The Curious Case of Sidd Finch

by George Plimpton

  I said that she had, but that their "bag and baggage" wasn't much. A toothbrush. What she and Finch together had as worldly possessions-forgetting his French horncould almost be put in a large purse.

  "What is she like?" Jay asked.

  "I haven't seen much of her. They're still asleep. She's kind of a free spirit."

  "You say she stepped off a Windsurfer?" he asked.

  "So I understand," I replied.

  I thought of her the night before, the rain plastering a knee-length man's shirt against her body as she came in the door. She was shivering slightly. She had announced cheerfully, "This is much better than Mrs. Butterfield's. It's like being in an aquarium-cool and lovely. We're all underwater!"

  "She's quite spectacular," I told Jay.

  "I see," Jay said tentatively. "Well, we're sort of worried about this development. Are you sure this meeting between the two was coincidental? You don't suppose she's a plant from the Commissioner's office. Maybe Peter Ueberroth knows about Sidd and worries about the impact he'll have on the game."

  "Possibly."

  "Or the Los Angeles Dodgers. She sounds sort of Californian."

  I replied that I had no idea. I said I would let the Mets know if anything surprising or untoward happened.

  "You're good to do this," Jay said. "We didn't know it was going to happen."

  "They didn't want to go to a hotel," I said. "The girl told me Finch was pretty straight."

  "The blimp pilot thought it would be great."

  "So I understand," I said.

  Actually, life in the bungalow seemed to go on pretty much as before. I kept to the schedule of my master chart -my little fishing expeditions, my somnambulations on the hot boards of the marina piers, my occasional visits to Amory Blake, and my trips to the public library to research "odd occurrences."

  The Mets sent their car to pick Sidd up every morning at II:30 or so for his stint in the enclosure at HugginsStengel. The driver blew the horn out in the street. Sidd wore his baseball uniform (it had the number 21 on the back of the jersey) out to the car; he carried an odd, decrepit black glove with him, along with a kit bag that apparently contained clothes into which he changed when he met Debbie Sue out on the beaches later-jeans, a bathing suit, a cotton shirt, whatever. She stayed around the bungalow until she left for the beaches about noon.

  I was entranced by her-small-breasted, long-necked, with a delicate, pointed head, high-cheeked. Her eyes were blue, sometimes with blue liner to emphasize them; her mouth was pale and wide, but I don't remember that she ever enhanced it except with a small gleam from a chapstick. Her energy! She rushed for the phone when it rang. "Owl, it's for you." It was her practice to produce instant nicknames for people. Within minutes of meeting her I had become "Owl," not because I resembled one, but because my family's name, Temple, made her think of the university whose athletic teams are known as the Owls. "Oh, Owl, you look bushed?" she'd say.

  Like so many girls brought up in the South, she ended almost all of her sentences with a question mark, as if she lived in a kind of wondrous world in which she was not sure of anything. "I went to the Bay last night? With Sidd? We swam out in the darkness and porpoises were out there? We could hear them snuffling? And breathing?" And so forth. Even her name seemed a tentative thing. When asked for it she would reply, "Debbie Sue?" as if she were charmingly addled and not quite sure.

  Her hair was tawny, sun-streaked and unkempt, as if hurled into a mare's nest by the sea in which she spent so much time; however tumultuous, it always seemed to frame her face in breathtaking ways. She tossed it. She ran her hands through its folds with impatience, with no results that were discernible. Often, she flung the whole shebang forward away from the nape of her neck, her head down, the golden mass spilling for the floor, and then flung her head back as if violence could bring order to that lovely disarray.

  She was tall, with legs that she folded under her on sofas, endlessly restless and shifting about, as if life itself was to be spent settling into a comfortable position. The only time I saw her motionless was when I found her asleep on the settee that hung on chains out on the back porch-sprawled across the cushions as if shot. A singlethonged sandal had fallen off and lay on the floor under a long-toed foot suspended out from the edge of the settee. It was almost impossible to sit on that particular piece of furniture without its moving; yet she was so relaxed, the settee hung like a potted plant from a rafter. A wisp of hair moved in the faint motion of her breathing.

  It was rare to find her in such a state. Most of the time, in the most minimal of coverings, her bare feet slapping on the linoleum flooring, she hurried about the bungalow in haphazard perpetual motion. She seemed endlessly in search of something-looking for a cigarette, and then after a few puffs hopping up to extinguish it not close at hand but in a distant ashtray. She paid frequent inspections to the refrigerator, the creak of the door opening, and then a moan to indicate that she was not allowing herself to remove anything from its shelves. Returning, she never seemed to slide into a sofa, but rather to fling herself upon it, then flopping in utter relaxation, as if the effort to soar in among the pillows had spent her completely. I tend to exaggerate, but in truth she was exhausting to have around. In comparison, Sidd and I moved through the bungalow as if undersea-she darted across our paths like a spirited tropical fish.

  Sidd was easy to be around-though I understood what Mrs. Butterfield meant by being "startled" by him. He had a tendency to appear suddenly from the shadows, often preceded by the crash of something falling over or a grunt from catching a shin on the side of a piece of furniture. For an athlete he was extraordinarily clumsy, or perhaps it was that he never could get his eyes adjusted to the gloom of the bungalow. He looked like a grown-up moppet -a long neck, narrow shoulders, and a bird-cage chest. His smile showed slightly uneven teeth, and sometimes his hand would drift up to cover his mouth, which increased his demeanor of shyness, uncertainty.

  He was thin-hipped, with long legs that he set way down in front of him in a farmer's stride; the fingers of his arms grazed alongside his kneecaps.

  He was hardly a prize, I thought, for someone as attractive as Debbie Sue. But she seemed obsessed by him -reaching out to touch him or tousle his hair as she perched on the side of his chair. His reaction to this was what one might have expected from one so shy-a confused and somewhat startled, if pleased, acceptance of what was being done to him.

  I had put them in separate rooms on the night of their arrival-for no other reason than it seemed the proper thing to do with a monk. Debbie Sue was under no such compunctions, and afterward I never bothered about it again.

  Usually I ran into the pair in midmorning, fussing in the kitchen. Sidd would turn to me, his fingertips together: "Namas-te." He explained that the Tibetan word for greetings and farewells meant "I salute the spirit within you."

  Debbie Sue loved "namas-te." Sometimes I would get up before them, and she would float into the little kitchen to find me standing in a decrepit bathrobe, staring bleakly at a coffeepot making its way toward a boil; she always surprised me with her entrance-wearing a brief T-shirt, this time with a bright-hued, perky Mickey Mouse with the sole of one shoe showing. She would give a slight bow, and with her fingertips together she would say not "namas-te" but its translation-"I salute the spirit within you"-in a theatrical, sleepy voice. I would say the same to her. We exchanged the phrase like lovers.

  I found I was enjoying their company. I telephoned my sister-one of the few outgoing calls of the decade-and said I had two boarders. She was incredulous. "A Buddhist monk and his girl?"

  "A very sudden but apparently solid romance," I explained.

  I said nothing to her about Sidd being a pitcher with the New York Mets. If I had said so, my sister would have assumed I had gone completely around the bend-giving myself over to a strange, shadowy world of phantoms and bewildering imaginings.

  "That's quite a step," she said.

  "What?"

  "Tak
ing in boarders. What does the young woman do?"

  "She windsurfs," I said. "They love the beaches. He meditates and she swims. She's teaching him how to catch a Frisbee. She's the daughter of a golf professional who lives up the coast. Played on the golf team. Duke."

  "What?"

  "Duke University. She's dropped out for some reason or other."

  My sister said, "Your mother wants to know how your book is coming along." It was her oblique way of finding out for herself if I was beginning to write.

  "I'm sorry," I said. "Nothing much has stirred."

  "How is Amory Blake?"

  "I have a vague idea I'm helping him with a book."

  She didn't ask me to explain. Before she hung up she suggested that my new boarders might provide inspiration. "Take notes," she suggested.

  Debbie Sue and Sidd came back from the beach to the bungalow about six o'clock. Debbie Sue called from the front lawn, "Owl!" Her voice carried. When the two were late I wandered around the bungalow. Once I went to the supermarket and bought a chicken and the fixings for something quite grand-my way of showing I was pleased they were there. But no one could cook. We stared at the chicken in its plastic wrapping. So Debbie Sue and I had the beef tetrazzini from a package and Sidd had a salad. A cheese. Ice cream. Tea. After dinner we went out through the bungalow to the screen-enclosed porch in back. The frogs were beginning. The evening fell.

  Sometimes we talked about baseball. Sidd would describe his stint in the enclosure. He said he wouldn't mind if I came to watch. He asked technical questions about baseball itself. A few afternoons he had watched a few intrasquad games from the little stands at Huggins, but his knowledge of the game itself was pitiful. It was practically a matter of telling him how many innings there were. He knew almost nothing about the game's history.

  I told him that the Mets had prepared for him by dropping baseballs out of a blimp.

  "How interesting."

  "It was the only way they could think of to get the ball going fast enough. It was Nelson Doubleday's idea."

  "Did anyone get hurt?" Sidd asked.

  "I don't believe so," I replied. "Frank Cashen said they lost quite a few baseballs. The field was muddy. A lot of the balls went deep into the muck with a kind of a thunk. One day some farmer is going to plow up all those baseballs and he's going to spend a sleepless night or so wondering how they got there."

  Debbie Sue, swinging in the darkness on the settee, fantasized how "neat" if something "real weird" had been tossed out of the gondola. "A stuffed toy animal," she suggested, "to keep the catchers from being bored. A kanga- roo'd drop down out of the sky."

  Debbie Sue lit a cigarette. Its tip glowed as she puffed on it awkwardly. It swung in an arc as the settee creaked on its chains. The frogs were in full chorus out in the back. The darkness enveloped us.

  Debbie Sue occasionally offered to get a fourth for dinner, or to invite someone over afterward to join us ("one of my windsurfing pals?"), but I was never very enthusiastic about it, and neither was she. Perhaps she didn't want to take any chances with another girl around Sidd. Besides, we had become comfortable, the three of us, and a fourth in those first days, no matter how compatible, would have seemed an intruder. Sidd would have been less likely to talk about the Himalayas, or anything else for that matter, and he certainly would not have played the French horn or produced any of his sound effects for us.

  That was the best part of hearing him talk about the mountains-that he would occasionally stop and punctuate what he was telling us with an uncanny representation of some sound-the cry of a bird, or the wind soughing through bamboo forests, or the creak of prayer wheels turning, the flap of banners, footfalls on the pebbly mountain paths, the cry of children in a distant valley, echoes, a rooster crowing far off. He could produce an infinite variety of sounds with no more than an odd flutter of his throat. Sometimes I wondered why he ever bothered with his French horn; he could have imitated its sound without carrying that black case around, but no, he allowed it was the difference between singing and playing an instrument.

  The first imitation I heard him do was the sound of a rock dislodged by the hooves of a blue goat high in the mountains-his throat muscles pulsing as he produced the click of the rock ricocheting down the cliff face until its last distant reverberation in the mountain vastness.

  "God, how did you do that?"

  His imitations seemed to quiver the air around us, a kind of stereophonic effect that disguised where the sound was coming from.

  "I have"-and he made a slight inclination of his head to indicate that it was a talent that he was by no means responsible for-"an ear that can not only memorize the intricacies of rhythms, but allows me to imitate them. That is why I can play the French horn with a certain amount of proficiency. I can hear Brahms and play it, but I can't read it off the sheet music."

  Debbie Sue looked admiringly at Sidd. She touched his face. "He can do taxi horns. London and Paris horns, and a refrigerator door slamming. He's awfully good at a bathtub emptying!"

  As the evenings went on I got to know something more about Sidd's background. His father was an anthropologist who liked to say that he had traveled among people who had been forgotten by the world and who in turn had forgotten the world. He was fascinated by the hill people of the Himalayas.

  "Father was well known in those parts of the world. He was once blessed by the thirteenth Dalai Lama," Sidd said. "He told me the Lama touched him with a colored ribbon attached to a stick. The most respectful of blessings is when the Lama puts two hands alongside the head, or one hand, or two fingers, or even one finger. My father was British, of course, studying tribes in the foothills, and the Dalai Lama probably did not think highly of himsome kind of meddler, I suspect he thought he was, so he was touched with the tip of a ribbon from a stick."

  I asked about his mother. "I never knew her," Sidd said. "She saw my father off on his expeditions. She thought of his trips as being what she might read in novels.

  "My father named a mountain after her, Mount Edwina. It was not a major mountain, but a pretty one...."

  Sidd told us she was older by a few years than his father. Browsing for "things" in catalogs and Country Life, she turned up at auctions to bid for them. She had an extraordinary collection of scarab brooches that lay on velvet in glass-covered display cases in a long gallery on the third floor of the London house. She saw to her husband's social life in London. She organized the musicale evenings. Even on winter nights she used a fan, circulating a heavy musklike perfume among her guests.

  Then one spring she surprised and rather dismayed her husband by saying she would like to go with him. She could shop the capitals on the way-Paris, Cairo, Istanbul -and then once there in the mountains she could sit in a camp chair in front of the canvas tent and read. Tea, of course. A "native" would be assigned to make sure nothing approached that would be disturbing-large lizards and so forth.

  It was an ill-fated decision. She disliked everything from the moment the door of the London house closed behind her. She was appalled by the places they stopped by on the way. She was horrified by Bombay with its pavements plastered red with betel-nut spit and the white of bird droppings ... and the street barbers with their customers standing in front of them with their heads bent to get their hair cut. In Kathmandu she kept to her hotel room. It was better out in the fresh air of the encampments.

  Sidd's father did the best he could to make her comfortable. He pitched her tent so that when she sat in her camp chair she had the most spectacular views of the mountains. But then one evening she stood up from her camp chair and took a few steps in a heavy mountain fog. She slipped in the mud, went down, and started a long slide that took her over the edge of the abyss and into what must have been an exhilarating drop in some ways, so long that she must have wondered vaguely if that was all there was to it....

  Sidd, of course, never recounted it to me this way ... it was a vision that floated into my mind after he had described it in
rather flat terms ... sadly, as if it were something he thought I should know but that he did not really want to mention. He remembered his father's discomfiture when her name came up. He told us his father rarely went up to the third floor, with its display cases of scarab brooches.

  Debbie Sue loved to hear about the London house. It was enormous apparently. Some of the rooms were so large that they seemed to beg occupancy-like hotel lobbies, with heavy chairs with armrests set along the gallery walls. Sidd said that as a boy he would hide behind the weight of a damask curtain and wait for someone to come along, and usually someone would, heralded by the click of heels on the marble flooring, muted suddenly by the softness of a carpet, then the heels again, and a maid would hurry by with something on a tray for someone higher up the social echelon than she. There was inevitably the whine of a distant vacuum cleaner.

  He described the library, which had a balcony reached by a small circular stair. As a child he would peer down through the railings on the heads of the guests his father had collected for elaborate dinners. The room below was so vast it never looked crowded, and from above, with their ball gowns spread out, he said the women moved like a regatta across the carpet.

  "What sort of people came?" I asked.

  "The fancier parties were the musicales," Sidd replied. "That was when my father met Dennis Brain, the great French horn player from the London Symphony. After dinner my father would guide everyone into the music room, which was set up with gilt and red ballroom chairs in rows. The musicians sat at one end under a very noisy portrait of a stag at bay. The painting served to give the music, even the most delicate of instrumentations, a kind of curious wild quality-as if it were being played under desperate circumstances. One of the musicians told me that they always played a little faster at my father's musicales. My father loved brass instrumentation. He was like Peter the Great, who had brass bands play for him at dinner. One Christmas my father gave me a French horn."

  Debbie Sue asked how Sidd got along with his father. "He was an austere gentleman-quite formal with me, which I suppose would be natural since in some inner corner of his mind he would remember that I was an orphan and not of his blood. He wore tweeds. About him there was always the faint scent of violets, some kind of cologne he wore. He was all I had. I can remember the sadness when he stood in the great front hall amid his suitcases, all very functional and worn, with big leather straps for reinforcement, because he was going off to the mountains, to the Kalahari, the steppes, the rain forests, wherever. His last words to me were always `Now, young man, you are in charge,' and the front door would close behind him. He was referring to quite a large retinuecooks, butlers, chambermaids, many of them standing in a row behind me as he left. The house was enormous. It's on Denbigh Close. Do you know Denbigh Close? A little park, Logue Park, on the corner. My friends from school would come to play for the afternoon, and for tea, and somehow it was never the same between us afterward. I never could show them through the place with any sense of confidence. `This is the drawing room,' pulling back these tall oaken doors with latches as big as books. `The billiard room.' They were never anxious to play hide-andseek or sardines or any of the you're-it games we played in their houses. `Oh no. Let's not.' They must have thought that I could push at a paneling and disappear into secret passages and creep around behind the walls while they wandered nervously down the corridors with the suits of armor, and the war paintings, and the occasional grandfather clock.