Fin & Lady: A Novel (30 page)

“A little different when you’re seventeen than when you’re fifteen,” Fin told me. He sat in a compartment, Henry across from him. A woman patting her face with eau de cologne sat beside Fin. Next to Henry was an elderly, florid man slicing and offering cheeses and apples and salamis. “He’d been a prisoner of war,” Fin said. “War always ends with people sharing apples, I guess. Eventually.”

Fin looked for Donatella on the beach, but he never saw her there. They stayed for a few days. I was just starting to walk, I’m told. I was a baby on a beautiful island with my mother and father. “I think she still hoped you all would live together someday, permanently, you and Michelangelo and her.” But even without that, Lady came back from that summer happy, Fin said. “We all wanted peace and love,” he said. And in her uneven, scrappy way, my mother seemed to have found it.

*   *   *

And then it was Fin’s senior year of high school. So much of what happened in those years has been reconstructed for me by Fin, it’s sometimes hard to tell which are my memories and which are his. The place on my mother’s shoulder that fit against my cheek. The pressure of her hand, cool and light and reassuring, when she held mine. I remember black patent-leather shoes with seed pearls in the shape of a flower. I remember driving in the car, curled up in the back with Gus. I remember cows, big and black and white, with tails like whips swatting flies. I remember my mother reading:
You must never go down to the end of the town without consulting me
. I remember being happy. At least I think I do, thanks to Fin.

*   *   *

And then came July 4, 1971. The air was sweet with summer. The windows were down and the freshness of citrus and jasmine traveled with us in the little car. Hunched brittle pines, stars heavy in the sky, too bright, too big, too many, too close to be real, four people squeezed into the Fiat 500, Lady and Michelangelo in front, Fin in back, his hands emerging from the sunroof, palms forward, me on the seat next to him, watching, I’m told. I don’t remember this part. Any of it. But I know the story as well as I know my name.

Fin had arrived in Capri that day. He’d just graduated from high school. He was eighteen. I was two. Lady was driving, fast, as fast as she always drove. We had gone to Anacapri to celebrate, to celebrate everything—the Fourth of July, Fin’s graduation, Fin’s acceptance to Columbia, Fin’s arrival. Lady had borrowed the car from a friend and that was part of the celebration—driving. My mother loved to drive. There was only one real road in Capri, and she drove up that narrow, twisting lane to the restaurant and now down the narrow, twisting lane, fast. It was the perfect night. Fin was so happy. We were all happy. The car careened around each curve, hugging the steep cliffs that soared beside them. I was clapping my hands.

Then Fin remembers lights, headlights, a wall of rock, sheer, rising up blank and immediate. Then looking up at the starry sky. The scented breeze. The delicate perfume of lavender. The mineral smell of blood. Someone cradling his head. Someone telling him not to worry, but not in English. Not in Italian. Still, somehow he knew. But who was it? Not Lady. Not Michelangelo. Where was Lady? Where was Michelangelo? Where was I? He remembers the ambulance, a tiny ambulance. He remembers the lights, the European siren, that World War II movie siren.

And then nothing.

I remember nothing. And then nothing. And then Fin.

I remember him sitting beside me holding my hand. In a hospital. A hospital the size of a thriving veterinary service, he told me later, years later. He had a cast on his arm and black stitches like Frankenstein’s monster on his forehead.

I cried for Lady. “I want my Lady.”

“I’m here,” Fin said. He had been there all night, sitting, waiting for me to wake up. Before that, he had been in a hospital bed, too. He’d woken up in a room with several beds, but at that point he didn’t know he was in a hospital. He didn’t know where he was. He saw two handsome older men in white linen suits standing beside him. You have blood on your jacket, he tried to say to the one who looked vaguely familiar, but nothing came out, and he went back to sleep, or whatever you call the drugged, shocked unconsciousness after an accident. When he opened his eyes again, there was a nun standing beside him. Oh no, he thought. I have died and heaven is Catholic and I’m in big trouble. But he was alive, and the nun told him in halting English that he had been in a car accident.

“Who were the men in the white suits?” he asked. “Who was the man with blood on him?” Because what if the men were angels and the nun was lying and Fin was dead and heaven was Catholic?

“They found you,” she said.

Fin wanted the men to come back. He didn’t want to be in a room that looked like a World War I ward with a nun in a black habit, her face round and smooth, her nun hat lifting off her head like starched plumage.

“French,” the nun said. “They waited until they saw you were doing well. Now they go back to France.”

“Am I doing well?”

“Oh yes.”

He had a sudden, sinking thud of a thought. “The others?” he said. “How are the others?”

“Everything is fine,” said the nun, and Fin knew everything was not fine. Everything was far from fine.

When he woke up the next time, a doctor was there with the nun. Fin felt stitches on his forehead, the long welts and furrows of stitches.

“How are the others?” Fin said. “You have to tell me.”

“Everything is fine,” the doctor said.

And Fin was sure we were all dead.

*   *   *

He was wrong. I was alive.

*   *   *

When they let him get up, he came to my room. I had been thrown from the car. You flew, Fin told me when I woke up. You landed on a cushion of fragrant lavender. Like a little bird in a nest.

“Did you fly?”

“Just a little,” Fin said. “But I had a rough landing. See?” He held out his arm in its thick white cast. “We’re a little broken, you and I. We have to put ourselves back together.”

I asked for Lady. I remember, in little jagged bits, how thoroughly, utterly, she was not there.

I was bruised, but that was all. Flung from the car into a pillow of lavender, just as Fin said. Through the open window I had flown. Fin had been flung against the door and broken his arm. Lady and Michelangelo had gone through the windshield. The two Frenchmen in their white linen suits found us. One drove on to get help. The other held Fin’s head. The Frenchman didn’t even know I was there at first. Then I mewed like a kitten, that’s what he told the doctor, and he found me in my lavender nest.

We left the hospital the next day and went back to the green door that led to the garden that led to the small white villa. Fin carried me on his shoulders, and I rested a foot on his cast. I could touch the great, rough lemons overhead. It was then, as we walked beneath the lemons, that Fin told me that Lady and Michelangelo had been killed.

My mother is buried in the Cimitero Acattolico, the tiny Protestant cemetery on Capri. She would have liked that, I think. Fin was sure of it. Especially when Gracie Fields moved in eight years later. Capri was where Lady felt most at home, where she fell in love. It is an enchanted place, and that’s all Lady really wanted, isn’t it? To be enchanted, finally, after enchanting everyone else.

Biffi was at the funeral. He flew over right away, and Mabel came with him. She wore a black hat with feathers that she let me blow in every direction.

My father was buried in Milan. I’ve never followed up on that part of my family, thinking he would not have wanted me to. But Fin and I went back to Capri almost every year. We stayed in the house with the green gate. We walked in the Cimitero Acattolico. We talked about Lady.

*   *   *

For a long time I didn’t really understand that my parents were dead. I understood only that they were not there. And I understood that Fin was. That he would always be there. He took me home to New York, and he was there, holding my hand or putting me on his lap, telling me stories about my mother or giving me sips from a spoon of milky cappuccino. He carried me under his arm, he put me on his shoulders, he fed me and bathed me, he took me to my first day of school, he pushed me on the swings. And when I had nightmares, which I did for years, nightmares of drowning, he rocked me back to sleep singing soft Italian songs, pop songs about love. He taught me to ride a bicycle. A navy blue one with three speeds.

We visited the cows, of course. Darlington and Daisy were his mother’s favorites. His mother’s name was Lydia, too, just like mine. Did I know that?

I did know that. I knew Fin’s father was my grandfather and Fin’s mother was not my grandmother. But most of all, I knew Fin was my guardian.

“A guardian means I shelter you,” he said. “And get you coffee ice-cream sodas.”

Which he did.

“I had a guardian, too,” he said.

“You were lucky, too,” I said.

And Fin laughed and kissed me on the head and said, yes, he was lucky, too.

Epilogue

Fin is turning sixty this year. My guardian, Uncle Fin, though, understandably, he never wanted me to call him that.

Imagine being an eighteen-year-old boy suddenly responsible for a two-year-old? Well, Mabel was there, thank goodness, holding my hand in the stony alleys of Capri, on the ferry, up the stairs to the airplane. She was there in the house on Charles Street. She said,
Thank the Lord you’re a girl, boys are nothing but trouble, except some boys, of course
. Then she’d laugh and say,
Who am I talking about, Lyddie?
And I’d say,
Finnie!
And she’d say,
No! Gus!
And I’d say,
Finnie!

We also had Biffi, and thank goodness for him, too. Biffi was there in Capri, arranging everything, smoking his pipe, making me dolls from pipe cleaners and attaching them to the buttons on my blouse. He was there in New York. He was there whenever Fin needed anything, whenever I needed anything. I used to call Biffi “my Biffi,” the way you might say “my grandfather.” I don’t see how Fin would have gotten through college without Biffi. And Biffi has always been the one I could go to when I wanted something Fin wouldn’t let me have. My first car, for instance. It wasn’t the money—I had saved enough to pay for that hunk of junk. It was that Fin never wanted me in a car at all, ever, even taxis. I can’t really blame him. But there are places in the world without buses or subways, and I went to college in one of them. Biffi had a series of girlfriends over the years, all of them artists, one odder than the next. Sometimes I went to see their shows. They painted themselves with dots or slept in glass cases. But when they were off duty, as Biffi put it, they would do ordinary things like take me to the Bronx Zoo.

Sometimes I wonder what my life would have been like if my mother and father hadn’t died in that car accident, of course I do. Fin smiles that Lady smile of his and says it would have been wonderful. It would have been full of fun and freedom. It would have been full of books. It would have been an adventure. And then I say,
My life has been wonderful. It has been full of fun and freedom. And books. And isn’t everyone’s life an adventure?
And then he tells me one of his stories about Lady. He’s been telling stories about Lady since I can remember. The stories are full of love
. I try to keep out the ironical
, he says.
Children have no need of the ironical
.
Mabel said that.
I miss Mabel. She retired when I went to college, moved into a condo in Virginia with her sister. They’re both about a hundred and one. They send birthday cards for each of my kids every year. Mabel even signs them “Maybe.”

Children have no need of the ironical? I don’t know. Maybe that’s exactly what they need. Is it ironical that, when I got married, Fin gave me the house on Charles Street and moved back to his grandparents’ house in Connecticut? Is it ironical that I even got married?

Fin never did. He lives with a beautiful woman named Debbie. She was very much a part of my growing up, she was part of my family, but she and Fin have never married. I have a feeling, and not a happy feeling, that his refusal to marry has been some kind of homage to Lady, but maybe I’m wrong. Maybe Debbie didn’t want to get married, some sixties residue, perhaps. For a while they said that they could not in good conscience get married until their gay friends were able to. Then the laws started changing and Phoebe and all the rest of their gay friends started getting married, and still Fin and Debbie did not. Maybe they’re waiting until they’re twenty-five. Ha ha. Sometimes Fin says,
How can I marry someone named Debbie, of all things?
The name of a commercial cupcake.
And then Debbie says,
How can I marry a man named
Fin? Named on a whim? Not even Huckleberry Finn
,
but French for ‘the end.’

To which I say,
But it wasn’t the end at all, was it?

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank Antonio Monda and Davide Azzolini and everyone involved with
Le Conversazioni
for introducing me to the enchanted isle of Capri; Sarah Crichton for her battered red diary; Jennifer Crichton for her memory; Nat Hentoff for
Jazz Country
; Mara Nierman for her colorful education; Vicki Tolar Collins for long-ago Iráklion; Paul Berman for the romance of little ways; and Gabriella Platania for her kindness, coffee, and lemon-scented garden.

Also by Cathleen Schine

The Three Weissmanns of Westport

The New Yorkers

She Is Me

The Evolution of Jane

The Love Letter

Rameau’s Niece

To the Birdhouse

Alice in Bed

A Note About the Author

Cathleen Schine is the author of
The Three Weissmanns of Westport
,
The New Yorkers
, and
The Love Letter
, among other novels. She has contributed to
The New Yorker
,
The New York Review of Books
,
The New York Times Magazine
, and
The New York Times Book Review
.