Lily White

by Susan Isaacs

  “Where were you going to get married?”

  “The next city. He said Boston. He hadn’t worked Boston for over ten years. I said: ‘Boston? Like maybe Miami Beach for a honeymoon?’ He said all those rich old widows down there were too smart about cons. They almost expect it. But he said we’d just get away from Long Island after Bobette was done and figure it out.”

  “What did he do with Bobette’s money?” I asked.

  “He never got it! He was still working on her.” But I knew that Bobette had taken out forty-eight thousand dollars the afternoon of the day she was murdered. Mary went on: “Norman said Bobette was one tough nut, but once he got through her shell …”

  “What?”

  “He could tell. She was going to be real juicy!”

  Six

  Catholics say that a child of seven has attained the age of reason. Not being Catholic, there was no reason for Sylvia White to know of this milestone. Still, she was vaguely aware that a seventh birthday had significance. So she redecorated Lee’s bedroom.

  Down came the wallpaper with the pastel lambs, off came the yellow-and-white gingham bedspread. A shaggy persimmon carpet was laid. A couch covered in a heavy baby-pink cotton with a design of interlocking triangles of raspberry and burnt orange was brought in to serve as a bed.

  For the prepubescent daughters of the aggressively upwardly mobile, a pink-and-orange palette was not unheard-of in the annals of 1950s interior decoration, but on the North Shore of Long Island, Lee’s room was the first of its coloration. It earned Sylvia kudos from the group of fashionable suburban women who were her friends: “I’m speechless. Gorgeous!” “I couldn’t believe … pink and orange! And it works. That Sylvia … gifted.” “Beyond gifted: an artist!”

  Aesthetics is rarely an issue with a second grader, but it had to be for Lee. She missed her pastel lambs. However, since she had, indeed, reached the age of reason, she understood what really mattered to her parents: clothes first, furniture second. She was a quick study. A stylistic faux pas would invariably provoke a fierce reaction—what she thought of as Mommy’s Mad Breathing, a snort of annoyance amplified by smoker’s phlegm. It didn’t take her long to figure out how to avoid it. When her mother would thrust, say, a swatch of tangerine polished cotton under her nose and demand: “What do you think?,” she learned first to check which expression Sylvia was wearing—the “Ick” or the “I love it”—and then to respond accordingly.

  Not that Lee was a submissive child. Far from it. But having figured out that her mother cared primarily about appearances, all Lee needed to do to be deemed a dutiful daughter was to use her nailbrush, say “Thank you” frequently, smile a lot, and cede to Sylvia all decisions about clothes and interior design. Silence on the subject of the day’s barrettes seemed not too great a price to pay for freedom. Then she was on her own. No clandestine nocturnal cookie retrievals for this kid. No oxygen deprivation under the covers to hide book and flashlight. Lee could gorge on Mallomars. No one would stop her from reading and rereading The Bobbsey Twins’ Merry Days Indoors and Out till the wee hours in the bright circle of light from a one-hundred-watt bulb beneath a pumpkin-color glass shade shaped like a coolie hat that hung over her bed.

  By age seven, Lee realized (as she sat on Sylvia’s pièce de résistance, a lounge chair shaped like an amoeba, covered with an apricot-and-shocking-pink awning-stripe fabric) that deference to her mother’s fashion whims was the best way, actually the only way, to have fun with her mother. A trip to the city to buy a new spring coat and Mary Janes could be a laugh-filled lark: a “just us girls” lunch in a restaurant with aqua tablecloths and hot popovers; making fun of Ick dresses, like the one with cherries pinned on the bosom at Best & Company; dropping in on Daddy’s fur store, where Mommy tried on all the new styles and Dolly gave her a piece of chinchilla to stroke. She understood that saying “Gosh!” when her mother modeled a three-quarter-length silver fox was politically wise. It showed that Lee knew what was important in life—fur and style—and it made her whiny, I-want-to-go-home little sister look even worse.

  At age four, Robin Renée White had traded in the infantile digestive irritability that had kept her awake and screaming twenty hours a day for a permanent colic of the personality. Nothing made her truly happy. She never giggled. The company of other children made her edgy. Playground noise gave her headaches. She could become agitated by a game of Candyland. Of course, there were times—listening to “Bibbidi-Bobbidi-Boo” on her Cinderella record, cutting out dresses for paper dolls—that Robin’s lovely heart-shaped face took on a touchingly soft expression. Sylvia and Leonard would glance at each other and exhale a sign of relief: Maybe the worst is over. Maybe now we can have the photographer come back and she’ll smile and not wail in terror—“Oooo! Wooo!”—when the flashbulb goes off. (In fairness to Robin, it should be noted that on these rare occasions when her taut nerves relaxed and she began to smile, Lee was not beyond sneaking up from behind the moment Sylvia and Leonard’s backs were turned and poking Robin hard and fast in the ribs, causing the little girl to lose the little equanimity she possessed and break into demented screams.)

  Still, Robin was competition. No doubt about it. She was far prettier than Lee, if one’s definition of pretty is huge eyes in a waiflike face, and a rosebud of a mouth. Her daintiness was memorable. Lee was the sturdy sort: Her body was saved from the inevitable consequences of Mallomars only because she had picked up a stray gene for athleticism. (That particular gene had last turned up in the girls’ great-great-grandfather on their father’s side, who was the fastest runner in exurban Pinsk—a not unwelcome talent, considering the proclivities of the neighboring peasants.) Otherwise, Lee was generic Girl. Her brown braided hair was neither straight enough to gleam in the sunlight nor curly enough to render her adorable. Her features were certainly pleasant but not singular enough to be remarked upon.

  Robin was also smarter than Lee, if intelligence can be measured by standardized intelligence tests, age of onset of reading readiness, and ability to view long division as an intriguing process rather than an affliction. But that would come later. At four, smart little Robin had a tendency to make derisive tsk-tsk noises whenever her seven-year-old sister expressed an opinion—a frequent occurrence. That Lee merely ignored this scorn and kept on talking was an early, conspicuous, and of course unheeded sign that she was cut out to be a litigator.

  From her lounge chair by the window, Lee could see the downward swoop of the lawn, the kidney-shaped swimming pool in its summer turquoise splendor. (The Whites’ house itself, a not ungraceful assemblage of wood, fieldstone, and glass rectangles, designed by an architect who had studied under an architect who had worked for Frank Lloyd Wright in 1937, sat on two acres of velvet green lawn.) Lee could see, beyond the cabana—an overpriced shed with two changing rooms and a wet bar—that her mother was creating art. Or trying to.

  Sylvia White was living disproof of the myth of Jewish intellectual superiority. She had scant imagination, hardly any curiosity, and only basic intuitive smarts. What she had was style. She looked smart. She was always a pleasure to behold—even in rolled-up, paint-stained cut off khakis and the old white oxford shirt of Leonard’s she used for painting. Her honey-colored hair was tied back in a blue bandanna, so if a stiff breeze came along, it would not blow her hair onto the wet canvas that stood on the easel before her.

  The painting! From where Lee was sitting, it looked as if Sylvia was stabbing her picture. But Lee understood that her mother was making leaves on the sycamore she’d been attempting to capture for the last three months, stippling green on naked gray-brown branches with the flat of her brush. Pow, pow, pow, went the brush. Lee was too far away to make out the details of the canvas, although she had already seen enough of her mother’s work to know the truth: lousy. Even a seven-year-old child with almost no artistic ability could tell that Sylvia’s trees were flat, lifeless things. Ditto with Sylvia’s still lifes—orange sections and a hammer, a vase of
flowers beside a hatbox … to say nothing of her portrait of Duchess, the collie. Sylvia had hung that one over the fireplace in the living room. Lee watched her father sneaking fast, abashed glances at it. A couple of months later, it was taken down and replaced with a picture of black squiggles that she heard her father say, not without pride, cost enough to float a battleship.

  Thus, at the age of reason, Lee had already grasped her mother’s mediocrity and deduced that she cared deeply only about superficialities. Well, with one exception. Lee recognized that there was a single genuine passion in her mother’s life: her father.

  As Leonard’s coolness toward Sylvia changed to complete detachment (on the way to coldness), as he turned his attention to Le Fourreur and his model/bookkeeper/lover, Dolly Young, his wife’s ardor for him grew. It was a perfect inverse proportion. Lee observed her mother’s eyes devouring her father as he brushed barbecue sauce on spare ribs—so many brush strokes that it was clear to Lee that his mind was on something other than pork. She observed her mother’s coquettishness—her kiss on the back of his neck while he was watching his first Meet the Press on the new TV in the den, her curling up on the lounge chair beside him when he was reading the Sunday paper by the pool. All Sylvia’s come-ons seemed to arouse was irritation. Still, the woman clearly could not help herself. Watching her mother get ready for her father’s return from work, reworking her hairdo, putting on another dot of liquid rouge and spreading it over her cheek, like a caress, fiddling with the neckline of a peasant blouse—taking it off her shoulders, back up, letting it slip off one shoulder, tugging on it to bare a bit of bosom, Lee knew without a doubt that Sylvia was capable of feeling.

  So how come she could not spare a little extra? Not that Lee consciously asked that question: Why is a privileged American woman incapable of the same devotion to her young as the average hyena? It was a good question. But at seven (and fourteen and probably even at twenty-one), even the most analytical child cannot answer it satisfactorily. It boils down to this: Her mother does not love her because she is, indeed, unlovable.

  But at least there was some tenderness, a little physical affection in Lee’s life. She received it once a month, during visits from her father’s parents, Nat the Commie and Big Bella.

  To be hugged by three-hundred-pound Grandma Bella (“How are you, my beautiful, vonderful tootsie-pie?”) was to risk suffocation between those two monstrous marshmallows that were her grandmother’s breasts. To have your hair tousled in gratitude by Grandpa Nat because you snuck upstairs and emptied your piggy bank (so, he explained, you could give your seventeen dollars and forty-four cents to Deserving Negro Children Down South) was to risk baldness.

  It was worth the risk. Humans are, after all, warmth-seeking creatures. However, once a month is not enough, and the Weissbergs’ visits to the Whites were marred by terrible tension: Leonard’s face turning ashen, then livid, almost blue, at the sound of his mother’s voice (“You’re such a big shot, sveetheart, you can’t kiss your mudder anymore?”). Sylvia’s appalled expression upon spotting her father-in-law’s white, hairless, skinny bowed legs in red Bermuda shorts. Inevitably, being a quick-witted girl, Lee realized she was not getting her birthright—love—from her elegant, well-modulated parents. Why not? Weren’t they supposed to offer love without qualification? And how come her grandparents, who were willing to give it, made her parents almost sick?

  But if the classical psychologists are correct, it is the mother who is the key figure in a child’s life. Lee, while no stranger to self-examination as an adult, never had a clue as to how many stratagems she employed throughout her childhood to try and woo this woman who stood, at that moment in 1957, five hundred feet away, before a dreadful painting of a very beautiful tree.

  For the sake of fairness and in the interests of feminism, however, let us not make Sylvia Bernstein Weissberg-Weiss-White the villain. First, there are worse people in this story. A lot worse. And second, even if we accept as true the notion that the mother is the star in a child’s firmament, Sylvia was one of two parents. If she was dysfunctional, how come the other parent could not step in and function a little? Did Leonard think four trips to the zoo, an occasional excursion to Carvel, and bedtime readings of Madeline when Lee had chicken pox made him a good father?

  Did he honestly believe that all he had to do to be a good family man was pay for his daughters’ ballet lessons and not divorce his wife and marry his mistress? Leonard knew better. He felt better, experiencing occasional surges of love for his children that came straight from his heart. But those times, when Lee’s prowess at crab-apple tree climbing filled him with great fear and greater elation, or when Robin’s exegesis of Jerry Lewis’s role in The Delicate Delinquent made him proud, and he grabbed her, hugged her and covered her with kisses, he unfailingly sensed a change in Sylvia. He’d look up: No, nothing, just a wide Isn’t-that-just-the-sweetest? smile. But (was it his imagination?) the smile seemed a touch too broad, so even her back teeth were on display. So he merely unwrapped the little girl’s arms from around his neck, gave her a friendly wink and a pat on the backside, and sent her off for another year or two.

  Beyond Sylvia’s easel, where the well-fertilized lawn ended, was a hundred-foot-wide strip of trees that, in full leaf, gave the illusion that the Whites’ property was baronial, backing up onto a great forest. But from her second-story window, Lee could see it wasn’t so. The land rose about forty feet, then leveled off at the beginning of Hart’s Hill. Yes, a house with a name. Not that Lee could see it from her window, but she knew it was there. An estate. The estate next door.

  Hart’s Hill got its name in the late eighteenth century from the deer that roamed the north shore of Long Island. These noble mammals (albeit hopelessly tick-ridden) seemed drawn to that particular promontory. They grazed that very spot where, in 1757, 1820, and 1898, the manor house would be built. (The first house was destroyed by a fire in the hearth that claimed one Mrs. Rebecca Taylor as well as the rum syllabub she was preparing. The second was razed by a Mr. Arthur Taylor and the third erected by same after he made his second million in attorney’s fees advising Edward Harriman during Harriman’s acquisition of the Union Pacific Railroad.)

  But before all this construction and upward mobility put an end to the noble hart, a real deer could wander right to that place. Its coat glowing red in the sunlight, a stag might gaze northward across the stern gray waters of Long Island Sound to look upon the dark-green forests of mainland America.

  The Taylors of Hart’s Hill themselves weren’t much given to gazing, at least by the time their neighbor, young Lee White, became aware of them. They were too busy. Foster Taylor had left the Manhattan law firm of Willoughby, Crane and Buffet to serve on the United States Olympic Committee; he was also a trustee of the Boy Scouts of America, the American Bobsledding Association, the Iron Lung Alliance, and A Mighty Fortress, a traveling Episcopal goodwill choir. Georgina, his wife, was known as Ginger. It was said that if she hadn’t gotten married in her sophomore year at Hollins and then gotten pregnant (the events actually occurred in reverse order), she could have been a professional tennis player. In addition to her daily workouts on the grass court at Hart’s Hill, Ginger raised and showed basenjis, dogs that are inherently neighbor-pleasing since they do not bark. However, they do defecate, and entire broods of basenji puppies would often scamper down the hill and leave odoriferous brown lumps among the phlox in Sylvia’s all-white garden.

  Foster and Ginger were tall and lissome. Each carried two rare recessive genes that suppressed fat on thighs and upper arms, which they passed down to all their four children, so the younger Taylors, too, grew up tall and lean-limbed. And handsome, with their mother’s finely wrought features and their father’s high color. Since Fos and Ginger were an effervescent couple, finding hilarity in everything from bobbing for apples to knock-knock jokes, they had a real belly laugh when they realized their initial initials were right next to each other in the alphabet. F for Foster! Ha-ha-ha!
G for Georgina. Ho-ho-ho! So they named their children Hope, Irene, Jasper, and Kent. (They might have gone on to Lawrence, Melanie, and even Nathaniel, but Kent was born retarded, and Foster thought that sort of killed the fun, Kent’s not getting the joke.)

  Unlike the basenjis, the Taylors did not scamper down the hill. In fact, while they were vaguely aware that someone had built a modern house on the property beneath them, they remained happily unconscious of the Whites’ existence.

  The same cannot be said for the Whites. There was not one single day that Leonard did not think of the Taylors. As with a man haunted by a lost love, the most oblique reference could evoke their presence. Words: athlete, hill, tennis, old money, lawyer, rich, and Olympic made him dizzy with a mixture of desire and fury. Sights: a sailboat in the background of a Philip Morris ad; a church steeple; a dog (in fact, even Duchess, instead of barking and scaring away the little fuckers, seemed to view the basenjis’ excretory activities with an admiration approaching awe). Fos Taylor, himself standing on the platform of the Shore-haven station, holding his Herald Tribune at arms’ length to compensate for his farsightedness, or giving his train pals (whom Leonard thought of as the Taylor Boys) his idiosyncratic greeting, a stiff military salute, but using only his index finger. One time, he’d given that salute to Leonard—or so Leonard had thought. An explosion of joy went off inside Leonard, so powerful that it knocked him senseless. Somehow he managed a crisp salute in return. He thought: I’ve been tapped. (Tapped! what a wonderful word!) I’m one of the Boys. A second later, he saw Fos’s eyes blink-blink-blink at the wrongness of his, Leonard’s, behavior and he knew … Turning around, he spotted one of the Taylor Boys right behind him, the fat one, who looked like an overblown Audie Murphy balloon. “Sorry,” Leonard began gamely, “I thought you were saying hello to …” Yes, he knew all about how crazy they were for acting as if nothing was bothering you even if you were in the middle of an A-bomb detonation, but by that time, Fos and Fat Boy had somehow managed to move off sideways. Not only that: They were saluting Paper Boy, the one who got on the train every day with the Times, the Trib, the Journal-American, and the Wall Street Journal. They were grinning too, as if they couldn’t wait to tell him something hysterical.