Lily White

by Susan Isaacs

  “Daddy? He’s fine, Grandma,” Lee replied absently, all her energies focused on a single loop of pink wool.

  “Who’s he fooling—White—with a schnozz like a knockwurst?”

  Lee was tempted to ask what “schnozz” meant but, fearing it was yet another Yiddish word for “penis,” kept silent. She was spending the weekend at her grandparents’ apartment in Brooklyn and, as she always did, had taken over Bella’s crocheting. This current project was an afghan comprising of squares with a tricky rose design in the middle that required all her concentration.

  “They fight?” Bella inquired, with a casualness that immediately caught Lee’s attention. Bella always described herself as having retired from acting, but truth is, even in the Yiddish theater, where extravagant gestures were anticipated and overacting was applauded, Bella had been deemed lacking in subtlety. The truth was she had not jumped off the stage; she had been pushed. But as Bella did not find the truth appealing, she ignored it and created her own Biography of a Star (she had been too great to be a mere ingenue) who had left audiences weeping and critics gnashing their teeth in despair at her departure. And she did it all for the love of—as Bella always told it when relating the details—“a regular Joe named Nat.”

  “Fight? Who? My parents?”

  “No, not your parents. Debbie and Eddie.” Bella patted her hair, pleased with her show business allusion. She had a new hairdo, Lee noted, a bun of dyed red hair, a swollen thing, that looked like a bite from a huge and vicious insect, but her grandmother seemed quite pleased with her appearance. Then again, Bella believed herself to be a ringer for Rita Hayworth, demonstrating an exuberant ego not often found in three-hundred-pound, fifty-six-year-old working-class women in the outer boroughs of New York City. Satisfied with her hair, Bella let her left hand drift over to the coffee table, where it discovered a bowl of M&M’s, and scooped up just three fewer than the critical mass of sugar-coated chocolate that would induce diabetic shock. “Of course I mean your parents. Hey, you’re stretching the wool too tight, Miss Lily Weissberg.”

  “That’s not my name.”

  “It’s what your name oughta be. Now it’s too slack; tighten up the littlest bit. Good. And you know it and I know it and your father, Mr. White, knows it. White! Like he’s from Ohio, with a cow. ‘Howdy, Farmer White. How’s your alfalfa this year?’ ‘Not bad, if I say so myself.’”

  Lee smiled and, abandoning what her mother called “proper carriage,” wriggled deep into a corner of the couch: Ah, a perfect meeting of buttocks and cushion. The furniture in her grandparents’ living room had been sold to them at a going-out-of-business sale by a salesman who swore the entire suite—couch, two club chairs, a side table, and a coffee table—would last forever, little knowing that for once he was telling the truth. Besides being rugged it was comfortable. And unusually hideous, a Brooklyn restatement of French Provincial style that might have been better left unsaid: painted white wood with flecks of gold, skinny legs, upholstered in royal blue. An odd choice, perhaps, for a card-carrying Communist and his apolitical (but nominally fellow-traveling) wife, but the Weissbergs were blind to its pretensions and saw only its brightness. “Livens up the whole apartment!” Bella had decreed. Lee, whose aesthetic judgment had been honed by Sylvia, grasped that the suite was in the worst possible taste. Nevertheless, side by side with her certitude of its hideousness lay the contrary belief that her grandparents’ furniture was the most regal anywhere. Besides, with its fat pillows filled with cheap, chopped-up foam-rubber, it was vastly more comfortable than the icy spareness of the Whites’ Bauhaus furnishings.

  “So?” Bella demanded.

  “What?”

  “Do they fight?”

  “Once in a while.”

  “What about?”

  “I don’t know. They go upstairs and shut the door. I just … Their voices get louder, but I can’t hear what they’re saying.”

  “You think I was born yesterday?” Bella demanded. Her voice, easily capable of projecting from the Flatbush section of Brooklyn to an audience on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, resounded in Lee’s ears. A second later, she softened her statement, smiling in kindly fashion, her mouth a tiny upturned crescent in her round moon of a face. “You don’t gotta tell me nothing if you don’t want to, toots.”

  “There’s nothing much to tell, Grandma.”

  “Fine by me.”

  Two silent stitches, then: “There’s nothing Mommy does that makes him happy. Even when she tries.”

  “So give me a for instance,” Bella said, sitting back, crossing her arms and resting them on her shelf of a bosom.

  “Like dinner parties. You know? Like they had twelve people over, and I helped her set the table. It looked beautiful, with the Georg Jensen silver—”

  “Who?”

  “Their good flatware.”

  “Flatware,” Bella breathed. “God in heaven.”

  “Anyway, she made a centerpiece with a bunch of twigs and dead leaves and white roses.” Catching her grandmother’s about-to-curl lip, Lee added: “I know it sounds icky, but it was really beautiful. Very … What Mommy and Daddy call ‘stark.’ That means plain but in a very good way.” Lee took a deep breath, hesitating to give her grandmother ammunition in her campaign against her son’s life. “He came in, around six-thirty on a Saturday. He’d been at the store all day. Mommy took him into the dining room, you know, to kind of show it off. And he said: ‘Oh.’ just ‘Oh.’ And right away Mommy started acting too happy, the way she always gets when she’s …”

  “When she’s what?”

  “Afraid of him. No. I don’t know. When she’s … She wants him to love what she does, but the second he saw the centerpiece, he just stared at it. And she started acting even happier—laughing too much—ha-ha-ha!—telling about how she’d walked in the woods in back of the house to find the twigs and stuff and how she copied the idea from the dinner dance at the Museum of Modern Art … just blabbing away a mile a minute.”

  “And what did he say?”

  “Nothing. No, wait. He said, ‘They did those arrangements two yean ago! Then he said he had to go up and shower and change, but she kept hanging on to his arm and asking over and over ‘Is anything wrong, Leonard?’ So finally, he said: ‘No. Everything’s fine and dandy’ And then he just yanked his arm away and went up. Mommy sat down on one of the chairs and started crying, the way she always does.”

  “What way?”

  “Putting her head all the way back. So her mascara on her bottom eyelashes doesn’t run.”

  Bella took the crocheting out of Lee’s hands and put her arm around the girl, pulling Lee into the shelter of her warm, fat body. “Is he like this with you, tootsie?”

  “No.”

  “Is he okay with you kids?”

  “I always kid around with him. He says I’ve got a big mouth, but he doesn’t mean it in a bad way. He likes when I’m … what’s the word? Spunky. And he likes that I’m good at tennis and get mostly A’s at school. Robin gets A-pluses. She’s a big cry-baby and can’t do any sports. Daddy says learning sportsmanship is key.”

  “Key for what?”

  “For life. But he doesn’t play any sports.”

  “So how does it come to be a key?”

  “I don’t know. So I tell him about all our games and what Coach says about my backhand—a killer backhand—and it makes him happy.” Lee put the wool rose on her lap. “Happy in a kind of phony, excited way. He says: ‘Super-duper!’ I think he’s happier when Robin draws designs for him.” Lee’s normally golden skin took on a yellowish hue, as if all the bitterness deep within had risen to the surface. “He’s using one of her designs at his store. He’s actually having it made up. A raccoon coat with a hood that zips on and off.” Lee’s mouth tightened until her lips disappeared. “I can’t draw.”

  “Big damn deal. You got a killer backside, right?”

  “Backhand.”

  “Whatever. And you know I love your sist
er, but if a tennis ball came flying at her, she’d piss in her pants.”

  “More than piss.”

  “Right. So you’re very, very unique. Never forget that. You can play tennis and get A’s and crochet like you was born with a hook in your hand. And you’re a good girl too, nice through and through. And you’re nobody’s fool. Smart as a whip. Smart enough to know that nothing is ever going to make your father happy.”

  “Why not?” Lee asked.

  “Because what he wants is to be whatever he’s not. Mr. Joe College.”

  “How come he couldn’t get a scholarship? He was smart, wasn’t he?”

  “It wasn’t smartness. It was”—Bella touched an area around her solar plexus—“heart. I kept telling him: ‘Lenny, you can be anything you want, Lenny. You’re a brilliant kid, and you got a chance at the brass ring good as anybody’s.’ But he never believed that. He saw the deck stacked against him, with the plutocrats—you know, the haves—raking it in and the working-class getting dreck. That’s always true, and don’t you forget it. But now and then a person can make himself an exception. Something inside Lenny went bad, though. Like a disease that ate out the meat from his heart. Still and all, he did make a good business. Right? But he never got his true dreams. To be a big-shot lawyer in a three-piece suit. To be a sport. To be a goy. He got trapped in his own skin.”

  “And he didn’t have the heart to fight his way out?” Lee asked softly.

  “You got it in a nutshell.”

  “So why is he mad at my mother?”

  “Because … Maybe you’re too young for me to be talking to you like this, but you know what I always say? ‘What the hell!’ So here’s what I think and I told your grandfather and he for once in his life didn’t say, ‘Bella, you’re nuts.’ Lenny is mad at Sylvia because the girl of his dreams don’t want a furrier.”

  “But she keeps trying so hard to make him happy. It’ll never work, will it?”

  “I don’t think so, toots.”

  “So I have one question.”

  “Shoot.”

  “If he doesn’t like himself, and he doesn’t like her, and they’ll never be—you know—a fun couple … There’s a fun couple next door, in that big house, up on the hill. But not my mother and father. They’ll always be a pair of losers my father can’t stand.”

  “Go on.”

  “Don’t losers have loser kids?”

  “No! Not on your life, toots.”

  “It’s not what I think, Grandma. It’s what Daddy thinks. He’s got me and Robin. But if he had a son like …” The name Jasper Taylor choked her. She couldn’t say it. She had watched her father standing transfixed, adoring, gawking up at Jasper racing along the perimeter of Hart’s Hill’s grounds with a huge kite shaped like a sailboat streaming behind him. Leonard had been so taken up with Jasper that he was oblivious that he had turned the pool backwash lever and that water was gushing out over his kidskin loafers.

  And so Lee changed the subject and asked for a vanilla Coke. Thus, she never got to say Jasper’s name to her beloved Grandma Bella, who died of a hot fudge sundae three months later.

  Jasper disappeared from Lee’s life the following September, when he went away to prep school, the same school Foster had attended, a prestigious, pedagogically third-rate institution named for an Anglican saint so obscure the Archbishop of Canterbury would not have recognized his name. The next time she saw him was three years later, the summer of 1965, when they were both fifteen. She did not recognize him.

  “Jazz!” one of his friends called from the counter of Dante’s Pizza, and Jasper-now-Jazz slid out of his booth and ambled over, barefoot, to help his buddy carry the sodas.

  It was his feet that drew Lee’s attention away from the half-plain, half-sausage-mushroom-meatball pie that lay between her and Robin. Naked feet. “Ick!” Lee said. Going sock-less was one thing: In Sylvia’s book even that was tolerable only if accompanied by white duck yachting trousers, a striped boat-neck sweater, and a net income of over one hundred thousand dollars per annum. But a kid who went barefoot, even in his own house, was inviting society’s condemnation and opportunistic infectious disease.

  “Ooky-pukey,” Robin agreed. Despite this comment, she was a much-improved child. The onset of menarche, which signals a period of tribulation for so many young women and their families, had actually calmed her. Some biochemical magic soothed her overstimulated dendrites, and while she was certainly still high-strung, she was no longer an identifiable basket case. “Barefoot!”

  Jazz’s feet were big, Lee noticed as he passed her table, with some light brown hair on the tops and the toes and black filth on the soles. His calves were hairy, although he was tan and the brown hair had turned gold. Muscular calves. She looked up. Blue-and-green madras Bermuda shorts and a blue golf shirt with an alligator on the breast. An alligator! Mon dieu. Lee actually said to herself. (She was at that time traveling with the Shorehaven High School intellectual set, and she let out a fast exhalation, a cross between a snort and a sneer.) His biceps looked predictably strong, but what aroused her interest, to say nothing of her libido, were his forearms. Clear muscular definition. Powerfully developed brachioradialis bulging under the tanned skin. And those curly golden hairs; she sensed she could lift one with the very tips of her fingers and it would spring back. Lee glanced up, but he was standing at the counter, beside his friend, a tall drink of water, kibitzing with Dante, Junior.

  “I’m full,” Robin announced.

  “No shit, Ajax,” Lee mumbled, her eyes on the forearms.

  “I’m going to tell Mommy you said ‘shit,”’ Robin said, with less malice than a realization that her sister’s attention was elsewhere and she wanted it back. Greta had taken one of her rare days off, and her parents had gone to a charity party in a tent somewhere far out on Long Island, at the “cottage” of one of Leonard’s customers—which Lee knew was rich-talk for an estate on the ocean (unless the rich person happened to be referring to the hovel in the woods where his groundskeeper lived in degradation and squalor). Bred as Lee was by Sylvia and Leonard and molded by Galsworthy’s novels (The Silver Spoon had fallen off the shelf at the library and hit Lee on the shoulder as she was browsing—at a time when she should have been studying for her plane geometry regents), her knowledge of upper-middle-class white Anglo-Saxon Protestant mores was near-encyclopedic, albeit wildly outdated and next to useless, unless an awareness of the proper livery for footmen is considered a good thing to know.

  “I don’t care what you tell Mommy,” Lee told Robin. “Tell her I say ‘shit.’ Tell her I say ‘fuck.’”

  At this second, Jazz, passing her on his way back to the table with four paper cups filled with ice and a large bottle of Nedick’s, startled. Then he looked at her and smiled. A lovely smile (although his teeth were slightly crooked from overcrowded conditions and a belief by Ginger that nice families do not send their children to orthodontists). He had a pleasing face too. Its contours had sharpened in a fine, masculine fashion, changing from rounded to rectangular. His strong jaw now joined his face at right angles.

  Lee looked up at him. His smile, she could see, was neither a snotty smile nor a lascivious one, the kind a boy gives to the sort of girl who would say “fuck” in Dante’s. It was …

  “He heard you say it!” Robin whispered, aghast. “The F curse!”

  Lee didn’t deny it, but then, her attention was now focused on his receding back: more specifically, at the angle made by the bulges of muscle that were his buttocks as they tapered into the columnar solidity of his thighs. When he sat in the booth, he chose the seat that faced her. Thank you, she said to the God in Whom she already did not believe. But the boy wasn’t smiling at her anymore, not even looking at her. That was good, though, because it gave her a chance to study him. His friends were rich dipshits, probably private school kids, as was he. But he was different. They made loud, stupid sports talk about someone being traded to Detroit and pulled long strings of mozzarella che
ese from the pizza up into their mouths and made gross sucking noises. He just sat blowing on the slice he’d taken and looking pensive. No, serene. No, sensitive. That was it! He was so far above the morons he was with it wasn’t funny.

  “Lee!” Robin whined, demanding her attention. Lee hated this: being stuck with her sister on a weekend. “Lee!” It was an error, staring at the boy, because Robin turned and followed her gaze. “Why are you staring at him?”

  And a bigger error to deny it so vehemently. “I am not staring at anyone, you infantile ass.”

  “You are too!”

  “Shut up!” Lee snarled.

  Robin fell into shocked silence, not comprehending the intensity of her sister’s response. A second later, she did. “You have a crush on him,” Robin taunted. “I can tell!”

  “I do not!” Lee insisted, feeling her face, her neck, turning red, then purple, with mortification. Lee’s throat felt constricted. Her chest tightened. She could barely get out the words because of the terrible feeling she was choking. “If you don’t shut up, I’ll kill you!”

  “Ooh, I’m so scared!”

  Lee flared her nostrils, which usually caused Robin to at least squirm in her seat, but this time it was a futile gesture. So she narrowed her eyes and glowered at Robin. “I’ll tell Mommy where her three bars of Je Reviens soap went.”

  “Yeah?” Robin challenged her, although Lee picked up a quaver behind the resolution. “Where?”

  “Over to Erica Johanson’s for a slumber party, that’s where. And if Mommy finds out …”

  “You tell her that and I’ll tell her you’re madly in love with Jasper Taylor!”

  “What?” Lee demanded, confused.

  “With Jasper Taylor.”

  “Next-door’s kid? Are you kidding? That’s who he is?”

  “That’s him. Pizza boy.”

  Lee stared at the boy two booths down. “That’s …?” Even before Robin nodded triumphantly, she knew it was true. Well, he had been away at school someplace. She hadn’t seen him since … God, it must have been elementary school. He’d changed so much.