Fin & Lady: A Novel (13 page)

“Segregation is wrong,” Fin said to Mrs. Holbright, a little too loudly.

“Yes, yes, I suppose it is. So shall I give Lady and her Negro friends a donation?”

“Of course you should,” Fin said.

“Or shall I march?” the old lady was saying, not having waited for the answer.

March? Fin looked at the old lady. They would have to carry her on a litter.

“Although I should not like to go to jail, I’m sure,” she added.

Carry her to jail on a litter.

“Anyone can march,” he said. “Not everyone can give money.”

“Clever, clever. A little diplomat. You’ve got Hugo’s tongue in you. Charming man, your father. Charmed everyone. Except his own daughter, of course.”

“Don’t gossip,” Cee Cee said.

“Oh pooh. I’m old and I can behave as badly as I want to. Isn’t that right, Fin?”

Before Fin could answer, Cee Cee reached across and pinched the loose flesh of the old lady’s arm. “Mother!”

Mrs. Holbright was Cee Cee’s mother? Fin looked at them both curiously. He tried to imagine pinching his mother. Would his mother ever have gotten as white and slack as Mrs. Holbright, if she had lived? His young, tender mother?

“My mother’s dead,” he said to Cee Cee.

She pulled her arm back, as if Fin had been about to sink his teeth into it.

“Oh dear,” she said. “Let’s concentrate on the Negroes, shall we?”

Jack Jordan had not been invited. He was currently out of the picture, which at first had been a relief to Fin, except that Uncle Tyler now seemed to be back in the picture in a prominent way. He sat at what he considered the head of the table, which Fin, as of that moment, considered the foot. Pierre, who decorated all the rich people’s houses and apartments, was there, too. Fin didn’t know anyone else. He wished Biffi were there. He often wished Biffi were there.

“In Europe, the Negro is far better off,” said Pierre.

“That’s because they don’t have any,” said Uncle Ty.

“What is that supposed to mean?” Lady said.

Fin leaned on his elbows and happily listened to Uncle Ty and Lady disagree about civil rights. All the guests became louder as more wine was served. Even Mrs. Holbright seemed tipsy.

“Young man!” she shrieked at Fin. “A shoulder to lean on!”

He helped her to the bathroom. She had a gigantic pocketbook swinging from her arm.

“Keep an eye on your sister,” Mrs. Holbright said as he helped her back to the table. “I’m very fond of her.”

“Me, too.”

“You do look like your father, you know. Handsome man when he was young. And don’t mind Lady about him. She was fond of him.”

“Ha ha.”

Mrs. Holbright stopped to get her breath. “Divorce, temperament—they took a toll, I’m not saying they didn’t, but remember, Lady is one of those people who likes a good enemy, needs one. The drama, I suppose.” And they resumed their slow waddle, Mrs. Holbright’s hand heavy on his shoulder. “Yes, she really does like to bat them around a bit.” Mrs. Holbright gestured toward a smiling Lady and an exhausted, defeated Tyler Morrison. “I had a cat like Lady,” Mrs. Holbright continued. “Cee Cee! Cee Cee!” She reached across and poked her daughter.

“Mother! For goodness sake…”

“What was the name of that cat? The one who played with the mice? While they were alive?”

Cee Cee grimaced. “Latimer,” she said.

“Yes! Latimer.” Mrs. Holbright sighed. “We had to put him down.”

“Never tell a child what he can learn for himself”

Lady seemed to move from one suitor to another without warning, without rhyme, without reason. This time, though, Fin knew he had civil rights to thank. Finally, as August drew to a close, Tyler was out and, after a week or so of frenzied parties, Biffi was back. Fin followed him wherever he went in the house. Gus followed Fin.

“A parade,” said Lady.

Lady was a force of nature, Biffi said. A hurricane, a tornado, a sunrise, a shower of gentle rain. “Never be angry at the weather,” he told Fin. “There is no gain in it.”

Fin was not angry. He was relieved, relieved to have Biffi back, relieved not to be in boarding school, but mostly relieved to have discovered, even in the short time he’d been living with Lady, if not rhyme or reason, then at least a rhythm, a pattern, some order to things. The path Fin had been on since the death of his mother had seemed such a vague one, fading off into the mist, unmarked and going nowhere. But now he began to see his days as parts of weeks, his weeks as parts of months, all of them marked by short, specific seasons. There was cold, gray Tyler season and bland, humid Jack season, and there was Biffi season, bright cloudless skies that darkened dramatically into violent storms, then lifted to reveal the sudden blue sky again. It was Biffi season now.

“Tell the boy about his education,” Biffi said one day.

“Good grief, what’s your hurry?” she said.

“Where am I going to school? When?”

“Who said you were going to school at all?”

“I want to go to Phoebe’s school.”

“Okay, okay.” Lady solemnly put her hands on Fin’s shoulders. “You start school next week. And, yes, Phoebe’s school. I didn’t want to tell you until I had to. The prison-house walls and all that.”

Fin gave her a hug.

“Thanks, Lady.”

“It’s against my principles.”

“I know.”

“It is the American law, I believe,” said Biffi.

“Unless you get kicked out. Like Holden Caulfield,” Fin said.

“It’s not prep school, Fin!” Lady said. “For criminy Dutch sake.”

“I know. You would never do that.” Not now. Not with Biffi here.

“They sent me to boarding school because they didn’t like me around the house. But I like you around, Fin.”

“Did you go to boarding school?” he asked Biffi.

Biffi shook his head. No, no boarding school.

He took Fin for a celebratory hamburger.

“I’m glad Lady let me know I’m going to school before school actually started.” Then Fin told Biffi everything he could about the uncles. “She doesn’t even like Uncle Ty at all,” he said. “But there’s this hold he has over her.”

“History,” Biffi said.

“I guess. And Uncle Jack, forget it, she doesn’t like him, either. Not really.”

“But here is a question, my friend: Does she like Biffi?”

Fin wanted to say yes. He wanted to say, Of course she does, she’s in love with you. Instead, he ate his French fries, four at a time, covered in ketchup, until he could stuff no more in, a way to say nothing at all.

“And,” Biffi continued, “really, does she like anybody? Really like them? Sometimes I don’t know.” He handed Fin an extra paper napkin. “But we know she loves you.”

“Ty said I was the son she would never have to have,” Fin said through the French fries. But Biffi must not have heard, because all he said back was “You eat like a peasant.”

*   *   *

The first day of school, Fin arrived half an hour early and nervously entered what was supposed to be his classroom. There were no desks. There were no chairs. Just a man who seemed to be kneading dough on a long table by the windows. Fin said, “Sorry,” and turned to leave.

“Are you Fin Hadley?” the young man asked him. “Your mother said you’d be here early.”

“My mother is dead.”

Fin watched with delight as the young man flushed and cleared his throat. “I’m so sorry. I thought…”

“You mean my sister, I guess.”

“Oh. I see. Yes, she did seem rather young. Well! Here we are!”

“Is this Mr. Shelby’s classroom? Sixth grade?” Fin asked. But it couldn’t be. What kind of classroom had no desks?

Mr. Shelby explained that he was Mr. Shelby, but he was not, for all intents and purposes, Mr. Shelby at all: no one was called Mr. or Mrs. or Miss at the New Flower School.

“We’re all one here,” Mr. Shelby explained. “No distinctions.”

“Okay.”

He said his name was Rufus, but he liked to be called Red. Then he laughed. “For all sorts of reasons; the only one you need to know is that Rufus means red in Latin.”

“Do we study Latin?” Fin asked, excited. He was reading a book about the Battle of Actium.

“This is a progressive school,” the teacher said, obviously taken aback.

Mr. Rufus Red Shelby. What a jerk.

When the other kids arrived, ten in all, they sat on the floor in a circle. There were six girls and four boys. Even sitting, the girls towered over the boys.

Red’s pedagogical method became clear that first morning. When a little girl raised her hand, he ignored her. When she began violently swinging it in front of his face, he tilted his head away and did not otherwise respond.

“Red! Red!” she cried out at last.

“Finally!” he said. “You have learned your first lesson. We do not submit to establishment imperatives like ‘raising hands.’ If you want to ask a question, just ask your question! You have as much right to speak as I do.”

By now the little girl was squirming pretty desperately.

“Can I please have permission to go to the girls’ room?” she said.

Red considered this for a moment, then said, “Permission? This is not a matter of permission, Betsy. I like to put most of our endeavors to a vote.” He eyed the wriggling child. “But under the circumstances, yes, you can.”

Looking relieved, the girl asked, “Where is the girls’ room, Red?”

“Ah,” said the teacher brightly. “Never tell a child what he can learn for himself.”

New Flower was so different from Fin’s old school that he hardly thought of it as school at all. They began each day with Community Meeting, usually a song by Woody Guthrie or Pete Seeger, once with Pete Seeger actually there to lead them. Sometimes, when they went back to class, Red would ask them to be a tree, which took about fifteen minutes. They would stand or sway, whatever their tree was feeling like that morning. In Science, they raised fruit flies and made posters of different generations of fruit flies, coloring in their fruit-fly eyes with red or yellow, depending. They built a longhouse for Social Studies and ate beef jerky in it, then made posters of it. Some of the kids were bored with the longhouse because they had made a longhouse the year before, but Red said that wasn’t a longhouse at all, that was a wigwam. In Language Arts, they read and discussed the liner notes of Bob Dylan albums and made more posters. For Math, they had a different teacher, an older woman with lint on her sweater, who gave them colored blocks to arrange. No posters.

“Fin attends the New Flower Poster-Making Academy,” Lady said to Joan. “I like his ‘Vote for Goldwater, Vote for Death’ best myself.”

When the day was nice, the students would all troop out to Washington Square to Observe. There might be a toddler on a tricycle looking up at a mounted policeman on a huge horse, the horse towering above, its hooves clacking on the cobblestones, the reins pulled tight as the giant animal pranced and snorted. The uniformed officer might wear polished boots. A dark blue station wagon might cruise past. A fat girl on roller skates might clump behind …

Sometimes they painted their Impressions of their Observations. Sometimes they discussed them in the Sharing Circle.

“I wish I had roller skates,” a girl would say.

“Do you really?” Red would ask. “I mean,
really
?”

“Well, yeah, kind of. Yeah, I do.”

“But is it you wishing or is it the message you’re getting? To want roller skates? To want
things
?”

“Oh, like a message from a ghost? Or from God or something?”

“No,” Red would say wearily. “Not from a ghost. Not from God.”

Fin learned very quickly that the correct answer to most questions of this nature was “Advertising” or, even better, “Society.”

“Right. Exactly. Society. You don’t really
need
roller skates, do you, Missy?”

“Well, to skate I do.”

“Someone implants the idea of need, and that someone is…”

“Society,” Fin would say again.

“What did you do at your hotty-totty school today?” Lady asked when he got home.

“The fruit flies got out, so we don’t know what color this generation’s eyes are.”

“No wonder the school costs a fortune.” Lady handed him a package. “Here.” It was a book.
Kim
, by Rudyard Kipling. “Don’t let your teacher see it.”

“Is it dirty?”

“Nope. Imperialist.”

The Mets went 53 and 109 in 1964, finishing tenth in the National League. The Cardinals beat the Yankees in the World Series, a series in which Mickey Mantle hit three home runs. But even with the World Series as a reminder, autumn snuck up on Fin. Without the flocks of goldfinches, the flutter of dull-colored warblers in their fall plumage, the moon shining big and orange in his window, the humps of baled hay in the fields, the smell of the leaves sinking deeper and deeper into the wet earth, without the fading of the cicadas’ song, he was unprepared. One day he smelled wood smoke and realized autumn was all around him. He looked up to see geese flying south in formation over the Hudson River. The wind blew flurries of small gold leaves down the street.

“We’re segregated,” Phoebe said that afternoon as they turned onto Charles Street. “By grade.” She was in seventh grade, one higher than Fin. They never spoke at school. You couldn’t. You really couldn’t.

“Grade ghettos,” Fin said to Lady when he got home.

“Oh please, what puerile bunkum. Go talk to Mabel about that one, Finny.”

“What does puerile mean?”

“Boyish.”

“Is that bad? That’s not bad.”

“Okay. Childish. It means childish. Don’t they teach Latin in that school?”

“No. Latin isn’t relevant. Did you know that Cole Porter wrote a whole song in the subjunctive? He died last week.”

“Do you even know what the subjunctive is? Do you even know who Cole Porter is?”

“I read his obituary. And I
am
a child. So childish isn’t bad, either. Is bunkum Latin?”

“I’ve never heard of a private school without Latin. Do you want me to take you out? Put you in a real school?”

“No! I just made two friends.”

“In your ghetto?” Lady said, grabbing him by the neck and kissing his head.

“But they
are
grade ghettos,” Phoebe said the next afternoon. “They separate us. Based on our grade.”