The Ice Cream Queen of Orchard Street: A Novel Page 19

  Besides, Communism had been invented by Russians. Those drunken, murderous Cossacks who had beaten my grandfather to death in his own kitchen. I had no use for any of them.

  Bert, however, he saw it differently. “Only under Communism, Lil,” he insisted, “are the ideals of A-America truly lived. ‘All men are created equal,’ they say. But look at how this country treats women. And the coloreds. In Russia everyone is treated the same n-now. Y-you can’t have social equality without economic equality.”

  Disagree with him though I did, the look of conviction on his face when he spoke—his deep-set eyes pained with compassion—oh, it turned me to liquid, darlings. It made me nod as if hypnotized. Yes. Of course. I’ll accompany you.

  The gathering was in a basement on Delancey Street. Water dripping from an overhead pipe into a metal pan. Everyone shifting around on rickety benches in rain-soaked overcoats, trying to keep warm. The workers in attendance were mostly young—and a passionate bunch, to be sure. A bespectacled young man named Jay greeted us, clutching a notebook. He looked scarcely older than I was, yet he turned out to be an editor of the Daily Worker.

  “Please, do not be impressed. Social class and divisions of labor are merely artificial constructs.” He looked me in the eye fiercely as he shook my hand, which few people did.

  “Is he kidding?” I whispered.

  “Jay is a bit of a character,” Bert conceded, guiding me over to a bench. As soon as we settled in, a prepossessing woman with auburn hair and a swanlike neck sashayed over. “Well, hello there. Do you mind?” Without waiting for a reply, she lowered herself languorously into the other empty place beside Bert, gripping his arm to steady herself. “Oh, do excuse me.” She smiled blazingly. I noticed, however, that she made no attempt to withdraw her hand from his sleeve. I felt my stomach knot.

  Jay bounded to the front of the room. “Good evening, comrades.” He seemed to be under the impression that he was addressing a vast proletarian army in Red Square. “Over a year ago today,” he began, “Celestino Madeiros, already on trial for another murder, confessed. He said, ‘Sacco and Vanzetti are innocent.’ So why, comrades, I ask you tonight, why are they both still to be executed?”

  Jay fixed his eyes on us the way that Father Antonucci sometimes did during a particularly portentous sermon at church. Sacco and Vanzetti. Two anarchists accused of murder in Boston. I had read newspaper articles about them to Bert. Debates about their innocence had flared up at Hunter College and even on Mulberry Street, since the accused were Italians and largely believed to be victims of prejudice. Nonetheless Mrs. Salucci had spit, “Sacco? Vanzetti? Ai, ai! They make an embarrassment out of all of us.” Yet me, I had not followed the case closely.

  “You and I know why they are being condemned to die, comrades,” Jay declared. “You and I know the truth.”

  His pomposity quickly grated on me. I looked around. Beneath the one grimy window, I was surprised to see Rocco. He was leaning against the wall, fiddling with a bottle cap. When he saw me, he rolled his eyes and shot me a sly, conspiratorial look of boredom, then motioned for me to nudge Bert.

  Bert, however, was transfixed. I was gratified to see, at least, that he had shaken off the redhead. He was leaning forward with his elbows on his knees, listening intently. I could smell the rain in his hair, the faint residue of his shaving cream. His broad back spread before me. The temptation to run my hands up and down the flank of him was excruciating.

  “They are guilty of being immigrants. Italians. Radicals,” Jay proclaimed, stabbing the air. “They are guilty of believing in the freedom of speech—”

  So sue me: All I could concentrate on was how Bert and I were breathing the very same oxygen in that damp basement and how our knees, grazing each other in that cramped space, were nearly kissing.

  When Jay finished, everyone began yakking at once. A petition was passed around in support of the doomed anarchists. When it arrived at our place, I saw Bert’s panic. Grabbing the pencil, he practiced the motions in the air above the paper, rehearsing how to form each letter of his name just as I had taught him.

  “You’re doing fine,” I murmured. “First an A. Then L.”

  The redhead next to Bert gave an incredulous little bark. “She’s telling you how to write your own name? Who is this? Your own little schoolmarm?” Her eyes flashed at me with a sort of malicious triumph.

  I could see Bert’s face redden, the pencil slip from his fingers and roll under the bench. He opened his mouth to speak, but all that came out was “N-n-n-n-n-n-n-n—”

  Leaning across his back, I hissed at the woman, “Gai kaken oifen yam!”

  Go shit in the ocean.

  I sat back heavily. Blood pounded in my ears. “You vulgar little meeskite,” she spit. Huffily, she stood up and moved to a seat farther along on the bench. “Pathetic. Stupid. Crazy,” she announced generally to the people around her.

  Bert—I pointed quickly to the petition—give it here. Dejectedly, he surrendered it. His gaze remained fixed on the floor. I slipped the paper into my pocket. Sacco and Vanzetti would simply have to survive without it: I refused to give anyone any proof of Bert’s shame.

  “Come on. Let’s get out of here,” I said. It was a struggle to get to my feet, but to my relief, Bert helped me up and followed.

  Back on Delancey Street, the two of us walked along doggedly, not saying anything, the way you sometimes do after fleeing a particularly dreadful movie or play.

  “‘Schoolmarm,’” I said finally, my shock giving way to the full brunt of our humiliation. “That little puttana. I should’ve boxed her ears.”

  “Oh, Lil, I am so, so sorry. I should have stepped up. I should have said something.” Bert dug his hands deep into his pockets. “But what do you expect from me?” He shrugged miserably. “Me, who can’t even speak. Who can’t even write my own name.”

  Suddenly, he began to chuckle. “Though, you certainly said enough for both of us. ‘Go shit in the ocean,’ Lil?”

  A yeast of embarrassment rose within me. That mouth of mine that caused nothing but tsuris. That redhead had been right. I was vulgar.

  Yet Bert was gazing at me with a sort of enraptured astonishment.

  “Well. Aren’t we a pair?” He laughed. And suddenly, in his eyes, I saw a dawning, like the first flush of morning light creeping over the fields, turning everything to a blaze of gold. Reaching over, he slowly touched my cheek. He touched my cheek, darlings, with his rough mechanic’s thumb, running it gently over the fine seam of my jaw, over to the corner of my lips. Our gazes fused, and it was clear: the two of us, like two sides of a mathematical equation, two halves of a broken coin.

  Bert lifted my chin. He bent toward me. Footsteps came slapping along the pavement behind us. “Hey, what’s the matter?” Rocco caught up, breathless. “The two of you don’t speak English anymore? Half a block I’ve been calling.” He pounded Bert amiably on the back. “Sorry, compadre, but that was just not my ball game. Glad you decided to skedaddle. The only appealing thing in that basement tonight was the ladies.”

  The rain had stopped. The milky smoke of our breaths trailed off in the frigid air. Bert’s damp, glistening shoulder was lightly touching mine. We both grinned at Rocco, but we did not absorb him. Everything between us was frisson now, an unspoken language. Rocco, however, did not seem to notice.

  “And Sacco and Vanzetti?” He shook his head, dancing a little two-step before us. “Those poor dumb bastards don’t stand a chance.”

  That night when everyone was asleep back on Mulberry Street, I pulled the petition from my pocket. Sweat from Bert’s hand had smeared across the bottom right corner of the page, puckering it. Even though he hadn’t even signed it, it was now an artifact of him, and I smoothed it out lovingly, imagining that it was his hair I was stroking, and I relived the sensation of his thumb caressing my cheek and his hand pressing against the small of my back through the scratchy wool of my coat as he guided me out of that basement. Protectively. Proprietar
ily. We were quite a pair. He had said so himself! I tucked the petition into the little Bible that Mrs. Dinello had given me for my confirmation, beside a thin cotton handkerchief Bert had once lent me and a scrap of paper he had absentmindedly doodled on once during our lessons and a pressed dried daffodil left over from a bouquet he had brought over for Mrs. Dinello. Nothing Bert ever touched could I discard. Each item became a sacred keepsake. I knew it was childish, but from time to time, I took them out and ran my hands over them, imagining Bert’s fingers merging with mine through them.

  I did not dare tell the Dinellos, of course. I did not even tell Father Antonucci during confession that I often lied when I said I’d be spending my evenings tutoring at Henry Street. I was terrified that if I said it aloud—that Albert Dunkle had made me his girl—God would smite me and all my good fortune would vanish in a puff of smoke. Perhaps if it went unsaid, what I was doing was not really a sin. Sometimes as I watched the Dinellos in the mornings, struggling to help each other with their buttons and shoes, I felt such guilt, I thought I would split in two. Yet as soon as my thoughts returned to Bert, I was catapulted into happiness.

  One morning, however, Mr. Dinello woke up and simply did not look right. His face had a messy quality to it; his eyes were unfocused. Soon one faculty after another began to shut down like a row of storefronts. He lost the feeling in his left arm. His breathing grew shallow. Most disturbingly, his sense of taste became damaged. Sometimes he’d sample a fresh batch of vanilla or coffee gelato and shake his head. “Troppo aspro, troppo aspro.” Too sour.

  His eyesight began to fail. The rest of us, discreetly we began double-checking the labels on the ice cream pails as he filled them, to make sure the flavors corresponded. We cleared mops and buckets out of his path as he shuffled to the storage room. Sometimes he became agitated, and Mrs. Dinello had trouble reasoning with him, even as she was becoming increasingly frail herself. One afternoon she summoned me.

  “Ninella, come. Bring me the book.” With her unsteady fingers, Mrs. Dinello pointed to each column in her ledgers—to words she had memorized but still could not read phonetically—then to numbers inked across from them on fine blue lines. There were entries for the egg man, I saw, the milkman, fruit and corn-syrup deliveries, bulk orders of gelatin, for the premade ice cream cones the Dinellos were now ordering from New Jersey, for garbage collectors, taxes, neighborhood security.

  “The woman, she must always be in charge of the money, capisce?” she said. “But I am so tired lately, Ninella. And Carmella, she has birdseed for brains. This needs to be your job now.”

  I should have been elated, yet we were all working so hard now it often felt as though we were bailing out a sinking ocean liner with buckets. Cannoletti’s Ice Cream Company, those Sicilian mezza negri with their “Cheap and Sweet” second-rate ice cream, they were luring away more and more of Dinello & Sons’ regular customers. “Yes, yours is better,” the drugstore owner on Mott Street told Vittorio. “But why I pay ten cents more a gallon? With all the toppings, nobody tastes the difference anyway.”

  The only upside was that in all the hubbub, no one noticed me and Bert.

  He took me to the pictures. College with Buster Keaton, Spring Fever with Joan Crawford. The Jazz Singer, uptown at the great Warner’s Theatre. Oh, to hear sound, Al Jolson actually speaking! We attended free art lectures at the Workmen’s Circle. One unseasonably warm evening, Bert met me up at Hunter, and we rode one of the double-decker buses all the way down Fifth Avenue, sitting out on the top, looking at the fancy mansions and the Plaza Hotel and the grand New York Public Library, all lit up like jewelry boxes. Anything we did together—feeding the pigeons, watching the barges sliding by along the East River, listening to a wireless at the counter in a drugstore—felt exultant.

  “I love your hair, how thick and shiny it is,” Bert said one night, nuzzling my neck. “I love how you look like no other girl. So d-dramatic. So serious.”

  Yet one afternoon Rocco pulled me aside in the factory. “Horsey,” he said, his grip firm on my arm. “You have to stop.”

  I gave him a withering look. “What in heaven are you talking about?”

  “Don’t play coy. I know you’re stepping out with Bert Dunkle.”

  “You step out with girls all the time,” I sniffed.

  “That’s different.”

  “You don’t think I deserve a sweetheart?”

  “Be serious.” Rocco glanced around. “Come on. I’m like a brother to you, si?”

  It was the first time he had ever said anything like this. The words hung significantly in the air between us like a heavy piece of fruit.

  “I suppose,” I said, camouflaging my pleasure, shifting my weight.

  He gave me a prompting look. “It’s a brother’s job to look out for his family. Now, Bert may be one of my best buddies. And he’s a good guy. I know that. But I don’t forget for a minute either that he’s a Jew and a Communist. For you to step out with him, after all that Nonno and Nonna have done for you? You will bring shame on them before the entire neighborhood.”

  “What? Why?” I said, though in my heart, of course I knew. Mrs. DiPietro’s granddaughter had eloped with a longshoreman from Killarney—another Catholic, no less—scandalizing all of Mulberry Street. Now, no one but an uncle out in Brooklyn talked to her anymore. I knew how Mrs. Dinello felt about her. Even marrying a Sicilian was a disgrace. If the Dinellos learned I was seeing Bert, they’d be devastated.

  “You don’t think they’d perhaps be relieved?” I suggested, hoping against hope. “They’re convinced no one will ever marry me.”

  “Oh. And you think Bert will?”

  I jerked away. “Don’t talk to me anymore, Rocco.” I looked frantically around for something to clean, for utensils in the sink that could make a horrific clatter.

  “You took our family’s name,” he pressed. “Maybe this suddenly doesn’t mean anything to you, but it does to Nonno and Nonna. Don’t you think they’ve had enough heartache already?”

  “Get away from me.” I hobbled as quickly as I could to the storage pantry. Once I was inside, I reeled around, scanning all the cases of Knox gelatin, the bottles of Durkee peppermint and vanilla extracts, as if a sudden exit might present itself.

  Rocco pursued me. “You can’t marry someone who’s not a Catholic in the Church, you know. What are you going to do, Horsey? Just walk away? Is the Church just some sort of game to you that you pick up when you feel like it, then toss aside? Are all of us just a big joke to you?”

  “No! Stop! I don’t know! I don’t know! Look at me, Rocco!” I gestured to my hideous right leg, twisted inward with its fishlike foot. I ran my hand in a circle around my unlovely face. “What am I supposed to do? Live alone for the rest of my life? Become a nun?”

  “Well?” Though as soon as he said this, the absurdity of the notion became clear even to him, and he shook his head. “Bert will never convert. You know that. The guy doesn’t even believe in religion.”

  “So I have to choose, Rocco, between God and love? Is that what you’re saying?”

  We regarded each other miserably, hemmed in by lurid jars of maraschino cherries, by crates of knobby, shriveled walnuts.

  “Rocco?” His name caught in my throat like a burr. “Please. I didn’t want to feel this way. I prayed not to, Rocco. I’ve lost so many people already. And for the first time—the only time probably in my entire life, some man…”

  I looked at him imploringly. Rocco puffed up his cheeks and exhaled slowly. He began pacing the storage closet.

  “There are far worse guys out there. I know that,” he said finally. “And Nonno and Nonna, they don’t have long for this world.” His gaze pinned me to the wall. “I’m not saying it’s right. It’s not right at all. You be discreet, Horsey, do you understand?”

  “Of course. What do you think I’m going to do? Tell Mrs. Salucci? Call Il Progresso?”

  He snorted. “I’m serious. Not a word. You stay away from the nei
ghborhood with him entirely. He doesn’t set foot on Mulberry Street unless he’s with me.”

  “You’ll cover for us?”

  His eyes were like hooks. “Three conditions. First.” He gripped me by my shoulders as if I were a piece of furniture he was righting. “If I ever hear so much as a whisper that you’re a zoccola I’ll make sure you’re out on the street in a second, you got that? You behave yourself.”

  “What’s number two?”

  “Second, I am going to have a little talk with Bert. If he’s going to be stepping out with you, I want to make sure his intentions are honorable. Nobody disrespects the family. What? Why are you smiling?”

  “I’m not,” I said. “That’s fine.”

  “Three. You stop with the college. Immediately. You work for us full-time now. You pick up the slack.”

  This last condition completely took me aback. “Excuse me?”

  Rocco crossed his arms. “I don’t want Nonno and Nonna spending any more money on you. If word does get around that you’ve been stepping out with an Ammazza Christi Commie, I don’t want them feeling they’ve been taken advantage of any more than they have already.”

  “Even—”

  “You know that Nonno can’t see anymore. And Nonna is frail. But they won’t quit working, and they won’t let us hire anyone from outside either. Meanwhile, those mezza negri keep stealing our ideas and our clients. So what are we supposed to do, Horsey? You come back and work for us like you’re supposed to. If you want to be with this family, then you be with us a hundred percent. Capisce?”

  As far as Bert was concerned, I was amazed at how easily I was willing to give up the Church. Rocco, unfortunately, was right. I could slip off Catholicism like a borrowed coat; it was all ritual. Myths. An elaborate pageantry learned in childhood. But quitting college? That was nearly unthinkable.

  “They won’t think I’m being ungrateful by dropping out?” I proposed. “Your grandmother, you know, she wanted me to go.”

  “So you tell her it’s temporary. You can always go back, can’t you, if things don’t work out with Bert?”