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Ten years after, she has yet to finish her second book, which has bloomed into an elephantine “four-hundred-year history of mulatto people in fictional form” — what her husband Lenny calls a “mulatto ‘War and Peace.’”

The elephantine grand piano can easily bully its smaller partners or timidly overcompensate.

“He is mostly evasive. His pauses are elephantine. Broadway musicals could be mounted during his pauses.”

By the 1960s, Mr. Lorayne was best known for holding audiences rapt with feats of memory that bordered on the elephantine.

It feels less oppressive, less elephantine, lighter and more graceful on its feet.