Green Ice

by Gerald A. Browne

  Lillian took that seat and immediately struck up a conversation. The man’s name was Mitchell—Paul, call him Paul. He made a point of saying he wasn’t flying First Class because it had been fully booked and he hadn’t wanted to bump anyone. He was in the motion picture business. Not a producer, the next worst thing, he said. He arranged deals with foreign distributors. Had to fly a lot. Had no strings, used to, but none now. Did Lillian want a cigarette? No. A drink? No. Anything?

  Playing cards.

  The flight attendant brought a fresh deck.

  Lillian and Paul played for over two thousand miles. He should have known from the sharp way she shuffled. He thought she might be cheating, but she couldn’t be because they were playing losers deal, so she hardly ever got to handle the cards. By the time the approach to Kennedy was announced he was down four hundred and some. Perhaps they hadn’t been playing for dollars really, he suggested. Anyway, he didn’t have that much cash on him. Would she accept his personal check? How much in cash did he have? Two hundred seventy-five. Paul thanked her when she settled for two-fifty.

  She didn’t pick up her baggage. The Holbrook chauffeur was waiting, watching for her outside Customs. She had to go out that way. She waited for a crowd, got behind someone tall, ducked down, slipped around the side. The chauffeur never saw her.

  She taxied into the city to Broadway and Forty-ninth, where she asked a likely-looking girl directions to an army-navy surplus store. The nearest was on Eighth Avenue. Lillian found it, went in and bought an entire new old outfit: white regulation navy jeans that laced up the back, an overwashed khaki-colored tank top and a royal-blue satin zip-up jacket with an outline map of Korea appliquéd on its back.

  She changed in a pay toilet booth at the Port Authority Bus Terminal, flushed all her identification down the toilet, threw her school clothes in the trash receptacle. From there she caught another taxi to Lexington and Fifty-ninth, where she found a second-floor, all-night beauty shop. Not a wince while she had her hair cut short as a boy’s.

  By then it was nine-thirty. Her transformation and the taxi rides had cost $74. Lillian had left Geneva with only $52. She was grateful to that man, Paul, and the roommate who had taught her to play gin seven years and three schools ago. She still had $228 to go on.

  For the first time in her life she took a subway. The Lexington Avenue downtown local. To where the blue letters inlaid on the white-tiled station wall announced: ASTOR PLACE.

  She came up out of the ground and walked across Cooper Square to St. Mark’s Place.

  The East Village. It was wonderfully confusing, impossible for her to take it all in—all the loud colors and sounds, long-haired young men with jeans hanging precariously on their hipbones, girls so apparently with nothing on underneath. Lillian tried not to stare or appear out of place, sauntering along imitatively with a nonchalant, self-likable air. No one seemed to be taking special notice of her, and that was reassuring.

  Several young men and girls were sitting on the steps of a brownstone. Lillian stopped and faced them. They made room for her. She climbed up and sat among them. They didn’t talk much, were content to just sit and watch the passersby. Lillian felt included. As easy as that, she’d become one of them.

  She told them her name was Penny. Where she was from wasn’t asked.

  Seated next to her was a girl whose taken name was Charity, a fifteen-year-old with a roundish face and figure. Lillian admired the beads Charity was wearing. Striped blue-and-green glass strung with intermittent tufts of white feathers. Charity smiled with her entire face, took off the beads, and looped them over Lillian’s head.

  Lillian wanted to give something in return.

  “Got any bread?” Charity asked.

  “Some.”

  “I’d dig some frozen peas.”

  Charity grabbed up her blanket roll, led the way to a market on Second Avenue. Lillian bought a package of Birdseye frozen peas and a can of Fresca for Charity. A Three Musketeers bar for herself.

  “How long you been around?” Lillian asked as they walked up Second.

  “Where?”

  “Here.”

  “Ten days Sunday.”

  Charity had seemed such a veteran to Lillian. “Where do you stay?”

  “Anyplace.” Charity popped some cold raw peas into her mouth, let them melt a little before biting down. “They ain’t so good if you eat them fast,” she said, “but if you don’t, they unfreeze and then ain’t so good either.” Charity stopped beneath a street light. About four inches shorter than Lillian, she looked up into her eyes and asked, “You stoned?”

  Lillian was heavy-eyed. The six-hour time difference from Geneva made it five in the morning for her.

  She spent that night in St. Mark’s Church, stretched out on a hardwood pew, with her head sharing Charity’s blanket roll.

  The chauffeur waited two hours at Kennedy Airport before reporting that Miss Holbrook had not arrived.

  Laurence Holbrook II thought probably his daughter had changed her mind at the last minute, decided the school trip to Cairo or Rome would be more enjoyable. She’d been given that option.

  Mr. Holbrook was disappointed. And relieved. Since Lillian’s last time home, last summer, he had again built up his resolve to be a better, closer father. Nothing, neither crucial business nor the most promising pleasure, would be allowed to interfere. He would focus all his attention on Lillian, extend himself to her as never before, really stretch out, in the hope that they would take hold and establish a new span between them. There had always been the blood connection, of course, but very little had ever been exchanged across that either way. Less and less for the past six years. Not even tempers. Actually, he had never in his life reprimanded Lillian, never once given her so much as a spanking. Such things had been left to someone else, usually to Evelyn, her mother.

  Lillian hadn’t been planned.

  She was a sort of penalty for, anyway a consequence of, an impetuous moment on the way home from a party in Scarsdale. If Evelyn had kept her hands to herself, if she’d had two or three rather than six or seven champagnes. If they’d left the party earlier, or hadn’t gone at all. If there hadn’t been a place to pull the car over. If, when he was into it, his coming had happened on an out- rather than an in-stroke, he might have been able to withdraw.

  It seemed ironic to Laurence Holbrook II that Lillian, as imposing and complicating as she was, should have resulted from such simply avoidable circumstances.

  He would never forget doing ninety on icy roads, trying to get Evelyn home in time. A race against sperm.

  Only child Lillian.

  If Laurence resented her, it was a feeling too unnatural for him to admit, especially to himself. Any such feelings were coated with demonstrations of just the opposite. Inconsistent doting. Overplaying his role. He would take her to see the sea, get his feet wet with her, let her have anything she wanted for dinner, tuck her in and goodnight kiss her forehead as though it were fragile.

  Then, practically ignore her for a month.

  Evelyn’s constant caring made up for that, as much as it could. From the moment Lillian was toddling, Evelyn took her everywhere, time after time, even to places most mothers went to retreat from their children. With her while she had a facial, had her hair done, shopped at Saks, lunched at the Plaza, went to galleries, auctions at Parke-Bernet. Over the years they were together so much that Lillian took on Evelyn’s mannerisms, duplicated her gestures and ways, every nuance exactly. There had been considerable resemblance to start, but by the time Lillian was ten she was like a miniature Evelyn. People said it was remarkable.

  Lillian was ten that night at the huge summer house in Seal Harbor, Maine, when she overheard the quarrel between Evelyn and Laurence. She had overheard and even witnessed other such quarrels, many. Usually they happened at night. Sometimes Lillian pretended what she was hearing was a television program. That night they were having a long bad one.

  The next morning when Lillian
went down to breakfast, Evelyn was already up and out, gone sailing.

  Why hadn’t she taken Lillian along?

  Lillian ran down to the dock. The boat with its red sail was not yet too far out. Lillian shouted, but Evelyn didn’t seem to hear, didn’t look back. It was a heavy sunless day with a slapping breeze. Lillian sat on the dry, slivery wood of the dock, watched Evelyn sail away, headed directly out to sea. The smaller the red sail got, the thicker dark the sky became, and the breeze turned into a wind and blew windier. The sea, a disturbed color, all chopped up and spitting. Evelyn was a mere speck of red on the horizon that Lillian’s eyes tried not to let go.

  Evelyn’s body washed up five miles down coast. Three days later the ashes of her, in a solid silver urn, were placed in a crypt at St. James Cemetery in Greenwich, Connecticut.

  She left everything that was hers to Lillian. Though her social credentials had been less than those of Laurence Holbrook II, Evelyn Mayo had been worth more. The base chunk of the Mayo fortune was made in the mid-1800s by an Irish immigrant, Daniel Mayo. A glib, go-lucky gambler who won some Pennsylvania land with three nines. Found coal on it. The coal also got him into steel, which got him into a number of other profitable things. He died in 1908 at the age of fifty-four, bequeathing some twenty millions to his son Arthur. Arthur Mayo multiplied that. He cleaned up during the Depression. Sensed it coming, liquidated, transferred huge amounts to Europe. Thus, when practically everyone else was going under, willing to sell for next to nothing, Arthur Mayo had the capital. He acquired various large businesses that needed merely his financial transfusion to make them healthy. He pressed his cash advantage mercilessly when it came to real estate, especially choice properties in New York City, Boston and Philadelphia. For a while there, even Arthur Mayo lost track of what he owned and how much all of it was worth. And by the time he got everything in order, World War II broke out to offer other money-making opportunities.

  Arthur Mayo never stopped expanding. In 1953 he died at his desk in the Mayo Building, just minutes after finalizing the takeover of a major insurance company. He not only knew how to make money; he knew how to keep it. He had organized the Mayo holdings in such a complex way that it was impossible for the government to eat them up with taxes. The government took its bite, but by comparison it was a mere nibble. There were all sorts of generating funds legally structured around other funds. Like giant boxes containing boxes containing boxes and so on, until it came down to very little. What’s more, it was the sort of fortune already set up with excellent management, thereby leaving its principal beneficiary free to enjoy it.

  All that went to Lillian—upon her maturity. Laurence Holbrook II wasn’t even named executor. He considered that a slap in the face, but for the sake of his social-macho pride, the less made of it the better.

  Lillian was enrolled in a nice school located outside Philadelphia. It was said it was good for her to be away, distracted from hurt by having to contend with new surroundings and strangers.

  Over the next six years Lillian went to five such schools. In that same time, Laurence was married and divorced twice. He was perpetually involved with women, although never more than one at a time. Each affair was entered into with the same attitude of new, utmost importance. The only difference among them was it took longer for some to dissipate.

  That was another reason Laurence was disappointed that Lillian didn’t come home from her Swiss school in the spring of 1966. He had wanted to tell her about the young woman he was now serious about, might marry. He hadn’t asked for Lillian’s approval before, but she was old enough to appreciate such thoughtfulness. Besides, the previous summer Lillian had let him off the hook. Her last day home they had walked together in the woods around the estate.

  “Fatherhood isn’t natural,” she said. “Did you ever consider that?”

  He hadn’t.

  It was something she’d recently read that stuck with her.

  “Not long ago there was no such thing,” she said.

  “Everyone had a father.”

  “Yeah. But back in those days no one realized the connection between screwing and having a baby. Simply because the two happened nine months apart.”

  “How did they think the woman got pregnant?”

  “Some mysterious, divine way. Screwing was strictly for fun.”

  “Millions of years ago, perhaps.”

  “Only twenty thousand.”

  His impulse had been to say they knew better now, of course, but just then he was in no mood to defend himself. Seeing that he was willing to let it go at that, she put her arm around him, perhaps consolingly, and as they walked on he thought she was starting to understand him.

  Anyway, Lillian would not be home for spring vacation. That left him free to be with Patricia, whom he had met two months ago. Patricia with something in her eyes that he refused to believe was dollar signs. She wanted to go with him to his house in Palm Beach, and now that wouldn’t have to be sacrificed.

  He took up the phone, dialed half of Patricia’s New York number, then pressed the cradle down to get a fresh dial tone. It would be an easy enough point in his favor to express his disappointment to Lillian. He called the school in Gstaad. The headmistress told him that, no, Lillian was not there and, no, Lillian was not in Rome or Cairo. She had departed for home, as allowed by Monsieur.

  He called Swissair. Flight 110 had landed on time. The airline night supervisor confirmed that Lillian Holbrook had been a passenger.

  He called the police. Kidnapping was assumed. The newspapers and television played it up, milked the story. But gradually Where is Lillian Holbrook? gave way to more current issues and misfortunes and crimes. The kidnapping was briefly mentioned in the press eight months later when Laurence Holbrook II married twenty-three-year-old fashion model Darlene Casey.

  During the first few weeks Lillian often thought of going home. She felt guilty for causing so much commotion, and according to all the accounts she read and saw, her father seemed sincerely concerned. Ambivalent, restless, she took long late-night walks alone, until she was chased for her body and nearly caught by four studded leather types. From then on, she went up and sat on the roof to think things out.

  She decided in her own favor.

  She was living then with Charity in a one-room sixth-floor walkup on East Eleventh Street, near Avenue B. A pair of bedrolls, three plates, four mayonnaise jars for glasses, a few odd knives and forks. Stapled to the tops of the windows was heavy brown wrapping paper that could be rolled up and let down. A Swedish ivy plant, overcared for, on the sill. No refrigerator. For fifty dollars a month. They earned about a hundred a month stringing beads, sewing headbands and making simple silver wire jewelry that a guy sold to tourists at his head shop on MacDougal Street.

  Lillian stayed home more than half the time, didn’t hang around St. Mark’s Place or take up with anyone except Charity. She was afraid she’d be recognized. And there were plenty of bounty hunters around, guys and a few girls who turned in runaways for whatever they could get from parents. One or two of the free crash pads were actually operated for such profit.

  Lillian, because of her worth, had to be especially careful. She kept her hair trimmed short and wore plain wire-rimmed glasses.

  By August she was confident enough to march. Up Fifth Avenue, with ten thousand others. She and Charity carried a sign they had water-colored the night before. Delicate curlicues and pretty swirls around the request: PEACE PLEASE.

  She felt on display, intimidated by the onlookers, but after twenty blocks those feelings were stirred away. Never mind the ridicule from those on the sidewalks, the obscenities, or even the more active contempt of construction workers who threw garbage—she was in the stream of love, part of a gentle, invulnerable defiance.

  She practically skipped up the rest of the avenue, and on into Central Park to the Sheep Meadow, where the energy of the day was pooled on the grass in the sun. The word love was everywhere. Most beautiful slogan. Hers now. />
  Lillian really listened to most of the speeches, contributed her cheers. She mingled, exchanged tender gazes, got kissed and hugged by strangers, kissed and hugged other strangers, helped sing a wistful song and had white daisies rained upon her from a helicopter.

  It was, she thought, the most wonderful day of her life. She felt changed by it, as though she had passed from confinement to an openness where she joined a happier part of herself that had been waiting.

  From that day on Lillian was in the thick of it.

  She fell in young love twice. First with Michael and his poetry. Hitchhiked across the country with him. She didn’t like Haight-Ashbury. He did. One morning she left him sleeping. Caught rides to L.A., crashed around there, ran out of money, worked making beds in a big motel on Cahuenga.

  Hitched her way back east.

  Her second love was for Dennis and his intensity. He left her to join the Hare Krishnas. She saw him one summer Saturday, bald, barefoot, with a white stripe smeared down his forehead and the bridge of his nose, chanting and shaking bells near Rockefeller Center. Too busy with God to say hello.

  She concentrated then on being a better revolutionary, liked the designation.

  Fuck the Establishment!

  Stopped up pay toilets in Grand Central and elsewhere by flushing down tennis balls that lodged in the pipes.

  Carried a pocketful of four-inch flat-headed nails that she placed under the tires of any police cars and limousines outside the Waldorf.

  Was proud she’d been busted ten times.

  Knew how it was to have Mace in her face.

  The Chicago convention, fight night in front of the Hilton: She jumped on the back of a cop who was clubbing someone down. Rode, clawed, kicked for his groin. Came to a few hours later at Northwestern Memorial Hospital, stitched thirty-two times in various places on her skull and with a very puffy upper lip. She asked for a mirror, grinned at herself and made sure she still had all her teeth.