Fin & Lady: A Novel (28 page)

Now she was self-conscious. She backed away from Biffi, gave Fin a quick, savage look.

“You told him to come?” she said.

“No, no, the boy didn’t know,” Biffi said.

Lady had not even heard him. “You did, didn’t you, Fin? You traitor.” She took off her hat. She was barefoot. “Well, what difference does it make? You’re here,” she said to Biffi. “What shall we do with you?”

“You went out barefoot?” Fin said. “Are you crazy?” He was sorry the minute he said it, because he thought, Yes, she is crazy. She’s gone completely crazy. “I mean, you always tell me not to.”

Lady looked down at her feet. “Oh,” she said. “I guess I forgot.”

“Lady, sit down. I want to talk to you,” Biffi said.

“I won’t give it up,” she said. “I’m a big girl now. I am having this baby.”

“You sound like
As the World Turns
,” Fin said.

“Shut up, Fin.”

“Lady, just sit down,” Biffi said. “Please.”

Lady sat cross-legged on the floor.

“Take a walk,” Biffi said to Fin.

“I don’t feel like taking a walk.”

“My god, Fin, I came from Iraklion to talk to your sister. Go away. Please.”

Fin walked upstairs with as much dignity as he could. At the bend in the stairs he stopped. He listened. It went on for an hour or so. Lady wept and Biffi comforted her. Lady said she was a fool, and Biffi said it turned out she was human, after all. Lady said she would always love Michelangelo, and Biffi said, Yes, she would. Lady calmed down and asked him about being in the air force. Biffi said it was more American on an air force base in Crete than it was in Times Square. “What am I going to do?” Lady asked. “Marry me and be happy,” Biffi said. “You just ruined everything about this visit,” Lady said. “I know,” said Biffi. “I would like to marry you, though.” Lady said, “We’re both fools,” and Biffi agreed.

They went to dinner at a fish place overlooking the Marina Piccola. The waves lapped at the small beach. The moon rose, a crescent. Lady looked a little more like herself. She was animated. She stood up and danced to the music playing on the radio in the kitchen. They could barely hear it, just enough for Lady to dance.

“Thank you,” she said to Fin. “Thank you for getting Biffi here.”

“You’re welcome.”

“Because now I see what to do. You were right all along, Finino mio.”

Fin held his glass up. “To me!” He was giddy, carried along on the giddiness of Lady.

“It was there in front of me all the time.”

“To you!” said Fin.

“All that worry about lemons. What a lot of bother for nothing.”

Biffi held his glass up. “To lemons.”

“To the god of lemons,” Fin said.

“Thank you for understanding me,” she said to Biffi. “For understanding everything about me. For forgiving everything about me.”

“It is because I love everything about you.”

“Me, too,” Fin said. “So, when’s the wedding?”

Biffi and Lady stared at him.

“No wedding, Fin,” said Biffi. “Have you not been listening?”

“But she said I was right.”

“And so you are,” said Lady. “Why should I marry anyone? I have plenty of money. I have you,” she said to Fin. “I have my dearest friend, Biffi. And I have you,” she said, tenderly addressing her belly. “I have everything now. Thank you, Michelangelo. I would wither and die married to anyone. Wouldn’t I, Biffi?”

“Quite possibly.”

“Thank you. You came here and you reminded me why I ran away.”

Biffi sighed. Gave a small smile.

Fin looked at them in horror. “So you’re free? Is that it?”

“Oh good grief, no. I’ll never be free, not with a baby. Why would I want to be?”

She took Biffi’s hand and led him down the steep steps to the darkness of the beach, pulling off his shirt as they went. Fin could just make them out as they dived naked into the water.

Biffi left the next day. Fin walked him to the ferry.

“She is so alive, your sister,” Biffi said. “She makes the sun come up each day, you know. Though even she cannot prevent it from falling down again at night.”

“What the hell happened? Is she really okay?”

“For now,” Biffi said. “I think so. I am like a glass of cold water. Splash! In the face.” He laughed.

“She really is crazy.”

“A little.”

“What about you?”

“I’m crazy, too.”

“Not what I meant.”

“I am to be fine. I am to be Melvyn Douglas.”

“Who?”

“In
Mr. Blandings
American movie. Do you know nothing about your culture?”

“I know Homer wasn’t American. Or Hungarian.”

“Then you will go a long way in this world.”

They shook hands.

“Don’t shoot anyone,” Fin said. “And don’t let anyone shoot you.”

“Not on Crete. No.”

Fin hugged him. “I don’t want you to go,” he said.

“My dear friend,” Biffi said, kissing his head.

That Baby

They came home on a boat. It was a rough crossing, but if it had been calm as a pond, Lady would have been sick. She and Fin shared a cabin, and at night Fin, on the top bunk, could hear her retching in the bathroom.

During the day, she put a good face on it. “I’m putting a good face on it,” she said. “Do you know why?”

“For my sake?”

“No. Don’t be silly. I’m putting a good face on it because I don’t want the baby to be sad.”

They stood at the rail in the wind. There was a fine, misty rain. Lady breathed deeply. She smiled. “Won’t everyone be surprised?”

“A lot of people won’t approve, I guess, yeah.”

“No, I mean, won’t they be surprised at me? Being so happy?”

Fin was certainly surprised. You’re pregnant! he wanted to say. You have no husband. You are in the family way, wearing your apron high. The man you love went back to Milan to his wife and children. You’re knocked up, like the eighteen-year-old girl you used to be, going back to New York to face the world as an unwed mother. “Are you happy?”

A soft film of rain rested on her pale face. She smiled. Pushed his wet hair off his forehead. “Yes,” she said. “Yes, yes, yes!” They walked a little. “And no.” Then the wind picked up. “But yes.” The deck got too slippery to walk on. “But I can’t go inside.” Lady looked green. “Ever again.”

There were deck chairs sheltered by an overhang. They pulled wool blankets around their legs. Lady said, “‘If equal affection cannot be / Let the more loving one be me.’” Auden: the poem about the stars who do not give a damn. Fin felt a stab of love and pity and jealousy.

A steward offered them steaming cups of beef bouillon. Lady waved him violently away.

She said, “You know, nausea means it’s settling in nicely.”

“Breakfast?”

“The baby, you idiot. I’ve never felt this sick in my life, so it must be a very comfortable baby.” She smiled. “I’m very lucky.”

Lucky? She was violently sick to her stomach, vomiting all day long, carrying a love child, once known as bastard, and an Italian one, to boot. The man she loved, the one man with whom she’d ever fallen in love, was left behind on a noisy dock in Naples.

They told each other they would meet every summer in Capri.

“It’s better this way,” Lady said to Fin. A little unconvincingly. “Capri is where we exist, nowhere else.”

“You think he’ll change his mind? Come to New York?”

“Never.”

“Miss you so much he wants you to move to Milan?”

She hesitated before she said, “No. I guess not.”

The hesitation reminded him of something. Her tone. The resignation. The absence of resignation in the dreamy timbre of her voice. The unconscious shrug. The rueful smile. And then he realized: Lady had become one of them, one of the suitors.

“It’s very romantic,” she’d said to Michelangelo on the dock.

“You are an extraordinary woman,” Michelangelo said to Lady.

She’s dying inside, Fin thought.

That was true. But there was the other truth, the new one: Lady was alive, inside and out. Ever since Biffi’s visit, since their impromptu naked plunge into the bay, she had come slowly back to life, cleansed, born again, like a fish, flapping desperately on the shore suddenly restored to its watery home. Or a Siren. Sometimes Sirens were mermaids, weren’t they? Mostly they were birds with women’s faces. Not very appealing. Not at all like Lady. And yet, like Lady, the chicken-legged ladies lured so many sailors to their ruin.

No accounting for taste.

No accounting for anything.

“Next summer,” Michelangelo said to Fin, slapping his shoulder, kissing his cheeks.

Fin picked up his backpack and his guitar case and headed toward the ship. He had not played his guitar once. He turned to see Lady and Michelangelo in a passionate embrace. He watched as they backed away from each other, each lifting a camera and taking the other’s picture.

“So you don’t think he’s a cad?” Fin had asked as they stood on the deck and waved.

“I suppose he is.”

“Jesus, Lady.”

She laughed. “Who are you more jealous of?” she asked gently. “Michelangelo or the baby?”

Not an easy question. Which room would the baby take over with its spit rags and diaper pail? And whose fault was that if not Michelangelo’s? “I’m not jealous.”

“You will always be first in the hearts of your countrymen.”

“No, I won’t. Anyway, I’m not jealous. I’m concerned. For you.”

“Well, I do have you, Fin.”

“What are you going to do with it? The baby, I mean. I mean, I know you’ll take good care of it, but do you even know how to take care of it?”

“I love Michelangelo,” she said.

“Okay, okay,” he said.

“Anyway, who knows what will happen with him? In the future? Right?”

Fin said nothing.

“And whoever this baby turns out to be, it will know its father. Every summer.”

“Yeah, but…”

“And the rest of the time, we’ll do big things, the baby and I. Things I could never do if I were a hausfrau in Milan, right? First, we’ll go to Japan.”

“By boat?”

“Shut up, Fin.”

“Japan, huh?”

“The baby,” she said with a happy sigh, “will love Japan.”

*   *   *

When they got back to the house on Charles Street, there were no suitors waiting for Lady, as Fin had imagined there might be. Biffi was not there. He was still a spy in Crete. Tyler had unsurprisingly managed to get out of the draft without benefit of a wife and had quit his law firm, leaving the Hadley business behind him. He was engaged to the daughter of the head of his new firm and was thinking about taking a stab at politics. That’s what his former law partner told Lady. Tyler himself never spoke to Lady again. Jack, too, was out of the picture. He had met a girl dressed in orange robes tapping a tambourine and disappeared for many years.

“So the coast is clear,” Lady said.

“You’re sort of ruthless,” Fin said. He was thinking of his talk with Tyler in Connecticut. Actually, he was thinking of all the suitors.

“Yeah, well, kill or be killed. Love or be loved.” She squared her shoulders and stood almost at attention. “This is a new life, Finny. My real life.”

“Maybe that’s how Tyler felt about your old life. That it was his real life. Or even Jack. I know Biffi did.”

“Well, they were wrong. Jesus, Fin, what is it with you? You were mad at me when they were around. Now you’re mad at me because they’re not.”

What
was
wrong with him? Lady may have been ruthless, but she was also brave. It’s hard to imagine now, Fin told me, but being unmarried, raising a baby by yourself in those days—it wasn’t done. It was still a scandal, and Lady knew it. She knew who would drop her, who would drift away. Just about everybody. “I’m sorry,” he said. He hugged her. He kissed her on top of her head. He was so much taller than she was now. She smiled, then began to cry.

“Everything will be okay,” he said.

“You told me that when you were a little boy.”

“And I was right. I’m really sorry, Lady. Don’t cry. I don’t like it when people disappear, I guess.”

“Well, I’ll never disappear,” Lady said.

But that was a lie.

*   *   *

They did not go to Japan that first year, though Lady did return to Capri for the month of August.

She flew.

“Eight days versus eight hours. The baby says, Fly. The baby says, Don’t be such a baby.”

“I’m glad someone responsible is making the decisions,” said Fin.

Lady and Michelangelo rented the house with the green door at the gate, with the gigantic lemons hanging from thick, twisted vines above, with the sunset blushing on the walls.

Fin didn’t want to go.

“You’re such an only child,” Phoebe said. “No offense.”

“Have you ever lived with a baby?”

“I said no offense.”

They sat in a classroom in their new school. The New Flower School stopped at the eighth grade, so both Fin and Phoebe had moved on, both to a somewhat more conventional and demanding school on the Upper West Side. When Fin first got there in the fall, a rattled guidance counselor had called Lady in.

“At the request of the algebra teacher, we’ve given Fin a few tests, and I’m afraid he has developed a psychological block that prevents him from retrieving even the basic mathematical information he has learned.”

“Oh no, not at all,” Lady said. She bounced the baby and cooed at it. “He hasn’t blocked anything. How could he? He hasn’t learned anything to block.”

Fin stayed after school four times a week to be tutored. So did Phoebe. She was a year ahead of him, but so was her mathematical information block. The tutor spent twenty minutes or so explaining something, then left them to do problems together.

“Work in groups,” the tutor would say as she exited. “Form your groups.”

Fin and Phoebe were the only ones being tutored. They were already sitting next to each other. Fin shuffled through the book and opened and closed his binder, hoping that would indicate grouping. Phoebe just threw her head back and sighed loudly.

“You know that baby is not my sibling, anyway,” Fin continued.

That baby.

Fin was scared of that baby. He told me it looked like a possum, a baby possum, wrinkled and hairless. “You looked like a possum,” he said. “A baby possum.” He twisted up his face in disgust. “You were wrinkly and you had no hair.”