Lily White (68 page)

“We’ll just have fun,” I promised her. “No serious discussions about your future. No pressure.”

“If I don’t feel like going for my high school diploma, I don’t have to?”

“Of course not. I told you: We’ll just be two ladies out for a nice lunch.”

I didn’t mention that I had a few plans in place for her if she was interested. Beauty school, waitressing. I couldn’t help find her a job in a bar, because the state liquor authority would run her prints and find out about her record. As far as that went, I had already spoken to a lawyer I’d once dealt with in Baltimore who had recommended someone in Annapolis; he was going to look into getting the assault and fugitive charges against her reduced. I’d spoken to a pal in the probation department who knew a social worker in Queens who had a grant to work with prostitutes, offering them alternatives to the life; I’d set that in motion too.

I was interested in Mary’s past and her future. Ladies who lunch open up to each other. What had her family been like? What had turned her into a hooker? And was there any way to change her path so she wouldn’t about-face and go right back to it?

And all right, I was not without hope that somewhere in an hour and a half of her ditsy chatter I’d find a glimmer, a hint that she herself hadn’t picked up on, of where Norman Torkelson might have gone.

“What should I wear?” she asked as I pulled up to the apartment building. She took in my gray linen suit, then looked into my eyes with something that might have been pity. “I don’t have anything like that.”

“Anything other than shorts or jeans,” I told her. “It doesn’t matter. You always look wonderful.”

“Thanks,” she said, pleased by the compliment but not thrilled: It had not come from a man. The second she climbed out of the car, she was rubbing a lock of hair between her fingers, checking what conditioning it would need. “Oh, and thanks a million for getting me out.” She laughed. “I wish I could pay you a million.”

“You wouldn’t have to,” I said. “I’d give you a discount.”

Mary laughed. “A big fat one, I hope!”

“A big fat one.”

I drove to my office to check my mail and returned to Mary’s an hour later. She was gone. I never heard from her again.

When I think about the case and I’m in an upbeat mood, I imagine Mary on some Amtrak train out of New York, sitting next to a nice guy in a suit who knows she’s not the kind of girl Mama wants him to bring home, but nonetheless, he’s going to bring her home. I see her in a pretty house with a central vacuum system, pregnant, clipping coupons for Wisk and Just Right. When I’m feeling low, I see her punched in the face, kicked in the head by some drunken pig of a john who grabs back the fifty bucks he gave her.

And now and then, late at night, I think she knew all along where Norman was, and they are together again.

O
f course, the Torkelson case wasn’t even the half of it. To finish Lily White’s story, it is necessary to backtrack a few years, before Lee met Norman in the visitors room at the Nassau County Correctional center, even before Mary Dean met Norman when she was working the bar at the Paloverde Cocktail Lounge in the Maricopa Motor Inn in Phoenix. We have to return to the early spring of 1991, shortly after Lee’s forty-first birthday.

Sandi Zimmerman slid into Lee’s office and closed the door. She kept her hands behind her on the knob and narrowed her eyes in the furtive manner of minor characters in Humphrey Bogart vehicles. “There’s a man outside who says he’s your father,” she said. “His name is Leonard White.” Blood rushed to Lee’s head. She felt dizzy. She calmed herself: Great emotion—how could it not be? Or was this something beyond emotion? A stroke? “Is it?” she heard Sandi asking.

“Is it
what?
” Lee snapped. Her skull was expanding against her scalp, desperate to escape the pressure inside her head. By the time Sandi brought her father in, she’d be aphasic, trying to make the
D
sound—Dad—but she wouldn’t be able to move her paralyzed tongue up behind her teeth, and the only sound that would emerge would be a feral growl.

“Is it really your father?”

“Sandi, you’re standing in front of a closed door. I can’t see him.” Lee realized then that Sandi was probably frightened the man was not her father at all, but a dissatisfied ex-client packing a semiautomatic rifle under his raincoat. She was irritated that everyone else got carte blanche to be crazy and she had to be the sane one. Reluctantly, she put her massive cerebral hemorrhage on hold. “If he’s a spiffy-looking man in his mid-sixties, he’s probably my father.”

The man who came through the door was indeed her father. He did not look spiffy, however. Leonard had gone from slim to thin, but his trousers had not. They were held up by a pair of expensive suspenders—pearl-gray, with a black design. Plumes? No, bushy-tailed foxes. The suspenders held up his trousers, but he easily could have slipped both his arms inside the waistband. His hair had gone from distinguished silver at the temples to old man’s white. His face was no color at all. In the middle of her cheerful blue and white office, Leonard looked diminished and passé, a scene on a tiny fifties black-and-white TV.

“Hello.” Lee stood behind her desk, making no move to shake hands or come around to greet him. This was not a conscious, lawyerly, ploy. Her body refused to let her move and her mind was in no condition to countermand the order.

“Sorry to drop in on you like this,” he began. He sounded nervous, but she was relieved that his voice was still the same, a slightly raspy Brooklyn baritone, rather pleasing, but with an accent that made it sound as if there had been some game in his
neighborhood in which all residents tried to speak with Oxbridge diction—and only Leonard had not gotten that it was a big joke. “I suppose I should have called first.”

“Please sit down,” she said.

Carefully, he lowered himself into one of the chairs that faced her desk. His thumb caressed the arm, reflexively checking out the fabric, as if considering it as a possible lining for one of his coats. “I don’t know how much Valerie’s told you,” he said.

“About what? Look, I’m not being coy. She’s fourteen and a half, and she tends to be a little self-involved.”

“The actor. Did she tell you I called her an ‘actress’ and got a big lecture?”

“She doesn’t talk much about what she does when she’s with you or her father. Except if you take her to the theater, you and—” Lee realized her father was waiting to see what euphemism she would come up with for family members, so she came up with none. “—Mom or Jazz and Robin. What is it that Val might have told me about?”

Leonard shook his head: I can’t find the words. Lee leaned forward. The swivel mechanism in her desk chair squealed. Maybe she wasn’t having a stroke, but her head did not feel right. Healthy people do not feel pressure against their temporal bones. What could Val be keeping from her? Some relationship? Sexual? Could she be pregnant? She’d had her period for a year. But she had invited only two boys—old buddies from elementary school—to her bat mitzvah: two boys and twenty-three girls. Drugs? What else could it be? Had Val broken down and confessed to her grandfather that when Lee was working late, she sneaked bottles of wine spritzers up past Puella and was one of those secret teenage alcoholics? Had Lee been overestimating a child’s ability to cope with a working mother, a retarded uncle, a Holy Roller housekeeper, a ten-year-old accordion prodigy, three dogs and two cats and a perpetually present black Republican?

“I don’t know where to begin,” Leonard said.

As this was what ninety percent of the clients sitting in that chair said, Lee at least knew what she had to do: ask something, anything, that would demand an answer. “How is Mom?”

“You do know!”

“No. What? Is something wrong?”

“Wrong? Metastasized stomach cancer.”

Lee hugged herself, her arms enfolding her belly. “I’m so sorry.”

“She’s got two, three more months, the doctor says. Sloan-Kettering.”

“She’s in the hospital?”

“No. What can they do for her there? I have her home.”

“Is she in pain?”

“No.”

“Who’s taking care of her?”

“I’m semiretired these days. I do what I can.”

“Is there anything I can do?”

Leonard sat back and crossed his legs, too suave a gesture for talking about cancer. “Is there anything you can do?” he mused. “Let me give you a bit of background. I don’t know if you read the financial pages, although you must. You’re a lawyer.”

“The financial pages?”

“Wait. Hear me out. The fur industry is, as they say, enjoying hard times.” He gave a harsh laugh, the sort where no sound is emitted because the lips are too tightly clamped together. “
Our
business is not doing well. Don’t worry. I didn’t come here for a loan. I came because I felt you ought to know about your mother.”

“I can’t believe Val didn’t say anything,” Lee said.

“Well …”

“Have you actually told her that her grandmother has cancer?”

“No,” he admitted. “Not in so many words. She knows Sylvia’s been under the weather. But you don’t say ‘cancer’ to a fourteen-year-old.”

“Yes you do.”

“Well, we don’t. Anyway, this is the thing: about the business. What I was trying to tell you. All those anti-fur people were marching up and down in front of the salon.” He uncrossed his legs and leaned toward her. “For three years!
Screaming
at anyone who came in. They picked four or five targets, and we were one of them. Because of our clientele. The best and the brightest: That’s who we’ve had right from the beginning. We hired security men, but that just kept them from throwing red paint. It didn’t make the customers come in. They were afraid. Those animal people are psychos. You know about them? They throw paint on the garments!”

“I’ve heard.” About a year earlier. Will had been over. As they usually did before he left, they turned on the TV for the news and the Johnny Carson monologue. The screen filled with protesters in front of a department store, screaming, cursing, hooting at fur-wearing women. Spontaneously, Will and Lee broke into applause.

“And it’s not just the psychos. The real problem is, it’s not the eighties anymore.”

“You were doing all right before the eighties.”

“But all that was nothing compared to the eighties. We couldn’t get to the bank fast enough. And now … dead.” He rubbed his hands together. They made a sandpaper sound. The backs of his hands were protuberant blue veins, large brown blotches. “We had to close Le Fourreur. Valerie didn’t tell you?”

“No. I’m sorry to hear it.”

“Last year we did no business at all. Nothing. And this year is going to be worse. Less than nothing. All the Furhavens—the low-end stores: Our profit margins are shaved to almost nothing,
and we’re not even making our rent. We’ve already closed the two in Jersey. What can I tell you? Everything is nothing.”

“What about all the money you made in the eighties?”

“It was tied up. Real estate. We both had co-ops in the city. Me and Jazz. Jasper.”

She almost smiled. “I know who you mean. I didn’t know you had places in the city. Val’s not a very good gossip.”

“I’m surprised she hadn’t said anything. She’d been to both places. They were beautiful. I was on Fifth, near the museum. Jazz was Park in the Sixties, one of the most exclusive buildings in the city. And I had the house in Palm Beach.” He looked to a wall lined with framed photographs Will had taken. “Not the house you were in,” he said to the photographs. “Another one. On the ocean. And Jazz had one close by, and one in Vermont. They’re all great skiers, the whole bunch—”

“I don’t mean to be rude, but I’d like to know why you’re here.”

“We sold them all, but you wouldn’t believe it. These days everybody’s trying to unload everything they bought in the eighties, when prices were sky-high. There’s a glut on the market and everything, everything we sold we sold at a loss. Terrible. The art your mother bought. We practically gave it away. Robin’s jewelry. Edwardian. It was auctioned at Sotheby’s. They wouldn’t have taken it if it wasn’t quality stuff. Everything. We poured it into the business. We hired a new designer, someone very hot. I can’t tell you what we spent on advertising and public relations. But in the end … nothing. It got so bad we had to let Greta go.”

“I know she’s not with you anymore.”

“Val told you?”

“No. Greta comes to dinner every Thursday.”

“She does? How is she?”

“She seems all right. She’s been coming to dinner once a week
for years—since Jazz switched sisters. It’s the only way she could see me and Kent.”

“For God’s sake!” Lee could not tell if her father was angry at her remark about Jazz switching sisters or about his housekeeper’s secret life. “Greta didn’t tell you about closing the stores, or about us having to let her go?”

“No. We never talk about you. A few months ago, she told me she retired. She never was a big talker. And she’s very proud. She wouldn’t say she was fired.”

“Believe me, I felt bad. But she had a nest egg. They’re a very frugal people.” He shook his head wearily. “In my life, I never could be frugal. It’s not my nature. But it wasn’t bad being the other way, generous, because I knew I had to make the kind of life I wanted. It was an incentive. The better I wanted to live, the more I made.” He shook his head. “Not anymore. I had to put the house up for sale. The house you grew up in. Do you know why? Because we need money to live! It’s come to that. Every night I pray for a buyer. Jazz and Robin had to put their place up too. A showstopper. Right on the Sound. I wish you could see it.”

Lee knew that when she repeated that line to Will she would laugh, but just then, she could not. “Why would you wish I could see it?”

“Sorry, I didn’t mean to hurt you.”

“Then or now?” Leonard pretended he had not heard her question. “You know, talking about then… Right after Jazz left me, I thought: It’s understandable that he would want Robin. She’s so helpless, so beautiful. She makes Jazz feel important. Useful. Manly. All I seemed to be able to do was diminish him. But now … I can see it more clearly. Once Jazz knew he had overreached, marrying me, there really was only one alternative: Robin.”