Fin & Lady: A Novel

by Cathleen Schine

  “Why not?”

  “Do you want me to be an old maid?”

  Now it was Fin’s turn to snort. An old maid. Lady. “That would never happen.”

  “Damn right.”

  And so Fin lay on the floor on the flokati rug reading Native Son and waiting to let Jack in while Lady finished getting dressed. Uncle Jack arrived right on time, as always. He nodded at Fin, said, “Hi,” then began pacing.

  Fin followed him, bent over, pretending to be Groucho Marx.

  “Cut it out.” Jack took out a cigarette.

  “I can blow smoke rings,” Fin said. “Lady taught me.”

  “She would.” Jack sat, then got up and began circling the room again. Gus came into the room and began to follow him.

  “Cut it out,” Jack said to the dog.

  “Something wrong?” Fin asked.

  “Tell me something,” Jack said. Fin stopped. The dog stopped. “Does your sister confide in you? You know, about things?”

  Fin said, “What kind of things?”

  “Well, if I knew that, would I be asking?”

  “You mean like adulterous things?”

  “You mean adult.”

  “No, I don’t.”

  At this, Lady came into the room looking lovely and innocent, with big false eyelashes like Twiggy.

  “We’re talking about adulterous things,” Fin said. With great pleasure, he watched Jack color.

  “Adult,” Jack said.

  “Let’s go, Jack. Be a good boy, Fin,” Lady said. “Don’t corrupt anyone else tonight, okay?” She took Jack’s arm, but Jack turned back to Fin.

  “Adult. Not adulterous,” he said. He smirked at Fin. “Because I’m not married.”

  “I never said you were.”

  Jack looked mildly pacified.

  “She is,” Fin said. He smiled innocently at Lady. “Or was supposed to be.”

  “You are?”

  “No, of course not. It was a long time ago, anyway.” She led Jack through the door. “Good night, my little duenna,” she hissed at Fin.

  “Married in the eyes of God,” Fin yelled at the two figures as they descended the stairs to the street. Gus began to bark his shrill bark.

  “The eyes of God?” Mabel said, coming up behind Fin. She slammed the front door shut. “Get to bed or I’ll give you the eyes of God but good.”

  * * *

  On Fin’s twelfth birthday in February Mabel baked a coconut cake and Lady took Fin and Henry James to a Knicks game.

  “Gorgeous,” she said.

  “Willis Reed,” Fin told me. “He was a rookie then and he was the one Lady had her eye on. She had a good eye.”

  When she came up to bed late that night, she saw Fin’s light on. “Why are you still awake, birthday boy? It’s two in the morning. I told you you’re too young to read Native Son. It would give anyone nightmares. It is a nightmare. This whole country is a nightmare if you’re Negro.”

  “I didn’t have a nightmare. I finished Native Son a long time ago.”

  He held up the book he was reading. The Mysterious Island. “Biffi gave it to me. For my birthday.”

  “Biffi,” she said, obviously annoyed. “You never give up.”

  “I didn’t say anything.”

  “Four and a half months left before I become an old maid: that’s what you’re thinking.”

  “I’m not thinking anything. Honest.”

  Lady pushed him over and lay down beside him. “Would you read to me a little?”

  Fin picked up the book. He was on page 284, when the castaway, who has become almost subhuman in his isolation, is found.

  “‘It is a great misfortune to be alone, my friends…’” he read.

  “Man,” said Lady, “even Jules Verne has an opinion.”

  * * *

  This was the winter of Martin Luther King’s march to Selma, Alabama. It was the year the United States first sent troops to Vietnam. Lady took courses at the New School. Fin read Alan Watts.

  One evening, Tyler showed up with his briefcase, the first time in months. He and Lady had to discuss taxes, apparently, Fin’s taxes. He didn’t stay too long, but afterward Lady said, in the dull, resigned voice she often was left with after a visit by Tyler, “Maybe Tyler’s right. Maybe you would benefit from someone more mature and responsible to look after you. No one has ever accused me of being mature, or responsible.”

  “You’re taking child-rearing advice from Tyler? I don’t get it. I thought he controlled my money, not my destiny.”

  “No one controls your destiny, Fin. Not even you.”

  “That’s profound,” he said. From the kitchen table he picked up a soldier he’d been painting, and pretended to examine it. But he barely saw it, barely saw the blue tunic of the French cuirassier, the glistening black boots, the bowed legs meant to slip over the black horse he’d left lying awkwardly on its side, its hooves still lifted in their never-ending gallop. “So Jack is out and Tyler’s back? Is that it?”

  “No one is out and no one is back. I’m allowed to go out with my friends, aren’t I?”

  “Ask Tyler.”

  “Wow, you really dislike him, don’t you?”

  “News flash.”

  “He said you assume a nauseated expression when he enters the room.”

  “Observant.”

  “He wants to take you skating.”

  “At my boarding school or my foster parents’? He’s such a hypocrite. And a brownnoser.”

  “That’s a truly vulgar expression.”

  Fin, who had never before considered the literal meaning of the word “brownnose,” reddened. “Gross, Lady.”

  “He wants to take you skating at Rockefeller Center, okay? Right here in New York City. Anyway,” Lady continued, “they’re all brownnosers, let’s face it.”

  “Gross, gross. Uncle Ty has ulterior motives, okay?” said Fin. “And he’s not worthy of you. At all.”

  “I know,” Lady said, suddenly serious. “Don’t think I don’t. But sometimes, well…”

  “Ulterior motives. Unworthy. And ubiquitous.”

  “Spelling test at school?”

  R.A.B.B.I.T.T.

  “I can’t spell them. Only say them.”

  “Tyler has your best interests at heart, Finny. He didn’t mean…”

  “Yes, he did.”

  “Christ, it’s just skating.”

  “Tyler wants to get rid of me. You just said so.”

  Lady sighed, a soft, light sound that could mean anything from distress to confusion to coffee ice cream, her favorite. Then she put her arms around Fin, quickly, gently—so quickly and so gently he hardly noticed, until there she was, holding him tight against her. Awkward, angry, hands still in his pocket, Fin did not move.

  “I won’t let anyone send you away,” she whispered. “Ever.”

  You better not. You better not, Lady.

  “I’m sorry, Fin. I’m no replacement for a mother, am I? I know you miss her. You probably miss your father, too. Poor Finino mio.”

  “He’s your father, too,” Fin mumbled. “I keep telling you.”

  “I know it’s not the same.” She kissed his head. “Not the same as a real family.”

  Fin pulled away. “Of course it’s not the same!” Everything blurred, he was so angry. His own voice sounded harsh and high and far away. “It can’t be the same. I don’t want it to be the same. I want it to be the way it is. Why don’t you ever listen? No one listens. Tell Tyler to go break up someone else’s family. Tell Tyler to go to hell!”

  Fin ran up the stairs, two at a time, trembling. He slammed the door to his room. He opened the window and leaned his head out, breathing in the evening urban hush, the cold air.

  There was a knock on his door, and Lady came in carrying a shoebox.

  “Why do you flirt with everyone and go out with everyone and, and, you know … if you don’t even really like them?” Fin didn’t look at her. He closed the window and leaned his head against
the pane. “Why?”

  “I don’t know, Fin. How should I know? I’m trying, that’s all. Maybe I think that the next one will turn out to be The One, like in a song. I do think that sometimes. I hope that. Why shouldn’t I hope that?” She sat down on the floor and put her face in her hands. “Even if it’s not true.”

  “Maybe it’s true,” Fin said, sorry now. Lady looked pitiful, sitting there, her elbows on her thighs, her cheeks smashed up in her hands. “It’s true. It’s definitely true. But…”

  “But what?”

  “But it hurts people, it hurts their feelings.”

  Lady twisted a hank of hair around her finger. Like a Shirley Temple curl. “Love is cruel,” she said. “Right? But it really is. It just is.”

  Sure. Love was cruel. In books. In movies. Even on television, love was cruel. Even in comic books love was cruel. Poor Superman. Poor Lois Lane. But this was not a book or a movie. It was not about a superhero. It was Fin’s sister, Lady, kind and tender and inattentive. And Fin sometimes could not help wondering if it wasn’t love at all that was cruel, if it was Lady.

  “Anyway,” she said, “I have feelings, too, believe it or not.”

  The room was dark and Lady was outlined by the light in the hallway. Like a Buddha. A thin, elegant Buddha with long, long hair and a Shirley Temple curl.

  “Are you in love with Tyler?” Fin asked.

  “Fin, come on.”

  “No, really.”

  Lady stood up and switched on the light and the Buddha vanished. It was just Lady. “What are you, the House Un-American Activities Committee?”

  “And what about Uncle Jack? You can’t be in love with all of them.”

  Lady looked tired. “Who said I was? Some people make you feel easy and good when you’re with them, that’s all.”

  “Like Biffi,” Fin said. He, anyway, felt easy and good whenever Biffi was there puffing on his pipe.

  “No, not like Biffi. Biffi is triste, which means sad. He skips around and grins and jokes, but Biffi carries the world around with him. And the world is triste.”

  “Well, Ty should be triste. And Jack is stupid.”

  “Jack is a little stupid, granted. You have to be a little stupid to be happy.”

  “But you’re happy.”

  “Q.E.D.”

  Now Fin had to laugh.

  She picked up a kneeling English soldier from his bookcase and turned it over in her hand, admiring his paint job. He had glued tiny puffs of cotton to the end of the rifle. “Like smoke,” she said dreamily.

  “This is Waterloo.” He pointed to the squares of British soldiers he had set up, to the rows of French cavalry waiting to charge. “The front row would shoot, then kneel down so the next row could shoot. It was an innovation. That’s how we beat Napoleon.”

  “We?”

  Fin laughed again. He found it so difficult to stay angry at Lady. Maybe that’s what the suitors experienced. First you got angry, justifiably angry, a burning anger. Then she caught you off guard, she made you laugh, and the laughter swept the anger away like a strong wind sweeping a cloud over the horizon.

  “What’s in the box?” he asked.

  “I got these for you.”

  “That box has been in the hall forever.”

  “Mmm. I got them for you, for your birthday, and then I forgot to give them to you.”

  She had already gotten him a present, a perfect, wonderful present. A record player, actually a stereo with separate speakers, a KLH.

  “You’re impossible,” he said, unconsciously mimicking her.

  Inside the box, he found a pair of desert boots.

  “Do you like them?” Lady asked. She was leaning eagerly over his shoulder. He could smell her perfume and her body beneath it. He blushed. “These are the ones, right?” she said. “The ones you wanted?”

  He took them out of the box and set them on the floor.

  “These are exactly the ones,” he said.

  “I meant to give them to you; then, I don’t know, something or other, you know me…”

  As Lady rambled on, Fin slid his feet into the shoes.

  “Lady?”

  “Yes?”

  “These are about five sizes too big.”

  “But I told them twelve.”

  “That’s my age.”

  Lady contemplated the big clown shoes on Fin’s feet.

  “Crap.” She looked distraught.

  “That’s okay,” he said, patting her hand consolingly. “We can exchange them tomorrow.”

  She grabbed him in a tight hug. “How could you think I’d ever let anyone take you away? Especially in those shoes. Lavender Jesus, who would take you? P. T. Barnum?”

  It was a few days later that she handed him the book about toy soldiers by H. G. Wells. Little Wars. She had inscribed the first page: “To Fin, My Little General, once more unto the breach, dear friend, once more!” Her signature was large, full of flourishes. Fin has sworn to me that she splashed her favorite perfume on it. I’ve seen him hold that book up to his face and breathe in its scent. And say, “Once more.”

  “Boys don’t have babies”

  In spring, the little trees flowered. The vine in front of the house on Charles Street flowered, too, with purple fragrant wisteria. The wind shook the branches of cherry blossoms, their petals blew down the street like confetti, and there was sun at last, bright and generous. From his window, Fin could see daffodils in someone else’s garden.

  Clouds were brisk and white. Apple tree blossoms were white, trembling on their dark branches, as white as the clouds, as white as the men’s shirt sleeves against dark suit jackets thrown over one arm. Little girls played hopscotch, the path of boxes drawn on the sidewalk with white chalk.

  On April 12, 1965, opening day, the Mets would lose to the Dodgers, Don Drysdale would hit a home run, Drysdale, the pitcher, a humiliation that would sting for years. But that afternoon, after school on a beautiful spring day, before the game had even started, everything was still possible.

  “It’s spring!” Fin yelled, running into the house after school, slamming the door behind him.

  “I hate spring,” Lady said savagely. Her allergies. She had a wet washcloth pressed against her eyes, a cup of coffee on the kitchen table in front of her, a pack of cigarettes. She held the washcloth out to Fin. He wondered why water from the kitchen tap was never as cold as from the bathroom tap. Lady draped the thing over her entire face this time. Fin laughed.

  “It’s like a mask,” he said. “Like plaster of Paris and they make a mask.”

  “That’s called a ‘death mask,’” Lady said dryly. The finches sang joyously outside. “Stop that racket.” She reached out, blindly slamming the window shut. “Light me a cigarette, angel,” she said.

  Fin grabbed her pack of cigarettes from the table and put one in his mouth, catching a glimpse of himself in the window’s reflection, posing for a moment. He lit a match, puffing carefully until the cigarette caught, then lifted one corner of Lady’s terry-cloth death mask and placed the filter end between her lips. Lady was convinced that clouds of cigarette smoke protected her from pollen.

  “That’s my boy,” she said, inhaling deeply, exhaling, the smoke spiraling above her. She waved the cigarette around like a stick of incense.

  Fin pictured the two swollen eyes beneath the washcloth, pink like rabbit eyes, and her nose swollen and red. She sneezed, making the edge of the heavy wet washcloth jump. “I’m so miserable.”

  Fin went into the living room and put on a record. Lady’s record collection had grown since they moved to the Village. There had been pop and rock uptown, which in a chronologically backward migration had journeyed into jazz and then blues and folk when they first moved into the house on Charles Street. Down all those uneven coffeehouse steps she went to hear old black men and young white men rasping out songs accompanied by their big, booming guitars. Lady had gotten a guitar herself, but had yet to play it. Sometimes Fin would stretch his hand aroun
d the shiny wood neck, the frets and metal strings tearing into his fingers.

  He put Bringing It All Back Home on the spindle, stacked on an Ian and Sylvia. Mississippi John Hurt, the Rolling Stones. He turned the volume down low.

  “Lie down on the couch,” he said. “Just pretend it’s a hangover.”

  Fin sat in the low lounge chair, his legs out, his head back. It was so peaceful, just him and the sniffling Lady and “Subterranean Homesick Blues.” He could see the sky above the brownstones. He could see the soft, quick clouds. No Tyler, no Jack, no Biffi, no uncles or suitors of any kind.

  “We want the old Bob Dylan,” Lady chanted halfheartedly from behind her washcloth. The song changed. “She Belongs to Me.” Gentle. Liquid. “And the new Bob Dylan,” she said.

  You will start out standing proud to steal her anything she sees …

  Yes, Fin thought. He looked at Lady, her terry-cloth death mask turned to the ceiling.

  She never stumbles / She got no place to fall …

  Lady pulled the washcloth from her face and stared at Fin. Her face was sullen, swollen, blotched. “Nothing,” she said, as if he’d asked her what was wrong. She put the damp washcloth back on her face. Her hand patted the coffee table, a search, here, over there.

  “They’re in the kitchen,” Fin said.

  As he went to fetch Lady’s cigarettes, Fin walked past the small guest bathroom. He remembered Mrs. Holbright, remembered walking her to the powder room the summer before, waiting outside the closed door trying not to hear the tinkling sounds on the other side, walking her back to the table, to her daughter, Cee Cee. You do look like your father, she’d said. Handsome man, she’d said. And don’t mind Lady about that, you know. She was fond of him.

  “Why do you hate Daddy so much?” he asked Lady when he came back into the living room.

  “Who said I hate him?”

  Fin shrugged. “Anyway, you never talk about him.”

  “I don’t hate him,” Lady said. “I don’t hate ‘Daddy.’”

  Fin was sorry now that he had brought up the subject. The way she said “Daddy.” The way she sat up, holding the washcloth on her face like a bandage, a World War I bandage.

  “I didn’t hate him,” she said. “He hated me.”