Lily White

by Susan Isaacs

  But what has meaning for me could be a turnoff to some guy.

  That’s right, Will agreed. It could be. So what are you going to do? Create a life for yourself that’s so man-pleasing that any guy in the world would fit in? Keep an electric drill and a jigsaw in the garage and a tape of NFL highlights on top of the VCR?

  Meanwhile, she kept seeing Terry Salazar: sometimes once a month, sometimes four or five times a week.

  And she saw Will. For his social events, he occasionally still escorted Maria. Lee went to weddings, bar mitzvahs, christenings, and lawyers’ dinner dances alone. But he began coming to her house for dinner once a week, then four or five nights. They tried cooking together, but they had too many fights, so he often chased her out of the kitchen and cooked himself. They saw almost every movie that came to town. They bought a Philharmonic subscription together. They played tennis twice a week. He was the one who persuaded her to take Val’s acting abilities seriously and did the research on acting classes in the city, and dramatics camp for the summers. They took Val to the theater and Kent to the petting zoo he loved. They spoke on the phone first thing in the morning, from their offices, and last thing at night, after Will got back to his house.

  After ten years of friendship, he finally introduced her to his parents. His father had worked with horses all his life, and with Will’s financial help, he and his wife had retired to a condominium near Virginia horse country. They were an imposing couple, dark brown, broad-shouldered, and big-nosed like their son. Jack Stewart looked as if he could tame a stallion with a withering glance, and Marjory, in her own way, was equally impressive; her palms were stained purple from the fruits and berries she was perpetually putting up. Except for the four hours a night she slept, she was never without something to pickle or preserve.

  The elder Stewarts wore only plaid. Or, as they corrected Lee, tartan. The colors of the clan Stewart. Dress Stewart. A slightly larger variation of the pattern: Muted Dress Stewart. Then there was Gray Stewart. Black Stewart—which Will never failed to comment upon. Oh, I see we’re in Black Stewart today, he’d say to his father. How apt. Quiet, William! his mother would command, coming between the two men. Will told Lee it was not until high school that he realized how odd it was for people to wear plaid every day of their lives. Plaid shirts, plaid skirts, plaid jackets. Plaid bathrobes. Plaid slippers. Plaid ties to church. Plaid seats on their dinette chairs. Only the Stewart tartan, of course, which made each sighting of a Gray Stewart raincoat or Black Stewart bathing trunks all the sweeter. In his sophomore year at Columbia, it hit him that the closest his parents had ever come to Scotland was the eighteenth-century farmer who had owned and perhaps sired Jack’s ancestor. Again and again, Will asked his parents why, or more to the point, how could they. What were they trying to be? Why don’t you wear a dashiki if you want to show what you are? Or all those ropes of beads, the way they do in Kenya? They became furious at his brass: We’re Stewarts!

  “Hey, Dad,” Will said. His parents were visiting him from Virginia, and he had invited Lee, Val, and Kent to go with them to a Mets game. He and his father were fervid fans, transferring their Brooklyn Dodgers-Jackie Robinson fanaticism to the newer National League New York team. “Gray Stewart today!”

  “Shut your fresh mouth!” his father barked.

  Kent smiled in commiseration with either Will or Jack Stewart. Lee could not be certain. Or he might be happy simply because he was sitting in a box seat close to first, right over the Mets dugout. It was a sunny day, and he was devouring the two hot dogs Will had bought him and being allowed to sip Lee’s beer. Valerie, at fourteen, was not eating or sipping anything. On a diet, she had brought along a bag of raw vegetables and was resting her carrot entirely too suggestively on her lips while making eyes at the first baseman, a fellow who looked like a descendant of the Jukes and the Kallikaks. Between batters, he seemed to be ogling her back. Marjory Stewart eyed the plastic bag of vegetables hungrily, as if she wanted to snatch it from Val’s unappreciative grip and make a fast chutney.

  Lee smiled in Will’s direction but knew he would not notice her. He and his father rarely took their eyes off the field, as if they, and not Mets management, were responsible for any success the team might enjoy. To look at them, plaid-jacketed father and blue-blazered son—with mother in a plaid shirtwaist beaming on—was to think: Ah, there is the great American family.

  In fact, they took no joy in each other. The Stewart men merely shared a love of the national pastime. And while both parents might enjoy a fine afternoon in box seats provided by one of their son’s corporate clients, they were not happy with their son. Nor was he with them.

  In Jack and Marjory’s view, Will had let them down. He had not married and given them grandchildren. Bad enough, all those little plaid dresses and tiny plaid baseball caps going to waste. Worse, he was not the first black president of the United States. He had not even tried.

  Will thought he had. He had bought them their condo and their Subaru station wagon, sent them on luxurious senior citizen bus tours all over the country, given them their dream, a first-class trip to the Kentucky Derby. He spoke to his father’s cardiologist so often they were on a first-name basis. He donated such a hefty sum each year to their church that whenever Will visited Virginia, the minister came to the airport to greet him. He even tried to take his parents to Scotland: I’ll go with you. But they declined, not approving of Europe. He told Lee that they might have accepted the trip if he could have flown them there on Air Force One. Back in 1980, his father had urged him to run, telling him it was a Republican year. Will, Jack counseled, the country is ready for a Negro president.

  Nothing Will accomplished—Law Review at Columbia, getting into the D.A.’s Office, heading the Homicide unit, becoming a name partner in the most prestigious law firm on Long Island—was enough for his parents. We expect the best from you, they had warned him when he went off to Columbia. He thought he had given it.

  It’s not that they want the best from you, Lee told him. It’s that they want everything.

  They’re always disappointed, he’d replied.

  As long as you’re not. Will had nodded, but it was one of the few times his face turned sour. His expression was crabbed, angry.

  But looking at those plaid people, Lee thought: better to want everything for your child than to want nothing, the way my parents did.

  Well, when she thought about it, her mother at least had wanted something from her: better taste. Or maybe a more bubbly child, one who was fun to buy shoes for, one who could jolly her out of a clinical depression. In the years since her divorce, Lee often ruminated on the myth of the ever-loving, overprotective Jewish matriarch. How come she hadn’t had one? Where were all those self-sacrificing mamas hiding? Was the Jewish mother a myth perpetuated by male writers and filmmakers—they being the boys, the chosen children who actually got the love and protection? Or in becoming White, did Sylvia make some final break with her heritage, taking on Anglo-Saxon Protestant restraint without the concomitant sense of duty, strength of will, and grace under pressure?

  Still, every time Lee considered her mother’s failings, she could not help but wonder what it was that formed the woman. A lifeless, unloving household? Lee had only a vague memory of her grandparents Bernstein, two pallid whisperers who, in their last years, when she was a little girl, seemed to murmur only about the Judge’s gas. Was her mother a casualty of these two people, dead decades before they died? Was there something incomplete inside Sylvia, a spark that ought to have caught fire but never did, so she never received sufficient heat to make her truly human?

  Yet could Sylvia truly be pronounced dead? Wasn’t she capable of passion? To be sure, it was passion for furniture, passion for clothes, passion for appearances, but still, she cared deeply about something. If mother love did not come naturally, could she have worked at caring deeply about her own child? And if she could not have cared, what had kept her from behaving with a little common decency all tho
se years? Or like Paula Urquhart, could Sylvia White mount a defense by claiming to be a victim who could not help herself?

  Maybe the jury had found her client not guilty, but Lee did not believe she was innocent. And she did not believe it of her mother either.

  She could find no excuses for her father. He knew his wife was more than defective; she was hurting Lee by malign neglect. Why hadn’t he fought for his daughter? What made him feel he had the right to now and then shake his head over his wife’s indifference—Too bad—and then wrap himself up in his own furry world in Manhattan? Would he have stuck around a little more if it had been a son who was being damaged?

  It was not as if Leonard was ignorant of what a father was supposed to do. He had had two lively parents. True, Nat the Commie had not been the most supportive father, but he was not an unfeeling louse. He had wanted the best for his son and pulled all the threadbare strings he could on Leonard’s behalf. And Bella, that loud, loving realist, would have done anything for him.

  But as with so many children of immigrants, the world outside had meant more to Leonard than the world in his parents’ one-bedroom railroad flat. To be part of that outside world, he needed to destroy everything of Bella and Nat that was inside him, for he lacked the imagination and the spirit to keep them with him as he refined himself. So Leonard grew whiter than white, so white he became invisible. But it was not only himself and his parents he obliterated. Lee came to believe that if you are willing to do away with your parents, you will then be willing to destroy anyone else in your family who gets in the way of how you want to be perceived.

  So while Lee no longer saw her parents, she understood that for Valerie’s sake and her own she could not kill them off. She had to let them live. She never spoke ill of them in front of the child. When Val came home from her weekends with Jazz and Robin and her two half-brothers/first cousins with reports on them and on her grandparents, Lee listened with interest and suppressed every hateful remark that came to mind. She never lied and told the child she loved Sylvia and Leonard, but she did tell her daughter: I know how much they love you. She did not add: Because you are Jasper Taylor’s child.

  She also searched her memory and found enough decent moments to use for show-and-tell with Val. Sylvia fussing over what Lee would wear to the prom. Leonard celebrating her acceptance to Cornell. Planting sunflowers. Going with Mom to buy new Mary Janes for the Young People’s Concerts in the city. Going with Dad to buy our dog Woofer. Being allowed to buy all the paperbacks she could hold in her arms.

  Lee looked at her companions basking in the gorgeous July sun in the box at Shea Stadium. The Stewarts, who were incapable of taking pride in their extraordinary son. Will, who could not give up trying to make them proud. Kent, whose parents had not inquired as to his welfare in seven years. Herself.

  She turned to her daughter. “Hey, Val,” Lee said softly.

  “What?” The teenager’s eyes remained on first base.

  “I love you.”

  Val was wary. Fearful. But no, thank God, the first baseman had not heard her mother. Quickly, because she could not divert her attention for too long, she turned to Lee and removed the carrot from her lips. “I know you love me, Ma.”

  A half hour later, after the first baseman had struck out and the Mets shortstop slammed what looked like an in-the-park home run and the crowd stood up and roared, Val once again put down the carrot and murmured, just above the din: “Love you too, Ma.”

  Twenty-five

  Despair. Remorse. Anguish. Misery. No one word in the language can express what I felt about Woodleigh Huber’s decision to go ahead with the prosecution of Mary Dean. Sickened comes close, but that doesn’t take into account the rage I felt at the injustice, or the shame I felt that I had allowed myself to be conned.

  “The worst thing about it,” I told Will Stewart as we sat rocking on my front porch, “is that I can’t think of any way to put the scales of justice back into balance—short of running Huber over with my Jeep.”

  Will put his hand on my shoulder. “Stop trying to keep an ironic distance. You’re a mess.”

  “Yes.”

  Will was a lawyer, and before Jerry McCloskey was sent in to degrade and dishonor the Homicide unit, Will had run it. Now he was a hotshot civil litigator, so his hand wasn’t resting on my shoulder just because he was being Mr. Empathy. He knew precisely what I had done: come up with an alternate version of Bobette’s murder that showed my client to be innocent. Okay, lawyers do that all the time. They tell a once-upon-a-time story that views the facts of the case in a soft pink light. If it’s a really captivating fairy tale, some juries will buy it. Sometimes even the lawyer buys it.

  But I just didn’t think: Hmm, good argument. Better than what the government has. I bewitched myself—with Norman Torkelson’s help. And then, because I believed in the story so completely—Love Triumphs over Wickedness! No-Good, Rotten Con Man Seeks Expiation Through Sacrifice!—my belief, my passion, gave me the power to enchant everyone else. Will Stewart knew: I hadn’t been a lawyer; I’d tried to grab Justice’s toga and wear it myself. Except it didn’t fit. I was in large part responsible for a killer’s taking a walk and an innocent person’s paying for the crime. Earlier that day, a bus had rolled out of the Nassau County Correctional Center taking Mary Dean and twelve other female prisoners up to Bedford Hills.

  “Don’t run Huber over,” Will advised. “You’d be the prime suspect. The minute the lab ran tests comparing the tread marks on his face with your Jeep tires, you’d …” His voice trailed off.

  “Go ahead. Say it: I’d be sharing a cell with Mary.”

  “No. I’m not going to remind you she’s in jail and Norman is probably sitting back, sipping a margarita in some Sun Belt state. I came over to cheer you up.”

  “Consider another line of work.”

  “No. And I’m not leaving until you’re okay.”

  “Then you’re in for a life sentence.” I tried to keep my voice light, so Will wouldn’t know how appealing his never leaving sounded to me. We rocked back and forth for a while in familiar silence, two old fogies on the front porch watching the twilight. Stars were coming out, and a gibbous moon. I caught the season’s first hint of honeysuckle. “Will?”

  “What?”

  “Are there any other cute moves I could make to force Huber to let Mary go? Anything I haven’t thought of? Because there are no more tricks left in my bag—not even ineffective tricks I could use just to piss him off.”

  “Nothing beyond what you’re doing now—spinning your wheels with the habeas corpus petition.”

  “But we both know that’s not going to work.”

  “Correct.” Will leaned his head against the spindles of the rocker and closed his eyes, pretending to take in the honeysuckle. Except I knew him too well to be suckered by a deep sniff. He was thinking, so for a few minutes I got hopeful. He was such a fine lawyer. A clever strategist. A smooth negotiator: The other side never got up from the table feeling screwed, even if they had been, royally. But more than that, Will was creative. When he couldn’t win by logic or law, he often won through sheer surprise. “Lee.”

  I rocked forward and stayed that way, ready, I suppose, to jump up and act. “What?”

  “Lean on me for this.”

  “You have an idea?”

  “For springing Mary Dean? No. Nothing comes to mind.” I let the chair rock back. “Not right off the bat, anyway. But you’re going off the deep end and you don’t want anyone to stop you. That’s crazy. You’re not responsible for her being in jail. At worst, you made a mistake. Lawyers make mistakes every day.”

  “Not like this.”

  “Yes. Like this and worse.”

  “Everyone knows I was conned. Everyone knows that poor girl is spending the better part of her life in prison because I thought I was being such a hero.”

  “Everyone knows you misjudged Norman Torkelson. So did Holly Nuñez. Is she sitting in a rocking chair right now havi
ng a psychotic episode?”

  “No. She’s trying to figure out a way to put a hundred miles between her and me. So is everyone else, except you.”

  “You’re always telling me how smart I am.”

  I looked at him, so dark he was almost a shadow in the nightfall. “You are. The smartest.”

  “So if it’s my assessment that you made a mistake but not a fatal one, why can’t you accept it? Or do you think my intellect has limits, in that the only thing I can’t evaluate is how badly you fucked up?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Trust me, Lee. What do you think is going to happen? You’re going to walk into the Bar Association and all conversation will stop? And then—like in one of those old westerns—someone will spit on the floor? I hate to tell you this, kid, but you’re a one-week wonder and your week is up tomorrow.”

  “You’re wrong, Will.” I was in a bad way. Sure, I would slog on and finish out my life, maybe chalk up a couple of big wins, maybe have a grandchild or two, but I felt a deep dullness, a sense that I would never again know pleasure.

  “I don’t know if it’s because you’re a woman or what, but you feel you’ve got to have the biggest balls in town. Everyone else can screw up: not Lee White. Or maybe because you got conned by that schmuck husband—”

  “Ex.”

  “—ex-husband, you can’t accept that it could happen again.”

  I got off my rocker and leaned against a post, looking out at the street, away from Will. “Give me truth or pretense, and what do I wind up going for every time?”

  “Truth,” he said.

  “Like hell I do.”

  “You’re a woman of the world. Why does it come as a shock to you that some men get away with murder?”

  I turned back to face Will. “I let it happen.”

  “Come off it, Lee! You didn’t let it happen. It happened. You see injustice every day of the week in your work. You think you’re immune? Who the hell inoculated you?”