Free Fin & Lady: A Novel by Cathleen Schine Page A

ask?”
    “No!”
    They shook hands.
    “One year, Fin. One year, twelve months, three hundred and sixty-five days. Or thereabouts.
    “No lemons,” she added. “There are a lot of lemons out there,” and she left the room trailing smoke and scent and confusion.
    Fin was able to begin his search for Lady’s future husband the next day. He wasn’t sure how Lady had managed to make so many friends so quickly, but almost every night there was a party at her house, some planned, some spontaneous. People dropped in, Fin noticed, as if they were in Connecticut bringing round a pie, but these people came late, after midnight sometimes, and brought not pie but a bottle of bourbon or wine. Fin sat at the top of the stairs in his pajamas and watched the young men and women drinking and laughing. And talking. He had never seen people talk so much.
    Sometimes he came downstairs, ostensibly to get a glass of milk from the kitchen, but really to see them talk as well as to hear them. Stagnating in the swampland of collectivism . Extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice, moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue . Then they said something about being a crazy cat. At first Fin thought they were talking about Krazy Kat and asked if they knew if Krazy Kat was a girl or a boy. The cartoons had always unnerved him. But they said, No, they wished Goldwater was a cartoon, he should be a cartoon, he was all too real.
    He watched them dance, waving their arms and jiggling crazily. He watched them argue. Young men, standing so close they nearly touched, would shout at each other, forefingers poking the other’s chest. There were factions, so many factions, musical factions, political factions.
    “What’s a Trotskyite?” he would ask the next morning. “Who’s A. J. Muste? Why shouldn’t honkies play trumpet? What’s a honky? Where’s Port Huron? What pill?”
    Gus roamed among the partygoers, his nose occasionally sniffing crotches regardless of faction, his tail knocking over cocktail glasses, his loud, shrill bark punctuating the music.
    The New York City Fin encountered with Lady was utterly different from his earlier years of safe and comfortable routine. Lady did not believe in routine, or safety, or, frequently, in comfort, either. Lady’s downtown world was one of urgent, restless urbanity. Everything about his new home was full of color and noise and movement. To Fin it was as good as a circus.

 
    Spumoni
    What you don’t know about Lady, because I haven’t told you, is that she was a great reader, and reading was something she was determined to share with Fin. It was she, as I’ve mentioned, who gave Fin the Tintin album on the ship and translated it aloud as they gazed at the bright, clear drawings. It was she who sent him a copy of Just So Stories on his sixth birthday, which his mother read to him. It was she who gave him The Phantom Tollbooth , Huckleberry Finn , and Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland . Later, when she saw that his interest in toy soldiers was abiding, she presented him with a copy of H. G. Wells’s Little Wars (the man was a pacifist, after all), and a copy of Tristram Shandy , so he could read of Uncle Toby’s bulwarks. He never read past Uncle Toby, but he never forgot him, either.
    On the day Fin met Biffi Deutsch, he was reading The Spy Who Loved Me , which was not at all like Chitty Chitty Bang Bang and sometimes confusing, but he could not be seen on the steps reading a book written for a child. Biffi was a Hungarian Jew who as a small child had survived the war in Budapest, survived the invading Germans and then survived the invading Soviets. Fin knew nothing of this when he met Biffi, only learning of it much later, from an obituary of Biffi’s mother. Odd, to know so little of a man who had meant so much to you, Fin told me once.
    After the war, Biffi and his mother came to the United States to join Biffi’s father, an art dealer who had been safely stranded in New York