Fin & Lady: A Novel (3 page)

“Ah,” Lady said, moving on to Mr. and Mrs. Hadley. “Papa! And
la bella
long-suffering Lydia. What brings you to the enchanted isle?”

Fin had never heard anyone speak to his father in this jaunty, irreverent way. He looked from one to the other. They looked surprisingly alike, their faces long and angry, though Lady was beautiful and young and smiling and angry, while Hugo Hadley was stony and angry. “You know perfectly well why we’re here,” he said.

Lady said, “Coffee?” and before anyone could answer, she waved to a waiter and said something in Italian.

“Thank you,” Fin’s mother said softly. She put her hand on her husband’s arm and said, “Let’s sit down.”

“I don’t have time for this nonsense,” Hugo said.

“We’ve come halfway around the world to find Lady. I think we can stop for some coffee, Hugo.”

“To find me?” said Lady. The waiter came back with three cups of coffee and a large glass of orangeade for Fin. “Well, here I am.”

Here she was. They had found Lady, and the adventure was clearly not over, his mother was right. Fin was fascinated by her. She was not a child, though she was his sister. She was not an adult, either, at least not like any of the adults he had ever met. She never stopped moving. She called out a cheerful
“Ciao!”
to a young man passing by. She pulled Fin onto her lap and spooned the foamed milk from her coffee into his mouth. Her hair was long and loose, and she pushed it back from her face. She jumped up, carrying Fin under her arm, and ran to babble in Italian at a girl across the way. She put Fin down and ran back, holding his hand.

“Godamn it, you never could sit still,” Hugo said. “Not even for your own wedding. Look, I don’t want to be here, Lady, I’m only here because your mother asked me to find you.”

“That was very thoughtful of you,” Lady said. “You have succeeded. You can go back to New York.”

“We’re taking you with us,” Hugo said. He spoke in an angry hiss. “We’re taking you home, do you hear me?”

“I don’t have a home.”

Fin’s father rolled his eyes. “Jesus H. Christ.”

Lady said nothing.

“This melodramatic crap has got to stop, Lady.”

She waved at someone she knew, smiling, the smile fading as she turned again to her father.

“It’s got to stop,” Hugo repeated.

“Go to hell,” she said. And she got up and walked away, disappearing into a small dark alley behind the café.

“Oh dear,” Fin’s mother said.

“We did find her, though,” Fin said. “Didn’t we?”

“Typical,” Hugo was saying, pulling out his wallet. “She left me with the bill.”

*   *   *

It took Hugo Hadley three days, a frozen bank account, two long discussions with Fin’s mother, three or four pleading long-distance phone calls from Lady’s mother, the other Mrs. Hadley, and a visit by Hugo to every shop and restaurant in Capri suggesting that the extension of credit to his daughter would be a losing proposition. Three strange, wonderful days for Fin. The town was full of steps and alleys. Enormous lemons hung from vines. The beach was tiny, the harbor full of brightly painted boats. There were dolphins one day. The sun was high and hot. Children kicked a ball in the piazzetta. A bell rang. And he was with Lady.

They were on a flat rock that jutted out to the water, Fin, his mother, and Lady. It had taken forever to get there. A staircase had gone down a mountain to the flat rock. Practically a mountain. Lady lay on her back in the bathing suit she’d worn in the picture in the newspaper. One arm was over her eyes. Fin’s mother sat on a red towel looking out at the sky, one foot in the water.

“Everything will work out for you, Lady,” she said. “I know it will.” She rubbed suntan lotion on Fin’s back. Fin made the pebble in one hand jump over the pebble in the other hand.

“I made a mess of things, didn’t I?” Lady said. “Do you know my mother has a hope chest for me? Don’t you think a hope chest looks like a coffin? But I’m hopeless, I suppose. I should have a hopeless chest.”

“You’ll find someone you truly love. You’ll find a wonderful husband.”

“But why?” Lady said, sitting up. “Why do I have to?”

Lydia looked a little shocked, then she laughed. “Lady, you’re whining like a child. It’s not medicine, for goodness’ sake. It’s your whole life. It’s your future. It’s everything! Don’t you want to fall in love and get married? To the right man?”

“I want to fall in love. Everyone does. And get married. Of course I do. Someday.”

“Then someday you will.”

“Oh Lord, give me a husband … but not yet!”

They both started laughing. Lady gave Lydia a kiss. Then she dove into the water and swam toward the two gigantic rocks that looked like a bridge and a hat. Fin thought Lady looked like a mermaid. He almost thought she was a mermaid, he told me. Something magical. Everything seemed enchanted. Every moment. At the Blue Grotto, he lay back in a rowboat and watched the arch of rock close around them as he and Lady slipped through a tunnel into the flickering blue cave. A soft shimmering blue light spread beneath them. The water lapped against the sides of the rowboat. “Is it real?” he asked.

He didn’t even know what he meant by that. But Lady did.

“Yes,” she said softly. “It’s real.”

Then she sighed and said to no one in particular, “Unfortunately, so is everything else.”

The next day they were driven to the harbor in one of the taxis with the striped, fringed canvas tops: Hugo Hadley, Lydia Hadley, Fin Hadley, and Lady Hadley. “The Hadley family,” Fin said.

“Active imagination,” Hugo muttered.

Fin’s mother kissed his head.

Lady said nothing to anyone. Her arms were wrapped tightly around herself, as if she were hanging on for dear life.

*   *   *

The ocean liner was named
Cristoforo Colombo
, and it would take eight days to sail to New York. There were three pools, one on each deck. Their deck was the top deck, the top layer of the cake.

People stood on the pier in Naples and waved white handkerchiefs. Fin waved back,
Goodbye, whoever you are
. The ship’s horn brayed like a lumbering animal, but the ship slid effortlessly into the Bay of Naples, past towns clinging to the mountainside, flocks of white stucco houses perched like grazing sheep. Fin kept waving long after the people on the dock disappeared, his chin on the rail, watching the world recede.

In the photos from this trip, Fin is always grinning. In one photograph, which Fin kept framed on his desk as an adult, he sits on his father’s shoulders. Standing beside Hugo, Fin’s mother holds a sun hat on her head with one hand, the other clasping Fin’s skinny leg. The wind is blowing—blowing the sleeves of Fin’s shirt, blowing his mother’s hair beneath her hat, even finding a bit of Hugo’s thinning hair to lift away from his bare head. Behind them, to the right, a young woman lies on a deck chair, her head back as if in sleep, her eyes wide open.

Lydia and Lady spent hours stretched out in deck chairs, their knees covered by plaid wool blankets. Hugo Hadley paced the deck, incongruous in his dark gray suit, his cigar clamped between his teeth. Fin followed him sometimes, other times just watched him pass, once, twice, three times, always serious, always pausing before his wife and daughter as if to assure himself that they were still there.

One afternoon, as Lady flipped through a copy of
Life
magazine they’d gotten in Rome, Hugo paused in his promenade and addressed her: “You have never even said you’re sorry.”

“I’m sorry you felt you had to come all this way to starve me out of my hole like a rat and stand guard over me on this trip across the wine-dark sea.”

“Not at all what I meant.”

“I’m sorry you’re here, then.”

“That does not surprise me.”

“Now, now,” Lydia piped from the next deck chair. “Now, now.”

“Look,” Lady said, “I took care of it, okay? I told you. There was absolutely no reason to fly halfway around the world like some Victorian paterfamilias. It’s done.”

She smiled at him, but there was no joy in the smile.

“Leave the girl alone, Hugo,” said Lydia.

“Yes, let us not assassinate this lady further, Senator … Have you no decency, sir?” Lady said.

“How dare you!”
McCarthy?
That villain? Hugo, a proudly progressive Democrat, was practically sputtering.

“Oh please.”

“You’re … you’re…” He was really angry. He had turned his angry purple. “You’re not fit,” he said at last. He stomped away, his small, uncomprehending son following him, imitating his short, pounding steps.

“We need a drink,” Hugo said when he noticed Fin.

Fin drank ginger ale with a maraschino cherry in it. There was a clear plastic swizzle stick, its top in the shape of a ship.

“Look,” he said, showing his father. “The boat.”

“You’re a good guy,” his father said. “You know that?”

“Lady is really a very nice person,” Fin said, sensing this unusual compliment to himself had something to do with his sister, something uncomplimentary.

“Nice?” Hugo laughed. “‘It is very nice to think / The world is full of meat and drink…’”

“‘With little children saying grace,’” Fin added proudly. It was a Robert Louis Stevenson poem he had memorized for his mother. “‘In every Christian kind of place.’”

“If you say so,” his father said.

Fin was never bored on those eight days aboard ship. The waves rose up like snow-topped mountains, so close he could almost have touched them, if he’d been a giant. He was reading a Tintin comic book, the only hardcover comic book he had ever seen. At least, not exactly reading it, but looking at it, frame after frame of smooth color and comic adventure. In a rocket ship, a tipsy, weightless Capitano Haddock chases his whiskey. Milu the dog is in a spacesuit. Tintin, too. On the moon! Eleven years later, when men in spacesuits did land on the moon, Fin thought of Tintin climbing down the rungs of the ladder, stepping off the red-and-white-checkered rocket ship, and he thought of Lady. The comic was all in Italian. Lady had given it to him, and sometimes she sat him on her lap and translated. He carried it with him everywhere. When he sat beside the lifeboat where no one could see him, he would open the book, look at the pictures, and listen to passing adults exclaim at the beauty of the sea or the clouds, the prelude to gossip about the other passengers: those two were snobs, that one a lush, this family rather vulgar, that one Israelites without a doubt; now that gentleman, on the other hand, and his lovely wife were charming, they must be quite wealthy, mustn’t they, what piercing eyes, so sad about the brother, if it was even true, which was doubtful, although where there was smoke …

The engines were loud and exciting. The wind rattled the tarpaulins, the lines, the magazines and books the travelers were reading. And always, trailing the
Cristoforo Colombo
was their own pale, foaming wake.

Fin would rush from one end of the boat to the other, from one deck to another, from the first-class dining room to the swimming pool, always empty of swimmers, its turquoise water sloshing along to its own rhythm, different from the rhythm of the waves in the sea below. Up and down he went, fore and aft, inside and out, sliding his hands along varnished rails and thickly painted white metal studs, along silk wall panels and velvet chair backs. Outside, the air was fresh and cool and whipped by the wind; inside, it was stale and still and sweetened by careful flower arrangements. There were officers in uniform, waiters in uniform, maids in uniform. Sitting on the deck, he watched the legs of passengers promenading by, their shoes, their pant legs, their ankles above sneakers and white wool socks, their painted toenails in delicate sandals. Once, he dreamily dug his hands down between the cushions of a banquette in the lounge and discovered a small but engaging cache of girlie magazines.

“Eight days,” his father was saying. “If we’d flown like everyone else, we could have been home in eight hours.”

“I think it’s lovely taking a ship,” said Fin’s mother. She patted Lady’s hand.

“I didn’t ask you to come, Daddy.”

Fin’s mother sighed. “Your father doesn’t really understand fear of flying.”

“He doesn’t understand anything else about me, so why should he understand that?”

“Your father’s just a little old-fashioned…”

“That’s it, goddamn it,” Hugo said. “A conspiracy of fools.” He stood up and stormed away.

Lady snorted.

The magazines had pictures of naked women.

“Woo woo!” Fin said, flipping through them.

“What have you got there, Fin?” his mother asked. Then, seeing the magazines, she gave a characteristic girlish giggle and said, “Oh good golly!”

“Dirty magazines?” Lady let out a laugh, too, the wonderful, coveted horsey laugh.

Fin stuffed the magazines back between the cushions. When he went to retrieve them later, they were gone.

*   *   *

Lady’s dresses were crisp and pale during the day, dark and breathy at night, always cinched in tightly around the middle.

“Look at you, Scarlett O’Hara!” Lydia said, wrapping her hands around Lady’s tiny waist.

“Scarlett O’Hara was a tramp, too,” Hugo said.

“You can try it on later, if you like,” Lady said to Fin’s mother.

“Over my dead body,” said Hugo.

Fin suddenly pictured his father’s dead body, cold, waxen, laid out on a slab of marble like Frankenstein’s monster, Lady standing over it, like Dr. Frankenstein. And beside her? There was Fin.

He shivered, pressed himself against his father, reached for his hand.

“Over my dead body,” Hugo Hadley repeated, looking very much alive and rather smug because of it.

“That will be the day,” Lady said. And she turned back to her dinner.

“Hugo, please take it easy on the poor girl. After all…”

But Lady, again, laughed.

Lady laughed at Hugo Hadley. Nobody laughed at Hugo Hadley. Not his wife, certainly. Not his law partners. Not Fin. No one laughed at Hugo but Lady.

Fin stared at her, open-mouthed, awed.

“Close your mouth before you catch a fly,” Lady said.

*   *   *