“Bad wine and grass”
Of course Fin could not really be kept away from politics. Even the air was political, charged and blown about by the war, the undeclared war, the illegal war. President Johnson had doubled the draft. Thirty-five thousand called every month. The government increased the bombing. Marines were burning down villages with Zippo lighters. You saw them do it on the evening news. Channel 2. When the antiwar march happened, when 25,000 people marched down Broadway in the cool autumn sunshine, Lady marched of course. So did Fin.
“We’re marching with Women for Peace,” Lady said. “People are bringing their toddlers, for God’s sake. In strollers. And his school is marching. The whole eighth grade…” She said this to Biffi. “So don’t say I’m being naïve.”
“You leave me no choice, my darling.”
“I can interpret that statement two ways,” she said, “so I will interpret it in the way that suits me best.” She gave Biffi a hug. “You’re very sensible.”
“I choose when there are my battles,” he said. “That is my charm.”
Fin was sitting on the floor, listening as always, as he read The New York Times, spread out on the coffee table. Margaret Sanger’s obituary.
“Margaret Sanger’s mother died at forty-eight. And she’d already had eleven children,” he said. “Eleven. No wonder Margaret Sanger invented the term ‘birth control.’”
“Criminy Dutch,” Lady said.
“Her father carved angels on tombstones.”
“I should say so.”
* * *
At the peace march, Fin and his class followed a huge papier-mâché airplane. Around them people dressed in black were wearing skull masks, banging on cans.
“We should have brought something to bang on,” said Henry.
“Like your head,” said James.
There were people everywhere, for blocks and blocks. You looked down Fifth Avenue and there were bobbing heads, thousands of bobbing heads. No cars. No buses. No taxis. Just people. No horns honking. No sirens. Just chanting, people chanting. The papier-mâché aircraft preceded them like a parade float.
The raw eggs thrown into the crowd didn’t start until they got to Eighty-sixth Street. Fin and Henry James ducked them, laughing.
New York, and life itself that year, began to feel like a parade to Fin. When he’d first arrived in the city with Lady two years earlier, everything appeared exaggerated, like a circus. But he’d gotten used to the city and its people so quickly. New York became familiar. Take the bus across town, the subway uptown or downtown, streets that run west are odd numbered, east are even, one minute to walk one block. The Bronx was up, the Battery down, the Mets in Queens. The Village was home.
Now, however, that breathless feeling had come back, that city delirium, outlandish, raucous, giddy. Anything, anything, could happen, would happen, had just happened. It was a pageant. It was, Fin once told me in a voice suggesting there was no need for any further explication, New York in the sixties.
Looking back, you might think New York in the sixties was tailor-made for Lady. The language of the counterculture, “liberation,” that word, on its own, should have welcomed Lady into its loose, flowing embrace. And there were so many possible liberations. There were Liberation Armies, for example, or, say, Sexual Liberation, now a cultural and political movement where once there’d been just Lady and her indiscretions. And, of course, there was the Liberated Woman. Lady had always been a Liberated Woman. In her fashion. But, in fact, in her fashion, Lady did not take to the sixties at all.
The idea of a commune, for instance. Communes struck Lady as barbarous. What was the point? she asked. Why would she live with other people, hell was other people, everyone knew that. Why would she eat undercooked lentils and sleep on a ratty mattress on the floor when she could sleep in her own house and eat lamb chops and baked potatoes? Why would she share in washing the dishes when she had a dishwasher? Not to mention a maid? She liked to wear flowers in her hair. But she did not like to serve the hippie men their coffee at political meetings. If that was communal, she wanted no part of it. She liked to have suitors, but she certainly did not like to share them. Why would she share a boyfriend? That was not freedom. That was slavery, or close enough.
Fin explained it to me this way: Lady grew up protecting her independence, what she could find of it, cherishing every moment of freedom, fighting for it. She was not inclined simply to hand it over, not about to share it with the world at large.
But I wonder if it was more than that.
“I will miss you,” Lady said as she tucked her Courrèges boots away in the closet. And she did miss them. For Lady, there was a nostalgia for those long-ago first glimmers of freedom, for the way freedom first looked, the way it first tasted.
“How is it,” she said, “that the martini, which has served so many so well for so many years, is now unattainable when you go to a party? How is it that there is now only bad wine and grass?”
No, it was Fin who fell for the sixties.
“You cannot go to school barefoot,” said Lady.
“You’re so uptight.”
“Good grief, Fin. You’ll get tetanus.”
“You are so straight.”
“And you’re an idiot. Put on your goddamn shoes.”
Fin was astonished. Lady, his wild, untamed Lady, who had been so open to the world when the world had seemed so closed—now, now that the world was shaking off the oppression of the straight and the uptight, now when the world was beautiful and free, now Lady, that most beautiful and free spirit, had closed herself off with a vicious snap.
“She’s an only child,” said Phoebe. “That’s why.”
“I wish you wouldn’t always say that. She has a brother. Me.”
“But you’re more like her kid. She’s just trying to be a good substitute mother.”
“That’s fucked up.”
Phoebe nodded sagely. In her book, which meant whichever of her parents’ psychology books she had read most recently, most things were fucked up. Parents, certainly. Sisters, naturally. And a sister as a parent? Well, enough said.
“But,” she said, “the most fucked-up thing is fucking.”
Fin had developed, over the years, a fairly comfortable understanding of sex. There were the chickens in Connecticut, those unforgettable performances by the rooster.
“Sounds like rape to me,” said Phoebe.
There were the Morgan horses at his neighbor’s stable, stallions brought in specifically to inseminate the mares.
“Prostitution.” Phoebe again.
There was Lady, who, Phoebe agreed, was as knowing and powerful and cruel as a goddess, as benevolent and natural and innocent as the birds and bees.
And there was Fin, who these days thought of little else. Sex. It was there in the warmth of the sun, in the touch of the rain. It was spring. It was eighth grade.
Sometimes in class he stared across the circle they still had to sit in for part of each day and watched the plaid pleated skirt of Karla directly across from him. Karla, whose brother was Mark, a boy in the grade below. Karla Mark, get it? The red diaper babies. Karla wore short skirts, as did all the girls, and sat with her legs to the side, bent like the sprite on Canada Dry bottles. Her pale knees, one resting lightly on the other, leading to her white thighs, one just before the other, and then the pleats, the crisp pleats parted slightly as the skirt continued on its way to cover up another pleat that Fin could only dream of. And so he did dream. Daydreams. Night dreams. All kinds of dreams.
Sometimes Fin and Karla would sit together in Earth Science. Fin could hardly breathe beside her. How could anyone breathe beside Karla? In eighth grade, how can anyone breathe at all?
Fin never mentioned Karla to Phoebe, or to anyone else. Not to Biffi, certainly not to Lady, not even to Henry James. It was a secret, one whose secrecy seemed vital, yet so utterly ordinary: he liked a girl. So what?
He didn’t tell anyone, yet everyone seemed to know.
“You’re an adolescent,” Phoebe said. “Adolescents are nymphomaniacs because of their hormones.”
“What about you?”
“I’m polymorphous perverse.”
He made an unconscious decision to stop playing with his toy soldiers. He put them away in shoe boxes, wrapping the metal ones in cotton.
“Think you’re all grown up now?” Mabel said. “No more toys?”
They were all in the kitchen, Mabel cleaning up after breakfast, Lady using markers to make an antiwar poster, Fin looking for tape to seal up the shoe boxes of soldiers.
“It’s an antiwar thing,” Lady said. “Philosophically. Right, Fin?”
“I don’t think Fin’s thinking much about philosophy these days,” Mabel said, fixing him with a look, that Mabel look. “Unless girls are a philosophy.”
“Lay off,” said Fin.
“Really, Fin?” Lady said. “You have a girlfriend?”
“Lay off.”
Summer came, the summer of 1967, and none too soon, to rescue him from Karla. She went to camp in the Berkshires. Fin wrote letters to her that he never sent. They said, “I’m so fucked up. But nothing gets me down.” He had just read Richard Fariña’s book Been Down So Long It Looks Like Up to Me. There were parts of it he didn’t understand. There were parts of almost every book he read these days that he didn’t understand, yet somehow sensed, as if they were in his dreams or were dreams themselves.
He appropriated Lady’s guitar. Of course it was a Martin. He played on the front steps of the Charles Street brownstone, Gus at his side. He wasn’t very good. Sometimes people would drop a coin in his guitar case.
“You’re panhandling in front of your own house?” Lady said. “That’s certainly sticking it to the Man.” She laughed. “You crack me up, Finny.”
“Hey,” he said. “Peace, okay? I’m not hurting anyone.”
She bent down, lifted his hair from his face, kissed him on the forehead. “Let’s go away.”
“You want to hitchhike to the Grand Canyon? That’s what you said when I first came to live with you.”
“I said a lot of things.”
She sat down on the step beside him and lighted a cigarette. She flicked her hair away from her face. “Finino,” she said. She plucked a guitar string. “Are you any good at this thing?”
“No. But we’re starting a band. Fin’s Henry James ExtravagAnts.”
“Finino,” she said again. It was as if she hadn’t heard him. “Remember when we met? The day we met? In the piazzetta?”
He nodded. He would never forget that day: the warm embrace of the sun and the warm embrace of his strange, exotic sister; the glare of the sky and the glare of his angry father, the soft murmur of Italian all around him and the soft voice of his mother. It had all merged, soft-edged images, maybe, but at the same time clear, perfect, and vivid.
“Nine years,” she said.
Nine years? She must have been so young. He’d never thought about it, how young she had been. Why would he? Lady was ageless, young then, young now, young forever, forever the same. He, of course, had changed in nine years. Nine years ago he was a tiny little boy in a sailor suit; now he was taller than Lady, now he played guitar, now his hair hung down over his face. He had changed. He had grown. He had grown up. But Lady … Had she changed, or grown, or grown up? He had never considered the possibility. She was the norm, the glowing, unpredictable, unstoppable norm.
“What have I done in nine years, Fin? Niente.”
“The way to do is to be. That’s from the Tao Te Ching.”
“That’s all very well for you. You’re still young.” Lady was twenty-seven. “Can you imagine what the world would be like if everyone decided that the way to do was to be?”
“Peaceful.”
“Maybe.” She stood up. “Unless you tried being where someone else wanted to be being.”
“So profound,” Fin said. “Anyway, you’ve done a lot.”
“Like what?”
Like what? Like be Lady. Wasn’t that enough? It was enough for Fin. Lady was everywhere for him. She didn’t have to be anything.
“I don’t know. Everything. So where should we go?”
“Remember our deal? You were going to find me a husband, Fin. What happened?”
“You don’t really need to get married anymore. The world has changed.”
“Has it? Don’t girls get married?”
“Anyway, you don’t really want to get married. You never did.”
“Is that right?”
“I guess it is, Lady. Or you would have.”
She tapped a foot. Fin remembered how her pale nail polish had seemed so exotic. Now her nails were natural. She was not one to cling to passé fashion. Mourn it, yes. Wear it? No.
“You don’t want to get married. Not now. Not ever. Just admit it, Lady. Go with it.”
“I just never thought I’d be twenty-seven and still not married. I haven’t found the right man, okay, I get that. But what if I never find him? Ever? It would be horrible. Oh, you don’t understand, Finny,” she said softly. “How could you?”
If he really admitted to himself that Lady would never marry Biffi, then, yes, he thought he understood. There simply wasn’t anyone else who was good enough for her. Lady was beautiful and charming and rich, all the things that should have made her an easy match. But to Fin’s mind, there could be no easy match for Lady. She was too beautiful, too charming. Too quick. Too generous. And too rich to need to get married. But he couldn’t say that. So he played the first few chords of “Sloop John B.” I wanna go home … Let me go home … Well I feel so broke up …
Lady stubbed her cigarette out on the step. “I hope this dirty war is over soon, Finny. If you grow up…”
“What do you mean if?”
“… and then get drafted,” Lady said, “we’ll have to move. Where should we move to?”
“Hitchhiking to the Grand Canyon won’t cut it then, huh?”
“When did you develop this passion for the Grand Canyon? Jesus Christ, Fin, we’re talking about Vietnam.”
“You want to move to Vietnam?”
“Ha ha.”
Fin played the first few chords of “Mr. Tambourine Man.” “I used to think that you were half a person because you were my half-sister,” he said.
“Which half?”
“Bottom. Patent-leather shoes. And white socks.”
“Did you really? That’s sweet. Why are children so literal-minded, I wonder.” She picked the cigarette stub off the step and threw it into the open guitar case.
“Hey!” Fin said.
“Don’t litter.”
He saluted her.
“Not funny, Fin. Not funny at all.”
The Italian Word for Hedgehog
Maybe the suitors each had a timer and it had been ticking away and the autumn of 1967 set off the fuses and the fuses were crackling, the flames moving along like the flames in a cartoon, three teardrop-shaped flames sizzling and getting closer and closer to three sticks of dynamite. Maybe time itself had changed and three years became even longer than it really was, an eternity, to them, to Lady. Maybe their clothes had turned into costumes. Maybe Jack wore bell-bottoms striped and starred like the American flag. Maybe Tyler wore a peace medallion. Maybe even Biffi wore a suede vest and sideburns. Maybe the Beatles gave up drugs for the Maharishi, but maybe the smell of marijuana in the house on Charles Street got thicker and thicker. Maybe Jack started dropping acid. Maybe Tyler took too much speed.
Lady didn’t like any of it. Fin sometimes pictured them, Jack, Tyler, and Biffi, sitting on the sofa, one, two, three, ducks in the carnival. Going round and round on a conveyor belt, as they always had with Lady, each blast from the air gun missing, missing, missing, until …
“If you drop acid, or anything else for that matter, I will know,” Lady said to Fin. “And I will kill you.”
“Don’t you want me to expand my mind?”
“I wil
l know,” she repeated. “And I will kill you.”
Fin almost believed her.
“You’re such a drag sometimes,” Jack said.
“I’ve seen what I’ve seen.”
And what she had seen was too many friends left dazed by too many drugs.
“You’re really quite prudish,” Tyler told her. “Capriciously prudish. A mercurial drag.”
Capricious? Caprice was Lady’s perfume, a trace of temperament that told you she was in the room or just had been or was skipping down the stairs toward the doorway. Lady loved the word “capricious.” She said it came from the Italian word for head and the Italian word for hedgehog. Unless it came from the Italian word for goat. Capricious. It reminded her of Capri. “Mercurial”? She loved that word, too. “Like a god,” she said.
Was she simply bored with them, like a god? Is that why she ended up doing what she did? Or was it simple, active cruelty? Fin explained it to himself later as an act of desperation, the desperation of someone capricious, someone mercurial, someone so capricious and mercurial that the capricious and mercurial times were squeezing her, dimming her, making her feel she was disappearing in the smoke and hallucinations. Of course, he explained it to himself later as many things, some of them angry, but most of them extraordinarily kind.
It started that year leading up to her twenty-eighth birthday. It was almost as if the suitors sensed something, as if she’d given off some signal, a chemical, like a bee or an ant: the end is nigh, fellas.
It rained heavily for days. The sky was low, dark, a uniform iron gray.
“I’ve never met anyone like you,” Jack said to Lady, holding her hand in his. “You’re so different, so fascinating. You’re…”
Fin insists that Jack then said, “You’re … out of sight.”
The cold rain continued, and Tyler started bringing Lady little gifts, Mexican silver earrings, things like that, things she liked, lovely, not extravagant. He knew how to play it. “There is something piquant about the pursuit of your sister,” he said to Fin. “Don’t you think?”
Fin & Lady: A Novel Page 15
