Fin & Lady: A Novel (7 page)

*   *   *

“Why does Lady like Tyler Morrison?” Fin asked Mabel one morning. They sat at the kitchen table while Fin picked at his breakfast and Mabel had a cup of coffee. “He acts like he lives here.”

“Well, he almost did, didn’t he?”

Fin slapped his hands on his face like one of the Three Stooges to portray frustration. “What?”

“She jilted him. Left him standing at the altar.”

Fin stared at her. “You mean like a wedding?”

“That’s what I mean.”

“I went to a wedding that was Lady’s wedding, but Lady never came.”

“That’s the wedding, then. Even Miss Lady didn’t skip out on two of her own weddings. Went off to Europe on an ocean liner. She’s never taken an airplane in her life, and I don’t blame her.”

Lady and Uncle Ty? Impossible. Of course she had jilted him. He was so obviously inferior to her with his trim, insolent manner. Lady, unconstrained and rash,
afoot and lighthearted
—Lady could never have capitulated to Tyler Morrison and his little spinning hat.

“Our Miss Lady is foolish, but she’s no fool,” Mabel said.

Our Miss Lady. Fin smiled. It sounded like a church. Or a television show.

“Yeah,” he said. “Our Miss Lady is no fool.”

“Foolish, though.”

“Yeah. Foolish.”

“But no fool.”

“She wouldn’t get married to him again, would she?” he asked Mabel.

“That,” Mabel said, “is the question.”

Lady appeared, bleary-eyed. “What is the question?” she said. She poured herself coffee. “My head is pounding.”

“Will you marry Uncle Ty,” Fin said, “this time?”

Lady frowned at Mabel.

“The truth will set you free, Miss Lady,” Mabel said.

“Well, I
didn’t
marry him, did I?” Lady said. “Good grief. What is this, the Spanish Inquisition? I was eighteen years old, for crying out loud.”

“It was one of those arranged child marriages,” Mabel said to Fin. “Like the Hindus.”

“Close enough,” Lady said.

“You’re not eighteen now,” Fin said.

“Neither are you. And I’m your guardian until you are, and I have a headache. So dry up.”

Lady drank her coffee.

“Hangover?” Fin asked.

“No.” She glared at Fin. Then: “
Yes.
So sue me.”

“So will you? Marry him this time?”

“You don’t own me, Fin,” she said. “Or you,” she said to Mabel. Then she started singing the Leslie Gore song.

She sang it all the way through. It was one of her favorites.

The Promised Land

Lady was unpredictable, that was the one thing you could predict. That’s what Mabel told Fin. So every morning he woke up in the rose-colored bedroom that had belonged to Lady’s mother and looked out the window to try to predict the weather instead. But the city sky would be just the same—smooth, metallic—and he knew it would be hot, the same as yesterday, and he waited for the day that would not be the same, dreading it, sure of it, curious and impatient.

It arrived in July.

“You’re up,” Fin said to a bustling, showered, beaming Lady. “It’s so early.”

“When you’re up, you’re up,”
Lady said.
“And when you’re down, you’re down / And when you’re only half-way up / You’re neither up nor down.”

“Okay.” What else could he say? What do you say to a nursery rhyme? She spread jam on a piece of toast. Even that, even the way her hand held the knife—it was not the way other people spread strawberry jam. Swipe, swipe—giant motions, graceful, but really giant. As if she were wielding a sword.

Mabel was there earlier than usual, too. “Pack your bag and grab your hat,” she said grimly. “We’re setting sail for the promised land.”

A sail? The
Cristoforo Colombo
 … “Capri?”

“Capri?” Lady said. “What are you, the beautiful people? No, no, we’re going to Greenwich Village!”

“With the ugly people. You got your bongo drums?” Mabel asked Fin. “That’s what they do down there. They drum and they sing nasty old field songs. They wear sandals on their dirty feet. They cohabitate. And they dress raggedy. That’s where your guardian, who is charged by the United States of America to take care of you, that’s where she’s taking you.” She poured him a glass of orange juice. “And me.”

“Why didn’t you tell me?” Fin said. “Is the house ready?”

“No. Nearly done. But I have to get out of here,” Lady said, almost frantically. “Why does nobody understand that? I have to get away from here.”

A gilded cage day again. They had become quite frequent, paralleling the frequent visits of Tyler Morrison.

“You could go to boarding school. With Uncle Ty.”

“Uncle Ty,” Lady muttered, her tone satisfyingly sarcastic.

“Then you’re not going to marry him?”

Why did everyone assume she needed someone to tell her what to do? Lady said. Why did everyone think they needed to be like a father to her, like her father? One Hugo Hadley in a lifetime was enough. This was 1964. She wanted to live her own life, a big life. She needed a big life, a real life. Bigger than the lives of the girls at Rosemary Hall, bigger than the lives of the other girls at Wellesley, bigger than her mother’s life, her father’s life, and certainly bigger than Tyler Morrison’s life.

“He asked you again and you said no!”

“I’m not ready to settle down,” Lady said, ignoring him. “Is that a crime?”

“No!” Fin gave Lady a thumbs-up.

“Life is big and bountiful. I want to go to Africa to live with chimpanzees.”

“And that’s why we’re going to Greenwich Village,” said Mabel.

“Freedom in our own backyard, Mabel. Freedom from this big bourgeois ball and chain, freedom from charity balls, from suitable suitors, from lawyers and stockbrokers and bankers. Freedom from Hadley hell!”

“Freedom from Uncle Ty!” Fin said.

“Freedom from all of them!” Lady cried, taking Fin’s hands and dancing him around in a circle. “Come on, Mabel! Freedom!”

But Mabel just watched them, silent, her expression unreadable.

*   *   *

Lady and Mabel climbed into the front seats, Fin and Gus into the back of the convertible. They drove down Fifth Avenue and Fin watched the cars driving uptown. Were those cars leaving Greenwich Village? Why? That was where everything was happening. He smiled a superior smile. Goodbye, Uncle Ty, and good riddance. Goodbye, as well, to the cool, cushioned ease of Lady’s mother’s sprawling apartment, goodbye to the doormen, who smiled at him and accepted the enthusiasm of Gus’s greeting with patient equanimity, goodbye to Mike and the other elevator men. He would miss them. But Fin already missed so much, he told me, that he was getting used to the feeling.

The buildings hung over them, blocking out the sun but not the heat. Lady wore sunglasses and a blue chiffon scarf on her head. She sang along with the radio, the Beach Boys, “I Get Around.” The sound of her voice, just off-key, came back to him on the hot car breeze.

As Lady had said, the house was not finished. There was no front door, for example, just a makeshift plywood barrier. There was no electricity. There was no staircase from the main floor to the kitchen downstairs, partially below street level: you had to walk past the plywood barrier and down the front steps, then down two more steps around the side, and then, finally, into the kitchen. But the house was no longer empty, either. There was furniture, all right: weird furniture, low and angular. The paintings were enormous and bizarre, some geometrically bizarre, some shapelessly bizarre, but all bizarre all the same to Fin. There was a haphazard feeling to the whole enterprise, as if someone had thrown his clothes on the floor. If his clothes were furniture. Nothing was where it should be. Huge pillows, not on the couch but on the floor. The rug? Not on the floor but on the couch. A mirror stood on the floor, leaning against the wall. The curtains on the window were Indian cotton bedspreads, a different pattern for each window.

A small man had pulled back the plywood for them, beaming, his face almost perfectly round. His eyes were round, too, and black, like someone in a comic strip. He was smaller than Fin, but he had a mustache as thin as a pencil line.

“‘Groovy’ is the word you are searching for.” He had a heavy accent. He held out his arms toward the jarring arrangement of jarring items. “For the groovy debutante.”

“Oh, I left the debutante uptown, where she belongs…”

“Uptown with all the real furniture,” Mabel added.

“Mabel does not approve,” Lady said, laughing. “Mabel does not approve of anything I do, do you?”

“No,” Mabel said. “I do not.”

The small man was named Pierre. He was the interior decorator. He had made the house look like this on purpose. Was he an adult? Yes, of course, obviously: his hair was thinning, he had a mustache, and he was dressed like a man in a suit and tie. A little man. In a little suit and tie.

“The child’s eyeballs are popping out of his head,” Pierre said, staring back at Fin.

“Put them back, Fin.”

“How do you do,” Fin said. He held out his hand.

The little man’s little hand took his and shook it vigorously. “The door will be here tomorrow. Electricity tomorrow. The stairs … this will take another week or so. You’re impulsive, my friend Lady. And impatient. It is what we love about you, yes?”

“You’re a genius. It looks like we’ve lived here for years.”

Fin caught Mabel’s eye. She opened her mouth a little, as if to speak, then shook her head, and closed it.

“And now we will live here for years to come.”

On the second floor, there were two rooms. One was Lady’s bedroom, the other her study.

“What are you studying?” Fin asked.

“Life!” Lady said.

Fin’s room was on the third floor. Next to it was a room with a television.

“Color television,” Lady said. “Just for you.”

“Color!” He laughed out loud. “Can I watch it whenever I want to?” His grandparents had favored wrestling and
Walt Disney’s
Wonderful World of Color
in black-and-white on Sunday nights.

“When do you want to?” Lady asked.

Fin looked at her blankly. Did she not understand the simplest thing? He knew Lady was the wisest person he had ever met. She was certainly the most sophisticated. But there were times, like this, when she seemed almost asleep, with her eyes open, her voice clear and loud, standing upright on her lovely legs. Like a horse. A beautiful, powerful horse. Fast asleep.

“Oh well, if you don’t know, I certainly don’t,” she said when he did not answer.

Fin’s bedroom had a fireplace in it. The walls were decorated with rugs of colorful geometric design, but there were no rugs on the floor. Nor were there curtains on the windows. He could see the back garden—some flagstones, a tree in the middle, a curved wooden seat encircling the trunk. Beyond it, another garden and the windows of another house staring back at him. When he got into his pajamas that night, he did it in the bathroom, a flashlight balanced on the radiator, trying to hold the door closed with his foot as Gus nudged it with his long nose. He woke up in the middle of the night, confused. Where was he? Not home. Not which home?

Out his window he saw yellow squares of light, the windows of the brownstones backing onto the garden. He was in Greenwich Village, in Lady’s house, the terrific, perfect, groovy house.

He lay there in the unfamiliar semidarkness, the sheet pulled close in spite of the summer heat, and he wondered what more he could do to make Lady like him. She liked him, but did she like him enough to keep him with her? Forever? He often felt that Lady was just ahead of him, just out of reach, rounding the corner, leaving just a glimpse of her hem as she disappeared, a tiny flag.

“Stop blowing smoke in that boy’s face!” Mabel said the next day, lugging the vacuum cleaner into the new living room. “What is wrong with you, Miss Lady?”

“Please don’t call me Miss Lady, Mabel. This is a new age for the Negro.”

“When
you
work for
me
, that’ll be the new age. And when you get married, then I’ll stop calling you Miss Lady.” Mabel glowered at her. “I’ll call you Mrs. Lady.”

“You’ll have a new name, anyway, when you get married,” said Fin. “Then we won’t be the same.”

“Our dear departed father wouldn’t let my poor old mother give me a middle name so that I’d be able to use Hadley as my middle name. So we’ll still be the same in a way.”

“My middle name is Hugo.”

“There, you see? We just can’t escape, can we?”

“While you two sort yourselves out, I have to vacuum,” Mabel said, and pushed the button of the new silver vacuum with her foot. Fin jumped on to ride like a jockey, knees to his chin, then got off and stared out the window. A Checker cab went by. A man scraped something off his shoe on the curb. Fin wondered where the beatniks were.

“Where are the beatniks?” he said when the vacuum was dragged up the stairs and out of earshot. Now all they could hear was the banging of the workmen on what should have been the stairs to the kitchen.

“Oh, Fin, what am I going to do with you in Greenwich Village?”

Fin did not answer. It was not a question one answered, he understood that. And, too, what
would
she do with him? He had no idea.

“Let’s see,” Lady said. She tapped her lip with her finger. “You could come with me to the beauty parlor! And the dentist!”

Fin made a face.

“No?”

Fin shook his head.

“What would you like to do? What did you used to do?”

“Ride my bike. Play baseball.”

Lady considered this. “I don’t know how to ride a bike.”

“I could teach you.”

The next day, they bought bicycles. English bicycles with leather pouches full of little tools attached to the backs of the seats. Fin’s was dark green, Lady’s was dark blue, and they had three speeds, not at all like his fat-tired bike at home.

Fin held the back of Lady’s bike and told her to pedal as fast as she could. He ran behind her, holding the bike steady. Then he let go.

“You did it!” he cried as she pedaled down the sidewalk.

“I did it!” she said when she had turned around and come back.