The Death and Life of Zebulon Finch, Volume 1 (21 page)

XIII.

L
EATHER CONDUCTED THE FIRST ROUND
of interviews as would a sane man. One, he greeted his visitors decked out like an
au courant
gent of the 1910s: fitted three-piece suit with thigh-length double-breasted jacket; shirt starched to hell and back; fat-knotted tie; trousers creased like shark fins; hair slicked back to an otter's specifications. Two, he met them in an urbane setting: a drawing room beautified by a crackling fire and fresh nosegays from Mary's garden, as well as a table of tea, crustless sandwiches, jellies, and pound cake.

Three, he did not wear a large metal mask upon his head.

For these reasons, the early interviewees were the lucky ones. The New York phrenologist, for example, who canvassed my skull with tape measure to appraise what he insisted were the twenty-seven different organs of my brain. Or the French hypnotist, who claimed that, through suggestion alone, he could deliver me from
folie de doute
(my apparently piteous lack of self-confidence), thereby facilitating the memory of the events that led to my
petite problème.

It was all I could do not to kick these shysters in the nuts. Leather, of course, took boxes of breathless notes. His professionalism began to erode only with the arrival of the spiritualists. Still he wore the suit, still he used the drawing room. But his face and neck were an alarming pink from last-minute treatments of the Isolator. The seers
and clairvoyants put on their best shows regardless, and we were treated to lively seances and amusing memoranda from the spirit realm. Leather tried to keep up with his notes, but it was a challenge, what with those fat droplets of sweat smearing his ink.

You are a perceptive reader. You see where this is going?

Away went the tie. Then the coat. Next the tea and sandwiches. At last went the drawing room itself. Soon Leather was receiving each aspirant fraud in the lab itself, devolved by then into a grotto of haphazard, broken instruments and a Revelation Almanac in disarray. No wonder the tarot card reader, a turbaned Italian matron, could not complete a reading of me before gathering her deck and scuttling away. Leather paid her little attention. His hand kept straying to stroke the Isolator, its sumptuous felt surface, sensuous eye windows, and long, ridged oxygen hose.

Mary sent me looks of panicked appeal when we crossed paths. Merle, herself an untamed bitch, sniffed the alpha dog's rabidness and laid low. Even Gladys sensed the bad juju and kept clear of her father, dragging away her ceramic dolls by the feet, their once-beautiful heads of hair serving as mops for floor dust.

Better than the dust of the street,
thought I.
I must make the doctor see the family he is driving to bankruptcy.

The idea of forcing a tête-à-tête gave me misgivings, but so did watching the devolution of the single man in history who'd extended to me both sensitivity and respect. A truthful, if uncomfortable, encounter might make me a better son; was it too much to hope that it might inspire the doctor to be a better father?

Severed from Harvard, Leather had nothing but time, so I needed only follow the disconsolate strains of “
Moro, losso, al mio duolo
” to find him during a spell of repose. The Victrola had been
moved to the laboratory and was the single piece of equipment kept spotless. That night I found the doctor draped across a hardbacked chair, the Isolator perched high upon his head like a welder's cap. His eyes dragged and his skin was yellow and glossy.

I stood there until he gasped.

“Right there, you hear it?”

Saliva ribboned his lips. It was a nauseating but common sight; the excess of oxygen acted as low-creeping fog, filling his lungs with dew.

“I did not,” said I.

“It was the sound of a single sense split into multiple nonsenses, and then those nonsenses fornicating in orgy to conceive a new sense. Gesualdo, he understands me. The question is, Finch, have you found your way to understanding him?”

“My ears, I think, have heard too much burlesque.”

A bleary smile stretched across his flushed face.

“That's Harvard talk. They would be the first to damn my dear Gesualdo. Did I tell you he murdered three people?”

“Dr. Leather, please forgive me for saying so. But it is you, I worry, who is murdering three people. Your wife. Your daughter. Yourself? That is, if you do not patch your broken path.”

“A few small deaths in a wider war. What difference could it make? Now, Gesualdo, the story goes, returned from a fabricated hunting trip to catch his wife
in flagrante delicto
with a duke. He killed them both, of course, and displayed their corpses outside the castle for passers-by to enjoy. There was much to enjoy, too; the conniving wife had been stabbed twenty-eight times and her body was shortly violated by a passing monk—so it goes, Finch, so it goes. There was a son, too, whom Gesualdo suspected as being the offspring of the
duke. Gesualdo swung the boy on a high swing, back and forth, back and forth, until he was rattled to death, while below a choir sang madrigals exalting the beauty of death.”

“Back and forth, yes—this is the futile motion of the cheats and shammers you bring to this house. Have you lost your way so badly?”

“Lost my way? Gesualdo himself was an alchemist as well as a composer, and did not shrink from human experimentation. Had
he
lost his way? These passions led to his lifelong insomnia, further so-called insanity, and death at the hands of his servants, whom he ordered to flagellate his body with maximal barbarism. Had
he
lost his way?”

“You compare yourself to this musician again and again, and to what end?”

“Gesualdo's madness
was
his genius. The Harvardians think I am mad, and, indeed, I hope that I am. Mad as Eratosthenes, as Darwin, as Columbus!”

My efforts were useless. Had I urinated in the doctor's face, he'd have likely applauded my inspired lunacy and taken fevered notes upon piss-soaked pages.

The Isolator clamped down over his face.

“I wonder.” (
Hweeeeee . . . fweeeeee . . .
) “If I might use a hose. To attach the Victrola. To the Isolator.” (
Hweeeeee . . . fweeeeee . . .
) “Create a pristine capsule. Of musical enlightenment.” (
Hweeeeee . . . fweeeeee . . .
) “Do you, Finch. Suppose that I might?”

Limits of decency exist even for walking corpses. So I shan't tell you of the voodoo priestess the doctor shipped in from Haiti to distill from me a driblet of Death, a woman of copper skin and gray bristled hair whose feats included having foretold the recent sinking of the
RMS Titanic
. No, I shan't tell you how she dappled my face with
sweet-smelling paint and danced along to a tuneless drum. I shan't tell you how she kissed my ear, how her tears moistened my flesh, and how I felt rising from her body a warm sorrow that extended backward to include countless sympathetic ancestors.

Because what service would such information provide but to depress you? Instead I shall tell you how, partway into the woman's ritual, the doctor took up the Isolator, asking, “You don't mind if I . . . ?” and then suctioned so hard that the hose crimped. I shall tell you how he scoffed as this woman performed an augury that any damn fool could see was legitimate; how he giggled at the vial of Death she presented before he dashed it to the floor; how he lifted the oxygen tank and brought it down upon her back; how she scrabbled away on all fours while he chortled laments about the charlatanism of the Negro hegira; how she made it away bleeding only because I entangled the legs of the helmeted maniac.

That I shall tell you because it is important.

XIV.

I
N THE FALL OF 1912
the creditors took the furniture.

Merle came alive; in fact, she was incensed. A typical young miss of the era would have shrunk from the burly menfolk bashing their wide shoulders through our narrow archways. Not this daughter of mine. While the lady of the house wept in the corner, Merle nipped the workers' heels. One minute she foamed with newfangled curses: “You meddlesome boob!” “You swinish dingbat!” The next, she affected a faint as they hauled away a favorite piece: “Oh, Dearest Lord, not the bedframe! Anything but my Italian bedframe!”

Merle's frenzy might have possessed some absurdist humor (none of the furniture, after all, belonged to her) if not for the poignant path of her fall, and rise, and fall; having at last settled onto a summit of luxury, she was now being inched back toward the precipice of poverty. Exhausted, she collapsed onto a six-legged gilded French sofa; they took the sofa. Demoralized, she crumpled onto a Persian rug of curvilinear motif and raspberry color; they took the rug. From there she trembled upon the bare floor, the only thing she, or any of us, could count on.

The Leathers, after all, had to eat. The doctor watched dispassionately from the third floor, where he held himself against a bannister and gnawed upon a stale wad of bread. Three stories down, Dixon, just as silent, swept each crumb into a white-gloved hand.

In the winter of 1912 they took everything else: the Pierce-Racine touring car, the four-in-hand draft horses, each urn and lamp and mirror, every last piece of family silver. And, of course, the art: earth-hued neoclassical nudes, glowering portraiture, and countless marble busts, each of which glared in disappointment as it was packed into a crate.

In the spring of 1913 they took the clothes. Wardrobes were halved, then halved again. Mary became emotional as she made the calculations of which gowns would fetch the most at resale—the prettiest ones, always the prettiest ones. Gladys handled it with less poise, sniveling as she watched her favorite items of pink and lavender being dragged away as if to the gallows. Merle, of course, was the worst. My, how she shrieked when Dixon came asking for items to sell. She gave up nothing, not a single damned glove or garter.

In the summer of 1913 they took Gladys—or, at least, they tried, a delegation of concerned womenfolk from a local orphanage who came knocking. I watched from an upper window. The woman in charge apologized to no end as she relayed the leaves of gossip that had blown their way, stories regarding the doctor's severance from Harvard, fantastical experiments, corpses in the garden, and, of course, the drain of assets that had been streaming from the front door for months for all to see. Might it not be best to remove the child from so toxic a situation before harm befell her?

It was Mary's breaking point. Though her face burned in shame, she cast away the meddlers. That night, for a change, I was not the only sleepless one; Mary's forceful exhortations to her husband stretched on for hours, no doubt every second of it necessary, for the doctor had behaved of late as if the only plane of reality was the third floor.

What an address Mary must have delivered! For the first time in two years, Leather materialized for breakfast. Mary, Gladys, and Merle stopped mid-chew and Dixon dropped a bowl of fruit. Leather ignored the reaction and sat, his red eyes the most vivid accessory of a colorful ensemble, the last one he owned: a white shirt with high collar, bold orange-and-brown tie, long white-on-black-striped jacket, and matching pants turned up at the cuffs.

“A good day to all,” said he, reaching for the bread.

Appetites all around were lost. Never having had one, I leaned over the bowls of hominy and lyonnaise potatoes (our meals had gone downscale) and scrutinized the doctor. Without his oxygen tank, he labored to breathe, yet managed to display that stiff upper lip we Americans had heard so much about, pushing morsels of food past antagonistic teeth despite how they nauseated him.

Mary, oh intrepid one, chose to downplay the event.

“Doctor,” asked she, “will you be having tea?”

“Tea.” Dixon echoed the word from a stupor. “Yes, very good!”

Leather lifted a hand to halt him.

“I wish, instead, to have a word.” He brushed his sleeves in a fair facsimile of refinement. “This morning I shall travel to the college to see Dr. Obediah Cockshut. You may recall his name, Mother; he is the last man in that crumbling asylum who possesses even a grain of vision. His study on congenital cataracts is a landmark, and few men in the world know as much about syphilis. If anyone will hear me out, it is Cockshut.”

“And what,” ventured the wife, “will you ask of him?”

“To come here.” The insolent tilt of his chin dared anyone to complain. “To dine with us.” He cut his eyes at me. “To see for himself the metaphorical goldmine I work day and night to excavate. I do
not relish bringing another miner into my quarry. But I no longer see a choice. Cockshut, of course, will agree with my assessment and use his agency to convince the college to reinstate my funding. He must!”

If you desire an unabridged catalog of Dr. Leather's failings, I can supply it, free of charge, provided that your shelves are strong enough to bear the weight. There is no doubting, however, that he was a master persuader. That same eve he returned to our nervous lot victorious from what he portrayed as a superlative presentation, though he made us wait an hour to receive that news, having staggered inside as he did, gasping for the Isolator.

After some oxygen, though, how he paraded and puffed and whipped us into militarism! Dr. and Mrs. Cockshut would arrive at our house the following night and everything, absolutely everything, stressed he, rested in the balance.

Leather snapped his heels at Dixon, who shot up to his full height of twelve or fifteen feet. What satisfaction the old butler found in being ordered about again! Cockshut, barked Leather, would require the finest whiskey! The best cigars! Playing cards, too, and do not shy from ribald designs, for Cockshut fancied himself an accomplished lecher as well as player of lansquenet. Naturally we would need a full staff, too, so Dixon would need to hire and train, for tomorrow night only, a housekeeper, underbutler, two valets, two maids, two footmen, a cook, and a scullery maid. Such an expense would leave the Leathers without a cent to their name, but this was the ineludible gamble.

Dixon and I had our differences, but by Gød, his
“Yes, sir!”
stirred me to my bones! This event might mark the household's last stand, but we would make that stand as a family. Leather clapped and the butler shot away as if he had shed thirty years.

Leather spun upon his heel and faced his astonished wife. Mrs.
Leather, said he, was tasked with marshaling what few pieces of furniture and finery remained and reorganizing them into a few key rooms, while shutting off routes to emptied spaces so that the Cockshuts would find no evidence of desperation.

The doctor widened his focus to include me. His individualized attention typically clenched me inside an invisible fist of fear, but this time I chewed that fear, swallowed it, and stood tall.

“Mr. Finch, you are tomorrow's centerpiece. Yours is the part of Dapper Young Man, if you think you have the chops to play it. None of your dissension, please; remember what happens should you fail. The city street will become our operating table, broken glass our set of scalpels. Concentrate, Finch, upon who you could be should you prevail in this performance.”

Performance.
The word poked at me.

“Should there be seating cards?” he asked himself. “Aye, there should! On yours, Finch, let us indulge in showmanship.”

Showmanship.
That word poked me as well.

“‘The Revolutionary Zebulon Finch.' No, that connotes rebellion. ‘The Trailblazing Zebulon Finch'? No, not enough. ‘The Thaumaturgic Zebulon Finch'? Well, that's too much. ‘The Astonishing Zebulon Finch'?”

At last I found my tongue.

“No,” said I. “Not that one.”

“And what of me?”

We turned as one to find Merle, her fine chin pointed at the chandelier, her hands clasped knuckle-white. She had not made a direct address to the doctor in what might have been a year. Her chest, as usual, rose and fell rapidly, out of anticipation or wrath it was eternally difficult to say.

“You?” Leather's inspirational timbre flattened. “You are to stay away.”

Her eyes slitted.

“I'm not invited to dinner?”

“Young lady, you are not invited to anything. Your entire presence here has been uninvited.”

Her cheeks darkened to scarlet.

“I have every right to sit alongside my father.”

“You crave our food, nothing more. For once you shall not have it.”

“Papa.” Her lip quivered. “Tell him that I may join you.”

Relations between Merle and me had been on gravel footing from the outset. But since her veranda outburst, I'd made it my purpose to shield her from Leather's aberrations until I earned her trust, at which point together we might abscond. Taking a stance between Merle and Leather was a delicate proposition.

“I . . . see no real harm,” said I. “Can't she—”

“Papa.”
Leather mocked her plosives. “A cat mimics affection better. You are sub-cat; I'll grant you status of leech. Except leeches have value in a laboratory setting, whereas your style of bloodsucking is futility itself.”

Long had my pride been abraded when a man showed indifference to my opinion. I might be weak of limb, but not too weak to take up an iron paperweight and bludgeon the doctor's egocentric skull! What prevented me was simple confusion; I had little experience acting on the behalf of anyone but myself. Into the space left by my inaction tumbled the quick-tongued Merle.

“How dare you say this to me,” said she.

“I am sure you have been called much worse,” said Leather. “Show your face at this dinner and be very sorry that you did. Have I made
myself abundantly clear? Have I used words small enough for you to decipher? Indicate, girl, indicate!”

“You are the one who will be sorry. You have no idea how sorry.”

With that, she turned and ran. Her lovely skirts made a colorful fuss, putting to shame my continued silence; I stood there mouthing the air like a beached fish.

“Mr. Dixon,” called Leather.

From the next room: “Sir?”

“A third footman for tomorrow. Stationed outside the brat's room. There's a good man.”

Activity hastened the afternoon and evening. The quietude of the house at night supplied me additional hours to consider my duties, both to Leather and Merle. I got up, as I was wont to do, and commenced upon my usual directionless wander—perhaps the last of its kind should the next day's event go awry. I got no farther than the second-floor landing. There stood my daughter in a sleeping gown, her hair brushed to perfection and her pale face aglow through a veil of moonlight.

I advanced so that we stood upon equal footing and adopted a smile, defense against what I feared would be castigation for failing to land her a dinner invite.

“I see you have inherited my insomnia,” said I.

Merle snatched the lapel of my bedshirt and her sharp little underbite gnashed at my chin.

“I'll stay away from his hoity-toity affair. What choice have I? But that means you have to succeed on your own. Think of Mrs. Leather if my welfare isn't enough for you. Think of her daughter. Think of them on the street eating garbage. Make Dr. Cockman, whatever his name is, make him see who you really are, see everything you're really
capable of. You show him that, he can't deny us anything. No one can.”

Johnny had not been a son, but even at his besotted end he'd been more childlike than this girl. Had scar tissue hardened the raw vulnerability that had once caused her to shatter a mirror with her fist?

“Of course,” said I. “I shall do my best—”

“If you are my father, then you will do what is
required
. Anything that is required to take care of me.”

Small, simple, sensible words, were they not? Yet they burrowed into me like metal screws, leaving unsealable gouges that blooded with a single repulsive fact. Daddy's little girl? Perhaps. But Merle Ruby Watson was, by then, older than her papa.

And, as you shall see, craftier as well.