Free Fin & Lady: A Novel by Cathleen Schine

inside. He could hear someone playing scales on a saxophone. Someone had put bras on a line to dry. Greenwich Village was everything he had hoped it would be.

 
    “Just like the Bible”
    A week or two after they’d moved downtown, Lady came sweeping into Fin’s room. She was wearing a short dress with tiny straps she called spaghetti straps. Fin thought for years that she had made that up to amuse him: spaghetti straps. She was going out to dinner and a movie with some friends. She sat on the floor in her dress. She was made up, but had no shoes on. She said, “Finny, I’ve got it!”
    Fin had been arranging toy soldiers on his pillow.
    “Oh, Finny, none of that,” Lady said, eyeing the soldiers. “We’re pacifists, babe. Didn’t I mention that? Well, now you know. Now listen, I’ve thought it over carefully, and I have the answer to what we can do with you while you’re here.”
    “ While I’m here?” He was going someplace else? So soon? When did he have to leave? Was Lady coming, too? “Where am I going?”
    “You’re not going anywhere, for the love of Mike. But we have to have something for you to do, n’est pas ?”
    “ N’est pas! ” Fin agreed, relieved.
    She was shimmering in the late-evening sun, her shoulders so thin, bony compared with his mother’s. Except when she was sick. But Lady wasn’t sick. She was healthy and alive, she smelled like wild roses, intoxicating. She had painted her toenails a bright white. He thought she was magnificent.
    Then she said, “You will help me get married!”
    Fin sat silent and shocked.
    A husband? What had happened to Fin and Lady, the orphan family? Would the husband be an orphan, too? But the husband would obviously be Tyler Morrison, and Fin would have to help Lady marry him. How could Lady have changed her mind so fast? It was Fin’s fault, that’s how. Fin hanging around Greenwich Village, where everyone was groovy and free except him, an eleven-year-old with nothing to do. It was Fin. He was holding Lady back in her quest for a big life.
    “You don’t have to marry Uncle Ty,” he cried out. “I’ll be good. I’ll play by myself. I’ll help Mabel. I’ll make friends, too…”
    “Uncle Ty? Good God, no. We’re downtown now, Fin.”
    A new husband he had not even met? What if the new husband did not want an eleven-year-old brother-in-law?
    “Who?” he asked. “When? When are you getting married?”
    “Well, let’s see … I’m twenty-four. The deadline is twenty-five. After that you really do become pathetic. So we have a year. A little less than a year.”
    Fin tried not to let his relief show.
    “Just like the Bible,” Lady said. “Except that was seven years. And I won’t have to share my husband with my sister.”
    “Because you don’t have a sister.”
    “Well, that’s one reason. So, what do you think, Fin? Can you help me find someone to fall in love with in a year?”
    “Don’t worry. Everyone falls in love with you, Lady.”
    “That’s not what I said.”
    Fin thought about that for a moment.
    “Twenty-five,” Lady was saying. “Then it’s all over. How’s your Shakespeare, Fin?”
    “I watched the Beatles in A Midsummer Night’s Dream on television.”
    “How about Taming of the Shrew ?”
    “Uh-uh,” Fin said, but Lady was already reciting, standing, one hand on her heart, her other arm flung out.
    “I will be master of what is mine own:
    She is my goods, my chattels; she is my house,
    My household stuff, my field, my barn,
    My horse, my ox, my ass, my any thing.”
    She poked Fin’s chest. “I don’t want a master. And I don’t want to be an ass.”
    “Me, either.” But Fin was thinking more of the barn and the ox, which was almost a cow.
    “And that’s where you come in, Finino.”
    Fin thought, Me? I can’t marry Lady; then, for one fleeting second: Can I?
    “You really have to help me. One year to find one, a good one, one I’m in love with. Is that too much to