Lily White (21 page)

That night, Lee’s shapely legs swelled until they looked like bowling pins. The tiny red dots that covered them, signaling her immune system’s outrage were so numerous that from the soles of her feet all the way up to her thighs she was a solid blaze of crimson. Her legs were so sensitive that it was agony when she covered them, even with a sheet. Greta had gone off to Frankfurt for a rare week’s vacation, her mother was in one of her moods where she never got out of her bathrobe, so there was no one to look in on Lee. For forty-eight hours she lay shivering in the arctic air-conditioning, too sapped from antihistamines to get up and open a window.

But her espionage had been worth it. What memories! What treasures! Jazz’s powerful forearms. His brawny wrists. And his shorts! He must have outgrown them, because when he lunged for a net ball she could see his hamstrings as they thickened into the pale crescents of his buttocks. Oh, and she didn’t want to forget the bandanna he’d tied around his head as a sweatband. And more! When he and his mother changed over, and he was facing Lee; he looked so … Okay, not handsome. But he had such a genuinely
nice
face, and when his mother aced a serve so hard he didn’t even see the ball, he hadn’t gotten defensive or temperamental. On the contrary! His wonderful face, his absolutely, totally good-natured face lit up with an appreciative grin.

It had been worth it! Jazz, she said to herself. Jasper. Jazz. If she ever met him, what would she call him? Of course, he might say: “Hi, I’m Jazz Taylor.” Or: “How do you do? My name is Jasper Taylor. I believe we are neighbors,” hopefully oblivious that in fifth grade she’d almost punched him in the suck.

Does all this sound like an obsession on Lee’s part? It was. Not a dangerous fixation, the sort you hear of nowadays, where monomaniacs stalk their prey without rest or mercy. Actually, until her sortie up the hill, the extent of Lee’s preoccupation with Jazz consisted of calling his prep school (from a pay phone
so the call would not show up on her parents’ bill) to ascertain when his spring break would be. She then spent an inordinate amount of time walking Woofer back and forth past the Taylors’ driveway, hoping (in vain, it turned out) to get a glimpse of Jazz.

She kept hoping throughout her senior year of high school. Aware that they were both in the same grade, she fantasized every night about running into him at college interviews. (“Jasper, isn’t that the girl who lives in that modern thing down the hill?” “I think it may be, Dad.” Then, Jazz would turn to her: “Excuse me, are you from Shorehaven?”) When Jazz didn’t show up for the guided tours at Cornell or Brown, she felt cheated, as though she’d just missed him by seconds. She had even gone so far as to arrange interviews at Smith and Mount Holyoke, for the sole reason that, having studied an atlas, she’d calculated that the two colleges were a mere sixty miles from his prep school. In her mind’s eye, she could see him waiting at a bus stop just outside snow-covered, Christmas-card Amherst on a frosty New England afternoon, anxious about getting back to be on time for afternoon tea or chapel or whatever. She’d spot him and turn to her mother: “Stop the car!” Then she’d lower the window and say: “Aren’t you from Shorehaven?” They’d give him a lift back to school. With the cooperative illogic of fantasy, she was magically transported to the back seat beside him, while Sylvia chauffeured up front; by the time they got to his school, Jazz was slipping his class ring onto her finger. Of course it was much too big, but she knew exactly how to tape it so it would fit.

But the question remains: Was this obsession anything more than the standard teenage crush? Yes, it was.

Lee White clung to the image of Jazz Taylor’s sliver of ass, to the remembrance of his vigorous baritone, far longer than might be considered healthy because she was a lonely girl. True, she had a lot going for her. She was a gifted (if not brilliant) student,
a key member of the girls’ tennis team, and managing editor of the Shorehaven High School
Beacon
, where she was a pillar of strength and fount of common sense for the temperamental reporters and the wild, impetuous photographers. She had a smart and lively best friend, Dorie Adler, three devoted pals, and at least ten acquaintances who thought of her in the warmest possible terms. But she had never had a boyfriend.

Of course, a seventeen-year-old girl who has never had a beau is not exactly a rarity. Still, almost every girl, even the most obnoxious adolescent, stands on the brink of womanhood with the reassuring knowledge that her family’s love has always been (and will ever be) there for her. So it is no great loss if she does not yet have a pair of manly eighteen-year-old arms around her, because she knows—from her mother, father, sisters and brothers—that she is intrinsically lovable. In time, Mr. or Dr. Right will embrace her and whisper in her ear precisely what her family has been telling her all along: You are
wonderful.
I love you.

But Lee never got that from her parents. Not just those three little words: the feeling behind them. By the time she was finishing high school, Leonard was hardly home except on weekends. In 1967, there was no business like fur business. Well-off women wanted more than just their full-length minks. They wanted “fun furs”—ski jackets of dyed rabbit, trench coats lined in sheared beaver—plus serious furs to show that they were worthy of more than mere mink; they seized fox coats, sable cloaks, shearling tunics, off the racks at Le Fourreur as if they had been sentenced to decades of hard labor in Siberia. Leonard was becoming rich beyond even his wildest dreams.

So it was no problem for him to pay the rent on a one-bedroom apartment on East Seventy-eighth Street so he could have a place to stay weeknights. Obviously, Sylvia could not be there with him. The girls needed her. But he urged her: “Use it whenever you come in during the day. It’s a great place to put your
feet up for an hour or two before dinner if you’ve been shopping.” (What Sylvia did not know, naturally, is that when she called the East Seventy-eighth Street apartment, the phone also rang in Dolly Young’s somewhat larger, more lavishly furnished co-op apartment on Central Park South which Leonard had also paid for and where he actually spent most Monday through Thursday nights.)

So Lee saw relatively little of her father. On school holidays, like Columbus Day or Veterans Day, he would often take her out to lunch, but their conversations were limited to safe subjects: school, polite inquiries about her friends and—the only area of her life that aroused his interest—the triumphs and travails of the Shorehaven tennis team.

“What’s your won-loss record?” he inquired one day during Easter vacation of her senior year.

“You had to ask?” Lee laughed as she reached across the table at Miss Pansy’s, a tearoom around the corner from her father’s store. “We’re one-five.”

“Even with your backhand?”

“If it weren’t for my backhand, we’d probably be five-one.” Father and daughter exchanged smiles, each comfortable that this was not the case. Lee picked up a crustless triangle of her sandwich. “What’s this gook inside?”

“Pecan cream cheese,” Leonard answered, a little nervously. He never knew what Lee would say next. “A specialty of the house.”

“Is it a big
goyishe
thing or something?”

“Shhh!”

“They’re all
goyim
here. They don’t know what I’m saying.” Leonard glanced around nervously. “Dad, relax. We’re in New York City. It’s not against the law to say
goyim.
”

“Where did you hear that word?”

“It’s not
f-u-c-k
or anything,” she said, smiling at his attempt
to remain unperturbed. “Grandma used to say
goyishe
all the time.” Leonard tried to appear as if this was a surprise to him; Lee made no effort to hide her amusement at his behavior. “And I heard it at Dorie Adler’s.”

“Oh.” Leonard pretended to be absorbed in removing the gluey cream cheese coating from his teeth, following the dictates of good breeding—an impossible task.

“‘Oh,”’ Lee mimicked. “Okay, I’ll put a help-wanted ad in the paper: Friend Wanted: Only Protestants need apply.”

“I didn’t mean—”

“Sure you did!” Lee retorted, but she smiled when she said it, and she had such a generous smile that it softened the censure.

“You know what’s great about you?” her father demanded.

“No. What’s great about me?”

“Your spunk. Men like that.”

Lee put down her sandwich. “I don’t think so.”

“Sure they do,” he insisted. “You don’t think there are a lot of boys up at Cornell who want a girl with brains and …” He searched for a word. Lee waited for him to say “beauty” or at least “good looks.” Finally he said: “… gumption. Listen, Lee, the most fashionable, beautiful—and wealthy—women in New York come into the salon. And you know what?”

“They don’t have gumption.”

“Right!”

“But I bet they had dates for their senior proms.”

“Maybe. But they can’t keep a man’s interest. Their husbands—uh—stray, if you understand me. Because when a man comes home from a day’s work, he doesn’t want a bubble-head. He wants someone he can talk to.” Loud silence: Leonard suddenly slammed on the conversational brakes, realizing that his uncommon honesty had almost brought them careening into the very walls of their home. Before it could last too long, he added: “You’ve got the brains to be someone special. You want to
be a doctor? I’ll pay for medical school.” Considering that the worldview espoused in
The Feminine Mystique
had not yet made an impact on the psyches of male furriers, this was a remarkably decent offer. “A lawyer? A college professor? I’ll be behind you a hundred percent.” Then he patted her hand, and it was not a mere offhand caress; it was a pat replete with heartfelt warmth, the closest gesture to a genuine declaration of love she would receive from him in her life. “Lee, sweetheart, come on. You’ll get your MRS degree too. Iron those wrinkles out of your forehead. Stop worrying. I guarantee it: You’ll hook some guy.”

Then Leonard waved to Olive, their waitress, a sourpuss he’d been trying to charm for a decade, and told her to bring his almost straight-A daughter who would be going to Cornell—that’s one of the Ivy League colleges, Olive—next September a slice of Miss Pansy’s famous Nesselrode pie.

The only guy Lee got that year was her prom date, Nestor “Baby” Langley, who weighed two hundred ninety-seven pounds. If his ironic moniker makes it sound as if Baby was a future tackle for the San Francisco 49ers, then it is doubly misleading. Baby got his nickname simply because he called everyone “Baby,” believing it made him appear cosmopolitan. An amiable boy whose reputation for wit was based on his total recall of the epigrams of Oscar Wilde, he was as soft as the Ring Dings he was unable to resist. Baby, the editor in chief and movie critic of the
Beacon,
was the only boy in Lee’s crowd who still could not find a prom date the week after Memorial Day—not even among the pathetically eager ninth graders in the fast crowd at Shorehaven Junior High. At the urging of a half score of their journalistic colleagues (“How can you
not go
to your senior prom? Even if it’s with a friend. It’s
better
with a friend, because you
know
how superficial high school relationships are and friendships last forever”), and after Dorie Adler drove over to Baby’s house and
stood beside him, holding his perspiring hand, as he phoned Lee and formally invited her, Lee and Baby became, ad hoc, an item.

Sylvia was elated. Not about Baby, of course (although Leonard was not displeased, somehow aware that Baby’s father, Thaddeus Langley, was a member of Rolling Hills, the golf club to which Foster Taylor belonged). Sylvia was enraptured at the thought of shopping for a gown. “You need something very unique,” Sylvia declared as she sat on the edge of Lee’s bed.

“Not ‘very unique.’ ‘Unique’ means one of a kind.” But Sylvia had become distracted. She scanned the room—now white and yellow, with a daisy-chain stencil painted high on the walls and around the edges of the oak floor. Hmm, she seemed to be saying to herself. Apparently, she had forgotten that she’d redecorated it a year earlier. Placing a Bougainvillea Pink-enameled index fingertip on her one-shade-darker Appassionata Pink lower lip, Sylvia appeared lost in thought—although not so lost that Lee could not see where she was headed.

“Mom.”

“What?”

“We’re not doing my room now. We’re doing me.”

Sylvia offered an apologetic smile and even touched her daughter’s cheek for an instant. “I made a list of places to look for prom dresses.”

“Mom, I just want a plain, peasant-style—”

“Why? Are you a peasant?”

“We’re not exactly descended from the Hapsburgs.”

“Who are they?”

“They live on Driftwood Drive. He’s an accountant.”

“I don’t think we know any Hapsburgs.”

“I was just kidding. They were an aristocratic family.”

“Well, your father is an aristocrat in the fur industry.” Lee knew what was coming next. “How many furriers got mentioned
in last August’s
Vogue
and
Bazaar?
” Sylvia demanded. “We all have to keep up a fashion image … me, Daddy, Robin and
you.
”

“The editors of
Vogue
aren’t covering the Shorehaven High School prom. It’s safe for me to wear a peasant dress.”

“Do you want to wear work boots and carry a sack of potatoes out onto the dance floor?” Sylvia, no fool, quickly saw that the notion of work boots was not without its appeal, so she talked fast. “We won’t look on the Island, because then you’ll see yourself coming and going. But you want something classic. You’re not Henri Bendel. I crossed that off my list. Too severe for you. You’re Bonwit’s. Saks. Bergdorf’s too, but their stuff is so matronly this year you could throw up. Don’t get me wrong: I’m not talking about anything sweetie-pie pastelly for you. You’ve got high coloring.”

“I’m sallow.” Lee didn’t close her eyes, because she knew what she’d see in her mind’s eye: Jazz Taylor at his prom, twirling a wisp of a girl, an ethereal violet-eyed gamin who had waist-length blonde hair, a letter of acceptance to Radcliffe, and a complexion somewhere between peaches-and-cream and porcelain.