The Curious Case of Sidd Finch

by George Plimpton

  "Oh, Owl, it was funny," she said. "Over the public address system the Circle Line guide had just finished telling us all the famous people who live in the big apartment houses just down from the Mullinses'-Greta Garbo, J. Paul Getty, Johnny Carson, Gloria Vanderbilt, Henry Kissinger, and everybody, and that Frank Sinatra once had a penthouse on top of the building opposite ... and all of a sudden here came the little black apartment house where we live and there was Mister Puss looking across at us. I could see him clearly. I shouted at him, "Mister Puss! Look, it's Mister Puss!" All these people around me cried out, `Who? Who? Mr. Who?' "

  When Sidd got home from practice that afternoon, Debbie Sue twirled him around. "How did it go? Did you bean anyone?" But then she startled him by saying she was going to put a disguise on him. We were planning to go out that night-our first evening on the town.

  "Why must we do this?" Sidd had asked.

  "I don't want you stared at," she said simply.

  Sidd sat in a chair opposite her. I sat and watched. It was a wonderful time for her-being utterly in control of him, tipping his chin, asking him to stare at the ceiling, while she applied various eye shadows, paints, ointments, and powders she had collected from the Mullinses' bathrooms. Sidd complained-but mildly. He looked vaguely like a clown when she had finished. His faintly melancholy looks were emphasized by eye shadow; his cheeks were brightly rouged. She settled a pair of dark glasses on his nose. We went to a Japanese restaurant. People stared at him, not because they recognized the Mets' newest star, but because he looked vaguely like someone prepared for Halloween.

  Once, during dinner, Debbie Sue nudged me. "See that man over there?" She pointed surreptitiously at a man sitting alone at a corner table in the recesses of the restaurant.

  "Yes."

  "How much do you think he weighs?"

  I looked and said about two hundred pounds.

  "How about that guy over there?"

  Sidd didn't seem bothered by Debbie Sue's interest in what people weighed around the room. From across the table he asked me, "Whatever happened to the small man with the bow legs?"

  I went through a moment of confusion.

  "The gentleman from Burma who could hit home runs."

  I suddenly understood he was asking me about the dream I had described to him in Florida. "But that was just a dream, Sidd. Yes. A Burmese batter with a silver bat came up to the plate and really socked one off you. The ball went up over an elephant in the bull pen in left field."

  "There's no reason why there shouldn't be someone in baseball like that," he remarked.

  "There're millions of Burmese," I said, grinning at him. "The law of averages . . . "

  "Mr. Johnson would like me to pitch again on Thursday night," Sidd said. "He is apologetic, but what he calls his rotation is `shot'-as he put it. It's the last game of the Cardinals series and he feels that having pitched once against them successfully, I might be able to do so again."

  "What did you say?"

  "I told him I was prepared. The arm-"

  I interrupted to ask if he wasn't worried about having a bad day. I shuddered to think what that might be like with a ball that traveled at that rocket speed. "After all, Sidd," I said, "most athletes have ... well, good days and bad ones . . . "

  He nodded. "It is difficult. There is a test in the Himalayas where the trapa sits in a snowfield and his tumo is judged by how much snow he melts around him. I knew of a very cocky trapa sitting down in a great snowbank near Tang Tin, which is a mountain in western Tibet, to show everyone his stuff, and nothing happened. They all stood around while he tried to get his tumo-heat going, straining hard, and imagining himself as a charcoal fire, and finally he looked very fragile and small, shivering there in the snowbank. It was not his day."

  "So it can disappear," I said. "I mean once you learn, it's not necessarily with you always."

  "I'm afraid so," he said.

  We turned on the television when we got back to the Mullins' apartment.

  "Lordy, it's Smythe," Sidd said. He dropped down in front of the set. "He was at Stowe with me."

  The screen was showing a haughty face listening to a question. A microphone appeared near his mouth; he looked at it nervously. A tongue flickered out to wet his lips, which appeared faintly rouged. "Calls himself Finch now, does he? Used to be Hayden Finch. His father was related to Sir Philip Sidney. Of course, Hayden was adopted. Played the French horn in the woods, I do recall that. Left school early. Something about his father dying in an airplane crash. Never spoke to anyone. We always thought he was stuck up. Or stuttered. Never answered any questions. I remember him saying `I'd rather not say.' Don't recall what was being asked of him."

  A master appeared on the screen wearing a tweed coat. "Hopkins," Sidd whispered to us. "Taught Classics." The master smiled brightly. "He was a clever boy. Rather independent Fink-Hadden was ... oh, Finch ... yes ... Hayden Finch. Quite a good musician. The oboe, was it? Oh yes, French horn. He tended to play the wrong compositions at practices, as I recall, which made him somewhat ... how would one say? ... unsteady. Not one to play in the school orchestra. An athlete? I can't say really. He wasn't one of the great athletes we've had here because I'd remember. Cohn Shellington, the great Irish miler we had here, or R. M. Bartlett, who won four caps on that splendid English rugby team back in the fifties. Hayden Finch was certainly not of that calibre. Oh, a baseball player? Well, that explains why his name doesn't spring to mind ... we don't play baseball at Stowe. Or do we? Never have to my knowledge."

  The BBC announcer appeared and talked about Sidd's father-mentioning the mysterious airplane crash in the Himalayas (an aerial view appeared showing the general area where the plane had disappeared), the tragedy of his wife, Edwina, a line or two about her famous scarab brooch collection, and then, of course, an account of her fall (once again an aerial panorama appeared showing the fatal peak in the mountain chain).

  We had a brief scan of the house on Denbigh Close. Their reporter had rung the bell. No answer. The camera peeked through the windows. The furniture within was covered with shrouds. Neighbors were interviewed and said that the house had been deserted for years. Sometimes, for hours on end, they said they could hear a Hoover whining through the place.

  "Do you suppose your model train is still in operation?" I asked Sidd when the program was over.

  His eyes lit up. "Oh, I suspect so. Everything was to be kept as it was. The sheets over the furniture can be whipped away. The cleaning lady is required to go down to the ballroom. She is supposed to go to the electric panel and push the appropriate switch to keep the train set operative. It must be the worst moment of the day for her. Everything starts up. The lights in the farmhouses go on. In his caboose the Mr. God of All He Surveys is carried along for two or three feet, at which point it's all right for her to cut the switch and hurry back upstairs."

  That night after supper Sidd began talking about Dennis Brain, the famous French horn player who had per formed in his father's house in London. He described a composition Brain often played in concert halls-Mozart's horn Concerto in E, which is notorious for stopping abruptly in midflight.

  "It's quite odd," Sidd said. "It's unfinished-this marvelous piece of work."

  His father had described a performance of the concerto in London's Jubilee Hall where Brain had sat in a chair out in front of the orchestra. After a series of brilliant violin and oboe passages, the horn enters heroically, suggesting great things to come. But then in the middle of an intricate and wonderfully florid passage, the horn stops ... like a breath cut off. In that abrupt silence, Brain stood up from his chair. He smiled. He shrugged his shoulders and then turned and, carrying his horn, walked off the stage. It was that shrug of his that Sidd's father remembered so vividly: it seemed to suggest not so much bewilderment as an acceptance that the composer had the right to do such things.

  Debbie Sue wanted to know why Mozart hadn't finished the concerto.

  Sidd smiled as he shrugged his sh
oulders. "Who knows. Mozart left a lot of unfinished pieces ... but what is so strange is that this one is so obviously a masterpiece."

  He asked us if we would like to hear the last notes. Debbie Sue went up the spiral staircase to bring down his horn.

  I have vivid memories of her, instant portraits, as if flashed on a screen from a carousel projector. She is always in half-light in these flashbacks, as if the magic of her would dissolve in a bright glare. No matter. One of the recurrent images is of her on the circular stair that night. She seemed to be guided by the gold instrument in front of her, holding it as if the coils were quite foreign to her; she handed Sidd the horn almost in relief.

  "There!"

  It took Sidd a relatively long time to prepare the horn to play ... so different from the instantaneous action he gave to his other skills-pitching a baseball or producing his sounds of mimicry. He took it and blew emptily through the mouthpiece.

  "Do horn players have to warm up?" I asked.

  "Horn players are usually the first to arrive at the concert hall," Sidd said. "My father told me Dennis Brain warmed up for over an hour."

  "You don't do that?"

  "Well, not for an hour."

  "You're like the English tennis player. The one who said, `I don't knock up.' "

  Sidd smiled. He raised the horn to his lips.

  The fragment lasts only three minutes or so-a theme, and then a trill that trails off, and sure enough, just as he had described it, it stops terrifyingly ... as if the player had been run through and toppled off the chair.

  "You ache for more, don't you?" he said, placing the horn on his lap. "It stops on a dominant, which is the a of amen without the men after it."

  Debbie Sue's lips were half parted. "I don't understand," she said.

  Sidd smiled ... very much as Dennis Brain probably had on the stage of the Jubilee Hall. "There's a saying of Buddha," he said. " `Be earnest in cessation although there is nothing to cease; practice the cessation although there is nothing to practice.' "

  XVII

  'HE BACK of the Mullins apartment looks down on a mangy alleylike garden. A fire escape lets down into it. It is not quite clear how Al "Big Cakes" Caporetto got onto the fire escape-perhaps by hooking the bottom ladder down somehow, or being given a leg up onto it by an accomplice. In any case, he got into the Mullins apartment from the fire escape landing opposite the dining room. He squeezed his bulk through one of the windows and dropped to the floor, upsetting a large brass candlestick in the process. It fell on the rug, bounced, and rolled noisily across the bare floor before fetching up against the baseboard.

  Debbie Sue heard it. She was lying, half awake, in the big bedroom upstairs. Her first thought was that Sidd was practicing one of his domestic sounds in the next room, an odd one to be sure, an object rolling on a bare floor. Then she realized that Sidd was beside her, lying on his back, his thin nose aloft like a sail. Someone else was downstairs.

  The window shades were up. The two enjoyed the morning sunlight streaming in from across Queens and the river. At night they liked the half-light from the streetlamps along the East River Drive below, a soft, silvery light that shimmered on the ceiling and made their bodies -often the sheets thrown back in the summer heatglow. Debbie Sue could see the cat on the window seat. His head was poised, fixed: he, too, had heard whatever was down the spiral staircase below....

  She nudged Sidd. He stirred. She whispered, "Sidd, something's downstairs."

  His eyes snapped open. She could see his eyelashes flick in the light.

  "What?"

  "Something's downstairs in the back. Something fell off onto the floor. It made a clatter."

  "It's the cat," he whispered.

  "No, look."

  Sidd raised up on his elbows. On the window seat the cat's outline against the night sky was as stiff as if sculpted. "He hears something," he said. "It must be Robert coming home. Maybe he's in the kitchen getting something to eat. What time is it?"

  "It's two in the morning. Sidd, let's go and see."

  He groaned. But he swung his feet to the floor, pulled on his shorts, and the two of them, Debbie Sue in her man's shirt, crept along the corridor to look down the well of the spiral staircase.

  Sidd felt Debbie Sue's fingers tighten on his shoulder. Her breath popped in his ear. Crouching to peer down the stairwell, he could see the length of the living room. He could make out the bulk of a man, his shadow huge on the carpet, moving slowly, like a widening pool, for the foot of the stairs.

  Debbie Sue called down, "Owl?"

  The figure started. His face shone vaguely under the brim of a baseball cap tilted up.

  Debbie Sue sputtered softly. "It's not Owl, it's Big Cakes!"

  "What?"

  "Frighten him," she whispered. "Make a sound."

  Sidd's throat was dry. His mind was vacant. Later he thought what he might have produced-the scream of an elephant. The click of a rifle bolt being drawn back. The hissing of a fuse. A police siren. Instead, clearing his throat, he worked up the sound of a taxi horn-an old French taxi he had heard once in Kathmandu.

  Below, the man jumped. His shadow wavered on the carpet. They could see his head turning in the faint light coming through the riverfront windows. Then Sidd did the click of a refrigerator door opening and closing, following that with the sound of a carpet sweeper being drawn back and forth over a rug. He did the sad warble of a mountain dove. He finally produced a gunshot, but it was the sound of a rifle fired far in the distance, its echo in the ravines dying prettily away. There was very little reasoning for his selection-it was like the aimless humming of someone walking nervously down a dark alley.

  The barrage of sound-as if from a turned-down television set being flipped from station to station-seemed to have little effect. The shadowy shape paused at each sound, but continued to move toward the foot of the stairs.

  "Throw something at him," Debbie Sue whispered. "Wing him!"

  Sidd whispered, "The best remedy for all obstacles is to meditate on Voidness."

  Debbie Sue punched him sharply on the arm.

  Sidd was continuing, "Milarepa suggests that one should regard all enemies as passersby on the road."

  Debbie Sue whispered, "That guy wants to hurt you!"

  " `The angry fist never strikes the smiling face.' "

  "Sidd!"

  They could see the thin gleam of a flashlight hunting for the spiral staircase, finding it, and they knew the intruder was on the way up.

  "Throw something," Debbie Sue whispered again.

  Sidd reached out in the semidarkness, his hand patting swiftly across a tabletop. His fingers closed briefly around a book of matches, then a tiny picture frame that he knew contained a baby photograph of a Mullins child.

  "Quick!"

  His hand, sweeping back across the floor, touched what at first he thought was the bulk of a wastepaper basket, pliable, though, and liftable. His fingers gripped into whatever it was and with a grunt he picked it up, cradled it in his palms, and tossed it down the stairwell.

  A yowl went up as the man reeled backward into the living room. A lamp went over. Sidd and Debbie Sue scuttled down the corridor back into their bedroom. Sidd slammed the door.

  "Lock it!"

  "There's no lock," Sidd said, feeling up and down the side of the door.

  "What did you throw?"

  "I threw the cat at him," Sidd whispered. "I hit him in the chest with Mister Puss."

  "It won't stop him," Debbie Sue said. "He's coming up after us."

  Someone else was in the apartment. Noodles McGuire had let himself in about five minutes before Caporetto. It had been a simple enough matter to tail Big Cakes from Abe's Fish and Stream in Astoria to the East Side of Manhattan. While Big Cakes was reconnoitering in the backalley garden, Noodles pushed all the buttons of an intercom in an entryway just up the street and got himself buzzed in. He could hear the intercom behind him squawking, "Come on up, Betty." He hurried up the several fligh
ts out onto the roof. There he crossed over the adjoining roofs to the last building on the block, where the Mullinses lived. After a quick look at the dark river and the lights of Queens beyond, he jimmied open the roof entry door and hustled down to the top floor of the Mullins apartment. The name was below the peephole. With a quick manipulation of a credit card and a thin tool of his own devising, he let himself into the darkness of the apartment. He sniffed. A cat. Somewhere a cat was in the place. He smiled. He himself was a cat burglar. For him the excitement of his profession was not necessarily that he made off with jewelry from a bedside table, but that while doing so a head would stir restlessly on the pillow just inches from his hand. A couple on the bed ... even more exhilarating! He was very good at his trade. He checked out his sneakers. He cleared his nostrils with Afrin Nasal Spray so that his breathing was as quiet as a bird's. When he jimmied his way into houses that were empty, he was disappointed. There was no challenge. He wrote notes and left them in place of what he had lifted. On the piano he played "Chopsticks" loudly in the dark.

  The reason for his presence in the Mullins apartment was out of the ordinary. He had heard that Big Cakes was boasting around Abe's Fish and Stream Club that he was going to take care of the Buddhist monk, like, "personal." No guy was pitching two shutouts in a row, not against the Cardinals anyway. Not with the kind of money he had bet. Someone asked how he was going to do anything about it. Caporetto, who'd had a few beers and was never one to keep much to himself, said that he had gone out to Shea after practice and had tailed the pitcher home from the ballpark to a dead-end street on the East Side. He'd seen him moving around in the windows of the second floor. No problem at all. Finch was holed up in the apartment of some guy called Mullins. He'd gone to the entryway and looked at the buttons.