You didn’t like or not like your father. It was wrong even to think about it. No one asked a question like that.
“I guess I did.”
She handed the handkerchief back. He turned it so he could see the monogram.
Then, just as quickly as this wintry Lady had appeared, she turned calm and sunny again. “Well, it’s just us now.” She smiled her wide, soft smile. Fin, helplessly, smiled back. “We’re a family now,” she said. “Lady and Fin.”
She lighted another cigarette, and Fin gazed, fascinated, at her face softened by the smoke. She seemed like someone from a sorcerer’s land, from a palace or a grove or a fantastical cave.
“Ooof,” she said, sniffing a bottle of milk from the fridge and wrinkling her nose. “I’ll have Mabel get you some nice proper boy food tomorrow. I should have asked her today. I wonder if I even mentioned that you were coming. Man, will Mabel be surprised.”
“Who is Mabel?”
“Who is Mabel? You do have a lot to learn.”
He went to bed in a large double bed in a room with heavy rose-colored curtains. He wondered if it was Lady’s mother’s room. He was afraid to ask.
“Your car is neat,” he said. “It’s fun with the top down.”
“We’ll have more fun, too,” Lady said. She ran her hand over the top of an ornate dresser. “Don’t worry, Fin. We’ll be out of this velvet coffin in no time.”
Fin had a queasy vision of his own mother’s coffin, now buried beneath rich, dark Connecticut soil, and he sat on the edge of the bed. He must have turned green or something because Lady said, “Oh, for crying out loud, Lady, you did it again.” She sat down next to him. “Sorry.” She put her arms around him. His mother was gone, embraced by no one, embracing no one, her hands crossed on her breast. In a coffin. Was it a velvet coffin? Was it lined in velvet? He was glad he didn’t know. He sat stiffly until Lady sighed and said irritably, “I really do lack finesse.”
Then she left him alone.
He put on his pajamas but did not brush his teeth, thinking, So there, an act of rebellion against he knew not whom. He lay in the big bed, feeling cold and scrawny, reaching his hand down to touch the dog sleeping peacefully on the floor beside him. The noise of the traffic throbbed on the street below. They were on the tenth floor, higher than the trees. But there were no proper trees, only puny ones growing through the sidewalk. He closed his eyes. He heard a siren. Cars honked their horns. They were so loud he felt as if they were being driven straight through the window, past the curtains, and into this unfamiliar luxurious room, taxis and cars all around him, surrounding him.
But when he opened his eyes, there was no one there, just the white band of street light creeping in beneath the shade as if it were morning.
It wasn’t morning.
He closed his eyes and tried to fall back to sleep. He opened them. He remembered another night, when he was six and lived in his old apartment. When he had opened his eyes in the middle of the night and seen his mother in the darkness. When she sat on his bed. When he said, “Mommy,” sleepily, then noticed something was wrong. When his mother cried. When her face was white. When she scooped him into her arms and said, “Daddy got very sick.” When she pressed her cheek against his. “And now he’s gone.”
Fin went to the funeral and clutched his mother’s hand. You must never go down to the end of the town without consulting me.
Was his father sick before he died? Did he surreptitiously sneak small white tablets of nitroglycerin beneath his tongue? Did doctors warn him to stop smoking his cigars, stop gulping his Scotch, stop working so hard, stop scowling and pacing and running his hand through his thinning hair? Yes. He was sick. The doctors did warn him. But no one warned Fin. To Fin, the death of his powerful, imperious father was not only a surprise, it was a mistake. His father, that enormous, growling reality, could not possibly disappear.
Where was the end of the town? he wondered.
“Daddy is in heaven,” his mother whispered.
“Yes,” he said, though he saw Daddy lowered into the ground.
Fin had searched the crowd for Lady. It was her father’s funeral, too. Where was she? Maybe no one had told her. He looked from face to face. They were sad faces. Sometimes they spoke to him, but he could not answer. He turned away from the sad faces and looked for Lady’s sad face. He kept looking for her sad face at the graveside. Over my dead body, his father had said. That will be the day, Lady said, laughing. Close your mouth, she’d said, or you’ll catch a fly. And he had laughed, too.
At the apartment afterward, people ate and drank as though they were at a party. Fin climbed to the top shelf of the linen closet and lay there in the fresh sleepy scent of ironed sheets. His father was gone. It didn’t really matter where. He might have left the house to take a walk. Hugo Hadley liked to take walks.
His mother found him there, later, after everyone had gone home, asleep.
“It’s my clubhouse,” he murmured as she lifted him down.
She put him in his own bed, then slid in beside him.
They moved to Connecticut within a month. Lydia Hadley had never liked the city, not really, and Hugo’s financial affairs were not in the best of shape. He was, Fin told me, one of those strong personalities who does not plan for his own unthinkable absence from the world. There was hardly any money in the bank. No life insurance policy, either.
Fin and his mother retreated to the rolling hills of eastern Connecticut to live with Lydia’s parents. The disruption was so complete that the move in some ways helped Fin adjust to his new fatherless state. Everything was different, so why not that, too? It was as if they had left his father in the apartment in New York so he could make his infamous early-morning phone calls, then storm off to the office, crushing his hat angrily on his large, commanding head. It was, indeed, as if he’d gone out for a walk. Sometimes. Other times, especially at night, Fin twisted in his sleep until the blankets and sheets were coiled around him like ropes.
Now everyone was dead, just like his father. Everyone but Fin and Lady. Fin called Gus onto the bed. He pushed his foot into the soft ruff where he could feel a heartbeat.
Fin met Mabel when he woke up. He followed the smells of breakfast and found himself in a kitchen with a tall, thin, smooth-skinned, middle-aged Negro lady who handed him a plate of fried eggs, toast, bacon, a glass of orange juice, said, “Dogs and children, dirt and devilment,” shook her head sorrowfully, and told him to eat up. She had the expression of a policeman giving you a ticket: Don’t make it worse.
The large apartment, he learned from Mabel, belonged to Lady’s mother. “But she’s gone now.”
“So Lady lives here?”
“She didn’t tell you anything, did she? Well now, Miss Lady has purchased a house down in Greenwich Village, where the beatniks live.”
“I saw it last night. It’s empty.”
“She says she needs to be herself. Why do you need to move from top to bottom to be yourself? I could run a hundred blocks and back and I’d still be myself. I’m myself sitting right here. She needs to be herself? I told her, Miss Lady, I wouldn’t wish that on anybody, even you.”
“How far is a block?”
“Twenty in a mile.”
“They don’t have blocks where I live. They have roads. And lanes.”
“I’ve heard of them,” she said, laughing. “Well, you live here now, so enjoy this mess of luxury while you can, because Greenwich Village is no place for a place like this place, I can tell you that.”
That was the first day of what Fin would later call the Honeymoon. Lady doted on him as if he were a pet. She ran her hand over his hair the way he patted Gus. “Good boy,” she would say softly, out of the blue. “Good boy.”
She took him to an ice-cream parlor across the street from Central Park. There were stuffed animals everywhere. She made Fin order hot chocolate in addition to his hot fudge sundae. Then they went to a movie in Swedish in which a little boy shoots his toy gun a
t a dwarf, who then dresses the boy up as a girl. The boy’s mother goes to the opera, but Fin never knew what happened after that, for Lady suddenly said, “Oh Lord,” and pulled him out of the theater. Lady laughed as they stood on the sidewalk outside the theater, shaking her head and looking wild and horsey, and Fin laughed, too, though he had no idea at what. Lady took him to the zoo in Central Park after that, and he fed peanuts to the elephant and ate a hot dog from a cart on the street. Then they got in a cab and went to see Hello, Dolly! He sat in his plush seat, stunned at the vibrant spectacle, the immediacy, waiting for Louis Armstrong to appear.
“Sextillions of infidels”
When he looked back on it years later, Fin could not recall exactly how many of these Honeymoon days he had with Lady. There was a toy store bigger than his old town hall, a red wooden sailboat as a present, a walk to a pond in the park to watch it cut through the water, then drift and stall with the breeze. More ice cream, at Schrafft’s this time—an ice-cream soda, coffee with vanilla ice cream. Another musical, Fiddler on the Roof. Pizza. Chinese food. And Lady.
It was Lady even more than the sweets or the horse-and-carriage or the toys or the egg roll or the theater late at night. She held his hand when they crossed the street, as if he were a toddler, but he was proud to hold Lady’s hand. Her long legs flashed beneath her short skirt. Her hair moved with her stride, her smooth horsey gait. People noticed Lady. Fin saw that. She talked to everyone, as if she knew them, as if they were her friends. She talked to them everywhere—on the steps of the public library, in the elevator, at Bonwit Teller.
Fin took in everything about her—sandals, scent of perfume and cigarettes, white teeth, palms damp with perspiration in the heat. This was his new life, and it was so colorful and powerful, so fast, that it was hard to relate it to his old one. Lady walked so quickly. Everyone on the sidewalk did. When Lady poked him in the back to hurry him along, he said, “Are we late?”
“No, Farm Boy. We’re alive.”
And he picked up his pace to match hers.
“Damn it,” she said suddenly. “I did it again. No finesse.”
But we are alive, he thought, a little guiltily. It’s not Lady’s fault we’re alive. Or mine. He was alive, even if his parents and grandparents were not. They had abandoned him to this noisy, busy city, to this sister who raced everywhere she went. He was no longer a little boy on a farm. He moved his legs faster. “You do, too, have finesse,” he said.
At night, Lady read to him:
“Afoot and light-hearted, I take to the open road,
Healthy, free, the world before me…”
Only in the morning, when he first woke up, did he have time to think. Then he would lie in bed and listen to the screeching of brakes, the slamming of delivery-truck doors, the petulant car horns, the whistles of the doormen, and he would recall morning at home, at the home he had left behind. There was the rooster, though he was not a reliable rooster and often crowed at night as well as in the morning. The cows made their soft, sweet lowing complaints. And there were birds, more and more voices joining together as the sky grew lighter. Crows and robins and blue jays and sparrows and mockingbirds and catbirds and red-winged blackbirds—his grandfather had always been trying to get him to hear the difference. But all he heard was song. At these times, in the struggling light of a New York City morning in spring, Fin hugged the dog to him and felt almost faint, whispering his mother’s name, “Mommy,” into the dog’s white ruff.
One day Lady took him down dirty cement steps at Eighty-sixth Street and Lexington Avenue. “The subway!” she said. With a puff of hot, filthy air, the train roared into the station. They boarded and Fin held the pole happily until the subway stopped at Ninety-sixth Street and Lady grabbed his hand and pulled him off.
“There!” she said. “One of the wonders of modern transportation. What’s left on our list?” And they took a cab to the Empire State Building.
“Aren’t we going in?” Fin asked, staring up.
“Ye gods, no,” said Lady.
Instead they went to count the stars in Grand Central Station and admire the Kodak Colorama taking up one wall, a huge photograph of four girls in white gowns, America’s Junior Miss Pageant. Or was that a different day? Was that the day they went to Chinatown and saw the dead ducks hanging upside down? Or maybe the day they had tea at the Palm Court and listened to the musicians playing waltzes? Or contemplated the swords and armor and mounted knights at the Metropolitan? The days glided so carelessly, one into the next, each so surprising and new and yet, exactly because they were so surprising and new, so similar. He couldn’t recall exactly which was which or even how long the Honeymoon lasted. What he did remember, piercingly, was the fullness of those days and the heady fatigue.
What he remembered, too, and just as piercingly, was the day the Honeymoon ended.
It was a warm evening, and outside, the light was soft and indolent in the golden sky. He came in from a walk with Gus and plunked himself down on the little foldout seat in the elevator. He liked watching Mike the elevator man. Mike had a quiet, melodious Irish accent. Fin found his company soothing after a day with Lady. The Honeymoon days were always hectic and bounteous, and to walk the dog, alone among the men returning home from work, among the nannies skippering baby carriages along the sidewalk, that was Fin’s time, not so much to contemplate his new life as to stop thinking about it altogether, to breathe.
Today Lady had been even more accelerated than usual, walking faster, talking faster. She’d taken him to the Museum of Natural History, his favorite, then rushed him through the exhibits so quickly he had no time to feel the threat and size of the grizzly bear above him or sneak past the yellow-eyed wolves in the dark or find the horizon of the painted savannah backdrops or pity the dead rabbit clotted with dusty maroon blood. They walked home through the park, practically ran.
“I have to get away,” she kept saying.
“From where?”
“Here. There. Everywhere.”
Sometimes Lady said she was free as a bird. Sometimes she said she was in a gilded cage. Today had been a gilded-cage day.
In the elevator, Fin balanced on the flipped-down wooden seat. Gus sat beside him, ears pricked forward. Mike the elevator man sported a mustache, but wore white gloves, which detracted from the dignity of his uniform considerably. They looked so much like Mickey Mouse hands.
“Aren’t you hot in those gloves? It’s almost summer, I guess.”
Mike grunted. “From the mouths of babes.”
Gus flopped onto the floor with an abrupt dog sigh. Mike let Fin pull the brass lever himself, steering the elevator, as Fin thought of it, to the top floor and down again with a series of sickening, thrilling lurches. After a while, Fin said he guessed he ought to go back to the apartment for cocktails, a new ritual Lady had introduced him to.
“What a world,” Mike said.
But just as Mike was about to close the elevator door, a young man entered the building door. He tipped his hat to the doorman, greeted Mike with a wink, and, on seeing Fin and Gus, backed up with exaggerated surprise.
“Lassie!” he said. “You came home.”
Fin had never liked winkers, and now the man had taken off his hat and was spinning it on one finger.
“It’s been a while, hasn’t it, Michael?” said the man.
“Yes, sir, Mr. Morrison,” Mike said, giving Fin a sidelong glance.
The elevator stopped at Lady’s floor and the man got out. He turned to Fin and Gus with an expression of mock dismay.
“Are you two following me?”
Fin was about to speak when Mabel opened the door. “Look who’s here,” she said.
“With bells on,” said the cheerful Mr. Morrison, handing her his hat.
In the living room, Lady was slouched in a chair smoking furiously, as if smoking were something you worked at, practiced, like playing the piano.
Mr. Morrison said, “You look wonderful, Lady.”
&nbs
p; “Merry as a cricket,” said Lady, but she did not look merry. She looked ready to bolt, trailing her reins behind her.
“It’s been a long time.”
“Has it?”
“Too long.”
The conversation was stilted, as if it couldn’t breathe.
“I’m home,” Fin said loudly. “Lady, I’m home.”
“Yes, I seem to have acquired an entourage.” Mr. Morrison glanced at Fin and Gus. “Do you know them?”
Mr. Morrison was nattily dressed and, Fin noticed, had beautifully manicured hands. Fin put out his own rather grubby hand and watched with pleasure Mr. Morrison’s brief hesitation before taking it.
Lady poured whiskey into a glass and handed it to Mr. Morrison.
“You remembered,” he said.
“It’s a drink, Tyler.”
Mr. Morrison said, “Skoal?”
Lady turned to Fin. “Mr. Morrison is … an old friend.”
“I hope I am,” said Mr. Morrison. “I want to be friends with you, too, son.”
“My father’s dead.”
But then, to Fin’s chagrin, Lady asked him to leave her and Mr. Morrison alone to discuss business.
In the dining room, Fin helped Mabel set the table. “What business?” he asked.
“He’s a lawyer.”
“Why does Lady need a lawyer? Did she get in trouble?” He tried to sound concerned, but he was relieved. A lawyer, not a friend, not a boyfriend.
“White people have lawyers before they get in trouble. Especially when they’ve got boys around. Eleven-year-old boys.”
He grinned at her. She gave a small twitch, which he took to be a smile in return. Mabel wore a wig. She adjusted it slightly.
“Is that hot?” he asked. “Like a hat?”
“You ask too many questions.”
“But is it?”
“Hot as all get-out.”
“So it’s good in winter. And winter’s longer than summer.”
This time, Mabel really did smile.
A little while later, Lady called Fin into the living room. There were a few things they had to discuss, she said. A few things about Fin’s situation. “You see, Mr. Morrison is your fiscal guardian—”
Fin & Lady: A Novel Page 4