Fin & Lady: A Novel

by Cathleen Schine

  “Fin attends the New Flower Poster-Making Academy,” Lady said to Joan. “I like his ‘Vote for Goldwater, Vote for Death’ best myself.”

  When the day was nice, the students would all troop out to Washington Square to Observe. There might be a toddler on a tricycle looking up at a mounted policeman on a huge horse, the horse towering above, its hooves clacking on the cobblestones, the reins pulled tight as the giant animal pranced and snorted. The uniformed officer might wear polished boots. A dark blue station wagon might cruise past. A fat girl on roller skates might clump behind …

  Sometimes they painted their Impressions of their Observations. Sometimes they discussed them in the Sharing Circle.

  “I wish I had roller skates,” a girl would say.

  “Do you really?” Red would ask. “I mean, really?”

  “Well, yeah, kind of. Yeah, I do.”

  “But is it you wishing or is it the message you’re getting? To want roller skates? To want things?”

  “Oh, like a message from a ghost? Or from God or something?”

  “No,” Red would say wearily. “Not from a ghost. Not from God.”

  Fin learned very quickly that the correct answer to most questions of this nature was “Advertising” or, even better, “Society.”

  “Right. Exactly. Society. You don’t really need roller skates, do you, Missy?”

  “Well, to skate I do.”

  “Someone implants the idea of need, and that someone is…”

  “Society,” Fin would say again.

  “What did you do at your hotty-totty school today?” Lady asked when he got home.

  “The fruit flies got out, so we don’t know what color this generation’s eyes are.”

  “No wonder the school costs a fortune.” Lady handed him a package. “Here.” It was a book. Kim, by Rudyard Kipling. “Don’t let your teacher see it.”

  “Is it dirty?”

  “Nope. Imperialist.”

  The Mets went 53 and 109 in 1964, finishing tenth in the National League. The Cardinals beat the Yankees in the World Series, a series in which Mickey Mantle hit three home runs. But even with the World Series as a reminder, autumn snuck up on Fin. Without the flocks of goldfinches, the flutter of dull-colored warblers in their fall plumage, the moon shining big and orange in his window, the humps of baled hay in the fields, the smell of the leaves sinking deeper and deeper into the wet earth, without the fading of the cicadas’ song, he was unprepared. One day he smelled wood smoke and realized autumn was all around him. He looked up to see geese flying south in formation over the Hudson River. The wind blew flurries of small gold leaves down the street.

  “We’re segregated,” Phoebe said that afternoon as they turned onto Charles Street. “By grade.” She was in seventh grade, one higher than Fin. They never spoke at school. You couldn’t. You really couldn’t.

  “Grade ghettos,” Fin said to Lady when he got home.

  “Oh please, what puerile bunkum. Go talk to Mabel about that one, Finny.”

  “What does puerile mean?”

  “Boyish.”

  “Is that bad? That’s not bad.”

  “Okay. Childish. It means childish. Don’t they teach Latin in that school?”

  “No. Latin isn’t relevant. Did you know that Cole Porter wrote a whole song in the subjunctive? He died last week.”

  “Do you even know what the subjunctive is? Do you even know who Cole Porter is?”

  “I read his obituary. And I am a child. So childish isn’t bad, either. Is bunkum Latin?”

  “I’ve never heard of a private school without Latin. Do you want me to take you out? Put you in a real school?”

  “No! I just made two friends.”

  “In your ghetto?” Lady said, grabbing him by the neck and kissing his head.

  “But they are grade ghettos,” Phoebe said the next afternoon. “They separate us. Based on our grade.”

  “But we get to get out of the ghettos. So they’re not real ghettos.”

  “But a sixth-grader can’t come into a seventh-grade classroom.”

  “Unless they skip a grade.”

  Phoebe thought this over. Then they argued over which was the real attitude of the Beatles: “I don’t care too much for money, money can’t buy me love” or “Give me money, that’s what I want.”

  Phoebe’s grandmother had gotten her a guitar. Phoebe had immediately charged a book of chords to her parents at the bookstore, and she and Fin took turns trying to teach themselves the chords for “On Top of Old Smokey.” She had an album cover of Dave Van Ronk taped to her wall, and she tried to imitate the roughness of his voice, with mixed success.

  “You know what ‘House of the Rising Sun’ is about, right?” she asked Fin when they decided to move on to that.

  Fin pretended to be concentrating on getting his pinkie in the proper position for an F chord.

  “Prostitutes,” Phoebe said. “It’s a whorehouse.”

  “I know,” Fin said.

  “You did not.”

  Fin looked up from the guitar, and in spite of the contemptuous expression on her face, he grinned at her.

  “I knew you didn’t know. You probably don’t even know what a prostitute is.”

  “I do, too. They follow armies around. Did you know that?”

  Phoebe did not, and furthermore, she declared, she did not care.

  * * *

  Thanksgiving dinner was spent with Biffi and his mother, a sharp-eyed woman in a well-cut camel-hair suit and laced suede shoes who had spent two days cooking a traditional Thanksgiving dinner. There was a huge turkey on a platter surrounded by plates and bowls of mashed potatoes, peas and onions, creamed corn, and extra stuffing, all of it, somehow, tasting vaguely of cabbage. The table was covered by a thick white linen cloth, and the silver was heavy and bright. Fin could barely lift his elaborately decorated crystal glass of water.

  “What lovely dishes,” Lady said.

  “Queen of England,” said the unsmiling Mrs. Deutsch. “Same.”

  Lady had brought a bottle of champagne, a glass of which seemed to cheer Mrs. Deutsch considerably. She toasted the New World and insisted Fin have some bubbly, which she pronounced “boobly.” It was the first champagne Fin had ever tasted. “Like Gigi!” said the now quite jolly Mrs. Deutsch.

  The next day, Lady gave Fin a paperback of Colette’s novella.

  “What’s a courtesan?” he asked, reading the back cover.

  “Look it up.”

  The book had an old-fashioned drawing of a girl on it.

  “Don’t mind that,” Lady said.

  “Is it dirty?”

  “Is love dirty?”

  Fin raced upstairs and read the little book straight through.

  Wasn’t it a little … inappropriate? I once asked him.

  “Is love inappropriate?” he said. “Or beauty? Or literature, for that matter?”

  Well, sometimes it is, I said.

  But Fin would always be a bit of a romantic, at least when it came to books. That was one of the things, one of the many things, bequeathed to him by Lady.

  Money was another. It’s true that Lady went through quite a bit of it at first. People said she was careless with money, but Fin always said they were wrong, that she was not careless at all, but carefree. He understood Lady’s relationship to money. She loved it, he said. Not the way a miser loved it, or a gambler. She wasn’t consumed by desire for money. For Lady, money was a pal, a generous pal, generous to her, to Fin, to her friends when they needed generosity.

  “Money,” she said, “is freedom.”

  Freedom, that highest good, along with Fun.

  “You will have both, Fin. Freedom and Fun. Perché no?”

  She meant: Not like me. She meant: I won’t be like our father. She never said so in so many words, but it’s what she meant.

  It was harder and harder for Fin to remember his father. Sometimes he would hear something, a door slamming, or smell a cigar, or see a
man in an overcoat and hat, and his father would come back to him, his deep voice, his sudden corrosive presence.

  He would remember being curled on his mother’s lap. She stroked his hair in her sweetly absent way. The room was silent, just the rhythmic sound inside his head of her small hand gliding across his scalp. Then she sang to him, songs he would not remember, but the musical sound of her voice, clear and intimate, he would recall always. And into the scene of one of these cherished memories of his mother, into the room where he lay, a little boy on his mother’s lap, a great noise, a banging of doors, and cigar smoke, all would announce the arrival of his father. The reverie was over, the oasis gone like a desert hallucination.

  “Damn fool,” his father might say. His mother would ask, Who?, or not. His father would answer, or not.

  Fin would look up at his father. That’s most of what he remembered: looking up.

  “Did you study your spelling?” Hugo would ask. Fin remembered that, too.

  And Fin continued looking up, silent.

  “‘Dog’?” said Hugo.

  Silence.

  “Go ahead,” Fin’s mother whispered.

  “D.O.G.”

  “Okay, then,” Hugo said. “‘Rabbit.’”

  Rabbit? How many b’s? How many t’s? How many a’s? Fin felt hot. Felt his heart beating. He had practiced with his mother. “R.A.B.B.I.T.T.?”

  “What do you do all day with him?” his father said, angry, turning on Fin’s mother. Fin clutched her hand.

  “He’s only a child,” she said gently, then she stood, let go of Fin’s hand, and took his father’s. She gave her husband a kiss as Fin got up and backed out of the room.

  “R.A.B.B.I.T.?” he said suddenly, from the doorway.

  “Well, why didn’t you say so in the first place?” his father said, suddenly jovial, and held his arms open to let Fin jump inside his heavy embrace.

  His father had been like that. Encompassing, like air. Unpredictable, like Lady. “Demanding, like life,” Fin told me, with a shrug.

  But Lady didn’t think her father was a bit like life. He was everything that kept her from life. He was strict. Severe. Cruel, Lady said.

  “The prison house,” she called her home. “A prison you couldn’t escape, a prison you were born into.”

  “But that, surely, is called existence, no?” Biffi said when she told him this.

  “You can’t possibly understand how awful it was because you experienced so many things so much worse,” Lady said.

  Fin checked her expression. Yes, she was serious.

  “So don’t even try,” she added.

  * * *

  Fin’s best friends at school were a boy named James, who could play the guitar, and another named Henry. Lady referred to them as Henry James, thinking it hilarious. It’s true they were a pair. They looked like brothers, both with black shiny hair and enormous, round blue eyes. Fin, they discovered, was a good pitcher, and they spent their recess time playing wiffle ball on the closed-off street or, in bad weather, in the small gym. Sometimes, instead of playing ball, they flipped baseball cards.

  Phoebe had an impressive stack of baseball cards that her grandmother, who lived in Omaha, Nebraska, had gotten for her on a recent visit. Instead of buying a few packs of cards with the powdery slab of pink gum inside, Phoebe’s kindly and ancient grandmother had been convinced that one was supposed to buy the entire display box, which held twenty packs. At ten cards each, that was two hundred altogether. An instant collection.

  “You’re so lucky,” Fin said.

  “You think? It’s kind of destroyed my will to succeed.”

  * * *

  Parent-teacher conferences were held twice a year at New Flower. There were, of course, no grades given out, so these meetings were supposed to be taken very seriously. Lady swept off to the first one on a blowy December evening, late before she even stepped out the door. Fin put on an album. Buffy St. Marie.

  What would his teacher make of his glamorous sister?

  He opened a box of cookies and poured himself a glass of milk. He lay on the couch and stared out the windows. The wind blew through the slender trees, scattering their last few leaves. From his position, lying on the low couch, he could see Phoebe’s window on the second floor across the street, but no light was on. Her parents ate dinner every night at eight o’clock, and Phoebe was expected to join them. She claimed it was the only time she saw them. He imagined them seated around the oval dining table, politely passing dishes. He envied them, the little family of three. “Pass the butter to your father,” he imagined the mother shrink saying, smiling sweetly at the shrink father. “It’s margarine,” said Phoebe’s imagined voice, and Fin’s imagined family dinner was over.

  Lady came back from that first parent-teacher conference with a smile Fin was beginning to understand—the Smile of Conquest. He would talk about that special smile years later, with his own special smile, the one that crept across his face whenever he thought of those early days with Lady.

  “Lordy Lou, your teacher sure can talk!” She gave the smile again.

  “N.O.,” Fin said. “No. Really, Lady. Not him. I forbid it.”

  His words brought back a memory—his mother, her pale blue coat, her slender fingers around his. You must never go down to the end of the town …

  “My little captain,” Lady said, ruffling his hair. “Your poster-making is above average, apparently. And can I help it if your teacher finds me fascinating?”

  “Yes,” said Fin. “You can.”

  Then came Christmas, Fin’s first without his mother. He pretended it was a different holiday, not the one he’d celebrated in Connecticut with his mother and his grandparents, not the one with snow and trees, not the one with the silver early-morning sky as he shook his mother and begged her to get out of bed. He pretended it was another holiday, but still a holiday with a tree, a Christmas tree. He wanted a Christmas tree, he just did. He begged for a tree, following Lady from room to room until she said, “Okay, okay. A tree. Two trees. A forest. Just stop whining.” They selected the biggest tree in the lot, then began to drag it along the sidewalk, laughing and gummy with sap, stopping every few feet to rest.

  By the time they got home, two young men were carrying the Christmas tree on their shoulders. Lady invited both of them to her Christmas Eve party. Fin and Phoebe decorated the tree with ornaments from a huge box that Lady seemed surprised to find in a closet. “Well, look what we have here,” she said.

  “You knew they were there,” Fin said.

  “Did not.”

  “You wanted to get a tree all along.”

  “Not.”

  The ornaments were glass balls mostly, a few wooden reindeer and teddy bears and sleds, a tin giraffe, a car driven by Santa, some stars. The lights were red, yellow, green, and blue. Mabel appeared with popcorn balls wrapped in colored cellophane.

  “My parents won’t let me get a tree,” Phoebe said. “Because we’re Jewish.”

  “You’re Jewish?” Fin asked. “Like Biffi?”

  “I guess so. Does he eat bacon?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then, yes. Jewish like Biffi.”

  The Christmas Eve party went on so long it seemed to Fin that it must be New Year’s Eve when everyone finally left. In the morning, it was Christmas, though, not New Year’s, and the flat winter sun poured through the windows onto the tree and the packages beneath. Fin’s stocking was filled with oranges and walnuts. Biffi’s gifts to him, left under the tree the night before, were a jackknife and a copy of The Wind in the Willows. Mabel had left a harmonica. Lady gave him new pajamas, slippers made of deerskin, the new Beatles album, Beatles ’65, a hat like John Lennon’s, and a subscription to The New York Review of Books, along with the most recent copy.

  “A grown-up paper,” he said, rather awed.

  “Don’t be silly. Look—Gore Vidal writing about E. Nesbit. A book by Eric von Schmidt, you like him. And it won’t kill you to read a little Lowell
, you know.”

  He threw his arms around her. Then it was time to give Lady her present. He’d thought long and hard about what to give her, Biffi, and Mabel. Phoebe was easy—a Coke bottle with an elongated neck and a huge paper flower, both of which he’d seen on Eighth Street. He finally decided on a paisley scarf for Mabel. A package of multicolored pipe cleaners for Biffi, which Fin really wanted for himself. And for Lady, a wooden box he’d made at school. “To keep your love letters in,” he said.

  Little Wars

  And then, briefly, sadly, it was Jack season again. There wasn’t much snow that Jack season, but the sky was gray and gloomy and Fin spent most of his time inside, listening to records or reading. He started Native Son, but he could read it only during the day. It was too disturbing at night. At night, he read Lady’s old copy of E. Nesbit’s Five Children and It. Gore Vidal highly recommended it.

  He wasn’t sure what exactly had ushered Biffi out of their lives this time—an enormous argument, as usual, but he didn’t know what it was about or even if it was about anything. Lady now simply declared that Jack was a breath of fresh air. And there was something fresh about Jack, in a hygienic and scrubbed way. He was extremely physical, a big strapping guy, a jock. A jock after a shower.

  “You can’t marry a jock, Lady.”

  “Says who? And who said I wanted to marry Jack? Who said I wanted to marry anyone?”

  “You did.”

  “Do you hear any wedding bells?” She put a hand up to her ear. “I don’t.”

  “You don’t have to get married ever, you know.”

  She gave an odd, horsey snort and said, “I can’t not get married forever, either.”