The Curious Case of Sidd Finch

by George Plimpton

  "You like to hear him talk about the house in London."

  "Owl, that's where I want to go. I want to go with him to the lawyers and get the key to the house. It'll be a terrific scene. They'll look at his blue jeans and his big boots? They'll ask, `Who are you?' He'll tell them. `I am Hayden Sidney-Whyte Finch ... long-lost heir ... also known as Sidd Finch." She gave this a highly dramatic reading, her attempt at an English accent tempered by her Southern roots. "But they won't want to give up the key," she con tinued. "They'd finally have to, wouldn't they? We'd run down the stairs and hop in a hansom cab."

  "A hansom cab?"

  "Oh, Owl. I don't even know what a hansom cab looks like? But in the movies people are always jumping into them when they're going to reclaim their inheritances. You can't do it any other way. We'll open these huge doors when we get there. It'll be musty inside-great halls, and the suits of armor with dust sheets over them. Sidd will hold my hand. We'll take a tour. `This is Mum's room. She died in a fall before I came to Denbigh Close. I'll show you her scarab brooches up on the top floor. This is Dad's dressing room, with his military boots in the corner. He died in an airplane crash. This is Nanny's room. She whipped me once with a riding crop, one of Dad's, when I wouldn't finish my supper. She shouted at me, "You're nothing but an ungrateful orphan waif!"' Oh, Owl, it'll be so romantic! We'll go down to the ballroom in the basement where the railroad trains are. Sidd'll pull a sheet off this huge control panel." Her eyes shone. "He'll turn on the system. Click!"

  She sat up and shaded her eyes. She looked down the beach for Sidd. "I hope he's sitting up in the dunes trying to think of The Void and all that-and not succeeding."

  She giggled. "I like to think he can't quite get rid of me. I'm waiting just outside his consciousness? He gives up and I march in with a big brass band. Pom-poms." She looked out at the Gulf. "No porpoises out there today," she said. "Will you come and swim with us tonight-the porpoise romp? It's awfully exciting."

  I said I'd think about it.

  "You have plans?"

  "No," I said truthfully.

  "Did you write today, Owl?" She hoisted herself around and sat up; she rested her chin on her kneecap.

  "I'm afraid not."

  Both Debbie Sue and Sidd were concerned by my writer's-block problems. Back in the bungalow she would peer at the blank paper in the portable typewriter out on the side porch, curled from the humidity, and suggest that I type out the word "The" to see if anything happened. I grinned and said that Robert Benchley, The New Yorker humorist, had tried it. He stared at his "The" for a while and then went off to a poker game where he spent a pleasant hour or so hoping that in the process his creative impulses would get a jolt of some sort. Back in his office, he took another look at the "The." Nothing stirred, so he left for an hour or so with his Round Table acquaintances in the Algonquin Bar. Finally, telling them that he had some work to do, he went back to his office. There was the "The." This time an idea came. He sat down and finished the sentence. It read "The hell with it," and having done this, he locked up his office and went out into the evening.

  "At least he wrote a sentence," Debbie Sue said.

  I told her that my writer's block was a truly monumental one. "It's so large I really don't worry about it," I said. "It's like having a huge debt-so large that you can't panic yourself about it anymore. It's simple. I am an exwriter."

  After an awkward silence, Debbie Sue asked, "Well, what happens when you sit down at the typewriter and start ... just pecking away?"

  It was possible to do so, I said, but what came out was worthless-sort of like a chimpanzee fingerpainting.

  "What words do you type?" she wanted to know.

  I shrugged. "Mostly they're the same. I seem obsessed with `Along the driveway the lilacs were in bloom.' I type that one a lot."

  "Oh, but that's beautiful, Owl," Debbie Sue said. "It's so romantic."

  "That's as far as it goes," I said. "There's nothing at the end of the driveway."

  I told her about Amory Blake. "He's trying to make me a cartoonist. He has me drawing characters with balloons over their heads, which I am supposed to fill in with dialogue."

  Debbie Sue was intrigued. "What are they saying? Have you got your characters talking?"

  "The balloons are empty."

  "Oh, Owl, how sad. At least you could put some sounds in the balloons."

  "Oh, there are awful stories about writers' blocks," I told her. "When William Faulkner left Warner Bros. they found an empty bottle of bourbon in his office and a sheet of paper on which he had written, five hundred times, `Boy meets girl.' "

  Sidd appeared down the beach. As he came toward us I wondered if anyone (about four or five desultory folk were lolling there in the wan early spring sun) could have guessed they were looking at possibly the most devastating force in the game of baseball. The bones of his rib cage showed as he strode toward us, a shy smile working at his features. Debbie Sue had bought him a pair of colorful jams with parrots down the side, somewhat oversized, so that it looked as if at any instant he could step out of them and leave them behind on the sand.

  He flopped down next to us. "Did you write today?"

  I told him I was sorry, I hadn't.

  "I've been thinking about it," he said. "The answer is first to go through a kind of basic Catholic repentance. Lie down and review in your mind. Don't blame yourself. Demean the hate. Think of beings as detached absolutes."

  "Come on, Owl," Debbie Sue said; she smiled at me companionably. "Let's see you be a detached absolute!"

  "I'll give you a mantra," Sidd said. "It might help. It's from a lama who tutored Milarepa, Manjushri, who is the archangel of the Word. It goes `Om Ara Ba Tsa Na Dhi.' Like all mantras, it has to be repeated over and over again. It's important to draw out the Dhi ... like a soft cry.

  "What does it mean?" Debbie Sue asked.

  "It means, in so many words, `Living ripens verbal intelligence.' Repeat it after me-'Om Ara Ba Tsa Na Dhi.'

  We did, sitting solemnly there in the sand. Sidd said he would write it down for me on a notepad when we got back to the bungalow.

  "They work, Owl," Debbie Sue said. "Guess what? Sidd stopped me from smoking. He told me that Tibetans believe cigarette smoke kills these delicate little things ... what are they called, Sidd?"

  "Gandharvas. And also dakinis. They are winged spirits, quite helpful ones. You can find them plucking harplike instruments and carrying flowers at great religious events."

  "That was enough for me," Debbie Sue said. "I stubbed my cigarette out in a plate. He taught me a little mantra, just in case. It goes: Om Bhaishajya (which you say twice), Maha Raja Samudgate Svana."

  "In so many words, it means: `Oh doctor, doctor, great doctor, get with it!' " Sidd told us. "I gave it to Davey Johnson who is trying to stop chewing tobacco."

  "What's the theory?" I asked. "Do you say them very fast or slowly?"

  "There are some who say that if you recite a mantra slowly and perfectly it's better than rushing through it a million times..."

  We practiced the writing-block mantra-drawing out the Dhi at the end.

  Debbie Sue sighed. "I'm hungry. I feel like writing a cook book," she said.

  It was almost dark when we left the beach. We stayed to watch the sunset, vast brush strokes of purple from the rain squalls far out in the Gulf. Debbie Sue told us she had seen a waterspout out there once-"a thin, squiggly line reaching down to the sea," so harmless-looking that she wished she had her Windsurfer with her on the beach so that she could have sailed out to "take a bath" in it.

  Sometimes after supper Sidd brought the French horn out to the back porch and played it. He hitched one melody or horn call to another in effortless succession. I don't recall any bumbles or errors-astonishing, I would suppose, from such a difficult instrument. Sometimes I recognized a refrain-Siegfried's horn. Always, at the first notes, the frogs in the lily pond out back would stop their chorus for a minute or so before erupting once more.
>
  We asked how Sidd had come to choose the horn. He told us that it was his father's favorite instrument. The great horn players of the day were invited to the musicales in the London house. His father's good friend was Dennis Brain, probably the greatest horn player who ever lived. Sidd had never known him (he was killed in a car crash in 1957) but his father often talked about him.

  "He actually had Dennis Brain's horn in the house," Sidd said. "The car had gone into an elm tree in a rainstorm. The horn was discovered in the grass, a little way from the car. It was badly smashed. My father had it reconstructed by Paxman Bros. of London. He let me play it sometimes. There's a photograph of father wearing a little rose in his lapel sitting next to Dennis Brain in a sports car. Brain was very fond of cars and drove them at high speeds. My father would drive to concerts with him. He'd arrive at the concert hall scared. He'd calm down during the concert, but then halfway through he'd begin to get scared again because he knew Brain was going to drive him back home."

  Sidd went on to say that Brain came from a famous family of horn players. His father was well known for the length of time he could hold a note. He once bet a brilliant violin player that he could sustain a note on a horn longer than the violinist could hold a note on a string with one slide of the bow. He did, too, holding a note for seventyfive seconds while the violin player drew the bow imperceptibly slowly until the tip of the bow fell off the string.

  In the darkness of the porch Sidd gave us an imitation of what that had sounded like, the violin note like a sigh, wavering finally, and then abruptly chopped off by silence.

  "The frogs love it," Debbie Sue announced. "Listen to them."

  She wanted to know if Sidd had taken the French horn with him to the Himalayas.

  Sidd replied that he had not, but he had become accomplished on Tibetan instruments. "Once I picked up a tungchen, which is the Tibetan long horn. Actually you don't pick it up, because the end lies on the ground when you play it. The tungchen has a terribly long sound box and you have to work up quite a column of air through it in order to get anything to come out the far end. People say it sounds more like a diesel horn than a musical instrument. I learned it fairly easily. The monks looked at me in surprise. The first piece I played on the tungchen was `London Bridge Is Falling Down'-I haven't the slightest idea why-and then I played the Beatles' 'Strawberry Fields.' Terrific echoing effect. In fact, the last phrases of `London Bridge' were drifting back from the mountains when I was quite a bit into `Strawberry Fields.' The monks asked me to play the tungchen at the ceremonials. They said they would be responsible for the selections."

  "They didn't want to hear `Strawberry Fields'? " Debbie Sue asked.

  "No. They preferred pieces with only one note-long, very persistent wails. It's a fine melancholy background for the chanting that the monks do...."

  "You couldn't really carry the tungchen around," I commented.

  "You'd need a whole row of yaks," Debbie Sue suggested.

  Always around midnight Debbie Sue announced that it was time to go out and romp with the porpoises in the Bay. Sidd invariably groaned. They would borrow my Volkswagen and go off for a couple of hours.

  I went with them once. We undressed on a narrow pebbly beach and waded out. Just offshore the bottom took on the consistency of a kind of muck; the ooze worked its way pleasantly up between the toes. The shelf dropped away very gradually, so that we waded a long distance before the water was at our waists. Debbie Sue led the way, the outline of her naked behind barely visible to guide us, slowly setting, truly like a pale moon, as the water reached slowly up her body.

  Sidd did not like being out there. As he waded, little exclamations escaped him, as if a bare foot had fetched up against a shell or the back of a crab. It was rather eerie. The night I went it was so dark and foggy that the Bay, flat and absolutely still, seemed to meld into the night sky. There was no horizon. The temperature of both air and water was about the same, so that when we got out to where the shelf dropped off into deeper water, we seemed to float within a vast, dark sphere.

  I have no scientific explanation why the porpoises turned up-possibly they happened to pass there on a regular sweep along the shore. Nor do I know how many there were-two, perhaps three. Suddenly we heard their backs break the surface, the distinct puff of their expirations, and then the faint suck of water and the Bay closed in behind them. Debbie Sue let out a yelp of excitement. They were invisible in the dark-a faint fish smell hung around us. Once or twice, close by my legs, I felt the soft pressure of a displacement of water, which meant that a large body had gone by within feet of mine.

  The porpoises spent almost fifteen minutes around us. Debbie Sue wouldn't leave until they had moved on. She called to us from farther out in the darkness, "They might come back!" I waited, treading water, while Sidd, next to me, was tall enough so that his long toes gave him a precarious anchorage on the bottom. His head was tilted back to keep his chin clear of the water.

  Back on the beach, we carried our clothes in bundles to the car rather than endure the discomfiture of putting them on our damp bodies. We drove home naked, the warm wind coming in the windows drying us off.

  I was worried about the police, especially when we got to the streetlights of Pass-a-Grille. I said, "Even here they tend to look upon naked threesomes with suspicion."

  Debbie Sue said, "We'll tell them we have a monk in the car and they'll understand."

  I 'HE METS kept in touch. Jay Horwitz called up on occasion in the evening. Debbie Sue, who could not bear to let a phone go for more than a ring or so without pouncing on it, would call out, "Owl, it's for you?"

  On the other end Jay would mourn that he didn't want to press me in any way, but was there news?

  I told him there wasn't anything concrete, but at least Sidd seemed happy. He was continuing to meditate in the dunes and practice back in there-there'd be the distant crash of cans and sometimes one would sparkle briefly in the sky, kicked up by the power of the pitch. He seemed in harmony with himself.

  "Any hint?"

  "Well, he gave me one of those sayings the other day."

  "Yes ...?"

  " `When the chickens are cold they roost in the trees; when ducks are cold they dive in the water.' "

  Jay paused for a few seconds. "Not exactly ... scrutable," he said.

  "I'll keep you informed," I told him.

  "Toronto comes in here April 2. Davey wants to put the kid in against the Blue Jays `B' squad to see what happens."

  "I'll mention it."

  "What about the girl who answered the phone?"

  "Yes, Debbie Sue ..."

  "What's he doing with a girl anyway?" Jay asked. "Aren't monks supposed to be celibate?"

  I looked around to see if Sidd was within earshot. "Sidd's more of a student than a monk," I said, " . . . a kind of `wine taster' ... sips of culture rather than a fulltime imbiber."

  "A wine taster? That's a new one. What about the girl, though?"

  I did not tell Jay what had happened earlier that morning-that my own suspicions had gotten the best of me. It was Jay himself who had suggested that Debbie Sue represented some interested party: an infiltrator-sent either to spy on Sidd or somehow disrupt things ... perhaps by the Commissioner himself. So, padding down the bungalow corridor after her, I suddenly-very much on impulse -cupped my hands to my mouth and bellowed, "Ueberroth!" She jumped, quite frightened, and turned around.

  "Owl, don't ever holler that awful word at me."

  I apologized. I told her that something had caught in my throat.

  "I don't know what it means, but it's gross!"

  "Well, we have no read on her," Jay was saying on the phone.

  "I'm not doing much better," I said. "She's apparently a good golfer. A student, or was, at Duke."

  Jay asked if I had followed through on Nelson Doubleday's suggestion that we get Sidd to see some baseball movie classics. The Natural, of course, with Robert Redford had been mentioned, and also a film I
had never heard of called It Happens Every Spring, starring Ray Milland as a chemist who, by chance, discovers a compound that avoids wood. When Milland applied the compound to baseballs, he made as effective a pitcher as Sidd Finch apparently was in real life.

  "I can send over the cassettes," Jay said.

  "We don't have the appropriate machines," I admitted.

  "No VCRs? My God, what goes on there at night?" he asked.

  I told him that we talked. We did a certain amount of reading, and Sidd did his meditating, telling us about the Himalayas, and so forth. Sometimes we turned on my sister's television set. I didn't say that late at night Debbie Sue and Sidd very often went down to the Bay-Sidd murmuring and complaining-to swim with the porpoises.

  Jay thanked me for the report. He urged me to reach him if there was a hint of a decision.

  I promised and hung up.

  The next morning I stopped by Huggins-Stengel to watch Sidd pitch in the enclosure. I arrived late. He had already taken his practice throws and gone off to the beach.

  I hung around for a while. The batting-cage had been wheeled onto the field. Davey Johnson was standing behind it looking through the thick mesh at his hitters taking their turns. Recognizing me from the Dr. Burns seminar in Cashen's office, he waved me over. I found it exhilarating to be so close to things-the faint hiss of the pitches as they came in, the pop and the long flight of the baseballs going out, and seeing the batters check their stance and adjust and work on their swings. The balls the hitters let go whacked up against the canvas at the base of the cage. Johnson had his foot up on the support-bar behind the mesh.

  "How's your boy?"

  "Sidd? He seems content enough," I said. His usage of "your boy" made me think once again how the manager seemed to distance himself from Sidd.

  "I understand he's going to make up his mind by April first."

  "I didn't know."