Lily White Read Free Page B

character actress in the Yiddish theater, weighed nearly three hundred pounds and had dyed her frizzy hair the color of a rusty steel wool pad. Bella’s voice was so lacking in mellifluence that a simple “How are you,
tataleh?
” was, to her son, more agonizing than a thousand pieces of fresh chalk screeching along a blackboard.)
    But these women of the Gardens were so removed from Leonard’s experience they might as well have belonged to another species. He could only worship them from afar. While he could easily (very easily) picture himself wrapping a golden sable cape around pearly shoulders in the front hall of one of the grander Tudors and hearing a grateful wifely “Thank you, Leonard, my dearest,” he could not actually bring himself to smile his wide, engaging smile at one of them, so afraid was he of rejection—or perhaps of acceptance. His only sexual encounters took place in another borough: exchanging chaste kisses with Brooklynstenographers—and feeling up Flo Feinman, the Slut of Borough Park. Secretly, he was afraid he would never find anyone he would desire enough to marry.
    Six years passed. Since this is Lee’s story, not Leonard’s, suffice it to say that much happened in that time. Although Leonard remained innocent of the wondrous topography of women, in business he was on his way to being a man of the world. He had risen higher than he had ever dreamed—thanks to that louse Isadore Frumkin. Leonard’s boss’s black market diet of marbled steak and Hershey bars led, inexorably, to a crippling heart attack shortly after V-J Day. Leonard, backed by a loan arranged by an eager-beaver junior vice president of the East New York Savings Bank (a member of Nat’s Communist cell), became the owner of Frosty Furs just before Christmas in 1946. A year later, he proved he was a natural capitalist. Business was booming to such an extent that he repaid his bank loan, bought a 1947 Lincoln Continental that made Mr. Frumkin’s Packard look like a hunk of junk—and told his father, “Absolutely no contributions to Communist front organizations!” when Nat hit him up for a fifty-dollar contribution to the Soviet-American Folk Dance League.
    Leonard was not only putting some distance between himself and his past. He was also hard at work to get the polish he hadn’t been born with. He went to the theater and saw Cornelia Otis Skinner in
Lady Windermerés Fan
(which he’d thought might have something to do with the fashion business). He listened to WQXR for culture. He went to the movies for diction lessons (although he did drop his lord-of-the-manor “How teddibly luffly of you” pretty quickly after his mother, Bella, started yuk-king it up, mistakenly believing that her son was indulging in a rare moment of frivolity and doing an imitation of Ronald Colman in
The Late George Apley
).
    But his urbanity wasn’t entirely superficial; Leonard went toevery Furriers Industry Council meeting and absorbed his tony Manhattan colleagues’ wisdom on everything from remodeling Astrakhan coats to what whiskey to drink (Johnnie Walker Black) and precisely how to order it (“on the rocks, splash of soda—no twist, sweetheart”). He overcame his natural shyness by forcing himself to ask his customers leading questions. (“What are your Thanksgiving plans, Mrs. Fiske?” “No, really, I’d love to hear about your Easter centerpiece, Mrs. Guilfoyle.”) Thus he gathered an enormous amount of data on the folkways of the preeminent stratum of the upper middle class.
    Gradually, the young man gained confidence. His customers began to find him charming: “Mrs. Johnston, that seal would clap his flippers if he could see you in his coat! No, seriously. I mean it. You look”—he’d take a deep breath as if to clear his head so he could find the perfect word—“lovely.” At twenty-three, Leonard was almost on top of the world. He had money in his pocket, a firm jaw, a head of lustrous jet-black hair (more than