Lily White (7 page)

As was Leonard. He was now the proprietor of Le Fourreur, a Manhattan fur salon so exclusive that it was rumored that Mrs. John Foster Dulles was told in no uncertain terms that she’d have to wait two months if she wanted a full-length tawny brown ranch mink.
That
was how great the demand was for exclusive designs by Jean-Louis, Leonard’s couturier. The rumor about Mrs. Dulles was not true. It had been made up and spread by Leonard, who also invented “Jean-Louis” for his designer, who until then had been Bobby Anello, hitherto of Westchester Fancy Furs.

Rumor was only one of Leonard’s many marketing strategies. He called the twenty percent break he routinely offered all his good customers a “fashion industry deep discount” when he phoned the editors of
Vogue, Harper’s Bazaar,
the
New York Times,
and the
Herald Tribune
to tell them about it. When they dropped by Le Fourreur, he charmed them by serving tea in Haviland cups and by throwing in a black or silver fox stole with whatever garment they bought and paid for as a way of saying Thank you for your patronage. After a spectacular December 1952 season, the Whites were no longer comfortable. They were well-to-do.

Sylvia had charge accounts at Saks Fifth Avenue, Tailored Woman, and Henri Bendel. Leonard went from ready-made English suits off the rack at Moe Ginsburg’s to perusing a book of swatches in a suite in the Plaza that M. Thierry Boucault, the noted Parisian haberdasher, occupied on his semiannual trips to New York. They hired a live-in maid. They bought a suite of
signed Picasso lithographs for the living room. They donated money to the United Way and the Boy Scouts. They bought a Christmas tree. (However, Leonard could not figure out how to get it to stand up on its own. He forbade Sylvia to ask the maid how to do it, so the tree lay dying on the living room floor until the second of January. They waited until the following year for their first real Christmas: Leonard spent a half hour on an early December Saturday at Colonial Nursery and Garden Supplies, pretending to survey their inventory of snow shovels but actually checking out their Christmas tree. Its secret was finally revealed: underneath a ladylike green velveteen skirt lay a clunky metal brace. To decorate their tree, Sylvia spent an entire day at Bergdorf Goodman—without even stopping for lunch—choosing ornaments: blown-glass orbs within orbs, a galaxy of silver stars.) And they sold their house two weeks before the raspberry bushes Sylvia had planted in the fertile soil of Great Neck bore their first fruit. Once again, the Whites moved eastward and upward.

Getting back to the X for a moment. Sylvia had some bad times right after her first child’s birth. There she was, drained, pulled at by episiotomy stitches and dragged down by the blues, and Leonard had sauntered into her hospital room with a huge bouquet of white roses and an I-don’t-care-that-it’s-not-a-boy grin, and she’d thought: Who is this man? Of course, she knew he was her husband, and the father of her baby, but he had looked so strange. Those big lips, the insides displaying themselves, pink and wet, like some insect-eating tropical flower. He’d come over and sat on the edge of the bed, taking her hand in his. She tried to gaze into his eyes, but those giant lips filled her range of vision and they moved, inexorably, toward her, puckering slightly for a kiss. She wanted to shriek the way that woman did in—what was that horror picture?—
I Walked with a Zombie.
Grotesque! Abominable! Please, please don’t get any closer! Don’t …

Well, he’d kissed her and she lived through it. In the next couple of years, however, those horrible moments recurred, and a couple of times the lips seemed to puff up right before her eyes. How could his customers think he was so attractive, the Christian ones with husbands whose lips were never any wider than zippers?

But things had gotten better. And better. They’d had a good anniversary the past June. Leonard had taken her to the best restaurant in the city, Le Pavilion, where he’d shaken the hand of the man in the front, except she realized he was giving a bribe or a tip or whatever. The man had glanced into his hand and gotten very charming and offered them a nice table. Leonard ordered champagne and then let the wine waiter pick out their wines, and by the end of the evening, Sylvia slipped her foot out of her black peau de soie Chanel sling-back and was using it to rub the inside of Leonard’s thigh. And that September, he told her to meet him in the store—salon—right after closing. He asked her to try on the Russian sable Mrs. General Motors had ordered. But then he said: “This is too good for Mrs. General Motors. Why don’t you keep it?” When she finally comprehended what he was talking about, she almost fainted from joy, and the salesmen, who were still there and Dolly, the model/ bookkeeper, who’d peeked out from the office, had applauded.

Thus the intersecting of the X. Sylvia finally understood what his customers saw in her husband. While no one would call Leonard conventionally handsome, with his made-to-order suits and beautifully cut hair he could look ultra smart—in an Italian kind of way, but upper-class Italian, from Italy. She remembered how once she’d loathed his lips, but now realized that if you looked at him as a whole, he was very appealing. Now and then, even stunning.

And Leonard’s heart softened too. He realized that while his wife’s diction all but shouted “Born in Brooklyn! Bred in
Queens!” throughout her childhood she’d been forced to whisper instead of talk. So who heard the accent? To look at her, she could be an English horsewoman.

But after the legs of the X cross, they again part. So it was with Mr. and Mrs. White. In her third month of pregnancy with her second daughter (who would be named Robin Renée), Sylvia came down with terrible morning sickness. Then it became all-day sickness. Leonard worried about how thin she was getting, how bad it was for the baby because sometimes Sylvia’s entire dinner would be a single Ritz cracker. Her face became spotty and her hair lost its shine, but when he got home, he would take her in his arms and say something reassuring, like: “It won’t last forever.”

But instead of being comforted, she got all weepy and clung to him. Sitting beside him in the movies over the weekend, hugging his arm, stuffing it in the divide between her two swollen breasts. Butting her pillow against his at night, so he could feel her hot breath on the back of his neck. And it wasn’t just physical clinging. She called him first thing in the morning: How was the ride in on the Long Island Rail Road? Late morning: Who are you having lunch with? Early afternoon: What did you have for lunch? Was it good? Did you have dessert? Late afternoon: How’s it going? Any good customers stop in? Early evening: What train are you taking home? She’s pregnant, he told himself. And she loves me.

But that made him realize that she had never before displayed this interest, this passion for him. Did the hormone changes in her make her feel more free? Well, she hadn’t been so free when she was pregnant with Lee. In fact, sometimes he knew Sylvia was pretending to get excited, and she was a lousy pretender. Oooo. Oooo. Always Oooo, repeated two times. But now she had a repertoire of noises, and they were for real. She’d become crazy for him. Now that he was well-to-do.

Now she always was ready for him. Not just ready: If he didn’t come to her, she’d come to him. Now, no matter what she wore, her nipples always stuck out. He could feel them when she clung to him. Well, he thought, trying hard to be fair, I’m a big shot now. That’s very attractive to women. But a voice called up from his subconscious: Hey, Len. Is that the real thing, when the girl has to see sable before she falls in love?

A couple of months after she fell for her husband, Sylvia dropped by the salon on her way to Tailored Woman, to use the bathroom. Leonard introduced her to Mrs. Wriston Brandt, wife of
the
senior partner in
the
biggest Wall Street law firm, a man once referred to as “Mr. Trusts and Estates” by the
Wall Street Journal.
Instead of saying “How do you do,” or, if that was too stuffy, “Hello,” Sylvia had said “Hi.” But the way she said it, all nasally, with that New York intonation. It came out “Hoy.” To his credit, Leonard admitted to himself that he was a terrible snob—and that the only decent pedigree in the entire White household belonged to their new collie, Duchess. But still … “Hoy.”

Mere weeks after the Mrs. Wriston Brandt incident, Leonard was going over accounts payable with Dolly Young (who had come to New York from Bristol, Massachusetts, to be a Conover model but who failed, not for want of oblique facial planes but for lack of length, being only five feet four). The key point here is that in her entire life, Dolly never said “Hi.” Always “Hello.” She also said “think yew” for “thank you.” In both instances, her speech patterns had to do with regional usage rather than social class. As she and Leonard were looking over the Pincus Notions and Trimmings invoice, Dolly said, “They rob us blind and they don’t even say think yew,” impulsively, Leonard kissed her.

Thus began an affair that lasted for decades.

I
f I’m right in believing that I’m typical of most American women, then there’s got to be millions of bottles of used-but-once hair conditioner abandoned on the floors of showers and the ledges of bathtubs from Maine to Hawaii. Makeup kits must hold so many unfinished mascara wands that each house in the United States could supply a company of Rockettes. And as for the national glut of rejected moisturizers: Better forgotten in medicine cabinets than tossed onto the country’s landfills where they could trigger an ecological calamity.

Is this another tirade about how the beauty industry exploits the low self-esteem of American women? Nope, just the opposite. All those social critics: they don’t know their ass from a hole in the ground. They carry on about the insecurities of American women and completely ignore the extravagant self-confidence we display. Critics! Listen to the female ego. It’s not saying: I loathe myself. No, it’s telling you: I am a mere taupe eye shadow
away from gorgeousness. Each of us has a breathtaking creature locked inside. And all we need to break through to infinite desirability is a new brand of thigh cream.

Take me, for instance. You’d think, having lived forty-five years, I’d have picked up on God’s message: “Lee White, Esq., is not going to be a sex goddess in her lifetime.” But no, I don’t hear it. Nor do the rest of my sister Americans. Because nothing except death can kill that ravishing dame who walks in beauty inside us. If a normal adult female’s just-before-sleep dream is a sweeter, more graceful, poreless version of herself, then what woman does the one-in-a-million true beauty fantasize about? A flatulent, bezitted battle-ax? Right now, you may be tempted to tap me on the shoulder and ask: Hey, what does all this have to do with the Torkelson case? So I’ll tell you: All this is a prelude to Mary Dean walking into my office.

It didn’t hit me right away that she was the most beautiful creature I’d ever seen in my life. No, keeping pace with my secretary, Sandi, who was ushering her in, she was just a tall young woman, twenty-two or so, with a ton of makeup on, wearing … The man in my life once told me there was no one in the world more mean-spirited than a New York clothes snob. So I censored my nasty thoughts about her kelly-green suit with forest-green velveteen lapels. I stood to greet her. “Have a seat, Ms. Dean.”

“Thanks,” she said, speaking with nervous quickness. Instead of realizing that my right hand was extended in order to shake hers, she thrust a tightly stuffed envelope into it.

“Oh,” I said, taken aback by her nervousness. I’d assumed Norman would have himself a cooler cookie. The envelope, no doubt, contained my retainer: fifteen thousand dollars. Cash, and from the heft of it, probably hundreds. A not unusual method of payment, since many of my clients weren’t interested in check writing—not if the check was going to diminish their own
assets. They liked paying by check only if the assets belonged to somebody else. (Soon after we became partners, Chuckie Phalen told me a precautionary tale: One year out of law school, he’d taken a check from some client. When he went to cash it—after the jury had come back with an acquittal—he happened to glance at the name across the top, the person whose account it was: Charles Michael Phalen, Counselor-at-Law.)

As Mary was still standing, I motioned for her to sit. Then I handed over the envelope to Sandi, who left my office to return to her desk, where she would open it and make sure the retainer was inside—not just a wad of cutup newspaper. You’d think I’d have hated practicing law this way, dealing with such overt sleaze-balls. But every time I worked on a nice, clean white-collar criminal matter—sales tax evasion, co-op conversion fraud—a giant yawn arose inside me that the biggest corporate check couldn’t stifle.

Mary, still jittery, hadn’t taken a seat. She clutched her purse tight against her chest in a pathetically defensive posture, her shoulders and head thrust forward. She stared out the window. It was one of those nasty days in early May, more appropriate to March, rainy, gray, with a low, chill wind that blew down the street and bit at your ankles. I spoke so sweetly I practically cooed: “Please sit down.”

“Jeez,” she said, alighting on the edge of an armchair in front of my desk. “Sorry. I didn’t mean to take up so much of your time.” The backs of her hands were red. Her nails were chewed down so low they sliced into the flesh of her fingers. Then she babbled, a long, agitated apology about how the police had impounded Norman’s car and how the taxi she’d called hadn’t come and how just when she thought she was okay, she discovered the bus she was on was headed to Long Beach. Normally, I would have cut her off as courteously as possible, but suddenly I found myself transfixed by Mary’s looks.

First of all, I realized her face was a flawless oval. True, the heavy makeup she was wearing was unflattering, chalky, especially against the peachy glow of her neck. Her cheeks were as bright as geraniums. The lipstick she wore, a neon orange, was applied so thickly that when she formed words beginning with b or p it looked as though her lips would meld. Still, I could see that the makeup was not meant to hide serious imperfections. Her skin appeared flawless.