Lily White (12 page)

“Want to go inside and play with my dollhouse?” Lee asked Robin.

“No.”

“Want to put on our bathing suits?” Lee tried to make it sound like the opportunity of a lifetime. “Turn on the sprinkler?” Her voice reached heights of delight. “Run in and—”

“No!”

“Want to color?”

“No.”

“In my Peter Pan coloring book, Robin. You can use my crayons.”

Robin started to climb off the glider. Quickly, Lee brought it to the fastest, smoothest halt she could. Still, Robin fell onto the ground and went screeching back to Sylvia. “Mimmy!” Sylvia slammed her brush into a can, threw Lee a dirty look, and, grabbing Robin by the wrist, half led, half dragged her to the patio.

The chairs, made of white wire mesh and resembling a cupped hand, were parts of an ensemble of metal outdoor furniture Leonard had ordered from France. They left funny marks on the backs of your legs if you were wearing shorts, Lee
knew, but they were comfortable. Her mother lit up a cigarette, closed her eyes, and smoked. When she exhaled, she pursed her lips into a little bird mouth. Robin, seeing her mother’s eyes safely shut, brought her foot up to her mouth and started biting her toenails. “Stop it!” Lee mouthed, but Robin ignored her. Lee closed her eyes, leaned back in the wire chair, and smoked an imaginary Pall Mall, breathing out a perfect thin column of smoke.

So neither Lee nor Sylvia noticed when Robin slipped out of her chair and headed toward the swimming pool. The gardener had finally oiled the gate of the white iron fence surrounding the pool (after receiving a nasty note from Leonard on the subject, enclosed with the monthly check), so neither Lee nor Sylvia heard a thing when Robin reached up and, with remarkable dexterity, flipped up the childproof latch. And of course, when Robin walked down the four steps into the pool, there was not a sound, because by the time her feet reached the bottom of the pool, the water was over her head.

Peril ought to be accompanied by the roar of a tidal wave or the screech of metal crushing metal in a car crash. Not by silence. Sylvia smoked on. But Lee opened her eyes. Something was not right. What? Oh, the absence of Robin crying, sniveling, or even shuffling. Lee swiveled her head, checking out the field-stone wall of the house, the swings, the perennial garden, the woods that rose up the hill. … But she couldn’t spot the buttercup color of her sister’s playsuit. Lee climbed out of the wire chair. “Mommy.”

“Shhh.”

“Mommy, where’s Robin?” Sylvia, sluggish from the heat, listless with boredom occasioned by her own art, shrugged and inhaled deeply. It must be said that she did not comprehend the import of Lee’s question. Without malice, it can be said Sylvia was in another world: picturing how to achieve the most drama
in an arrangement of pineapples, grapes, and melons for a fruit platter she was planning for a Labor Day pool party. A flash of yellow caught Lee’s eye.

In an instant, she flew across the crew-cut lawn to the pool. Before her mother had a clue that anything had gone wrong, Lee White opened the pool gate and took a step into the pool. Robin was in the shallow end, but too far to reach from the steps. Another step down. The water was overheated. It lapped around her calves and felt awful, almost hot. The stench of chlorine was so strong, as if it were masking some other, terrible smell. She should get out, call her mother. “You’re not the boss of Robin,” her mother was always telling her. “
I
am. Leave her alone.” One more step, up to her waist. She could dog-paddle, but then what could she do about Robin? She couldn’t grab her and swim with just one hand, could she? Robin was right at the spot where the shallow part got deep, over both their heads, so she’d be stuck out there too.

“Mommy!” Lee called, but Sylvia didn’t hear her.

Robin was just floating there. No, not quite floating, because she was a little bit under the water. Not moving, her arms held out, limp, as if she were pretending to be a dead bird. Was this what drowning was? In the cartoons, you always hear “Heeeelp! Save me!” But not a sound, except the
glub-glub
of bubbles from the pool filter. Drowning? Yes!

And what could a seven-year-old child do? Run get her mother? Dial O and say, the way they taught you in school: “This is an emergency. My stupid sister is drowning”? There was nothing to do. Which was when the nascent trial lawyer took over and, nevertheless,
did.
Lee plunged forward into the water, swimming over to her sister. Dog-paddle, dog-paddle, she thought. Uh-oh, I’m in over my head. I could drown. I’m not allowed out this far. Keep going. Dog-paddle.

Like Lassie. So Lee thrust her head forward and, with her
teeth, grabbed the yellow playsuit—and, in doing so, dragged her little sister out of the jaws of death.

Sylvia, roused by the splash of the paddling, was there when Lee brought Robin up the stairs. “Oh God!” Sylvia screamed over and over. “My baby! Oh, God.” Shut up, Lee thought, as her mother, shrieking, grabbed Robin away from Lee, as if Lee had done something wrong. “Oh, God in heaven!” Sobbing, Sylvia held the limp child so tight that, through sheer luck, she squeezed some of the water out of Robin’s esophagus. The child regurgitated up the rest all over her mother, to Lee’s satisfaction. “What happened?” Sylvia cried, a question directed toward God more than Lee, planting anguished kisses over the little girl’s head and face.

“She went into the pool,” Lee explained.

“Why didn’t you stop her?”

“I didn’t see her.”

Now that Robin was coughing and gagging and clearly alive, Sylvia laid her gently on the flagstone pool deck and, weeping, almost silently, crouched over and dipped her forearms into the pool to wash off the vomitus. She rubbed and rubbed, then sniffed her skin and pulled her head back in disgust.

“Mim—” Robin gasped.

“Baby,” Sylvia said, taking the child back into her arms, although admittedly averting her nose from the stench.

“Mimmy.”

“Baby.”

Lee turned and walked back into the house. Neither her mother nor her sister noted her departure or her absence. And that would have been that, except for Ethel, the eighth maid to whom Sylvia had said, upon hiring her: I hope you’ll soon be a member of the family. On being fired by Leonard that Saturday, Ethel, twenty-three years old and up from Macon, Georgia, knowing there was more to the world than picking peaches, and
not willing to take any guff from a white man who had just told her she was Not Willing to Do Her Fair Share, told him he was a mean ole dog with a ninny for a wife—

“I’ve heard enough!” Leonard shouted at her.

—and he should tell his girlfriend not to wear so much makeup because it came off on his shirts, even if the ninny didn’t see it, and did he know Lee saved her little sister’s life when the ninny fell asleep and the baby almost drowneded in the swimming pool. Huh? Did he know that?

“What happened?” Leonard was shouting at Sylvia.

She closed their bedroom door so he wouldn’t wake the girls. “Nothing.”

“She wasn’t drowning?”

“No!”

“Goddamn it to hell, Sylvia. I’m sick and tired of having to deal with these maids, and if you can’t make do with the next one, then you’re stuck.
Stuck.
Either you train them properly or you make the beds yourself. Do you understand me?” His voice rose even louder, filling every inch of the room. There was no corner safe from his anger. “I will not fire another goddamn one of these stupid girls and have them open up a fat mouth to me and—” The knocking on the bedroom door must have been going on for some time, but Leonard and Sylvia didn’t hear it until he paused for breath so he might continue his tirade. Instead he opened the door.

“Mommy? Daddy?” Lee wore a pale pink nightgown with tucking all over the chest. She would have preferred Little Lulu pajamas, but her mother had said no, this is much finer-looking, and besides, the pink is perfect in your room. She squinted to keep out the bright lights of her parents’ room. “I heard yelling and I got scared.”

“Lee,” her father began.

“Stop it, Leonard,” said Sylvia, trying to cut him off.

“Lee, did anything happen in the pool with Robin?” Lee was no dope. She knew her mother wanted her to keep quiet. But she had been like Lassie. Brave and keen. And no one had said: “You are a noble-hearted creature, Lily Rose,” or even: “Thank you.”

“Robin was drowning,” she said, cocking her head to the side in order to look pert and putting on (it has to be conceded) an obnoxiously smug smile. “I saved her. Like Lassie.”

“Where was Mommy?”

“Mommy was …” Too late, Lee realized this was a subject better left alone. She shrugged as if to say: Gee, I forgot what I was gonna say.

“Where was Mommy?” Her father’s voice was so loud it shook the mirror over her mother’s dresser. “Where?” She could feel the voice in her stomach. “
Where?
”

“On the patio,” Lee whispered.

“What was she doing?” Lee looked to her mother. Her mother looked away, as if there was something behind the bathroom door that was demanding her attention. “
WHAT WAS SHE DOING?
”

“Smoking.” Lee mouthed the word rather than enunciated it. “Her eyes were closed for a second. That’s why she didn’t see. Just for a second.”

Her father sent her away then, without asking to hear the details. That’s what she had wanted to tell him about. The details. They were so wonderful: the too hot water, the dog-paddling, the chlorine taste when she grabbed Robin’s soaking playsuit between her teeth, the water down her throat and up her nose, what a load Robin was, so don’t think she’s so skinny compared to me. And to hear her father say: Lee, you were brave and keen.

What she got instead was Greta Wolff, a thoroughly decent, indefatigable, ever vigilant, utterly humorless martinet from
Frankfurt am Main, who served as a perpetual reminder to the entire White family that Sylvia was ineffectual and a liar, that Robin needed constant coddling, that Leonard was master of the house—and a merciless one.

And that Lee was a born troublemaker.

B
elieve me, I’m not in favor of coddling criminals. I don’t want my purse snatched or my head bashed in any more than the next dame. But there’s something more than justice we Americans dish out to people who violate our criminal laws. Take Norman Torkelson (or any one of my clients I can’t spring on bail). Once they’re locked up, we don’t just take away their freedom. Nope. We humiliate them.

You want an example? Take the food. To call it unspeakable is to be kind. Three times a day, the inmates receive mounds and patties and globs of stuff the flat, gray-brown color of those splotches of year-old gum that adhere to city sidewalks.

A prison food digression: Years ago, when I was still prosecuting, I spent a day interviewing an inmate, a guy named Alfred Dunder, six feet two, three hundred pounds, with front teeth so buck they protruded almost perpendicular to his gums. Facing life without parole, Alfred had decided to cooperate in our investigation
of a homicide—i.e., rat on his fellow murderers. Naturally, I wanted him to live long enough to testify, so our meeting had to be secret. He, Sam Franklin, and I sat in a room near the medical unit that was not much bigger than a stall shower. Around one o’clock, Sam’s stomach grumbled, joining mine for a duet. Just then, one of the laughing boys from the sheriff’s office brought in Alfred’s lunch. He slammed down a tray on which was a plate with three different varieties of stuff Nassau County was calling food. Not only did it look revolting; I had to breathe through my mouth so as not to smell it. Alfred, despite his eighty-five IQ, his brain damage from twelve years on smack and PCP and his total lack of empathy for his fellow human beings, picked up my disgust in two seconds flat. “Hey, Missus D.A., wanna—” he sneered at me, “—eat my lunch?”

But the food is not the most degrading aspect of prison life. If you really want to test-drive your gag reflex, give a look at the toilets in the adolescent men’s cell blocks. Or if you find fear more compelling than nausea, take a peek at the inmates themselves. Well, not at them, since many of them are not at all unattractive; they work out and are well-muscled; some of them have lovely smiles and, despite an occasional missing tooth, appear no more malign than the average gas station attendant. No, the peek should be at their rap sheets. Or at their victims’ statements—often made from hospital beds, sometimes from deathbeds. I’m not objecting that we put malefactors away. Why shouldn’t we? Don’t they deserve incarceration in order to garner the traditional benefits of a prison sentence: rehabilitation and deterrence? (That neither occurs very often is a point that should surprise no one in America.)

But if nobody is rehabilitated or deterred, something does happen in our jails. Just about everyone who stays in longer than a month comes out a career criminal. Less than four weeks, a first-timer may still be so staggered by what he experiences, and
as yet unable to adjust to the brutishness, that he vows: Never again.

A hard-assed cop like Sam Franklin would say these bad guys are already past redemption when they go in. I don’t buy that. I’ve seen enough eighteen-year-olds go to jail merely stupid or angry or cocky. Two years later, they emerge irreversibly vicious.

Maybe the food and the toilets and the stink and the total depravity of prison are society’s way of getting even, as in: This is all you deserve, you thieving/murdering/check-kiting/dopedealing bastard. Or the ugliness could be the prison authorities’ expression of their own rage, as in: This is payback for me having to spend my life working in a jungle, keeping you animals under control. Of course, what makes a person want to be a prison guard is another story: One guy, with a round, cheery, freckled face, the kind of guy who leads everybody in another chorus of “Toorra-Loorra-Looral” on St. Patrick’s Day, told me he used to be a Long Island Rail Road conductor, but being a guard paid two thousand bucks a year more. Two thousand extra bucks per annum to spend forty hours a week in hell? I can’t believe it’s the money that drives a man or woman to put on that uniform any more than the need for sex drives a rapist.