The Ice Cream Queen of Orchard Street Read online

  For the first time in my life, people stared at me openly—not with repulsed fascination but with respect. Excitement, even. Bert and I went out to dinner at the 21 Club one evening, and a woman in a silk stole approached. “I’m so sorry to disturb you, but are you Lillian Dunkle from the commercials?” she said breathlessly. Behind her, her mortified husband tried to wave her back to their table. With a trembling hand, she held out a dinner napkin and a pen. “It’s such an honor, such an honor, Mrs. Dunkle. I’m sorry, but would you very much mind?”

  “Lillian Dunkle,” I signed across the linen with a flourish. “The ‘Lame Dame’ of Ice Cream! So sue me: I worry!”

  “Oh,” the woman said, fanning herself. “Aren’t you just the best! And that cane of yours—it really is peppermint-striped! Oh, that’s just darling.”

  Autographs. Photographs. Public appearances. And still more television commercials with me doing the talking and Bert smiling and waving as mutely and adorably as Harpo Marx. The highlight, however, was being asked to the White House. Mamie Eisenhower hosted a luncheon honoring Jonas Salk, Dr. Mulvaney, the March of Dimes—and Bert and me. Again we stayed at the Willard. I felt like a queen. That’s when I wore my first Chanel suit, custom-made, the color of strawberry ice cream. Bert, he wore a bespoke suit with a gold tie tack I had specially made for him in the shape of an ice cream cone. Both of us, we were so nervous we could not speak. Bert was afraid he would stutter, of course. Yet me?

  As a White House butler ushered us through a portico out into the Rose Garden, I was suddenly no longer aware of the photographers standing discreetly on the periphery—or even of the other guests nervously wobbling about on the lawn, holding delicate, untouched teacups. Instead I was somehow moving through the dim, low-ceilinged front room in Vishnev with its dirt floors and the bloodstain that would not come out of the window sash. I felt Mama hoisting me and my sisters one by one into the rickety wagon full of rotting cabbages, and the handful of rubles stitched into the armpit of my threadbare gray coat, digging into my underarm, and the cold seeping in behind my collar. A color guard announced, “Ladies and gentlemen, the president of the United States,” and suddenly a brass band was playing “Hail to the Chief,” and an American flag was snapping in the wind, and I was aware of the sun overhead, turning the Washington Monument into an enormous sundial, and the SS Amerika was bucking and heaving in the gunmetal sea, and I was vomiting over the grimy edge of the bunk beside Flora, clutching a handmade babushka doll that a woman whose own child had died had given me. President Eisenhower himself was moving toward me, shaking everyone’s hands in a half circle, and he was smiling and moon-faced, this man who had landed in Normandy and saved the world, his smile as broad and happy as the nicest vanilla ice cream—and I felt a stab of exquisite grief. I smelled the manure of the cobblestones on the Lower East Side, the mealy rags, the cockroaches, the soupy, miserable stench of the Beth Israel Dispensary. I saw myself jabbing at the vicious black rat in the Dinellos’ kitchen with a broom, then Bert sliding the cigar band over my finger, and I saw the Corwins’ shack—that banging screen door that never got fixed—and I heard the hammer of the machines in our first factory and saw miles and miles of automobiles flooding the parkways, tubs and tubs of ice cream packaged in our distinctive beige-pink-and-white striped tubs. For a moment, my body seemed to float outside itself, so great was the sense of unrealness and the aching yearning that Mama and Flora and Mr. and Mrs. Dinello could be there beside me as President Eisenhower was right now towering above me in his blue-gray suit, smelling of expensive, lemony aftershave, as he was smiling, leaning down, shaking my hand, and saying jovially, warmly, “Ah, Mrs. Lillian Dunkle. The Ice Cream Queen of America herself. Welcome to Washington.” The elation and utter sadness of the moment, darlings! My eyes teared up, and I found myself swallowing and my mouth opening dumbly: “Mr. President.” That was it. In an instant he had moved on. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Mamie, blinking adoringly up at Bert and drawling, “The president and I do so love your butter pecan. And everything you’ve done for the March of Dimes, of course,” shaking one of his hands with both of hers, her knuckles stubby and pink. My mind, it felt like it was disintegrating into particles in the sunlight as I tried desperately, desperately, to absorb the entire moment of me, Malka Treynovsky fusing into Malka Bialystoker fusing into Lillian Maria Dinello fusing into Lillian Dunkle right there in the Rose Garden of the White House, trying to distill the very essence of shaking the president’s hand, and then Mamie’s, while also trying, somehow, to capture it all in epic color, free of all time, space, and decay, crystallized, so that Bert and I, we could remain in this very moment forever and share it with every generation of our family, before us and after. Albert and Lillian Dunkle. Drinking tea and nibbling little ham sandwiches with the First Lady and President Dwight D. Eisenhower, cameras whirring and clicking away. Two guests at the White House.

  That afternoon when we returned to the Willard, oh, did Bert and I drink! And then, slowly, after our hearts calmed, we made love—like two hesitant virgins—regarding each other with a sort of questioning awe, trying to reassure ourselves that our bodies were still there—that we were rooted together and that this wondrous event had in fact really happened. Those rich, glamorous people photographed shaking hands with the president of the United States of America as his guests at the White House.

  They had really been us.

  “Lil, this is all your doing,” Bert said quietly, his hand softly touching my hip. “You’re a star now, you know that? All this.” He gestured around the grand hotel suite, with its sumptuous brocaded bedding, its ornate furniture, its sweating silver ice bucket of champagne sent up compliments of the management. “I always knew we could do it, doll. People everywhere, they love us. They love our ice cream. And they especially love you.”

  “They do, don’t they?” I laughed.

  Yet, though I reached for Bert’s hand and pressed it to my heart, deep inside I felt only this: a hot, fierce explosion of panic.

  PART THREE

  Chapter 13

  The press always gives me grief for wearing large sunglasses. But you try getting out of a goddamn Cadillac with flashbulbs exploding in your face and see how you fare—especially with a cane.

  The New York Supreme Court hadn’t been built yet when my family walked up toward Orchard Street that very first day in America. Now it rises above Centre Street like the Parthenon. It’s elegant, I suppose, but architecture has rarely been about beauty, darlings. Most buildings throughout history have been designed to promote power or fear. Dunkle’s helped change this, I like to believe. Certainly the ancient Greeks and Romans never built glass drive-ins with fiberglass ice cream sundaes twirling atop their roofs.

  “We could go around toward the back, Mrs. Dunkle,” my lawyer says, nodding at the driver. “There’s a side entrance for the disabled.”

  “Please,” I say. “Back entrances are for servants or criminals. I have nothing to hide.”

  “I just thought with all the stairs—”

  “You just ‘thought’? Well, don’t.”

  My car glides to a stop at the curb. Through the tinted windows, I can see them. All waiting for me. Such a production. Channels 2, 4, and 7, WNEW, even WPIX, my old station, those pricks, with their satellite trucks and their blazing lights and their wires draped across the sidewalk like black licorice. All those reporters and photographers, primed for action like hunters in a duck blind. Who do they think they’re kidding?

  Hector, my driver, switches off the radio. Jason has set the dial to some station where everyone screams at you. I don’t care for it much, except that it greatly irritates the lawyers.

  Miss Slocum glances at me as she reaches for her briefcase. Her white incisors match the string of pearls at her throat. I cannot stop staring at them.

  “Are you okay, Lillian?” she says with exaggerated concern.

  “It’s ‘Mrs. Dunkle,’” I say, glancing out the window.
>
  “I’d take that as a yes.” Jason grins.

  She clears her throat, swings her legs around, and wriggles toward the door with one hand clutching the hem of her skirt so it won’t bunch up. Hector helps her out gallantly. Jason pats my knee. “Okay, Grandma.” He laughs, unfolding a pair of reflective black sunglasses. “Showtime, huh?”

  “Tateleh.” I rub his leg. The sunglasses make him look like a young assassin. Underneath the Brooks Brothers jacket his mother made him wear, he’s got on a yellow T-shirt with a silk screen of Che Guevara. Such a wisenheimer.

  “Whoa. Look at all the reporters outside,” he says, cracking his knuckles one by one, working his fingers along his hand like it was a musical instrument. “Okay. Here we go.” He slides down the length of the seat in his leather pants and struggles to unfold himself from the back of the Cadillac. Beyond him I can see the rest of my legal team assembling on the street, conferring with Miss Slocum and Mr. Beecham, ignoring the phalanx of reporters.

  Hector comes around to help me out. The Cadillac acts as a buffer between me and the press. “Give me my handbag,” I say.

  “Do you want your cane first?”

  “Handbag.” As I slide it into the crook of my left elbow, the lightness of my purse is dispiriting. I’d wanted to bring Petunia with me, but dogs are not allowed in the courthouse apparently, unless they’re “service animals.” My lawyers also insist that carrying a Chanel handbag with a Chihuahua tucked into it will not endear me to the jury. They want me to look “as sympathetic as possible.”

  “Now give me my walking stick,” I tell Hector. My new walking stick is custom-made, with black Chinese lacquer and a filigreed silver head. My lawyers, of course, would have preferred it if I hobbled into court on one of those ghastly aluminum walkers—or, better yet, rolled in in a wheelchair. Ideally, I suppose, they’d love it if I were paraplegic. They seem determined to play up my disability. How little they know. Being a cripple never inspires pity so much as it does repulsion, darlings. And no, I did not refrain from wearing my good jewelry either.

  My sunglasses are already in place, and the coiffeur came to the house before breakfast. Sunny fixed my face as she always does, but with extra powder and rouge. I know from being on television all these years what those lights can do. My suit is the color of butter pecan ice cream. Packaging is so important. You never want to wear dark colors to a court appearance. Purple makes a jury think you’re mentally unstable. Navy: trying too hard, hiding something. Red or black: might as well hang a sandwich board around your neck reading GUILTY. I do not need a three-hundred-dollar-an-hour lawyer to tell me this. People are not sophisticated. They see dark, they think “bad,” “shady,” “untrustworthy.” They see light, they think “clean,” “pure,” “fresh.” Jason tells me this is racist. So sue me: I’m just saying what I’ve observed. In the ice cream industry, you always want your chocolate-based flavors to appear creamy, not earthy or bitter. Our Devil’s Food Cake, our Molten Fudge, our Cocoa-Loco. Marvelous flavors, all of them, but most of them sat in the cases for weeks, slowly crystallizing. Vanilla, meanwhile, is the number-one-selling flavor in America. You can’t tell me this is simply because of the taste. Not when you have rum raisin available. Or mint chip. Yet Aryanism still carries the day, darlings, even in the ice cream freezer. I don’t like this any more than you do. But there it is.

  Each time I go to court, I make sure I’m adorned in nothing darker than peach. And my silvery hair is streaked with so much blond now that it looks like lemon ices.

  “Lillian! Lillian! Over here!” the reporters shout as soon as they spot me.

  I grip Jason’s hand tightly in my left. “Stay with me, you hear?” The flashbulbs start exploding, blinding filaments of hot white.

  “Gotcha.” He grins at the reporters, my grandson, draws back his shoulders, and actually waves like a movie star. “Good morning, Neewww Yoorkk!” he yodels. “And if any of you like what you see here this morning, hey, come by an’ check out Alarm Clock at the Pyramid Club on Monday night. Four hours of totally rad performance-art madness.” The head lawyer shoots him a vicious look. I beam, however. Thank God someone else in this family understands marketing.

  Isaac opposed having Jason accompany me, of course. “The kid’s eighteen, Ma. You’re not dragging him into any of this.”

  “Petunia isn’t allowed inside the courthouse,” I said. “I’m not going in there alone.”

  “I’m going with you. I’m your son.”

  “I don’t want you. You make me nervous. I want Jason.”

  “He’s not spending his summer vacation embroiled in a scandal, Ma.”

  “How is this embroiling him in a scandal? He helps me into the car, he helps me out of the car. He walks with me. He sits on a bench. Afterward maybe we go to the Plaza. Have a little something for the mouth.”

  “I’ll be there at seven and ride down with you.”

  “You’ll do no such thing. You’re not on my side, Isaac. Not you, not Rita. Don’t think I don’t know what you’re up to.”

  “Oh, Ma. Stop it already with the paranoia.”

  “Don’t tell me to stop. For months you’re too busy to see me. But all of a sudden, you have time to hire these big-shot lawyers? To go through every last bit of paperwork and watch every piddly thing I do?”

  “Edgar was a crook, Ma. I’m protecting your interests and the company’s.”

  I sniffed. “Sunny can accompany me to court.”

  “C’mon, Ma. Somebody had to step in, and you know it. It was getting way out of hand. And now all these charges on top of everything else?”

  “It was a mistake!” I shouted. “One tiny, ten-second mistake! The kid is fine! Nobody was even watching at that hour!”

  “Oh, yeah? Then why were you arrested, Ma? Why all the lawsuits?”

  “Don’t you dare treat me like a criminal.”

  “Who’s—I’m not, Ma—I just—”

  “Put my grandson on the phone!” I hollered. “I’m finished with you.”

  The first day Jason came with me was for the hearing on the assault charges. He showed up wearing a black motorcycle jacket with zippers all over it and combat boots and about a pound of Vaseline in his hair. It stood straight up from his scalp. He appeared to have been electrocuted. The lawyers almost had a coronary. “Mrs. Dunkle,” they said, “with all due respect, we’re not sure this is the image you want to present.”

  “What image?” I said.

  “Your grandson. He looks like a juvenile delinquent.”

  Jason laughed. “Actually, I’m like fifty percent water,” he said, holding up his hands.

  “Excuse me?” said the lawyer.

  “Please,” I said. “My grandson looks like a meshuggeneh teenager. What else is he supposed to look like?”

  Of course, I myself would have preferred that Jason dressed nicely. But he’s eighteen, for Chrissakes. What was I going to do—buy him a suit and tie on the way to court at nine in the morning? In the past perhaps I would have. But I have no patience for that sort of rigmarole anymore. If I’d wanted another adult beside me who looked like a lawyer, I’d have taken my son.

  It turned out that the photos—of Jason in all his punk-rock nonsense escorting me to the courthouse—were a public-​relations coup. A little old lady with her rebellious but doting grandson: That’s what the public saw. Those pictures humanized me more than any cane or walker or lady lawyer ever could.

  As for Jason, girls have been showing up outside the Dunkle’s on Lexington Avenue where he works, he says, and leaving little notes and gifts for him at home with his doorman. “Going to court with you has been the most awesome thing all summer, Grandma,” he laughed this morning as I measured out our cocktails. “Alarm Clock is even going to do a bunch of monologues about it.”

  Now, still holding my hand, he pivots before the photographers for an instant and grins brazenly. He may be tipsy, but he’s not stupid, my grandson. He doesn’t utter another word.
<
br />   “Lillian, do you have anything to say to the Newhouse family before the hearing?” a reporter shouts out from the melee.

  “Lillian, what do you say to the charges that the Dunkle Ice Cream Corporation has not paid any taxes since 1978?”

  “Lillian, they’ve been calling you the ‘Ice Queen,’ the ‘I-Scream Queen,’ and the ‘Ice Cream Scam-Witch.’ Do you have any response to this?”

  “No comment. My client has no comment,” Miss Slocum shouts, waving them away furiously and guiding me by the elbow. For a moment the squadron of microphones jabbing at me—the flashbulbs creating a wall of exploding light—are horrible and disorienting. I lose my footing. I wobble backward. Jason steadies me. “Just keep going, Grandma,” he whispers. Beecham steps in front of us and shoos the reporters back.

  The granite steps of the courthouse rise before us like a pyramid. “I’m okay now,” I murmur, dropping Jason’s hand. “I’ll take these on my own.”

  “You sure?”

  Waving him off, I step up with my left foot, then drag the right one up behind it. My hands are shaking, yet I refuse to reach for a railing. “One,” I say under my breath. “Uno.”

  All these years later, I still count stairs in Italian.

  I step up the next step.

  “Due.” I exhale.

  I step up the next.

  Tre.

  The rhythm, the tune in my head, is building.

  Jason hovers by my left elbow, Miss Slocum is behind me on my right.

  Quattro.

  Slowly, one turgid step after another, I rise. At the base of the courthouse, everyone watches. I am aware of their gaze on me, the judge and jury of them all, their faces tilted upward, their malicious delight focused on my predicament. Beneath my buttery designer suit, I feel myself perspire. A nerve under my left eye begins to spasm. I grip my cane more tightly. All of it could go in an instant. Just one bad turn and I could lose everything. I swallow. I refuse to even entertain the possibility. For a moment, though, my heart feels as if it is fibrillating. I have to stop to catch my breath. Yet I straighten the hem of my jacket and point my chin like a compass needle up toward the door to the courthouse. Doggedly, I resume my climb. I am making it to the top of these goddamn steps on my own. Without anyone helping me. This is the image I want in the press. This is the picture the whole world needs to see.