Fin & Lady: A Novel Read Online Free PDF Page A

both. And so he wondered: Did she sing “Whatever Lola Wants” while standing on the piano in the lounge of the Cristoforo Colombo or did he dream it? Did she throw a glass of champagne at their father when he called her heartless, a disgrace to womanhood? Did she appear beside Fin’s bunk one morning and stroke his hair? Did she cry and hold his hand to her lips and kiss it? Or had he dreamed it all?

 
    “Isn’t it terrific?”
    Six years later, when their paths crossed again so fatefully, Fin asked Lady: Was it all a feverish dream? The singing? The dawn visit? The thrown drink? Even the kiss on the hand?
    He asked her in the car on the drive from Pomfret to Manhattan, the drive from his old life to his new life. He stared straight ahead, afraid of this quick, herky-jerky young woman who was all the family he had left: a herky-jerky family, chain-smoking, driving with one hand into the setting sun. Then Lady said, “Finny, remember our voyage?” and Fin blurted out, “Did you really throw a drink at Daddy? Did you sing on the piano? On the ship?”
    Lady glanced his way, laughed, looked back at the road, said, “Who the hell knows? I was schnockered, Finny. Across the Atlantic and back again, drunk as a boiled owl.”
    Fin said, “I had a fever.”
    But Lady was already on to the next topic. “Now, a trip I would like to take with you would be India. I would like to go to India someday. Find a guru. Perché no , eh, Finino?”
    “Okay.”
    “Okay? That’s all? India , Fin.”
    The drive was long, and once they pulled onto the thruway, conversation in the convertible was pretty much impossible. Wind blew Fin’s hair back sometimes, sometimes blew it in his face. He had fought with his grandparents about his hair. They remembered bowl cuts from the Depression.
    “We can afford a barber,” they said.
    “I don’t want a haircut,” Fin said. “From anyone.”
    “He looks like Prince Charles,” Fin’s mother said fondly, petting his wavy hair as if he were a spaniel.
    “Princess Charles is more like it,” his grandmother said.
    The dog sat on Fin’s lap during the first part of the long drive. Fin’s legs fell asleep, but he wouldn’t disturb Gus.
    “Quite a lap dog you’ve got there, Fin.”
    Ha ha. Very funny. He held the dog closer, rested his face on top of Gus’s silky head, closed his eyes into the wind.
    After they pulled into a rest stop to use the bathroom, the dog moved on his own to the backseat. Lady put the radio on, but the noise on the thruway was so loud they couldn’t hear anything, and she turned it off. A truck driver pulled up next to them and honked his horn, pointing at Lady’s legs. She gave him the finger. She smoked—nonstop. But near Bridgeport, she flicked her cigarette out the window and reached over and took Fin’s hand. The day was fading, and to their left a large power plant sparkled with lights.
    “Family is family,” Lady said. Yelled, actually, above the wind and traffic noise.
    “Yup,” Fin yelled back. And mine is gone. Except for you. He held her hand tighter.
    He must have fallen asleep. The radio was blasting Peter and Gordon. It was dark, though not a true dark, not the kind of dark they had at home. But this was home, he reminded himself. New York was home now, not Pomfret. This was the dimly remembered city dark, the deep black of night washed in daubs of colored light—the streetlamps and banks of windows, the traffic lights, the blinking restaurant signs and glaring storefronts. A world without love —the song was being sung directly to him. Yet there was Lady, her face lit by streetlights. Would Lady love him? She was singing along. She swayed to the music.
    When she noticed Fin was awake, she smiled, a large warm smile. She put a hand out, took his hand again. But this time, she brought it to her lips and gently kissed it. Just like the dream on the ship. The schnockered dream that was real.
    Fin never forgot that moment. It was when he