The Ice Cream Queen of Orchard Street: A Novel Page 18

  “All the ice cream we can eat. That’s the deal you made with her husband.” She poked him again. “So that’s the one we’re keeping.” She looked at me. “Think you can salvage what you’ve got in there?”

  “I’m not sure,” I said. “Once it turns at all soupy, it’s ruined. I need to move quickly.”

  She looked at my leg. “Well, Donald and I are just sitting here,” she said gamely. “Put us to work.” Yet as she said this, I noticed, her gaze swept away from me and Donald and settled on Bert, kneeling before the generator in the sunshine.

  * * *

  Albert Jacob Dunkle was born the youngest son of a prosperous dry-goods merchant in Vienna. When his father, Heinrich Dunkle, wasn’t traveling to Antwerp or Hamburg to haggle over linen and silk, he was pulling out his gold pocketwatch and timing his four sons as they performed calisthenics in the back garden in their underwear. Bert’s mother had died when Bert was three. Every morning Bert’s stepmother, Ida, yanked him out of bed to scrub his face and fingernails with ice water. She refused to let him go to the toilet until he had made his bed, dressed himself, and polished his shoes to her satisfaction. Fumbling and often terrified, little four-year-old Bert usually failed. He wet himself, and she beat him.

  He began to stutter. At school, oh, how he yearned to understand! Squeezing his eyes shut, he would attempt to commit the alphabet to memory, yet the shapes somehow always differed on the pages from the way he’d conceived of them in his mind. Letters in books undulated and cleaved before his eyes, numbers do-si-do’d in their columns. All around him in the classroom, the other boys’ hands shot up confidently. Everyone else seemed able to decode the hieroglyphics written on the chalkboard. Sometimes Bert tried to speak, yet phrases stuck and unraveled in his mouth. “P-p-p-p-p-p-p-leeease” was often all he could manage. His teachers assumed that he was simply not trying. Calling him lazy and stupid, they lashed his knuckles with their rulers. The headmaster decided that Bert’s failings likely stemmed from his being “latently” left-handed. He ordered Bert’s left hand to be tied behind his back throughout the school day, forcing him to do everything using only his right.

  Heinrich Dunkle had no patience for his youngest son’s constant stammering and befuddlement, for his failing grades, for his inability to read. There was a chronic glassiness in Bert’s eyes—likely due to being uncomprehending, fearful, and ignored each day. Yet Heinrich mistook it for daydreaming. He had a business to run. A spoiled, careless child was nothing he had time for. Bert’s extraordinary handsomeness likely did not help either. All across Vienna, women stopped in the streets to fuss over young Bert, touching their gloved hands adoringly to his florid cheeks and shaking their heads in blushing admiration. What a beautiful boy, they marveled in German. Such thick, honeyed curls. Such long eyelashes. Such a perfect face. Oh, what a heartbreaker this one will become.

  Every father resents being upstaged by his son. “Look at you,” Heinrich spit. “Utterly useless.”

  That a Jewish boy would forgo his bar mitzvah was inconceivable. Yet by age twelve Bert still could not get through a simple portion of the Torah. Hebrew, read right to left, was even more impossible to grasp than German. “Albert, he has a good heart,” the rabbi told Heinrich sadly, “but it’s likely the Messiah will arrive before this child ever learns Hebrew.” Bert got through the ceremony only by chanting his parashah phonetically in tandem with the rabbi.

  After the service, when friends and family returned to the Dunkles’ town house on Fabergasse to celebrate with the customary sweet wine and cake, Heinrich Dunkle took Bert into the grand firelit library, locked the door with its elegant brass key, and backhanded him across the face. “What kind of a man are you?” he bellowed. “What kind of man is so lazy and insolent that he lets the rabbi be a bar mitzvah for him?

  “You are an embarrassment,” he said. “You cannot read, you cannot add. What do you think? You are too handsome to work?”

  “B-b-b—” Bert stammered.

  “Only a woman can get by on good looks, and then she is a prostitute. A Jewish man, he needs brains to survive. He needs chutzpah, he needs ingenuity. Otherwise he is finished in this world. Do you understand?”

  “B-b-b—” Bert said again.

  “What on earth is the matter with you?” Heinrich Dunkle hissed. “You can’t even speak.”

  It had been assumed, of course, that, like his brothers, Bert would one day take up Heinrich’s import business. Yet after the disastrous bar mitzvah, Heinrich decided that his youngest son should be sent to America instead. Manual labor in a new world full of ruffians, without any ladies patting his head and proffering him sweets from their purses; certainly, this was what the boy needed. This would teach him to focus and work. Heinrich had an old friend, Arnold Shackter, who had immigrated to New York, where he ran a haberdashery on Rivington Street. Arnold assured Heinrich that Bert could work as a stock boy for him. In the spring of 1914, just as Gavrilo Princip and the Black Hand were finalizing their plans in Serbia, Albert Jacob Dunkle was put aboard a train bound from Vienna to the port of Antwerp. He carried with him two sets of clothing, a new pair of leather suspenders, and, tucked into the Torah that he still could not read, a photograph of his parents on their wedding day. Forty American dollars were stitched into the lining of his coat, and his housekeeper had slipped him three butter cookies wrapped in a linen napkin. That was it. He was just thirteen years old.

  Chapter 7

  I explained to the Dinellos, of course, that Bert was merely one of several students I’d begun to tutor privately each week. As a source of extra income, nothing more. Yet his presence at their kitchen table—his earnest brow furrowed in concentration over his primer, the gold light playing off the mantels of his cheekbones—made me feel as if I were filled with whipped cream. When I earned enough extra pocket money, the first thing I did was purchase a new dress—ink-blue georgette with a dropped waist, I remember, and a silk rose appliquéd to the collar. Every time Bert came over for a lesson, I just happened to wear it.

  Perhaps because he had a questioning, childlike quality that made him look younger than his twenty-five years. Perhaps because whenever he spoke, his careful enunciation made him sound thoughtful. Or perhaps because he was so inordinately masculine, so handsome—the Dinellos took to Bert. That he was a Jew, that he “had no people,” might have ruffled them more in regard to me. However, what they saw developing was a friendship between Rocco and Bert. Nothing else.

  The very first time Bert arrived in the doorway of our kitchen for his lesson, an instant camaraderie sprang up between him and Rocco. As two parentless young men, Rocco and Bert seemed to recognize something in each other’s anxious eyes and preemptive bluster, in each other’s eagerness to make a joke and have a good time and endear themselves to the world. They quickly teamed up as two young bachelors, talking of sports, eyeing the ladies, colluding about “deals.” After I finished my tutoring sessions with Bert, I sat forlornly by the window, watching him and Rocco head off down the street together for their nights on the town.

  Rocco was now twenty-one. His older brothers had both married and were sharing an apartment on Mott Street. On the streets of Little Italy, Rocco had developed a reputation as an enterprising young man. He had an easy, loose-limbed walk and a jaunty grin that seemed to split his narrow face in two. “Ai, paesano,” he greeted men he encountered, slapping them on the back. His laugh, like a machine gun—“Yah-ha-ha-ha-ha”—could be heard down the block. He was gangly, and his oil-black hair still never stayed in place, yet whenever he sauntered into a room, he managed to fill it.

  Rocco loved to duck into speakeasies after work. He loved to buy a round of drinks and hold forth telling stories that grew more outrageous and bawdier as the evening wore on. Bert, always shy at first, was happy to laugh appreciatively and be shepherded into basements and card games by someone who could make the smoky crowds part before him and do the clever talking. His great looks always guaranteed that the women
came flocking in a cloud of perfume. “He is like a flower to the bees,” Rocco teased. “You should see him with the ladies, Horsey.”

  Every time Rocco called me this in front of Bert, it felt like the kick of a hoof.

  “Bert, you stay for dinner, si?” Mrs. Dinello said whenever he came around. “You don’t eat enough. A handsome young man like you needs his strength.”

  “Thank you, s-signora.” The cuffs of his jacket were frayed, yet he never arrived without a small bag of dried apricots or a clutch of daisies for her. So good-looking and well mannered: Of course he really had to be Italian, Mrs. Salucci declared. As word got around, girls in the buildings suddenly found it incumbent upon themselves to drop by the Dinellos’ unannounced whenever Bert was visiting, bearing plates of sfogliatelli that they just “happened” to have made that morning. Even though, as a Jew, Bert was forbidden fruit—or perhaps precisely because of this—they wanted a glimpse. One evening Lisa and Theresa Vitacello, two girls who had moved into one of the top-floor apartments across from Mrs. Salucci (and of whom she disapproved even more than me—zoccola she called them), dared to stop by on their way out to a nightclub. Dressed in a fringed, jet-beaded frock and clouds of marabou feathers, Lisa blithely perched on Bert’s lap without a second thought, waving a long black cigarette holder and tossing her head like a Thoroughbred. “My, my,” she said. “Who do we have here?”

  I had never seen Mrs. Dinello pick up a broom and shoo someone out of her apartment before. Yet amid the melee of “Out, outs” and “Well, I nevers” and the clatter of cheap high heels on the metal stairs, Bert, I couldn’t help noticing, looked delighted. Whenever women fluttered around him, his face lit up like Christmas.

  Each time he and Rocco strode off together into the night after his lessons with me, I felt a horrible pang.

  My other students, I taught them from my old school primers. But Bert’s stammer, his inability to read—they belied the fact that he was at least as curious about the world as I was. “How does a continuous-batch freezer work?” he wanted to know. This Trotsky everyone was talking about, how did he differ from Engels? Could I explain Sigmund Freud to him? What about Nikola Tesla? Why were the coloreds in the United States so reviled when they had done nothing wrong? The injustices of the world, he seemed to take them personally.

  He loved the moving pictures, Bert. He loved all sorts of music. He loved baseball, Babe Ruth and the Yankees in particular. And Charles Lindbergh and that airplane of his. Bert loved quietly taking apart machines, seeing how they worked. If left to his own devices and allowed to focus solely on one task uninterrupted, he could dismantle and reassemble a bicycle, a clock, a coffee grinder. He only got into trouble if he was required to do more than one thing at a time, especially under pressure. Then he became, by his own admission, fartootst. Tangled up, malfunctioning. Though he still roomed at Mr. Shackter’s, he now worked at one of the new garages that had opened on Houston Street. He could work there for hours beneath a car, unhurried, focused, learning in his own particular way.

  To me he brought books he borrowed from the library and begged me to read them to him—Emma Goldman’s My Disillusionment in Russia, a brand-new translation of Martin Buber’s I and Thou, novels by John Dos Passos, Fitzgerald’s The Beautiful and Damned. He brought me political pamphlets, playbills, sports pages, travel brochures for ocean liners—anything, really, that came across his path and intrigued him.

  “Oh, L-Lil, you have a beautiful speaking voice,” he said. “You understand so much. And you are s-so patient with me. Before this”—he motioned to the jumble of books and pamphlets arrayed across the table—“it—it felt like I was just living behind a th-thick wall of glass all the time.”

  Albert Dunkle. Albert Dunkle. His smell, like cut grass and fresh-baked bread. The muscular cords of his neck peeking through his loosened collar. Albert Dunkle. His name began to play in my mind like an aria. I heard his voice in the songs on the radio; I saw his face reflected in the freezers at the factory. As soon as I heard his knock on the Dinellos’ door in the evenings, a frenzy shot through me. He’d walk in with a paper bag of toasted almonds held as gently as a dove in his solid, tapered left hand. The corners of his eyes crinkled as he smiled. The wingspan of his shoulders spread as he pulled off his overcoat. Oh, darlings, it was like having a seizure. Once I nearly dropped the kettle. I stood in the middle of the kitchen, trying to keep my legs from trembling as I wiped down the table. It took all my strength to inhale and say blithely, “Oh. Hello there, Albert. You’re late.”

  So extravagant were the moods he set off in me—the incessant ache—that I believed I’d become possessed. I would’ve wriggled out of my skin and abandoned it in the street like a snake’s if I could have. My hands would stray over my own body at night; I’d grip and twist my pillow in exquisite agony. Please. Don’t be so shocked. Every new generation thinks they’re the only ones in history ever to experience desire.

  Albert Dunkle, Albert Dunkle. As soon as I slid into the polished pew on Sundays, I fell to my knees. Mrs. Dinello, she prayed beside me, of course, for her dead sons and niece and grandchild and daughter-in-law. But me? Instead of praying that I would find Mama and Papa and my sisters again one day, I now begged, simply, Please, Lord. Make it stop. Or: Please, Lord. Make Albert Dunkle love me. I could not decide which I craved more. And still I could not look up at the statue of Jesus. Yet now it was because his bare, writhing, muscular torso—I imagined it was Bert’s.

  After confession I could never say enough Hail Marys and Our Fathers.

  I lied to my professor. I told him I needed to drop his poetry class so that I could work at my family’s ice cream parlor in the afternoons. Then I lied to Bert. “The only time I can tutor you is after lunch,” I said. For a moment I felt terribly guilty. Yet for two glorious hours a week, I managed to get him all to myself. No neighbors rapping on the door with baskets of rolls. No Rocco yah-ha-ha-ing. Just Bert and I, hunched over books, our heads bowed together as if in prayer. His voice as it tripped on the words. Our fingers running over the printed letters in tandem. Whenever I explained something to him, he blinked at me with such astonishment! My insides felt like an aviary.

  Yet one week Bert arrived at the apartment breathless, carrying a stage script of all things. He’d met a showgirl from the Yiddish theater, he announced. “Oh, L-Lil, you should have s-seen her! Such a c-creature as I have never seen. She c-could make me fall to my kn-knees.”

  Her name was Frieda, he thought. “Oh, I am so fartootst with names,” he said laughingly. But this Frieda, she had wrapped her smooth arms around him and whispered softly in his ear with her lipsticked mouth that he was so handsome, surely he should appear onstage with her. It was crazy, he confessed to me, but he wanted to try it. He had to! Oh, how he loved vaudeville! And this girl! Could I help him memorize a short monologue? Frieda had arranged for him to audition for a small production on Second Avenue of the play Tevye the Milkman.

  What could I do? The idea of helping him win the heart of another woman, of him running off to join the theater, of course it was unbearable to me. Yet so was the thought of him being humiliated. Or heartbroken. Indeed, Bert’s pain, to me, the prospect of it seemed worse than my own. And surely if I did not help him, Bert would find someone else who would.

  I looked down. The scars on my leg were still visible through my pearl gray stockings. Angry red crosshatches.

  “If you can’t spit the lines out, why not try singing them,” I suggested miserably.

  “Like a song?”

  “Mm-hm.”

  Slowly, I read him each line. Slowly, he sang them back to me. The words came out perfectly this way. “Lil!” he cried. “That’s a miracle!” I tried to smile gamely, though I felt so utterly wretched, I thought my very sinews and bones would disintegrate.

  Together we rehearsed like this, again and again, until he knew his lines by heart.

  “You are a wonderful teacher,” he said. “I c-cannot thank you enou
gh.”

  The morning of his audition, as I took the subway up to Hunter, all I could think of was Bert kissing this Frieda, running his hand along the smooth, uninterrupted plain of her legs, the two of them starring in the Yiddish theater on Second Avenue, their names side by side on a marquee. My stomach hurt so badly that at one point, I believed I would faint.

  Yet he did not pass the audition. The malicious jubilation I felt filled me with both guilt and relief. With all those onlookers in the drafty theater, shrouded in the darkness beyond the footlights, and Frieda observing him coolly beside her director, oh, Bert said somberly, as soon as he stood up before them, he just started to stutter and stutter. “F-finally I did manage to start singing the l-lines instead, just like you told me,” he said. “And they all started to l-laugh, of course. I laughed with them, Lil. Wh-what else could I do? I t-told them, ‘Look, I’m a terrible actor, but if you’re ever c-casting for a musical comedy—’”

  He smiled haplessly. “I tried, though, yes? And I’d have n-never believed that I could—”

  Suddenly he turned to me. “Next Thursday evening. Some p-people I know, from the neighborhood. They’re having a political meeting. I’d like to s-speak at it, if I can. I never have before. Do you think you could come with me, Lil?”

  What little I knew about Communism I did not care for at all. So sue me: I have never found the faceless masses terribly compelling. And the idea that the Dinellos could build their little ice cream factory into a great success only to have it taken over by “the proletariat”? This was repellant to me. I dreamed of being rich myself one day, I informed Bert. What was America if not the great promise of freedom and wealth? Certainly nobody I knew had immigrated here to share. Nobody I knew was hoping to hand over the fruits of their labors to every goddamn nudnik in the tenement.