Lily White Read Free

begin at the beginning. I should—

Two
    I n truth, Lee White, B.A., Cornell University, J.D., New York University School of Law, did not have a clue as to where the beginning really was. She might have told you it was the moment J. J. O’Shaughnessy (a retired lawyer devoting his golden years to twirling wisps of hair that grew from his ears while watching Court TV in the Dominican Village retirement home in Amityville, Long Island) referred an old client, Norman Torkelson, to his poker buddy Chuckie Phalen; Chuckie, busy trying a first-degree arson case, passed Norman over to his law partner, Lee.
    Or if Lee was in a rare reflective mood—let’s say sitting with her gentleman (a lawyer himself) before a roaring fire—she’d muse: It must have begun the summer after my second year in law school, when I was interning in the Manhattan D.A.’s office. Do you know, that was the first time in my life that I ever had an abstract thought! It sneaked right up and bit me on the ass. Thegentleman, amused, would chuckle. Lee would go on: All of a sudden—ka-boom!—I comprehended the beauty of the criminal justice system, its balance, and that a person accused of a crime is also entitled to a defense—
must
have one—even if he is utter scum and guilty as hell.
    But Lee White, like most people, had no idea where the real beginning really began. So to commence:
    Let us start with the White business. Had she been a premature baby, her last name would have been Weiss. Two weeks before her birth day, her father, Leonard, took off from work to go to court and change the family’s surname to White so that the son he was anticipating could flash his birth certificate anywhere in America and not be challenged.
    Although now White, Leonard and his wife, Sylvia, did not abandon the old-world custom of naming a baby for a dead and inevitably boring relative. Leonard and Sylvia called their surprise daughter Lily Rose, after Sylvia’s maternal grandmother, Leah Rivka Mutterperl, a woman who became distraught upon realizing, on her second day aboard the S.S.
Polonia,
bound for Ellis Island, that she had left her false teeth on a washstand in a hovel in a shtetl about sixty miles due south of Cracow three weeks earlier and who never again was able to regain her equanimity.
    Before Weiss and White, the family’s name had actually been Weissberg until 1948—two years before Lee’s birth—when Leonard shortened it to Weiss. When asked, “Weiss?” by a customer who acted as if she had heard something unpleasant, he replied (too quickly): “Weiss means ‘white.’ It’s actually a very common German name … like White is here.” As the fur trade was in those days an industry of men named Glickstern and Steinberg and Rubin, the knowing smile on his customer’s face mortified Leonard and determined him to be White, although it took him two years to get up the courage to actually do it.
    In any case, until Lee was born, Leonard and Sylvia were so confident in the imminence of a son (whom they planned to name Bartholomew, after Leonard’s grandfather Baruch Weissberg) that they barely gave a thought to what to name a daughter, much less to how silly Lily White sounded, especially when, after a few months it became obvious that the girl’s coloring was going to be decidedly Mediterranean.
    Fortunately, their firstborn’s childish pronunciation of Lily was Lee-Lee, so in a sense, Lee christened herself … although in the case of the Weissberg-Weiss-Whites, christened is obviously not the right word, while “jewed” would be not only a misnomer but might give offense, however unintended—somewhat the way “lily white” began to in 1954, in those months just after
Brown
v.
Board of Education
was handed down.
    That Leonard WWW would be sensitive to the feelings of the Negro is not surprising, since he was the incarnation of that old Nixonian saw that Jews live like Episcopalians and vote like Puerto Ricans. His liberalism, however,