Lily White (65 page)

But as with so many children of immigrants, the world outside had meant more to Leonard than the world in his parents’ one-bedroom railroad flat. To be part of that outside world, he needed to destroy everything of Bella and Nat that was inside him, for he lacked the imagination and the spirit to keep them with him as he refined himself. So Leonard grew whiter than white, so white he became invisible. But it was not only himself and his parents he obliterated. Lee came to believe that if you are willing to do away with your parents, you will then be willing to destroy anyone else in your family who gets in the way of how you want to be perceived.

So while Lee no longer saw her parents, she understood that for Valerie’s sake and her own she could not kill them off. She had to let them live. She never spoke ill of them in front of the child. When Val came home from her weekends with Jazz and Robin and her two half-brothers/first cousins with reports on them and on her grandparents, Lee listened with interest and
suppressed every hateful remark that came to mind. She never lied and told the child she loved Sylvia and Leonard, but she did tell her daughter: I know how much they love you. She did not add: Because you are Jasper Taylor’s child.

She also searched her memory and found enough decent moments to use for show-and-tell with Val. Sylvia fussing over what Lee would wear to the prom. Leonard celebrating her acceptance to Cornell. Planting sunflowers. Going with Mom to buy new Mary Janes for the Young People’s Concerts in the city. Going with Dad to buy our dog Woofer. Being allowed to buy all the paperbacks she could hold in her arms.

Lee looked at her companions basking in the gorgeous July sun in the box at Shea Stadium. The Stewarts, who were incapable of taking pride in their extraordinary son. Will, who could not give up trying to make them proud. Kent, whose parents had not inquired as to his welfare in seven years. Herself.

She turned to her daughter. “Hey, Val,” Lee said softly.

“What?” The teenager’s eyes remained on first base.

“I love you.”

Val was wary. Fearful. But no, thank God, the first baseman had not heard her mother. Quickly, because she could not divert her attention for too long, she turned to Lee and removed the carrot from her lips. “I
know
you love me, Ma.”

A half hour later, after the first baseman had struck out and the Mets shortstop slammed what looked like an in-the-park home run and the crowd stood up and roared, Val once again put down the carrot and murmured, just above the din: “Love you too, Ma.”

D
espair. Remorse. Anguish. Misery. No one word in the language can express what I felt about Woodleigh Huber’s decision to go ahead with the prosecution of Mary Dean. Sickened comes close, but that doesn’t take into account the rage I felt at the injustice, or the shame I felt that I had allowed myself to be conned.

“The worst thing about it,” I told Will Stewart as we sat rocking on my front porch, “is that I can’t think of any way to put the scales of justice back into balance—short of running Huber over with my Jeep.”

Will put his hand on my shoulder. “Stop trying to keep an ironic distance. You’re a mess.”

“Yes.”

Will was a lawyer, and before Jerry McCloskey was sent in to degrade and dishonor the Homicide unit, Will had run it. Now he was a hotshot civil litigator, so his hand wasn’t resting on my
shoulder just because he was being Mr. Empathy. He knew precisely what I had done: come up with an alternate version of Bobette’s murder that showed my client to be innocent. Okay, lawyers do that all the time. They tell a once-upon-a-time story that views the facts of the case in a soft pink light. If it’s a really captivating fairy tale, some juries will buy it. Sometimes even the lawyer buys it.

But I just didn’t think: Hmm, good argument. Better than what the government has. I bewitched myself—with Norman Torkelson’s help. And then, because I believed in the story so completely—Love Triumphs over Wickedness! No-Good, Rotten Con Man Seeks Expiation Through Sacrifice!—my belief, my passion, gave me the power to enchant everyone else. Will Stewart knew: I hadn’t been a lawyer; I’d tried to grab Justice’s toga and wear it myself. Except it didn’t fit. I was in large part responsible for a killer’s taking a walk and an innocent person’s paying for the crime. Earlier that day, a bus had rolled out of the Nassau County Correctional Center taking Mary Dean and twelve other female prisoners up to Bedford Hills.

“Don’t run Huber over,” Will advised. “You’d be the prime suspect. The minute the lab ran tests comparing the tread marks on his face with your Jeep tires, you’d …” His voice trailed off.

“Go ahead. Say it: I’d be sharing a cell with Mary.”

“No. I’m not going to remind you she’s in jail and Norman is probably sitting back, sipping a margarita in some Sun Belt state. I came over to cheer you up.”

“Consider another line of work.”

“No. And I’m not leaving until you’re okay.”

“Then you’re in for a life sentence.” I tried to keep my voice light, so Will wouldn’t know how appealing his never leaving sounded to me. We rocked back and forth for a while in familiar silence, two old fogies on the front porch watching the twilight.
Stars were coming out, and a gibbous moon. I caught the season’s first hint of honeysuckle. “Will?”

“What?”

“Are there any other cute moves I could make to force Huber to let Mary go? Anything I haven’t thought of? Because there are no more tricks left in my bag—not even ineffective tricks I could use just to piss him off.”

“Nothing beyond what you’re doing now—spinning your wheels with the habeas corpus petition.”

“But we both know that’s not going to work.”

“Correct.” Will leaned his head against the spindles of the rocker and closed his eyes, pretending to take in the honeysuckle. Except I knew him too well to be suckered by a deep sniff. He was thinking, so for a few minutes I got hopeful. He was such a fine lawyer. A clever strategist. A smooth negotiator: The other side never got up from the table feeling screwed, even if they had been, royally. But more than that, Will was creative. When he couldn’t win by logic or law, he often won through sheer surprise. “Lee.”

I rocked forward and stayed that way, ready, I suppose, to jump up and act. “What?”

“Lean on me for this.”

“You have an idea?”

“For springing Mary Dean? No. Nothing comes to mind.” I let the chair rock back. “Not right off the bat, anyway. But you’re going off the deep end and you don’t want anyone to stop you. That’s crazy. You’re not responsible for her being in jail. At worst, you made a mistake. Lawyers make mistakes every day.”

“Not like this.”

“Yes. Like this and worse.”

“Everyone knows I was conned. Everyone knows that poor girl is spending the better part of her life in prison because I thought I was being such a hero.”

“Everyone knows you misjudged Norman Torkelson. So did Holly Nuñez. Is she sitting in a rocking chair right now having a psychotic episode?”

“No. She’s trying to figure out a way to put a hundred miles between her and me. So is everyone else, except you.”

“You’re always telling me how smart I am.”

I looked at him, so dark he was almost a shadow in the nightfall. “You are. The smartest.”

“So if it’s my assessment that you made a mistake but not a fatal one, why can’t you accept it? Or do you think my intellect has limits, in that the only thing I can’t evaluate is how badly you fucked up?”

“I don’t know.”

“Trust me, Lee. What do you think is going to happen? You’re going to walk into the Bar Association and all conversation will stop? And then—like in one of those old westerns—someone will spit on the floor? I hate to tell you this, kid, but you’re a one-week wonder and your week is up tomorrow.”

“You’re wrong, Will.” I was in a bad way. Sure, I would slog on and finish out my life, maybe chalk up a couple of big wins, maybe have a grandchild or two, but I felt a deep dullness, a sense that I would never again know pleasure.

“I don’t know if it’s because you’re a woman or what, but you feel you’ve got to have the biggest balls in town. Everyone else can screw up: not Lee White. Or maybe because you got conned by that schmuck husband—”

“Ex.”

“—ex-husband, you can’t accept that it could happen again.”

I got off my rocker and leaned against a post, looking out at the street, away from Will. “Give me truth or pretense, and what do I wind up going for every time?”

“Truth,” he said.

“Like hell I do.”

“You’re a woman of the world. Why does it come as a shock to you that some men get away with murder?”

I turned back to face Will. “I let it happen.”

“Come off it, Lee! You didn’t
let
it happen. It happened. You see injustice every day of the week in your work. You think you’re immune? Who the hell inoculated you?”

“I couldn’t see past the surface. I thought I could. I thought I
knew.
That’s what gets me. I believed I was different, that I had depth. If I gave my heart to a person, or to a cause, it would be someone or something worth fighting for. And what happened? I was duped.”

“Yes, you were.”

“So?”

“So why don’t you go off and shoot yourself because you believed what appeared to be the truth twice in your life? Come on, Lee. What have you ever done that you feel obligated to give yourself such a bad time? Not even Woodleigh Huber, that shitheel, would dare to do to you what you’re doing to yourself.”

“So I should just forget it?”

He got up from his rocker and stood right beside me. “No. Not quite yet.”

My daughter, Valerie, was a marvel to look at: cascades of auburn hair, peachy skin, and huge, intelligent hazel eyes that dominated her face—and any room she happened to be in. At two in the afternoon that Sunday, she happened to be dominating the kitchen and laundry room. She had invited a fellow actor—a tall girl from Chicago, who was trying to look like a born tragedian—to spend the weekend. It appeared that they had taken in laundry from the entire cast and crew of the cable TV movie they had bit parts in. Between wash loads, they watched the entire filmography of Maggie Smith. Val had said: Want to be a patron of the arts? So I’d paid for the video rentals
as well as their foray into Ben & Jerry’s—this a half hour after I had watched Val tearing a head of lettuce into tiny pieces, dicing a zucchini and slicing mushrooms and meticulously measuring out a quarter teaspoon of Parmesan cheese, agonizing over its fat content.

“Where are you going, Ma?” she asked, her spoon poised to dive into the ice cream again.

“No place special,” I said, hoping she’d say: Hey, you paid for this stuff. Why not join us? Come on, dig in.

Chicago was working on Chunky Monkey while maintaining a sour expression that should have curdled the cream. Maybe she was involved in her process, as my daughter would say. Probably daydreaming about being Medea killing her children. I liked most of my daughter’s friends, but this dame was a heavy piece of furniture. I wasn’t in the mood for moods.

Val, I could see, had gone for her usual, a pint of New York Super Fudge Chunk. “If you’re going to be passing the video store, we forgot
The V.I.P.’s.
”

“I’m not sure what I’m doing. I want to plant some nasturtiums, but if I do go out, I’ll—”

Val smiled at me, a wide, incredibly friendly smile, so unexpected on a classic pretty face. Part of her charm, I thought for the millionth time. Surprise. That this lovely young woman was still entrancing with fudge chunk on her teeth and a chocolate ice cream coating on her chin—Suddenly I didn’t fall into my usual isn’t-she-a-marvel reverie. Something wasn’t wonderful. Something was wrong. My maternal instincts are pretty good. “Ma, you’re looking at me funny.”

“No I’m not.”

“Yes you are.” But no, it wasn’t Val.

It was the chocolate.

I was rushing around, looking for my car keys. “It was the chocolate,” I said. “I’ve got to go.”

“What?” She knew my leaving would mean she was going to have to fold her own laundry. She might be an actor, but she was not a lawyer’s daughter for nothing. If she could not win one point, she’d try for another: “Do you want to take us out for sushi when you get back?”

“Very much. But now … Hate to rush out on you, but …” I was picturing Bobette’s mouth and lips, thick with chocolate from the Snickers bar. “I’ve got to get to the women’s prison in Bedford Hills before visiting hours are over.”

On the drive up to Bedford Hills, I was thinking that I should have taken Chicago with me, to show her what a really tragic face looked like. Except even before Mary Dean spotted me and broke out into a big smile and a two-handed wave, she looked happy. All right, if not happy, then at least something between untroubled and carefree.

“Hi!” she enthused. “It was
so
sweet of you to come and see me. I was talking to one of the girls and saying, ‘It’s gonna be a bummer on visiting day ’cause I’m not from New York and I don’t know anybody so how can anybody come and visit,’ and the next thing, here you are!”

“You sound pretty cheerful,” I said. “Considering the circumstances.”

“Yeah, well, what can you do?” The blue uniforms of Nassau County were gone. New York State, for some reason, was pushing a deep green, a more flattering color for Mary because it matched the dark-green glints in her emerald eyes. “You know what? I’m going to finish high school. You can do that here. To tell you the truth, they kind of push you. I mean, you can’t just go to work in the laundry or in the kitchen. No, before they even talk to you about a job, you gotta take all that English and history and—jeez, I hope not math. But that’s New York for you. A very smart state.”

I could see by the way Mary flashed little smiles at the other inmates, or made ooh-isn’t-he-cute faces at their boyfriends or children, that she was knocking herself out being congenial. She was right to want to build up some credit. Beauty like hers was a liability in the slammer. If someone took a dislike to her and a fight broke out, they would go for her face. Bruise it the first time, disfigure it the second. In fact, her whole ebullient manner—upbeat smile, happy babbling—was a front. I was at least relieved to see the other inmates wave back with a reasonable degree of warmth, noting, I had no doubt, that Mary was obeying the unwritten law: scrupulously avoid eye contact with their men.