The House That Shadows Built (1928)

CASTLE GARDEN 37 pert instructor, he formed the habit of ducking always to the right. In a year or so he had started a beautiful cauliflower on his left ear. Years later, when appearances began to have their uses in his life, the surgeons did their best to prune it down; but that ear still has a curious, flattened extension. The fur business was seasonal in those days; fashion had not yet conceived the “summer fur.” Its busy season began in May and it slackened off nothing before Christmas. The journeymen and apprentices had to find other employment for the winter and early spring. Most of the other apprentices worked during the slack season at bottling imported wine. So when Frankel laid off its force, Adolph busied himself with piece-work, which amounted to three or four dollars a week, in a wine cellar on Third Avenue. There were other ways of supplementing a small income. Ridley’s Department Store in Grand Street needed extra packers and wrappers on Saturday night. Beginners earned twenty-five cents; experts, fifty cents. Mr. Blau got him a regular Saturday night job at Ridley’s. Some of the other boys in his amorphic boxing club earned twenty or fifty cents a night as supers in the melodramas along the Bowery. Fascinated by the glitter of the footlights, Adolph applied once at the stage door of the London Theatre. But the stage manager threw him out of line — he was too small for the drama.