Fin & Lady: A Novel (2 page)

“Oh God. A mutt, too?”

“He’s not a mutt. He’s a collie.”

“Shouldn’t it stay here with its flock of cows? Won’t it be sad without them?”

“He would be sad without me.” What Fin didn’t say was that he would be sad without Gus, but Lady didn’t need him to, it appeared.

“Oh God,” she said again. “Well, where is Rin Tin Tin hiding, anyway?”

He was at the Pounds’.

“He’s at the pound? Good grief, they couldn’t wait until after the funeral?”

“No,” Fin said. “The Pounds, the people you met, the people who took care of me.”

“Thank God,” she said. “I do not approve of euthanasia, Fin. Remember that. If it ever comes up.”

“What’s euthanasia?”

“Come on,” she said.

Fin had packed his clothes in a large suitcase. A pair of blue jeans, two pairs of cotton slacks for school, his shirts. His sneakers. Two sweaters. His winter jacket. He hadn’t been sure what to pack, really. He had never packed for himself. His toothbrush. He had almost forgotten it. In a box he’d put his baseball glove, toy soldiers, comics, models, books, and records. He wondered if Lady had a record player.

“The rest will be put in storage, Finny. So don’t worry.”

“This is all I have,” he said. “There is no other stuff. No stuff that’s mine.”

“I’m afraid it’s all yours now.” Lady pointed to his grandmother’s collection of little Delft houses, to the needlepoint pillows, to the cranberry glass and the wooden rocking chair—to everything in the house. And then she pointed out the windows. “The cows, too, Finny.”

It hit Fin then for the first time that he was really leaving. It hit him then, and not for the last time, that nothing would ever be the same again.

“Does Lady need defending?”

The existence of Lady was revealed to Fin in pieces, literally. When he was four, someone—a guest? a maid?—mentioned a half-sister and was immediately shushed by Mr. and Mrs. Hadley. Fin was left with the picture of a girl cut off at the waist, of two legs, two feet, two black patent-leather shoes, two white socks. This half-sister was half of the only sister he knew, the sister of the boy down the hall, and so she wore the same gray wool pleated skirt. She was half a sister, the bottom half, no arms, no hands, no face. He was left, too, with a sense that this decapitated sister was secret, and secrets, he already understood, were generally associated with shame.

When he was five, he saw her picture for the first time. It was in a newspaper lying open on the dining-room table. A young woman posed demurely for the camera, a strand of pearls around her neck, like his mother’s pearls, but the girl in the picture had skin like the pearls, too. She was beautiful. She wore a white wedding dress, shiny satin. Lace.

“That’s my name,” he said, pointing to the word “Hadley” in the caption.

“Aren’t you clever?” said his mother. “Reading
The New York Times
.” Though she sounded nervous and glanced at her husband. When Hugo Hadley grunted, she said, “That’s your half-sister. That’s why she has the same last name. And she’s getting married.”

“Thank God for small miracles. And I pity the poor fool,” Fin’s father said.

“You’ll meet her at the wedding,” Fin’s mother said.

But he didn’t.

The wedding was in a church, and Fin sat in a pew in his gray wool shorts and Peter Pan–collared white shirt. He had new shoes for the wedding. And knee socks. He waited and waited and watched men in black-and-gray-striped pants and long black jackets rush up and down the aisle. He waited and waited and pushed one knee sock down, then the other, pulled one knee sock up, then the other. He waited and waited and watched his father appear from a door in the side of the church, then disappear back through the door, his face changing from its normal color first to red, its color when he got angry, then to purple, a new color. Fin kicked his new shoes against the pew in front of him and waited as his mother whispered nervously to another lady. He waited and waited and waited, in vain.

“Did Lady get married?” Fin asked in the taxi. “Did we miss it? What happened?”

His father was silent. His face had gone back to red.

“There was a change of plans, sweetheart,” his mother said. “Lady’s not getting married today after all.”

Not long after the wedding at which Lady did not get married, Fin saw her picture a second time, a different picture in a different kind of newspaper, smaller, and his sister was on a beach in a bathing suit. She wore sunglasses and held a cigarette in one hand. Fin thought she was even more beautiful than in the last photograph, and said so.

“Beautiful? Yes, she’s beautiful,” his father said, throwing the paper down. “But she’s no lady.”

“She is because her name is,” Fin said. “So she is.”

“What was I thinking?” Hugo said. “Lady. Ridiculous name.”

Fin had been named on a whim, too. February 18, 1953, windy and raw outside—“cold as charity,” Hugo Hadley liked to tell his friends. His newborn son and his wife both healthy and sleeping, he left the hospital and walked out into the early dark, no thought of where he was going, happy, relieved, just walking and walking, and just when he realized he was bitterly cold, he spotted a revival house. He would slip in to warm up. The film:
Les Enfants du Paradis
. Almost over? Just as well. He couldn’t bear to watch the whole thing. The French … too theatrical in general. He paid no attention to the movie, arty crap, until it was over. Then the screen went black, and three bright white letters appeared.

FIN.

“I think Lady is a pretty name,” said Fin’s mother.

Hugo laughed. “Who are you defending, Lydia? My choice of names? Or that little tart? I can never tell with you.”

“You don’t need defending.”

“Does Lady need defending?” Fin asked.

“You have no idea what we’re talking about,” Hugo said, as if that answered Fin’s question.

Which was true, of course, he had no idea what they were talking about, except that they were talking about Lady, and that he knew when something was wrong in the house, and something was definitely wrong.

*   *   *

A few weeks later, a tall, elegant lady visited. She was introduced to Fin as Mrs. Hadley. He looked up at his mother, alarmed. She laughed, her musical girlish laugh, and said, “Don’t worry, baby. Mommy’s still Mommy. This is another Mrs. Hadley. This is Lady’s mother.”

Fin shook hands with the other Mrs. Hadley.

His father came out of the living room and said, “Well, well.”

Then Fin was told to go and play. Who, he wondered, when they said that, did they think he was going to play with? He went as far as the dining-room door, and from there he watched them settle themselves, the other Mrs. Hadley on a stiff armchair, his mother perched on the edge of the sofa, his father striding back and forth, saying, “I can’t just leave everything and go chasing after her.”

“I’ve tried,” said the other Mrs. Hadley, who was dabbing at her eyes with a small handkerchief. “I found her in Paris, it wasn’t hard, there she was at the Ritz. A runaway at the Ritz! She can be ridiculous. She said she didn’t want to get married…”

“She certainly made that clear. At the last possible moment.”

“But she won’t get married, even though…” The other Mrs. Hadley paused. Then: “She won’t get married, she won’t take care of things. Does she think she’ll wake up one morning and the problem will have solved itself? You have to do something, Hugo.”

“Poor thing,” from Fin’s mother, a snort from his father, a sigh from the other Mrs. Hadley.

Then: “Damn it.” Fin’s father.

“Think about how alone she must feel.” Fin’s mother.

“I doubt that Lady is alone.” Fin’s father.

“You haven’t changed a bit, have you?” The other Mrs. Hadley.

“She’s a disgrace. Let her rot abroad.”

“You don’t mean that, Hugo,” Fin’s mother said.

“She’s nothing but trouble, and I do mean that.”

“Nevertheless,” said the other Mrs. Hadley, “she is your daughter.”

“She needs you,” Fin’s mother said.

“She needs to be brought home and spanked.”

“And so I thought of you,” the other Mrs. Hadley said in an acid tone.

*   *   *

“We are going on a trip, Fin,” his mother said the next day. “We’re going to find your sister, Lady. In Paris. Won’t that be fun?”

“Oh, loads,” said Hugo.

Fin thought of the newspaper photograph of Lady. “Is Paris on the beach?”

“We are going to find her and bring her home,” his father said. “Put the fear of God in her.”

Fin didn’t want to put the fear of anybody in anybody. Neither, it appeared, did his mother.

“I still don’t see the point of taking Fin and me,” his mother said. “It’s such a long trip. And the whole thing is so awkward…”

“Awkward? I’ll tell you what’s awkward. Having a daughter who behaves like a common…” He looked at Fin and stopped himself. “It will grease the skids, okay? She likes you, Lydia. She always has.”

He sounded as if he were about to say, God knows why, but he didn’t, just shook his head, patted Fin, and said, “Don’t mind me.” By which he meant, Fin knew from experience, just the opposite. Mind me. Do as I say. Before I say it. As in, go away now, Fin, go away and play.

*   *   *

They were off in search of Lady. His mother said it was an adventure. In an airplane. Like Sky King, Fin said, but she did not watch television with him and just nodded vaguely. The airplane lurched off the ground and into the clouds. Fin was too excited to eat his dinner, but he put the packet of sugar printed with the letters TWA in his pocket, a souvenir. It would take an entire night to get to Paris. They were going to rescue Lady. Fin did not understand what they were rescuing her from, and he did not care. He was in a plane and the clouds were below him.

The elevator in the hotel in Paris had no walls, just ornate wrought iron you could see through.

“It’s like Babar’s elevator,” he said.

“I thought Babar was an elephant,” his father said, and Fin and his mother exchanged a look of superior knowledge.

The milk in the morning was sour and warm, like no milk he had ever tasted, and he refused to drink it. He ate a croissant, a revelation. He and his mother walked through a park where no one was allowed to step on the grass. They saw a puppet show, which terrified him. The puppets screamed in high-pitched voices and hit each other over the head. The loaves of bread in Paris were as long as baseball bats.

But Lady was not in Paris.

“She skipped town,” Hugo said.

And they took a train to Nice. They stayed overnight in a hotel across the street from a rocky beach. In the morning, while his father was looking for Lady, Fin and his mother saw a camel on the beach, and Fin’s mother lifted him up so he could have a ride.

But Lady had skipped that town, too.

“At least,” Fin’s father said, “she hasn’t moved on to the casinos.”

“She has no sense,” he said later.

“She’s just a child,” Fin’s mother said.

“She’s certainly behaving like one.”

They took another train that night.

“We’re going to another country,” his mother said. “To Italy.”

The train rocked and rattled, and Fin slept on the highest bunk of the triple-decker. Their cabin had a tiny sink. The sink folded up, like the beds. Would they ever find her? He was curious about his half-sister who had skipped two towns and skipped her own wedding. “But when we find her,” he said sadly to his mother, “the adventure will end.”

His mother hugged him and said, “I hope you’re right, my love. But I wouldn’t bet on it.”

*   *   *

They arrived in Rome early in the morning and searched for Lady there; at least Fin’s father did, making phone calls from the hotel, setting off on “wild-goose chases.” Fin and his mother took a walk and ran up and down wide steps and threw pennies into fountains guarded by naked marble men. But Lady was gone again, and that afternoon they took a train to Naples and from there a ferry to Capri. Fin sat on a wooden bench, tired, his hands sticky from an ice-cream cone he’d successfully lobbied for in Naples. He watched the shore recede, his eyes half closed. His mother pulled him onto her lap. That’s a volcano, she said. Would it erupt while they were in Italy? Oh no, it was extinct.

“The only one who’s going to erupt in this place is me,” Fin’s father said.

The ferry landed, and Fin was so sleepy his father had to carry him off.

“Wait’ll I get my hands on her,” he heard his father say.

“Hugo,” his mother said. “The boy.” Then: “Look, Fin. We’re going in a funicular. Up the cliff.” And: “Look, Fin. The taxis have no tops, just awnings.”

She began humming “The Surrey with the Fringe on Top,” until Hugo shifted irritably in his seat. “Never mind,” she whispered then, her face against Fin’s, her arms around him.

Another hotel, another man carrying suitcases, another narrow cot brought in for Fin to fall asleep on. Blissfully.

*   *   *

When Fin saw his sister for the first time, she was sitting in the piazzetta at a café drinking coffee by herself. She was as beautiful as her pictures. She stubbed out a cigarette, stood up as a young woman walked by, and kissed her on both cheeks, smiling, speaking rapidly in Italian.

Then she saw Hugo Hadley. Her face hardened. The skirt of her white filmy dress danced in a sudden gust of wind. She sat down without saying a word. Then she saw Fin.

He was holding his mother’s hand. The sunlight made him squint. Lady was wearing sunglasses. She grinned. Fin, helplessly, grinned back.

“Finino!
Fratello mio, vieni!
”

She does not speak English, he thought in alarm, but when she held her arms out, he let go of his mother’s hand and ran to his foreign sister.

“Howdy, pardner,” Lady said. Perfect English, to his relief.

Even as an adult, Fin would remember that moment, the harsh sunlight, the circle of crumbly buildings, the cry of the gulls overhead, the smell of coffee, the scent of perfume, and the eyes of his new sister, a young woman in a white dress, those dark eyes. He turned his own eyes away, conscious suddenly of a feeling so overwhelming it made him shy.