Chapter 2 #2
Leonard and his parents were also white, but they’d moved from New York, so they knew a different way of living.
Mrs. Lifton told me she liked Florida’s weather, and she appreciated that the cost of living was much lower than it had been in Manhattan.
She’d even learned to tolerate the bugs.
But regarding Jim Crow, she felt the entire state was stuck in the past. She said she’d spent a summer in Paris before the war, and the French didn’t understand segregation at all, and wondered how we could live with ourselves.
She said when some white American from the South tried to defend Jim Crow, the French said, “La raison du plus fort est toujours la meilleure,” which meant people in charge can always find ways to justify bad behavior.
The first time Leonard’s mother and I really talked, we were sitting out on their main back patio while Leonard changed out of his school clothes.
I greatly admired that patio. The back patio of our rental was a concrete slab with folding chairs, but the Liftons’ patio looked like another room in the house—it had a roof with a ceiling fan, and nicer furniture than we had in our living room.
The Liftons also had a kidney-shaped pool in their backyard, and this was when that was unusual, even in Florida.
Beyond the pool lay Coffee Pot Bayou, which was not the color of coffee, but a sparkling blue, or later in the evening, a deep green that softened to gray.
On the other side was St. Pete proper. If I squinted, I could see the dock of the city park where my father, Bobby, and I had seen the manatee.
“My guess,” Mrs. Lifton told me, “is that it’s shaped like a coffee pot, as seen from above.” She raised a long, slender arm and gestured at the cloudless sky. “But no one I’ve asked seems to know for certain. My husband thinks it must be some old inside joke.”
When Mrs. Lifton was a younger woman, she’d been a theater actress, living on her own in New York.
The second time she and I were out on their patio together, I asked if she had any pictures.
I meant pictures of her when she was living there.
I’d seen pictures of New York in magazines.
She went back inside, brought out a little photo album, and showed me a picture of herself with flowers in her hair, and wearing a long gown. “I was Ophelia,” she said.
I had to tell her I didn’t know who that was, and she was patient as she explained, saying she liked that I was always so curious.
She kept ticket stubs and playbills in this photo album, and she pointed to a playbill for Othello and said it was from when she’d gone back up to New York during the war to see Paul Robeson play the lead.
“He got a standing ovation. I’m sure he got one every night.
He was brilliant.” She sat with her legs tucked up, her bare feet resting on the cushion of that nice couch like it was the ground.
“We have theater here, of course, but not the opportunity to see that sort of artistry.” She saw she had to explain again, as I didn’t know who Othello was, or Paul Robeson.
When I understood Paul Robeson was a black man, and the leading lady was not, she said I found that shocking only because of how I’d grown up.
I considered this opinion, I think, more than I would have coming from someone else because I was dazzled by her.
I thought she resembled Katharine Hepburn, and when I told her this, she laughed in her musical way and told me she’d actually been Hepburn’s understudy when they were both in college in Pennsylvania. She called Katharine Hepburn “Kate.”
“It wasn’t so thrilling,” she added, taking a leaf from the patio’s potted lemon tree, holding it out for me to sniff.
“She never missed a performance. But she was lovely to me. She still sends a Christmas card every year.” She laughed again.
“Or her assistant does. Tell me, Nora. Do you smell the lemon on the leaf? I just adore that, that even the leaf smells divine.”
But I’m getting ahead of myself, going on about Leonard’s mother. She certainly made an impression. But when I went over, make no mistake, I was there for him.
—
I met Leonard, or rather, I saw him, on the first day of my sophomore year, my first day at the high school.
St. Petersburg High was the first high school in the country to cost over a million dollars to build, and it was the prettiest building I’d ever been in, and also one of the biggest. To me, it conjured a Spanish castle, with white stucco walls and a red clay barrel roof, and bell towers with arched doorways.
The front lawn had palm trees and all kinds of flowers.
I often had to strain to hear my history teacher over the chatter of birds, as the classroom’s Juliet balcony looked out over one of the shade trees in the senior courtyard, which had a little fishpond with a gurgling fountain.
As a sophomore, the senior courtyard was off-limits to me, but I could sit in the junior courtyard, and this was where I first saw Leonard.
He sat by himself, reading a book, pink bougainvillea climbing the trellis behind him.
Even with his gaze lowered, I could see the angles of his face and, when he shifted his weight, the easy grace of his long body.
I thought: My God, who is that? And why isn’t there a whole kettle of girls trying to get his attention?
I figured he must be new. But before the bell rang, a couple of other boys walked up, and he put his book down to talk with them.
One of them said something that made him smile, and well, seeing that, my fate was sealed.
I sound shallow, I know, losing my senses because of the way a boy I didn’t even know looked when he smiled. But that’s what it was, at first.
The other two boys walked away, and “the Beautiful One,” as I thought of Leonard then, went back to reading.
“Nora,” Roberta chided, “you’re staring.” But Irene whispered that she could see why, and they both laughed. I pretended to tie the lace of my shoe so I could crane my neck and try to see what he was reading. I couldn’t make it out.
After school, I set about sleuthing. Roberta had an older sister, Becky, who was in eleventh grade and usually nice, and the next time I was at their house I asked Becky to get out her yearbook from the year before.
I found his picture, and I liked his name.
But when I said it aloud, Becky made a sour face and said sure, okay, Leonard Lifton was easy on the eyes, everyone knew that.
But he had a bad personality. He thought he was too good for regular people because his father ran the hospital and they lived in a big house on Snell Isle.
She said if Leonard Lifton was Catholic, he’d be at St. Paul’s, but too bad he wasn’t, and he had to trot his high horse over the bridge every day, mixing with the riffraff.
And from the way he acted, Becky said, you could see how much this pained him.
“I don’t have anything against rich people,” she added.
“Susan Monters lives on Snell, and she’s perfectly friendly.
But my friend Gayle waitressed at the country club last summer, and she had to wait on Leonard’s family.
She said his parents were fine, but Leonard was out-and-out rude.
Wouldn’t even acknowledge her, though they’d been in classes together for years.
All three of them ordered steak. He’s an only child, wouldn’t you know. ”
Becky assured both me and Roberta that there were too many quality fish in the sea to waste our time on a stuck-up, boring one like Leonard.
She spoke to us with the wisdom of age, as if we were both her younger sisters, though I was probably almost Becky’s age.
Because of my September birthday, I was old for a sophomore, though because I was short, no one guessed.
In any case, I thought, but did not say, that I was old enough to think for myself.
It was true that most every time I saw Leonard Lifton, he was by himself.
Because he was tall, he was easy to spot in a crowded hallway, and he just stared straight ahead as he walked.
But I’d seen his smile, just that once, and there wasn’t anything snobby or high-horsey about it.
I remained fearful of lying, fearful I would always fail at it.
But I wasn’t a fearful person in general, certainly not socially.
So many people were still coming in new to St. Pete, and as I’d already been there a year, I felt it my responsibility to welcome them, especially the quieter ones, as much as I could.
I didn’t want anyone to feel left out or lonely, and I’d found that most people appreciated my coming up and saying hello.
My father once told me that anyone who didn’t want to talk to someone as pleasant and pretty as I was must be unwell in the head, and though I understood he was severely biased in my favor, I tended not to take the occasional rudeness to my overtures personally.
But introducing myself to Leonard Lifton was a different matter.
He was older than I was, a junior, and he’d been in Florida for longer.
He ate steaks with his parents at country clubs, and he lived on some island I’d never heard of.
Still, I thought, there was no law against saying hello to a person.
The next time I saw him with a book in the courtyard, I went over, sat down beside him, and asked what he was reading.
He looked up and stared at me like I was a giant talking wasp.
But at this point, I could see him up close. His eyes were so dark they were almost black. Lifton sounded like an English name, but I thought he must be at least a little Italian. One of his eyes was slightly larger than the other, and just the larger eye had a mournful look.
“I’m Nora, by the way. Nora Chesnow.”