The Death and Life of Zebulon Finch, Volume 1 (16 page)

IV.

L
O, HIS PARENTHOOD WAS ESTABLISHED.
For me, those first months were a brand new childhood, quickened so that I might make up for all I'd never shared with my real father. Leather obtained a leave of absence from his work, something Bartholomew would never have contemplated. Like a child, I was shy beneath his focused attention; like a father, he encouraged me, advancing me past the detestation I held for my own body. He toiled night and day; day and night I learned to tamp down my chronic impatience and let him toil. When his investigations overwhelmed, I mounted brief rebellions, but he had a patriarch's poise, honoring my hesitations before reassuring me that it would all be worth it.

Zebulon Finch was valuable raw material—about that there was no debate—but a finite one able to be harvested in only the smallest allotments. A carefully plucked hair. A fine scrape of cheek tissue. A hairline peel of elbow flesh. Each bodily theft I bore with what I felt was grown-up stoicism.
Make your new father proud,
I told myself.
Show him that you are worth his regard.

Each sample then suffered the laboratorial gauntlet: submersion in colored oil, heated to steaming, decolorized with alcohol, and counterstained with Bismarck brown. Rapidly the samples outgrew our storage. So it happened that I found Leather one morn dressed as a sous chef, wrapped in an apron splotched with sawdust and paint
and gripping a straightedge. His chin was elevated in what I would come to know as his posture of self-congratulation.

“You slumber like an old dog, Finch. Look fast upon my latest creation so that we might be nimble and make hay of it.”

The western wall had been cleared of tables, shelves, racks, cabinets, and lamps, and painted a blinding white. Atop it had been drawn Leather's latest shrine to organization, a black grid dividing the wall into five hundred squares of equal size. The X axis was inscribed with cryptic biologic descriptions (
Vascular; Reticular and Lymphoid; Generative
), while the Y axis comprised a list of chemical procedures (
Staining; Purification; Recombination
). Some boxes already had occupants: flimsy bits of my body in capsules held aloft by small shelves.

“Here we will record our advancement with the breadth of a farmer's almanac. Before these boxes are filled we will have our response to religion's Revelations.” He sighed in gratification and slapped the operating slab. “Off with the shirt. Let us place another piece upon the Revelation Almanac.”

This quantification of our progress nearly made tolerable the fact that I was not permitted beyond third-floor boundaries. For a time, I took the cloistering in stride. Leather's brain was an organ so further developed than my own that it was folly for me to doubt his decree. But my everlasting nemesis, Boredom, did at last hunt me down and commenced hectoring me across days of material preparation; weeks of interminable experiment; months of tedious note-taking, note-erasing, note-reviewing, and note-appreciating; and an unremitting silence more oppressive than the Pageant of Health's obstreperous jabber.

To this tedium, the doctor was impervious.

In fact, he whistled.

The same tune, over and over. And over and over. And over.

It made me want to jump through the goddamned window! I reasoned with myself that it was human nature for fathers to frustrate sons, though that did not prevent me, one fine spring day, from letting go with a groan loud enough to rattle the room's beakers.

“Enough! This aria of yours is relentless!”

Leather stopped buffing his favorite centrifuge.

“I must have been whistling. I did not realize.”

“Not realize? Here, examine my ears, what is left of them!”

“A reaction to the arts. A hostile one, at that. This is noteworthy.”

“It's noteworthy for how it's driving me raving mad!”

Leather took up a pen.

“Describe the emotions the music makes you feel.”

“Is murder an emotion? Because I could murder someone right now. Anyone, really.”

“Is there no upswell of ecstasy? No euphoric transport? No rumble of transcendence?”

“There will be a rumble, I expect, when your damn whistling head rolls down the stairs.”

Leather tapped a finger against his chin.

“I wonder what might be learned if we put a finger to art. To see if it quickened your vitals. Yes, it's a champion idea.”

“A night at the opera? But I haven't the right bow tie.”

The doctor hurried out with such speed that the shelves upon the Revelation Almanac chimed in his wake. Ten minutes of curious noises followed: clumsy thumping from the first floor, crotchety words with Dixon at the second, and then the doctor's pained gasps as he scaled the final flight.

Had he not been so famous an abstainer, I would have taken him
for stinking drunk. He was as flushed as a wino, struggling against the weight of a lustrous mahogany box affixed with an enormous horn at least three feet in diameter. It barely fit through the door. Huffing with exertion, he mustered a last burst of strength and lifted the awkward thing onto the examining table. He panted his explanation.

“Victor VI. Deluxe model. The best, Finch. The absolute best.”

I eyed the device with suspicion.

“Does it grind meat? If you tell me to stick my arm into that thing I shall refuse.”

Leather mopped his brow with a handkerchief.

“See this disc? Through vibration of sound, a modulated groove has been cut into the wax. See this crank? It powers the circulation of the disc. This, Finch, is a steel needle. Observe its insertion. One simply releases the hand break—and look. The platter turns. Cunning, eh? They call it a Victrola.”

“I've got it! It's an alchemy machine. You piss into the horn. The wheel turns the pee into milk.”

He arranged the disc upon the platter with persnickety precision.

“The public wishes to hear opera blowhards bellowing aggrandizing codswallop. Enrico Caruso? That Italian gasbag? His ‘
Vesti la giubba
' is broken glass to the ears! But I am in personal contact with the Gramophone Company. They are, after all, Englishmen. I arranged and paid for an acoustical stamping. I gathered the best performers. No expense was spared, I assure you. The composer: Carlo Gesualdo da Venosa. Rescue your reputation, Finch, and tell me you know of him.”

“A composer? Of music?”

Leather touched his temples as if my words brought him pain.

“It is not your fault. You have been brought up, no doubt, on the pabulum of Mozart. You have heard nothing like this before, of that I assure you.”

He operated the machinery with confident hands. The steel needle found its place in the revolving disc and a deep grumble rolled from the giant horn, five voices in grieving unison. For a moment I was horrified. These were no less than the moans of persecuted spirits! And we'd invited them into the house? It was only by remembering my own status as persecuted spirit that I was able to resist lobbing the contraption to the floor.

The music was a winter gale howling through a breach. Then it lifted, individual voices darting apart, the soprano flighting skyward away from the sinister sawing of the bass. Even through the thick walls, the horde of hounds out back heard the song and began to howl. Leather closed his eyes to shut out their protest.

“Listeners of the seventeenth, eighteenth centuries called this madrigal licentious. Disgusting, they said.”

His right hand sailed invisible tides.

“From Gesualdo's sixth book of madrigals: ‘
Moro, losso, al mio duolo
.' From 1611. His masterpiece. Mozart came over a century later and remained centuries behind. Can you feel it? The chromatic tension? You might interpret it as dissonance. It is close, Finch, ever so close. For the entirety, it totters at the edge of ruin. And where but ruin, I ask you, is there more beauty? The brightest colors of nature we find in carcasses swallowed back into the loam. In short, Finch, the beauty of Gesualdo is
your
beauty. They were right, those eighteenth-century pundits. The music is disgusting.”

Leather, though, was rapturous, afloat in the phonic vapor. I confess that I was curious to feel what he felt. I crossed my arms in
the discriminating manner of a critic and leaned into the palpable vibrations. The Victrola flattened the music so that it sounded as if it were being performed from the cellar, yet still I could picture berobed singers going through the pious undulations of an impassioned recital.

Alas, the score held no power over me. As it reached its final fermata, Leather rested his tired conducting hand upon his breast. Before him, the boxes of the Revelation Almanac held steady like five hundred pairs of hands waiting to applaud.

“This piece is a threnody. The word originates from the Greek
threnos
, to wail, and
oide
, an ode. It is a hymn to the dead. Quite different, you will agree, than an elegy. There is no mourning here. Here there is only love. You must love death to live inside of it, to call its black canals home, to willingly turn over exorbitant fares to the purgatorial boatmen.”

The black beetles of his eyes, forever skittering, were for once at peace.

“Gesualdo makes no sense to you. No matter; he will. In the meantime I have purse enough to pay both of our fares through the Underworld. What we shall find there will change you and me forever.”

Cast what aspersions you will about the doctor, but he was correct.

It happened overnight.

V.

T
HE LEATHERS' SLEEPING QUARTERS WERE
located beneath the lab and it was commonplace for me to hear the murmurs of nuptial debate. That night, however, the interplay was turbulent. I removed myself from bed, opened the chamber door with a surplus of caution, and crept on bare feet to the staircase bannister, where I adopted the time-honored position of eavesdropping child.

Up drifted the protestations.

“You have a child to think of,” pleaded Mrs. Leather.

“No,” corrected the doctor. “
You
have a child to think of. I have my work.”

“And I am thinking about her. She's been choleric since birth.”

“All infants are bilious.”

“I think we should consider the possibility, that is all.”

“That is all, eh? The possibility that this patient of mine, this patient of historic import, is somehow to blame for this child's niggling cough. It's preposterous, Mary, and offensive.”

“I do not mean to offend. But he's . . . this patient of yours, he's . . . unclean, isn't he? It is what the maids say.”

“You're listening to the maids? Their conniving minds and rutting bodies are what are unclean.”

“You can't blame them. They saw Mr. Finch when he arrived.”

“What they saw was mud. You are aware that mud washes off?”

“Please don't be cross. Mr. Finch looked unwell. And a baby is so susceptible to disease.”

“You wish to teach me about biology? You, the wife? To me, the surgeon? This is how you would like to expend your energy tonight?”

Hip-hip-hurrah, Dr. Leather, good show!
This complaining woman's attempt to force me back into a roofless life was unwarranted.

“Of course you know best,” said she. “But you did recommend a sterile environment.”

“Yes, and did you follow my instructions? Good girl. Let that be the end of it.”

“Will you at least examine her? Can't you find a minute for that?”

A hard object smacked down upon a harder surface.

“I have given you free hand in household affairs. What else does an American wife want? Do you wish to be tyrannized? Is that it? Not every baby you sprout will die inside your womb, you know.”

“Oh!” It was an inadvertent squeak.

“Two babies you have lost, and now you worry that you might yet find a way kill a third. This is distracting twaddle. Children die. I hold you blameless for the deaths. Should our current child die, I would hold you blameless for that as well.”

“The way you talk! It's so . . . heartless.”

“You know me, Mother. My constitution requires me to speak the truth.”

“I don't want the truth! I want you to
care
. I want you to care for your
daughter
.”

Leather's final word on the matter was the cracking open of a leather-bound book.

The lady wept. Even after I returned to bed, her soft sobs troubled my dormant chest. Too many times I'd tracked careless mud into Wilma Sue's chamber, peed in her convenient sink, spat in the corner of the room because it was there. Boorish behavior that I now regretted! Mrs. Leather was a fine enough woman; it had been she who'd prohibited Dixon from ejecting me from her doorstep.

The longer I dwelled upon it, the firmer became my opinion that Dr. Leather had behaved with undue harshness. Our accord as father and son had thus far been a successful one, and it distressed me, as it might any child who overheard a parents' quarrel, that our family might be poisoned by discord. I determined to present myself to Mrs. Leather, and to the house staff as well. In all likelihood the pack of them believed me to be a half-man, half-myth locked away in a tower of fairy tale dimension.

Morning brought the doctor as reliably as it did the sun.

His bright eyes assessed the fists of resolution carried at my sides.

“A simple observation, Finch: your muscles are unsuited for pugilism.”

“I want to go downstairs. I want to be introduced as would a normal person. I see no reason for me to be jailed up here.”

“Is your experience of me that I make decisions without reason?”

“My experience of you doesn't go beyond this room!”

“Have you considered that you might best be studied in a pure environment?”

“In a pure environment? Like your sickly daughter?”

Leather tapped his teeth together thrice.

“I see we have us a snoop.”

Well, Reader, I was caught out. I pressed my fists into my thighs and within a smog of shame bore his disappointed inspection. But
the intractability of youth remained. I might have even stuck out my bottom lip.

Three more taps of his teeth were followed by a single, curt nod.

“You believe that you are ready? Then let it be so.”

My cold muscles relaxed, my fists unclenched.

Was he not the most generous and trusting father?

So crossed the antithetical paths of Zebulon Finch and Mary Leather. We met over dinner, the details of which are lost to me for how rabid I was to see a human face, any face, other than that of the doctor. The infant child, Gladys, referred to by Leather as “his progeny,” was the same indistinct potato as any baby, but Mrs. Leather herself I eagerly catalogued. She was not beautiful by any stretch, though in her ardent brown eyes, prominent cheekbones, and tightly bunned hair she was as handsome as a mother should be; handsomer, anyway, than Abigail Finch simply due to her absence of malice.

Mrs. Leather spoke only a smattering; how could she manage more past her husband's dynamic discourse? Leather had met his wife, said he, at the hospital. She had arrived there suffering abdominal swelling and heavy feminine bleeding. By chance, it was Leather who found her stumbling about the hallways begging for help, and later he requested a report from his colleagues, who recommended the full removal of her uterus. Leather, swaggering wunderkind, scoffed at the dramatic diagnosis, doused Mrs. Leather with chloroform, and went in himself.

What he discovered was an apple-sized tumor extending from the uterine wall into the pelvic cavity. It required no great logical leap for me to attribute Mrs. Leather's miscarriages to the resultant surgery. Ah, but the tumor, rhapsodized Leather, the tumor was
magnificent
; it resembled a human head, complete with nodules for ears, eyes, and nose.

It was a ghastly thing to bring up at dinner. Leather's enthusiasm made me wonder if he'd saved the tumor for his future wife to appreciate. Was it even now stored in one of the lab's specimen jars? The idea sickened me, even though I did not deserve that luxury. It was I, after all, who'd once cupped a handful of bloody teeth before the man from whom I'd knocked them and then gloated about it later to cronies.

Mrs. Leather, as bad luck would have it, was stuck with the both of us. Leather's leave from Harvard had achieved farcical length, and he was being forced to return several days per week to lecture alongside the “rust-gathered automatons.” Not being a proponent of relaxation time, he seized upon the fact that Mrs. Leather and I had been successfully introduced. (Laugh if you will; I did.) Soon enough, swore he, I would be the recipient of great gobs of attention and it would behoove me to be fluent in the necessary, if tiresome, formalities of the noble class. Mrs. Leather would teach me all I needed to know.

Leather was master of the household, and as his subjects neither of us had a say in the matter. On the morning of his first day back to work, he convened the three of us in the great hall, where he gave me a pedant's final audit and fluffed the ascot he'd provided to cover my gaping neck wound, for Mrs. Leather was not privy to the truth of my spectral condition. Satisfied, Leather took his leave, stranding his wife and me in the echoing space, wondering what in Gød's green Earth we were supposed to say to each other.

Mrs. Leather was the first to try.

“Ethel Barrymore is winning great praise in
A Doll's House
. I should like to see it, wouldn't you?”

“You wish to see a doll house?”

“It's a play.”

“Ah. You mean a stage play?”

“It's Ibsen.”

“Absinthe?”

“
Ibsen.
He's a playwright.”

“Ah.”

A crackling start! For a while we searched the corners of the room for clues regarding how to proceed. Mrs. Leather produced a cloth and ran it across Gladys's muculent nose and glutinous mouth. I shuddered and Mrs. Leather saw it. I regretted it. My opinion of babies hovered somewhere between disinterest and disgust, but that did not excuse my poor timing.

Her voice, louder now, tripled from the marble floor and timbered walls.

“I understand that you are to live with us indefinitely, Mr. Finch.”

I shrugged. “It would appear so, ma'am.”

“That must mean you are very important to the doctor. I do not know why; that is not a wife's business. I do know that previous guests have been kept to the dining and drawing rooms.
Strictly
kept. I have been given word that you are to enjoy free rein inside the house. That is quite a surprise. Forgive me; all I mean is that it is unusual. I shall do my best to make you comfortable, of course.”

“Good of you, ma'am.”

Her smile was tight and distrustful.

“Why don't I give you a proper tour, then?”

Eager to kill, cut up, and bury this monstrosity of a conversation, I nodded. It wound up a questionable decision, as the next several hours were given to an overlong survey of late eighteenth-century New England interiors. From room to sumptuous room we crawled,
maids with brooms scurrying before us like startled mice, as Mrs. Leather recited flavorless trivialities about aluminum light fixtures, armorial stained glass, and how exactly the library's previous medieval tapestry wallpaper was inferior to the Chinese-influenced cinnabar that ousted it.

She might have well recited her screed to a blank wall. Her cold suspicion angered me, and by and by I ached to break from decency and show this woman the true quality of Zebulon Finch. I'd smash that red-brass perfume mirror! Set fire to those French drapes! Such mischief would at least provide her the excuse to have the ever-lurking Mr. Dixon throw me to the street. I'd have liked to see the doddery old bugger try!

Thankfully for the decor, as well as my brittle bones, the doctor burst into the drawing room around two, catching his wife mid-monologue. She could barely execute a curtsy before Leather began pouncing about, ripping at his tie as if it were the noose binding him to Harvard.

“Everything you see here is camouflage, Finch, the baubles and enamels beneath which insecure humans huddle, both here in this ridiculous house and there at that ridiculous college. Do fish pack themselves inside such beautiful crystals? Yes, they do—when they are dead!”

“Welcome home, Doctor.”

Mrs. Leather was not as relieved to see her husband as I would have guessed.

“The world is not so symmetrical as all of this, is it? Life's natural state is the jungle, the twist of roots, the tangle of the nerve system. Gødliness is where? In chaos, in chaos! Not in the gilded homes of the well-heeled or the spired churches of the devout.” He gave his
wife a condescending smile. “Listen to Mrs. Leather, Finch, but do not take her to heart. I wouldn't want you corrupted.”

In seconds the doctor had dismissed his wife's entire day of work. Her placid mask went untroubled; she knew, as I myself was coming to know, that Leather was as unmindful of his cruelty as a spoiled child is his privilege.

“Shall we luncheon?” asked she. “I know you do not favor hospital meals.”

“Gruel steeped by sloppy sots with unwashed paws! Never do I touch a morsel.”

Mrs. Leather's knowledge of the doctor's palate was encyclopedic and her instructions to the cook intensive. She was an impressive hostess at lunch, more impressive still at dinner. And so on: breakfast, lunch, dinner, week after week, month after month. What I remember most from that grinding stretch is not the doctor's careening about the attic of the world nor his filling of the Revelation Almanac, but rather the wife's unflappable fortitude in the face of ongoing banality. Isn't that curious?

Mrs. Leather took care never to seem thankful for my company, and I, perhaps seeking a parent's approval, began to give her lessons my full attention. Manners were a lost cause. Which fork went where? Not that I could eat. When to bow, or shake, or kiss? Not that I ever would. My innate shortcomings exhausted the both of us and her lessons took on a bent more personal and, therefore, far more enjoyable.

She shared with me the most important sections of
The Ladies' Home Journal
,
to date my favorite publication. She commandeered the kitchen and taught me the workings of the eighteen-dollar refrigerator, a two-hundred-pound brass-hinged leviathan constructed of
northern elm. As a blithesome aside, she mixed a bowl of Jell-O, a bizarre orange gelatin with a jiggle that reminded me, deliciously, of décolletage.

After a time, we had exhausted what the rooms of the house had to offer and she dared take me outdoors. Oh—that lemon light! The nattering of birds! Those winged maple seeds in their eternal spirals! Like a puppy I chased after her. Outside she pointed out to me the building's notable details, the curved transoms and stepped parapets, and introduced me to the doctor's Pierce-Racine touring car, eight hundred dollars worth of machinery that no one had any clue how to operate. And so forth, until I got to know quite a bit about her without ever learning much at all.

It was in April of 1906 when Mrs. Leather showed me her collection of bicycles and velocipedes corroding in a shed alongside the dog kennel. These were unintuitive contraptions featuring one to six wheels in all manners of combination. She gestured and named a few—“Manuped,” “Rover,” “Leipzig”—before her arm sagged in dispirit.