered what might have been “Lord have mercy,” but Fin hardly heard her. He hardly heard Biffi reading the second telegram.

“‘Stay alive. For me.’”

“Did I get one? Did Mabel get one?” Fin asked.

“Stay alive for me? That is very dramatic. This is all very dramatic of her,” Biffi said, crumpling his telegram.

Gus sensed something was up and moved uneasily among them, giving someone a poke now and then to get them in line.

“I don’t want to go to the farm with you,” Fin said to Tyler. “I want Lady to come home.” He knelt next to the dog and laid his head against Gus’s soft ear.

Mabel knelt down beside Fin and put her arms around him. “You’re a good boy, you hear me? I told Miss Lady she was lucky to find you.”

“You never told me that.”

“It was none of your business. But now it is.”

“She can’t make me go to the farm with Tyler. She can’t.”

Biffi was saying, “What if I choose not to stay alive? Eh? That would show her some things or two.”

“No argument from me,” said Tyler. To Fin or to Biffi? It was unclear.

When Jack arrived, no one was really surprised. He had gotten a yellow telegram, too. “Where did she go? She just wrote, ‘Don’t forget me. But let me go.’”

“She’s having a nervous breakdown,” Fin said. “Can’t you see? We can’t just let her go off like this.”

Mabel said, “Am I to understand that you gentlemen are staying for dinner?”

Yes, she was to understand that. They stayed, and they returned, night after night, for seven nights, until the first telegram from Capri arrived.

“Don’t try to find me. I need to breathe.”

“She wants you to go after her,” Phoebe said to Fin. “That’s why she said not to. She wants someone to rescue her, like you and your father and mother did. It’s a psychological manifestation.”

“Of what?”

“How should I know? I’m not a mind reader.”

The suitors continued to hang around. They arrived, all three, at about six, settled themselves in the living room, and read their papers and argued amiably, as if they were in an old-fashioned men’s club.

“Well, my father says not to worry,” Tyler was saying. “He knows a shrink who can get me out. People like us don’t have to go—Lady was right.”

“Lady was wrong,” Biffi said, puffing on his pipe. “People like us ought to go.”

“Shorty, make us a pitcher of martinis, would you?” Jack said to Fin.

“No. I owe martini fealty to only one master. And she is gone.”

“Christ, you’re a pain in the ass. Since the minute I met you, you’ve been nothing but a pain in my ass.”

“Then my work has been successful.” Fin bowed.

“Fresh little brat, isn’t he?”

Tyler said, “He’s part of the package, Jack. Better make your peace with the kid.”

“Yeah? Well, when I was a kid, kids went to boarding school.”

“You’re not a kid anymore,” Fin said. “And this is my house, and I think you should all get out of my house.”

“No one’s going anywhere, sport,” said Tyler.

And indeed no one did. The suitors ate at the house on Charles Street. They drank at the house on Charles Street. And if they drank enough, they frequently slept at the house on Charles Street. Sometimes Fin sat with them. He wasn’t sure which was worse: the anger he felt at himself for forcing Lady to run away or the anger he felt at the suitors for forcing her to run away.

“I didn’t mean this to happen,” Fin said while they all sat at the dining-room table. You’re a fake, he had said. You’re a hypocrite. You’re an old maid. How could he have said those things? He’d driven her away.

Mabel had made meat loaf and mashed potatoes and string beans. The meat loaf was enormous and sat there on its platter like a hunched animal.

“It’s not your fault,” Biffi said. He reached for the knife to cut the meat loaf, but Tyler grabbed it first.

“Well, it’s not your fault, that’s for sure,” Tyler said. “You’re leaving town. She didn’t need to get away from you. She needed to get away from me. I was the one putting so much pressure on her. But if I could just see her, talk to her…”

“You?” Jack said. “She already ran away from you once. No, it was me. It’s all my fault. I drove her to this.”

Mabel had come into the room with a bowl of salad. She slammed it on the table. Leaves of lettuce flew into the air, then landed safely back in the bowl. “No wonder she ran away.”

The three men looked a little startled. Then Biffi said, “You are upset, Mabel. So are we all. We all miss Lady.”

“Just continue your discussion, all about what you need, what you did, never a thought to that poor girl, what she needs. You just eat your dinners at her dinner table and feel sorry for yourselves. Nothing’s changed. You just go right ahead.”

“Should we fire her?” Tyler said when she’d gone.

“She doesn’t work for you,” Fin said. “So you can’t.”

And they continued eating and quarreling in comfortable acrimony.

On the day before Biffi had to leave, he arrived at the house earlier than the others, and he had his mother with him.

“I’m being sent to Crete,” he said.

“Not Vietnam?”

“No. My language skills prefer me to Crete.”

“No wonder we’re losing the war.”

“You are too young to be so cynical, but I forgive you. My mother is coming to stay with you. I have arranged everything. She will look after you until you leave to be with your sister.”

Mrs. Deutsch gripped a white paper bag in her tiny hand. Fin wondered if it was the same paper bag as the one she’d had in Wellfleet. The pastries must be really stale now. Two cases of champagne were delivered minutes after her arrival.

“A going-away toast,” she said, “to my son, who should know better,” and she swallowed a glass of warm champagne.

“We will drink champagne and toast my Biffi every day, yes?” said Mrs. Deutsch. “You will read to me Colette. Such days! A fête, every day a fête.” Then she began to cry.

Biffi put his arms around his little mother.

“Take care of her, please,” he said to Fin.

“Where’s your uniform?” Fin said.

Biffi shrugged and said, “Soon enough.”

“Too soon,” wailed Mrs. Deutsch. “Too soon.”

Biffi spoke to her in Hungarian, then hugged Fin. “You will look after each other,” he said. He said it as a question.

Fin said, “Good luck.”

Biffi held out his hand. Fin grasped it, shook hands, and found, when he pulled his hand back, a wad of twenty-dollar bills there.

“Whoa.”

“For emergencies.”

After Biffi had gone, Fin took Mrs. Deutsch up to his room. He had a small safe, a toy really, that Mirna had given him as a twelfth-birthday present. He kept his stash of grass there when he had any, but it was empty at the moment. He convinced Mrs. Deutsch to lock her paper bag of “medicinals” there.

“See?” he said, as if he were talking to a little kid. “I’m putting my money there. So you can put your paper bag there, too. For safekeeping.”

She closed the little door with a sigh of satisfaction and turned the red combination lock. “Now,” she said, “if only my son could be as safe.”

She went back to the living room to crochet and drink champagne and cry.

Fin sat on his bed and tried to ignore the weight of the emptiness he sensed everywhere in the house. Lady was gone. Biffi was gone. He looked out the window at the gardens of his neighbors, strangers. A cat walked delicately across a brick wall. There were three robins poking for worms in the dirt. The sky was a flat powdery blue. He wondered what the sky was like in Capri right at this moment, in Crete, in Vietnam. He went downstairs and found Mabel and asked her if she knew Biffi had left his mother with them.

“Yes,” she said. “Not quite what I was expecting. But then nothing ever is.”

Mirna called that night.

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

“Very funny.”

“She did. On a ship. To Capri. She left a note.”

“Oy.”

“Yup.”

“Are you … okay?” Mirna said in her Mirna voice.

“No.”

Mirna was silent a moment. “Oy,” she said again. “Fin, you’ll come stay with me. Until Lady comes home. She’ll come home soon. I have a couch. It pulls out.”

Stay with Mirna? Good grief. But he was touched that she would ask. She hated people in her apartment. They cluttered it up, she said. With themselves. “It’s okay,” he said. “Mrs. Deutsch is staying here. Biffi brought her. We are babysitting for each other. And Mabel’s here. Except she has to go home every night because she has a family. Did you know she has a family? She never mentioned it before. She has a sister with diabetes and two cats. And her son and his wife live two blocks away from her and they have two babies, a girl and a boy. I never knew any of that until Lady ran away. So I’m glad Lady ran away. Because now I know Mabel better. She’s a grandmother. Do you know I didn’t even know her last name? It’s Sparks.”

He hung up.

“Mabel,” he said, finding her in the kitchen, “Mirna invited me to stay with her. But I said no thank you.”

“I’m thinking of throwing Miss Lady across my knee when she comes back.”

“You could come to Italy when she sends for me. Then you wouldn’t have to wait as long. Except you have a whole family here.”

“That’s the truth.”

“Lady is my family.”

“That’s the sad truth.”

*   *   *

The sad truth was everywhere that spring, an enormous sad truth, bigger than Fin’s. It filled the days and the nights and the street and the country and the world. Martin Luther King was assassinated. There were half a million U.S. troops in Vietnam.

Mrs. Deutsch was miserable, her son having gone off in the service of what she called a second-tier imperial nation. Fin was miserable, too, his sister having gone off the deep end, and they suited each other just fine. They sat upstairs after dinner watching television, something Lady would never have done. They both liked
Bonanza
.

Downstairs, lurking, were the two remaining suitors.

It occurred to Fin that Biffi had assigned his mother to baby-sitting duty not so she could look after Fin or so that Fin could look after her, but so she could look after his own marital interests.

Sometimes Fin was so angry at Lady that he had to literally walk it off. An hour, two, three hours’ walk in the lengthening afternoons. He would compose angry letters to Lady in his head. You left me with a crabby, senile Hungarian lush, a superannuated high school prom king, and a rat-pack impersonator. How could you?

Did he use those words? Not then, not striding through the streets in a fury. He used those words later, years later, when he tried to explain how angry he’d been and how, after taking one of these walks of wrath, he would think of a horse, a wild horse, a mustang, no, a thoroughbred, prancing, eyes rolled back, nostrils flared, backing away, its head high, and that vision of that horse would make him think of Lady and of her suitors and of her ward, him, and of life itself, and he would think, Of course she ran away, what else could she possibly do?

He did write to her. Real letters. He told her what was happening in school, which was not much. He told her that he still went to the silent peace vigils. He told her about Tyler and Jack inhabiting her house on Charles Street, drinking her Scotch. He told her Mrs. Deutsch was babysitting, that she still had her paper bag of jewelry, that she had arrived with two cases of champagne, which she’d almost polished off already. He told her the wisteria was blooming. He told her to come home.

The
Odyssey

First shalt thou reach the Sirens; they the hearts

Enchant of all who on their coast arrive.

The copy of the
Odyssey
arrived two weeks before school ended, two weeks before the telegram summoning Fin to Capri. “The Sirens lived here,” Lady wrote in a note tucked into the book. “On Capri.” Where she’d found it, an English translation, in Italy, she did not say. But it arrived on a Tuesday and was waiting for him in the living room when he got home from school.

“A classic,” said Mrs. Deutsch. “By János Arany.”

“It’s by Homer, I think, Mrs. Deutsch.”

“In Hungarian, it is by János Arany.”

“So he’s, like, the translator?”

“I read it in Hungarian. Therefore it is by János Arany.”

Fin liked Mrs. Deutsch. Her occasional bursts of gaiety and underlying melancholy reminded him of Biffi. He missed Biffi terribly, almost as much as he missed Lady. Mrs. Deutsch liked to check the safe each night before she went to bed. Fin would open it and extract the bag of jewels and old, rock-hard cookies, and her delight at finding them there, just as she left them, surprised Fin every time. The sigh she gave, a soft puff of air, as if she’d been punched, lightly; the smile, small and secret, the relief in her eyes were the same every night, and every night Fin felt strangely protective of her, paternal, strong, and tender.

“János Arany was a great poet,” she continued. “Shakespeare is the János Arany of English.”

“I guess you miss Hungary.”

“No,” she said. She shook her head. “No. I miss the past.”

Tyler took Fin to Connecticut, as requested by Lady. The dog came, too. He was going to stay with Mr. Cornelius, the music teacher, while Fin was away.

“Turned out not to be such a bad idea, holding on to your Connecticut property,” Tyler said. “Real estate keeps going up, sport.”