Lily White

by Susan Isaacs

  “They didn’t win with me,” Robin said. “I’m not what they want me to be.”

  “Sure you are,” Lee said.

  “No. Only to the extent that I’m not a junkie now. I didn’t finish college. I have a menial job—”

  “It’s a good job. You love being with kids.”

  “Not to wipe fifteen asses three times a day. That sounds terrible. I do like the job, and I know that if I went back to school, I’d major in education. But right now … I guess I’m doing the best I can.”

  “You’re doing wonderfully.”

  Robin retied the ribbons of her cork-platform espadrilles. She had become her mother’s shopping companion. Lee had observed to Jazz that her sister was the best-dressed day care worker in America.

  Certainly the best-looking, Lee ruminated. Now that Robin was off drugs and had had her teeth capped, her fragile prettiness had bloomed into beauty. She had her mother’s willowy figure and fair coloring, but with finer, sweeter features, as if a Pre-Raphaelite painter had given Sylvia a makeover. “I’m doing all right,” Robin said. “You’re doing wonderfully. You have it all.”

  “All by Mom and Dad’s standards. A husband, a house in the suburbs. I mean, what was the point of all my rebellion? I married the man of their dreams, and I’m about to give them a grandchild who they’re praying won’t have a nose like Grandpa Nat, and I’m living in a rose-covered cottage two and a half minutes from their house. If they had given me a blueprint, I couldn’t have met their specifications any better.”

  “You became a lawyer.”

  “I had to do something after college. No one was pounding on my door, shouting marriage proposals.”

  “Give me a break!” Robin said. “You could have gotten some normal kind of job.” Having arranged the bows on her espadrilles to droop with the proper degree of casualness, Robin was now running her fingers up her shin, over and over, searching for a near-invisible blonde hair her razor might have missed. Lee could not get over how someone as intelligent as her sister could be so utterly serious about fluff. “Anyway, you’re the one who chose this life, with Jazz, living here. You’re just pissed off that it’s what Mom and Daddy wanted for you. But you shouldn’t be.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because it’s what everyone in the world wants. Love, marriage, a beautiful house. Ask yourself this: What would I rather have than love, marriage, and a beautiful house?”

  “Nothing,” Lee admitted. She glanced around the living room, with its comfortable overstuffed chairs and warm wood tables. The afternoon sun streamed through windows framed by ruby roses. “I can’t believe we lucked into this place, can you?” Robin smiled, a fuller smile than in the past. Besides her teeth being fixed, she was also happier. “What’s so amusing?”

  “You’re so sophisticated,” Robin said.

  “Sophisticated? Every time Mom looks at me, it’s like she can’t decide who to call first: a wardrobe consultant or a plastic surgeon. I mean, I’m one notch above dowdy.”

  “I mean intellectually sophisticated. You question everything. And whenever you talk about your job, you always wind up talking about how you didn’t trust what some cop swore up and down to, or you didn’t trust some lawyer, or even—before you started doing only murder cases—that you didn’t believe what the victim of a crime was saying.”

  “So?”

  “So you’re funny.” Robin lowered her head and chuckled. Then she looked back up at Lee. “Listen. This is just between us, okay? But do you think a gem like this house just happens to become available the day you decide Okay, fine, I’ll move to the suburbs?”

  Lee felt neither a shiver of foreboding nor an all-senses alert. All she experienced was the slightest shift in sensation, so that instead of feeling normal she felt nothing. “It was prearranged?” she asked offhandedly, as though she had suspected sly doings all along.

  “I’m sorry. I probably shouldn’t have said anything.”

  “It’s okay. Tell me.”

  “Mom and Daddy went looking every weekend in the spring. Not this spring. Last. I don’t know if it was even for you that much; it just gave them something to do. Anyway, the Howell estate had been up for sale forever, but no one was buying it, so it was being broken up.”

  Lee tried to fill in the blanks. “They negotiated for this house?” Robin nodded. “Without us ever seeing it?”

  “Of course not! Daddy took Jazz over. He fell in love with it too. It is irresistible. But he knew you didn’t want to move, so he said he’d have to convince you first, because otherwise showing you the house would be meaningless. But while all that was happening, Daddy was afraid it would get away. He wanted to make sure no one else got it. So he and Jazz did something financial, with money from the business—and they bought it.”

  Lee felt her belly growing rigid with a contraction. At first, it seemed like the ones she had been experiencing for weeks: awesome when you felt the strength of the muscle getting itself into shape, but certainly not painful or even uncomfortable. But this one! “My God!” She gasped at its violence. “I’m not sure if I can take this.”

  Valerie Belinda Taylor was named for two great-grandmothers, Valentine MacDougal and Bella Weissberg. Born on the fifth of July, she would tell her friends when she grew older: Even then I was slightly perverse. By the time she uttered that statement she was studying acting at Juilliard, and thus, hyperbole was not a stranger to her tongue. But the truth was, from day one, despite a tendency to make even the opening of a bag of potato chips an occasion of theater, Val was a good-natured, reasonable child.

  A good thing too, because for the first few months of her life, her parents were feeling anything but good-natured. “How could you?” Lee demanded from her bed in the maternity wing at North Shore Hospital. She kept her voice down, because just beyond the drawn curtain, the woman in the next bed was having trouble nursing and a gynecologist and two nurses were standing around the bed, discussing nipples. “It’s such a betrayal.”

  “What the hell are you talking about?” Jazz asked. Since the floor was made of hard tiles, and he could not dig his heels in and thus demonstrate his determination to fight this one to the finish, he simply crossed his arms tight across his chest. “You are blowing this way out of proportion. It was a business deal, for God’s sake.”

  “You bought the house before I even agreed to leave the city!”

  “Your father and I bought it because it happened to be an excellent investment opportunity.”

  “You’re full of shit!” she said, obviously too loud, since the nipple committee beyond the curtain fell into quivering silence.

  “Keep your voice down.”

  “How can I?” she demanded, although in a whisper. “You lied to me!”

  “I did not! I went into a deal with your father, who happens to be my business partner. Okay, I admit this was—is—a great house for a young couple. A little gem.”

  “You know who you sound like? That oozing-charm jerk of a real estate agent. ‘Little gem!’ And don’t tell me you didn’t lie. We went to his office and you shook his hand as if it was the first time you’d ever met him. Then we drove to the house, and you looked around like Wow, gee, what a place, and you said you never even knew it existed.” Lee could tell from the slump of Jazz’s shoulders that she had scored. “If that’s not a lie, what is it?”

  “I did it for you.”

  “You did it for yourself. If you were doing something for me, you would have let me stay in the job I loved.” He stood and walked to the foot of the bed, putting distance between them. “In the city I loved. What do you want? To grow up and become our parents?”

  “We’re not our parents,” Jazz said, leaning toward her over the foot of the bed. Lee could hear him trying to remain calm, trying to get the anger out of his voice by substituting the tone of benign understanding that he knew from natural childbirth class one ought to use when dealing with a woman who is four hours postpartum. “And Valerie isn’t
going to grow up to be us.”

  Lee was about to demand: But what about your lying to me? It was too big a matter to let drop. But just then a nurse came in holding Val, and the tug at her heartstrings as well as the tug of the stitches in her episiotomy incision made her feel particularly vulnerable. So she reached up for her baby and put her to her breast and a moment later she was nursing for the first time and Jazz was back beside her on the bed, running his finger over his daughter’s perfect pink cheek and smiling beatifically. They looked for all the world like a picture of paradise, so when Jazz whispered, “I’m sorry,” Lee nodded and decided to let it be for the time being.

  The time being moved very slowly when Lee came home from the hospital. Having spent all her adult life being overstimulated, she found that the peacefulness of maternity made her edgy. She held Val a great deal, unable to get over the wonder of all the tiny parts parents traditionally wonder at. She luxuriated in the serene lassitude breast-feeding induced and understood why cows were so content. She started to reread Jane Eyre but found it too rousing, so she put it down and picked up Emma. She wrote thank-you notes for all the little pink gifts friends of their parents had sent and for gender-neutral yellow and green gifts from their own friends.

  Kent came over to check out his new niece and was so pleased by all the activity—the baby’s diaper being changed, the interviews with prospective nannies, opening gifts, helping Lee make dinner and set the table, the new large-screen TV and videocassette player in their den—that he stayed. In her fourth week home, Lee sat across from Kent playing checkers—a game he did not quite comprehend but which he nevertheless enjoyed, trusting Lee to help him move his pieces and tell him who won. She realized he was now part of their household. What do you think? she asked Jazz, who replied, I don’t know. What do you think? She thought it wasn’t so bad having Kent around. He was really doing well. Not that she necessarily wanted the responsibility, but the thought of sending him home to her in-laws’, where he would be, if not ill-housed, then surely ill-clothed, ill-fed, and ignored, disturbed her. So she said: Let him stay—if it’s okay with your parents. They laughed, Jazz did a fine imitation of his parents celebrating, and they turned out the light; and since it was too soon after birth to have intercourse and since it didn’t really pay to start fooling around on a Sunday night if nothing was going to happen, they went to sleep.

  In Lee’s fifth week home, Will Stewart came for lunch, bringing with him a silver cup with Val’s initials and an autopsy report and crime scene photos of a double homicide in Hewlett Harbor—a banker and his girlfriend shot dead in the banker’s sauna. “Beautiful,” Lee said, holding up the cup to the sunlight.

  “To go with the silver spoon she was born with,” Will explained. “It’s not quite an antique. It’s from the 1880s or ’90s. The dealer had a fit when I asked him to monogram it, but I told him this is for a very special young woman.” He bent over Val’s carriage and touched her nose and ran his finger lightly over her downy scalp, but he declined Lee’s offer to pick her up. “Not for single guys,” he said, sounding slightly nervous, as if by holding her he would then be held liable for anything that went wrong for the rest of her life.

  They sat under an old linden in the backyard. Lee had spent the morning on a salmon mousse and was still edgy over the suspense of unmolding it. It looked beautiful, she had to admit, surrounded by translucent slices of cucumber and toothpick-thin curlicues of carrots scattered capriciously about. She had set the redwood picnic table with some of her Taylor linens, and although it was almost like falling on the point of a sword, she asked to borrow some of her mother’s English china. Too showy, she had fretted, moments before Will arrived, rearranging an allegedly casual centerpiece. But there was something about him that made the gracious gesture seem all right—not ostentatious but a grand idea—and now she was glad she had fussed.

  “This could have been your case,” Will remarked, buttering his roll, watching Lee read through the medical examiner’s notes. “Not that you have time to watch TV or read a paper, but it’s all over the news.”

  “What should I have done? Stuck my uterus in a shopping bag and come to work right from the hospital?”

  “If you were really dedicated.”

  “How’s the office?” she inquired. For a quarter hour, they discussed the case he had brought to show her. Then he regaled her with amusing war stories of other cases Homicide was working on and added a few horror stories about Jerry McCloskey’s increasing attempts to interfere with his running of the unit—and Woodleigh Huber’s reluctance to put an end to McCloskey’s political maneuvering. “Why are they doing this to you?” Lee asked.

  “Because I fired one of their boys and refused to hire another.”

  “But you hired me. I was a political contract.”

  “You were different. You were good. The guys they sent me were consummate party hacks. Huber genuinely wants me to run the best Homicide unit in the state, but he also wants me to staff it with his imbeciles, so he sends McCloskey down to try and get me to comply.”

  Will looked wonderful, Lee thought. He sat relaxed in a lawn chair, the plate and napkin resting casually on his lap, his dark skin shining in the glimmers of sunlight that shot through the thick leaves of the linden. The only man on whom a seersucker suit was not baggy. Of course, Will Stewart could wear the salmon mousse on his head and look elegant.

  “When are you coming back, Lee?”

  “Soon.”

  “Define soon.”

  “Another six to eight weeks.” They both turned to Val. She was fast asleep, but her tiny mouth was busy making nursing movements.

  “She’s a beaut,” he observed. “Hard to leave.” He set his plate and napkin on the table. “Are you thinking of not coming back?” Lee froze, thinking perhaps something had gone wrong and Will did not want her back. Or if not Will, maybe Woodleigh Huber had determined that her father-in-law did not deserve such a big plum as her job. “Now stop it,” Will admonished. “I see you going off the deep end, and there’s no reason for it. I want you back. So does everyone. Okay? But every time I call you about one of your cases and ask, Hey, when do you see yourself getting back here? you start obfuscating: I’m not sure. I have to speak to the doctor. I have to check a nanny’s references. Can I call you back, I’m rolling out a pie crust.”

  “Well, I just told you,” she said, wishing she had not made peach pie for dessert. “Six to eight weeks.”

  Will studied her. “Forget I’m your boss and you live and die by my whim,” he said. “Talk to me. Is something wrong? I sense … I don’t know. I sense something.”

  “I feel a certain pressure to stay home.”

  “From your husband?”

  “From my whole family. I’m out of sync with them. Definitely with my mother and sister. My mother tries on shoes for a living, and my sister works as a volunteer in a day care center. You couldn’t find two more traditional women’s roles if you looked for them.”

  “Okay, so you feel pressure to be a housewife?”

  “Yes. But there’s a lot about being a housewife that I like. There’s a part of me that would love to win a Pillsbury Bake-Off or learn to cut a dress pattern. But I want to be a lawyer too, more than I want immortality for my blueberry-ricotta cheese tartlets. Much more. Actually, the pressure isn’t just from my mother and sister. It’s more from the men. Here they are, Jazz and my father, going off to work. And what do they do there? Talk about sleeve lengths. Have coffee with rich ladies and butter them up—‘Indulge me. Try on the lynx. I have a feeling it’s right on the money with your coloring.’ And what do I do? Hang out with a bunch of hairy-chested cops and criminal lawyers. Strategize how to demolish a witness on cross.”

  “So they’re doing traditional women’s work too?”

  “Yes, in a sense, even though it’s business. I think they see what they do as not quite manly enough. Girl stuff. And I’m sure as hell doing the boy stuff.”

  “So you fee
l you don’t fit in anymore?”

  Lee nodded. Even though Val had not made a peep, she picked her up from the carriage and held the baby close against her. “It’s not what I do at home that I don’t like—the cooking, the crocheting, and all that. It’s how I am that bothers me. I hear myself sometimes, and I’m talking half an octave higher than I do at the office. So girlish, so sweet, so un-ball-busting. I never talk about work anymore. Just ‘Whew, had a hard day,’ or something like that. Nothing of substance. Because nobody wants to hear it.”

  “Are you sure it’s not just you feeling guilty about how much you love being a lawyer because your husband … couldn’t cut it?”

  “No, I don’t think so. Does how much I love it show?”

  “Sure, blatantly and flagrantly. For all your blueberry things, there’s a part of you that loves a fight, has to contend. And isn’t what we do a much more civilized way to deal with aggression than the way our defendants get rid of their hostilities? So if you’re thinking of quitting …” Will reached out for Val. Lee draped a cloth diaper over his seersucker shoulder and handed him the baby. Although he did not smile, he looked extremely content with what he was doing. “Don’t quit. You need a safe arena to fight in.”