The Ice Cream Queen of Orchard Street Page 10

  Slowly, I closed my eyes and touched the spoon lightly to the tip of my tongue.

  Unctuous, milky sweetness spread through my mouth like cold fire. Silky and impossible, it dissolved into a flavor I’d never known—vanilla—then slid down my throat like a salve. I supposed that my eyes must have widened with astonishment. And I could not help it. I smiled. It was a cataclysm of deliciousness “Ahahaha, si?” Mr. Dinello said with pleasure.

  Gelato, he called it. Gel-La-Toe. The word itself was like music. And the ingredients Mr. Dinello used were unknown to me then. Who’d ever seen pistachios in Vishnev? Or tasted cinnamon? There were no artificial colorings in his ice cream—no garish, dead-giveaway yellows, browns, or pinks. So each time we made a new batch of gelato together—as became our habit—it was a fresh revelation. One Sunday I put the spoon in my mouth and tasted fragola—strawberry—for the first time. Then cioccolato!

  Each time I did, Mr. Dinello watched me intently, with pleasure. I couldn’t hide my delight. I slurped and licked. I grinned. It was the best food I had ever eaten. My fate, it had been set in motion.

  It was hard for me to be mean to Mr. Dinello when we made ice cream together. And yet, except for the singing, I remained silent as we worked. Even when I wanted to speak, the words simply refused to come. Sometimes the ice cream itself seemed to stick at the back of my mouth like a web, and an ache grew in my throat.

  Of course, I always tell the public that I fell in love with ice cream as soon as I first ate it—that it was my one great pleasure as a poor little immigrant girl on the Lower East Side. For decades I marketed Dunkle’s as a confection of pure joy—as a distillation of childhood, sprinkles, rainbows, and magic. Some of our advertisements even promoted it subliminally as—dare I say?—a source of redemption. In the 1960s, after I did my famous “Please Come to Dunkle’s” campaign, we ran a series of television commercials that depicted a family having a very bad day. Mary loses the spelling bee, Willie strikes out at baseball, Dad gets yelled at by his boss, Mom burns the roast beef—even the dog gets a burr in his paw and trots into the kitchen whimpering. But after dinner the family opens a carton of Dunkle’s ice cream together—or piles into the car and goes to Dunkle’s for Happy Cones and Mint Everest sundaes—and presto! Suddenly their world turns Technicolor again and all is well. “Dunkle’s,” Spreckles the Clown, our mascot, says, waving into the camera, “for happy endings always.”

  Yet the truth is, darlings, that ice cream, for me, was not a food of happiness at all. Oh, yes, of course: Whenever I first put it in my mouth, I experienced an explosion of delight. But there was no chewing ice cream, no way to let it linger to trick my hunger. As soon as I began to lick the spoon, the ice cream inevitably started to turn to liquid. By the time Mr. Dinello disappeared back upstairs, leaving me alone in the kitchen with the debris—the sweetness on my tongue was already becoming a memory. It was like love: No sooner had I finished it than a devastating sense of loss always set in. Sitting alone in the drafty storefront, staring down at the dirty spoon in my hand, I wondered why everything I adored disappeared so quickly. Clearly it was my fault. Filling with guilt, with shame, I thought about my family—and of what I had done to them to drive them away. Ice cream? All it did was intensify my grief.

  Mama, I always thought. What would she say if she could see me in the little ices factory?

  “Why you eat but never smile?” Mr. Dinello asked me sadly. “You no like anymore? You try another flavor?”

  He could have flavored it with gold, I suppose. He could have flavored it with diamonds.

  I had to run away. I had to escape the ice cream factory on Mulberry Street, I decided, and somehow find my way back to my family in South Africa and show them how worthy I had become.

  Instead of performing my duties grudgingly, I began to crank the handle of the ices maker each morning with the determination of an athlete, until my biceps cramped and Mrs. Dinello herself had to say, “Ninella. Basta.” Enough. Later, when Mrs. Dinello went to “messe,” I practiced walking back and forth across the storefront on my crutches. Four times I walked across the drafty room, then five. Soon, not only could I cross the storefront with ease, but hop across the floorboards using just one crutch to support me.

  By then, however, afternoon light slanted across the storefronts on Mulberry Street in slices of deep, autumn gold. Mr. Dinello mounted a blackened grill onto the back of his wagon and replaced its sign with a new one reading, CASTAGNE CALDE. HOT CHESTNUTS. 5 CENTS.

  The season for ices was over.

  One afternoon he arrived in the office panting. “Ninella,” he said. Behind him followed a man with a tweed cap and a drooping mustache.

  “This is Mr. Fabricante, from L’Ordine Figli d’Italia,” Mr. Dinello said. “He bring a gift.”

  The stranger held out a wooden hook. A cane, a tiny one, meant for a child. “My son, he had the polio. Maybe you can use this now,” Mr. Fabricante said quietly.

  Hesitantly, I shed my crutches and leaned on the cane. Mr. Fabricante gingerly held my elbow. I took a trembling, jerky step. I wobbled and flailed a little. A ribbon of pain shot up my right leg, but only for an instant. Then I found I could balance, and slowly I hobbled forward. Once, then again. Then again. Then again.

  Walking with my cane was very much like turning the crank of the ice cream maker. The more I did it, the more I endured and the more I could do. My left leg grew stronger, and though my right leg jutted inward—still in its brace—and pain sizzled in my calf on occasion, I found I could put more and more weight on it.

  The first frost came. The sidewalks of Mulberry Street glistened with ice. Though I pleaded to go out, Mrs. Dinello insisted I remain indoors. “You should not trip on the sidewalk with your cane and break the other leg.” She frowned. “That is the last thing we need.”

  And so every morning I climbed up and down the tenement stairs instead.

  One labored step after another I took, dragging my right leg up behind me. Tenants let me limp about the building and in and out of their homes, paying me no mind. It could be like that back then. Trying to maintain privacy was often more trouble than it was worth, especially when everyone could hear you doing your business in the toilets on the landings, and your sneezes rang through the air shafts, and your arguments over love and money and family, no matter how hotly whispered, became common knowledge as soon as they began.

  On each floor I hobbled through the Dinello family’s living quarters, then their neighbors’. Each apartment was covered in its own sadly hopeful wallpaper, the cheap patterns of roses and paisleys streaked with a thin film of soot. Paint peeled on the doorframes, soups simmered on blackened stoves, tiny statues and a few treasured keepsakes from the old country sat displayed proudly on warped breakfronts and rigorously polished mantels. My right leg was often tender and throbbing, but each step brought me closer to the pier on Whitehall Street, to the ticket booth at the shipping office.

  Mrs. Salucci was so busy nattering away and snubbing me as we worked that I found it surprisingly easy to steal from her. A spool of blue thread. A pair of tassels from her curtain stays. A card of straight pins. Downstairs in the storefront, I managed to pry loose a floorboard in the office with the tip of my cane and hollow out a little space beneath it. A tin teaspoon, I put in it. A hairpin from Mrs. Ferrendino’s nightstand. A cake of brown soap from the Piccolo family on the third floor. And so sue me: a rubber ball from a drawer in the room where Rocco and his brothers slept. I also took the violet-candy tin with the necklace of wooden beads inside it from Mrs. Dinello’s desk. With my brace it was easy to slip things beneath my skirt and clutch them against my bad leg with one hand. People in the tenement were so used to seeing me limp like that that they stopped seeing me altogether—if, in fact, they had ever seen me at all. Everybody looks away when a cripple enters a room, and certainly no one expects her to steal. Who filches things when they can’t run?

  Although I sometimes felt a stab of guilt when I slipp
ed a shoehorn or a glass marble into my stash, my heart raced with the inexplicable thrill of it. And as soon as I stole the items, I truly believed they’d been mine all along. My treasures. Alone at night, I would sometimes examine them, turning them over lovingly in my hands—lifting the wooden necklace on over my head, squinting through the clear glass marble shot through with wisps of blue like smoke.

  Oh, I adored the novelty of them, the delight of having little things of my very own—things that would stay put and be there for me to play with. Yet I was aware, of course, that every week a junk man came around to the tenement. (In retrospect it seems he was often more akin to a pawnbroker. People bought and sold things that they dearly needed, that weren’t junk at all. Once I’d seen the Sciottos sell a fancy coverlet they’d brought over from Reggio. It was so they could pay their rent that week and not get evicted, Mrs. Salucci reported smugly.) If I could bear to part with my treasures, I hoped, the junk man would give me money, too.

  It was Christmas, it was something called New Year’s, it was the winter of 1914. Far beyond Mulberry Street, great gears of history were turning. Half a world away, in a chilly, abandoned farm on a Bosnian hillside, a young man named Gavrilo Princip was being trained in marksmanship. Come late spring, in a plot hatched by a group of secret Serbian revolutionaries called “the Black Hand,” Gavrilo would assassinate the Austrian Archduke Ferdinand and his wife, Princess Sophie. At age nineteen, Princip would inadvertently set off a world war that would claim the lives of over 8.5 million soldiers—including three from America named Silvio, Vincenzo, and Luigi Dinello. Between Gavrilo Princip and the Spanish flu, the Dinello family would be decimated by the end of the decade.

  Also of significance, in that same winter of 1914, two Russian-Jewish immigrants, Dora and Daniel Salk, were conceiving their first child in an East Harlem tenement just a few miles north of the Dinellos. Born late that October, their son would be named Jonas. Forty years later, he would go on to create one of the most important vaccines in history—and inadvertently help catapult me to fortune and fame as well.

  But who could know all this back then? Of the winter of 1914, I have little memory. Eventually the gutters pooled with grayish sludge as the snow melted and the sewers backed up. Parades appeared in the street; Italian men singing and carrying gilded statues balanced on their shoulders garlanded with paper flowers. They tossed candy to children watching from the curbs. Oh, how I longed to go out!

  And then, I was in a thin brown coat, a size too big. The air was chill, my breath vaporous. Mr. Dinello was holding my elbow. Carefully, I was maneuvering down one metal stair, then another. They were corrugated, with slits cut into them like the top of a pie. A doctor appeared, red-faced, nodding. My brace was unbuckled, discarded, my leg discolored and throbbing, Mrs. Dinello kneading it like bread dough as I sat lengthwise on a settee.

  Soon my gait was improving. Yet I sensed that no one quite knew what was to be done with me.

  One night I heard the Dinellos’ whispers tumbling down through the air shaft.

  “But we can’t. I made a promise—”

  “Ha! To who? A ghost? That tailor, he’s only come around once. Not one letter, not one nickel he’s sent.”

  “But it’s not right, Generosa.”

  “Oh? What if something happens to her? If she is going to continue to live in this house—”

  “What you tell Father Antonucci? Her people, they would never agree—”

  “Her people? She has no people, Salvatore!”

  Silence.

  Then Mr. Dinello sighing. “Allora, she will just go with us and sit.”

  The next Sunday, Mrs. Dinello announced that I was to accompany the family to the Most Precious Blood Church. Its white marble façade rose among the tenements on Baxter Street like a beautiful piece of lace, as magnificent as any building I had seen in Hamburg. About “church” I understood very little, except I suppose I had gleaned that it was where Italians went to synagogue. Directed into one of the long, polished benches beside Rocco, I forgot to be mean to him. On the far wall, extending up toward a dome in the heavens, winged babies alighted from clouds above figures with gold rings radiating from their heads. A large, pale statue of a man rose before us. He was absolutely naked except for his midsection, which appeared to be wrapped in a tallis, and he was suspended by his wrists from a pair of crossbeams. Streams of blood were clearly visible on his hands and also dripping down the sides of his head, encircled in a ring of vicious thorns. “Mrs. Dinello, Mrs. Dinello!” I cried, tugging at her sleeve and pointing. “Why is that man nailed up there like that? What happened to his clothes? Why is he bleeding? Is he supposed to be dead?”

  My voice pierced the din; everyone inside Most Precious Blood Church seemed to pause. Rocco and his brothers began snickering. “That’s Jesus, you numbskull.” Rocco elbowed me in the ribs. Mrs. Dinello looked appalled. Reaching over, she gave Rocco a wallop, then grabbed me by the wrists. “You do not speak in the church. You do not say anything, capisce?” she whispered fiercely.

  I nodded. I teared up, but I refused to cry in front of Rocco. “That’s Father Antonucci,” she said more gently, gesturing to a sad-eyed man wearing a white robe with an olive green tallis draped over his shoulders. “Our priest.” Father Antonucci began speaking in a strange language. He turned his back to the congregation, however, as if he were angry with us. It was odd to see him speaking to the wall. At one point the audience stood up, then sat down. Then they stood up again. Then people were kneeling. Mostly women, I noticed. At first it was disquieting. Then frustrating. Then, just like at synagogue in Vishnev, tedious.

  It was hard to keep from swinging my legs or humming. I kept trying to avoid looking at the terrifying statue overhead. I kept waiting for the Torah to come out, but it didn’t. Instead a large basket was passed around. When the basket arrived before me, Mrs. Dinello drew out a few coins from a little pouch pinned inside her bosom. She handed me a penny and made it clear I was to put it in the basket. I did, then watched hungrily as it was spirited away. Rocco watched the basket move among the congregation, too. “Where does the money go?” I whispered.

  “To Jesus.” With his sharp little chin, he motioned to the statue of the man hanging from the cross in agony.

  “What does he buy with it?”

  “He answers prayers. When you die, if you’re good, he sends you to heaven.”

  Finally Father Antonucci held up a big silver kiddush cup and chanted something. Everyone in front of us began to file out of the benches and form a line. When it was our turn to go up, Mrs. Dinello stayed my arm. I watched Rocco and his brothers and their mother and Beatrice slide out of the pew. “Can’t I go, too?” I said.

  Mrs. Dinello shook her head. “The Communion, she is for the Catholics only,” she whispered, glancing fiercely at her husband. “You must be baptized first. Then make the first confession. How old are you, Ninella?”

  “Generosa!” Mr. Dinello said.

  Mrs. Dinello frowned at him and slid out of the pew.

  Watching her join the line, Mr. Dinello shook his head and patted me on the knee. “Ninella, you do not do anything you do not want, capisce?” he said softly. “You do not get baptized unless your people say si, si?”

  I nodded, though I did not comprehend him at all. My eyes were fixed on the basket of money sitting on a little podium to the side of the altar.

  * * *

  A grand society wedding was taking place uptown that spring. The bride required an ocean of lace. For weeks Mrs. Dinello, Beatrice, and I stayed up far into the night in Mrs. Salucci’s factory, meticulously weaving and stitching beneath the glow of a single gas lamp, our backs bent, our fingers growing bubbled with blisters, our necks drooping with fatigue. The day when the order was finally completed and delivered, Mrs. Salucci plucked a roll of damp bills from the sweating gap in her bosom. The pay was more money than Mr. Dinello had earned that whole month selling roasted chestnuts. To celebrate, Mrs. Dinello announced,
she would take Rocco, Pasquale, Pietro, Vittorio, and even me to one of the new moving pictures uptown that she had been hearing so much about from Mrs. Ferrendino.

  We took the trolley all the way up to Herald Square. Rocco insisted on showing off by reading all the signs aloud: THE SARNOFF $2 HAT SHOP. SHOESHINES. SCHLITZ BEER. The marquee of Weber’s Theatre was jeweled with lights. “‘D. W. Griffith’s The Battle of the Sexes,’” Rocco announced proudly. “‘Starring Donald Crisp and Lillian Gish.’” He smiled so smugly I wanted to box his ears.

  In the lobby a blond woman in a filmy blue dress stood holding a tray of cigarettes for sale. For a moment I recalled standing with Papa inside the picture house in Hamburg. It made me unbearably sad.

  The Battle of the Sexes was a melodrama. It was hard to tell precisely what was going on. Since Mrs. Dinello and I could not read, Rocco and his brothers kept having to read the titles aloud, then translate them for their grandmother, while the people seated beside us grew increasingly annoyed and told them to shush. But I was entranced. For there, on the screen, was the same glamorous young woman who had bedazzled me back in Hamburg. She had long ringlets of hair, an angelic mouth, and a radiant litheness that was so graceful and captivating, I was utterly beside myself. Seeing her, I was infatuated all over again, swollen with longing and ambition. For the first time since my accident, perhaps, I felt something akin to hope.

  When we stepped out onto the dusty sidewalk afterward, however, blinking and disoriented in the afternoon light, Mrs. Dinello sniffed, “You should not have to read at the pictures. They are supposed to be like the opera.” As we walked to the streetcar, she appeared increasingly irritated. Yet, I tagged behind the Dinellos as though in a dream. It felt as if roses were blooming inside me. As I hobbled along with my cane, my right leg jerking and dragging over the pavement, in my mind’s eye I was waltzing. I was twirling. I was the beautiful young daughter in the moving picture, resplendent, dancing high above the city.