The Ice Cream Queen of Orchard Street: A Novel Page 15

  “Oh, jeez.” One of them squatted beside the chassis in the bleaching sunlight and shook his head. “I think your axle may be busted.”

  “Are they actors, too?” I heard a woman ask.

  “No one is an actor here, ladies,” I said with irritation, fanning myself with my hand. My skirt and apron stays were plastered to my backside. “We’re selling ice cream. And that’s my husband. Not Errol Flynn.”

  The women looked at him incredulously, then me, then our truck—the big striped loaf of it. Ice cream trucks were not common in 1936. Ours was actually a secondhand Divco Twin Coach bakery truck that Bert had retrofitted with a small continuous-batch freezer and a couple of cold-storage cabinets. These were wired to a generator that ran off the engine. Provided you hunched over, there was just enough room inside for two people. Bert usually scooped from the freezer inside to the left, then handed the cones to me to pass to the customers through the door, which folded open like an accordion. We’d painted the outside with broad bands of pale pink, white, and beige to resemble Neapolitans—the chocolate-strawberry-and-vanilla ice cream bricks that were very popular back then and often sold by the slice. I’d written DUNKLE’S FROZEN CUSTARD over the windshield and on both sides of the truck in cherry red script above what was, I suppose, our first logo—a picture of an ice cream cone (a triad of circles over a V) inside the outline of a heart.

  With its music box, its whimsical lettering, and its now-collapsed front tire, this truck, it was all that Bert and I had in the world. Most nights we even slept in it.

  “I’m sorry, folks,” said the man from the roadster, squinting up at us from beside the crushed tire, “but from what I can see, this isn’t going anywhere.”

  Other drivers crouched with Bert in the dust. “The axle’s bent,” Bert said. The men debated what to do. Sun burned through the salted breeze. Seagulls circled overhead, cawing. Before the accident we had stopped just twice. The playgrounds and parks in Queens had been nearly empty that morning. Fifteen cents, we had made. Most of our inventory sat nestled in dry ice in the cold cabinet, waiting to be sold. Fourth of July afternoon was supposed to be our single busiest day of the year.

  I squinted up at the white-hot noon sky. The noxious smell of tar rose from the road.

  In the past we had cut the engine for fifteen, even twenty minutes without a problem. We needed to stop it—and the generator—in order to sell the ice cream. Otherwise, of course, it was too noisy and dangerous, and our customers would choke on exhaust fumes. We worked quickly, Bert and I. Bert, in fact, could scoop a cone to weight—exactly 3.5 ounces and not a penny more—in eight seconds. This is important, darlings. You lose a lot of money if you don’t scoop ice cream properly. You have to scrape the scoop across the face of the ice cream, curling a ribbon over itself so that it forms a ball that’s hollow in the center. You need to create the illusion of size and density yet make each scoop no greater than 3.5 ounces. Otherwise you lose your profit margin.

  Bert had practiced over and over, with me timing him and weighing his efforts on a little scale. Since I could add and make change in my head, we got to where we could serve thirty customers in just under fourteen minutes. We’d never had the engine off for more than twenty-five.

  Over by the front of the truck, I could see one of the men stand up and sigh. Another shook his head. Bert looked bereft. A terrible feeling came over me. It was Saturday, a national holiday. Even if there was a service station nearby, it would not open until Monday at the earliest. Eighteen gallons of Dunkle’s “frozen custard,” all that we had left in the world, were just sitting there, stranded with us in the heat.

  * * *

  The spring after I was baptized, Mr. Dinello seemed to disappear. Had I not heard his boots squeaking on the stairs early in the mornings, when the smoky, violet-cloaked alleys had not yet come to life, and had I not heard his voice whispering excitedly late at night when only a single gas jet remained lit in the kitchen and Mrs. Dinello wearily set out a plate of manicotti for him, I would have thought he had vanished completely, just as Papa had.

  During the day, in his absence, a lot of men tromped in and out to speak to Mrs. Dinello, though the storefront kitchen itself remained closed. Mrs. Salucci kept shaking her head and tsking. “Salvatore, he is too much of a dreamer. He is going to wind up in the poorhouse—or getting a visit from La Mano Nera—or worse.”

  Yet the Dinellos’ apartments filled with an air of expectation, a gleeful secret, a collective holding of breath.

  “Come,” Mrs. Dinello said to me one Saturday morning after I’d finished washing the dishes. The boys were already out, and the tenement rang with a peculiar silence. She braided my hair and cleaned my cheeks with spit as she often did just before we left for church. Instead of turning right, however, toward Baxter Street, she put her hand on the small of my back and guided me north then west, onto a big thoroughfare crowded with storefronts and chiming with streetcars. Halfway down the block, Mr. Dinello stood waving excitedly. “She is magnifico, si?” he said, gesturing grandly. Behind him, on a large, freshly washed window, were the words DINELLO & SONS FANCY ITALIAN ICES & ICE CREAMS stenciled in burnished gold letters. Through the glass we could glimpse a long enamel counter. The grandsons were already inside stacking crates and mopping the floors.

  The new Lafayette Street factory was easily three times the size of the Mulberry Street storefront. Dusty floorboards, rats, gas jets, the competing scents of garlic, tomatoes, and marjoram—all of this was now gone. White tiles ran halfway up the walls, like wainscoting, and the walls above were painted cream. More remarkably, there was electricity. Three elaborate globe lamps hung above the countertop like pearl earrings. And then, standing sentinel in the back corner, was the factory’s crowning glory: a motorized, vertical continuous-batch freezer—a remarkable, cylindrical machine, gleaming with nickel plating and promise.

  In the decade before my family and I arrived in America, a man named Burr Walker, oddly enough—Burr, darlings, could you make this up?—invented a “circulating brine freezer.” Instead of employing ice and rock salt, this curious contraption froze ingredients inside a cylinder encased in brine, cooled with an ammonia compressor. In 1905 another man, named Emery Thompson, who ran a soda fountain in one of the grand New York City department stores, took the idea one step further. He invented what was called a “gravity-fed continuous-process freezer.” Such a mouthful, I know.

  This machine was upright, so that you could pour the ingredients in the top, start the motor, and have it all come out as ice cream into a pail at the bottom. Batch after batch you could make without ever stopping.

  The state-of-the-art freezers that Bert designed for our New Jersey plant are based, in fact, on this early model—and oh, they are beautiful things, darlings. A thousand gallons an hour they can turn out for our supermarket division. Twice a week we give tours at the facility. I’m telling you, you should see them.

  The small freezer that Mr. Dinello purchased was far more modest, of course. As I recall, it could turn out thirty, perhaps forty gallons an hour. Yet it was a magnificent investment. Suddenly none of us had to hand-crank an ice cream maker any longer.

  “You see? You see?” Mr. Dinello demonstrated, climbing up on a stepladder and pouring a great quantity of creamy liquid into an aperture. Tightening a seal, he flicked a switch. Suddenly a great noise filled the room and the entire kitchen seemed to shake violently. When the machine jerked to a halt scarcely a minute later, he removed an enormous pail from beneath it and winked. We gathered around and gasped. Inside was a gallon of glistening vanilla ice cream.

  In twenty minutes Mr. Dinello could make what used to take us hours of labor.

  Business, of course, exploded. Gelato, gelato: Talk of it rang through the Mulberry Street tenement like music. The Dinellos’ sons gave up their sandhog jobs to help run the operation. Five flavors of ice cream they made now every morning—chocolate, strawberry, vanilla, coffee, and pistachio—plus two kinds of
ices. Lemon or cherry, grape or orange, depending on what was in season. In addition to two cold-storage cabinets in the storefront, a dank room in the basement had been converted into a “hardening room,” where ice cream could be packed in ice and stored. Six vendors soon worked for Mr. Dinello, selling Dinello & Sons Fancy Italian Ices & Ice Creams in distinctive white-and-gold wagons that Mr. Dinello himself designed. Fanning out from Wall Street all the way north to Houston, their cries of “I-SEE CREMA,” mimicked the same cadences of his own chocolaty baritone, rising over the squares and the tenements like flocks of birds.

  Occasionally a man came to the Mulberry Street apartment dressed in a jacket with a silk lining and an expensive bowler hat, speaking Italian, winking jocularly; Mrs. Dinello handed him a thick envelope tied with string.

  Watching him come and go, Mrs. Salucci scowled. “Well, of course, the first payments are always the easiest to make.”

  The new ice cream machine enthralled me. It was a giant continual magic trick. In went the liquid—and presto!—out came ice cream! When nobody was looking, I touched my fingertips lightly to the dials, fondled the knobs, and peeked inside the spout at the bottom, trying to figure out how it worked. Ice cream, the frozen confection itself, still left me feeling melancholy when I ate it. But ice cream making—the astonishing, abracadabra, transformative process of it—that I adored. That I could watch happily for hours.

  So could the grandsons. That very first day, we stood shouting “Look! Look!” each time a new batch of ice cream blobbed into the pail. It seemed inconceivable to us that the same miracle could occur over and over again. Mr. Dinello demonstrated one flavor after another. First vanilla! Then strawberry!

  Yet when I patted the shiny silver chassis, Mr. Dinello scolded, “Ai, ai, ai, do not touch her. These machines, they are not for little girls.”

  Only the sons and grandsons were allowed to operate the brand-new equipment. Only the sons and grandsons were now privy to the Dinellos’ updated ice cream recipes. Only they were entrusted to sample each batch, and shovel the fresh ice cream rapidly into large metal drums wrapped in burlap, and load them onto the waiting wagons, and wash down the freezers, sinks, and countertops with bleach. Only the grandsons could help themselves to heaping dishes of chocolate ice cream after school without asking permission. Only the boys and men worked with Mr. Dinello, all singing opera together in the bright new kitchen as they worked.

  Me, I had to continue to report upstairs to Mrs. Salucci every day after school. “Why are you frowning?” said Mrs. Dinello, frowning herself as she wiped her hands on a dishrag. “You make good money for us with the lace. In the shop you will just get in the way.”

  I had thought that once I was baptized, of course, I would be magically transformed. At school, despite being bullied, I excelled—in math and reading in particular. After dinner I sat at the table patiently teaching Mrs. Dinello every evening, guiding her puckered fingers over the block letters in my school primers. “‘House. Mouse. Louse,’” she repeated after me.

  “Good,” I said. “Now try these, signora. ‘Birth. Girth. Mirth.’”

  I made attempts to smile—something that has never, I’m afraid, come naturally to me. Every Sunday I went to confession and prayed to Jesus (even as I avoided gazing up at him, writhing, denuded, and bloody as he was), arranging my face into a beatific look of piety as I joined the line for Communion.

  Yet Beatrice and Annunziata continued to regard me as little more than a washbasin or an ironing board. When I said “Buona sera, mio zios” as they hurried through the doorway, the Dinellos’ three grown sons grimaced. I never sat on anyone’s knee, or had my hair rumpled regularly, or called the Dinellos “Nonno” and “Nonna”—or received an affectionate swat on the backside and a kiss on the forehead before bed. Everyone still called me Ninella, or simply la ragazza—“the girl”—never Lillian. Except for Rocco. He now called me “Horsey.”

  I could not understand why I could not compel anyone’s love. Surely, with my new name, I had become a new and better person. What was I doing wrong? The problem, I finally decided, lay in my one persistent, secret infidelity.

  Some days after school, instead of heading directly to Mrs. Salucci’s apartment, I found myself hobbling back to Orchard Street. Certainly I knew better—yet the impulse, it was as relentless as an itch. I stood before my family’s old tenement, staring up at the fire escapes, at the cheap curtains pinned over the windows and the laundry laced across the façade, crossing my fingers and willing Mama and Papa and my sisters to materialize. Sometimes I approached the tenants or peddlers stationed nearby. “Please, when my papa comes back, or if you ever see a little blond girl here named Flora, could you tell them that I am at the Dinellos’? Tell them to look for the ices man.” As I said this, a fragile, impossible bubble of hope always swelled within me. Like most abandoned children, I told myself stories, that Papa was simply too busy doing great, magnificent things to return to me just yet. One day he would no doubt reappear in an automobile, dressed in splendid clothing, carrying a paper sack for me, full of chocolates filled with jam.

  The strangers on Orchard Street, however, they regarded me quizzically (I was oblivious to the effect that the tiny silver crucifix Mrs. Dinello had given me for my First Communion, dangling on a slim chain around my neck, might have had). And the whole neighborhood grew increasingly alien in my eyes. I had not learned to read Hebrew letters, after all, only Roman ones. The Jews in their odd clothing from a different part of the Old World began to appear distinctly separate from me, blurry and strange, as if from a long-ago dream.

  Yet somehow I became convinced that Mrs. Salucci knew my dirty secret, my hidden longings. If the Dinellos were ever going to fully accept me, I concluded, I would have to renounce Orchard Street entirely. Otherwise they would think I was disloyal; they would think I was still Malka the Jew. Perhaps I truly believed this and began avoiding the street out of penance. Or perhaps returning there just made me too unbearably sad. No matter: I willed myself to sidestep the Jewish quarter entirely.

  Yet sometimes in the broiling summer, when the grandsons and I climbed upstairs with our thin sheets and cushions to sleep outside on the rooftop, I couldn’t help glancing across the forest of water towers and chimneys several blocks toward the east, to where I thought Mr. Lefkowitz’s old window must be.

  Setting my pillow down on the hot, scratchy tar roof, I imagined Mama in the sanitarium. I imagined Bella scrubbing floors in a grand apartment overlooking a garden in that place called “the Bronx.” Flora, however, I could not bear to imagine at all. Still, I watched the faraway window steadily in the growing darkness, hoping against hope to see a familiar face silhouetted in the gritty panes. But no one ever appeared, and finally, as the night inevitably set in, the light in the distant window always blinked out.

  History. It never seems to have any relevance, darlings, until it happens to you.

  In 1917, because of the war, sugar prices escalated 83 percent. To conserve cane sugar for the troops—and perhaps even to save the ice cream industry—the USDA encouraged ice cream makers to replace up to 50 percent of the sugar they used with corn syrup. Other substitutes—such as powdered eggs and milk solids—were also sanctioned.

  When he taste-tested the first batch of Dinello’s strawberry made with corn syrup and dried egg whites, Mr. Dinello flung his spoon down on the counter with uncharacteristic disgust. “This!” he cried. “She not even tastes like the food!”

  Yet what choice did he have?

  Then, in the spring of 1918, Luigi and Silvio were conscripted into the army, their brides-in-waiting long lost to them in Italy amid the war. Not wanting to be separated from his brothers—and eager to prove his loyalty to the new nation that had brought his family such prosperity—Vincenzo signed up as well. Such a sense of responsibility people had back then! The piers of Lower Manhattan, once teeming with new arrivals, were now teeming with these very same immigrants, reoutfitted in fine olive uniforms by th
e United States War Department, heading back the opposite way.

  Those in our neighborhood who couldn’t serve found jobs with the metalworkers, shipbuilders, machinists, and longshoremen, with tool-and-die casters, in factories turning out boot soles, tin cans, pocketknives, belt buckles, rivets, and rope. Mr. Dinello suddenly found himself an aging man with a few humble ice cream wagons, astronomical bills, and no one to help him sell a new product he despised. “Gelato americano,” he called it derisively. For a few terrible weeks, he returned home early—his boots heavy on the stairs, his white mustache drooping sadly—and sat on the settee with his head in his hands. “Oh, Generosa,” he whispered. “What have I done?”

  So sue me: I sensed an opportunity. One night after Beatrice had dropped off to sleep, I tiptoed into the kitchen in my bedclothes.

  “Ai, Ninella. It is late,” Mr. Dinello said. “What is it?”

  “Please,” I said softly, looking first at him, then Mrs. Dinello. “I want to help you. With the ice cream.”

  Mr. Dinello laughed wearily. “Ai. At midnight?”

  “At the shop. With the boys. I’m strong. I’m good. I can work hard.”

  “Go to sleep, Ninella,” he said.

  Casting around for a final argument, I seized upon what seemed to be an important thing to say, what I was hearing all around me on the stoops and in the schoolyard. “Please,” I said. “I want to do my part for the war.”

  At this, Mr. Dinello gave a mirthless little laugh. Yet when I climbed back into my bed a few minutes later, to my great delight I heard him and Mrs. Dinello arguing.

  “Beatrice and Annunziata are helping now, Salvo. Why not her, too?”

  “She cannot move quickly. She cannot lift things. The machines, they are dangerous.”

  “What is she going to do? Fall into them? She can sit on a stool. Nobody is ordering the lace now. Last week only one dollar she brought in.”

  The next morning, Mr. Dinello said with resignation, “Come, Ninella.” Gripping my hand, he helped me down the steps into the chilly, sooty dawn. A few horse-drawn wagons clattered by; the sky was streaked with colors of sherbet. To be alone with Mr. Dinello—to be included—made me exultant. Just as we arrived at the little factory, a dairy wagon pulled up.