Fin & Lady: A Novel by Cathleen Schine Page B

Europe on an ocean liner. She’s never taken an airplane in her life, and I don’t blame her.”
    Lady and Uncle Ty? Impossible. Of course she had jilted him. He was so obviously inferior to her with his trim, insolent manner. Lady, unconstrained and rash, afoot and lighthearted —Lady could never have capitulated to Tyler Morrison and his little spinning hat.
    “Our Miss Lady is foolish, but she’s no fool,” Mabel said.
    Our Miss Lady. Fin smiled. It sounded like a church. Or a television show.
    “Yeah,” he said. “Our Miss Lady is no fool.”
    “Foolish, though.”
    “Yeah. Foolish.”
    “But no fool.”
    “She wouldn’t get married to him again, would she?” he asked Mabel.
    “That,” Mabel said, “is the question.”
    Lady appeared, bleary-eyed. “What is the question?” she said. She poured herself coffee. “My head is pounding.”
    “Will you marry Uncle Ty,” Fin said, “this time?”
    Lady frowned at Mabel.
    “The truth will set you free, Miss Lady,” Mabel said.
    “Well, I didn’t marry him, did I?” Lady said. “Good grief. What is this, the Spanish Inquisition? I was eighteen years old, for crying out loud.”
    “It was one of those arranged child marriages,” Mabel said to Fin. “Like the Hindus.”
    “Close enough,” Lady said.
    “You’re not eighteen now,” Fin said.
    “Neither are you. And I’m your guardian until you are, and I have a headache. So dry up.”
    Lady drank her coffee.
    “Hangover?” Fin asked.
    “No.” She glared at Fin. Then: “ Yes. So sue me.”
    “So will you? Marry him this time?”
    “You don’t own me, Fin,” she said. “Or you,” she said to Mabel. Then she started singing the Leslie Gore song.
    She sang it all the way through. It was one of her favorites.

 
    The Promised Land
    Lady was unpredictable, that was the one thing you could predict. That’s what Mabel told Fin. So every morning he woke up in the rose-colored bedroom that had belonged to Lady’s mother and looked out the window to try to predict the weather instead. But the city sky would be just the same—smooth, metallic—and he knew it would be hot, the same as yesterday, and he waited for the day that would not be the same, dreading it, sure of it, curious and impatient.
    It arrived in July.
    “You’re up,” Fin said to a bustling, showered, beaming Lady. “It’s so early.”
    “When you’re up, you’re up,” Lady said. “And when you’re down, you’re down / And when you’re only half-way up / You’re neither up nor down.”
    “Okay.” What else could he say? What do you say to a nursery rhyme? She spread jam on a piece of toast. Even that, even the way her hand held the knife—it was not the way other people spread strawberry jam. Swipe, swipe—giant motions, graceful, but really giant. As if she were wielding a sword.
    Mabel was there earlier than usual, too. “Pack your bag and grab your hat,” she said grimly. “We’re setting sail for the promised land.”
    A sail? The Cristoforo Colombo  … “Capri?”
    “Capri?” Lady said. “What are you, the beautiful people? No, no, we’re going to Greenwich Village!”
    “With the ugly people. You got your bongo drums?” Mabel asked Fin. “That’s what they do down there. They drum and they sing nasty old field songs. They wear sandals on their dirty feet. They cohabitate. And they dress raggedy. That’s where your guardian, who is charged by the United States of America to take care of you, that’s where she’s taking you.” She poured him a glass of orange juice. “And me.”
    “Why didn’t you tell me?” Fin said. “Is the house ready?”
    “No. Nearly done. But I have to get out of here,” Lady said, almost frantically. “Why does nobody understand that? I have to get away from here.”
    A gilded cage day again. They had become quite frequent, paralleling the frequent visits of Tyler Morrison.
    “You could go to boarding school. With Uncle Ty.”
    “Uncle Ty,” Lady