Lily White

by Susan Isaacs

  The trip to Florida was hellish, the entire plane jammed with people over sixty-five who did not try to hide their disapproval of a disheveled woman who would let her child out of the house in pajamas. As the plane emerged from the clouds, the first glimpse of palm trees buoyed her, until they reminded her of her honeymoon in St. Bart’s. Why am I doing this, running home to Mommy and Daddy? To squeal on Robin? Mommy, guess what Robin did! To find solace? Maybe, but experience told Lee that Sylvia and Leonard were not likely to be listed in any Who’s Who of great consolers.

  The truth, she admitted to herself in the taxi, was that she needed someone to share more than her outrage. Will might have done that, but she had not been able to bring herself to call him. He could not share her shame.

  “Little girl sick?” the taxi driver asked, looking at Val’s pajamas in his rearview mirror.

  “No. It’s just more comfortable for traveling,” Lee told him.

  “Nice neighborhood you’re going to. You live there?”

  “No.” He was waiting for something more. “My parents do.”

  Shame. They had indulged Robin for so long. All of them, Lee included. And instead of indulgence leading to mere sloth, it had bred viciousness. How could Robin have done this vile thing to the family, tearing herself off from them irreparably, taking her sister’s husband and, not content with that theft alone, trying to grab her sister’s child? Give me what Lee has. Give me! Give me!

  But forget what Robin had done to Lee and Valerie: How could she have been so heartless about her parents, her father especially? Leonard had come to full life only in the sunshine spread by Jazz. Now that light would go out. And Kent. Robin wanted smart and pretty and bright-eyed Val, but Lee bet her sister and Jazz were planning to put a stamp on Kent’s head and mail him back to his negligent parents.

  “Once you get past the Palm Hacienda turnoff, do you know how to find the place?” the driver asked.

  “Sorry, I don’t remember.” In truth, Lee had never been there. Her parents were only days in their new house. Old house. Not one of the major mansions, but still grand enough to have a name: La Luna. They had bought it from the social butterfly scion of a Pittsburgh corrugated box fortune, and while they laughingly said they had been merely looking for a nice place with a pool and a water view, it had been clear to Lee they were using the place to launch an incursion into Palm Beach society.

  What would her father do now? More and more, he had been relying on Jazz. And Jazz had indeed proved himself reliable. At Thanksgiving dinner, Leonard had assuaged his guilt at leaving the salon for three months by chuckling: I’m just a phone call or a plane ride away. And, to give equal time, what would her mother do? Take to bed for months, as she had done so often in the pre-Jazz era? Would she sneak out for secret shopping trysts with Robin? Or would there now be inexorable pressure on Lee to become someone whose name, measurements, and style preferences were known to the salespeople in every boutique from East Fifty-ninth to East Seventy-ninth Streets?

  “Very nice, ma’am,” the driver said as they pulled up in front of La Luna, and Lee felt obliged to overtip him. As he was thanking her and as Val, barely toilet trained, was yelling “Pee!” the huge front door with its crescent moon knocker jerked open. Lee had expected a white-coated, brown-skinned butler. Indeed, one was hovering in the background. But in the foreground were her parents, looking almost as agitated as Lee herself.

  “You’re here!” Sylvia was crying, although on close inspection, Lee could see no actual moisture around her mother’s eyes.

  “Thank God!” Leonard bent down and took Val into his arms. “We were frantic!”

  “Panicked!”

  “Terrified!”

  “Pee!”

  “Lee, how could you have just taken the baby—” her mother demanded.

  “Stop it, Sylvia,” Leonard directed.

  “—in the middle of the night—”

  Lee grabbed Val and, with the help of the man in the white jacket, found a bathroom just feet away. Black marble with black fixtures. It looks like a toilet in hell, Lee thought. She squatted before her daughter, holding her up for lack of a potty seat. She could not believe that Jazz had actually called her parents. Could he be so stupid as to believe she would hurt Val? “What a big girl you are!” she told her daughter, pulling off a length of toilet paper. “I am so proud of you!”

  As Lee and Val emerged from the bathroom, the white-coated butler was gone. So was Sylvia. “Where’s Mom?”

  “Sending the housekeeper out to buy clothes for Valerie.”

  “Thank you,” Lee said, and allowed her father to take her arm and gently lead her, as he would someone suffering a terrible illness, to the back of the house. A huge porch overlooked a pool and, beyond it, a body of water that was not the ocean. “Beautiful,” she said.

  “Shwim?” Val asked.

  “Later,” Lee promised.

  Her mother came out with the butler, who was bearing a tray of sandwiches, a pitcher of iced tea, and a smaller pitcher of milk for Val. To Lee, it was such an act of kindness that she felt herself choking up. That is, until she caught her mother eyeing her slacks and blazer. All that could be wrong with them was: wrinkled, a mismatched plaid on the seam of the sleeve—a red plaid, no less. “Why don’t I bring you upstairs so you can take a shower?” Sylvia said. “I can lend you an outfit. I know I have a Vivienne Westwood that has a little give to it.”

  “Later,” Lee said. “Thanks.” She cut Val’s sandwich into the finger-length shapes the child preferred. “What did Jazz tell you?” she asked her parents.

  “It wasn’t Jazz,” Sylvia began. She stopped as Leonard cleared his throat.

  “Robin called you?” Lee asked.

  “She said there had been some disagreement,” Leonard explained. “That you were very upset and you grabbed the baby and ran out in the middle of the night—”

  “It was a little before seven o’clock in the evening.”

  “Oh. Well, you know your sister,” he said. “High drama and all that.” He paused. “You should have called, Lee.”

  “What would you have done at that hour on a Sunday night?” From a Fun! Sun! Florida! shopping bag, Lee pulled out a Weebles toy fire truck filled with little round Weebles firemen. She had bought it at the Palm Beach airport. She placed it on the grass below them, out of hearing distance.

  “Well?” she asked Val. “Come here. It’s all yours.”

  “T’anks, Ma!” Beside the truck, Lee set down a coloring book and a large box of crayons, more colors than Val had ever had. “Wow!”

  “I mean,” Sylvia was saying, “you should have called just so they weren’t so worried—”

  “They?” Lee inquired. Too loud, she realized. Her parents did not yet know what she did. “I have something to tell you,” she said. “Something very painful.” Leonard edged forward in his chair. Sylvia, though, just sat back and crossed her waxed legs. Her Pure Pomegranate toenails blended perfectly with her reddish-gold thongs. She did not look as though she wanted to hear anything painful. But whoever does want to, especially in a paradisiacal place like La Luna? And certainly not on this, Sylvia’s second day as a probationary jet-setter. “Jazz and I are going to get a divorce,” Lee said, trying to give them the good news first.

  “Uh-huh,” said her father.

  “Oh,” said her mother.

  “He’s been having an affair.” To this they said nothing. “He wants to marry the woman.” Her parents were more motionless than the palm trees in giant terra-cotta pots that ran the length of the great porch. Shock, Lee thought. What a blow. She looked to her father, knowing how Leonard adored Jazz. Driving to and from work with him every day. Popping in and out of each other’s offices all the time. Chatting on the phone at night, on weekends. Shock. And he didn’t even know about Robin yet. Just wait. The pain, the disgrace, the—

  The butler appeared in the doorway. “Do you need anything more, Mrs. White?”

  “No, than
k you, Gibbons,” Sylvia said sweetly.

  Sweetly? Wait a second, Lee thought. It was one thing not to want to mess with a butler named Gibbons. Another for her mother to be able to keep up her gracious-lady act in the face of such awful news. Unless it was not news. “Dad?”

  “Yes, sweetie?”

  “Do me a favor and call my office, tell them I’m here. I don’t want them to worry.” She did not say that nothing short of reading in Newsday that the mutilated body of a thirty-year-old female had been found with a “Lee White, Attorney-at-Law,” business card clamped between its teeth would cause anyone in her office to worry. Leonard, however, looked as if he was about to delegate such a potentially secretarial duty to Sylvia, so Lee added: “I’d like you to speak directly to Chuckie Phalen, Dad. He deals better with men. Don’t give any details. Just that I had to come down on an important family matter.”

  “Sure, honey.”

  Leonard went off into the house. Lee waved at Val on the lawn, but the child was too busy with her fire truck to notice. Sylvia smiled at her daughter. “I know. One of those nonsexist toys. But why firemen? Ick. Oh, now’s a good time. Want to try the Vivienne Westwood?”

  “Sure!” Lee smiled back, then allowed her face to dissolve into sadness befitting the occasion. “In a minute. Mom, did Robin tell you the whole thing?” Sylvia’s eyes darted around searching for Leonard, which answered Lee’s question. “She told you about her and Jazz?”

  “Yes. Lee, let’s be honest: I know you feel it’s the end of the world, but it isn’t.” Lee had been a criminal lawyer too long not to know the witness was not telling the complete truth. Check the demeanor. Brow drawn. Okay, was a drawn brow appropriate to the news that your younger daughter had been sleeping with your older daughter’s husband? “You’re still young, attractive—”

  “I can’t think about that now.”

  “I know. I can’t tell you what this is doing to me.”

  A drawn brow. That was all. Was that a response to learning hours earlier from a phone call that your younger daughter was planning on marrying your older daughter’s husband and had joined with him in demanding custody of your only grandchild? Lee did not want to know. And yet she did: That was precisely why she had sent her father to call Chuckie. “You’ve known about this for a while, Mom.”

  Since it came out as a statement and not a question, Sylvia was perplexed about how to respond. Lee looked at her mother: curious. So her mother said: “Not for that long.”

  “Dad kept it from you?”

  “He didn’t want me to get upset.”

  “I can understand that,” Lee said. “It isupsetting.”

  “I know this must be such a shock for you, Lee. I’m so sorry.”

  “Thank you. It’s been awful.” Did she hear footsteps? “So Jazz will stay in the business?”

  “Well, you know…”

  “Dad’s come to rely on him so much.”

  “Well, he has made a difference.”

  “And he’ll still be married to a daughter, so it won’t be that different than before.” It was only then that Sylvia comprehended Lee had trapped her. And just as her mouth dropped open, her husband walked in, and her eyes filled with fear as well.

  “What’s wrong?” Leonard asked. “What is wrong?”

  Before her mother could say anything, Lee said: “I’m here telling you my husband has left me, and you’re asking what’s wrong?”

  “Sorry,” Leonard breathed. “I spoke to Mr. Phalen. Some character! He says to tell you—”

  “You knew goddamn well they were going to demand custody of Val, didn’t you?” Lee snarled at him. Her father was literally taken aback. He retreated two steps toward the safety of the house. “Didn’t you?” she demanded louder.

  “Shhh!” Sylvia pleaded.

  Lee ignored her mother and walked over to her father. “If you don’t tell me what I want to know, I’m going to start screaming. Terrible things. The servants will hear.” She paused. “The neighbors will hear. I will accuse you of the most vile crimes. I hear horror stories every damn day in my office, in the courts, and I’ll accuse you of everything I’ve ever heard.” She took her index finger and stabbed her father in the chest. “You knew they were going to demand custody?”

  “Please, Lee, it’s better for us all—”

  At the top of her lungs, Lee boomed: “How would Gibbons like to know about the time you—”

  “I knew,” Leonard whispered. “I knew.”

  “How long?”

  “That?” If there was a “that,” Lee knew, there was also a “this.” “A few weeks. Jazz told me after he spoke to a divorce lawyer.”

  She got to the “this” with another poke. “And how long have you known they’ve been lovers?”

  “Just a few weeks more.”

  “You’re lying!” Lee blared.

  “Lee, please,” her mother begged. “We love you. We’re so sorry you have to go through all this terrible—”

  Lee flipped her hand in her mother’s direction: You’re dismissed. “How long have you known about Robin and Jazz? Don’t think you can lie to me. I ferret out the truth for a living. I’ll get it from you no matter how long it takes and how loud I have to yell.”

  “Don’t threaten me, Lee,” Leonard said, setting his jaw firm.

  “What do you want to be accused of first? Embezzlement? Insurance fraud? No, that’s boring. Why don’t we jump right into a really interesting sex offense?”

  “Let’s stop the theatrics. They won’t get you anywhere.” He glanced toward the house and the unseen Gibbons. “I found out soon after it started.”

  “Which was …”

  “When you were pregnant. The accountant was troubled by some charges Jazz had made to the business. So was I. I went and talked to him.”

  “And he said: ‘It’s okay, Dad. I was just fucking—’”

  “Don’t use that word!” Sylvia called out.

  “‘I was just having illicit sexual congress with your younger daughter while your older one was pregnant with your grandchild. Don’t worry about the charges. It’s all in the family.’”

  “Do you think I was happy about it?”

  “What did you do about it?”

  “What do you think? I spoke to him. I spoke to Robin, heart to heart. I told her: It isn’t right.”

  “Did you at any point threaten to throw him out of the business if he couldn’t keep his pecker in his pocket?”

  “Lee!” Sylvia called, getting up from her chair.

  “Do you honestly think my threatening him like that would have stopped it?” Leonard inquired.

  “Yes. If you had threatened to fire him. Or to kick that slut out of the house so she would have to earn her own living. Yes, indeed. But you couldn’t, could you?” Leonard looked past her, as if waiting for a ship to come in. “Because you’re afraid of Robin. But that’s not the prime reason. It’s not fear. It’s love. You love Jazz more than any of us, more than all of us put together. If you had a third daughter and Jazz wanted her, you would condone that too. You would choose him over her. Protect him over her.”

  “You have your crazy theory,” Leonard said quietly. “Nothing I say can stop you.”

  “That’s right. So give your boy a message. He’s not getting custody.” She turned to her mother. “Call me a cab.”

  Sylvia looked to Leonard. “Go ahead,” he told her.

  “I don’t know who to call,” she replied.

  “Tell Gibbons,” Leonard said harshly. “He’ll do it.” She hurried into the house.

  “‘Tell Gibbons,”’ Lee repeated, an unexpected smile forcing itself onto her face.

  She hurried down to the lawn to pick up Val. “Shwim?” asked the little girl.

  “Soon,” Lee said, brushing off the grass from her pajamas.

  “Shwim please?”

  Lee looked down at Val, all thirty-seven inches of her poised to leap into her grandparents’ pool and splash. Right on the sp
ot, Lee determined she would not be on the next plane to New York. What was she rushing back to? All she had left was right there beside her. Chuckie could cover for her at the office. She could call the matrimonial lawyer at Will’s firm and set him to work. And she could find a hotel with a pool—and allow herself and her daughter a day or two to shwim.

  Joe Clark, Lee’s divorce lawyer, was a tall, trim, broad-shouldered man in his forties, with a blond crewcut. He and Will, side by side in De Ruyter, Lefkowitz and Stewart’s oak conference room, looked like photographic negatives of each other.

  “Can he get custody?” Lee asked. Looking tanned and healthy, she felt embarrassed. She should be wan, frail, maybe trembling a little. That’s how she felt. She had kept Val in Florida for a week, and every night after the child went to sleep in the middle of their king-size bed in the Miami Beach hotel room, Lee would stand over her and weep in silence, terrified that Jazz would win custody.

  She finally forced herself back to New York, but there was no comfort there. Jazz’s attorney was not what she had imagined—a sleek, shiny counselor to upper-class Manhattan husbands. No, much worse: Jazz had chosen Manny Plotkin, a short, bald, sputtering Long Island lawyer, a human torpedo who was fast making a reputation for himself demanding—and often winning—rights for men in child custody suits.

  “Realistically?” Joe said. “It’s the exception rather than the rule for fathers to get custody. Especially where the child is a little girl. It’s just not done.”