Fin & Lady: A Novel (18 page)

“Goddamn Reds,” the policeman said, and left him alone.

It was Biffi who came to bail out Lady and Fin.

“I have seen you on the television,” Biffi said to Fin when they rode home in a cab. Biffi sat between Fin and Lady. “You were very brave. She?” he added, nodding sideways at Lady. “A fool.”

“Fools rush in where angels fear to tread,” Lady said, not in the least offended. “What an adventure!”

“Dilettante,” Biffi muttered. “Crazy American. What if I was not there for extrication?”

“Have you ever been in jail?” Lady asked. Her eyes were glowing.

“We shall not talk of jail,” Biffi said. “You are hungry?” he asked Fin.

“We stood up to Dow Chemical, to the police!” Lady said. “Who can think of food at a time like this?”

“A boy,” said Biffi. He put his arm around Fin. “A boy from jail.”

Lady leaned against Biffi from the other side. “You’re sweet,” she said. “In your obnoxious way.”

“I’m not hungry, Biffi,” Fin said. He felt his eyes closing. Stay awake. Keep your eyes open. If you let yourself fall asleep, all this will vanish. There will be no Lady resting her head on Biffi’s shoulder. There will be no Biffi’s shoulder for her to lean on. There will be no Biffi and Lady, quiet, together, like a couple, like a husband and wife. There will be no Fin. Like their child.

“I brought you a chocolate bar,” Biffi said.

“Oh goody!” said Lady. “Three Musketeers.”

Fin tore open the wrapper, suddenly very hungry. “I read the book,” he said to Biffi.

“Better for your teeth,” Lady said, which he knew meant she wanted a bite, the first bite.

“Lipstick?” he said.

“Nope. All worn off in the pokey.”

“All for one and one for all, then.” And he handed over the candy bar.

“Pokey,” Biffi muttered, then spat out a barrage of enraged words that must have been Hungarian. They were, at any rate, not English.

Lady came back at him in Italian.

More Hungarian.

More Italian.

Lady did not understand Hungarian. Biffi did not understand Italian. Fin understood only that the spell was broken. They weren’t the three musketeers. They weren’t a family. They were a tower of Babel.

“I hate you both,” he said when the taxi pulled up to the house. But they didn’t even hear him.

Mirna called that night. Fin answered the phone in the kitchen while Biffi and Lady argued in the living room.

“You’re a television star!” Mirna said.

“You saw?”

“Everyone saw!” She sounded happier than Fin had ever heard her. “Mazel tov, Fin! Today you have an FBI file! Today you are a man!”

“Hey!” Fin said, banging into the living room. “Mirna says I have an FBI file. Isn’t that cool?”

Biffi looked sharply at Lady.

“Okay, okay,” she said. “Okay, you’re right, Biffi, okay?”

“No more arrests,” Biffi said to Fin.

“But napalm is wrong. That’s suppression of free speech,” Fin said, though he was so relieved by this news that he could hardly stand up: no more sit-ins, no more policemen, no more jail.

“I am protecting you, the whole you, not just your talking,” said Biffi.

“You’re not my father,” Fin said.

He ran up to his room. He waited. He slammed a foot against the wall, then again, looking with satisfaction at the black scuff marks on the white paint.

Still no one came.

No one came to punish him, to ground him for the week, to take away his TV, to whack him on the seat of the pants, to wash out his mouth with soap, to holler helplessly, to stamp feet or order him to apologize. To do something. Anything. No one came up to his room. Why would they? A father would have. A mother would have. But he had neither.

He kicked the wall again, the noise blunted by the crepe souls of his desert boots.

*   *   *

“What is wrong with you?” Lady asked the next morning. She had actually gotten up in time for breakfast. Or perhaps she had not slept. Her face was drawn and gray. “You insulted Biffi,” she said.

“So do you. You insult everyone.”

“Not when I need them.”

“Fine teaching for the boy, Miss Lady,” said Mabel, pushing a plate of scrambled eggs at Fin. “You pay no attention to what Miss Lady says, Fin. Not ever.”

Lady put her face in her hands. “I’m sorry, Fin. Mabel’s right. Mabel’s always right. I’m a terrible guardian. And a terrible person. Biffi’s right. Everyone’s right. I’m wrong.”

This was where Fin was supposed to say,
No, you’re not. You’re a wonderful guardian
. For an instant, he thought of agreeing with her.
You’re selfish and irresponsible and immature
, he would say.
Not fit to be anybody’s guardian. Not fit to be anybody’s guardian but mine
, he added quickly, superstitiously.

“No, you’re not, Lady,” he said. “You’re the best guardian.”

Now she would look up at him and smile, tentatively.

She looked up from her hands. She smiled. Tentatively.

“You’re nuts,” he said. He smiled back.

“You don’t hate me for getting you thrown in jail?”

“Nope.”

“You don’t hate Biffi for not wanting me to get you thrown in jail anymore?”

“Nope.”

“No more sit-ins, though.”

“I know. No more.” No more policemen? No jail? Yeah, he could promise her that.

“For the time being,” she added, to comfort him.

“Ever.”

“I’m glad there’s one adult in this kitchen,” Mabel said. “Besides me.”

That afternoon, after school, Fin called Biffi at his gallery.

“I’m sorry for what I said,” Fin said.

“You said nothing but what was truth.”

That’s what I’m sorry about, Fin thought, but he said, “Don’t be mad at Lady.”

“No one can remain mad at Lady, can they?”

“Apparently not,” Fin said, though he wished that sometimes, somehow, he could.

*   *   *

The suitors had become part of life. Like school. Like baseball. Like the movies that ran over and over on
Million Dollar Movie
. Like the chance of snow. That was certainly the way Lady seemed to feel. Sometimes she would make a big deal about how many places she still had to visit before she was “hooked up to the plow,” that she still had to go to Japan and to India and to Africa, that she had to get away. She did rush around, that was true. Looking back, Fin sometimes said fondly that was all she did, that rushing was the substance of her activity rather than what happened in between, that she never really went anywhere.

So the trip with Biffi that summer was a big deal. A big deal signifying nothing, perhaps, but a big deal nevertheless. They went to a cottage in Wellfleet for two weeks. Lady took Fin with them, too. And Gus. Biffi, in retaliation, Fin thought, took his mother. Mrs. Deutsch had a big white paper bag on her lap in the car, where she sat in the tiny backseat with Fin and Gus. Grease showed through the bag in spots. Mrs. Deutsch kept opening the bag and looking in. Checking. Who could get into her paper bag to get whatever was in it out? No one. Yet she shot suspicious sideways glances, not just at Fin, but at the placid dog as well. Gus did once poke at the bag with his sharp nose, and Mrs. Deutsch let out a shrill cry. Sometimes, when she looked into the bag, she reached a hand in and rummaged around, a noisy operation, the paper bag rustling and crinkling, and what must have been other, smaller bags inside the big white bag also rustling and crinkling. When the bag was open and her hand had disappeared inside it, the smell of butter and sugar wafted from within, making Fin and Gus sniff the sweet air and stare at Mrs. Deutsch and her paper bag. She would furtively tear off a piece of whatever it was that smelled so deliciously of butter and sugar in the bag and jab it into her small, frowning mouth, lick the white powdered sugar from her fingers, close up the bag again, and clutch it, as if Fin or Gus or the man on the moon were trying to pry it out of her hands.

“What’s in there, anyway?” Fin finally asked.

“Medicinal.”

When they stopped at Howard Johnson’s, she brought the bag into the restaurant with her. She held it on her lap while she ate fried clams.

“Did you make them or something?” Fin asked when they were back in the car and Mrs. Deutsch was once more rummaging in the bag. “The cookies?”

“They are digestives,” she said. “For my digestion.”

When they arrived at their cottage on a sand dune overlooking the beach, Fin stood looking out at the ocean. It was vast and gray, and the waves that crashed so insistently on the beach came from the other side of the world. He remembered standing on the deck of the
Cristoforo Columbo
, the blank foaming ocean everywhere, in every direction. He remembered his mother’s hand, cool and smooth, resting on his on the railing. He remembered his father, one hand on Fin’s head. “The English call whitecaps white horses,” his father said. “They look like wild horses to me,” his mother said. Wild horses, Fin had thought. Like Lady.

Mrs. Deutsch came up beside him and stood with him, watching the ocean from the tall, windy dune.

“Hmmph,” she said. “In Hungary,
there
we had beaches.”

The rented cottage had two bicycles, and Fin and Lady rode into town to buy fish to cook for dinner.

“I taught Lady to ride,” Fin said to Mrs. Deutsch.

“In Hungary I ride with no hands holding,” Mrs. Deutsch said. She grabbed Fin’s bike from him, deposited her paper bag in the basket, and demonstrated. In her large red-skirted bathing suit she looked like an aging circus performer.

Each morning Mrs. Deutsch emerged from her room in the red bathing suit carrying her white paper bag. She spent the day on a beach chair reading Hungarian novels. When she wanted to take a “dip,” she solemnly handed the bag to Fin to guard. When she returned from the water, she wrapped herself in a towel, said, “Thank God, thank God,” as she poked in the paper bag, then fell asleep, the bag tightly grasped by both hands.

On the third day, Fin could stand it no longer. He had to know. What was in the bag? What cookies, what cakes, what pastries or doughnuts or Danish or petits fours could be so delicious, so precious?

He waited until Mrs. Deutsch was asleep, then asked Biffi, “What’s with the bag? What does she have in there? Hash brownies?”

Biffi looked fondly at his sleeping mother. “My mother keeps her jewelry in the bag with the cookies,” Biffi said. “The cookies are, I think, quite stale.”

“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.