Fin & Lady: A Novel (29 page)

But Lady thought I was beautiful. “She used to hold you and stare at you and make unconscious noises. She sounded like a mourning dove. She said your name over and over. When you cried, she sang and put you on her shoulder and walked in circles.”

“That’s what all mothers do,” I said.

“But she was Lady. It was like watching a ballet.”

I was born in May, a few days after the anniversary of Lydia Hadley’s death.

“So it was a little hard to concentrate,” Fin said. “Plus you were so ugly.”

“Maybe you could have said to yourself that your mother would have found joy in the beginning of a new life.”

“That’s what Lady said.”

“What did you say?”

“I didn’t say much in those days.” He was thinking of death, not life, of all the deaths when he was so young, of his mother, not my mother, of his father, not my father, of himself, not me.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “I was a little messed up that year.”

“Nineteen-sixty-nine? So was everyone else, by all accounts.”

“Not you. Not Lady. She was the happiest person in the world. She was deliriously happy. Lady Hadley boarding an airplane? Do you know how much strength you gave her?”

Maybe it took someone so completely dependent on her to give Lady real independence. That’s what Fin thought, anyway. Or maybe he just said that to make me feel important. He liked to make me feel important. And loved.

“Lady took you everywhere from the minute you were born. People didn’t do that in those days. She took you to restaurants and movies. She took you to peace rallies in your perambulator, a giant baby carriage with a camera case strapped to it.She took you to SDS meetings. There was so much urgency to Lady. It was contagious.”

At the SDS meetings, she took pictures of boys sitting on the floor, narrow shoulders hunched forward, of men with beards, their heads held contemplatively to one side, of pretty girls with long shiny hair standing at the edges. Lady didn’t like the edges, though.

Fin said Lady probably would have taken me to Woodstock if she hadn’t already made plans to see Michelangelo in Capri in August. “So you must always respect decadence,” he told me, more than once.

“It’s not really decadent to take a baby to see her father instead of going to a hippie rock festival.”

“On Capri everything is decadent, and for that we must be grateful. At Woodstock, you could have been trampled in the mud.”

Fin did not go to Woodstock, either, which broke his heart. In July he worked in the storeroom of a shoe store and went to concerts at night. He saw everyone. Everyone. He saw Janis Joplin. He saw Cream. He saw Jefferson Airplane, the Grateful Dead, Jimi Hendrix, Ravi Shankar, B.B. King, Chuck Berry. He saw everyone. There were concerts at the Fillmore East. At the Cafe Wha? At high school gyms. He smoked grass and listened to music. And he went to Shea Stadium, where the Mets were, miraculously, winning.

It was a giddy time, especially looking back at the music and the clothes, the things people like to look back at. But there was something menacing, too. Not just the war, though that was there, always, an accompaniment, like a soft drumbeat, to everything that went on, especially as he got older and closer to draft age. But there was also, often, something more immediately foreboding. At peace rallies, there were police on horseback, high above you, with shining black boots digging into frothing sides, the horses skittering nervously, the police stern and staring. There were kids on the street, runaways, dirty and strung out and homeless. Maybe if you lived out of town and you came to the Village to buy some jeans or get a poster of the Doors, maybe the gritty kids with cracked fingernails and glazed eyes looked like children of the revolution or flower children. To Fin, who lived among them, they looked beleaguered and desperate and sad. Which is how he felt that year. He was sixteen. He wrote songs about it. But he never sang them.

“So you see why I didn’t pay much attention to you,” he told me.

“The world was coming apart.”

“Well, I thought so, anyway.”

Lady tried to help him. She offered to ride bikes again, but he was too old for that now. She asked Mabel for advice.

“They get like this,” Mabel said.

“Boys?”

“Don’t tell me you didn’t get like this.”

“Yes, but I was so unhappy.”

Mabel said, “Sometimes you play dumb. Sometimes you are dumb.” Then they bathed the little baby in its bathinette, and Fin, that difficult dark cloud hovering unaccountably in paradise, was momentarily forgotten.

“What the hell is a bathinette?” I asked Fin. “You made that up.”

“Someone did.”

*   *   *

Lady wouldn’t leave Fin home alone when she went to Capri, which was why he did not get to go to Woodstock. He refused to go with us to Capri, so he spent August on a bicycle trip with Henry James.

“Through the Alps?” Phoebe said. “That’s kind of hilly, don’t you think?” She was working at a camp for disadvantaged children. “They bus them in so we advantaged rich white teenagers have something to do,” she said. But really she loved it. The children taught her how to dance, and she seduced the director, who was twenty-four.

The beginning of Fin’s trip was spent in a motel outside a provincial city he cannot remember the name of. One of the kids had strep throat, so they all had to sit around for almost a week playing gin rummy until he got better. When they set off, it was raining, a steady drizzle that followed them up and down mountains. After two weeks, Fin convinced Henry James to jump ship, and they took a train, with their bicycles, to Greece.

“I have a friend in Iraklion,” he said, and they descended, three sunburned sixteen-year-old boys with enormous calf muscles, on the air force base.

Inside the base it was dusty and orderly, outside the base it was dusty and disorderly. “You will stay outside the base,” Biffi said. He took them to a small restaurant and watched, laughing, as they ate.

“Do you have any idea what it is you’re eating?”

“Who cares? We haven’t had anything but sandwiches since, like, New York,” Fin said.

“It could be goat,” Biffi said.

“Who cares?”

They continued to shovel whatever the stew was into their mouths.

“When do you get out of here?” Henry said when they were finished. He took a sip of the Greek wine, which looked like olive oil.

“Another year.”

“Maybe the war will be over by then.”

“In two years we’ll be in the lottery,” James said.

Fin pointed at Biffi. “See?” he said.

“I didn’t start the war.”

“No, but you perpetuated it.”

“I did what I thought was right. But it has not done anyone any good,” Biffi said sadly. “Poor Czechoslovakia.”

There was confused silence. None of the three boys paid attention to any news unless it was about Vietnam.

“Well, at least we got rid of Johnson,” Fin said. “But everything else in the world is pretty fucked up.”

There was some murmuring and clinking of squat heavy glasses. Henry and James went off to sleep at the student hostel.

“Good night, sir,” they both said politely. “And thank you for a lovely dinner.”

Biffi looked at Fin in surprise.

“They’re from very good homes.”

“Oh.” Biffi saluted them.

“The baby looks like a dead baby possum that fell out of a tree,” Fin said when they had gone.

“How unpleasant.”

“Lady loves it. She is actually in love with it, I would have to say.”

“Do you mind?”

Fin shrugged. “It has nothing to do with me.”

“So cynical, Fin. It is just a baby.”

“A baby possum.”

“It will grow up.”

“Into a possum.”

Biffi laughed. “So she is happy? Really happy? This breaks my heart with joy.”

“How can you spy and translate when you can’t even speak English? I still don’t understand that.”

“One of the many mysteries of world domination.”

Now Fin laughed. “I miss you,” he said. “The house is like, I don’t know, a Christmas manger.”

“Straw? Virgins?”

“It’s so fucking blessed. Everything is joyous and blessed. You know, there are people dying all over the world, but at our house, it’s peace and joy.”

“Would you rather have dying?”

“You know what I mean. It’s so … hypocritical.”

“What a rigid ideology you have. No joy?”

Fin drank some more wine. Which tasted surprisingly like dirt. Sweet dirt.

“Youth is idiotic,” Biffi said.

“Thanks.”

“I miss you, too, you know.”

The moon was high in the sky. Some wobbly airmen passed by. Fin ate something smothered in honey that James had left on his plate. “Good,” he said. “I’m glad.” He was glad someone missed him. “If no one misses you, you don’t really exist.”

“Then you exist very much.”

“And you never had to kill anybody.”

“Not directly.”

“Shit,” Fin said. “Really?”

“I don’t know. Which makes it worse, in a way.”

*   *   *

It was when I was born that Mabel finally agreed to stop calling Lady “Miss Lady.”

“I mean, what will the baby think? Growing up and hearing you talk like that, Mabel?”

Mabel pondered that. “I’ve always said it to be ironical,” she said. “But babies don’t need anything more ironical than life dishes out, that’s true.” And she stopped. She called my mother “Lady.” I called my mother “Lady,” too. It sounded so pretty to me. When I was very little, I called Mabel “Maybe,” though she was as certain a part of my life as anyone.

I haven’t told you my name yet.

“What’s its name?” Fin asked when my mother and I got home from the hospital. It could have been anything, Fin thought. Anything awful. Lady had refused to discuss it. She was hiding it from him, which meant it was a crazy hippie name like Coriander or Tundra. What’s its name? he remembers asking with the superiority and contempt he tried so hard to cultivate in those days.

Lady said, “Lydia.”

Lady named me Lydia.

“That was my mother’s name,” Fin said.

“I know.”

For one moment, just a moment, Fin bristled, thought, It’s a bribe. So I will like the baby. Then he looked at Lady holding the small, silent thing wrapped in a white blanket, and he knew it was not a bribe, it was an act of love, pure and simple.

*   *   *

I think it was Gus who finally changed Fin’s mind about me. Gus loved me. He loved to lick my sticky cheeks. He watched Lady, followed her, as she carried me around the house. He slept by my cradle. He ran to get Lady when I woke from a nap, ran to her and pushed his nose into her hand and whined and barked like Lassie. Fin swears he rocked the cradle when I cried, but I don’t believe him.

And then sometimes Fin would hold me, hold me out to Gus as an offering, and Gus would lick my feet and I would laugh.

“When you laughed, you didn’t look so possumy,” Fin said.

I’ve seen pictures of myself when I was a baby. Hundreds of them, actually. Once I was born, Lady was much more interested in taking photographs of me than of rocks and blank walls. I didn’t look at all like a possum. I was a very pretty baby, I think. I had round cheeks, not narrow possum cheeks. I had no teeth, not long yellow possum teeth. I had blue eyes, my father’s beautiful blue eyes, not red pinprick possum eyes. And Gus loved me. And Mabel loved me. And Lady loved me. Lady, my mother, loved me. Finally, Fin loved me, too.

“You used to sit in a corner with your toys and talk to them. You never stopped talking. You were so charming. You were so intent. A little bossy.”

“What did I say?”

“I have no idea. But your toys were very attentive. They never seemed at all bored.”

*   *   *

“It’s a beautiful name,” Mabel said that day when we first got home from the hospital.

Fin nodded. He couldn’t speak.

“You’re lucky to have such a pretty name,” Mabel cooed at the baby.

“Wow,” Fin said at last.

“Lydia,” Lady said very softly.

And that’s when Gus licked my face for the first time and Mabel and Lady shooed him away and Fin’s resolve began to falter.

“That’s when we became a family,” he told me. “Right then. I just didn’t know it yet.”

Fin started to love me gradually. But from deep within his cramped, personal teenage misery and his big, apocalyptic, sixties teenage misery, he started to love me.

“Where has everyone got to?”

The first few years of my life are not as clear to me as they were to Fin, of course. Fin says Lady sang mildly obscene ditties to quiet me down.
Oh, I used to work in Chicago, in a department store
 … That kind of thing. I remember the Central Park Zoo, riding on Fin’s shoulders. He smelled like Neutrogena soap. Lady smelled like L’Air du Temps, Fin said. Mabel smelled like me, Ivory soap. Fin would swing me around by my arms until I got dizzy. Then we would lie on the floor next to each other and watch the room spin. He unpacked his toy soldiers on my second birthday and let me play with them. Little men from long ago. Then he packed them up again. I ate my dinner early, but as soon as I could sit, Fin says, I sat at the table in my pajamas and watched Fin and Lady eat theirs. Sometimes I retreated to the floor beneath the table. Gus would lie beside me and look at me with his serious brown eyes. Sometimes, when they were done eating, Lady and Fin would join us. Fin told me we would sit underneath the table, the four of us, Gus and I both wriggling with joy, and Mabel would come in and say, “Where has everyone got to?” The trick was not to laugh.

I know we finally did go to Japan, because Fin told me. He says I was the tallest person there. Ha ha. I know we never went to India. It was planned for when I was four. But we did go to Australia. And we did go to the Grand Canyon. Sometimes I think I remember seeing a kangaroo, which would obviously be in Australia, but since my memory of the kangaroo is in black and white and it is wearing boxing gloves, it was probably from a movie or a rerun of an episode of
The Gale Storm Show
. I was only one and a half.

In the summers, Lady and I went to Capri. In 1970, when Fin and Henry were traveling through Europe on a Eurail pass (James had moved to Boston with his family and fallen out of touch), they came to see us. They started out in London and made their way slowly to Rome, then took the train down to Naples.