Fin & Lady: A Novel (23 page)

“Are you referring to my ancestral home? And all the chattel therein?”

“Oh brother.”

“When you say ‘brother,’ are you referring to my blood tie to Lady Hadley?”

After that there was silence in the car for an hour or so. Then, from Tyler: “What have you got against me? Exactly?”

Fin thought for a minute. “I’m not sure, actually.”

“Just chemistry, huh?”

“I guess.”

“You excited about going to Capri?”

Fin thought about that for a minute, too.

“It would be better if Lady just came back,” he said.

“We agree on something, then.”

Fin tried to read the
Odyssey
, knowing it would somehow annoy Tyler, but he immediately felt carsick and closed the book. It annoyed Tyler, anyway—he gave a dismissive grunt—and Fin was content.

Fin stared in front of him, waiting for the carsickness to pass. Why
did
he hate Tyler? Because he wore an ascot? Yes. Because he was in control of everything Fin had? Yes. Because he wanted to be in control of Lady? Yes, that most of all.

“No one can control Lady,” Fin said aloud.

Tyler emitted his small, sarcastic laugh. “Even Lady can’t control Lady.”

“She’s free,” Fin said. “That’s all.”

“Yeah,” Tyler said. “Right. Free as a bird.” Again that laugh. Then: “A vulture.”

“So why do you stick around? If she’s such a vulture?”

“I like getting my eyes pecked out. Don’t you?”

“Ha ha.”

Silence for a while. Not real silence, the roar of the road was loud enough, but human silence. And in the silence, Tyler seemed almost human, too, unhappy and human. Fin shook off the sensation. Don’t go soft on Tyler now, after all these years, he told himself. Do not fall for this pretense of humanity. But then, in a voice that was, indeed, soft, he found himself asking, “Why do you stick around, really?”

Now it was Tyler who took a while to respond. “I don’t know exactly,” he said at last. He gave Fin a quick smile, then turned back to the road. “Chemistry?” he said. “Bad, bad chemistry.”

They stopped at a Carrols and had cheeseburgers and French fries.

“One for the cur?” Tyler asked, and Gus got to have his own hamburger, which made Fin almost like Tyler. The car smelled of hamburger grease.

“She’s just so damn inconsistent,” Tyler said when they got back on the thruway.

“That is her charm,” Fin imitated Biffi’s voice and immediately felt disloyal.

“Now he’s an odd one,” Tyler said. “How are you doing with the mother?”

“We watch TV. She taught Mabel to make something disgusting with sour cream.” He didn’t mention the paper bag of jewels and stale cookies.

“She makes me nervous, prowling around all night,” Tyler said.

“Maybe you make her nervous,” Fin said. “Hanging around all night.”

“Touché, kid.”

And there was silence again.

Tyler drove fast, faster even than Lady. He didn’t slow down when they turned off the thruway, either. Slow down! Fin thought, but he wouldn’t give Tyler the satisfaction of saying it. Slow down! I’m sorry I said you hang out all the time at our house, even though you do, I’m sorry, I’m sorry, just slow down. Instead, Fin gripped the door handle. They were going to hit a deer, they would squash a rabbit, the car would skid into an oak tree and flatten like an accordion, like a car in a cartoon.

The car stopped in the familiar driveway, a sudden jerky stop that stirred the dust.

There was the house, newly painted. There was the barn, still peeling dark red paint. He heard a cow.

“Calling your name,” Tyler said.

Fin wondered, suddenly, for the first time in all the years that he’d known Tyler, what it was like to be Tyler. Not what it was like to be with Tyler, not what it was like to watch Tyler with Lady or Mabel or Biffi or Jack. But what it was like to be Tyler Morrison, not married, jokey and sarcastic and dapper in a way that was a little old-fashioned, a man who had to drive a fifteen-year-old boy to a farm in Connecticut because the woman who had left him at the altar a decade ago asked him to, and had not even asked nicely, a man stuck in a car with a fifteen-year-old boy who hated him and said so.

He turned and looked at Tyler. Tyler was wearing driving gloves. Fin felt suddenly and deeply sorry for Tyler. He was natty. He was rich. He was in a dirt driveway with Fin.

“Really,” Fin said softly. “Really,
why
?”

Tyler knew what he was talking about. He shrugged. “Really? I don’t know, Fin.”

Fin thought it might have been the first time Tyler had called him by name. Before that it had always been “kid” or “sport” or the dreaded “son.”

“Not money, because you have enough money, right?” Fin said.

Tyler laughed. “No one ever has enough money. Didn’t Lady teach you the facts of life? But no, not money.”

“I used to think it was money.”

“Yeah, you would. But no. No, it’s like you get an idea in your head … no, it’s more like you get an idea in your heart.”

Fin must have made some movement, or expression. He didn’t mean to. But he was surprised. He couldn’t have been more surprised. Tyler, the odious Uncle Tyler, was being so serious, so earnest. So eloquent, to Fin’s mind. An idea in your heart. Of course. That’s what Lady was for him, too. But he must have moved or twitched or something, because Tyler said, “Laugh all you want. I don’t care.”

“No, I’m not,” Fin said. “I’m not.”

“It all used to seem so important, so urgent.” Tyler pulled the keys out of the ignition. “Now I’ve had it. So go ahead. Laugh your head off. The joke’s on me. This last little caper … I surrender.” He held his hands up, as if someone had a gun to his back. The way he had the day Fin met him. I surrender, he had said then. He had surrendered to Lady. Now his car keys jingled in his hand. “I surrender, Lady. You go your way, I go mine. No more begging, no more hanging around for me. The spell is broken.”

The spell, Lady’s siren spell, was broken. Tyler no longer needed to lash himself to the mast, to stuff his ears with beeswax. That night, Tyler dropped Fin off at the house on Charles Street and did not come in. Fin climbed into bed and read about the Sirens. The spell of the Sirens, of
the mellifluous siren song
. The island of the Sirens, Capri, where he was going, where all around the bones of men lie, accumulated,
now putrid, and the skins mould’ring away
.

*   *   *

But mould’ring or not, Tyler was there the next morning. He sat at the kitchen table with Jack reading the Sunday paper. Mrs. Deutsch had made them fried eggs. She put paprika on the eggs. She put paprika on everything.

“Telegram from Lady,” Tyler said. He handed it to Fin.

The telegram said Fin should fly to Rome, then take the train to Naples, then take the ferry to Capri.

“Is she going to meet me? In Rome? Or at least in Naples?” Fin asked.

“You’re a big shot,” Tyler said. “What do you care?”

Jack laughed.

“Not like in the war,” Mrs. Deutsch said. “Peacetime easy peasy.”

“No, really,” Fin said.

“Really, wise guy,” Jack said.

Fin sat on the steps and missed the dog. If he could just have put his face against Gus’s silky ears. The dog never did much, no rescuing people from wells, not even any tricks, but he was always there, his breathing was always there, his tail sweeping the air, the click of his nails on the wood floor, his nose pushing and herding, the way he looked at you, hopeful, as though you could actually make something happen in the world. Maybe that was the way Lady felt about the suitors. But she had run away from the suitors, and he would never run away from Gus. Maybe that was the way the suitors felt about Lady.

Phoebe came down the steps of her house. She wore a flowered cotton dress, black, with gaudy red roses, long and smocked like the dresses pioneers wore in the movies. She was barefoot. Her hair was long now and she wore it in a braid. She crossed the street, her bare feet slapping. She had tried to get her parents to send her to a commune in Haight-Ashbury instead of camp. They had declined. They compromised on a teen tour through Europe.

“When do you leave?” she asked. She sat down on the step below him.

“Thursday.” School ended Wednesday. “When do you go?”

“Saturday. The other girls will probably be so straight. I could run away and come see you in Capri.”

“Yeah.”

“Hitch a ride.”

“Yeah.”

They sat gloomily. Phoebe said, “Bummer.”

Fin said, “Yeah.”

Phoebe said, “Is that all you can say?”

Fin said, “Yeah.”

Sometimes he wanted to touch Phoebe. But not very often. Sometimes, like now, she touched him. She grabbed his leg and put her head on his knee. He stroked her hair.

“Maybe I’ll lose my virginity,” she said. “Maybe I’ll fall in love and lose my virginity.”

“Your parents thought of that already. That’s why it’s all girls.”

“True. But maybe I’ll meet someone.”

“Who? The bus driver?”

“The incredibly gorgeous bus driver.”

“Ralph Kramden.”

“Shut up, Fin.”

“In the bushes with Ralph Kramden.”

Now she stood up, grabbed his hand, and dragged him over to her house. Up the stairs, into her room. Onto the bed.

They made out for an hour or so.

Then Phoebe jumped up.

“What?” Fin said.

“We’re not in love. We love each other, but we’re not in love.”

At that moment Fin didn’t really care if they were in love or had just met or were sworn enemies. “I don’t know,” he said.

“Yes, you do.”

He told her she was beautiful, which on that day she was.

“I know,” she said.

“What if the bus driver is ugly? And old?”

“I like older men. It’s a complex.”

This was so like Phoebe, the Phoebe he rarely thought of touching, that Fin came to his senses.

“You can drink wine in Europe,” she said. “They don’t have alcoholics because children drink wine. You have to wear long sleeves in churches. In Italy you say ‘please’ when you mean ‘excuse me.’”

“I’ll keep that in mind,” he said.

Helen Keller died. Her father had been a Confederate soldier. He found out about the Perkins School for the Blind in a book by Charles Dickens.

Robert Kennedy was shot. The world was coming apart.

*   *   *

On the plane, Fin was in the window seat. He looked at the clouds and the sky and was suddenly filled with happiness. He was on his way to see Lady. The world was coming apart, he reminded himself. Lady had abandoned him. Bobby Kennedy was dead. Martin Luther King was dead. His mother had loved John F. Kennedy and he was dead and she was dead. But still the clouds billowed like an infinite sea below and the sky darkened and the stars came out.

Beside him sat a woman who put on eyeshades and took a pill as soon as she sat down. The stewardess wore a little armylike hat and a pin on her collar with gold letters: TWA. Fin couldn’t remember what he ate, couldn’t remember much about the plane except the hat and the pin and the sleeping passenger in the eyeshades. He remembered climbing over the sleeping woman as quietly as he could to go to the bathroom. He remembered crawling back into his seat, again without waking her. He remembered wondering where she was going after they landed in Rome and if she spoke English. He thought of his first, and only other, flight, with his mother and father. It seemed so long ago. It was so long ago. Almost ten years. And here he was, going to find Lady again. He remembered wondering if she would run away again nine and a half years into the future. He would be twenty-four and a half and he would be flying across the Atlantic Ocean looking for Lady. And then nine and a half years after that. And nine and a half years after that, until he was an old man and Lady was a very old woman, still running away. He remembered thinking those things, he told me, and he wished, so many years later, that they could have been true.

On the train, Fin clutched his guitar case and sat on his backpack. The train was crowded with people so foreign he could have been in a dream. Kerchiefs and crumpled hats, cardboard suitcases spread on laps, cheese and bread unwrapped from butcher paper, smiles from a wrinkled face, suspicious glances from others. He had walked past each compartment, his guitar bumping into the doors ridiculously, his eyes cast down, until he settled on the floor in the area near the toilet. When the conductor came, Fin’s heart pounded. What if his ticket was wrong? What if the conductor made him sit in a compartment with people who would stare at him? But the conductor smiled, took his ticket, and moved on. Fin bought a sandwich through the open window when they stopped somewhere, he no longer remembers where, only the sandwich itself, fragrant, greasy salami on a round, hard roll. He slept then. When they reached Naples, he checked his money and took a taxi to the ferry, the ancient city slipping past him in a humid, chaotic blur. Soon he would see Lady. What would he say to her? Would he ask her how she could have abandoned him like that, with no warning, no discussion, no explanation? No. He would say nothing about it. He would be happy to see her. They would swim off a boat and visit the Blue Grotto.

And then they would go home to New York.

Enchanted

“
Questo è
Michelangelo,” Lady said. She presented the man as if he were a Michelangelo, a sublime marble monument in a city, as if he were the city itself, an actual city, a great city. As if he were Rome. As if, like Rome, he had existed for thousands of years, as if, like Rome, he were an empire, as if he straddled the world. “
Questo è
Michelangelo.”

Michelangelo was not as obviously good-looking as any of Lady’s usual suitors. Foreign-looking, absolutely. No one could have mistaken him for an American. His nose took up a lot of his face. Large, a little bony, a foreign nose, not sharp, not bulbous, not pug or hooked or aquiline. Not American. His mouth was a little sulky. Sometimes he pushed his lips out, just a little, when he was thinking. When he dismissed an idea, his lips pushed out a little more, a quick puff, a kiss of disdain. He was dark, tanned, with dark wavy hair combed back, away from his face. But it was his eyes that caught your attention. That’s what Lady said, and Fin had to agree. His eyes were as blue as the blue water; Lady was right. His eyes were sad and steady, but most of all, they were blue, each time he looked at you, blue. Blue again. As if they got bluer.