The Death and Life of Zebulon Finch, Volume 1 (24 page)

PART FOUR

1913–1918

To War We March!; Also, Your Hero's Education Into The Nature Of Sacrifice And The Possibility Of Brotherly Love.

I.

T
OGETHER MERLE AND I RODE
out a single stormful year. What occasioned our fracture? No less than the pointiest wedges civilization knows how to whet: money, sex, and war. Indeed it was a brief period, and yet that year is etched with permanence upon the foil of my memory for the hopefulness it brought me; the disappointment it brought, too. And the grief. Let us not forget the grief.

Our escape route was knotted as only practiced criminals can knot. Merle led us through alleyways of seeping trash, fields of whispering tallgrass, and underground tunnels through which rackety streetcars ground upon rails. We emerged, to our shared horror, in Cambridge, home of the execrable Harvard College. We banked northwest and so traveled for three days while the vengeful specter of Dr. Leather grasped for our ankles. We bartered for rides when we could and otherwise journeyed by foot, across a bridge spanning the Boston Harbor; through humid, buggy areas adjacent to the Broad Sound; and at last into the green hills that precipitated the end of the continent.

Lake Michigan was a mutt's water bowl when compared to the gnashing teals and grays of the Atlantic Ocean. The tide's magnet pulled at my skeleton; surely so titanic a water had the power to drag me down for good! But Merle was damp and miserable and we
had shot too far, and thus we backtracked to Salem, Massachusetts, and procured a two-bed chamber suitable for a young husband and wife—the only relationship we could mimic without rousing suspicion.

For days we did nothing but stare at the walls. Our backstreet window offered no visual relief but a sizzling gnarl of telephone wires. Meanwhile, we suffered the phonic enticement of automobile wheels thudding over brick, the whisper of women's petticoats, awnings snapping with the come-hither promise of fresh buyables. But the terror of Dr. Leather had us hobbled. We were afraid to leave the room, and when I slunk out overnight to gather food for Merle I found myself flinching at shadows. Jefferson Street was but twenty miles distant.

For three days, Merle ate what I brought her without objection.

After that, her loyal governess—discontent—returned.

“I can survive only so long on bread and water,” said she. “Look at my skin. It flakes. Look at my hair. It breaks like straw.”

“We need to remain hidden. For three months, perhaps four? I'm afraid that this is our lot.”

“It doesn't have to be. I have a suitcase full of dresses. We could sell one.”

“It would mean going outside during business hours. I suppose I could try.”

“You? You don't know the first thing about women's clothing! How would you barter?”

“Teach me, then. It is too dangerous a job for you.”

“I'll not wither to an old hag before I'm twenty. I'm going out.”

“You are not! That is my final word.”

“You don't get a final word, Papa. I'm older than you, you know.”

Dearest Reader, you see? Futility, thy name was Merle! She did, in fact, shove her way out with portmanteau in tow, after which I sat and fretted that she, the last person I had on Earth, might not come back. But she did, in fact, sell a dress, and she did, in fact, bring back to the room a feast of beef tenderloin and mushrooms, roquefort cheese, assorted cakes, port wine, and cigarettes. It was an irresponsible way to spend the money, but that, in sum, was Merle—forever clinging to the fantasy that her veins pumped blue blood.

Fattened and tipsy and reclined like a slattern, Merle leered with wine-stained teeth and withdrew from her suitcase a sewing kit she had purchased with her remaining few cents.

“And you thought I brought home nothing for my papa bear.”

She bade me to remove my shirt and untwine the squalid tablecloth that for days I'd kept around my torso. The flap on my abdomen bulged with misplaced organs and with tremendous shame I pushed them back into place. Merle looked as though she might faint but instead took a hard drag on her cigarette, thrust out her underbite, pushed me down onto the bed, lifted her skirts, straddled my legs, and unsheathed the sewing needle from the kit.

One need only see how she glared to understand what, to her, the act of sewing represented: her mother and those final years at the garment factory. Operating this needle verged on giving in to a kindred fate. Merle flung her cigarette, grabbed the wine, took a pull for strength, and then, with startling effortlessness, licked the thread and passed it through the needle's eye.

I told myself that each pinch upon my skin was proof positive of affection regardless of my daughter's corresponding oaths of disgust. Upon finishing, she hurled the wine bottle out of the window and guffawed when she heard it crash, and then kept on laughing, shaking
her head in disbelief at the repellent act she'd just performed. Not thirty minutes later she had left again with the portmanteau. Perhaps to sell another dress? Perhaps to buy a replacement bottle? Perhaps never to return?

It was a torture of incertitude and she a most capable torturer.

We hated Salem, each in our own way, but, alas, it became the only home we ever shared. That the town's infamy sprang from seventeenth-century witch trials did not escape my sense of humor. Who was the witch now? 'Twas I!—hunted by a fanatic of different puritanical stripe but who'd still love to see me burned at the stake, not to prove my allegiance to any particular demon but to continue tearing my body apart, just for fun, all revelations irrelevant, all almanacs be damned.

Fortune gave us a rare gift: a month, then another, then another, with no sign of Leather. Autumn eclipsed summer and our vampiric fear of being caught in the sun began to dissipate. My preference was that Merle cordon herself within arm's length of me, her dutiful protector, but she was newly twenty and had no intent of abstaining from the invigorating click and clack of an industrialized nation. Like any child phasing from her teenage years, she was insistent upon unencumbered freedom.

Our diminishing funds necessitated the continued peddling of her dresses, with each sale hitting her like an amputation. What she saw in our mirror delighted her less each week, yet through her face's sour contortions she still managed to force cheap wine.

I did not like to see my child sulk and tried everything a father might. In October we dared to attend our first motion picture, a silent one-reeler called
Calamity Anne's Inheritance
. Now
this
, thought I, gawping through the theater's flickering cone of cigarette smoke, was
entertainment fit for Zebulon Finch, requiring none of the constipating analysis demanded by literature or art!

At the conclusion, I rose to my feet and applauded.

“Run it again!” roared I. “Brava! Brava!”

“You,” groaned Merle, “are a constant embarrassment.”

The girl appreciated nothing. In November, I prevailed upon her submit to a photographer. Decades ago, a portrait of Bartholomew Finch, Abigail Finch, and my five-year-old self had graced our Chicago sitting room, and though I had detested the picture for its fraudulent depiction of fraternity, I longed now for my own proof of bloodline. Merle, keeper of our purse, was reluctant. By then she was down to three dresses, each spectacular in form and scandalous of neck, but scrubbed so often in a rusty tub that you could see through the fabric to the undergarments beneath.

But the Finch strain of vanity was strong within her, and one chilly afternoon we spent our last coins on a photograph of Merle in portrait. She was in snarling spirits, challenging the photographer's choices of lighting and posture until the very moment of exposure, when the shell of two embittering decades split open and a blinding radiance shone forth. When I saw the photographs I was struck anew by her beauty; Wilma Sue was alive in the girl's underbite, which for once looked not like the belligerent jaw of a piranha but a feature of highborn dignity.

By 1914 we were stone broke. I worried constantly that Leather might yet materialize, so I found a job that would not arouse attention: mopping a stockyard floor. Merle, meanwhile, dithered with flights of fancy. She wished to play the piano at the nickelodeon—although she could not play. She wished to sell gloves in a department store—although she could not make proper change. She wished to
operate a telephone switchboard—although she balked at the hard wooden barrels upon which the women sat.

Consequently she chose as her profession the harvesting and dispensation of my income. No matter that every cent I brought home stank of swine blood; it was accepted anywhere and soon Merle had dolled herself quite nicely. She was not circumspect about her mission: she was out to nab herself a man, preferably a rich one.

“They won't approach me with you hovering about,” griped she. “If I want them to pay for food and amusement, I will have to go find them myself.”

“Do you know what kind of men wait for a woman's proposition?”

“Yes. Men like you.”

Blast it all! The girl had me there.

Janitorial obligations brought me home late but Merle began returning even later, three sheets to the wind and rubbing her crumpled dance card across her bosom, mumbling of the dozens of faultless men who'd taught her the quickstep and the Brazilian tango. Frightened that Leather might spot her, I handed out stern warnings and then could not believe my ears. Me, warn someone else against impulsive behavior? And yet I felt a squeezing that must be the same for all fathers regardless of age, that this child of mine was being stolen from me by males who were my inferiors.

After a time she began to enjoy our sham marriage, as it permitted her the thrill of cuckolding me. Various mendicants she kissed so near our chamber door that her inebriated giggles passed right through the paper-thin walls.

“Shh,” some scoundrel or other would say. “Your husband will hear.”

“I hope he does,” she'd laugh. “Let him get a big, long earful.”

Feminine strategy, as best as I could figure it, was to trade upward, but perhaps due to her dirty clothes or caustic manner, Merle was unable to progress past groping lowlifes. Those pretty red dance cards were replaced by phone numbers scribbled on horse-racing schedules. The twinkle in her eyes was replaced by a volcanic gleam. Some early mornings she would arrive with her dress in disarray or lips smacking with a bad taste. The situation worsened in spring, when she began to come home with more money than with which she'd left. She'd sit hunched over the booty, her face distended into a loose red grin that I did not for one second believe.

In June of 1914 I was roused from my nighttime meditation by the hallway hullabaloo of a physical struggle.
Leather!
thought I.
He has found us at last!
I threw open the door with the only weapons at hand, two wine bottles, and found Merle on all fours and reaching for the doorknob while a man, sloppily intoxicated and bleeding from the lip, clearly no surgeon, grasped at her naked calves. I smashed the bottles together above his head. He shrunk beneath the storm of shards and I might have stabbed him in the neck—hadn't I done similar to my old pal Fratelli?—had not Merle landed a heel to the fellow's teeth.

I rolled the unconscious sot down the outdoor stairs like a laundry sack and repaired to our room. Merle was curled into a ball upon the bed. I locked our door, turned off the light, brushed glass dust from my hands, and dropped down next to her.

“Listen, you drunk,” said I. “If you expect me to cope with your boo-hooing all—”

Her arms coiled around my torso with so much force that I interpreted it as an attack upon my sewed stomach. But her fists clutched
my nightclothes and she was crying, this daughter of mine,
sobbing
if you wish to know the truth, so violently I worried that the worn seams of her dress might not survive it.

My hands did not know where to go. I'd not held my daughter since the day she'd broken the Leathers' mirror, and being neither woman nor physician, the protocols of comfort were foreign to me. Much simpler would be to refund her months of spite and shove her to the floor. But I could not. Her unraveled brown hair, black now with tears, hid a bruise upon her temple; there was grime behind her ears, evidence of inferior soap and cold bath water; and her hitching body was little more than scaffolding—the girl was once again starving.

I took the back of her head in my hand and stroked her hair. I felt a spiritual soaring. I pressed her face against my chest until her nose was flattened in the most darling, pitiful way, and she held me all the tighter and wailed with abandon until my shirt was wet and warm against my cold skin. I savored her supplications, not the usual pointed “Papa” but rather the heartrending “Daddy, Daddy, Daddy.” Yes, she was drunk, her allowance, pride, and probably her virtue bespoiled one way or the other, but if that was what it took to smelt this steeled female, then I'd take it, and with gratitude.

I believe that things might have ended up different for Merle and me had not, the very next day, a disaster of historic magnitude swept across Salem. While I chased animal guts with my mop, an agglomeration of combustible materials exploded at a nearby leather factory. The town, parched from summer drought, was greedy for fire. By the time my slaughterhouse was evacuated over one hundred acres were in flames. It was the Great Salem Fire of 1914 and before it was through there would be a loss of twenty thousand homes and ten thousand jobs—mine among them.

The building in which Merle and I lodged had survived; what burned to cinder was our moment of opportunity. In one stroke, I'd lost our income and Merle had lost her assorted haunts. Three days later, as stunned Salemites sifted through the ashes, an Austrian archduke named Franz Ferdinand was assassinated far across the world in a European province called Bosnia. When the news reached Salem, only two details impressed themselves upon me. One, the Serbian assassin was but nineteen; I was downright jealous of his well-publicized feat! Two, the organization he worked for was called the Black Hand.