Lily White (11 page)

Did he honestly believe that all he had to do to be a good family man was pay for his daughters’ ballet lessons and not divorce his wife and marry his mistress? Leonard knew better. He
felt
better, experiencing occasional surges of love for his children that came straight from his heart. But those times, when Lee’s prowess at crab-apple tree climbing filled him with great fear
and greater elation, or when Robin’s exegesis of Jerry Lewis’s role in
The Delicate Delinquent
made him proud, and he grabbed her, hugged her and covered her with kisses, he unfailingly sensed a change in Sylvia. He’d look up: No, nothing, just a wide Isn’t-that-just-the-sweetest? smile. But (was it his imagination?) the smile seemed a touch too broad, so even her back teeth were on display. So he merely unwrapped the little girl’s arms from around his neck, gave her a friendly wink and a pat on the backside, and sent her off for another year or two.

Beyond Sylvia’s easel, where the well-fertilized lawn ended, was a hundred-foot-wide strip of trees that, in full leaf, gave the illusion that the Whites’ property was baronial, backing up onto a great forest. But from her second-story window, Lee could see it wasn’t so. The land rose about forty feet, then leveled off at the beginning of Hart’s Hill. Yes, a house with a name. Not that Lee could see it from her window, but she knew it was there. An estate. The estate next door.

Hart’s Hill got its name in the late eighteenth century from the deer that roamed the north shore of Long Island. These noble mammals (albeit hopelessly tick-ridden) seemed drawn to that particular promontory. They grazed that very spot where, in 1757, 1820, and 1898, the manor house would be built. (The first house was destroyed by a fire in the hearth that claimed one Mrs. Rebecca Taylor as well as the rum syllabub she was preparing. The second was razed by a Mr. Arthur Taylor and the third erected by same after he made his second million in attorney’s fees advising Edward Harriman during Harriman’s acquisition of the Union Pacific Railroad.)

But before all this construction and upward mobility put an end to the noble hart, a real deer could wander right to that place. Its coat glowing red in the sunlight, a stag might gaze northward across the stern gray waters of Long Island Sound to look upon the dark-green forests of mainland America.

The Taylors of Hart’s Hill themselves weren’t much given to gazing, at least by the time their neighbor, young Lee White, became aware of them. They were too busy. Foster Taylor had left the Manhattan law firm of Willoughby, Crane and Buffet to serve on the United States Olympic Committee; he was also a trustee of the Boy Scouts of America, the American Bobsledding Association, the Iron Lung Alliance, and A Mighty Fortress, a traveling Episcopal goodwill choir. Georgina, his wife, was known as Ginger. It was said that if she hadn’t gotten married in her sophomore year at Hollins and then gotten pregnant (the events actually occurred in reverse order), she could have been a professional tennis player. In addition to her daily workouts on the grass court at Hart’s Hill, Ginger raised and showed basenjis, dogs that are inherently neighbor-pleasing since they do not bark. However, they do defecate, and entire broods of basenji puppies would often scamper down the hill and leave odoriferous brown lumps among the phlox in Sylvia’s all-white garden.

Foster and Ginger were tall and lissome. Each carried two rare recessive genes that suppressed fat on thighs and upper arms, which they passed down to all their four children, so the younger Taylors, too, grew up tall and lean-limbed. And handsome, with their mother’s finely wrought features and their father’s high color. Since Fos and Ginger were an effervescent couple, finding hilarity in everything from bobbing for apples to knock-knock jokes, they had a real belly laugh when they realized their initial initials were right next to each other in the alphabet. F for Foster! Ha-ha-ha! G for Georgina. Ho-ho-ho! So they named their children Hope, Irene, Jasper, and Kent. (They might have gone on to Lawrence, Melanie, and even Nathaniel, but Kent was born retarded, and Foster thought that sort of killed the fun, Kent’s not getting the joke.)

Unlike the basenjis, the Taylors did not scamper down the
hill. In fact, while they were vaguely aware that someone had built a modern house on the property beneath them, they remained happily unconscious of the Whites’ existence.

The same cannot be said for the Whites. There was not one single day that Leonard did not think of the Taylors. As with a man haunted by a lost love, the most oblique reference could evoke their presence. Words:
athlete, hill, tennis, old money, lawyer, rich,
and
Olympic
made him dizzy with a mixture of desire and fury. Sights: a sailboat in the background of a Philip Morris ad; a church steeple; a dog (in fact, even Duchess, instead of barking and scaring away the little fuckers, seemed to view the basenjis’ excretory activities with an admiration approaching awe). Fos Taylor, himself standing on the platform of the Shore-haven station, holding his
Herald Tribune
at arms’ length to compensate for his farsightedness, or giving his train pals (whom Leonard thought of as the Taylor Boys) his idiosyncratic greeting, a stiff military salute, but using only his index finger. One time, he’d given that salute to Leonard—or so Leonard had thought. An explosion of joy went off inside Leonard, so powerful that it knocked him senseless. Somehow he managed a crisp salute in return. He thought: I’ve been tapped. (Tapped! what a wonderful word!) I’m one of the Boys. A second later, he saw Fos’s eyes blink-blink-blink at the wrongness of his, Leonard’s, behavior and he knew … Turning around, he spotted one of the Taylor Boys right behind him, the fat one, who looked like an overblown Audie Murphy balloon. “Sorry,” Leonard began gamely, “I thought you were saying hello to …” Yes, he knew all about how crazy they were for acting as if nothing was bothering you even if you were in the middle of an A-bomb detonation, but by that time, Fos and Fat Boy had somehow managed to move off sideways. Not only that: They were saluting Paper Boy, the one who got on the train every day with the
Times,
the
Trib,
the
Journal-American,
and the
Wall Street Journal.
They
were grinning too, as if they couldn’t wait to tell him something hysterical.

Smells: The odor of dog shit enraged him. Once, he had to restrain himself from grabbing the leash of a toy poodle from a woman on Lexington Avenue, just down from Le Fourreur, and strangling her with it. In his mind, he could picture the skin of her neck reddening, puckering under the leather leash, and it gave him pleasure, as did imagining the squoosh sound as he pushed her dying body into the tiny brown pile her shitty little dog had made.

Sounds: The
thwomp!
of tennis balls from the Taylors’ court moved him to melancholy to wrath and back again. The Taylors were a large family, and each member seemed to have a hundred friends who played, so
thwomp!
went on from seven on Saturday mornings to dusk on Sundays. Once, when Sylvia’s parents were over for Mother’s Day, the Judge had whispered: “Your neighbors play a lot of tennis, don’t they?” Leonard became disconsolate. All he could do was nod. Then he excused himself and went into his bedroom, locked the door, and called Dolly, breaking his own No Contact on Weekends rule. They talked dirty for two and a half hours, until Sylvia banged on the door. “Leonard? What are you doing in there? Is anything wrong?” He didn’t bother covering the mouthpiece. He never did. He had no secrets from Dolly. “It’s Jack Feldman, Syl. You know, from Siberian Sable. They had a warehouse fire. Please, I can’t get off the phone now.” Sylvia apologized and went back to put on the charcoal herself.

Actually, Leonard did have one secret from Dolly. He knew she was game for anything, but although he was dying to play Mr. and Mrs. Taylor, he didn’t have the courage to suggest it. How he wanted to put on that accent from Princeton or wherever and be Fos (“Ginger, dahling, I am not like all those other chaps on crew, am I?”). Dolly would be Ginger, which was not
such a stretch, since she was actually slender as a reed. But as powerful as Leonard’s desire was, so was his fear that, knowing this about him, Dolly, if she turned against him, could blackmail him for everything he had. And he would give it to her, that’s how horrible it would be if anyone found out his secret.

Of course, if he left Sylvia and married Dolly, they could play Fos and Ginger all the time. So how come he didn’t? Ah! That was one more secret Leonard kept from Dolly: that he would never marry her. Even if he could get free without Sylvia killing herself, which he doubted, and even though he loved Dolly with all his heart, he knew she wasn’t good enough for him. She was trying to be, taking French lessons at Hunter at night and going to matinees on Saturday; she had seen almost every play on Broadway and could discuss them very intelligently. She was taking riding lessons in Central Park. But if something terrible happened and Sylvia died and he was free, he wouldn’t marry Dolly. He would want the real thing.

Seven-year-old Lee, of course, knew nothing about her father’s affair, although in the intuitive way of smart children, she knew there was something fishy going on with Dolly. Why was Dolly so inexhaustibly wonderful to her? Dolly would practically gasp with delight on those rare occasions when Leonard brought Lee to work with him. “Lee! What a surprise!” she would gush, and then look toward Leonard: “Please, Mr. White, would it be okay if I took Lee out for an ice cream sundae?” And her father would consent. When they’d get to Schrafft’s, Dolly would ask Lee what seemed like hundreds of questions about second grade and about Robin and her mother. And no matter what she said, Dolly was thrilled. Even if she said something stupid, like: “Uh, gee, I dunno what my favorite color is.” Dolly was very sweet, and always looked beautiful and smelled like flowers, but the child wished she’d just shut up so Lee could concentrate on her sundae. Peach ice cream with hot fudge, whipped cream,
and a cherry, although they were a little cheap with the fudge this time. Lee hoped Dolly would notice and ask her if she wanted more, and she’d say: Maybe just a teeny bit. But then the man behind the counter would think she looked like a real nice girl and feel awful she’d gotten so little hot fudge, so he’d give her two—no, three—of those big spoons full. But instead Dolly was waiting for her to say something. Oh. Favorite color. “Uh, yellow. No, red.” Dolly would gasp: “Red! I can’t believe it! I love red too!”

Actually, even though Lee knew Dolly’s delight in her was, well, phony, she liked Dolly. It was wonderful to sit there with someone who felt you were important enough to fake pleasure in your presence. With her mother …

It had never been good. True, Lee was clever enough to know that when her mother brought home a box that said Tailored Woman and took out a suit or a dress, she had to say: “Mommy! That’s beautiful!” Not only that: Having gone through all that trouble, Sylvia wasn’t really satisfied unless her daughter added something original—and cute. But what qualified as cute? One time, as her mother took a yellow chiffon dress from its tissue-paper bed and held it up against her to model it, Lee asked: “Mommy, can I have that dress when you die?” Her parents thought that was very cute, or, her father’s new word for cute, “droll.” So the next time her mother got something—a Balenciaga coat—she asked if she could have the coat when her mother died. This time, though, her mother snapped: “Stop it!” So she had to think up something else cute. It was very tiring, or, as her father said, “wearing,” to be droll all the time, because her mother bought something new nearly every day.

And if she wasn’t cute, her mother wasn’t happy with her. Not angry, to be fair. Not mean. Just … bored. Her mother found her boring because the things Lee found interesting—the collie, her new bike with training wheels, her
Madeline
book, and thinking
about what she was going to get for lunch—her mother had no interest in.

But Lee was determined to win over her mother. Just then, gazing down from her window, she noticed her mother setting down the paintbrush. Why was she doing that? Oh, there: It was Ethel, the latest live-in maid, walking across the lawn, bringing out Robin after her nap. Through the open window, Lee could hear a faint “Mimmy,” as Robin cried out for Sylvia. (Lee knew this was a bad sign for Ethel, because by forcing Robin onto Sylvia, Ethel was Not Taking Responsibility, which meant Sylvia would talk to Leonard and Leonard would fire Ethel first thing Saturday morning. Firing maids made him very crabby, so it would be a bad weekend.)

“Mimmy!” Robin’s voice wasn’t so high that it made you cover your ears, but its pitch worked its way through your semicircular canals and into your head and grated your nerves; a few more “Mimmy”s, and Sylvia’s and Ethel’s teeth would start grinding. Nonetheless, Lee had to admit Robin’s curls were golden. Even more ominous, Lee realized, Robin was showing dangerous signs of Fashion Smartness. Just the other day, sitting on the kitchen floor, she’d pulled on the ribbon of Sylvia’s espadrilles and said: “Pretty!” Sylvia’s color had gone all rosy, and she’d laughed and said: “Yes. Pretty and
very
expensive.” Lee jumped out of the apricot-and-pink lounge chair and raced downstairs.

By the time she got across the backyard, Robin was sitting on the grass and whimpering. “What’s wrong?” Sylvia was demanding, her hands on her hips, her brush dripping dark-green paint onto the grass. At the sound of her mother’s displeasure, Robin’s whimpering changed to whining. While this did not displease Lee, she did understand that the short, sharp spikes of grass on which Ethel had plopped her sister were prickling the little girl’s legs. So Lee hauled Robin up, drew her over to the swing set,
and sat her on the glider. “Thanks, sweetie,” her mother called out, and went back to her painting.

It was a lazy August afternoon. Now and then a bird tweeted or a bee buzzed on its way to Sylvia’s rose arbor. Lee sat across from her sister and glided, slowly, so as not to scare Robin. Day camp was over, third grade was two weeks away, her best friend, Dorie, was visiting her grandmother in New Jersey, and she’d torn up her paper dolls and flushed them away because her mother had said: No more toys. You have the nice paper dolls. Lee had come to her and said: I can’t find the paper dolls. Unfortunately, her mother had found a paper leg (wearing paper Capri pants) floating in the toilet bowl and Lee was being punished with no Ed Sullivan on Sunday.