Lily White (39 page)

“What?”
Lee asked, convinced she had not heard right. True, Melanie herself often seemed as if she had been sucked up by a cyclone from the tea party she had been hostessing and plunked down in the D.A.’s Office. A dainty perfumed handkerchief always peeked out of one of her modest long sleeves. Melanie was known as a genius strategist, the greatest teacher of advocacy ever. Lee, however, was appalled. This was 1975! The very idea of using feminine wiles to achieve a goal was disgraceful. “Use my
what
?”

“Your femininity,” Melanie replied. She sounded so genteel that she should have been sitting before a silver tea service, offering clotted cream and marmalade, not at a desk with a stack of crime scene photos of a victim shot in the nose at close range.
Her desk was a great and clumsy gray metal affair, but the photos were arrayed in a delicate fan shape, and all her papers were in folders on either side of a cream-colored blotter set in a tan leather holder. “The problem with women trial lawyers is this: They try to be men.” She gestured to Lee to be seated, a gracious roll of the wrist.

“I’m not trying to be a man,” Lee said, thinking back to the day before, her second trial in the Supreme Court unit. Simple. A one-witness robbery. Where could she have acted mannishly? A bodega owner in East Harlem claimed the defendant held a gun on him and then ran out with the three hundred dollars from the cash register and a carton of Camels. “Are you talking about the Suarez case?” she asked.

“I am.” Melanie picked up a petal that had fallen from the single white rose she always kept in a bud vase on her desk and, with delicacy, sniffed it. She had gone to Radcliffe.

“But I won!” Lee exclaimed. “The jury came back about four-thirty.”

“I know.”

“So where was I mannish?”

Lee really didn’t want to hear Melanie’s answer. She dreaded it. It would be something humiliating—like telling her she should use lip wax because juror number eight seemed to be staring at the area directly under her nose. And indeed, he had, all during her summation. Or the answer could be something more profound—like she was acting so masculine that people would think her wedding ring was a phony.

Sometimes she actually felt like the man of the house, coming home late, neck stiff, muscles sore, bones aching, only to find that Jazz had prepared a big dinner. Why? They could have gotten a sandwich from the deli. He could have been working as late as she was. He should have been. Jazz said everything was fine. What was she worried about? And in truth, he had not been
fired. But she had seen with her own eyes, at his law firm’s outing the previous June, how the partners did not take him seriously. Hello! they would call to him, a little too heartily, without stopping to make conversation. Jazz didn’t seem to care, though, or even notice. Boring, was all he could say about the partners. Workaholics, he remarked of his fellow associates. Not me. So he left the office while others still had three or four hours more work, while Lee herself still had three or four hours. He came back to the apartment, watched the news, listened to the radio, cleaned, did the laundry. And cooked. Then he showered to be fresh when she came home. Well, this was the wave of the future; that’s what all the articles on the New Feminism told her. Forget sex roles. Be what you want to be. And if you have a husband willing to take on household responsibilities, then be grateful and give him a great big kiss as he hands you your pipe and slippers.

“I didn’t say you were
mannish
,” Melanie explained. “I said you are using tactics that are associated with men. Yelling, for instance.”

“When was I yelling?”

“During most of your summation.” She rubbed the rose petal between her thumb and forefinger.

“I wasn’t yelling,” Lee retorted. “I was trying to sound strong.”

“But your talent is for being direct, down-to-earth. You’re likable. I admit I was in and out of the courtroom, but I must have seen about an hour of the trial. You were very easy to take. You asked a question—a well-thought-out question—and you knew just what to do with the answer. You were polite to witnesses, to the judge, to Suarez’s idiot lawyer. When you made an objection, your voice was firm but under control. Excellent.”

“Thank you.”

“But you almost blew it during summation.”

“I wanted to be forceful.”

“Be forceful for Lee White, then. You were forceful for some hairy-chested Italian guy out of St. John’s. Sweeping gestures. Big voice. They could have heard you in Bronx Supreme. And that banging on the podium!” Melanie let the petal drift from her fingers. Then she crashed her fist on her desk. “Does that seem natural?”

“No, but I’m not like you,” Lee explained, trying not to stare at the lace hem of Melanie’s handkerchief.

“Granted. But you are not a stevedore either. You seem to be a bright, energetic young woman from … Where?”

“Long Island.”

“Do they bang podia on Long Island?”

“It’s not a local custom,” Lee admitted

“And the women there: Do they speak forcefully and directly? Or do they shout?”

“They don’t shout,” Lee admitted.

“If you came from a long line of female shouters, it might be another story. I assume you do not?”

“I had one grandmother who was in the Yiddish theater. She had a healthy set of lungs, but no, I don’t think she shouted.”

“Nor do you.”

“Right.”

“You see, juries know that about you,” Melanie said, looking at her short but perfectly buffed nails. “They watch you. During your opening. Walking up to the sidebar for conferences. Taking out a Life Saver during his lawyer’s cross of the transit cop. You, the judge, the defense lawyers … All of you represent the law to them. Justice. For many of them, this trial will be one of the most memorable events of their lives. So they are riveted on you and everything you do.”

“Sorry about the Life Saver.”

“Perfectly all right. The jury understands reaching into a
pocket or handbag surreptitiously and popping a Life Saver into a dry mouth. It also reinforces what they already know about you: a nice, normal person. A young woman from Long Island who was probably brought up
not
to shout.”

“But this is a
trial.
I’m a prosecutor!”

“This is a trial, and more than anything, they have to believe you. During your summation, several jurors were sitting back and going: Huh? What’s going on here? What’s she yelling about? This isn’t the assistant D.A. we’ve come to know and like. This is someone emoting. Being false. Can we trust her? Were we wrong about her being so nice?”

“But I won,” Lee argued.

“Yes, but look what you had going for you. The bodega owner was a great witness. And the defendant looked like the punk he is; he didn’t dare testify. The jury was out almost a full day. They shouldn’t have taken longer than a couple of hours. That means you almost lost them.”

“I didn’t realize … I thought because they were out so long, I had done a great job.”

“A good job. The summation … well, you made them doubt
you,
and therefore they doubted your case. But as you say, Lee, you did win it. Congratulations.”

The Whites and the Taylors got along amazingly well. That was because all four of them—Leonard, Sylvia, Foster, and Ginger—had good manners. If they hadn’t, Lee and Jazz’s third anniversary celebration at the Whites’ might have ended with words, or even a “Well, I
never
!” followed by a slammed door. Each set of parents despised the other individually and collectively.

Sylvia stood by the Frank Lloyd Wright-style chrome and glass bar where Leonard was pouring drinks and whispered in a not very
sotto voce
about Ginger’s outfit: “It’s a slap in the face!
Baggy cotton pants and an old sweater, like she was going out to mow her lawn … which would be nice for a change.”

“She probably thought it was casual,” Leonard replied. “Sunday afternoon, just to celebrate the kids’ anniversary.”

But Sylvia wasn’t having any: “It’s either a deliberate smack in the face or she’s the dumbest of the dumb goys, which—believe you me—is pretty dumb.”

At that same instant, Ginger was staring at the food on the dining room table—a turkey that looked as if it had been designed by Ralph Lauren, a glistening glazed ham, a jewel of a cranberry mold, a cornucopia of baby vegetables, a cheese platter that would cause the American Dairy Association to shout Hallelujah—and Sylvia’s triumph, which she had ordered two months earlier: gingerbread models of the Whites’ house and Hart’s Hill. Ginger murmured to her husband in a voice accustomed to summoning dogs from several acres away: “Who does she think is coming for dinner? The whole Israel army?”

“Not with that ham,” Fos countered. “Anyway, it’s just us.”

“I hate to say it, but it’s true what they say about them: They know the price of everything and the value of nothing. They
wanted
us to figure how much it cost. Have you ever
seen
such a display?”

Since both mothers were talking at the same moment, they did not hear each other. The fathers kept their feelings to themselves, although Leonard, once enamored of Foster Taylor, then respectful, had been shaken to his core when Fos asked him for rye and ginger ale. Rye and ginger ale! A 1940s low-class woman’s drink. Or was Fos kidding? Was it some Rolling Hills Country Club in-joke, where you ask for rye and ginger ale and everybody hoots with laughter and the bartender hands you an Absolut on the rocks with a wedge of lime. Leonard had tried an experimental chuckle when Fos asked for the drink, but there had been no corresponding laugh back.

Foster, in worn corduroys and a cotton turtleneck—which covered about a third of his sagging pelican chin—couldn’t think of a thing to say to his in-law, this slim, platinum-at-the-temples man mixing drinks and wearing a double-breasted nipped-waist suit and one of those dime-thin gold watches … on a Sunday! Who the hell gets dressed up like that in his own house? Can you talk about the Giants with a guy like that? Politics? There was no doubt in Foster’s mind that Leonard was a knee-jerk Democrat, and he’d wind up puking if he had to listen to him go on about liberal crap, like how Gerald Ford deserved to lose and how that liver-lipped cracker Carter was so great.

The elder Taylors were perched on the edge of one of Sylvia’s decorating epiphanies, a leather and chrome daybed that sat, plunk, right in the middle of the Whites’ living room. They were sipping their drinks, tiny bird sips, as if waiting for a moment when the Whites would turn away and they could bolt.

The Whites, standing by the bar, appeared almost paralyzed, their lips barely able to move. Lee assumed her mother was saying: Let’s serve dinner now, and her father was replying angrily: It’s only three o’clock. We can’t serve until four-thirty—at the earliest. How the hell could you ask them to come at two for a four-thirty supper?

“I don’t know,” Jazz said to Lee, with that irreverent, irresistible, and decidedly sexual half smile she loved. “Doesn’t look promising, does it?”

“God knows why. Two Fun Couples like them, they should be whooping it up.”

“What’s so amusing, you two?” Ginger called out so cheerfully it was clear she was desperate.

“What’s so amusing?” Kent echoed, sounding a sour note. His parents had stuck him with Lee’s sister, who was trying too hard to find something interesting for him to do. He was tired of drawing pictures of his family for her and making Play-Doh
out of flour and water and salt. It
wasn’t
Play-Doh, and he’d told her he was too old for Play-Doh, and she hadn’t listened to him. He wanted to be with Lee and Jazz. He wanted to eat. There it was, all set out on the table and they wouldn’t let him even go near it.

“You two look happy!” said Robin, using her ebullient voice. After six months in rehabilitation, she had returned to Shore-haven for four-times-a-week therapy and a volunteer job at a day care center. She was trying very hard to show the Taylors a good time and, while she was at it, to show she was not a thieving junkie. She was aware that was her reputation around town, a reputation—she had learned to own up to in group—she had earned. But it was exhausting having to act so animated and to keep Kent amused.

Jazz and Lee waved her over. As Lee knew he would, Kent leaped up and came along. “Hi!” he said. He put his arm around her, laid his head on her shoulder, and heaved a satisfied sigh.

“Hi!” Lee smoothed his hair back from his forehead. Too shaggy again. Deciding not to ask herself why her mother-in-law could spend hours every day grooming her dogs but couldn’t take the only child she had left at home for a haircut once every six months, Lee made a mental note to take him to the barber the following weekend.

“Hi!” Kent said again.

“Hi!” She turned to Robin. “I know this isn’t exactly scintillating for you. You’re being wonderful.”

“Stop it! Wonderful is having you guys here in the house. I mean, Mom and Dad have been great—especially considering how I made their lives a living hell. But they’re so nervous with me. If I’m not constantly smiling, they’re nervous wrecks.”

Lee reached out and put her other arm around her sister. Physically, Robin appeared more fragile than ever. Her dark-blonde hair was swept straight back from her forehead and
temples, accentuating the heart shape of her face with its pointed chin. She would have been beautiful or close to it—thin as a whisper, with whiter-than-white skin and eyes the color of an overcast sky—but the drugs she had taken for so many years had taken their toll. She had dreadful dental problems. To hide her unattractive teeth and bad gums, she puffed out her lips. While this made her mouth pretty and pouty in repose, when she spoke it looked as if she were imitating a fish.

Jazz stared at the sisters and, as people invariably did, marveled at their differences. Forget that they seemed to have come from separate families: They might have belonged to separate races. Although the same height, Lee was sturdy, with strong shoulders and hips verging on generosity. Her hair was thick and chestnut brown, her skin golden. In her walks through Greenwich Village, tourists would stop her and ask directions in French, Spanish, Italian, or Greek, believing she was one of their own. “The two of you …” he said, shaking his head in amazement.