Lily White

by Susan Isaacs

  So Lee pleaded with Leonard to let her get an apartment. Nothing fancy: There were walk-ups in the East Village that were really cheap. However, at that particular time he was feeling put upon by women. Sylvia had just redecorated the house; Robin was shoplifting and on four different occasions he had had to buy the silence of merchants; Greta was threatening to retire unless he converted to gas and bought her a stove with a salamander; and Dolly Young, having hinted broadly, had been given a top-of-the-line Jaguar. So Leonard drew the line. Don’t be ridiculous, he told Lee. The smell couldn’t be that bad. Dad, you want to wish you didn’t have a nose? she challenged him. Come on up, any hour, day or night. Leonard did not take her up on the invitation; instead he suggested that she learn to breathe through her mouth.

  Ah, but she breathed easier as Mrs. Jasper Taylor. Upon their marriage, Leonard told them: Stay in the married students’ dorm? How can I let my kids live in a dorm? On lower Fifth Avenue, he bought them a co-op in an upscale building, where the doormen called Lee “Madam.” Although modest in size, the place had all the requisite luxuries New Yorkers ooh and ah over: parquet floors, twelve-foot ceilings, crown moldings. When Leonard and the real estate broker showed them inside for the first time and all but said “Voilà!” Lee waited for Jazz to protest: Sorry, very generous of you, but we can’t accept this. What he said was: Hey, this is terrific! Thanks!

  More than the fact of Hart’s Hill, more than the way he pronounced “tomato,” this was the moment she became cognizant of the class difference between herself and her husband. She was the daughter of nouveau riche parents who, now that she had married so well, were impatient to indulge her. But where she came from, the passing down of privilege was an option, not a governing principle.

  In Jazz’s world, it was the natural order of things. True, the Taylors were upset that they had eloped, upset that their son had married a girl whose forebears did not play golf, but not so upset that Ginger did not unload a mammoth chest of Victorian flatware monogrammed with a T, an embarrassment of old linens, and two Hepplewhite chairs. They themselves might have set up the young couple in an apartment, but they were, as Jazz revealed—with not a trace of shame or bitterness—dead broke. Fos’s work for the U.S. Olympic Committee, although prestigious, paid just slightly more than nothing, and the cost of maintaining Hart’s Hill, his accountant kept informing him, was eating away the capital he had inherited.

  Still, as the firstborn son, Jazz was the beneficiary of his parents’ connections. He had been admitted to prep school on the basis of a telephone call. When he decided that Colgate was the college for him, his father said a few words to one of his then law partners. The partner had a chat with President Barnett; the following week, the word came down that Jasper Taylor would be a member of Colgate’s class of ’71. Every summer job Jazz ever held was the result of someone lifting a phone on his behalf. So while the apartment Leonard bought was beyond the young man’s expectations, the fact that his father-in-law was supporting him came as absolutely no surprise. It was the way things were supposed to be. That’s what parents were for.

  Accordingly, while Jazz was busy studying for the bar examination, Foster Taylor made a couple of phone calls; the men whom he called did likewise. Not long after, Jasper Taylor, Attorney-at-Law, was obliged to get what he and Lee called his Establishment Pig haircut; he had his long, glossy hair clipped to a reactionary three-quarters of an inch. Then he donned a pin-striped suit and dark red tie and began working down on Wall Street at the eminent law firm of Johnson, Bonadies and Eagle.

  When Leonard heard how Foster had gotten Jazz a job, he was galvanized and told Lee he was going to call his own lawyer, Seymour Breitbart, of Breitbart, Wasserman, Mishkin, Schwartz and Oshinsky, to see if there was a spot for her. They represent half of Seventh Avenue, Leonard ballyhooed. Two-thirds. The best designers. If you worked there, you could walk right into any of the showrooms—even the French places: Lapidus, Patou—and tell them, “I’m a lawyer at Breitbart, Wasserman,” and get to-the-trade prices.

  But she told him not to bother. She knew that she did not require a phone call. While not at the top of her law school class, Lee was close enough. True, in 1974, old-line law firms still subjected women to a remarkable array of insults and inequities. And the fact was, they rarely broke out the champagne upon the hiring of a Jew. Even so, she still could have gotten a job at Johnson, Bonadies and Eagle, or at Matthison, Appleby, or, for that matter, at the National Hockey League. Strictly on the merits. But Lee’s first job as a lawyer was at the place where she had been happier than ever before in her life: the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office.

  Her first case as an assistant was a third-degree sexual abuse. She prepared for it as if she were lead prosecutor in the Rape of the Sabines trial.

  “Look,” Jazz said, during her second week of preparation. “There’s such a thing as working too hard. I know you want to run with this thing, but it’s not the crime of the century.”

  Lee laughed. “It’s not?” Frankly, she did not feel like laughing about her trial, although objectively she realized that the case of People v. Robert Steven McCarthy was not a blot on the landscape of American civilization. It was merely a misdemeanor, to wit, the feeling up of one Joyce-Ann Goldenson on a northbound number 6 subway shortly after it pulled out of the Fifty-ninth Street station, a charge Robert Steven McCarthy vigorously denied. Not the crime of the century, but her crime. Nevertheless, Lee laughed along with Jazz, because here it was, one of the rare Saturday nights she didn’t have to be a complaint assistant and spend from eight o’clock to midnight in court. But she was still working. She should have been playing—with her husband. A good-looking husband, lean, well-muscled, lying right there beside her on the bed, naked.

  “Why don’t you just let the poor sucker go?” Jazz asked with a grin. For at least the millionth time, Lee marveled at his natural happiness. He instinctively looked at the bright side. That, combined with his fine looks and inborn kindness, guaranteed that he would always be Most Popular Boy. “Seriously. Why not?”

  “You’re kidding.”

  “No. Come on, babe, be serious. It was a feel, not a homicide.”

  “If you give me ‘She should have been grateful’…”

  “No! You know I’m not some stupid Neanderthal.”

  “You’re a smart Neanderthal.”

  “Right! Do you know what she should have done? Hauled off and smacked him. What was so terrible that she had to pull the emergency cord and call the cops?”

  “Because he pressed up against her side and started humping her. And then he pretended to get jostled and—what do you know!—his hand happened to get pushed up onto her left breast.”

  “That’s a crime?” Jazz asked, reaching up and letting his hand drift over both Lee’s breasts.

  She tried to relax, get back into the mood. She should be the one to initiate the next round of lovemaking. Hadn’t the last one, an hour before, been truly fine? So why didn’t she want more? But instead of tossing aside her yellow legal pad and stretching out along Jazz’s length, Lee found herself quoting the law: “‘A person is guilty of sexual abuse in the third degree when he subjects another person to sexual contact without the latter’s consent.’” Even as she said it, she could hear how prissy she sounded.

  “I know, I know,” Jazz said, getting into an even more comfortable position on the linen sheets his mother had given them. The sheets were monogrammed KVT. Another Taylor bride, although when Lee had asked Fos and Ginger who she was, neither had a clue.

  “I feel bad, being preoccupied like this,” Lee said, trying to sound tender. To feel tender. But she couldn’t. Jazz knew perfectly well she had to work late. Yet nearly every night for the past two weeks he had thrown some temptation her way: a movie, a Sly and the Family Stone concert, dim sum in Chinatown, a Rangers game. And each time she said no, sorry, the length of her apology grew. Jazz seemed surprised. He would say, in his usual sunny manner: Just thought I’d
ask.

  But what was he doing, asking? Where did he get so much free time? That was what Lee wanted to ask him. More than half their classmates from NYU were doing what Jazz was: working as first-year associates at big law firms. None of them were going to Rangers games. Not a single one had time to see a movie during the week—not when they were working until nine or nine-thirty every night, then dragging themselves home, praying they had clean underwear for the next day, and flopping, exhausted, into bed. How come only Jazz had time to play? Was there some secret footnote to the law firm work ethic that exempted prep school boys from the institutional nine-to-nine grind?

  “Don’t feel bad,” Jazz said good-naturedly. “It’s just that you never let up. Your father called the other day, worried. No, more concerned. Said you had circles under your eyes the last two times he saw you.”

  “I don’t have circles!”

  “That’s what I told him. It’s just that he doesn’t get it.”

  “Get what?”

  “Your … you know. Your ambition. In his world, a woman marries a professional and she quits her job—gladly—and devotes the rest of her life to picking out wallpaper.”

  “It’s not that I’m ambitious. It’s just that I love what I do.”

  “I know. Listen, stop apologizing. You’re a perfect wife and a great fuck and I love you and you can go back to your work with a clear conscience. You knocked me out. I’d probably need a crane to get it up. This way, it’s all your fault”—he grinned—“and I get to do exactly what I was dying to do, which is go to sleep.” He blew her a kiss, slid under the covers, and turned over.

  But what was he so tired from? Soon after the bar exam, when they both started working, she would call him at Johnson, Bonadies and Eagle in the early evening. Except he wasn’t there. Uh, one of the other associates would say, I, uh, think he left already. Or (another might add, more charitably) maybe he’s in the twenty-eighth-floor library. Not there at seven-thirty? She—making a third of what he was at her government job—was sitting in front of a mile-high pile of paper at her mud-green desk at seven-thirty, in the cubicle she shared with two other assistant D.A.’s, both of whom were also hard at work. Hesitantly those first few weeks, not wanting to embarrass him, she would call the apartment, and Jazz would answer: Hi! He was always in a bright mood, ready to chat. How’s crime paying? he would ask.

  Lee was so afraid for him. How could he just pick up and leave his office? Wasn’t he terrified of being fired? But he didn’t sound terrified: How did it go in court today, babe? Nice and easy. She’d chitchat for a minute or two, not wanting to seem as if she had something better to do than talk to her husband of eleven months. But the fact was, she had. Work. Or if work wasn’t better than Jazz—and it wasn’t, she assured herself—it was at least necessary. The first few years of being a lawyer were all about paying your dues.

  Well, her first payment was People v. Robert Steven McCarthy and she was going to get the little son-of-a-bitch for groping Joyce-Ann on the IRT.

  It wasn’t going to be easy. Robert gave a great impression; he had the bantamweight charm of a Mickey Rooney combined with an endearing deep, dumb voice—a little like Smokey the Bear’s. Joyce-Ann, on the other hand, came across like one of Freud’s case studies in hysteria. She was so tense she did not speak so much as yelp, so tense that when being questioned about her allegations, she crossed her arms over her chest and rocked her breasts as if they were foundlings. I think she’s going to make a lousy impression, Lee told the assistant supposedly supervising her trial, a man who had been a lawyer a year longer than she had. Do your best, he told her, not looking up from the lab analysis he was reading. Lee had a feeling that if he did look up, he would have no idea who she was.

  But he did soon enough. Lee won People v. Robert Steven McCarthy, the case everyone who thought about it—and there were not many—thought was a real loser. She did so the way all good trial lawyers do, with thorough preparation and natural talent. Lee’s gift was not for podium-pounding harangues or withering cross-examination, but for credibility. The very directness that had so often alienated her family worked in the courtroom. She did her best with what she had: intelligence, intuition, and common sense. If Joyce-Ann was tense, make her feel comfortable— or at least as close to comfortable as a Manhattan hysteric can feel. Lee spoke to her in a gentle voice and spent patient hours going over her testimony, until Joyce-Ann did not cringe at the word “erection.” True, she did flinch a bit, but Lee decided rightly that the jury would find this understandable, even laudatory.

  And if Robert sounded dopey like Smokey, it was just common sense to try and trip him up on some complicated question. So Lee probed: “You say you did not rub yourself against Ms. Goldenson that day. If you touched her at all, it was simply because you were jostled and fell against her. So then how can you explain your hand reaching around and squeezing her left breast?” I didn’t squeeze it, he insisted, as Lee knew he would. “Well,” she went on, “all right. You just touched it then.” Right, the defendant agreed, and he agreed to her next question as well, that yes, he did in fact remember touching her left breast, but it was an accident, definitely not a squeeze. And then Lee (having rehearsed the scenario at least ten times with a crouching Jazz playing the much shorter Robert) asked him to come off the stand and demonstrate how it happened. Pretend I’m Joyce-Ann Goldenson, Lee suggested. Robert’s lawyer objected. The judge overruled. Lee said: Okay, you grabbed for the subway pole in your right hand. That’s right, make believe you’re holding the pole. Now, if you were facing the direction both you and the complainant agreed you were facing … She positioned herself in front of him. Were you like this? she asked. Yes, he conceded. Then without actually touching me, show me how when you were jostled you came to rub up against Ms. Goldenson’s side. And while you’re at it, how your hand and Ms. Goldenson’s breast came into contact.

  The jury was out for just thirty-five minutes. When they returned with a guilty verdict, the first thing Lee did was race back to her desk and call Jazz. Fantastic! he’d exclaimed, and she could tell by his voice that he was truly thrilled for her. Brilliant! I mean it, Lee. All the courtroom stories are about great defense lawyers. Ever think of that? They’re going to have to start a whole new category for you: Genius D.A.’s.

  The truth was that Lee was good, quite good. But not a genius. There were two real geniuses in the District Attorney’s Office. One was a bland-looking man five years older than she, who tried homicide cases. He was half-Polish, half-German, born in a cold-water flat on East Eighty-seventh Street, out of Brooklyn Law School. His heart was so malleable it could assume the shape of any or all the jurors’ hearts. He barely needed an opening statement: That great heart of his told them all they had to know. Whenever she had time, Lee sat in on his trials. At the beginning she had hoped to learn something: the way he related to the jury or handled cross or how he spoke to the judge. All she learned was that whatever it was he had, she did not.

  But the following year, the other office genius, Melanie Tucker, the deputy chief of the Supreme Court bureau, had a great deal to teach her. “You ought to use your femininity more.”

  “What?” Lee asked, convinced she had not heard right. True, Melanie herself often seemed as if she had been sucked up by a cyclone from the tea party she had been hostessing and plunked down in the D.A.’s Office. A dainty perfumed handkerchief always peeked out of one of her modest long sleeves. Melanie was known as a genius strategist, the greatest teacher of advocacy ever. Lee, however, was appalled. This was 1975! The very idea of using feminine wiles to achieve a goal was disgraceful. “Use my what?”

  “Your femininity,” Melanie replied. She sounded so genteel that she should have been sitting before a silver tea service, offering clotted cream and marmalade, not at a desk with a stack of crime scene photos of a victim shot in the nose at close range. Her desk was a great and clumsy gray metal affair, but the photos were arrayed in a delicate fan shape, and all her pa
pers were in folders on either side of a cream-colored blotter set in a tan leather holder. “The problem with women trial lawyers is this: They try to be men.” She gestured to Lee to be seated, a gracious roll of the wrist.

  “I’m not trying to be a man,” Lee said, thinking back to the day before, her second trial in the Supreme Court unit. Simple. A one-witness robbery. Where could she have acted mannishly? A bodega owner in East Harlem claimed the defendant held a gun on him and then ran out with the three hundred dollars from the cash register and a carton of Camels. “Are you talking about the Suarez case?” she asked.

  “I am.” Melanie picked up a petal that had fallen from the single white rose she always kept in a bud vase on her desk and, with delicacy, sniffed it. She had gone to Radcliffe.

  “But I won!” Lee exclaimed. “The jury came back about four-thirty.”

  “I know.”

  “So where was I mannish?”

  Lee really didn’t want to hear Melanie’s answer. She dreaded it. It would be something humiliating—like telling her she should use lip wax because juror number eight seemed to be staring at the area directly under her nose. And indeed, he had, all during her summation. Or the answer could be something more profound—like she was acting so masculine that people would think her wedding ring was a phony.

  Sometimes she actually felt like the man of the house, coming home late, neck stiff, muscles sore, bones aching, only to find that Jazz had prepared a big dinner. Why? They could have gotten a sandwich from the deli. He could have been working as late as she was. He should have been. Jazz said everything was fine. What was she worried about? And in truth, he had not been fired. But she had seen with her own eyes, at his law firm’s outing the previous June, how the partners did not take him seriously. Hello! they would call to him, a little too heartily, without stopping to make conversation. Jazz didn’t seem to care, though, or even notice. Boring, was all he could say about the partners. Workaholics, he remarked of his fellow associates. Not me. So he left the office while others still had three or four hours more work, while Lee herself still had three or four hours. He came back to the apartment, watched the news, listened to the radio, cleaned, did the laundry. And cooked. Then he showered to be fresh when she came home. Well, this was the wave of the future; that’s what all the articles on the New Feminism told her. Forget sex roles. Be what you want to be. And if you have a husband willing to take on household responsibilities, then be grateful and give him a great big kiss as he hands you your pipe and slippers.