The Death and Life of Zebulon Finch, Volume 1

by Daniel Kraus

  “Let us get down to it,” said I. “Tell me, for starters, what you want.”

  With the kind of jarring movement that was becoming her trademark, she dropped her body to the silken bedsheets and struck a coquettish pose.

  “It was the comet!” exclaimed she. “It was a sign.”

  “The what?”

  “Don’t you read the papers? Halley’s comet! They say it passes once every seventy-five years. I know, science—what a bore! But this comet came on Sunday night and all the poor people were climbing roofs to see it, and so I did, too, and there it was! A little rider in the sky.”

  “Wonderful. May we return to our agenda?”

  “It had to be a sign, don’t you see? So I told myself to be brave and came to you, and here we are! Do you know what yesterday was?”

  “Tuesday. Yet another Tuesday.”

  “It was the day we passed through the comet’s tail. So! How about that! It was meant to be.”

  “Nothing is meant to be. I shall ask again: what is it you want?”

  She rolled her eyes.

  “You are such a father. Nag, nag, nag.”

  Before I could raise my voice to compensate for the disquiet brought to me by the f-word, she slithered from the bed and drew herself up to the lancet-arch window, parting the curtains with drama enough for a leading lady. She gasped at the view. Or was the gasp staged? With this girl, it was difficult to tell.

  “Why can’t we make a life together, Papa?”

  “I beg of you to stop calling me that.”

  “Oh! I had the most amazing bath this morning, let me tell you all about it!”

  “Please do not tell me about your bath.”

  “I think this place suits me. Suits both of us.”

  “Understand me: none of this is mine.”

  She sashayed from the window with a mischievous pout.

  “Not yet it isn’t.”

  “What is that supposed to mean?”

  To my horror, she patted my cheek with fingers slender and white, but also calloused. The sound was flat and sarcastic.

  “I mean only that you are in magnificent shape for a man your age. You might outlive the doctor, his dumb wife, all of them. You never know, this whole place could end up ours.”

  I knocked her hand away and she trilled with laughter, twirling away until she happened to catch a glimpse of herself in the boudoir mirror. Her eyes went wide as if seeing the approach of a momentous chocolate cake. She hopped this way and that, preening and primping.

  “We could tell everyone we are sister and brother,” said she.

  “What?”

  “We could be the toast of the town. The papa who looks forever young and his equally sensational daughter.”

  “Listen to me. I am engaged at this residence for purposes of work. Important work, if you must know. Furthermore, I cannot be a father. I would not have the first idea of how to behave. I am sorry for that. Believe me, I am. I will speak to Mrs. Leather and see if the family can offer some package of assistance, so that you might begin again in the world amid circumstances more favorable. Would that be agreeable?”

  I thought it was an amicable enough speech. But it brought an end to her ballet as rudely as a bucket of cold water. Her arched posture wilted into a self-protective hunch. Her haughty airs floated away to reveal the narrowed eyes and sullen underbite of one used to fighting from a corner. She leaned into the mirror, her harder face an inch from the hard glass, tracing her fingertips across her forehead. Even I could see the finespun wrinkles of a girl who’d spent her young life squinting against driving snow in soup lines, coveting the shopping baskets of the rich while gnawing week-old bread, stealing what she needed to survive only to face down condescending men of authority.

  How strange: a crumpling sensation in my chest.

  Was this what the living referred to as empathy?

  I opened my mouth but was a moment late. Merle drove her fist into the mirror. It exploded into silver daggers. For one second, reflections hung upon the air: raging, red eyes; spinning rose petals of blood; my own face turned to a broken puzzle, each twirl of glass alternating a frozen instant of shock. Glass, then, dropped everywhere, a thousand minuscule explosions, while she remained in her lupine hunker, her fist pumping red streams.

  By some primeval instinct I found myself at her side, wrapping a silk sheet around her wounded hand. Merle’s torso hitched with dry, raw sobs that I could feel in my very bones—and why? Because I had taken the girl into a full embrace. Her sopping injury was warm and damp, and it reminded me, for a soaring moment, of the painful thrill of actual life. Her blood, after all, was part mine, and in that moment we shared it, assailant and victim, beast and beauty, father and daughter.

  XI.

  THE UNSPEAKABLE RIGORS OF MEAT etiquette continued above, while below began an arduous process of acquaintance. Though Merle and I had launched our ship at an acrimonious port, we paddled somewhere more complex. Our quarters were close and we saw each other at vulnerable moments. Example: while dragging myself from the third-floor funhouse of horrors, body and soul equally sundered, I found Merle peeking from behind a door and judging my stoop of despair as genuine enough not to mock. Example: Merle, humiliated at the dinner table by Leather when caught holding her steak knife like a dagger, calming a bit when she saw me, in solidarity, give my knife the same murderer’s grip.

  Even more affecting were the moments of gladness. After an umpteenth snooping, I spelunked from Leather’s cabinets an old medical study featuring photographs of one hundred naked women, and the sincerity with which I collated my top ten made Merle laugh out loud. She, meanwhile, experienced moments of true bliss upon Mary introducing her to any number of modern luxuries: the telephone, through which she jabbered at switchboard operators; an air-conditioning unit before which she danced in disbelief; teabags, the first of which she sniffed and grumbled about before dunking it and discovering that it tasted just like real tea!

  The doctor bore his interloping grandchild like a foul odor. Mary, reactive as always to her husband’s mood, repeated to him at night that Merle intended to leave as soon as she’d made a determination of what she—a girl with no pedigree, no means, and no education—was going to do with herself.

  Did Merle also want cash, as Leather had suspected? Yes, she did, but I told myself that it was a reasonable reaction for one raised under fiscal fatigue. Mary, generous of heart, indulged the lass with a weekly allowance to help her find her footing. What Merle found instead was a row of the best shops in Boston, and rare was the week she did not promenade into the dining room wearing a new dress or accent of jewelry, to the constant captivation of five-year-old Gladys. Mary suggested that Merle take advantage of the new clothing to apply for a position as a nurse or a secretary. Merle said she’d think about it. There the discussion croaked, for the tantrums of Merle Ruby Watson were on the way to becoming legend, and keeping them at bay was key to a happy household.

  I felt that Merle and I had achieved, if not closeness, at least a wary respect. Still, she would reveal nothing about how she had tracked me down (I suspected my infamous municipal tricycling), though plied with the right coins, puddings, or flatteries, she would on occasion reveal patches of her mother’s story. Dearest Reader, I had to know; the agony was a parcel of mine to claim.

  Wilma Sue had left Chicago pregnant in 1895 and lived with Merle for stretches at a time in different Midwestern cities. With authentic agony, Merle described Wilma Sue’s final decade at a garment factory, cutting fabric for skirts and blouses she’d never afford until her hands doubled in size with swelling. Details were manifestly withering. Wilma Sue never once rode in a car. Never ordered food at a restaurant. Never bought an item of clothing off the rack. Hers was a checklist of a life devoid of dignity and desserts.

  Merle intended her stories to hurt and repel me, but th
ey had the opposite effect, especially given the status of meat etiquette, which, like its namesake, had begun to spoil. For months Leather’s arsenal of electrical toys had ripped apart People Garden corpses for no apparent gain, and the blood-spattered doctor, I feared, was losing all sense of direction, not to mention decency. I lived in apprehension of what atrocity he might dream up next, what part I might be forced to play in it, and what might be done to my own corpse if I refused.

  I believe it was natural at so taxing a juncture to search out a better fantasy: taking care of Merle as I had failed to take care of Wilma Sue. Week by upsetting week with Leather, my belief in the new course grew stronger: I would take care of her, I had to, for she was the sole product of a perished pecker, the only thing I’d ever made instead of destroyed.

  First, however, she would need to know the truth about Zebulon Finch.

  So it transpired one late-summer eve that I escorted Merle Ruby Watson to the domed veranda, where the two of us could commune in private. She moped most strenuously, as her preferred routine was to prance about the lower floors in her latest gown, tipsy from a smuggled bottle and guffawing at the imitations of the adoring Gladys. I guided her to the chair boasting the best view of the three-sided bay window and took for myself the opposite.

  “Your arrival,” said I, “has brought to mind many things long forgotten.”

  Her head tipped back and she giggled at the ribbed vault of the ceiling.

  “It looks like we’re inside a giant whale.”

  I counted to five before proceeding.

  “Merle, listen to me.”

  “All I ever do is listen to you.”

  “Be that as it may. I have something important to say.”

  She propped herself up on one of her sharp elbows.

  “If a whale swallowed you,” said she, “I’d try to save you.”

  I frowned.

  “Would you? Truly?”

  She snapped her fingers. “Changed my mind. I can’t swim. You never taught me.”

  “You are not making this easy.”

  “Hey, what goes on in that lab up there? Mr. Dixon never moves from that landing. I’ve given him the sad eyes, I’ve tried tickling his chin, but he’s too old to care. I know something strange is going on. Why won’t you tell me, Papa?”

  “In fact, I am trying.”

  “Are you?”

  She made a show of planting her triangular face into her open palms. It was impossible to know if her interest was honest or farcical.

  “Something happened a year or so after your birth. I was the target of—”

  “I know what you were.” Her chill was back. “Mother told me everything.”

  “Not quite everything. I—well, there is no best way to say this. In May of 1896 I was shot and killed on a stretch of Lake Michigan beachfront.”

  Merle performed upon me a long, careful study. Being the focus of her stare never failed to distress. It was the look of a butcher, hatchet in hand, determining where best to chop.

  “You have my attention, Papa.” She sounded as sober as Leather. “Please continue.”

  With a big balloon of a breath, continue I did. The moon had sailed halfway across its black sea by the time I finished my macabre tour, which began at the bottom of a lake, advanced to a monkey cage, and terminated in a Boston laboratory. At appropriate plot points, I revealed the gaping wound in my neck and the bullet holes in my shoulder.

  Merle was silent, her only movement being the painful-looking coiling of a strand of brown hair about a pitiless finger. I concluded with an abstract of the principles of meat etiquette and petered off, having prepared for my story neither satisfying climax nor sorely needed cliffhanger.

  Merle tapped her teeth with a fingernail.

  “I was right,” said she at last.

  “How so?”

  “That all this”—she gestured to the estate surrounding us—“could be ours.”

  Greed, greed, greed! Did this daughter of mine have a second emotion? Yes, Reader, I, too, was well-versed in material gluttony but her assessment felt so tawdry after my earnest unweighing. With a wave of my hand, I attempted to erase the comment from the record.

  “What we might gain from my condition is a lesser consideration.”

  “You told me you used to live on the streets. You know how it is.”

  “We could leave here. The two of us. That is what I want to say.”

  “And live happily ever after? In what? A ditch? A cave?”

  “I do hope those locales can be avoided. But even those fates would be sufferable if you and I suffered them together. Don’t you agree, daughter? Our unification might mean absolution for the both of us—even, perhaps, for your mother.”

  She scrambled to her feet as if my skin had begun to ulcerate with plague. Her chair crashed to the tiled floor between us and I flinched as if I’d been pinned beneath it. In a way, I supposed that I had. For when does Zebulon Finch consider anything through before reeling headlong into it?

  “We are not the same,” cried Merle. “I am not like you. I need shelter. I need warmth. I need food, I need water, I need clothes—did you consider any of this? If your secret business on the third floor no longer brings you satisfaction, then I suggest you behave like my mother, like any person with a child ought to: keep quiet and keep working. You, strange and sick as you are, might not need this roof above your head, but I do. I do! I will not let you ruin it!”

  Merle bolted from the veranda, kicking aside a set of wrought-iron firetools and shoving from a pedestal a rare seventeenth-century jug. Between the clanging of tongs and poker and the shattering of valuable stonewear, she disappeared, leaving in her wake a wincing medical marvel and his bindle of unwanted secrets, two seafarers locked inside the great whale that ate us and that might spend the next century or two over our digestion.

  XII.

  A PERMANENT RIFT SOON ROSE BETWEEN Cornelius Leather and the Medical School of Harvard College. For some time, the doctor’s afternoon homecomings had become fire-bombings from which the rest of us shielded ourselves. Harvard’s witless dunces, shouted Leather, alleged that his private undertakings were coming at the detriment of his lessons. The doctor was livid. He could no more hold rational discussions with these dripping idiots than he could pull pinecones from his ass!

  “They call me secretive!” His jabber was the same at both operating and dining room tables. “Well, indeed, gentlemen! Indeed I am! Only a feeble-minded twit would share his world-altering discoveries with lethargic plagiarizers! Oh, yes, they smell breakthrough all over me and they long to be the second, third, and fourth cooks named in my published recipe!”

  This was not the same paragon of sober intellect for whom I’d journeyed to Boston. But how could I flee if it meant leaving behind Merle, not to mention Mary and Gladys, who would then become subject to his concentrated wrath? I dwelt upon the workings of this elaborate trap while Leather boasted about daring the medical board to take away his classes, his title, and the research funding that the bleeding ignoramuses had written in black ink upon his contract!

  So take them away they did.

  No one, I believe it is safe to say, had ever defied the doctor with such temerity. He kicked through the front door that day, hoarse and howling, and raced to the third floor, where in a myopic fit he upended old jars of pickled eyeballs and testicles into the lovely bathtub. He then ripped off his shoes, socks, and trousers, and in his underwear stomped the organs until two inches of green mash coated the porcelain. I watched in silent shock as he pulled his trousers back on and strode away, trailing ocular and testicular residue. In the great hall, he damned each of us in turn.

  “How can any sapient man produce results in such a monkey house? You, wife, are a chimpanzee, canny of deception and clumsy of decision! You, child, are a howler monkey, hooting after your milk-g
iver and reveling in your aggravating blare! You, young woman, are a gibbon, the long-limbed prankster, palming your own shit in preparation to throw! And you, Finch, are the orangutan, so close to human that you have mistook your position as one of entitlement!”

  He shook his fist at the bronze candelabrum, the ebonized tallcase clock, the satinwood display cupboard, all the trappings of wealth and position he so despised.

  “Gesualdo himself could not have composed in such a zoo! Henceforth all disturbances will be eradicated! Total concentration shall be mine!”

  He disappeared into his lab for five days, corresponding with Dixon via notes slipped beneath the door. On the sixth day a massive wooden crate arrived at the house and Leather surfaced to greet it, his unwashed hair snarled into Medusa whips, his extremities trembling from lack of sustenance. He ambushed the crate with chisel and hammer, removed from the straw padding several smaller boxes, and struggled back up the steps as he’d once done with the Victrola.

  This inaugurated several more days of tense secrecy. From the lab I heard the thudding of heavy objects; from below I heard the anxious pacing of Merle and the alphabetical recitations of Gladys to her mother. It was as the females slept one night that I thieved down the hall, pressed my ear to the laboratory door, and detected the most peculiar sound. It rose, it fell; it was reedy and high-pitched; it was twice as unsettling for its oceanside softness.

  Hweeeeee . . . fweeeeee . . . hweeeeee . . . fweeeeee . . .

  I assessed the door’s dark maleficence. The filaments of straw poking from beneath it recalled the bed of a Highly Intelligent Monkey—and hadn’t Leather just cursed our domicile as a monkey house? This pairing of evidence was portentous but courage was the night’s directive; I cleared my throat and spoke.

  “Dr. Leather? It’s Mr. Finch. I wish to enter.”

  Hweeeeee . . . fweeeeee . . . hweeeeee . . . fweeeeee . . .