The Ice Cream Queen of Orchard Street Read online

  “Yes, but why should we, Lil?” He leaned toward me, sandwiching his hands between his knees. “We have the means now. It would be good for Isaac to have some fresh air. Don’t you think you deserve it?”

  I glanced at him, and when I did, darlings, I saw the real Bert, the old Bert, the tender, stuttering man who wanted desperately to please me.

  “I want to live in a high-rise, not a house,” I said. “All my life I’ve been stuck in tenements. Ground-floor apartments. That horrible shack in Bellmore. You want us to move? Fine. Marvelous. Then get us a place with an elevator and a view.”

  By that autumn we were ensconced on the tenth floor of a grand building on East Seventy-Second Street in Manhattan, with seven airy rooms and a brand-new dinette set, a velveteen davenport, and matching silk-upholstered armchairs that sat by the windows like a pair of dowagers. Plus a new, sleek Victrola in a mahogany cabinet. Every evening a gloved doorman ushered us into the elevator, with a brass gate that he pulled shut like the door on an elaborate birdcage. While I went to soak in the voluminous bathtub before supper, Bert walked from room to room with a drink in his hand, surveying all the treasures he’d purchased. For a former Communist, he certainly liked his furniture.

  One morning, however, we awoke to a sound like machine guns gunning, hammers clopping, and great plumes of smoke and dust billowing through our windows. What Bert had not anticipated was that a newer high-rise was being built directly across the street.

  Floor by floor our expensive view of the skyline was devoured. Soon we faced nothing but a wall of windows and brick; we had scarcely more air or light than we’d had in the tenements. Oh, how I wanted to box Bert’s ears! “You saw the lot across the street!” I cried. “Did you never once think to ask?”

  “L-L-Lil, I’m so sorry,” he stuttered, holding out his hands.

  “The one thing I ask you for! The one thing I ask!”

  To appease me, he bought an ink-blue 1948 Chevrolet Fleetmaster with sand-colored seats. He rented a garage space for it over in Yorkville and hired a driver named Martin to bring the car around every morning to take us to the factory. One Friday night when Bert and I arrived home, I found a large box on our bed, tied with gold ribbon. Inside was a calf-length black sable coat. It was absurdly heavy and soft. It must have cost nearly two hundred dollars. Of course, I had never had anything so marvelous in all my life. “Oh, no. This is far too expensive,” I said. “Where am I going to wear this, you nudnik? The refrigeration room in the plant?”

  “Why not?” Bert brushed back a lock of my hair. “I want you to have nice things, Lil.”

  “Bert, money is not for spending.”

  “Why not?” He shrugged. “We earned it honestly.”

  A pang shot through me. A rivet of guilt. Yet I said nothing.

  The coat was lined with pearl gray satin. Stitched inside was a label: MADE EXPRESSLY FOR BONWIT TELLER AND LILLIAN DUNKLE. Even the buttons were padded with fur. Bert draped it gently over my shoulders like a cape. I turned toward the full-length mirror. Cloaked in black sable, I looked feline. Imperial. Nearly seductive. I slapped Bert giddily on the chest. “This is meshuggeneh!”

  He produced a slim velvet box from his sleeve. “So if I bought you a string of pearls to go with it, you’d be upset?”

  Our life of luxury, darlings. This is how it began. It was Bert’s idea first, you see. Never, ever mine.

  Perhaps we should have known better.

  * * *

  The very summer after Bert had bought me my fur, a thoughtful, meticulous scientist named Dr. Sandler was working as a nutrition specialist at the Oteen Veterans Administration Hospital in Asheville, North Carolina. Summer was always “polio season,” and the disease struck children disproportionately. Little limbs gnarled and twisted like grapevines. Respiratory systems atrophied, and children had to be encased in iron lungs: medieval-looking machinery performed the mechanics of breathing for them. People believed that the heat and the crowds were to blame—public swimming pools, county fairs, picnics—all that exposed flesh and sweat creating a primordial soup of disease and infection.

  That summer of 1948, the worst polio epidemic in North Carolina history broke out. Every family in Asheville that could fled to the country. Yet Dr. Sandler began to suspect that neither crowds nor the heat was the real culprit. In the summer, he observed, children consumed significantly more candy. And soft drinks. And, in particular, ice cream.

  As Asheville’s devastation from polio grew steadily worse, Dr. Sandler felt compelled to go to the local newspapers and radio stations. Please, do not eat ice cream or candy, he urged his fellow citizens. Do not consume sugar at all. A desperate and frightened population across North Carolina took notice. Don’t eat ice cream, people raced to tell each other. It causes polio!

  By the time the polio season of 1949 approached, much of the South was already on alert. Although Bert had initially refused to allow Dunkle’s franchises to open in segregated areas (my husband, he aspired to be the Branch Rickey of ice cream), he could never deny any veteran. And so we had six Dunkle’s located in North Carolina by then, and ten other franchises in neighboring states. Our headquarters began receiving panicked phone calls from our owners: No one’s coming into our shops. Folks are saying our ice cream is poisoning their children. I’m not sure I can make my monthly payments.

  It was, of course, a disaster. In June alone, Dunkle’s shipped 400,000 gallons less ice cream mix to the South than the previous year. By July 650,000 gallons less. By August our stores from Washington, D.C., to Atlanta were nearly deserted. All six of our franchises in North Carolina were facing bankruptcy.

  “Does Bonwit Teller take back purchases?” I asked grimly, though the idea of selling back my sable—or my pearls, or the Chevrolet—was now unthinkable. That’s the odd thing about luxury, darlings. The moment you become accustomed to it, it’s no longer a luxury at all but a necessity.

  People forget this.

  “Perhaps we’ve gotten too big, Lil.” Bert raked his hands through his now-silvery hair. “Perhaps we should just close down the shops and cut our losses?”

  “But then what?” The problem with Dr. Sandler’s dietary claims, unfortunately, was that they appeared to have merit. All over the country, the polio epidemic of 1949 had proved even worse than the epidemic of 1948. Except in North Carolina—where citizens had reduced their ice cream and sugar consumption by almost 90 percent.

  Switching out the lights in our factory each evening, I was haunted by the sense that everything we’d built was about to crumble cataclysmically around me. Finally, perhaps, I was being punished. All my unconfessed sins. The lies. The thieving. The Dinellos. Those nameless, faceless Candie employees whom I had likely put out of work. Those Italian immigrants, innocents who had not yet become citizens, whose lives had possibly been— Here I forced myself to stop thinking altogether.

  Yet as word spread about Dr. Sandler’s theory, I knew it would only be a matter of time. Our franchises would fold, one by one, South to North, East to West. All our postwar innovations—all the frozen novelties and gimmicky flavors we’d been developing—could not save our industry from the threat of this epidemic. And then what?

  One night as we were sitting down to dinner, the telephone rang. Isaac, now a knock-kneed twelve-year-old with his first crush on a girl, scrambled to answer.

  “Pop, it’s for you.” Glumly, he set the receiver down on the credenza. “Some woman, Ada? She says it’s important.”

  Bert’s face seized and he dropped his napkin. “I’ll take this inside.” Hurrying into the bedroom, he shut the door.

  An alarm went off inside me.

  “Go to your room,” I told Isaac. “I’ll call you back when it’s dinner.”

  Gingerly, I lifted up the receiver and pressed it to my ear like a seashell.

  “—I told you,” I heard Bert saying, “I’m not meeting with you tomorrow. It’s a betrayal—”

  I felt woozy, arrhythmic. Yet a voi
ce on the other end interrupted, “For Chrissakes, Dunkle. The whole industry is going to be there.” It was male. Clipped. Sonorous. “High-Ho. Muldoon’s. All your competition. Even the Rockefellers are sending a lawyer from their milk trust.”

  Ada. ADA. The Atlantic Dairy Association, that was who was on the line. Not a woman at all. Slowly, I exhaled. I identified the voice. Clark Bauer, the president. I had heard him give a drunken toast at the Christmas party hosted by the Ice Cream Manufacturers’ Gazette the year before. His secretary had likely put the call through to Bert.

  “If we let the sugar people take the lead on this, without enough dairymen and ice cream companies on board, what do you think is likely to happen?” Bauer said. “I’ll tell you what. They’ll pass Truman’s buck. As soon as they’re challenged—as soon as they’re asked, ‘If sugar doesn’t cause polio, then how come Dr. Sandler’s diet is working in Asheville?’—do you know what they’ll say? ‘Why, it’s milk that causes polio, not sugar.’ They’ll turn against ice cream in a heartbeat trying to save themselves. You know I’m right, Albert. Those sugar people are spineless—”

  “B-but, Clark…” I could hear Bert’s voice wavering. “None of us do know why the diet works.”

  “Well, I’ve got news for you. We may never know. But I eat sugar and ice cream. You eat sugar and ice cream. Have we gotten polio? Millions of Americans eat ice cream every day during the summer. And you know what? Millions of them do not get polio. As far as I’m concerned, this Dr. Sandler is a quack. So get on board and fight this thing with the rest of us, will you? We’ll go down to North Carolina ourselves next summer if we have to. Hand out free ice cream cones to every man, woman, and child in the goddamn state. Show them they have absolutely nothing to fear but their own stu—”

  I was shocked: For at that moment, Bert hung up with a defiant click. Suddenly all I heard was Bauer’s disembodied voice groping: “Albert? Albert are you there? Goddamn it!” I barely had time to replace my own receiver in its cradle before my husband returned to the dining room, red-faced, agitated. I had never seen him in such a state.

  “Anything the matter?” I said, carefully arranging myself before my dinner plate.

  He shook his head violently. “Isaac!” he shouted with unusual force. “Here, doll,” he said, motioning to my plate, though he appeared distracted. “Let me serve you.”

  All night long, Bert was inordinately lovely and solicitous to me. Yet he related nothing at all of his conversation with Clark Bauer. And so I quietly seethed. What was the matter with my husband? Bauer was right. I read science journals. I kept up on the news. Dr. Sandler’s claims were pure hypothesis. Nothing scientific had been proved linking sugar to polio at all. But rumor and fear—I knew firsthand how quick and effective these were. Our entire industry was in danger, and its leaders were beseeching Dunkle’s to join with them to save it. Why had Bert opposed this? He wanted certainty? Since when was there ever certainty in this life? Oh, I could have given him such a thump!

  The next afternoon I slipped out of the factory and had Martin drive me into Manhattan to pay a visit to Clark Bauer myself. I thought he would be pleased to see me, to learn that I was committed to getting my husband on board. Yet when his secretary ushered me in, Clark Bauer’s lips tightened like a drawstring purse, and his chin elevated slightly. Indeed, he appeared to appraise me not through his eyes but through his nostrils. I could see him take in my leg, my cane, my sable coat in one dismissive sniff. An elaborate cruelty radiated off him like a scent. He did not invite me to sit.

  Not knowing quite what to do, I propped my cane against the edge of his desk and clutched my pocketbook. “It’s come to my attention that my husband is refusing to attend your meeting,” I said crisply. “But I’m in agreement with you, Mr. Bauer, that we all need to act together to save our industry. So I’d like to come in Bert’s place tonight, if I may.”

  “Excuse me?” Mr. Bauer sat up as if he had been stung. He fixed me in an annihilating stare. “With all due respect, Mrs. Dunkle, your husband is the one we deal with here.”

  “Mr. Bauer,” I said, drawing myself up to my full height before him, though admittedly this was not very much. “Bert and I have always worked as a team. I have as much a hand in our company as Bert does, and if he sees that I’m on board with you—”

  Bauer held up his hand as if putting a stop to traffic. “Well, if you’re such a ‘team,’ Mrs. Dunkle, did your husband not explain to you why you were not invited to this meeting with him? Did he not tell you that the association agreed unanimously that during this campaign, you, of all people, must be kept completely out of sight?”

  “Excuse me?” I said. Though I did not mean to, I took a step back. My throat felt filled with broken glass.

  “It’s nothing personal, Mrs. Dunkle. But surely even you can understand how detrimental it would be to have a cripple seen trying to reassure the public that sugar and ice cream do not cause polio.”

  “It wasn’t polio at all,” I said indignantly. “It was a street accident.”

  Clark Bauer stared at me, incredulous. “Do you think that matters, Mrs. Dunkle? All people need to see right now is a gimp-legged ice cream maker with a cane, and they’ll jump to their own conclusions. All their worst fears will be confirmed. Certainly you understand the power of images in advertising. Do I really have to spell this all out for you,” he said, reaching for his intercom, “or can you grasp this more quickly than your husband?”

  To sit stewing at home after this, in a dark parlor, walled off from the air and light by other, higher, brighter apartments, all the while listening to the insipid clatter of our domestic, Emeraldine, ladling beef stew onto a plate for Isaac’s supper—my awkward, finicky son (he didn’t like strawberries, because the seeds stuck in his teeth; he refused to wear sweaters, because the collars were itchy), my son, in all his indulged pubescence—with his new royal blue bicycle, and his trumpet lessons after school that Bert and I had paid for, and his store-bought track uniform—I did not work him as hard as I had worked at his age, yet still he shrank from me whenever I pulled him toward me and said, “Give Mama a kiss now”—to sit there listening to him inanely reporting the details of his school day to Emeraldine in the humid kitchen while the clock above the icebox ticked relentlessly and I listened for Bert, out carousing with his goddamn war buddies—Bert, who had forfeited a chance to join with the biggest men in our industry in a campaign to promote sugar and ice cream— Why? To protect me. And his precious principles, no doubt—should I box his ears or kiss him?—to sit at home in a narcotizing armchair after all of this, all the while seething, riddled with animosity and frustration—why, the prospect of it was simply unbearable!

  “Drive me to the office,” I barked at Martin.

  Back at the factory, I tried reviewing the accounts, yet I could absorb nothing. Conflicting, unseemly emotions ran rampant inside me like quicksilver. Mrs. Preminger had left early. I poured myself a scotch from her drawer. I ran my finger along the edge of her brass letter opener. I pulled apart the jaws of her Swingline stapler, then snapped them shut. I picked up her newest cat paperweight. It was made of onyx, a gift, she’d said, from her nephew, though I suspected she’d bought it herself. It felt so cold and heavy in my hand. Reaching back, I heaved it as hard as I could through the frosted-glass office partition. The violent shattering was so immensely satisfying. It had been a long time since I’d done something like this. I hadn’t realized how much I craved it.

  For a moment I stood panting, surveying my handiwork. Then I hobbled over and began mashing the shards into the carpet with the tip of my cane. I ground them down with as much force as I could muster. The sound was horrible; it ran up my spine like dry chalk on a blackboard. Finally I saw I had made quite a mess. I supposed I should leave it—we had janitors for this sort of thing now. Yet I hated disorder. I picked up the chipped paperweight and set it back on Mrs. Preminger’s desk. The job really required a vacuum cleaner, but all I found in the s
upply closet was a broom and a dustpan.

  Suddenly the phone rang. In the silence, the shrillness felt accusatory, as if God or Mrs. Preminger were telephoning down from the sky to reprimand me. I tried to ignore it, but the ringing continued, so finally I answered. It was Silas, our watchman. “Oh, Mrs. Dunkle,” he said with surprise. “There’s a man here to see you. I told him I thought you’d gone for the day, but he insisted I check. He says it’s an emergency.”

  For a moment my heart leaped. Had something happened to Bert? To Isaac?

  “Who is it?” I said.

  “He won’t give his name. He says he’s a friend of your father’s.”

  It was not until Pickles sauntered into the office that I was able to place him from the group of men that night at Rickie’s Round-Up. He had a heavy, cumbersome gait, and his name, I saw now, likely came from his nose, a bulbous gherkin dominating his face. His small, dark eyes, in contrast, were like peppercorns. He was wearing a raincoat, though it was not raining. As he entered, he removed his hat and glanced around slowly, appraisingly, as if he were considering buying the factory.

  “Wow. Quite a big joint here,” he said. “Though I figured for some reason it would be fancier.”

  He picked up the small wooden file box by Mrs. Preminger’s telephone, flipped up the lid with a greasy finger, then set it back down. He seemed to be in no hurry at all. Noticing her little beveled-glass candy dish of sour balls, he helped himself to a lime one, slipped it from its cellophane, and popped it into his mouth. Only men ever took such liberties: They walked into an office behaving as if it were theirs.

  “Can I help you?” I said with irritation. “You told my guard it was urgent.”

  Pickles picked up the Swingline stapler, just as I had. Only once he’d set it down did he notice the broken partition and the bits of glass sparkling in the carpet beneath it. I saw him survey the broom propped against the doorframe and the empty glass of scotch on the corner of her desk.