Fin & Lady: A Novel

by Cathleen Schine

  * * *

  Lady and Mabel climbed into the front seats, Fin and Gus into the back of the convertible. They drove down Fifth Avenue and Fin watched the cars driving uptown. Were those cars leaving Greenwich Village? Why? That was where everything was happening. He smiled a superior smile. Goodbye, Uncle Ty, and good riddance. Goodbye, as well, to the cool, cushioned ease of Lady’s mother’s sprawling apartment, goodbye to the doormen, who smiled at him and accepted the enthusiasm of Gus’s greeting with patient equanimity, goodbye to Mike and the other elevator men. He would miss them. But Fin already missed so much, he told me, that he was getting used to the feeling.

  The buildings hung over them, blocking out the sun but not the heat. Lady wore sunglasses and a blue chiffon scarf on her head. She sang along with the radio, the Beach Boys, “I Get Around.” The sound of her voice, just off-key, came back to him on the hot car breeze.

  As Lady had said, the house was not finished. There was no front door, for example, just a makeshift plywood barrier. There was no electricity. There was no staircase from the main floor to the kitchen downstairs, partially below street level: you had to walk past the plywood barrier and down the front steps, then down two more steps around the side, and then, finally, into the kitchen. But the house was no longer empty, either. There was furniture, all right: weird furniture, low and angular. The paintings were enormous and bizarre, some geometrically bizarre, some shapelessly bizarre, but all bizarre all the same to Fin. There was a haphazard feeling to the whole enterprise, as if someone had thrown his clothes on the floor. If his clothes were furniture. Nothing was where it should be. Huge pillows, not on the couch but on the floor. The rug? Not on the floor but on the couch. A mirror stood on the floor, leaning against the wall. The curtains on the window were Indian cotton bedspreads, a different pattern for each window.

  A small man had pulled back the plywood for them, beaming, his face almost perfectly round. His eyes were round, too, and black, like someone in a comic strip. He was smaller than Fin, but he had a mustache as thin as a pencil line.

  “‘Groovy’ is the word you are searching for.” He had a heavy accent. He held out his arms toward the jarring arrangement of jarring items. “For the groovy debutante.”

  “Oh, I left the debutante uptown, where she belongs…”

  “Uptown with all the real furniture,” Mabel added.

  “Mabel does not approve,” Lady said, laughing. “Mabel does not approve of anything I do, do you?”

  “No,” Mabel said. “I do not.”

  The small man was named Pierre. He was the interior decorator. He had made the house look like this on purpose. Was he an adult? Yes, of course, obviously: his hair was thinning, he had a mustache, and he was dressed like a man in a suit and tie. A little man. In a little suit and tie.

  “The child’s eyeballs are popping out of his head,” Pierre said, staring back at Fin.

  “Put them back, Fin.”

  “How do you do,” Fin said. He held out his hand.

  The little man’s little hand took his and shook it vigorously. “The door will be here tomorrow. Electricity tomorrow. The stairs … this will take another week or so. You’re impulsive, my friend Lady. And impatient. It is what we love about you, yes?”

  “You’re a genius. It looks like we’ve lived here for years.”

  Fin caught Mabel’s eye. She opened her mouth a little, as if to speak, then shook her head, and closed it.

  “And now we will live here for years to come.”

  On the second floor, there were two rooms. One was Lady’s bedroom, the other her study.

  “What are you studying?” Fin asked.

  “Life!” Lady said.

  Fin’s room was on the third floor. Next to it was a room with a television.

  “Color television,” Lady said. “Just for you.”

  “Color!” He laughed out loud. “Can I watch it whenever I want to?” His grandparents had favored wrestling and Walt Disney’s Wonderful World of Color in black-and-white on Sunday nights.

  “When do you want to?” Lady asked.

  Fin looked at her blankly. Did she not understand the simplest thing? He knew Lady was the wisest person he had ever met. She was certainly the most sophisticated. But there were times, like this, when she seemed almost asleep, with her eyes open, her voice clear and loud, standing upright on her lovely legs. Like a horse. A beautiful, powerful horse. Fast asleep.

  “Oh well, if you don’t know, I certainly don’t,” she said when he did not answer.

  Fin’s bedroom had a fireplace in it. The walls were decorated with rugs of colorful geometric design, but there were no rugs on the floor. Nor were there curtains on the windows. He could see the back garden—some flagstones, a tree in the middle, a curved wooden seat encircling the trunk. Beyond it, another garden and the windows of another house staring back at him. When he got into his pajamas that night, he did it in the bathroom, a flashlight balanced on the radiator, trying to hold the door closed with his foot as Gus nudged it with his long nose. He woke up in the middle of the night, confused. Where was he? Not home. Not which home?

  Out his window he saw yellow squares of light, the windows of the brownstones backing onto the garden. He was in Greenwich Village, in Lady’s house, the terrific, perfect, groovy house.

  He lay there in the unfamiliar semidarkness, the sheet pulled close in spite of the summer heat, and he wondered what more he could do to make Lady like him. She liked him, but did she like him enough to keep him with her? Forever? He often felt that Lady was just ahead of him, just out of reach, rounding the corner, leaving just a glimpse of her hem as she disappeared, a tiny flag.

  “Stop blowing smoke in that boy’s face!” Mabel said the next day, lugging the vacuum cleaner into the new living room. “What is wrong with you, Miss Lady?”

  “Please don’t call me Miss Lady, Mabel. This is a new age for the Negro.”

  “When you work for me, that’ll be the new age. And when you get married, then I’ll stop calling you Miss Lady.” Mabel glowered at her. “I’ll call you Mrs. Lady.”

  “You’ll have a new name, anyway, when you get married,” said Fin. “Then we won’t be the same.”

  “Our dear departed father wouldn’t let my poor old mother give me a middle name so that I’d be able to use Hadley as my middle name. So we’ll still be the same in a way.”

  “My middle name is Hugo.”

  “There, you see? We just can’t escape, can we?”

  “While you two sort yourselves out, I have to vacuum,” Mabel said, and pushed the button of the new silver vacuum with her foot. Fin jumped on to ride like a jockey, knees to his chin, then got off and stared out the window. A Checker cab went by. A man scraped something off his shoe on the curb. Fin wondered where the beatniks were.

  “Where are the beatniks?” he said when the vacuum was dragged up the stairs and out of earshot. Now all they could hear was the banging of the workmen on what should have been the stairs to the kitchen.

  “Oh, Fin, what am I going to do with you in Greenwich Village?”

  Fin did not answer. It was not a question one answered, he understood that. And, too, what would she do with him? He had no idea.

  “Let’s see,” Lady said. She tapped her lip with her finger. “You could come with me to the beauty parlor! And the dentist!”

  Fin made a face.

  “No?”

  Fin shook his head.

  “What would you like to do? What did you used to do?”

  “Ride my bike. Play baseball.”

  Lady considered this. “I don’t know how to ride a bike.”

  “I could teach you.”

  The next day, they bought bicycles. English bicycles with leather pouches full of little tools attached to the backs of the seats. Fin’s was dark green, Lady’s was dark blue, and they had three speeds, not at all like his fat-tired bike at home.

  Fin held the back of Lady’s bike and told her to pedal as fast
as she could. He ran behind her, holding the bike steady. Then he let go.

  “You did it!” he cried as she pedaled down the sidewalk.

  “I did it!” she said when she had turned around and come back.

  It did not occur to Fin for years, many years, that she had known how to ride a bicycle all along. “But she did,” he told me. “Of course she did! I see that now.”

  They rode their bikes around the Village that afternoon, but they never took them out of the storeroom behind the kitchen after that. It wasn’t much fun to ride a bike in New York after the initial excitement of teaching Lady how to do it. There were too many cars. Too many people. Too many potholes. Too many stop signs and traffic lights. Too many buses. Fin put his shiny green English three-speed bicycle into the storeroom and spent the rest of the day unpacking while Lady was off doing errands. He read an old comic. He studiously picked at a scab on his elbow for a few minutes. When it began to bleed, he panicked and pressed a piece of toilet paper against it, praying it would not leave a stain on his clothes. He did not want to hear Mabel’s opinion of boys who picked at scabs on their elbows.

  When he got hungry, he went outside, through the new heavy door, down the front steps, and in through the kitchen entrance.

  “Boys,” Mabel said accusingly, then handed him a tuna-fish sandwich and a glass of milk.

  “You should be playing baseball with your friends. Correct?” Lady asked him when she got back.

  “I don’t know anyone here,” he said. “I don’t have any friends.”

  “Then I’ll just have to do for the time being.” And she taught him how to blow smoke rings.

  She was going out that evening. “Do you want to come? It’s a nightclub. The man I’m going with is a bit of a bore. Are you interested in synthetic fabric? He’s very interested in synthetic fabric.”

  “Are kids allowed in nightclubs?”

  “I don’t see why not.”

  “You don’t?”

  “In Europe they let dogs into restaurants.”

  “You could take Gus.”

  Lady laughed. The big laugh. Fin was happy to get the big laugh. The big laugh made everything seem adventurous and full of joy through the drawn-out summer day. He complacently worked on a model airplane that afternoon. A World War II Flying Tiger. While it dried, he stared curiously out the window at the neighbors’ backyards. He could see a lady washing dishes at her kitchen sink. A little black-and-white dog ran out into a yard, barked at the sky, and ran back inside. He could hear someone playing scales on a saxophone. Someone had put bras on a line to dry. Greenwich Village was everything he had hoped it would be.

  “Just like the Bible”

  A week or two after they’d moved downtown, Lady came sweeping into Fin’s room. She was wearing a short dress with tiny straps she called spaghetti straps. Fin thought for years that she had made that up to amuse him: spaghetti straps. She was going out to dinner and a movie with some friends. She sat on the floor in her dress. She was made up, but had no shoes on. She said, “Finny, I’ve got it!”

  Fin had been arranging toy soldiers on his pillow.

  “Oh, Finny, none of that,” Lady said, eyeing the soldiers. “We’re pacifists, babe. Didn’t I mention that? Well, now you know. Now listen, I’ve thought it over carefully, and I have the answer to what we can do with you while you’re here.”

  “While I’m here?” He was going someplace else? So soon? When did he have to leave? Was Lady coming, too? “Where am I going?”

  “You’re not going anywhere, for the love of Mike. But we have to have something for you to do, n’est pas?”

  “N’est pas!” Fin agreed, relieved.

  She was shimmering in the late-evening sun, her shoulders so thin, bony compared with his mother’s. Except when she was sick. But Lady wasn’t sick. She was healthy and alive, she smelled like wild roses, intoxicating. She had painted her toenails a bright white. He thought she was magnificent.

  Then she said, “You will help me get married!”

  Fin sat silent and shocked.

  A husband? What had happened to Fin and Lady, the orphan family? Would the husband be an orphan, too? But the husband would obviously be Tyler Morrison, and Fin would have to help Lady marry him. How could Lady have changed her mind so fast? It was Fin’s fault, that’s how. Fin hanging around Greenwich Village, where everyone was groovy and free except him, an eleven-year-old with nothing to do. It was Fin. He was holding Lady back in her quest for a big life.

  “You don’t have to marry Uncle Ty,” he cried out. “I’ll be good. I’ll play by myself. I’ll help Mabel. I’ll make friends, too…”

  “Uncle Ty? Good God, no. We’re downtown now, Fin.”

  A new husband he had not even met? What if the new husband did not want an eleven-year-old brother-in-law?

  “Who?” he asked. “When? When are you getting married?”

  “Well, let’s see … I’m twenty-four. The deadline is twenty-five. After that you really do become pathetic. So we have a year. A little less than a year.”

  Fin tried not to let his relief show.

  “Just like the Bible,” Lady said. “Except that was seven years. And I won’t have to share my husband with my sister.”

  “Because you don’t have a sister.”

  “Well, that’s one reason. So, what do you think, Fin? Can you help me find someone to fall in love with in a year?”

  “Don’t worry. Everyone falls in love with you, Lady.”

  “That’s not what I said.”

  Fin thought about that for a moment.

  “Twenty-five,” Lady was saying. “Then it’s all over. How’s your Shakespeare, Fin?”

  “I watched the Beatles in A Midsummer Night’s Dream on television.”

  “How about Taming of the Shrew?”

  “Uh-uh,” Fin said, but Lady was already reciting, standing, one hand on her heart, her other arm flung out.

  “I will be master of what is mine own:

  She is my goods, my chattels; she is my house,

  My household stuff, my field, my barn,

  My horse, my ox, my ass, my any thing.”

  She poked Fin’s chest. “I don’t want a master. And I don’t want to be an ass.”

  “Me, either.” But Fin was thinking more of the barn and the ox, which was almost a cow.

  “And that’s where you come in, Finino.”

  Fin thought, Me? I can’t marry Lady; then, for one fleeting second: Can I?

  “You really have to help me. One year to find one, a good one, one I’m in love with. Is that too much to ask?”

  “No!”

  They shook hands.

  “One year, Fin. One year, twelve months, three hundred and sixty-five days. Or thereabouts.

  “No lemons,” she added. “There are a lot of lemons out there,” and she left the room trailing smoke and scent and confusion.

  Fin was able to begin his search for Lady’s future husband the next day. He wasn’t sure how Lady had managed to make so many friends so quickly, but almost every night there was a party at her house, some planned, some spontaneous. People dropped in, Fin noticed, as if they were in Connecticut bringing round a pie, but these people came late, after midnight sometimes, and brought not pie but a bottle of bourbon or wine. Fin sat at the top of the stairs in his pajamas and watched the young men and women drinking and laughing. And talking. He had never seen people talk so much.

  Sometimes he came downstairs, ostensibly to get a glass of milk from the kitchen, but really to see them talk as well as to hear them. Stagnating in the swampland of collectivism. Extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice, moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue. Then they said something about being a crazy cat. At first Fin thought they were talking about Krazy Kat and asked if they knew if Krazy Kat was a girl or a boy. The cartoons had always unnerved him. But they said, No, they wished Goldwater was a cartoon, he should be a cartoon, he was all too real.

 
He watched them dance, waving their arms and jiggling crazily. He watched them argue. Young men, standing so close they nearly touched, would shout at each other, forefingers poking the other’s chest. There were factions, so many factions, musical factions, political factions.

  “What’s a Trotskyite?” he would ask the next morning. “Who’s A. J. Muste? Why shouldn’t honkies play trumpet? What’s a honky? Where’s Port Huron? What pill?”

  Gus roamed among the partygoers, his nose occasionally sniffing crotches regardless of faction, his tail knocking over cocktail glasses, his loud, shrill bark punctuating the music.

  The New York City Fin encountered with Lady was utterly different from his earlier years of safe and comfortable routine. Lady did not believe in routine, or safety, or, frequently, in comfort, either. Lady’s downtown world was one of urgent, restless urbanity. Everything about his new home was full of color and noise and movement. To Fin it was as good as a circus.

  Spumoni

  What you don’t know about Lady, because I haven’t told you, is that she was a great reader, and reading was something she was determined to share with Fin. It was she, as I’ve mentioned, who gave Fin the Tintin album on the ship and translated it aloud as they gazed at the bright, clear drawings. It was she who sent him a copy of Just So Stories on his sixth birthday, which his mother read to him. It was she who gave him The Phantom Tollbooth, Huckleberry Finn, and Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. Later, when she saw that his interest in toy soldiers was abiding, she presented him with a copy of H. G. Wells’s Little Wars (the man was a pacifist, after all), and a copy of Tristram Shandy, so he could read of Uncle Toby’s bulwarks. He never read past Uncle Toby, but he never forgot him, either.

  On the day Fin met Biffi Deutsch, he was reading The Spy Who Loved Me, which was not at all like Chitty Chitty Bang Bang and sometimes confusing, but he could not be seen on the steps reading a book written for a child. Biffi was a Hungarian Jew who as a small child had survived the war in Budapest, survived the invading Germans and then survived the invading Soviets. Fin knew nothing of this when he met Biffi, only learning of it much later, from an obituary of Biffi’s mother. Odd, to know so little of a man who had meant so much to you, Fin told me once.