by Susan Isaacs
“Those guys never do. They piss it away. That way, they have a perfect excuse to pull the con again.”
“Exactly. So all Norman wanted was to make a quick score and move on. But he’s not the man he was.”
“Maybe it’s because he’s actually in love with Beauti-full. I mean, real love.”
“I think he is. On the other hand, he does admit he considered actually marrying Bobette. The guy is desperate to stop.”
“So, Lee,” Chuckie said, swirling the scotch around his glass, “you’re not prosecuting him now? You’re back to defending him?”
“Right.”
“So it was Beauti-full who done it, because she was afraid Norman would marry the old maid.”
“Right.”
“But are you sure Norman didn’t do it? The old maid may have laughed at him and he snapped. Remember? Or she figured out it was a con and he snapped. Or she held the money back in some way and he snapped.”
“Maybe Bobette wasn’t onto him. Maybe she was just kidding around. Like, ‘I’m not going to give you the money until you kiss my … whatever.’”
Chuckie shuddered. “Dreadful notion.”
“It’s not a dreadful notion, Chuckie. You’re antediluvian.”
“I’m not antediluvian. I’m Irish, and it’s dreadful. Anyone can see that’s why the poor fella snapped.” I shook my head, but I started picturing Norman’s powerful hands around Bobette’s throat. Then the next second, in my mind’s eye those hands tapered and grew soft and it was Mary who was strangling Bobette. “I can see that the sixty-four-dollar question remains unanswered in your mind,” Chuckie said.
“Who done it?”
“Pre-cisely!” Chuckie slammed his glass down on the desk for emphasis. A few drops of liquid sprinkled his hand. “Who done it?” He brought his hand to his mouth and licked off the drops.
I replied: “I still don’t know.”
As I rose to go back to my office, pack up my attaché case, and go home, Chuckie huffed: “One more sixty-four-dollar question, partner.”
“What’s that?”
“If she did do it—which strains what little is left of an old man’s credulity—is it conceivable that a fella with Norman’s character would actually take the rap for her?”
The next morning, I was the first lawyer at the correctional center. But not the first caller. I was chatting up one of the guards outside the visitors room, asking about her son, a kid I’d once represented for carrying a concealed weapon; I’d gotten him off and he was now studying to be an X-ray technician. Suddenly I smelled a familiar gardenia fragrance. At that same instant, a flash of canary yellow registered at the edge of my peripheral vision. I looked in the direction of the odor and color. Sure enough, it was Mary Dean, in a minidress that looked as if someone had taken a bolt of yellow polyester, wrapped it tight around her body, and then, on a whim, added sleeves the size of volley balls. The odd thing was, no one looking at her too-made-up face and trashy dress would say: Boy, does she look cheap. No, there was something about Mary that engendered goodwill. People would think: Aw, isn’t it sad that glorious-looking woman can’t afford expensive clothes?
“Hi!” she said, too cheerfully.
“How are you, Mary?”
She teetered on her high heels, not because she couldn’t balance in them, but because her weight was on the balls of her feet; she looked ready to run—and I got the feeling it was from me. “Me?” she said. “I’m fine!”
“Good.”
She teetered some more. “I hate to, like, insult you or anything, but I’ve got an appointment and I’m already late.”
“What kind of appointment?” I asked.
Naturally, she didn’t have an answer and it took so long for her to come up with one that even she knew she shouldn’t have bothered. “A-uh-a, you know. Doctor.”
“Did you just see Norman?”
“Yes,” she said, unconsciously slipping her hand under her hair and tossing it lightly. Norman must have just complimented her on it.
“How does he seem to you?”
“Um … Listen, I really have to get going. Give him a kiss for me.” I must have looked unnerved, because as she hurried off to retrieve her handbag from the lockers and get away from me, she called out: “I mean, tell him Mary sent him a big, juicy kiss.”
Norman was not in the mood to receive a kiss. The second the guard who brought him over to me left, Norman snapped: “Leave Mary the hell alone!”
“Norman, I know you’re very protective of her. I admire that. But she was in Bobette’s house the day of the murder. She stole Bobette’s wallet.”
“No she didn’t!” His brows drew so close together they became one.
“She admitted it to me,” I said.
“She lied.”
“No, she didn’t lie,” I replied calmly. “She stole it.”
“Listen,” Norman hissed, “she did not take the goddamn wallet. She wasn’t even in the house the day of the murder. It was another day that she was there. She’s confused. Maybe she’s covering up for me.”
“I’m sorry, but I don’t buy that. I think she—”
“I stole the wallet. I gave it to her. I said: ‘Go ahead. Buy out a store or two.’”
“When did you have time to give her the wallet? She made those purchases late afternoon or early evening the day of the murder, when you say you were still with Bobette, or going out to buy the champagne.”
“There was time. And she did not kill Bobette! Okay? Get off that!”
“Then who did? You?” Norman didn’t answer. He scowled, and although it looked like an adolescent’s sullen expression at first, it was clear his compressed lips were a grown man’s attempt to keep from screaming words of rage. “I know this is a terrible situation for you,” I went on. “You want to take care of Mary. The last thing you want is to implicate her in a murder. I admire that. But her presence at Bobette’s is your only hope.”
“Let me tell you something,” Norman said. He spoke so softly that I had to move close to the barrier between us. His face was just inches away from mine. I could see bunches of red capillaries in the inside corners of his eyes. “You leave her out of this. She is a sweet, innocent girl.”
“Then you’re saying she had nothing to do with the murder of Bobette Frisch?”
“I’m saying if you don’t leave her alone, you’re fucking fired.”
Twelve
Graduation day did not start out all that badly. A single powder puff of a cloud was all that marred the sky’s blue perfection. True, Robin had promised—sworn, in fact—that she would meet the family at nine-thirty on the dot in front of Barton Hall, where Cornell’s commencement exercises would take place. By ten o’clock, she still had not shown. Also true, Sylvia’s first act upon seeing her elder daughter in cap and gown was to lift a handful of Lee’s long, lank hair in her open palm, examine it, and inquire, after a tsk loud enough to be heard at UCLA: “I know it’s the style, but couldn’t you have pulled it back into a ponytail, so it’s off your face?”
Lee, who had spent three-quarters of an hour ironing her hair so it would meet her mother’s rigid Hair Sleekness Criterion yet still conform to proper student radical standards, snapped: “No. I could not have pulled it back in a ponytail.”
“Fine.” Wearily, Sylvia upended her palm; Lee’s hair dropped from her hand. “You’re the one who’s going to have to look at your graduation pictures ten years from now.”
Lee had taken Psych 1. While not introspective, she was hardly a bubblehead. She had to have known there was nothing she could do, short of marrying Yves Saint Laurent, that would make her mother happy with her. In fact, in her heart of hearts, Lee probably knew that even Yves would not please Sylvia, for when it came to Lee, her mother was unpleasable. Yet for all her pot-smoking, revolution-fomenting rebellion, Lee could not stop trying. Intent on giving peace a chance this day, she even smiled at her mother. But Sylvia, concentrating on the untweezed inch betw
een Lee’s brows, did not notice.
“Girls.” Leonard cut into the silence. “Let’s make it a happy day.”
He was not taking his own advice. To begin with, he was stewing over Robin’s failure to appear, although this should not have surprised him. Failure had become Robin’s vocation. She had dropped out of the University of Pennsylvania, having failed every course she took her first semester. She then failed to complete applications to any of the other, more tolerant institutions of higher learning that a pricey college adviser had suggested. Following that, Robin failed to show up for work at the Revillon showroom at Saks Fifth Avenue, where Leonard, after much obsequious pleading and pledging of future favors, had succeeded in landing her a trainee’s job. The man was at his wits’ end. During spring break, he had even confided to Lee that Sylvia suspected Robin might be smoking pot. Lee, subduing an urge to whoop with mean-spirited laughter, merely mumbled: “She never talked to me about pot.” Technically, that was no lie. As far as Lee could see, Robin was not much interested in such a namby-pamby hallucinogen as marijuana, preferring lysergic acid diethylamide.
A happy day? Not for Leonard. It wasn’t only Robin. In fact, for him, Robin was mere irritation. No, his misery was on a grander scale. He knew now: He was doomed to be forever locked out of the world he yearned to enter. His elder daughter could feel at home in the Ivy League. He could only pay the bills. For some reason, it had taken him forty-seven years to finally comprehend this simple fact of American life: He would never be one of them! Now, as he trudged up the seemingly endless hill that was the Comell campus, his legs ached. His knees felt as if someone had bisected them with a hatchet. The hammering in his chest made him feel that his heart was trying to crash through his rib cage and roll on the grass in shame. Also, he could not get his wind and had to clamp his mouth shut and concentrate on breathing through his nose in order that all the Old Boys and Old Girls so at home at this place wouldn’t think the Ivy League was too much for him.
Now he pulled out his handkerchief and dabbed his forehead: gentlemanly dabs. “I’m a bit overheated,” he remarked.
Lee observed her father. He wasn’t a bit overheated at all. He was sweating like a pig. Perspiration streamed from Leonard’s clipped sideburns down his shaven-to-raw cheeks. It splashed off his jaw onto his starched shirt collar. It dribbled from his chin onto the camera.
“Stand closer together!” he commanded his wife and daughter, trying to pretend he was a man in charge, the family photographer, and that his face was dry and his shirt wasn’t soaked. But his order came out harsh and loud. “Closer, goddamn it!”
Suddenly, Leonard saw a passerby, a snooty-looking horse-face in a slub-linen suit, turn and give him a slit-eyed glance. He felt she had peered into his soul—and learned it had been born in Brooklyn. Actually, the woman, an assistant manager of a Big Boy hamburger drive-in in Cincinnati, had noticed neither him nor his disagreeableness, as all her attention was focused in her myopic search for her soon-to-be-graduating grandson. But her glance made Leonard change his tone. His words became cultured pearls:
“Let me see some smiles! Syl, dear.” Sylvia, however, didn’t realize the voice she was hearing was her husband’s. “Syl, over here, sweetheart! Give me a smile.”
Clearly, money had been no object when it came to presenting himself and his wife to the Eastern Establishment. And—looking through the hideously expensive Hasselblad camera he had bought for the occasion—he couldn’t believe he could have been so blind: He had been so positive that he knew exactly how that presentation should go. For one thing, he had ruled out Sylvia’s customary darkly chic French or Italian ensembles. Instead she was decked out the way he’d told her he wanted her decked out: “A tweed suit. English. Don’t worry if it itches. It’s supposed to itch. That means it’s good quality. And stout walking shoes. Remember, tell them ‘stout.’” Her fashionable frosted hair, customarily an amalgam of bronzes, coppers, and platinums, had overnight, at his directive, lightened into ash blond. She had drawn it back, the way he urged, post-post-debutante fashion, and tied it with a folded Hermès scarf. (Had Sylvia been the devoted Taylor-watcher her husband was, she would have known instantly that her hair was now the exact hue and style of Ginger Taylor’s.)
This is what Leonard saw; irony of ironies, that while Sylvia could pass, he could not. He looked so wrong. Inadvertently, his hand smoothed his lapels, stroked his tie. Wrong. Oh, God, he had tried. His navy blazer was exquisitely tailored. Gray flannel slacks. Egyptian-cotton button-down-collar shirt. Silk rep tie. Loafers burnished until they gleamed the consummate loafer tone between mahogany and umber. He gleamed. In full East Coast Establishment regalia, he could almost have passed for an alum—“Hello, there, ’47.” Almost. Unlike Leonard, none of the genuine alumni gleamed. Their blazers and slacks and loafers looked as if they had been making the rounds of garden weddings and restricted clubs since the end of the first half of the century. Leonard’s own flagrant newness made him a marked man. He bowed his head in shame. In grief. He tried to fake total immersion in focusing the camera, but his face was too wet. And some of the wet stuff was tears at his own gauche sheen.
Lee glanced around, longing for a friend, or even an acquaintance, to dilute her parents’ presence. But the few graduating seniors still lingering outside Barton Hall were engaged in agonizing psychodramas with their own families and were thus too exhausted to come to her aid.
Lee looked back at her parents. Oh, God—her father! His hands holding the camera were trembling. And her mother: “Do you think Robin might be waiting someplace else?” Sylvia’s voice barely rose above a whisper, but the “else” careened out of control, rising to a high note of incipient hysteria.
“How the hell should I know,” Leonard muttered, trying to appear nonchalant, a difficult look to achieve when one is purple-faced and sweating bullets.
So Lee was graduated from Cornell University with absolutely no one paying attention to her. Her father, in his eight-hundred-dollar lightweight wool blazer, was beside himself. Actually, it was Sylvia who was beside him, but she was beside herself too, swiveling her head, trying to cover all the entrances to the cavernous building so she could wave Robin over the instant Robin came through the door. But Robin never appeared in Barton Hall.
However, there she was, waiting outside, when they emerged. Robin’s fair, heart-shaped face was clear as fine bone china, her features were small and delicate, her slender body was forever poised between youthful androgyny and womanhood. She squinted into the sunlight and offered her family a feeble wave, more a flick of the wrist than a real salute. An outsider, noticing her pale frailness, might have thought her ill. Her mouth, however, tight with the rage endemic to adolescent offspring of the haute bourgeoisie in the early years of the 1970s, gave her away.
“Hi,” Robin said to Lee, her tone sarcastic, as if Lee had done something that merited bitter derision.
“Hi,” Lee replied. She did not expect her sister to offer an apology for being late, which was wise, since she did not get one.
“Is it over?” Robin inquired.
“You missed it.” Lee had known Robin would pull something on graduation day. Without consciously rehearsing, she had prepared herself to react with aggressive neutrality. Still, she knew that Robin knew she was seething inside. Well, why shouldn’t she fucking seethe? Here she was, finally getting her goddamn degree. Headed for law school, for God’s sake! She had taken her law boards only as a lark, but they had been so stellar that she felt compelled to apply. True, her average was barely over a B+. She had no extracurricular activities, excluding indiscriminate sex and helping set fires in three ROTC file cabinets. Yet with those spectacular LSATs, she had been offered admission to every school to which she had applied: NYU, the University of Virginia, Georgetown, the University of Michigan.
But this day was not turning out to be a celebration of Lee’s achievement. Like every other occasion when the Whites got together, it had become Robin’s Day, a
time for forced smiles and spastic colons.
“Where were you, for God’s sake?” Sylvia’s voice, usually barely audible, was much too loud. Leonard made a hysterical “Shhh!” sound that lasted until he ran out of breath. But Sylvia wouldn’t shush. “You swore you’d be here!” she yelled at Robin.
“So? I’m here,” Robin replied, and waved to someone in the throng.
Sylvia stared at her then. They all did. But only Sylvia cracked. Why? It wasn’t so much that Robin had not washed her face, or that she was wearing tattered—in actual shreds!—polyester bell bottoms in a hideous rust-colored floral print, and a short top that exposed half her stomach and midriff, and a cheap, fake-pewter peace symbol on a leather thong, that made Sylvia start to sob. It wasn’t her dilated pupils that caused Leonard to gnash his teeth in rage and humiliation. No, it was that Robin had summoned over a man. Not a boy: He was in his early thirties. At least. Now she clung to his arm.
The man had a matted black beard; what looked like a strand of albumen from a soft-boiled egg bisected its width. His dark eyes were hooded. His nose was hooked. His blemished skin managed to be swarthy and pasty at the same time. If he had been wearing a long black coat instead of a torn T-shirt and what appeared to be bathing trunks, he would have looked like an anti-Semitic caricature.
“Aren’t you going to say something?” Sylvia shrieked at Robin.
“Shhhhh!” Leonard hissed.
“What do you want me to say?” Robin sounded like the sound track of a movie being played in slow motion.
“Like ‘congratulations’ to your sister!” Sylvia’s voice seemed to echo through the hills and across Lake Cayuga and come back, louder and brassier, for everyone to hear.