The Ice Cream Queen of Orchard Street Page 24

After we closed up for the evening, I poured all the change from our cash register into a milk pail. Scooping up handfuls of coins, I let the copper and nickel rain through my fingers in a triumphant, metallic clatter. Giggling like a child, I pressed two dimes to my forehead and let them stick to my damp skin like jewelry. “Bert! Look!” If those Dinellos could see me now. And Mama, I thought. Married. To a dashing, inventive man no less. With our very own ice cream business. And two patents pending. Me. The useless little meeskite with the limp.

  Before we went to sleep, I tiptoed over to the curtain that separated our bed from the storefront and peeked like a naughty, excited child at my own darkened shop—our shop—with its cold cabinet and the little bell over the door and the brand-new drive-up window Bert had cut into the side wall so we could serve customers directly in their cars. The fresh paint filling the air with a chemical tang. I ran my hands over the cool metal chassis of Bert’s soft ice cream machine just as I had the continuous-batch freezer at the Dinellos’. I opened the icebox and peeked at the little white ceramic dish of butter cooling inside, and the sliced chicken left over from supper: Food to spare, we had! And on the bottom shelf? A dozen milk bottles filled with our “secret” ice cream formula. Six brown, six white, lined up like rows of toy soldiers.

  A delicate sea breeze washed through the rooms. For the first time in my life, I slept in a real bed in perfect quiet and solitude. No neighbors or rude, galumphing boarders, no relentless street noise and clatter. Why, for the first time in my life, I even had a private toilet!

  Yet I suppose that such peace, it never lasts for long.

  Drawing me to him one night, cupping my breasts beneath my nightgown, Bert whispered, “Lil? What do you think? Should we finally make a baby?”

  I twisted around to face him. We were so close it felt as if our eyelashes were touching. Blinking rapidly, I ran my finger along the fine mantel of his cheek. “A baby?” I said. I arranged my face into my most adoring and supplicating smile, but my heart, darlings, grew instantly sick. For years I had been using the pessary I had gotten at the Mother’s Clinic after our wedding. A baby? How on earth could I handle a baby? Why, a pregnancy alone could tear you to pieces. Babies split you open like a fruit, sent your innards gushing out of you. My mother had nearly bled to death giving birth to me. As a child in Vishnev, I had seen for myself the muddy stains burned into the mattress. And Mr. Lefkowitz’s wife, she had died in childbirth. Plenty did. It was not uncommon then. And even if you survived bearing it, a baby could suck all the life out of you; every day on Mulberry Street, I saw women decimated with exhaustion and worry, their shoulders, faces, and bosoms collapsing from the never-ending burdens of diapers and colic and wailing and need. Children pummeled you, wore you out like fabric. Many of the women on the Lower East Side—unless they were Catholics—they were as relieved and grateful for a pessary as I was. Besides, how could I possibly run our business with both a child and my leg? I was not like other women, after all. Some days, when my joints ached, I needed Bert’s help simply to fasten my shoes.

  Delicately, Bert’s fingertips traced my hip bones, then slowly made their way down. “Wouldn’t it be so nice to have a little one?” he whispered. He placed his hand between my legs. “Did you take care already?”

  A husband, he could divorce his wife for refusing him children. Had I not gotten down on my knees before the altar at the Most Precious Blood Church and prayed for Bert Dunkle to love me? What sort of a monster was I? Why did I not desire what every woman was born and destined to do? Bringing Bert’s palm to my lips, I kissed it miserably. “No,” I lied. God forgive me, I thought. “I didn’t put my pessary in.”

  But the worst, it was yet to come. In the spring of 1937, Bert and I drove to the city for an appointment at the Niff-Tee Arctic Freezer Company. Bert’s patented Prest-O Soft Serve ice cream machine was wondrous, yet too expensive to manufacture ourselves. And so we’d brokered a deal.

  While the president of Niff-Tee ushered Bert into his office, I was shown to a seat on the edge of the sales floor and handed an old copy of Collier’s. All around me were posters for the newest models of Niff-Tee Arctic ice cream freezers. They looked like fantastical rocket ships. Chrome submarines. Weaponry.

  When you are crippled, nobody engages you in chitchat, darlings. Nobody says, “Nice weather we’re having,” or “How about those Yankees?” Their eyes flit over your twisted leg, your mangled arm, your wheelchair. Then they stop seeing you at all. The salesmen at Niff-Tee went about their business without so much as a nod. One of them, seated directly in front of me, lit up a cigarette and sorted through a stack of catalogs as if I weren’t even three feet away.

  “You could be polite and offer me a cigarette,” I said loudly. “It’s only my leg that’s damaged, you know. Not my brain or my personality.”

  His face reddened. “Oh, I’m so sorry,” he said awkwardly. “I simply didn’t see you there, Miss—”

  “Missus. Dunkle. My husband is meeting with your boss.”

  “Oh! I’m so sorry. Forgive me.” Scrambling to his feet, he came around his desk and proffered a slim brass cigarette case.

  “No. No, thank you.” I waved him away. “I don’t smoke. It ruins your taste buds.”

  “Well.” He forced a smile. “If your husband is considering purchasing a Niff-Tee Arctic freezer, I can tell you that they are top of the line. No doubt about it. Sold five of them already this week alone. Two to Schrafft’s, one to Muldoon’s, two to Candie. So you’re in good company.”

  I suddenly felt as if I’d been slapped. “Excuse me?” I said. “Candie?”

  “Over on Flushing Avenue?”

  “Oh, no. No,” I said. “The Candie Ice Cream Company went out of business three or four years ago.”

  “Where did you hear that?” The salesman waved away a milky plume of smoke and stared after a secretary, her backside twitching as she rolled a file cart past his desk. “They’ve been one of our steadiest customers for ages.”

  When we got to the address that the salesman had scribbled out for me, I ordered Bert to stop. Sitting on a wide lot right there on the waterfront was a large brick loaf of a building with CANDIE ICE CREAM CO. painted across the top in red block letters. Its trademark peppermint swirl seemed to spin like a pinwheel. Rows of casement windows glinted in the sun. Gulls from the river circled lazily above it in a halo. Bert and I sat side by side in our little dented truck, staring up at it. The Candie Company’s factory had the heft and monumentality of an institution. As if in response to our presence, one of the metal garage doors rumbled up just then and a large white refrigerator truck thundered past, kicking up dust, the peppermint-swirl logo bright on its side.

  “Well.” Bert let out a long, hapless breath. His hands were limp at his sides. “I guess they’ve done okay for themselves after all.”

  Me, I felt as if I’d been kicked. The Dinellos’ physical presence was palpable; it was as if their greedy heartbeats inside were radiating out through the building and synchronizing with my own, their breath as warm and moist and audible as Rocco’s had been those nights when he’d curled up beside me and cried as a boy. Beyond the frosted panes, I imagined Vittorio sitting smugly behind his desk in his shirtsleeves and a pin-striped vest, Rocco grinning beside him, mentholated with aftershave, telling his crude jokes, the two of them passing around a box of cigars to the Cannolettis in their slick, manly, thuggish way.

  Bert turned to me. “Do you ever miss them?”

  “What?” The violence of my cry surprised us both. “How can you even ask that?”

  He shrugged. “They were your brothers.” He added, “In a way.”

  Twisting the key in the ignition, he started the engine.

  As Bert steered the Ford down Sunrise Highway that afternoon—it was now clogged with cars and bulldozers and dump trucks belching exhaust fumes—I stared out the window and felt my wrath and humiliation spread over the landscape like tentacles. How naïve and foolish I had been! Takin
g the word of a single soda jerk on Sixth Avenue. All this time Bert and I had been crisscrossing the country, breaking our backs, barely getting by, living on ice cream dregs, and serving up two flavors in a roadside shack in a backwater, the Dinellos and the Cannolettis had been thriving in Brooklyn. Building an empire, it seemed.

  One day Bert and I, why, we would run their horrid Candie Ice Cream Company right into the ground, I vowed. Suddenly I could not imagine ever wanting anything else but this: our triumph, their utter destruction.

  The problem, however, was how. Bellmore was a town of less than a hundred. We had only a few local boys willing to work the drive-up window in the summer. Most evenings, Bert and I, we were so exhausted, we just flopped into the Corwins’ old armchairs and drank a cocktail and ate bread and butter for dinner, listening to the radio in a stupor.

  I stared miserably out at the highway. After crossing the Triborough, our truck had come to a standstill. Dozens of workers to one side of us were slathering molten tar over lanes of gravel with long-handled brooms. Bert should have gone into construction instead, I thought. Building bridges and parkways: That was where all the money was now.

  Then it dawned on me.

  Roads.

  In a few years, according to the newspapers, Long Island would be striated with highways. The government, it had big plans. Well, what better place to sell ice cream than on routes leading directly to the beaches? The smartest pushcart peddlers on the Lower East Side had always gotten to Orchard Street before dawn—to claim the best locations for themselves before anyone else snapped them up. Bert and I, why, we could do the same.

  If we could secure plots of land along the parkways before they were even completed, we could put a Dunkle’s Famous Soft Ice Cream stand on every major road on Long Island. And we would not have to run all these shops ourselves. Just as Mr. Dinello had done with his Italian ices as a padrone, we could have other people sell our product for us. “Dunkle’s,” after all, was becoming synonymous with “soft ice cream” in our part of Long Island. It was popular. And unique.

  We could “license” other people to sell Dunkle’s from stands bearing our name. Since it had already proved so arresting, each of these stands could sport our distinctive look—with three “flavor” stripes. Each store owner would buy Bert’s exclusive, patented Prest-O Soft Serve ice cream freezer and our secret ice cream formula directly from us. Making the ice cream would be so easy for them—they would never have to fuss with gathering or mixing any ingredients themselves—and the quality of our ice cream would be uniform and ensured. No matter where they stopped, Dunkle’s customers would always get the same, delicious-tasting soft ice cream. And Bert and I, of course, would make a profit on every machine and every bottle of ice cream mix sold. It was a win-win proposition for everyone. And with all the immigrants scrambling to flee the turmoil in Europe right now? Surely they would jump at a chance to own their own American ice cream stand. Perhaps Bert could meet them himself, right off the boat.

  No one, darlings, had ever thought of franchising like this before.

  I finally saw how we could trump the Dinellos. The more ice cream stores that were a part of our system, using our patented machines and our patented recipes—the fewer venues there would be for the Candie Company to sell to. Our ice cream could spread across the entire state of New York simply by following the roads. One day Rocco, Pasquale, and Vittorio would go for a drive and all they would see along every parkway, at every junction, on every billboard would be DUNKLE’S, DUNKLE’S, DUNKLE’S. Our name. Our ice cream. Our inventions. We would be everywhere.

  Terrible things were happening in the world by then, of course. So sue me: I became too preoccupied to pay much attention. While Hitler was banning Jews from universities and swimming pools and Mussolini was ranting about how the proletariat “deserved a bath of blood,” I sat up nights wondering, How could we secure a bank loan to buy plots of land along a roadway that had yet to be built? How could we entice people to become Dunkle’s owners?

  The desire for vengeance, darlings, it is like venom in your bloodstream. One drop can quickly take over your entire being. Yet while I dreamed and strategized and plotted tirelessly against the Dinellos, Bert seemed strangely listless. His thoughts, it turned out, were elsewhere, too.

  “Oh, Lil,” he said one evening, staring down into his glass of rye, “do you ever think that maybe, I should be in Andalusia?”

  “Excuse me?”

  “Americans are going over, you know.”

  I gave a sour, hiccuppy laugh. “Are you being a wisenheimer? You’re thirty-six years old. You’re an ice cream man. What are you going to do? Hurl sundaes at Franco?”

  “You read Robeson’s speech. ‘The artist must elect to fight for freedom or slavery.’ Well, why not us, too? I’m still strong. How can we stand by in the face of fascism?”

  I stared at my husband; his face was suddenly like one of those Picassos with two eyes on one side of the nose, the mouths bizarrely askew. Sometimes, it seemed as if Bert had dropped into his armchair straight through the roof. His alienness arrived like a meteor. I had not understood this about marriage: how your spouse could invert with a shifting of light and present to you as a complete stranger. Just like that.

  “Stop talking crazy,” I said. “You want to fight somebody else’s war halfway around the world?”

  “Not alone, of course, doll. With you.” But as soon as he said this, we both looked at my right foot, soaking in Epsom salts.

  I set my drink down. “For God’s sake, Bert. We have a business. Two patents pending.”

  Bert looked about the little room in distress, as if he hoped some ready-made answer might present itself to him. He picked up his drink, then set it back down, then scooted his chair closer to mine and took up my hands in his.

  “You remember Jay, from the Daily Worker? When I was in the city getting supplies last week, I heard that he’s in Barcelona, training with the troops. Yet what I am doing? Just sitting here like some shmendrik serving ice cream.”

  A shiver ran through me.

  “You’re not a shmendrik,” I said, as gently as I could. Reaching up, I brushed back the forelock of his hair. “All this nonsense going on—Franco, Hitler, Schmitler. You think we can control that? The best we can hope to do is survive, Bert. And we’re doing that. Without anyone’s help. And we’re building a business. A business you love, that makes people happy. This is something to be proud of. We can’t just pack our valises and go fight somebody else’s civil war.”

  “No, no, you’re right, doll.” Bert shook his head as if to dislodge the thought. He squeezed my hand. “Of course not.”

  Yet a few weeks later, the postman appeared at our door.

  “Got a package for your husband, Mrs. Dunkle,” he said. When I unlaced the twine, there, rolled in plain brown paper, was the latest issue of the Daily Worker. And a few days after that, an airmail letter followed. From Jay. In Spain.

  My grandson thinks that because I’ve contributed to President Reagan’s reelection campaign, I am some sort of right-wing lunatic. “‘Ronald Wilson Reagan’ is just an anagram for ‘Insane Anglo Warlord,’ Grandma,” he says. “‘Trickle-down economics’ is just a handout for rich people.”

  “Oh, really? I’ve got news for you, tateleh. We are rich people,” I say. “Reagan hates taxes, hates the Soviets, and likes Israel. So what’s not to love?”

  “I can’t believe you’re not even pro-choice,” Jason says peevishly. “I mean, like, what if I ever get a girl pregnant by accident?”

  I slap him playfully on the knee. “Then hurray for me. I’ll be a great-grandmother!”

  Yet the truth of it is, darlings, I donate to Planned Parenthood and the National Abortion Rights Action League, as well as to the Republican National Committee, thank you very much. Find a politician who thinks exactly the way you do, I tell Jason, and you might as well chop your head off right then and there—because it means you don’t have a single origin
al thought left in it.

  I am all for women planning their pregnancies. Certainly, if you are in the ice cream industry, you want to avoid having a baby anytime during the high season between April and September. Ideally, you want to conceive around March, give birth around Christmas.

  And if you can throw away your pessary and manage to get pregnant just when your husband is thinking of joining the Lincoln Brigade?

  Well then.

  So much the better.

  The night after I burned Jay’s letter, my hands became vines, climbing over the muscular wall of Bert’s back, creeping over the smooth plates of his chest, sliding along the fine bones of his hips, as hard and sculpted as handles. Slowly, I guided him toward me and found his mouth hungrily with mine. As he pushed up my nightgown, my heart thumped frantically—not from excitement, but from secrecy. And terror. And dread.

  Yet I whispered hotly in his ear, “Oh. Bert.”

  I had scores to settle. And franchises to build. Something simply had to be done.

  Chapter 9

  Imagine a single regiment of beleaguered men, landing on a tiny island in the middle of the South Pacific. As they stumble onto an empty white scythe of beach, a lone Japanese warplane rips overhead. Yet just as quickly it disappears. The horizon seems to absorb it. Slowly, the U.S. soldiers of the 81st Infantry realize they are alone. Bits of coral crunch beneath them as they trudge up the shore trying to figure out exactly where they are.

  When their military surveyors arrive two days later, rowing across a wide turquoise lagoon protected by miles of reef, they realize they have struck gold.

  The Japanese have believed that the sheer size of the Pacific will hobble America’s war efforts; the distances to refuel are simply too cumbersome. Yet the islet of Ulithi is perfectly situated between Hawaii, Japan, and the Philippines in a tiny archipelago. Its volcanic crags barely poke above the ocean. And the Japanese have relinquished it.