Lily White Read Free Page A

was not the usual concern for the underdog. He really didn’t care about the underdog unless the underdog had managed to get a few bucks together and was in the market for a fur garment for his wife or lady friend. No, Leonard’s liberalism was his inescapable inheritance from his card-carrying-Communist father, Nat, a shop steward for the Fur Workers Union, and his big-hearted, big-mouthed mother, Bella.
    Leonard received one further legacy: While Nat could not help his son gain admission to Harvard or obtain a seat on the stock exchange, he was able to secure him a position as floor boy in the back room at Frosty Furs in Forest Hills. Thus began his career: in 1942, seventeen-year-old Leonard—safe from the Army’s clutches because of a quirky kidney—traveled from Borough Park in Brooklyn to Queens. He swept the floors and scoured from workbenches the reeking grease that dripped offuntreated raccoon pelts. He stretched lynx skins on a board for the cutter and marked patterns onto garments. He was a hard worker, and an excellent one too. But nothing he did was good enough for his boss. Whenever there were no customers around, his boss, Isadore Frumkin, would growl, “Move yer whatsis, sonny boy!” He would scrutinize Leonard’s every move with the tight-clenched face of the congenitally sadistic.
    Was revenge on Mr. Frumkin the spark that made Leonard determine that someday
he
would be the boss of Frosty Furs and when he was, he would treat his floor boy like a human being? Who knows what ignites the entrepreneurial fire in a young man? Rebellion against his Trotskyite father? The ignominy of sweeping up scraps of muskrat and cigarette butts as well as the curlicues of oily lettuce that appeared to molt from the wet-breaded sardine sandwich Milton Kuperschmidt, the cutter, devoured every noon? Was it glancing out the window onto Austin Street and seeing Mr. Frumkin’s resplendent 1942 Packard illuminating the February dusk? Or could it have been observing Mr. Frumkin, kneeling on the floor to better gauge the hemline of Mrs. Whitcomb Knoll’s broadtail, casually run his hand up Mrs. Knoll’s pale and silky and Protestant calf?
    In those days, Queens was not yet the vigorous ethnic mishmash it is today. Entire neighborhoods—Douglaston Manor, Forest Hills Gardens—were not merely lily white: even the lightest Jews were prohibited, and, indeed, Catholics—including the fairest, without O’s or Mc’s or excessive offspring—were encouraged to reside elsewhere. To young Leonard, delivering a lapin muff and bonnet for Mrs. William Warren’s little Amanda, or picking up Mrs. Bradley Mercer’s nutria jacket (onto which Mr. Bradley had upchucked five Rob Roys and Welsh rarebit on New Year’s Eve) for a cleaning, Forest Hills Gardens was paradise. A mere three-block walk from the store put him on a street where flaxen-haired angels tossed balls to airborne blond dogs.Velvet lawns encircled four-bedroom, mullion-windowed houses that Leonard was soon to learn were called (albeit redundantly) English Tudor.
    He rarely saw the masters of the house; they were a half world away, fighting Heinies and Japs. Or at least they were in Manhattan, writing advertising copy for stool softeners.
    But the women stayed home in those days, and Leonard moved quickly from being merely enamored to falling in love with them all: the debutante daughters, the newlyweds, the young mothers, the matrons, the menopausal. It was, of course, pure prejudice, the viewing of an entire group as the Perfect One: a woman in tennis whites, with shiny hair and a voice as soft and luxe as lynx. (Clearly, this passion for anything female and Episcopalian was an indication that Leonard had a few unresolved odds and ends in the Oedipal department; they would remain problematical even after he undertook psychotherapy a decade later. It should be noted here, however, that his mother, Bella, a good-hearted, effusive woman who claimed a brief career as a