Lily White

by Susan Isaacs

  So he’d poured all this out to his wife for almost an hour and a half, and she’d shrugged. “Is that all you can say?” he’d demanded. Finally, she’d said, “I think it sounds wonderful,” but he could tell she didn’t. She was probably scared. Selling a booming business in Queens and opening up cold in Manhattan. Such a risk. Didn’t she realize he woke up at four in the morning with his intestines tied in knots? Such a huge outlay, what with inventory and a showroom with parquet floors and those antique French chairs with arms that cost about two hundred dollars each.

  Still, the way her skirt fit over her backside, like the skin on a knockwurst …

  “I said pinch myself,” Sylvia laughed, wriggling out of his grasp, moving into the kitchen to deal with the bags of groceries that filled the room. Stock up, Leonard had commanded her the day before, their first full day as home owners. She had left the baby with her mother, who was helping out till they got settled, and had gone on a shopping spree that had left the assistant manager of the A & P with his jaw hanging open—although he badbeen able to say: Can I have one of the boys put your bags in your car, Mrs. … And she’d filled in his blank. White, she’d said. To be perfectly honest, it had been humiliating, going from Weissberg to Weiss to White, but now that they were in a new community, starting out fresh as White, knowing he wouldn’t change it again (despite a few days’ flirtation with “Whyte”), she was glad Leonard had insisted. Anyway, the A & P assistant manager—he was very broad-shouldered, probably from lifting all those cartons of canned peaches—he said …

  “How much did you spend?” Leonard inquired.

  “What you gave me,” Sylvia responded, a little edgy because she had gone overboard, sweeping roll upon roll of paper towels into her cart, stocking up on Chicken of the Sea chunk white like the tuna was pheasant under glass or something. And she had pulled jar after jar of preserves off the shelf, until she had strawberry, black-currant, cherry, raspberry, gooseberry, plum, apple butter, and orange marmalade.

  But to his credit, Leonard wasn’t cheap. Nothing but the best. Well, not the best, because the best kind of a house was an English Tudor or something called a Georgian, he’d told her. Except then your furniture had to be antiques or at least come from B. Altman, so it was better to have a modern house. Then it could be spare. Spare. That was his new favorite word; it superseded “classic,” which came after “luxuriant,” which supplanted “discriminating.” He always had some snotty new word. To be honest, he had some nerve acting so snotty, what with Lard Lady, his mother, and his old man, Nathan the Red. “Spare.” Well, her clothes were spare, but then, she’d always had terrific taste. It was part of her artistic talent. Like, with her Hardy Amies green wool suit: a green felt hat trimmed with green feathers, but black suede pumps. She didn’t want to believe it when the salesgirl had suggested green alligator. No! She knew when enough was enough. Black suede gloves, large gold button earrings, and that was it. No bracelet, no necklace, no scarf. Spare.

  She loved buying. The dark jewel colors of the jams in the A & P. The sleek Danish-modern coffee table with those skinny blond legs that made it look as though it was tiptoeing over the cocoa-colored carpet. And on top of the table, casual, as if someone had just stopped reading them, not in a neat pile, the half-price art books she’d found in a store down the block from the obstetrician’s: how the dark red on the Utrillo’s cover echoed the scarlets and carmines on the Rembrandt’s. She wasn’t like some women, buy-buy-buy out of boredom. She loved what she bought, took pleasure in an object every time she saw it in her home. Okay, not a box of Lipton’s tea bags. But like that petticoat she’d bought in 1949, in a lilac so pale it was almost gray; it had narrow ribbon shoulder straps and scalloped ribbon trim along the hemline. Every time she opened her lingerie drawer, she’d feel good, just seeing it—and the yellow nightgown with the quilted bed jacket too.

  She thought about her things a lot, and about things she saw when she went to the city, things she couldn’t afford but remembered as if they belonged to her. She never forgot something once it caught her eye. Like in an antique store window on East Fifty-eighth, a silver tea set with the most delicate leafy pattern etched into it. The lid of the pot and the sugar bowl cover were topped with roses made out of silver. Incredible work. The last time she passed it, the store owner had waved to her from inside the store. Like: I know just how you feel. Wait: more than that. I know you’ll be back. He was very good-looking, with white hair and a white mustache, wearing a dark-gray suit that was almost black. Very slim. Neat. Like a well-packed cigarette.

  Leonard was clean. There was no man on earth cleaner. He used four Q-Tips every morning on his ears. But he wasn’t … what was that word he’d liked but not loved? Fastidious. He’d used that for a week or two. But he wasn’t fastidious, because he wasn’t in complete control over himself, not like the man in the antique store, with his hankie sticking out of his pocket in six perfect points. Nervous, Leonard would run his hand through his hair, and by late afternoon the Brylcreemed ends would no longer lie flat, but would coil like tiny springs at the back of his neck. Or he’d dribble something on his tie, a tiny drop of something, but then a poppy seed would stick to it. And in terms of looks: He wasn’t dapper, but he wasn’t a man’s man either, like the assistant manager at the A & P, with black hair peeking out from under his white undershirt, making little twirlies right below his neck. Or her still-life teacher, Jeffrey, at the Great Neck Center for the Fine Arts, with his black eyes and tight blue jeans. Leonard was just okay-looking. Dark-brown hair, brown eyes. Okay. Skin? Not like he had pockmarks, but you could see pores on his cheeks. Five-feet eight-and-a-half, even though it said five-ten on his driver’s license, so not quite tall enough. Not getting fat, but in the last year, in his new, slim English jacket, it looked like he was wearing a fox boa under it instead of a belt.

  Let us leave Leonard’s love handles and Sylvia’s mind and return to S-E-X once again. The E. If the vertical stroke is the institution of marriage, and the two Whites are the horizontal lines on either end, then clearly there is something between them. Remember, this was now 1951. They were neither sophisticates nor libertines, so it was nothing kinky. They seemed like a happy couple. They said “I love you” to each other every night just before they went off to sleep. They had sexual intercourse three times a week. At this point in their lives, the mere thought of taking a lover had never crossed either of their minds, so whatever was between them was certainly not another man or another woman.

  They had more disposable income than Great Neck neighbors twice their age. True, Leonard’s big plans might put them in the poorhouse, but as the Bankers Trust Company was willing to underwrite his grandiose fantasies of a showroom with Louis XV bergères on Lexington Avenue and East Sixty-fifth Street, its sales force taught from birth to inquire “Puis-je vous aider?” it was not money that had come between them.

  Could it have been that having a child had caused some rift? Highly dubious. If not a great child, our heroine was certainly an awfully nice one. In the late spring of 1951, Lily Rose White, thirteen months old, had three teeth and a sweet smile. Well, sweet when it came to friendly people, a smile in response to a smile: up on the right side, a quiver on the left—before spreading across her face and lighting up her big brown eyes. Definitely not one of those Aren’t-I-fabulous smiles the born-confident flash. But engaging enough.

  And she got better in the ensuing months. Some ordinary children are, for a short period, overcome by a monomania that lights them up like a holy spirit. Who knows why an ordinary little boy becomes incandescent at the sight of a garbage truck? Or how a plain little girl transcends her commonality and becomes a toddler goddess at the sight of an animal? For Lily Rose White, a blue jay evoked delight, a cat rapture, and a dog … bliss beyond all understanding. Sylvia learned that the fastest way to obtain her daughter’s cooperation was to threaten to withhold either the blouse with a Scottish terrier appliquéd on the collar or a cup decorated with an
owl and pussycat. Leonard was the more positive parent. He discovered that to take this nice enough (but after ten minutes of peekaboo rather boring) female child to the Bronx Zoo was to turn her into the Best Kid in the World. Show her a tapir and she’d howl with jubilation, a giraffe and she’d fall into silent awe.

  So it was not the child who came between Mr. and Mrs. Leonard White. What was happening that while allowing them to say “I love you” to each other once every twenty-four hours did not allow them to feel love? It is easy to tick off items on a list: Narcissism. Lack of trust. Self-loathing, the belief that anyone worth loving could not love them. Emotional immaturity. But the truth is, some questions have no answer. Suffice it to say that although Mr. and Mrs. White looked as if they had it all, they did not. They were wanting.

  Having avoided that issue, let us not avoid concluding S-E-X. Note how the two lines of the X intersect at only one point. Well, two years after their move to Great Neck, Sylvia and Leonard came together. She was two months pregnant with their second child. (A son, Leonard prayed to no one in particular. John Bradley White? Radley Wilson White? Did he dare Dalton Kendall White III?) Having successfully lost the ten pounds she had gained with Lee and not yet put it back on, as she would inevitably and irrevocably do, Sylvia had regained some of that high-cheeked, honey-haired elegance one would anticipate from the wife of a polo player, assuming one knew polo players. On those nights when she would stop by the salon to wait for him before they went out for dinner with other furrier couples or to the Museum of Modern Art, where she had made him—he was grateful—become a Donor so they got invitations to all the openings, Leonard could see his customers’ heads turn: Who is that woman in the Lanvin evening suit, its jacket lined with leopard-print silk, a leopard coat slung casually over her arm? Sylvia was at her peak.

  As was Leonard. He was now the proprietor of Le Fourreur, a Manhattan fur salon so exclusive that it was rumored that Mrs. John Foster Dulles was told in no uncertain terms that she’d have to wait two months if she wanted a full-length tawny brown ranch mink. That was how great the demand was for exclusive designs by Jean-Louis, Leonard’s couturier. The rumor about Mrs. Dulles was not true. It had been made up and spread by Leonard, who also invented “Jean-Louis” for his designer, who until then had been Bobby Anello, hitherto of Westchester Fancy Furs.

  Rumor was only one of Leonard’s many marketing strategies. He called the twenty percent break he routinely offered all his good customers a “fashion industry deep discount” when he phoned the editors of Vogue, Harper’s Bazaar, the New York Times, and the Herald Tribune to tell them about it. When they dropped by Le Fourreur, he charmed them by serving tea in Haviland cups and by throwing in a black or silver fox stole with whatever garment they bought and paid for as a way of saying Thank you for your patronage. After a spectacular December 1952 season, the Whites were no longer comfortable. They were well-to-do.

  Sylvia had charge accounts at Saks Fifth Avenue, Tailored Woman, and Henri Bendel. Leonard went from ready-made English suits off the rack at Moe Ginsburg’s to perusing a book of swatches in a suite in the Plaza that M. Thierry Boucault, the noted Parisian haberdasher, occupied on his semiannual trips to New York. They hired a live-in maid. They bought a suite of signed Picasso lithographs for the living room. They donated money to the United Way and the Boy Scouts. They bought a Christmas tree. (However, Leonard could not figure out how to get it to stand up on its own. He forbade Sylvia to ask the maid how to do it, so the tree lay dying on the living room floor until the second of January. They waited until the following year for their first real Christmas: Leonard spent a half hour on an early December Saturday at Colonial Nursery and Garden Supplies, pretending to survey their inventory of snow shovels but actually checking out their Christmas tree. Its secret was finally revealed: underneath a ladylike green velveteen skirt lay a clunky metal brace. To decorate their tree, Sylvia spent an entire day at Bergdorf Goodman—without even stopping for lunch—choosing ornaments: blown-glass orbs within orbs, a galaxy of silver stars.) And they sold their house two weeks before the raspberry bushes Sylvia had planted in the fertile soil of Great Neck bore their first fruit. Once again, the Whites moved eastward and upward.

  Getting back to the X for a moment. Sylvia had some bad times right after her first child’s birth. There she was, drained, pulled at by episiotomy stitches and dragged down by the blues, and Leonard had sauntered into her hospital room with a huge bouquet of white roses and an I-don’t-care-that-it’s-not-a-boy grin, and she’d thought: Who is this man? Of course, she knew he was her husband, and the father of her baby, but he had looked so strange. Those big lips, the insides displaying themselves, pink and wet, like some insect-eating tropical flower. He’d come over and sat on the edge of the bed, taking her hand in his. She tried to gaze into his eyes, but those giant lips filled her range of vision and they moved, inexorably, toward her, puckering slightly for a kiss. She wanted to shriek the way that woman did in—what was that horror picture?—I Walked with a Zombie. Grotesque! Abominable! Please, please don’t get any closer! Don’t …

  Well, he’d kissed her and she lived through it. In the next couple of years, however, those horrible moments recurred, and a couple of times the lips seemed to puff up right before her eyes. How could his customers think he was so attractive, the Christian ones with husbands whose lips were never any wider than zippers?

  But things had gotten better. And better. They’d had a good anniversary the past June. Leonard had taken her to the best restaurant in the city, Le Pavilion, where he’d shaken the hand of the man in the front, except she realized he was giving a bribe or a tip or whatever. The man had glanced into his hand and gotten very charming and offered them a nice table. Leonard ordered champagne and then let the wine waiter pick out their wines, and by the end of the evening, Sylvia slipped her foot out of her black peau de soie Chanel sling-back and was using it to rub the inside of Leonard’s thigh. And that September, he told her to meet him in the store—salon—right after closing. He asked her to try on the Russian sable Mrs. General Motors had ordered. But then he said: “This is too good for Mrs. General Motors. Why don’t you keep it?” When she finally comprehended what he was talking about, she almost fainted from joy, and the salesmen, who were still there and Dolly, the model/ bookkeeper, who’d peeked out from the office, had applauded.

  Thus the intersecting of the X. Sylvia finally understood what his customers saw in her husband. While no one would call Leonard conventionally handsome, with his made-to-order suits and beautifully cut hair he could look ultra smart—in an Italian kind of way, but upper-class Italian, from Italy. She remembered how once she’d loathed his lips, but now realized that if you looked at him as a whole, he was very appealing. Now and then, even stunning.

  And Leonard’s heart softened too. He realized that while his wife’s diction all but shouted “Born in Brooklyn! Bred in Queens!” throughout her childhood she’d been forced to whisper instead of talk. So who heard the accent? To look at her, she could be an English horsewoman.

  But after the legs of the X cross, they again part. So it was with Mr. and Mrs. White. In her third month of pregnancy with her second daughter (who would be named Robin Renée), Sylvia came down with terrible morning sickness. Then it became all-day sickness. Leonard worried about how thin she was getting, how bad it was for the baby because sometimes Sylvia’s entire dinner would be a single Ritz cracker. Her face became spotty and her hair lost its shine, but when he got home, he would take her in his arms and say something reassuring, like: “It won’t last forever.”

  But instead of being comforted, she got all weepy and clung to him. Sitting beside him in the movies over the weekend, hugging his arm, stuffing it in the divide between her two swollen breasts. Butting her pillow against his at night, so he could feel her hot breath on the back of his neck. And it wasn’t just physical clinging. She called him first thing in the morning: How was the ride in on the Long Island Rail Road? Late morning: W
ho are you having lunch with? Early afternoon: What did you have for lunch? Was it good? Did you have dessert? Late afternoon: How’s it going? Any good customers stop in? Early evening: What train are you taking home? She’s pregnant, he told himself. And she loves me.

  But that made him realize that she had never before displayed this interest, this passion for him. Did the hormone changes in her make her feel more free? Well, she hadn’t been so free when she was pregnant with Lee. In fact, sometimes he knew Sylvia was pretending to get excited, and she was a lousy pretender. Oooo. Oooo. Always Oooo, repeated two times. But now she had a repertoire of noises, and they were for real. She’d become crazy for him. Now that he was well-to-do.

  Now she always was ready for him. Not just ready: If he didn’t come to her, she’d come to him. Now, no matter what she wore, her nipples always stuck out. He could feel them when she clung to him. Well, he thought, trying hard to be fair, I’m a big shot now. That’s very attractive to women. But a voice called up from his subconscious: Hey, Len. Is that the real thing, when the girl has to see sable before she falls in love?