The Ice Cream Queen of Orchard Street Page 26

  Finally he released me. I wobbled backward. “Uh-uh. Wait. Not so fast.” Pulling me toward him again, he planted a fat, wet kiss on each of my cheeks. “That’s from the family.” I jerked my head, and he got me on the jaw by my ear.

  “Ywhahahaha.” He laughed his old staccato laugh and shook his head. “Still the same old Horsey, I see.”

  Righting the front of my dress, I felt myself reddening. “Please, Rocco.”

  He threw up his hands in mock contrition. “Oh, excuse me,” he chortled to the room.

  “Lillian. I forgot. She doesn’t like being called Horsey. She’s touchy, this one, eh? Be careful, or she’s likely to haul off and break all your windows. Ain’t that right, Bert?”

  Yet my husband had been roped into shaking hands with a representative from Louis Sherry. Rocco slapped his meaty hand on the nape of my neck and kneaded it. “Ah. I’m just playing here. Just breaking the ice. All in good fun, right?”

  Taking a step back, he regarded me as if I were a shipment of goods.

  “Well, you’re looking no worse for the wear and tear. So where you living these days? You ever get back to the old neighborhood?”

  “Just a few blocks from here.” I motioned with my chin. I felt almost whiplashed. “Over on Forty-Ninth Avenue. So I can walk to work.” My eyes fixed on Rocco’s face. I could see the remnants of the boy I’d once known darting just beneath the surface like a silvery fish. Rocco and I were here in my Hunters Point factory all right, yet at the very same instant we were standing on tiptoe in the corner of the schoolyard tossing pebbles through the chain-link fence. Poking each other on the dusty velvet settee in his grandmother’s parlor on Easter Sunday. Making paper fans in the kitchen of Dinello & Sons and scrunching them between our lips and our noses like mustaches and giggling.

  “Really? People live over here? I thought it was all industrial.” Leaning back on his heels, Rocco glanced around the office. “We’re out in Dyker Heights ourselves. Big house, of course. Very swanky. Lots of room for the kids. Four sons, I’ve got. A complete set. My oldest, Sal? Oh, Horsey, you should see this kid with a baseball. I’m telling you. He’s going to be the next Babe Ruth. Looks just like my pop, too. The spitting image.” He blinked down at his shoes. “May he rest in peace.”

  I thought of Luigi all those years ago, with his heavy boots and his mud-caked pickax. A shudder ran through me like a wire. Rocco. Perhaps we were lucky. We had both been given second chances.

  “You?” he said. “You got kids?”

  “Just one.” We were standing near my desk. I handed him the framed photograph of Isaac. “He just turned four. He wants to be a railroad conductor, he tells me.”

  “Mm. Looks like you.” Rocco nodded. Compared to his, my family suddenly seemed paltry. Rocco set the picture back down and sauntered over to the window overlooking the production floor. He rapped on the glass with his knuckles as if testing its strength. From below came the rapid-fire thug-thug-thug of the mixers and the clack-clack-clack of the conveyor belt, muted through the glass. Rocco watched as our bottling machine filled each quart with ice cream formula, then capped it with a twist and slapped a label on it before shuttling it down the belt.

  “Impressive. Very impressive indeed. I see you’ve done quite well for yourselves,” he said, turning. “Looks like we taught you well, eh?”

  “Excuse me?”

  Rocco grinned, yet only the corners of his mouth went up; his eyes remained narrow and pinned on me. “Looks like we ended up doing you one big fat favor, capisce?”

  Orson Maytree clinked his water glass with a spoon. “Gentlemen?”

  As the men installed themselves noisily around the table, Maytree leaned forward with his palms splayed out on the knees of his serge slacks. “Now, I’m from Texas, and we like our niceties down there. But as you know, there’s a war on. So I hope you won’t mind if I dispense with the pleasantries and get right down to the business of defeating the Nazis, the Japs, Mussolini, and making sure those Commies understand we’re a force to be reckoned with.”

  With military efficiency Orson Maytree launched into his spiel, repeating what he had told me over the phone but this time revising the number of troops, the estimated orders, time frames, logistics. “I’ve had us all meet here today because it’s our belief,” he said, “that Mr. Dunkle’s formula here could save everyone an enormous amount of time, money, and effort.”

  On cue, my husband poured a quart of vanilla mix into the Prest-O Soft Serve ice cream machine he’d brought up to demonstrate. With the flick of a switch, the freezer started, shuddered, then blurped out a beautiful curlicue of white into a little bowl. Bert filled up one dish, then another. Sonia distributed them around the table to all the men, many of whom eyed her as wolfishly as they did the ice cream.

  I was certain that the other manufacturers had tasted Dunkle’s before, much as I had made it my business to sample all of theirs. Still, the men bobbed their heads as they ate, nodding with approval. Our ice cream was delicious; they could appreciate the quality. I felt a bolt of pride. However, Rocco, I noticed, did not finish his. He pushed his dish pointedly to the side and sat back in his chair with his arms crossed, staring at Bert’s machine.

  “As I see it, we can do one of two things,” Orson Maytree Jr. concluded as everyone began wiping their mouths and lighting up cigarettes. “We can contract with some of you to supply thousands of gallons to the military each month yourselves. Or—if you’re willing instead to manufacture Dunkle’s ice cream formula and your factories can be modified to make it—Albert Dunkle here has agreed to license his patent to anyone else contracted as a supplier to the military.”

  At this, a murmur went around the room. I noticed a bitter little smile flicker in the corners of Rocco’s mouth. “Well, that’s very generous of you, Bert,” he said loudly.

  My husband, he simply shrugged. “We’re all on the same side now. Anything to defeat our enemies.”

  “Exactly, my friend. Couldn’t agree more,” Rocco said, grinning. A sickening feeling came over me.

  As the men gathered to collect their coats, Rocco brushed up beside me and said in a low voice, “So your husband is going to let us in on his trade secrets, now, is he?” He shrugged on his heavy wool overcoat, then squinted at me, all pleasantness draining from his face. “You know, some of the fellas here, they’re really impressed by that. They think your Bert is quite the altruist.” He tugged on one cuff of his overcoat, then another, adjusting them. “But me personally? Frankly, I think it’s the least he can do, Horsey. Because I don’t know who the hell you think you’re kidding.” He fixed his gaze on me. “Everything you learned, you learned from us. So now it only seems fair.” He slapped me vigorously on the shoulder. “We’re going to learn a few things back from you, eh?”

  I shot him a vicious look.

  “Aw, come now.” He grinned. “What’s wrong? You lose your sense of humor? Don’t you know when I’m teasing? Besides, your husband said it himself. We’re all on the same side now.”

  Grabbing his hat, he pivoted dramatically. “I’d like to thank everybody for coming. Always a pleasure, fellas.” Tipping his hat with exaggerated deference toward Bert, he said unctuously, “And I’m particularly looking forward to doing business with you, Mr. Dunkle. Very much indeed.”

  His shoes slonked against the metal staircase. In a blur of dark wool, he was gone.

  As soon as the room emptied, I felt behind me for my desk chair and sank down onto it. The machines on the production floor had been shut off for lunchtime. The silence of the factory felt sonic. My pulse pounded so hard in my head that my vision began to jiggle. When Bert returned from seeing the men off downstairs, he fairly skipped up the steps two at a time to the office, whistling “A-Tisket, A-Tasket.”

  “Oh, Lil, I think that went very well. Don’t you?” Striding across the room, he ducked beneath the trolley, unplugged the Prest-O machine, and began spooling the cord around his knuckles. “The war board. Every
one. They were very impressed with our facilities, they told me. Even Schrafft’s. I think they loved our ice cream, too.”

  “I believe so,” was all I could manage to say.

  “Mr. Maytree says we should expect to hear from him imminently. That was the word he used, doll. ‘Imminently.’” Bert beamed as he enunciated each syllable clearly. “He advised we speak to our lawyers.” As he wheeled the ice cream machine toward the little elevator, he stopped by the desk and planted a generous kiss on the top of my forehead. “Have Mrs. Preminger put this in the book,” he said happily, placing Mr. Maytree’s card on the desk blotter in front of me. A little gold-embossed eagle glinted in the corner. “He’s at the Hotel Pennsylvania until Friday, and it’s his hope, he said, to get something approved for us before he even leaves town. I think we should put in a call to Aaron, just in case.”

  Bert vanished behind the doors of the little elevator. A moment later I could hear the squeak and clatter as he pushed the cart out onto the concrete floor below me. He was so pleased, my husband. I had not seen him so joyous since Isaac was born. It made my heart hurt.

  I picked up Orson Maytree’s card by its edges, then tossed it carelessly back down onto the blotter. Aaron was our lawyer. I did not want to put in a call to him at all. Though legal safeguards and stipulations and restrictions could of course be written into any contract, in the end what was a piece of paper? Perhaps the other ice cream manufacturers would honor it; perhaps they would prove to be men of valor and decency, guarding our trade secrets even as they employed them. Not Rocco Dinello, though. This much I knew. Why, he himself had said it outright: Everything you learned, you learned from us. So we’re going to learn a few things back from you. It could not have been any clearer.

  As soon as they got their hands on our recipe, the Candie Ice Cream Company, they would concoct their own copycat version of our soft ice cream, tweaking the formula just enough to avoid a lawsuit, offering up their own swirly cones and sundaes and malted milk shakes, branching out into our territory with their own roadside shops and franchises. I was sure of it.

  Yet a midsize business like ours, it could not survive the war without supplying the military. Rationing was only going to get worse. Already, Americans were being urged to forgo using rubber and car parts; rumor had it that there would soon be restrictions placed on gasoline, raw materials, metal. Regardless of whether we cut a deal to share our formula with the War Department, the Candie Ice Cream Company would still happily sign on the dotted line. Either way they would win—and we would lose.

  Bert and I, we were going to become destitute all over again. And our little boy?

  I picked up the framed photo of Isaac dressed as Uncle Sam. His star-spangled top hat was lopsided, made from a cardboard cutout he’d colored in himself with crayons. Mrs. Preminger had attached a tuft of cotton batting to his chin with spirit gum. He was standing solemnly, gazing directly into the camera. It had been his first Halloween.

  My son.

  From the very first day, everyone else had cooed over Isaac. Oh, those tiny fingers and toes! That delicious baby smell! Couldn’t you just eat him up? Mrs. Dunkle, don’t you want to hold him some more? Bert, he arrived at the hospital cradling a ridiculous bouquet of red roses fattened with baby’s breath for me. A box of Prince Hamlet cigars for the doctors. Whitman’s chocolates for the nurses. “Congratulations, Mr. Dunkle,” the nurses chimed when they saw him, converging suddenly from all areas of the hospital, arraying themselves before him like a row of glossy show ponies. “Your son is so beautiful.” They beamed, tucking one foot behind the other, leaning across the reception desk. “He looks just like you, you know. The very spitting image.”

  I don’t know who they thought they were kidding. One look at my son, even as a baby, and you knew: He was mostly his mother’s stock.

  So sue me. Other mothers will never confess to this—and indeed perhaps I have never been a typical mother at all. Yet that tsunami of ecstatic, obliterating love a mother is supposed to feel for her baby the instant he’s placed in her arms? I felt none of it. Oh, darlings. All I experienced was panic. And a terrible, drowning sensation. I tried as best I could to paste a smile across my face as I lay like a gutted whale on the iron-framed hospital bed, incoherent with the twilight sleep of scopolamine, my privates gashed and stitched up like a ripped, throbbing cushion. My whole pregnancy had been a misery; each day felt like I was reliving that voyage I’d made as a child aboard the SS Amerika, queasy and dizzy and dread-filled. I was carrying low, and I had my limp and my cane to contend with. All my helplessness, my pregnancy increased it tenfold. I was ungainly and fumbling. My unborn son—how I resented him.

  By the time he finally emerged from me and had been placed in the crook of my arm, a tiny, squalling loaf, he knew. My ambivalence. My monstrousness. Even then, in those very first days of his life, he gazed at me with indictment. In all his miniature sinews and synapses, in his fragile fontanel and unformed muscles, he knew instinctively that I had borne him not out of love but desperation—that I had wanted not a baby but a tether for my husband. And so he set about punishing me. Wailing for hours. Refusing my breast. Shrinking from me when I reached out for him as a toddler.

  And yet.

  Studying the little sepia photo of Isaac now, with his cheeks puffed out and his stuffed dog clutched in his hand, the love I felt was fierce, combative. My difficult, unsmiling little boy: I would be damned if he grew up in the same poverty as I had, if Rocco Dinello in any way torpedoed his future the same way he had mine. My son: He would finish college. He would not be driven out of a family business. He would rightly inherit what Bert and I had wrought.

  I glanced frantically around the office for some sort of solution, as if it might appear like our ice cream mix, perfectly formulated, awaiting in a bottle. Think, Lillian, think. Yet I could not. I hoisted myself up and paced around the office. Bert was down on the production floor now, talking to our foreman over by the industrial mixers—no doubt telling him how beautifully the visit from the war board had gone, how our future gleamed like polished steel. Mrs. Preminger was on her lunch break. Though I’d never done so before, I opened her bottom drawer, unscrewed the little flask she kept hidden beneath the payroll tablet, and took a quick swig. The whiskey had been watered down; it offered only a sting. Yet the transgression itself brought a sudden bite of clarity: For there, on Bert’s desk, where I’d positioned it for the benefit of the war board, I spied the Bible that Mrs. Dinello had given me for my confirmation all those years ago.

  A few ruffles peeked out from the edges. In my haste I had not bothered to remove the cherished pressed pansy from the little bouquet at our wedding. Our marriage license. Souvenirs from our first dates.

  The idea hit me like a shock wave. Pulling out the paper, I scanned it quickly, my heart thudding. And it was there, just as I had hoped, smack in the middle of the page.

  The audacity of what I was about to do made my hands tremble so furiously I almost could not slot my finger into the brass dial of the telephone to connect to the operator and have her put me through to the Hotel Pennsylvania in Manhattan.

  When he called me back, Orson Maytree Jr. sounded less surprised than I had imagined. With a war on, I supposed, more and more wives were taking on command roles in their husbands’ businesses. After we arranged to meet, I told Bert that I was going to go to Manhattan to pay my dressmaker, then took a streetcar and a subway to Thirty-Fourth Street.

  The coffee shop at the Hotel Pennsylvania was overrun with new recruits in khaki pants and military caps creased as crisply as envelopes. The sleek chrome-and-Formica tables gave it the feel of an ocean liner. Except for two ladies seated by the window eating toasted liverwurst sandwiches, I was the only woman in the restaurant. All the other tables had been taken over by soldiers drinking milk and wolfing down pieces of pie. Indeed, there was no place at all to sit. This only increased my nervousness. Then I spied Orson Maytree flagging me across the dining room. He had a
lready installed himself at one of the booths in the corner. In front of him was a plate with a half-finished slice of Boston cream pie. Across from him a slice of apple pie also awaited with a sweating wedge of cheddar cheese and a second glass of milk.

  “I hope you do forgive me, Miss Lillian.” Rising to his feet, he shook my hand vigorously. “The waitress over there, she told me that there were only a few items left on the whole menu. If I didn’t order right away, why, there would be nothing left but toast and marmalade by the time you arrived.”

  Gallantly, he pulled out my chair for me. He seemed to know instinctively that banquettes were difficult for me to navigate—I always preferred a chair—and the apple pie and the cheese and the milk, I realized, he had ordered not for himself but for me.

  “I daresay I took a gamble.” Orson Maytree Jr. smiled, working away at his own pie with the side of his fork. “You struck me as more of an apple-pie gal than a Boston-cream-pie one. Am I right?”

  “Oh, my. Yes,” I said quietly, though the truth was, I had no appetite whatsoever. Orson Maytree’s kindness made me feel teary. My heart was thudding away frantically. At least, I thought, no one would notice me amid this hubbub of soldiers. No one would overhear what I was about to say. I looked at Orson Maytree Jr.

  “Pie before business, am I right? I hope you don’t mind, Miss Lillian, but all this traveling from plant to plant, meeting with one group of leaders, then another. It’s got me tuckered out.” He patted his stomach as if it were a pet. “I know I have to be careful. Yet it seems I’m always hungry long before suppertime.”

  With a few twists of his wrist, he made fast work of the rest of his pie, even scraping the last streaks of custard from the plate, and dabbed at his mouth with his napkin. “Now, then.” He looked at me pleasantly. The custardy treat had sated him, infused him with goodwill. He sat back heavily in the banquette.