Lily White

by Susan Isaacs

  To Lee’s surprise, Lucille Poole took a folding chair from another bridge table and sat beside her. “Wha’ doing?” she inquired. Lee lifted the yellow legal pad she had been scribbling on, but before she could launch on a spiel about the exercise of reasonable prosecutorial diligence in New York v. Wu, the professor added: “Not Wu. Summer.”

  Lee’s heart fluttered, then throbbed. A summer job offer? The chance to be Lucille Poole’s research assistant! To help draft the reply brief for the Quinones case, which would be argued—Lee swallowed hard—before the Supreme Court of the United States of America in the fall. For just an instant, she could hear Chief Justice Burger saying “Interesting point,” and Professor Poole, for once, speaking slowly enough for all to hear: “Credit where credit is due. My student assistant, Lee White, came up with that.” Her name in the Court record before she was even out of law school. And Jazz would probably do something wonderful, like putting that page of the transcript in a silver frame as her Christmas gift. Although, in truth, she’d rather have an engagement ring, but that appeared too much to hope for. He loved her. He had told her that. But he had said not one single word about the future beyond suggesting they get tickets to The Ritz for sometime in the spring. Could it be possible that he would just love her forever without ever asking her to marry him? She could be seventy-two, still without a ring on her ropy-veined left hand. No, worse: On her thirtieth or fortieth birthday—whenever she’d finally get up the courage—she would confront Jazz and ask him if he was ever going to marry her. Looking surprised and, worse, pained, he would explain that while he really and truly loved her, and the last thing in the world he wanted to do was hurt her, she—how could he put it without seeming like a total bastard?—she wasn’t what he imagined when he thought of a wife. He would probably do better with … not a lawyer. You know, someone less challenging. More traditional. More—don’t take this the wrong way—feminine. A teacher or something.

  “I don’t have any summer plans,” Lee told Professor Poole. “I want to stay in New York.” She was going to add something about wanting to be with her boyfriend but decided that might make Professor Poole think her frivolous, not the solemn sort who would work eighteen hours a day in mortal combat with Injustice.

  “I cannot use you as a research assistant,” Professor Poole announced. The awful thing was, every word was clear. Lee hugged the legal pad against her chest, close, like a teddy bear. What was she seeing in her mentor’s eyes? Pity? “Not an academic, y’know.” Not sorrow. Disdain?

  “Oh,” was all Lee could think to say. Not the rapid-fire response one might expect from a prospective litigator, but an understandable one, as she was concentrating on holding back a cascade of tears.

  “Not that you haven’t w …”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “It’s not that you have not worked hard this entire semester,” Professor Poole said, pronouncing each word as if it were a separate sentence.

  “Uh-huh,” Lee replied.

  “You’re dedicated … to put in the hours.” So? “But your talent … not in scholarship.” What are you talking about? I have an A-minus average! I made Law Review. Where the fuck else does my talent lie? “It lies in being fast on your feet,” Professor Poole went on. That means I’m shallow. Unoriginal. Unimaginative. “You were born to be a criminal lawyer.”

  “But not to argue before the Supreme Court?”

  “You might. Never know. Solid student. If a case should bring you before the Court … Few lawyers could deny themselves …” Lee waited. “But you aren’t …” Professor Poole’s voice evaporated.

  “A legal scholar.”

  “… good trial lawyer. Do you know how rare …?”

  “So this summer?” Lee was so ashamed. No, humiliated. No. She wanted to quit law school. She wished she could get married. “Do you have any suggestions, Professor Poole?” Lee inquired, her manner as casual as a customer asking a drugstore clerk for advice on choosing a lipstick. “I’d like something challenging.” She wanted to add: you egomaniacal hag, letting me work nights, weekends. Sending me down to pick up your fucking bacon-mushroom-Swiss burgers because you think the delivery guy takes too long and they get cold.

  “Yes.” Something Lee could not hear, and then: “… Manhattan District Attorney’s office.”

  “What?”

  Professor Poole rose. “A good lawyer … argue both sides. Manhattan D.A. … best place … I’ll … phone call.”

  Since Lee could not come up with another response, she said: “Thank you.”

  “That is, if you want … If you have other …”

  “Your calling would be great,” Lee answered. “I appreciate it.” Oh, God, she thought, what the hell am I doing?

  “… like it,” Professor Poole said.

  In fact, Lee loved it. By the end of her third week in the Rackets Bureau, she was working six days a week on the prosecution of one Howard “Howie the Hose” Fogelman for extortion: to wit, threatening seven kosher butchers on the Upper West Side of Manhattan with firebombing unless their stores carried the Gan Eden brand of knockwurst.

  To Lee, the Manhattan D.A.’s Office resembled a late forties black-and-white crime buster—except it wasn’t a movie. It was real and, miraculously, she was playing a supporting role. Forget being a star; she was thrilled to be welcomed, with an offhand “Hiya,” as part of the cast. She belonged. No questions asked. Lee treasured every detail of the hard-boiled life: the endless cardboard cups of overperked coffee; the dented metal desks; the rough-talking cops from Hell’s Kitchen and Harlem; the world-weary secretaries. She thrilled to the gruff, New York-accented banter of the assistant district attorneys out of St. John’s and Brooklyn Law; the eager-beaver preppy enthusiasm of the A.D.A.’s out of Yale and Columbia as they mimicked the jargon and the hunchbacked slouch of the toughest of the cops. Most of all, she loved her colleagues’ unspoken love for each other. She would gladly have worked seven days a week to see that Howie—whom, with the rest of the cops and A.D.A.’s, she referred to as “scumbag” or “that piece of shit”—got what was coming to him, but she knew it would upset Jazz.

  They were living together for the summer in a sublet on University Place, a studio with a rain forest of plants and a narrow Murphy bed on which, after making passionate, athletic, and benevolent love, they slept, arms and legs entwined. But it was not the sex Lee marveled at. It was Jazz’s sweetness. “Hi,” he would say all of a sudden, at a moment in the act when all that the other boys with whom she had slept could manage was, at best, a grunt of encouragement best translated as: Hump harder. But as Lee and Jazz lay together, sweaty bodies sliding against each other in humid currents exhaled by an air conditioner not equipped to handle heated sex, Jazz would somehow find the tenderness to say “I love you so much.” And he would gaze into her eyes as if he could see something breathtaking right behind them.

  Lee felt beautiful that entire summer, even in dark, lawyerly skirts and businesslike white shirts. Her skin glowed a rosy gold; her hair—pulled back into compliance by a tortoiseshell barrette, looked as if it wanted to break free and fall, thick and wanton, over her shoulders. “I love the way you look,” Jazz would tell her. And it wasn’t only in bed that he admired her. That was the nicest part: his tributes offered beside the Saran Wrap and aluminum foil in Marty’s Superette, or in front of the Abyssinian kittens in the window of Village Pets.

  Lee noticed, too, that for the first time, strange men were eyeing her with admiration. Not because she was exhausting herself being charming, clever, amusing, but simply because living with Jazz had transformed her into a love goddess. The guy in the subway token booth gave her the once-over, then the twice-over. The cop who stood by the elevator in the D.A.’s actually winked. Construction men on a scaffolding across Centre Street discovered new adjectives, and an elderly man in a seersucker suit walking his Doberman down Tenth Street doffed his panama hat.

  So while many in the D.A.’s Office gave up their
Sundays to go in to work simply because they could not bear to be away from the pursuit of justice or the company of their colleagues, Lee kept her day of rest because she wanted to be with Jazz.

  He needed her company. His summer job was less enthralling than hers. Through his father’s connections at the U.S. Olympic Committee, he was working in the office of the general counsel of the National Hockey League. Sports law, Foster decreed. It’s getting bigger every day. Get yourself in on the ground floor, buddy-boy. You’ll thank me. But by the end of the first week of July, Lee became aware that—as he was the previous summer, at the job his uncle had gotten for him at Matthison, Appleby—Jazz was bored. She could see it in his eyes, which lit up when she walked through the door each night. Thrilled by the very fact of her, true, but, even more, almost pathetically grateful for a friend to play with.

  “All you keep saying is that it’s boring. What specifically don’t you like about it?” she asked him the first week in August. They stood on the platform at Penn Station. Only nine in the morning, but the heat rising from the tracks was already so wetly oppressive that the few Sunday travelers had the glistening red faces of foundry workers.

  “I don’t know. It’s just boring.”

  “But you like hockey. I know a couple of people who can name all the presidents, but you’re the only one I know who can name all the Stanley Cup winners since 1704 or whenever.”

  “Since 1927.”

  “The fact is, you love hockey. So how can your job be boring?”

  He smiled, and for the hundredth or thousandth time, she marveled at his sunny temperament, which did not alter with adversity or foul weather or bad news. And Jazz’s optimism was contagious. With him at her side, she could face the Black Plague or a nuclear firestorm, knowing they would emerge unscathed and smiling. “You’re badgering the witness, Miss White,” he joshed.

  “I’m not badgering. This is what’s called probing. And I’m probing because I care about you, you fool. I want to see you happy.”

  He crossed his arms tight over his chest, as he always did when he was reflective, a mannerism Lee found utterly charming. Despite the sapping heat, she moved closer to him and immediately felt better. “I guess it’s boring because the job isn’t about hockey,” he explained. “It’s about law.”

  “Is that it, Jazz?”

  “Is what it?”

  “Do you feel pressured? Because your father and all the Taylors back to Peking Man were lawyers: Does that mean you’re doomed to be one? I mean, if you truly don’t like it …”

  “No. Law’s okay. I mean, I don’t wake up every morning all hot to discuss due process—”

  “You’re telling me!”

  “—but I want to be a lawyer.”

  “Is it that you want to practice law or you can’t think of anything else you’d rather do?”

  “That’s a big question for a Sunday morning.”

  “I know. You don’t have to answer it if you don’t want to.”

  She could tell Jazz did not want to give a glib response. He was considering her question, for both their benefits. “I honestly don’t know the answer to that. I look at you, loving what you do at the D.A.’s. But if it weren’t the D.A.’s, it would be the ACLU or the NAACP you’d be gung-ho about. You get wrapped up in stuff. I’m not like that. But maybe there’s something out there for me. I think to myself: Maybe somewhere there’s a job that’ll make me jump out of bed every morning and say; ‘Hey, I’m lucky! I get to go to work today!’ Or lots of jobs. It’s just that this job is boring.”

  Lee was very tired. In truth, standing on the platform waiting for the train to Shorehaven, having this meaningful discussion, she wanted nothing more than to lean against Jazz’s strong shoulder and close her eyes, save her strength for going home to Long Island. To Jazz’s home, actually.

  For the first time, he had suggested that they spend the day with his family. A milestone. Their relationship seemed to exist solely in Manhattan, as if he had come from a place like Bombay, she from, say, Montevideo, and there they were, alone together in New York. True, they appraised and analyzed their families often (Lee having taken Introduction to Psychology at Cornell and Jazz Introduction to Sociology at Colgate). But they spoke of their parents and siblings as if they were dead—or at least in a different hemisphere.

  But the previous evening, Saturday night, Jazz confided that his old lady was bugging him: She never saw him anymore. Lee suggested he could visit his family alone, half hoping he would, but grateful when he demanded: Are you kidding? Miss my one day of the week with you? So she could not have said no, even if she had wanted to. And part of her wanted to, most desperately. Part of her dreaded that the Taylors would not approve. Within seconds after the introduction, with a mere frozen smile from Ginger or a too stiff handshake from Foster, her relationship with Jasper Taylor would come to an end. And that would be even before they learned she came from the family who lived in the modern house that lay beneath Hart’s Hill. In Lee’s secret heart, she regretted telling Jazz the truth about being White. True, he seemed to have found the Weissberg-Weiss connection both exotic and amusing. But what if it was secretly disturbing to him? What if, unable to admit to a touch of anti-Semitism in himself, he just happened to mention the fact of her Jewishness to his parents, knowing that they would do the job—getting rid of Lee—that he was not quite man enough to handle?

  But around three that afternoon, as Lee was passing the kitchen on her way out to help Ginger feed the basenjis, she overheard Fos, back from his golf game, telling Jazz: “Nice girl you’ve got there, pal.” And since Jazz said “Thanks” and not “She’s one of the Jews from next-door,” Lee felt somewhat reassured.

  The Taylors’ life, however, was less reassuring. Take Hart’s Hill. It was, to be sure, a great house, perhaps even a mansion. Its ceilings were impossibly high, its rooms noble in dimension. Arthur Taylor, who had built it in 1898, had given his architect an open purse and his full confidence: Lay on the moldings, my dear fellow! Panel those walls with the finest hardwoods! Don’t stint on the leaded glass, old chap! But Hart’s Hill looked as if it had fallen on hard times half a century ago.

  Lee glanced around the grounds as she hurried to the doghouse. She staggered slightly under the new twenty-five-pound bag of Blue Ribbon Champion Chow. Ginger had forgotten to bring it from the garage. The grass tennis court was in beautiful shape, Lee noted, rolled every day. But the back lawn looked as if it had not been mown all summer. It wasn’t even a lawn anymore. Weeds and stiff yellow reeds had grown so high that the legs of the ornate wrought-iron garden furniture were completely hidden; a bench and four chairs appeared to be floating on amber waves of grain.

  The doghouse was not what Lee had imagined—a mini-Tudor manor house designed by the original architect of Hart’s Hill. Instead it was scraps of nailed-together lumber, a doggy-size Tobacco Road hovel. “Over here!” Ginger called out to her. Ginger was hunched over the mother dog, searching its coat for something Lee knew she would not want to see. “They eat and poop out here,” she explained. “Otherwise, they’re with us all the time.” Turning to the puppies, Ginger spoke in the squeaky baby voice the childless employ with small children. “You’re really little piggies, aren’t you? Making big, doody piles in the house!”

  Kent, Jazz’s younger brother, looked up from the dam’s coat and smiled at Lee, a radiant smile. Had it been an illustration in an old-fashioned children’s book, it would have been labeled: A Delightful Surprise. He had fine, tawny skin and golden-brown hair, along with the flattened features and epicanthic eye fold of Down’s syndrome. “Hi,” he said. “What’s your name?”

  “Lee.”

  “I’m Kent.” He smiled, pleased that their interchange had gone so well. While Jazz, with his long, angular, well-chiseled features, was clearly his mother’s son, Kent bore more of a resemblance to the middle-aged man Foster Taylor had become. However, Kent’s rounded face, with its baggy double chin, was redeemed by blue eyes
so bright they could indeed be called sparkling.

  But his clothes! Okay, Lee told herself, even Sylvia White wouldn’t expect a retarded fifteen-year-old to be a fashion plate, but it was not simply that Kent’s red-and-blue-striped pullover did not match his brown plaid shorts. They were far too tight, the shirt’s stripes making waves over his thick chest; they were clothes for a large boy rather than a good-size young man. The hem on one leg of the shorts had unraveled, and threads dangled down behind his knee. Kent kept slapping them away, but of course they continued to annoy him with their tickling.

  Ginger seemed oblivious to her son’s discomfort. And she appeared to be unaware of the ripped shoulder seam of his pullover, so the short sleeve hung down over his biceps like a striped armband. Yet she did not seem to be a cruel or an uncaring parent. She and Kent played what was evidently a familiar game: He picked up the pieces of kibble that had not made it into the dogs’ bowls, as she counted. “Thirty-seven,” Ginger pronounced, exhaling with only slightly weary finality. Kent appeared gratified by the total, although whether it was a high or a low number for them, or if he would be thrilled no matter what the tally, Lee could not determine.

  Still, despite the counting game, Lee couldn’t stop herself from scrutinizing mother and son as they headed back to the house: Ginger’s tennis clothes could have been called grays rather than whites; the seat of Kent’s shorts was black with what detergent commercials refer to, ominously, as ground-in dirt. Not just today’s dirt, Lee perceived. She wished she could keep from knowing. She longed to think well of the Taylors. After all, she had expected them to be perfect. Okay, perhaps a little too casual about money, about each other, but essentially the best family in America. Yet here she was, dragging her feet through the high, scratchy weeds that were the back lawn, forestalling the disillusionment that she knew was inevitable once she got into the house again and—this time—allowed herself to really see.