The Death and Life of Zebulon Finch, Volume 1 (17 page)

“I mentioned at our wedding that I should one day like to ride a bicycle. The doctor, wishing to please me but short, as always, on time, bought every one on the market. Then there were too many to choose from. I never rode a one.” She shrugged; her unperturbed mask did not alter. “That is the doctor's way. He pours a gallon when but a drop would do.”

I reached out and wiped dust from a particularly lethal-looking machine, a metal gargoyle with dual five-foot wheels and two wooden seats connected by a curved pole to a tiny third wheel at the rear.

“That is the Renn Tandem Tricycle. It was nicknamed ‘Invincible.'”

“I'm sure it was ironic,” said I. “Obviously, it is a sort of torture device.”

“Oh, no. It is quite safe.”

“Is that right? Put your feet onto these pedals, near those mean-looking gears. Then I'll collect your severed legs and we'll see if the doctor can sew them back on.”

Mrs. Leather turned to me, lips so tight that I thought she was about to let me have it. But the buds of her cheeks plumped and her lips opened into the pink shock of a smile, and a laugh tumbled out of her, all topsy-turvy. She tried to capture it with a silk-gloved hand but it was out of reach. It was funny to see and so I laughed, too, a papery, breathless noise that surprised me into laughing some more, which in turn incited her to laugh even harder.

Before it was over, there were tears in her eyes and a warmth at my core that I knew couldn't be real, for I was a creature to whom warmth was disallowed. Mrs. Leather panted for air, her face to the floor for decency's sake, and escaped locks of her bunned hair tapped at her flushed cheeks. In that moment, I could see the young woman she'd been, one who'd linked herself with the brightest of hopes to a clever English physician.

“Let us ride,” said I. “There are seats for two.”

“No.” She put a hand to her chest. “The doctor forbade you from leaving the grounds.”

I make no claim to being an oracle of female longing—my life story, in fact, can be read as a testament to the contrary—but the truth of how she felt was there to be read on her face. And who could blame her? Each morning I craned my neck out my chamber window to see Boston but the view was obstructed; I could see an elaborate cornice and rooster-topped weather vane, nothing more. Mrs. Leather, too, had an unsatisfying view; never did she leave the house, always saddled was she with Gladys and, yes, me. Weren't
we both trapped inside the castle's firmaments?

“We can ride and we shall.” I took command of the thing's handlebars and gave it a push. Flakes of rust scattered down into the vacated tire ruts. “‘Invincible,' you say?
We
shall be the invincible ones and it is this absurd contraption that will be subject to
our
tortures. Come, be my co-pilot.”

To this moment, as I scribble these words from down here in my author's tomb, I find myself incredulous that she accepted. What fettle it took to collect her skirts and position her matronly form upon the front seat, what dash she showed as we jounced from the garage and rumbled down the gravel walkway, what courage it took to let me steer our comical three-wheeler onto Jefferson Street and out into the golden open.

Boston! We had found her! Perched high upon our seats, we analyzed and conquered the bustling, laneless streets. Laggard horses and herky-jerky cars threaded between unyielding trolleys, as did an undulating mass of pedestrians, shoppers, newsboys, and bootblacks, every male figure duly hatted, for such were the demands of modern fashion. Mrs. Leather shouted the highlights over her shoulder. Over here, the Crown Jewel of the Back Bay, the awesome steel-framed juggernaut of the Berkeley Building! Over there, the Castle Square Hotel, advertising two-dollar-a-day doubles with a telephone in each and every room!

Fellows my own age threw horseshoes, wore college sweaters, or zipped by on modern two-wheelers. I waved, as if I were no different from they. Indeed, this fool's ride had taken on a time-traveler's importance. I was a normal boy; this woman, not Abigail, was the mother I deserved; and we were doing that thing I had heard tell of long ago:
having fun.
We swerved and wobbled; smashups were
staved off by shavings of luck. Mrs. Leather whooped at every near-disaster and I hollered just to holler. At length her hair came loose and whisked my face. I did not mind such blond whips of sunlight.

We both knew it when we had gone too far. Gruff, sweaty Bostonians gave us a parson's scrutiny from beneath derbies and stuffed-bird-decorated hats. Their surveillance was a danger to both of us. I turned around the tricycle and Mrs. Leather lodged no protest. What's that, Reader? You expected a ride into the sunset? It is pleasant to consider such romantic notions. But Jefferson Street, with its science and semblance of family, awaited. Which of those two factors was of greater importance I was beginning to wonder.

VI.

W
E STOWED THE INVINCIBLE WHILE
the hounds voiced their botheration. Mrs. Leather was brown with road dirt yet ablush with invigoration. While she did her best to pound grit from her dress, I monitored the house. At least one face watched from every window that I could see, eyes as blinkless as those of crows. One by one, the faces disappeared. It left me with a foreboding feeling.

“I should prepare for the doctor's return,” said I. “You will excuse me, Mrs. Leather.”

“Mary.” Her hair was uncivilized, the set of her lips firm. “Please call me Mary.”

I was speechless, but more than that I was concerned. Such proffered forwardness required reciprocation, but what had I to offer aside from the story of my unsavory origins both as criminal and as corpse? I faltered; I hawed; I took a backward step toward the house.

Even this coward's retreat came too late. Marching across the back lawn was Dixon, dressed, as always, to the nines and frowning, as always, with disapproval. Trailing him by thirty feet was a bombinating hive of secondary servants, seven or eight in total, close enough to overhear but far enough to escape collateral damage.

Dixon executed the slightest of cursory bows.

“Mrs. Leather, if I may, I request an audience.”

“What is this about, Mr. Dixon?”

One could not help but be moved by the courageous set of her shoulders, the ostentatious manner in which she gathered her loose cords of hair.

Dixon hit me with a disdainful look.

“It would better be discussed in private.”

“Would it? And what's more private than this fenced and hedged plot?”

Dixon tugged his vest and drew himself upward.

“The staff is bothered, quite bothered, and they have prevailed upon me to speak to you regarding—well, if I must say it, I must say it. The squiring about of you by this . . . lodger.”

“You refer to Mr. Finch? Our
guest
?”

“I remind you that I speak on the staff's behalf. Master Finch flusters the ladies under my direction. To be frank, the men as well. They exist in such disconcertment that carrying out their duties has become a challenge. Now the boy is spiriting you into the city? It is a shock too many.”

“Have any one of them been asked to wait upon Mr. Finch? To serve him food or prepare his room?”

“That is precisely the problem, Mrs. Leather. They have
not
been asked. Perhaps you are unaware of how this undermines the well-being of a servant. Furthermore, they complain of a, let us say,
unnatural feeling
upon encountering the young master.”

The favorable smile I had affected dried from my lips. Kowtowing domestics this crowd might be, but they could sniff out my aberration as sure as mosquitoes. In downtown Boston I'd enjoyed a fleeting dream of guileless boyhood, but the dreamer had awakened.

“More than one of the young ladies have come to me afflicted
with anxieties about their virtues as well as their souls. Their fears include divine retribution coming down upon this house, a house for which they feel, if I may say so, great affection.”

Mrs. Leather's cheeks had grown cherry red.

“I stand here aghast, Mr. Dixon. You do realize that Dr. Leather holds Mr. Finch in the highest of esteem? He would endure none of this, not a word. And neither shall I. You have in remarkably few words offended me, the doctor, and our guest. Mr. Dixon, I thank you for your years of service and I wish you and the rest of the staff the best in your future endeavors.”

The sole sound accompanying this astonishing declaration was the la-ti-dah melodies of house wrens, orioles, and sparrows. Dixon's fabled eyebrows lifted high into his forehead and his jaw, typically locked, lowered to approximately chest level. Nearer to the house, the servants went into a panic and asked one another if they, too, had heard the same unbelievable words coming from Mrs. Leather.

Dixon tried to reassemble his wits. “I . . . I shall need to speak to Dr. Leather, of course, before delivering such news to the others. He is lord of the house and he must know of this before—”

“Of course.” Mrs. Leather appeared unimpressed by the implicit threat. “I will have the doctor send for you when he is comfortable. Afterward, you may inform the staff that I will be pleased to offer them written recommendations. That will be all for now.”

Her sugared smile was a cobra's poison.

For the record, I have long been a fan of poisonous women.

It was the sort of performance that made one drunk with admiration. We conversed no further but I nigh floated through the next few hours, as proud as the lad whose mother had scolded the class bully into tears. The mood, of course, did not hold once Dr. Leather
arrived. I heard him issue sharp words, though official matters were postponed until morning, when Mrs. Leather, the sniffling Gladys on her lap, and I took seats in the parlor while the doctor met with Dixon behind closed doors. We could hear but murmurs. Again, neither of us spoke; what of consequence could be said that wasn't already felt?

We were on our third listen of Gesualdo's “
Moro, losso, al mio duolo
” (Mrs. Leather seemed to care for it no more than I, but it passed the time) when we heard the opening of the drawing room door. What followed was the proud plodding of Dixon going about his way. Mrs. Leather clawed at her sleeve cuff, which she'd nearabout unstitched over the past half hour.

Leather came into the room without a word, fell into a chair adjacent to the low-burning fire, and massaged his forehead.

“Have either of you heard that an earthquake of enormous magnitude destroyed much of San Francisco this morning? No, I suppose not. You were off operating a tricycle.”

Until that moment, I knew not the trampling shame of disappointing one's father.

“The city, they say, has been torn asunder as if by a pride of giant lions. Harvard speaks of nothing else. Bored surgeons filled with patriotic poppycock were fighting to catch a train west to help sop up the blood and, perhaps, feel better about their misspent careers.”

“That is dreadful,” managed Mrs. Leather. “Are there many dead?”

“A few thousand, give or take. What does it matter when we have a few hurt feelings to dress right here at home?”

Mrs. Leather looked down at Gladys's head. Seeing this firecracker of a woman so easily defused left me feeling bereft.

“I have reinstated Dixon,” continued Leather. “He is now the most handsomely compensated butler in the Northern states.”

“Retain them all,” blurted I. “Mrs. Leather let them go on my behalf. I will live elsewhere. In the shed out back. Or off the property entirely.”

Leather's eyebrows rose.

“A white knight. Here in our own home. How novel.” He gestured lazily at his wife. “No, you shall have your way, Mother. What difference is it to me? Fewer prying eyes and thieving hands, I say. The staff, save Dixon, will be gone before lunch. Which reminds me: you'll need to prepare lunch. You'll also be on your own with the child from this point forward. I presume you thought all of this through before firing our entire staff.”

Mrs. Leather continued to study Gladys.

The doctor slapped his thigh.

“So much business so early in the morning! But as I feel no quakes suggesting the imminent rending of this half of the continent, I bid you, Finch, to meet me in five minutes' time, not in the laboratory but upon our back property. Reassure me, why don't you, that you do not require a leash.”

He exited as briskly as he'd entered. Gesualdo's loathed madrigal came to an end, the steel needle of the Victrola snapping at the center of the disc. I brought myself to my feet, levered the needle, applied the brake, and turned so as to follow the doctor.

Mrs. Leather stood blocking the doorway, Gladys held to her bosom.

“I know why the staff feels as they do,” said she.

It was not a subject I wished to address, not while I was needed for some mysterious purpose out back. But women are a nuisance to sidestep, Reader, what with their hips and chests and countless other parts you dare not nudge.

“It is your eyes,” said she.

“What of them?”

She offered me a sad smile.

“You do not blink, Mr. Finch.”

You are no stranger, I'll bet, to being told that a wad of salad leaf resides in your teeth. The sensation that settled upon me was similar. I'd not realized that I'd deserted the practice of blinking, and now that the fact was voiced I was quite dismayed. Blinking was so basic a hallmark of Mammalia.

With her free hand she reached for my face. I flinched but she was quick, her thumb touching one eyelid, then the other, pulling both over my eyes. The friction against my eyeball was unpleasant. Mrs. Leather pulled the eyelids open again, then shut them, then did it several times more, until much of the stiffness worked itself out.

“A small detail,” whispered she. “But it will help put others at ease.”

Mrs. Leather, then, knew the truth. Had she figured it out on her own? The doctor would never have shared information above what he considered her intellectual grade. Even knowing what she did, there she stood, trying to help.

“Every time you have a child, Mr. Finch, you lose a piece of your soul. I believe that. It's right there in the blood and tissue. Souls do not come apart cleanly; it's a surgery. You of all people understand surgery. You understand that even when an operation is successful, it brings the patient closer to death.” She caressed her daughter's wispy hair. “Gladys is my miracle. I must do what is necessary to protect her, above myself, above you, above anyone. I do hope that you understand. The doctor's interest in children is nonexistent.”

Lies still came easy to me. “That's not true.”

“It isn't, not entirely. He did enjoy each pregnancy for as long as it lasted. He enjoyed examining me. In the beginning he'd even warm his instruments before using them. It's why he married me, you know—the tumor. He knew there would be miscarriages. And though the good doctor does not care for babies, he is rather fond of miscarriages.”

“Why are you telling me this?” asked I.

“Because you are but a boy. Until you are not, you are vulnerable.”

I would never
not
be a boy. Never, never, never.

Leather's voice echoed into the great hall.

“I see you need a leash after all, Finch. Join me now and I shall fashion you a strong one.”

Thank you, Mary.
The words waited at my lips but I knew better than to grant them passage. The gift of her first name had been given to me on careless impulse. But not even Dr. Leather could control how I used the name in my mind. From that moment on, Mrs. Leather would be “Mary,” and though never once did I speak the name aloud, it is how I think of her to this day, these many long decades after her death.