Free Borrowed Finery: A Memoir by Paula Fox Page B

“Oh. Hello. Frank.”
    He spoke English with a severe and glacial precision, seeming to bite each word like a coin to test its genuineness before letting it go.
    After I had been living on Audley Street a month or so, he followed me into the bathroom one morning. I was sitting on the toilet. He turned on a tap in the sink so the sound of water flowing covered the trickle of my urine. “You see?” he stated grimly. He repeated the two words, providing his own echo.
    My father once said mockingly, “Vi-cen-tīc-o plays the am-pīc-o … and says everything twice.” Two must have held an eerie numerical spell over Vincent. As well as repeating words twice, he tripped twice every time he climbed a flight of stairs.
    Leopold lived on the top floor of the house in a studio-like room with a skylight. A large drawing board tilted at an angle was the first thing I saw when the door opened. At its top was a narrow trench holding several drawing pencils and the razor blades he sharpened them with. Each razor bore a thumbprint-shaped smudge of black powder from the veins of lead that ran through the pencils.
    Leopold was an art director at Macfadden Publications. He showed me a photograph of Mr. Macfadden, posing as the world’s strongest man in a True Story magazine advertisement for a product or an exercise—I forget which—guaranteed to make weaklings strong. He wore bathing trunks that revealed his tanned chest and arms sheathed in muscles that resembled dark taffy. He looked very old—which, Leopold explained, made his muscular development the more remarkable.
    Leopold was away on vacation when I arrived at the house on Audley Street. I suffered from piercing earaches in the first few weeks. My grandmother, alarmed by my anguished cries, telephoned the minister for help. When I learned he was coming, my weeping ceased. But I knew, a desperate knowing, that he would stay only a few hours. The earaches diminished in intensity. That time Uncle Elwood visited me in Kew Gardens was the last time I saw him for many years. We wrote each other periodically.
    My heart had grown dull. Sorrow, and the changes in my life that were its cause, had worked its desolation upon me.
    Leopold changed that. He taught me chess and swung me in the air, and his large-hearted laughter lifted my spirits. When I opened the door to his room, I breathed in the buoyant aroma of the Cuban cigars he smoked. His deep-set dark eyes were like my mother’s except for their tenderness of expression. His stride was graceful, wary, and indomitable, like a big cat’s.
    When Vincent was away and only my grandmother and Leopold were in the house, I rested safely in the present.
    But when Vincent returned to Audley Street from his engagements, I stayed outdoors after school. I played with neighborhood children or by myself until it was the hour when Leopold would arrive at the Kew Gardens railroad station. I watched from a living room window as he walked up the narrow cement path, too narrow to accommodate his stride; he stepped off it, now and then, onto patches of rusty-looking grass on either side.
    I would run to the hall in time to see him greet his mother and bend down to kiss her cheek—none of the other brothers kissed her—and after I’d waited awhile, I’d go upstairs and knock on his door. He would open it and smile down at me.
    On sunny weekends, his studio, as he called it, was radiant with light. It was a different world from the bleak floor below. I slept in the same bed with my grandmother if Vincent was home. He always took my small room and bed.
    “Have the sheets been changed?” he’d call out in the hall, without troubling to see if there was anyone within range to hear him. I could sense his rage, suddenly flaring up like a banked fire.
    Once in a great while, Fermin visited. The fire of his rage was not banked. He maintained a grim silence around us, breaking it only to mutter furiously into my grandmother’s ear. I knew she felt his