Lily White (64 page)

She tried to find a man. Really tried. She was certain that somewhere out there was someone just right for her. Well, in order to face grim-faced judges and glowering jurors, even the most cynical trial lawyer must, at heart, be an optimist. Lee was. She accepted every blind date arranged by friends, neighbors, and colleagues. You never know when it will happen, she told herself. She cut no corners on these occasions, always flossing first, always making up before a magnifying mirror in bright light, always opening the door with a welcoming smile. Thus she spent evenings with a drunken physicist, a cocaine-addicted journalist, an anti-Semitic swimming pool contractor, a forty-seven-year-old endodontist who referred to his mother as Mommy. She met men who became nasty when she refused to have sex with them after a three-hour acquaintance, men who told her she was too smart for her own good, men so busy fulminating over their former wives that they never asked her a single question about her life. True, she was introduced to a number of men who were decent and courteous, but few of them interested her. One of them, a veterinarian, admired her beagle and reminded her of John Lennon. But after three dates he stopped calling. When she screwed up the courage to phone him, he sheepishly explained he had, uh, um, gotten engaged. One of those love-at-first-sight things. His fiancée, Lee later found out, was twenty-six.

For a little more than a year, in the mid-eighties, Lee went out with Robert Mandelbaum, a pathologist from New Jersey whom she met when he was testifying for Chuckie as an expert witness in a murder case. For the first few months she was so grateful that, unlike many medical examiners, Robert did not expound on putrefying limbs over dinner that she was able to ignore the fact that she did not enjoy his company. He’s perfect, she reported to Will. A widower, so there’s no ex-wife he hates. I’m so tired of going out and hearing about some greedy,
self-involved, manipulative, shitty mother-bitch-whore. Robert’s a genuinely nice guy. We go hiking a lot. He’s going to teach me and Val to cross-country ski. He loves music. He plays the cello in an amateur string quartet. He has a wonderful dog, a sweet, stupid Irish setter. A few weeks later, Will observed: You talk more about the dog than you do about the guy. Lee tried very hard to love Robert, or even to like him. She could not. During sex, she twice caught herself yawning and tried to hide it by rolling her head and moaning, pretending she was writhing in passion. She found herself faking ardor and could not believe that a doctor trained to notice the most minute evidence on the human body could not pick up that he left her cold. Will told her: All he probably notices is you’re not dead, which ipso facto makes you hot stuff. After a year, she admitted to herself and then to Will that Robert’s wife must have died of boredom.

I have to face facts, she told Will shortly after she stopped seeing Robert. I’m no bargain. She was grateful that Will immediately sprang to her defense, telling her how intelligent, pretty, good-natured, and fun—You’re a good time, Lee!—she was. So she prosecuted. Just imagine you’re a man telling a friend about me: She’s a lawyer, so she can never let you have the best of an argument. A real ball-breaker. She makes a decent living, but that house! Crazy, huge old place that sucks money out of her checking account. And who lives there with her? Her kid. Pretty but, you know, wants to be an actress and has a scene every fifteen minutes. Then there’s her ex-husband’s something … brother I think. How she got stuck with him I don’t know. A retard. Big guy, too, but he can’t stay home alone. Needs a baby-sitter the times she goes out with the daughter. Then she’s got this maid, this scrawny, white-trash woman who’s always blasting Pentecostal preachers on the radio. The maid lives there full-time with her son, nine or ten years old, who’s got Coke-bottle glasses and keeps bumping into walls because he’s looking
down at his accordion all the time. He’s not bad, but who the hell wants to hear an accordion eighteen hours a day? Oh, and she’s got three dogs: One of them has only three legs. A stray she found, hit by a car. Ugly! You should see the way it hops around: freaky, disgusting.

Will, Lee said, name me one man who would want to marry all that.

“All that” isn’t who they’d be marrying. It’s you. And you’re going to find someone, he assured her. Don’t worry.

Do you think I stacked the deck against myself? I mean, subconsciously created a situation that no man in his right mind could possibly want?

I think you’ve created something for yourself. Something you had to have: a family. Look, happily ever after doesn’t happen all the time. So what are you supposed to do when it doesn’t? Keep looking at your watch until you’re eighty, saying: Gee, he should be coming any second—I’ll be glad when he does, because then my life can have meaning? Or do you make a life that has meaning for you?

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 those 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.