Lily White (26 page)

Now he pulled out his handkerchief and dabbed his forehead: gentlemanly dabs. “I’m a bit overheated,” he remarked.

Lee observed her father. He wasn’t a bit overheated at all. He was sweating like a pig. Perspiration streamed from Leonard’s clipped sideburns down his shaven-to-raw cheeks. It splashed off his jaw onto his starched shirt collar. It dribbled from his chin onto the camera.

“Stand closer together!” he commanded his wife and daughter, trying to pretend he was a man in charge, the family photographer, and that his face was dry and his shirt wasn’t soaked. But his order came out harsh and loud. “Closer, goddamn it!”

Suddenly, Leonard saw a passerby, a snooty-looking horse-face in a slub-linen suit, turn and give him a slit-eyed glance. He felt she had peered into his soul—and learned it had been born in Brooklyn. Actually, the woman, an assistant manager of a Big Boy hamburger drive-in in Cincinnati, had noticed neither him nor his disagreeableness, as all her attention was focused in her myopic search for her soon-to-be-graduating grandson. But her
glance made Leonard change his tone. His words became cultured pearls:

“Let me see some smiles! Syl, dear.” Sylvia, however, didn’t realize the voice she was hearing was her husband’s. “Syl, over here, sweetheart! Give me a smile.”

Clearly, money had been no object when it came to presenting himself and his wife to the Eastern Establishment. And—looking through the hideously expensive Hasselblad camera he had bought for the occasion—he couldn’t believe he could have been so blind: He had been so positive that he knew exactly how that presentation should go. For one thing, he had ruled out Sylvia’s customary darkly chic French or Italian ensembles. Instead she was decked out the way he’d told her he wanted her decked out: “A tweed suit. English. Don’t worry if it itches. It’s supposed to itch. That means it’s good quality. And stout walking shoes. Remember, tell them ‘stout.’” Her fashionable frosted hair, customarily an amalgam of bronzes, coppers, and platinums, had overnight, at his directive, lightened into ash blond. She had drawn it back, the way he urged, post-post-debutante fashion, and tied it with a folded Hermès scarf. (Had Sylvia been the devoted Taylor-watcher her husband was, she would have known instantly that her hair was now the exact hue and style of Ginger Taylor’s.)

This is what Leonard saw; irony of ironies, that while Sylvia could pass, he could not. He looked so
wrong.
Inadvertently, his hand smoothed his lapels, stroked his tie.
Wrong.
Oh, God, he had tried. His navy blazer was exquisitely tailored. Gray flannel slacks. Egyptian-cotton button-down-collar shirt. Silk rep tie. Loafers burnished until they gleamed the consummate loafer tone between mahogany and umber.
He
gleamed. In full East Coast Establishment regalia, he could almost have passed for an alum—“Hello, there, ’47.” Almost. Unlike Leonard, none of the genuine alumni gleamed. Their blazers and slacks and loafers
looked as if they had been making the rounds of garden weddings and restricted clubs since the end of the first half of the century. Leonard’s own flagrant newness made him a marked man. He bowed his head in shame. In grief. He tried to fake total immersion in focusing the camera, but his face was too wet. And some of the wet stuff was tears at his own gauche sheen.

Lee glanced around, longing for a friend, or even an acquaintance, to dilute her parents’ presence. But the few graduating seniors still lingering outside Barton Hall were engaged in agonizing psychodramas with their own families and were thus too exhausted to come to her aid.

Lee looked back at her parents. Oh, God—her father! His hands holding the camera were trembling. And her mother: “Do you think Robin might be waiting someplace else?” Sylvia’s voice barely rose above a whisper, but the “else” careened out of control, rising to a high note of incipient hysteria.

“How the hell should I know,” Leonard muttered, trying to appear nonchalant, a difficult look to achieve when one is purple-faced and sweating bullets.

So Lee was graduated from Cornell University with absolutely no one paying attention to her. Her father, in his eight-hundred-dollar lightweight wool blazer, was beside himself. Actually, it was Sylvia who was beside him, but she was beside herself too, swiveling her head, trying to cover all the entrances to the cavernous building so she could wave Robin over the instant Robin came through the door. But Robin never appeared in Barton Hall.

However, there she was, waiting outside, when they emerged. Robin’s fair, heart-shaped face was clear as fine bone china, her features were small and delicate, her slender body was forever poised between youthful androgyny and womanhood. She squinted into the sunlight and offered her family a feeble wave, more a flick of the wrist than a real salute. An outsider, noticing
her pale frailness, might have thought her ill. Her mouth, however, tight with the rage endemic to adolescent offspring of the haute bourgeoisie in the early years of the 1970s, gave her away.

“Hi,” Robin said to Lee, her tone sarcastic, as if Lee had done something that merited bitter derision.

“Hi,” Lee replied. She did not expect her sister to offer an apology for being late, which was wise, since she did not get one.

“Is it over?” Robin inquired.

“You missed it.” Lee had known Robin would pull something on graduation day. Without consciously rehearsing, she had prepared herself to react with aggressive neutrality. Still, she knew that Robin knew she was seething inside. Well, why shouldn’t she fucking seethe? Here she was, finally getting her goddamn degree. Headed for law school, for God’s sake! She had taken her law boards only as a lark, but they had been so stellar that she felt compelled to apply. True, her average was barely over a B+. She had no extracurricular activities, excluding indiscriminate sex and helping set fires in three ROTC file cabinets. Yet with those spectacular LSATs, she had been offered admission to every school to which she had applied: NYU, the University of Virginia, Georgetown, the University of Michigan.

But this day was not turning out to be a celebration of Lee’s achievement. Like every other occasion when the Whites got together, it had become Robin’s Day, a time for forced smiles and spastic colons.

“Where
were
you, for God’s sake?” Sylvia’s voice, usually barely audible, was much too loud. Leonard made a hysterical “Shhh!” sound that lasted until he ran out of breath. But Sylvia wouldn’t shush. “You
swore
you’d be here!” she yelled at Robin.

“So? I’m here,” Robin replied, and waved to someone in the throng.

Sylvia stared at her then. They all did. But only Sylvia cracked.
Why? It wasn’t so much that Robin had not washed her face, or that she was wearing tattered—in actual shreds!—polyester bell bottoms in a hideous rust-colored floral print, and a short top that exposed half her stomach and midriff, and a cheap, fake-pewter peace symbol on a leather thong, that made Sylvia start to sob. It wasn’t her dilated pupils that caused Leonard to gnash his teeth in rage and humiliation. No, it was that Robin had summoned over a man. Not a boy: He was in his early thirties. At least. Now she clung to his arm.

The man had a matted black beard; what looked like a strand of albumen from a soft-boiled egg bisected its width. His dark eyes were hooded. His nose was hooked. His blemished skin managed to be swarthy and pasty at the same time. If he had been wearing a long black coat instead of a torn T-shirt and what appeared to be bathing trunks, he would have looked like an anti-Semitic caricature.

“Aren’t you going to say something?” Sylvia shrieked at Robin.

“Shhhhh!” Leonard hissed.

“What do you want me to say?” Robin sounded like the sound track of a movie being played in slow motion.

“Like ‘congratulations’ to your sister!” Sylvia’s voice seemed to echo through the hills and across Lake Cayuga and come back, louder and brassier, for everyone to hear.

“Shhhhhhh!” Leonard was nearly crazed with embarrassment.

“Don’t bother,” Lee said to Robin.

Robin gave a coy smile. “How about ‘congratulations’ to me?”

The Whites stood together in the comfort of not-knowing for a moment. Then Leonard, the head of the family, was forced to speak. “Congratulations”—his deep breath was almost a gasp—“for what?”

Robin rubbed up against the dirty elbow of the man by her
side. “Congratulations on my
marriage
,” she said, her voice sluggish and coquettish at the same time. “Mom, Daddy … oh, and Lee. This is my
husband.
” She lifted the man’s arm and put it around her shoulder. Then, leaning forward, she grabbed his other hand in hers. The man slid it out of her grip and placed his hand—his hirsute yet disturbingly delicate hand—in proprietary fashion on Robin’s naked stomach. Sylvia clapped her own hand over her mouth to stifle a scream. But the scream did not come because she started to faint. Leonard might have keeled over, too, but he leaned against his wife to keep her from flopping sideways onto the grass, which would, of course, have underscored their utter humiliation in front of hundreds of Protestants. The Whites, tilting against each other like two tent poles, were unable to move without humiliating themselves.

Maybe it was the glaring midday sun, but Lee’s eyes were drawn to the man’s arm that was wrapped around her sister. In the crook, on the pallid, vulnerable skin, she could see a scattering of dark dots. Birthmarks? she wondered. No. Blackheads. Blackheads on the inner arm? she had to ask herself. With this slobbo, why not? Still, she knew, even as she tried other, hopefully better explanations—spattered paint, bites from a small but spiteful insect—that the dots were the tiny scabs of intravenous injections.

Robin laughed an insolent barbiturate laugh. “Isn’t he cute?” Her parents remained tipped and dumbstruck. Lee felt the man’s eyes upon her. She gazed back into his face; it had absolutely no expression. Her fury at Robin was momentarily replaced by a shiver of dread. Despite his counterculture getup, this man was no aging hippie. He was … Lee’s heart began to flutter erratically under her gown. He was bad. She knew if she averted her glance he would discern her fear, so she kept staring into his empty eyes. “We’re Mr. and Mrs. Ira Kleinberg. Ira, say something.” Ira said nothing but at last turned his gaze from Lee to
Sylvia. Robin laughed again. Then, with a seductive roll of her hips, she sauntered over to her father. “Daddy,” she said. Leonard did not move or speak.
“Daddy.”

Leonard’s mouth formed “What?”

Robin whispered loud enough for all of them to hear: “We need money for a honeymoon.”

In later years, Lee would laughingly refer to it as the Summer from Hell. Too bad: She had been counting on that summer between college and law school. First of all, she was going to defeat Richard Nixon. Then, in her spare time, she would read
The Magic Mountain,
listen to Corelli’s concerti grossi, visit every museum in Manhattan, and, in short, get the liberal education she would have gotten at Cornell had she not been protesting the war, challenging racism, and cooking pasta for radicals. Admittedly, in the back of her mind, she also knew that she would drive by Jazz Taylor’s house a few times a day. Not that she was obsessed anymore, but the memory of him—his well-muscled thighs, the sunlight on his hair, his niceness—remained, her valentine, her most romantic memory.

But by the time Lee said goodbye to her friends after graduation, loaded her clothes and books and stereo in her car, and drove back to Long Island, she discovered that Robin and Ira were already there, having moved into Robin’s room. Not that they had asked if Sylvia and Leonard minded. They had simply bumped upstairs the two plastic garbage bags that contained Ira’s worldly possessions, pushed together the twin beds with their wicker headboards, and locked the door.

Then the summer began.

“Ask Robin what the hell happened to the thousand dollars I gave them for their honeymoon,” Leonard ordered Lee.

“Go tell Robin they have to get out of the room so Greta can change the linens,” Sylvia instructed her.

“Please inform your sister that I am doing a white wash today,” Greta commanded, “and that if she wants clean underwear, to leave a pile outside her door.”

No one mentioned Ira, but they all knew he was there. They all seemed to fear him. Leonard and Sylvia would rush past Robin’s room on tiptoes, as if trying not to disturb the fiend within, who, if angered, would come crashing through the door and rip their limbs from their bodies. Even Greta’s equanimity deserted her. She began making three or four desserts at night, offerings to placate the demon Ira, who appeared to feed only between the hours of midnight and dawn, leaving crumbs and crusts on the floor and dirty dishes on the kitchen table.

“Lee, ask Robin if she needs to renew the prescription for her asthma inhaler.”

“Find out if it’s okay if Jerry from Gold Coast Carpets comes in to clean her rug.”

“Would you
please
remind Robin that we have a septic tank system here and she
cannot
run the shower for a half hour.”

“I want you to tell her that playing that music at three in the morning is unacceptable! Do you hear me?
Un-ac-ceptable!
”

The Summer from Hell. Sylvia could no longer be relied upon to take to her bed for weeks on end and stay out of the way. Her usual melancholia gave way to agitation. She sat all day and into the night at the kitchen table, sucking on Parliaments, drinking endless cups of black coffee and hyperventilating, her exhalations coming out as mewling sounds.

Leonard was drawn back to his house with the reluctant fascination of a driver passing a bloody crash on the highway. Some workweeks, he came home every single night. None of Dolly Young’s considerable tricks could keep him in the city. “Anything happen today?” he would demand of Sylvia, his voice croaking, choking with emotion. Sylvia would shake her head back and forth very fast and fill her lungs with more smoke.
“Nothing,” she would rasp, clutching her bathrobe tighter against her chest. Her hand was a claw, her neck bones made a pitiful V. She was getting thinner and thinner but could only bring herself to eat a bite of the carrot muffins Greta baked fresh every morning to tempt her. “They didn’t come down at all.”