The Death and Life of Zebulon Finch, Volume 1

by Daniel Kraus

  It was a ghastly thing to bring up at dinner. Leather’s enthusiasm made me wonder if he’d saved the tumor for his future wife to appreciate. Was it even now stored in one of the lab’s specimen jars? The idea sickened me, even though I did not deserve that luxury. It was I, after all, who’d once cupped a handful of bloody teeth before the man from whom I’d knocked them and then gloated about it later to cronies.

  Mrs. Leather, as bad luck would have it, was stuck with the both of us. Leather’s leave from Harvard had achieved farcical length, and he was being forced to return several days per week to lecture alongside the “rust-gathered automatons.” Not being a proponent of relaxation time, he seized upon the fact that Mrs. Leather and I had been successfully introduced. (Laugh if you will; I did.) Soon enough, swore he, I would be the recipient of great gobs of attention and it would behoove me to be fluent in the necessary, if tiresome, formalities of the noble class. Mrs. Leather would teach me all I needed to know.

  Leather was master of the household, and as his subjects neither of us had a say in the matter. On the morning of his first day back to work, he convened the three of us in the great hall, where he gave me a pedant’s final audit and fluffed the ascot he’d provided to cover my gaping neck wound, for Mrs. Leather was not privy to the truth of my spectral condition. Satisfied, Leather took his leave, stranding his wife and me in the echoing space, wondering what in Gød’s green Earth we were supposed to say to each other.

  Mrs. Leather was the first to try.

  “Ethel Barrymore is winning great praise in A Doll’s House. I should like to see it, wouldn’t you?”

  “You wish to see a doll house?”

  “It’s a play.”

  “Ah. You mean a stage play?”

  “It’s Ibsen.”

  “Absinthe?”

  “Ibsen. He’s a playwright.”

  “Ah.”

  A crackling start! For a while we searched the corners of the room for clues regarding how to proceed. Mrs. Leather produced a cloth and ran it across Gladys’s muculent nose and glutinous mouth. I shuddered and Mrs. Leather saw it. I regretted it. My opinion of babies hovered somewhere between disinterest and disgust, but that did not excuse my poor timing.

  Her voice, louder now, tripled from the marble floor and timbered walls.

  “I understand that you are to live with us indefinitely, Mr. Finch.”

  I shrugged. “It would appear so, ma’am.”

  “That must mean you are very important to the doctor. I do not know why; that is not a wife’s business. I do know that previous guests have been kept to the dining and drawing rooms. Strictly kept. I have been given word that you are to enjoy free rein inside the house. That is quite a surprise. Forgive me; all I mean is that it is unusual. I shall do my best to make you comfortable, of course.”

  “Good of you, ma’am.”

  Her smile was tight and distrustful.

  “Why don’t I give you a proper tour, then?”

  Eager to kill, cut up, and bury this monstrosity of a conversation, I nodded. It wound up a questionable decision, as the next several hours were given to an overlong survey of late eighteenth-century New England interiors. From room to sumptuous room we crawled, maids with brooms scurrying before us like startled mice, as Mrs. Leather recited flavorless trivialities about aluminum light fixtures, armorial stained glass, and how exactly the library’s previous medieval tapestry wallpaper was inferior to the Chinese-influenced cinnabar that ousted it.

  She might have well recited her screed to a blank wall. Her cold suspicion angered me, and by and by I ached to break from decency and show this woman the true quality of Zebulon Finch. I’d smash that red-brass perfume mirror! Set fire to those French drapes! Such mischief would at least provide her the excuse to have the ever-lurking Mr. Dixon throw me to the street. I’d have liked to see the doddery old bugger try!

  Thankfully for the decor, as well as my brittle bones, the doctor burst into the drawing room around two, catching his wife mid-monologue. She could barely execute a curtsy before Leather began pouncing about, ripping at his tie as if it were the noose binding him to Harvard.

  “Everything you see here is camouflage, Finch, the baubles and enamels beneath which insecure humans huddle, both here in this ridiculous house and there at that ridiculous college. Do fish pack themselves inside such beautiful crystals? Yes, they do—when they are dead!”

  “Welcome home, Doctor.”

  Mrs. Leather was not as relieved to see her husband as I would have guessed.

  “The world is not so symmetrical as all of this, is it? Life’s natural state is the jungle, the twist of roots, the tangle of the nerve system. Gødliness is where? In chaos, in chaos! Not in the gilded homes of the well-heeled or the spired churches of the devout.” He gave his wife a condescending smile. “Listen to Mrs. Leather, Finch, but do not take her to heart. I wouldn’t want you corrupted.”

  In seconds the doctor had dismissed his wife’s entire day of work. Her placid mask went untroubled; she knew, as I myself was coming to know, that Leather was as unmindful of his cruelty as a spoiled child is his privilege.

  “Shall we luncheon?” asked she. “I know you do not favor hospital meals.”

  “Gruel steeped by sloppy sots with unwashed paws! Never do I touch a morsel.”

  Mrs. Leather’s knowledge of the doctor’s palate was encyclopedic and her instructions to the cook intensive. She was an impressive hostess at lunch, more impressive still at dinner. And so on: breakfast, lunch, dinner, week after week, month after month. What I remember most from that grinding stretch is not the doctor’s careening about the attic of the world nor his filling of the Revelation Almanac, but rather the wife’s unflappable fortitude in the face of ongoing banality. Isn’t that curious?

  Mrs. Leather took care never to seem thankful for my company, and I, perhaps seeking a parent’s approval, began to give her lessons my full attention. Manners were a lost cause. Which fork went where? Not that I could eat. When to bow, or shake, or kiss? Not that I ever would. My innate shortcomings exhausted the both of us and her lessons took on a bent more personal and, therefore, far more enjoyable.

  She shared with me the most important sections of The Ladies’ Home Journal, to date my favorite publication. She commandeered the kitchen and taught me the workings of the eighteen-dollar refrigerator, a two-hundred-pound brass-hinged leviathan constructed of northern elm. As a blithesome aside, she mixed a bowl of Jell-O, a bizarre orange gelatin with a jiggle that reminded me, deliciously, of décolletage.

  After a time, we had exhausted what the rooms of the house had to offer and she dared take me outdoors. Oh—that lemon light! The nattering of birds! Those winged maple seeds in their eternal spirals! Like a puppy I chased after her. Outside she pointed out to me the building’s notable details, the curved transoms and stepped parapets, and introduced me to the doctor’s Pierce-Racine touring car, eight hundred dollars worth of machinery that no one had any clue how to operate. And so forth, until I got to know quite a bit about her without ever learning much at all.

  It was in April of 1906 when Mrs. Leather showed me her collection of bicycles and velocipedes corroding in a shed alongside the dog kennel. These were unintuitive contraptions featuring one to six wheels in all manners of combination. She gestured and named a few—“Manuped,” “Rover,” “Leipzig”—before her arm sagged in dispirit.

  “I mentioned at our wedding that I should one day like to ride a bicycle. The doctor, wishing to please me but short, as always, on time, bought every one on the market. Then there were too many to choose from. I never rode a one.” She shrugged; her unperturbed mask did not alter. “That is the doctor’s way. He pours a gallon when but a drop would do.”

  I reached out and wiped dust from a particularly lethal-looking machine, a metal gargoyle with dual five-foot wheels and two wooden seats connected by
a curved pole to a tiny third wheel at the rear.

  “That is the Renn Tandem Tricycle. It was nicknamed ‘Invincible.’”

  “I’m sure it was ironic,” said I. “Obviously, it is a sort of torture device.”

  “Oh, no. It is quite safe.”

  “Is that right? Put your feet onto these pedals, near those mean-looking gears. Then I’ll collect your severed legs and we’ll see if the doctor can sew them back on.”

  Mrs. Leather turned to me, lips so tight that I thought she was about to let me have it. But the buds of her cheeks plumped and her lips opened into the pink shock of a smile, and a laugh tumbled out of her, all topsy-turvy. She tried to capture it with a silk-gloved hand but it was out of reach. It was funny to see and so I laughed, too, a papery, breathless noise that surprised me into laughing some more, which in turn incited her to laugh even harder.

  Before it was over, there were tears in her eyes and a warmth at my core that I knew couldn’t be real, for I was a creature to whom warmth was disallowed. Mrs. Leather panted for air, her face to the floor for decency’s sake, and escaped locks of her bunned hair tapped at her flushed cheeks. In that moment, I could see the young woman she’d been, one who’d linked herself with the brightest of hopes to a clever English physician.

  “Let us ride,” said I. “There are seats for two.”

  “No.” She put a hand to her chest. “The doctor forbade you from leaving the grounds.”

  I make no claim to being an oracle of female longing—my life story, in fact, can be read as a testament to the contrary—but the truth of how she felt was there to be read on her face. And who could blame her? Each morning I craned my neck out my chamber window to see Boston but the view was obstructed; I could see an elaborate cornice and rooster-topped weather vane, nothing more. Mrs. Leather, too, had an unsatisfying view; never did she leave the house, always saddled was she with Gladys and, yes, me. Weren’t we both trapped inside the castle’s firmaments?

  “We can ride and we shall.” I took command of the thing’s handlebars and gave it a push. Flakes of rust scattered down into the vacated tire ruts. “‘Invincible,’ you say? We shall be the invincible ones and it is this absurd contraption that will be subject to our tortures. Come, be my co-pilot.”

  To this moment, as I scribble these words from down here in my author’s tomb, I find myself incredulous that she accepted. What fettle it took to collect her skirts and position her matronly form upon the front seat, what dash she showed as we jounced from the garage and rumbled down the gravel walkway, what courage it took to let me steer our comical three-wheeler onto Jefferson Street and out into the golden open.

  Boston! We had found her! Perched high upon our seats, we analyzed and conquered the bustling, laneless streets. Laggard horses and herky-jerky cars threaded between unyielding trolleys, as did an undulating mass of pedestrians, shoppers, newsboys, and bootblacks, every male figure duly hatted, for such were the demands of modern fashion. Mrs. Leather shouted the highlights over her shoulder. Over here, the Crown Jewel of the Back Bay, the awesome steel-framed juggernaut of the Berkeley Building! Over there, the Castle Square Hotel, advertising two-dollar-a-day doubles with a telephone in each and every room!

  Fellows my own age threw horseshoes, wore college sweaters, or zipped by on modern two-wheelers. I waved, as if I were no different from they. Indeed, this fool’s ride had taken on a time-traveler’s importance. I was a normal boy; this woman, not Abigail, was the mother I deserved; and we were doing that thing I had heard tell of long ago: having fun. We swerved and wobbled; smashups were staved off by shavings of luck. Mrs. Leather whooped at every near-disaster and I hollered just to holler. At length her hair came loose and whisked my face. I did not mind such blond whips of sunlight.

  We both knew it when we had gone too far. Gruff, sweaty Bostonians gave us a parson’s scrutiny from beneath derbies and stuffed-bird-decorated hats. Their surveillance was a danger to both of us. I turned around the tricycle and Mrs. Leather lodged no protest. What’s that, Reader? You expected a ride into the sunset? It is pleasant to consider such romantic notions. But Jefferson Street, with its science and semblance of family, awaited. Which of those two factors was of greater importance I was beginning to wonder.

  VI.

  WE STOWED THE INVINCIBLE WHILE the hounds voiced their botheration. Mrs. Leather was brown with road dirt yet ablush with invigoration. While she did her best to pound grit from her dress, I monitored the house. At least one face watched from every window that I could see, eyes as blinkless as those of crows. One by one, the faces disappeared. It left me with a foreboding feeling.

  “I should prepare for the doctor’s return,” said I. “You will excuse me, Mrs. Leather.”

  “Mary.” Her hair was uncivilized, the set of her lips firm. “Please call me Mary.”

  I was speechless, but more than that I was concerned. Such proffered forwardness required reciprocation, but what had I to offer aside from the story of my unsavory origins both as criminal and as corpse? I faltered; I hawed; I took a backward step toward the house.

  Even this coward’s retreat came too late. Marching across the back lawn was Dixon, dressed, as always, to the nines and frowning, as always, with disapproval. Trailing him by thirty feet was a bombinating hive of secondary servants, seven or eight in total, close enough to overhear but far enough to escape collateral damage.

  Dixon executed the slightest of cursory bows.

  “Mrs. Leather, if I may, I request an audience.”

  “What is this about, Mr. Dixon?”

  One could not help but be moved by the courageous set of her shoulders, the ostentatious manner in which she gathered her loose cords of hair.

  Dixon hit me with a disdainful look.

  “It would better be discussed in private.”

  “Would it? And what’s more private than this fenced and hedged plot?”

  Dixon tugged his vest and drew himself upward.

  “The staff is bothered, quite bothered, and they have prevailed upon me to speak to you regarding—well, if I must say it, I must say it. The squiring about of you by this . . . lodger.”

  “You refer to Mr. Finch? Our guest?”

  “I remind you that I speak on the staff’s behalf. Master Finch flusters the ladies under my direction. To be frank, the men as well. They exist in such disconcertment that carrying out their duties has become a challenge. Now the boy is spiriting you into the city? It is a shock too many.”

  “Have any one of them been asked to wait upon Mr. Finch? To serve him food or prepare his room?”

  “That is precisely the problem, Mrs. Leather. They have not been asked. Perhaps you are unaware of how this undermines the well-being of a servant. Furthermore, they complain of a, let us say, unnatural feeling upon encountering the young master.”

  The favorable smile I had affected dried from my lips. Kowtowing domestics this crowd might be, but they could sniff out my aberration as sure as mosquitoes. In downtown Boston I’d enjoyed a fleeting dream of guileless boyhood, but the dreamer had awakened.

  “More than one of the young ladies have come to me afflicted with anxieties about their virtues as well as their souls. Their fears include divine retribution coming down upon this house, a house for which they feel, if I may say so, great affection.”

  Mrs. Leather’s cheeks had grown cherry red.

  “I stand here aghast, Mr. Dixon. You do realize that Dr. Leather holds Mr. Finch in the highest of esteem? He would endure none of this, not a word. And neither shall I. You have in remarkably few words offended me, the doctor, and our guest. Mr. Dixon, I thank you for your years of service and I wish you and the rest of the staff the best in your future endeavors.”

  The sole sound accompanying this astonishing declaration was the la-ti-dah melodies of house wrens, orioles, and sparrows. Dixon’s fabled eyebrows lifted high into hi
s forehead and his jaw, typically locked, lowered to approximately chest level. Nearer to the house, the servants went into a panic and asked one another if they, too, had heard the same unbelievable words coming from Mrs. Leather.

  Dixon tried to reassemble his wits. “I . . . I shall need to speak to Dr. Leather, of course, before delivering such news to the others. He is lord of the house and he must know of this before—”

  “Of course.” Mrs. Leather appeared unimpressed by the implicit threat. “I will have the doctor send for you when he is comfortable. Afterward, you may inform the staff that I will be pleased to offer them written recommendations. That will be all for now.”

  Her sugared smile was a cobra’s poison.

  For the record, I have long been a fan of poisonous women.

  It was the sort of performance that made one drunk with admiration. We conversed no further but I nigh floated through the next few hours, as proud as the lad whose mother had scolded the class bully into tears. The mood, of course, did not hold once Dr. Leather arrived. I heard him issue sharp words, though official matters were postponed until morning, when Mrs. Leather, the sniffling Gladys on her lap, and I took seats in the parlor while the doctor met with Dixon behind closed doors. We could hear but murmurs. Again, neither of us spoke; what of consequence could be said that wasn’t already felt?

  We were on our third listen of Gesualdo’s “Moro, losso, al mio duolo” (Mrs. Leather seemed to care for it no more than I, but it passed the time) when we heard the opening of the drawing room door. What followed was the proud plodding of Dixon going about his way. Mrs. Leather clawed at her sleeve cuff, which she’d nearabout unstitched over the past half hour.

  Leather came into the room without a word, fell into a chair adjacent to the low-burning fire, and massaged his forehead.

  “Have either of you heard that an earthquake of enormous magnitude destroyed much of San Francisco this morning? No, I suppose not. You were off operating a tricycle.”