Fin & Lady: A Novel (8 page)

It did not occur to Fin for years, many years, that she had known how to ride a bicycle all along. “But she did,” he told me. “Of course she did! I see that now.”

They rode their bikes around the Village that afternoon, but they never took them out of the storeroom behind the kitchen after that. It wasn’t much fun to ride a bike in New York after the initial excitement of teaching Lady how to do it. There were too many cars. Too many people. Too many potholes. Too many stop signs and traffic lights. Too many buses. Fin put his shiny green English three-speed bicycle into the storeroom and spent the rest of the day unpacking while Lady was off doing errands. He read an old comic. He studiously picked at a scab on his elbow for a few minutes. When it began to bleed, he panicked and pressed a piece of toilet paper against it, praying it would not leave a stain on his clothes. He did not want to hear Mabel’s opinion of boys who picked at scabs on their elbows.

When he got hungry, he went outside, through the new heavy door, down the front steps, and in through the kitchen entrance.

“Boys,” Mabel said accusingly, then handed him a tuna-fish sandwich and a glass of milk.

“You should be playing baseball with your friends. Correct?” Lady asked him when she got back.

“I don’t know anyone here,” he said. “I don’t have any friends.”

“Then I’ll just have to do for the time being.” And she taught him how to blow smoke rings.

She was going out that evening. “Do you want to come? It’s a nightclub. The man I’m going with is a bit of a bore. Are you interested in synthetic fabric? He’s very interested in synthetic fabric.”

“Are kids allowed in nightclubs?”

“I don’t see why not.”

“You don’t?”

“In Europe they let dogs into restaurants.”

“You could take Gus.”

Lady laughed. The big laugh. Fin was happy to get the big laugh. The big laugh made everything seem adventurous and full of joy through the drawn-out summer day. He complacently worked on a model airplane that afternoon. A World War II Flying Tiger. While it dried, he stared curiously out the window at the neighbors’ backyards. He could see a lady washing dishes at her kitchen sink. A little black-and-white dog ran out into a yard, barked at the sky, and ran back inside. He could hear someone playing scales on a saxophone. Someone had put bras on a line to dry. Greenwich Village was everything he had hoped it would be.

“Just like the Bible”

A week or two after they’d moved downtown, Lady came sweeping into Fin’s room. She was wearing a short dress with tiny straps she called spaghetti straps. Fin thought for years that she had made that up to amuse him: spaghetti straps. She was going out to dinner and a movie with some friends. She sat on the floor in her dress. She was made up, but had no shoes on. She said, “Finny, I’ve got it!”

Fin had been arranging toy soldiers on his pillow.

“Oh, Finny, none of that,” Lady said, eyeing the soldiers. “We’re pacifists, babe. Didn’t I mention that? Well, now you know. Now listen, I’ve thought it over carefully, and I have the answer to what we can do with you while you’re here.”

“
While
I’m here?” He was going someplace else? So soon? When did he have to leave? Was Lady coming, too? “Where am I going?”

“You’re not going anywhere, for the love of Mike. But we have to have something for you to do,
n’est pas
?”

“
N’est pas!
” Fin agreed, relieved.

She was shimmering in the late-evening sun, her shoulders so thin, bony compared with his mother’s. Except when she was sick. But Lady wasn’t sick. She was healthy and alive, she smelled like wild roses, intoxicating. She had painted her toenails a bright white. He thought she was magnificent.

Then she said, “You will help me get married!”

Fin sat silent and shocked.

A husband? What had happened to Fin and Lady, the orphan family? Would the husband be an orphan, too? But the husband would obviously be Tyler Morrison, and Fin would have to help Lady marry him. How could Lady have changed her mind so fast? It was Fin’s fault, that’s how. Fin hanging around Greenwich Village, where everyone was groovy and free except him, an eleven-year-old with nothing to do. It was Fin. He was holding Lady back in her quest for a big life.

“You don’t have to marry Uncle Ty,” he cried out. “I’ll be good. I’ll play by myself. I’ll help Mabel. I’ll make friends, too…”

“Uncle Ty? Good God, no. We’re downtown now, Fin.”

A new husband he had not even met? What if the new husband did not want an eleven-year-old brother-in-law?

“Who?” he asked. “When? When are you getting married?”

“Well, let’s see … I’m twenty-four. The deadline is twenty-five. After that you really do become pathetic. So we have a year. A little less than a year.”

Fin tried not to let his relief show.

“Just like the Bible,” Lady said. “Except that was seven years. And I won’t have to share my husband with my sister.”

“Because you don’t have a sister.”

“Well, that’s one reason. So, what do you think, Fin? Can you help me find someone to fall in love with in a year?”

“Don’t worry. Everyone falls in love with you, Lady.”

“That’s not what I said.”

Fin thought about that for a moment.

“Twenty-five,” Lady was saying. “Then it’s all over. How’s your Shakespeare, Fin?”

“I watched the Beatles in
A Midsummer Night’s Dream
on television.”

“How about
Taming of the Shrew
?”

“Uh-uh,” Fin said, but Lady was already reciting, standing, one hand on her heart, her other arm flung out.

“I will be master of what is mine own:

She is my goods, my chattels; she is my house,

My household stuff, my field, my barn,

My horse, my ox, my ass, my any thing.”

She poked Fin’s chest. “I don’t want a master. And I don’t want to be an ass.”

“Me, either.” But Fin was thinking more of the barn and the ox, which was almost a cow.

“And that’s where you come in, Finino.”

Fin thought, Me? I can’t marry Lady; then, for one fleeting second: Can I?

“You really have to help me. One year to find one, a good one, one I’m in love with. Is that too much to ask?”

“No!”

They shook hands.

“One year, Fin. One year, twelve months, three hundred and sixty-five days. Or thereabouts.

“No lemons,” she added. “There are a lot of lemons out there,” and she left the room trailing smoke and scent and confusion.

Fin was able to begin his search for Lady’s future husband the next day. He wasn’t sure how Lady had managed to make so many friends so quickly, but almost every night there was a party at her house, some planned, some spontaneous. People dropped in, Fin noticed, as if they were in Connecticut bringing round a pie, but these people came late, after midnight sometimes, and brought not pie but a bottle of bourbon or wine. Fin sat at the top of the stairs in his pajamas and watched the young men and women drinking and laughing. And talking. He had never seen people talk so much.

Sometimes he came downstairs, ostensibly to get a glass of milk from the kitchen, but really to see them talk as well as to hear them.
Stagnating in the swampland of collectivism
.
Extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice, moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue
. Then they said something about being a crazy cat. At first Fin thought they were talking about Krazy Kat and asked if they knew if Krazy Kat was a girl or a boy. The cartoons had always unnerved him. But they said, No, they wished Goldwater was a cartoon, he should be a cartoon, he was all too real.

He watched them dance, waving their arms and jiggling crazily. He watched them argue. Young men, standing so close they nearly touched, would shout at each other, forefingers poking the other’s chest. There were factions, so many factions, musical factions, political factions.

“What’s a Trotskyite?” he would ask the next morning. “Who’s A. J. Muste? Why shouldn’t honkies play trumpet? What’s a honky? Where’s Port Huron? What pill?”

Gus roamed among the partygoers, his nose occasionally sniffing crotches regardless of faction, his tail knocking over cocktail glasses, his loud, shrill bark punctuating the music.

The New York City Fin encountered with Lady was utterly different from his earlier years of safe and comfortable routine. Lady did not believe in routine, or safety, or, frequently, in comfort, either. Lady’s downtown world was one of urgent, restless urbanity. Everything about his new home was full of color and noise and movement. To Fin it was as good as a circus.

Spumoni

What you don’t know about Lady, because I haven’t told you, is that she was a great reader, and reading was something she was determined to share with Fin. It was she, as I’ve mentioned, who gave Fin the Tintin album on the ship and translated it aloud as they gazed at the bright, clear drawings. It was she who sent him a copy of
Just So Stories
on his sixth birthday, which his mother read to him. It was she who gave him
The Phantom Tollbooth
,
Huckleberry Finn
, and
Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland
. Later, when she saw that his interest in toy soldiers was abiding, she presented him with a copy of H. G. Wells’s
Little Wars
(the man was a pacifist, after all), and a copy of
Tristram Shandy
, so he could read of Uncle Toby’s bulwarks. He never read past Uncle Toby, but he never forgot him, either.

On the day Fin met Biffi Deutsch, he was reading
The Spy Who Loved Me
, which was not at all like
Chitty Chitty Bang Bang
and sometimes confusing, but he could not be seen on the steps reading a book written for a child. Biffi was a Hungarian Jew who as a small child had survived the war in Budapest, survived the invading Germans and then survived the invading Soviets. Fin knew nothing of this when he met Biffi, only learning of it much later, from an obituary of Biffi’s mother. Odd, to know so little of a man who had meant so much to you, Fin told me once.

After the war, Biffi and his mother came to the United States to join Biffi’s father, an art dealer who had been safely stranded in New York since 1939. On a picnic with his wife and son, Mr. Deutsch was struck by lightning. And killed. How could you not mention that your father was struck by lightning? But Biffi never did. He walked with a buoyant, unhurried step, as if the evils of the world had never chased him from country to country and never could. He often said the world was cruel, but he never seemed to mean it. After all, he had been named after a café in Milan that made exceptional cake, the Caffè Biffi, or so he said. It was not easy to know when he was joking. He was handsome, funny, and fierce, a diabolical black goatee surrounding a wide, beautiful mouth, angelic brown eyes shimmering above. His accent was musical, his name a confection. He might as easily have hailed from Freedonia as from Hungary. Fin was crazy about him.

“You’re crazy about him,” Lady once said.

“Yeah, but you’re just crazy.” Fin could say that to Lady. He could say almost anything to Lady. That was because most of the time she wasn’t really listening. Most adults never listened to children, and she didn’t listen most of the time, either. But then, when you least expected it, there she was, intent, curious, open, her eyes locked on yours, her whole being locked on yours.

No wonder Biffi Deutsch fell in love with her.

“Good lad,” Biffi said when he introduced himself that first day. Lad? No one had ever addressed Fin as “lad.” “Good lad.” When he shook hands, he left a dollar bill resting on Fin’s palm.

Fin tried to hand it back.

“No, no, it’s for you.”

Like a tip. Who ever heard of tipping a kid? Maybe in this man’s country they tipped kids. Or at least lads.

Fin led him into the living room, where Lady lay on the couch, her head covered by a pillow. Fin made his way closer, close enough to lift a corner of the pillow and whisper, “Someone’s here. A man. From not the United States.”

Lady emerged, ravishing, her skin as clear as porcelain, her eyes bright. “
Ciao
, Biffi! I wasn’t expecting you!”

“Not? You have invited me, you see.”

He settled down on one of the low curvy chairs and crossed his legs. As he did so, his pant leg rode up, exposing bright purple socks, a dazzlingly pale leg, and a dark garter.

Fin made them martinis.

“Who taught you this sophisticated skill?” asked Biffi.

“Lady did.”

“Did she?” said Biffi. “Did you?” he said to Lady, raising an eyebrow.

“He doesn’t drink them,” Lady said. “Do you, Fin?”

“No. They’re disgusting.”

Biffi laughed. “Well then.”

When Biffi and Lady got up to go to dinner, Biffi said, “Come on, you, too,” and Fin said, “Really?” and Lady said, “
Perché no?
” and Mabel said, “Wash your hands.”

They went to a small Italian restaurant with red-and-white-checked tablecloths and candles stuck in wine bottles that were wrapped with woven straw. There was sawdust on the floor, and Fin felt as if he were in a horse stall. He had spaghetti and meatballs. “Where are you from? Is Hungary near Italy? I’ve been to Italy. And Paris. Have you been to the World’s Fair? Do they have a Hungarian pavilion at the World’s Fair?”

“He’s usually as quiet as a mouse,” Lady said.

“I am?”

“Are you?” Biffi asked.

Fin thought for a moment. He heard his father’s voice:
Cat got your tongue again?
“Maybe.”

“I was a quiet boy,” said Biffi.

“Quiet children hear things,” said Lady.

“All children hear things,” Biffi said.

Fin watched as a beautiful striped slab of ice cream was placed before him.

“Spumoni!” he said. Just the word was festive.

“A traditional Hungarian dessert,” said Biffi.

“Ha ha,” said Fin.

“Oh yes!” said Biffi. “It is true. And Spumoni is my middle name.”

“Biffi Spumoni Deutsch,” said Lady. “It just rolls off the tongue.”