The Ice Cream Queen of Orchard Street: A Novel Page 6

  And I would’ve kept going, too, if I hadn’t stopped paying attention to where I was running and dashed blindly off a curb and not listened when Flora shrieked, “Malka!” and, in one terrible, vicious instant, collided with the right front hoof of Mr. Dinello’s horse.

  The horse. Ah, yes, darlings. We’re finally back to that.

  Chapter 3

  I awoke someplace greenish, dim. Dusty light, rippling. The pain was excruciating, radiating from my calf, ankle, knee.

  Mama? The taste of mud and hay lingered in the back of my throat. My right leg throbbed terribly. Papa?

  “Ach, ach. Don’t shout. You’ll wake the others.” A voice came: Yiddish, but unfamiliar.

  A broad face hovered over me, bald and wide like the moon. Her jowls jiggled like chicken fat. I screamed. “Shush, kindeleh,” the voice said. Where was Mama? A hand, big and raw, like a slice of corned beef, reached in and pressed itself to the back of my forehead. Cold, stony knuckles. “No fever. That is good.” She wasn’t bald. It was a white kerchief, I realized, tied tight around her head, with no hair showing at all.

  “Where’s Mama?” I asked again. My chest felt trussed.

  “Shush.” The frowning face vanished. My chin was wet. My nose was running.

  When I touched my leg, my palm knocked up against something hard. Where was my leg? Mama! My voice boomeranged. Beside me was another bed. Something stirred beneath a blanket, gave an animal groan. I screamed. The moon reappeared with its meaty hand curved around a glass of water. “Kindeleh. Drink this.”

  Today Beth Israel is a big, fancy-schmancy medical center that—up until recently—constantly solicited me for money. Up until recently, they loved me at Beth Israel, even though I usually couldn’t be bothered to attend their functions and had no problem letting them know that I thought their fund-raiser was a putz. But back then Beth Israel was simply a “dispensary”—a small clinic run by Orthodox Jews to serve the poorest of us poor on the Lower East Side. Mount Sinai, the nicer Jewish hospital uptown, had been founded by German Jews, you see. Oh, what a bunch of machers. Such aristocrats. They looked down on those of us from Eastern Europe. At one time they’d even formed a society to keep us “cruder” Jews from immigrating. They believed we’d make them look bad. Ha, I always say. Peel back any “superior” culture, and all you see is brutality.

  Nowadays it’s standard procedure to rush an accident victim to a hospital. Back then, however, hospitals were regarded the way public bathhouses and toilets are today—they spoke of charity, humiliation—to be avoided at all costs. For immigrants, hospitals were where people simply went to die.

  If there was a medical problem on the Lower East Side, families usually sent for one of the roving nurses from the Henry Street Settlement House. She’d climb the treacherous stairs to the apartment (or even step nimbly from rooftop to rooftop) to minister to you there. You could have cholera, diphtheria, tuberculosis. Health officials might be called in to quarantine your entire family—a mark or a decree would be placed on your front door—and a dozen of you could be confined there for months—until all of you were either healthy or dead. But you cared for one another at home.

  Poultices, ointments, boiled onions wrapped in cheesecloth, camphor, vinegar mixtures, brandy, tonics, chicken soup of course—these were the standard medicines of the day.

  Yet even back then, when a tiny girl was knocked unconscious in the street, her right leg twisted out from her body like a paper clip with her broken fibula poking through her skin, people knew enough to know that she needed a type of medical attention that went beyond anything that Henry Street or a nurse could carry up the steps in a worn leather satchel. And so someone—Mr. Dinello himself, it turns out—put me in his wagon and rushed me to the Beth Israel Dispensary.

  I have no memory of my arrival, nor of being X-rayed by a brand-new mechanical contraption that was the pride of the hospital. What I will see and remember later, groggily, is my mother. She materializes with her back to me, standing beneath the high, frosted window across from my bed. I am now propped up with pillows but slack-jawed and atrophied with pain. A doctor beside her holds dark panes up to the light. The eerie, translucent rectangles are mapped with bands, wisps, and knobs. One, he explains to my mother, is my leg.

  Though she has no working knowledge of science or anatomy, the visual makes it obvious: My tibia has a compound fracture, and my fibula has cleanly snapped in two like a branch. My right foot is broken. My pelvis is also fractured. Another film shows the graduated tines of my rib cage. Three of my ribs are cracked.

  “She is young, so her bones are soft. They will heal, Mrs. Bialystoker,” the doctor says. “Now?” He raises his eyebrows and shrugs exaggeratedly. “Whether she will walk again or walk with a limp? Or a cane? That we will have to see.”

  “Oy. Vey iz mir!” my mother cries.

  The doctor looks at her, not unsympathetically. “She’s very lucky, Mrs. Bialystoker,” he says softly. “She easily could’ve died.”

  My mother stares at me, immobilized and swollen, then at the doctor. After a moment she wails, “Oh, that she should have!”

  With a look of distress, she points accusingly toward my bed. “Bad enough she is one of four girls. Bad enough she is ugly. But now you’re telling me she is also a cripple? Tell me, please, Doctor. What am I supposed to do with a daughter like this?”

  Picking up her basket, she sobs, “Keep her, for all I care. She is useless.” Turning, she hurries out.

  Once, a few years ago, I mentioned this to Sunny, my domestic. She set down the silver polish and stared at me. “Oh, Missus Dunkle,” she said, shaking her head sadly.

  “Please,” I said. “Spare me the tears.”

  Parents just didn’t coddle their children back then. They needed you to walk? You got up and walked. If you didn’t, they left you sitting. What if the Cossacks came? You had better be able to run.

  Nowadays? Don’t get me started. People name their offspring Tiffany, Brittany, Courtney—all this baby royalty. Everyone pretends their kids are little aristocrats. I want to say to them, What did America fight the War of Independence for? Or, worse yet, the hippies. Lotus. Crocus. Who the hell knows where they get these farkakte names for their kids. One of Rita’s friends named her son Bodhisattva. Bodhisattva Rosenblatt. Can you imagine? Rita always says, “It’s no big deal. They call him ‘Bodi,’ is all.” Please. And the newspapers say I’m abusive to children?

  Besides, nobody ever loves you the way you want.

  For days—weeks—I lay in that dispensary. Mama, Mama, I wept. But she never came back. My voice bounced unheeded off the ugly waxed floors, the bare walls. Other patients complained. The nurses tried shushing me. Please, Mama, I sobbed. I promise I’ll be good. I promise not to eat any food. I promise to be quiet. Please, Mama, I wailed. I’ll find Papa. I cried the way only a child can, feverishly, hysterically, until I hyperventilated, my lungs and throat scorched from sobbing. Please, Mama, I’m sorry.

  Please, Mama. I’ll be useful.

  Nurses glided in and out, regarding me sadly. As they changed my bandages and put a salve on my heat rash, they tsk-tsked and tenderly touched the backs of their hands to my brow. I slapped them away.

  A rabbi who smelled of pipe tobacco and fried potatoes appeared. He was enormous. I screamed until he left. I want Mama! Probably there was a social worker, someone from a settlement house. I seem to recall a white blouse, a braided gold pin on a collar. Mama! I howled. It was hard to throw a tantrum with a broken leg and a bandaged chest, but I managed. I want Mama!

  Finally I lost my voice.

  The days grew hotter and hotter until the heat was its own animal. It hung over the beds in the infirmary, stalking and tormenting us like a predator. Even with the transoms and the windows cranked open, patients around me moaned. Sweat pooled beneath my bandages. Everything felt peed in. I itched, tore at my damp sheets. The smell of bedpans and ointments turned rancid.

  Eventually the doct
or sawed off my heavy cast and exchanged it for a lighter one and a brace made of metal, leather, and wood. “Where’s Mama?” I rasped. Each morning a nurse hoisted me out of bed by my armpits and held me upright until my contorted, throbbing foot grazed the floor and my heels sat atop her own feet. Moving slowly, she tried to coax me to walk in tandem with her, her feet guiding my own. Pain shot up my hip; my ankle seemed to buckle. The weight of the brace was almost unmanageable. I balked. When one of them tried to bully me into taking a few steps, I bit her.

  After that, no one seemed inclined to continue my physical therapy.

  The family has nothing. They’re fresh off the ship.…Come over here expecting charity, did they? Oh, the worst of the worst. They give all of us Jews a bad name.…But she’s only a child…Nu? Did you see those teeth marks she left? Not so much a child as a dybbuk…The place for the cripples? She has to have been here a year to qualify.…Gouverneur’s full up.…But what are we supposed to do? Send her to beg on the streets? Well, if that leg of hers doesn’t heal properly, there’s always the sideshow at Coney Island.…Oh! Gertie! (Laughing) You’re terrible!

  Leaning languidly in the doorway, fanning themselves with folded ladies’ magazines and copies of the Yiddish Forward, the nurses didn’t even attempt to whisper.

  Slowly, a thought began to dawn in me: The reason my mother wasn’t coming back was because she was off looking for Papa. She’d left Mr. Lefkowitz’s apartment on Orchard Street to search for him. And my sisters had gone along to help, of course. Perhaps Papa had found the place in America with the gold and the beautiful furniture. Or changed his mind and sailed to South Africa to make amends with Uncle Hyram. Africa was a very big place, perhaps as big as New York. I pictured my family, crammed back into steerage berths, rocking in time with the heaving sea. I imagined my father in Uncle Hyram’s dry-goods store deep in the desert, miserable, missing all of us terribly, wishing he could come back. Then, suddenly, my mother appears—surprise! My father’s face explodes with happiness. Right away he says, “Where’s Malka?” My mother tells him, “Oh, Herschel, she had a terrible accident. We have to go get her.”

  And that will be it—what convinces him to return to America immediately and what convinces my mother and him to stop fighting. Me, in the hospital. Soon they will all sail back to America together, this time with plenty of gold and bread in their pockets. Soon they’ll be arriving. They’ll go straight from the pier to the dispensary to carry me home.

  My voice was ruined from all the crying and wailing. It was like paper. I could barely speak above a whisper. But it didn’t matter. I wanted to remain quiet, for when my parents returned. I had to show Mama that my big mouth wouldn’t cause her any more tsuris.

  A doctor came in to examine my leg, hips, and ribs. The pain was unbearable, but I had no voice left to cry out with. A nurse asked if I needed to use the toilet. I simply nodded. When the enormous rabbi returned, I stared at the transom over his head the entire time. I noticed floaters in my vision, those little translucent bugs of cells; I followed them up and down. It helped me to stay quiet, to keep still. Only once could I manage to speak. Accompanied by a doctor, the worried-looking young woman in the white blouse leaned over my bed and stared directly into my eyes. “Malka, kindeleh,” she said softly, clutching my arm. “Can you hear me? Do you know where you are? Do you understand what has happened to you?”

  I stared right back at her. “Mama and Papa are in Africa,” I whispered hoarsely, “getting some gold.”

  The nurses began regarding me oddly. Another doctor examined my leg and manipulated it methodically. I thought he’d be impressed by my ability not to cry out, but when he left the room, he just shook his head.

  The next morning Gertie came in. For some reason, since I had gone mute, people began talking to me extremely loudly and slowly, as if I were deaf as well. Whipping off my top sheet, Gertie bellowed, “YOU’RE MOVING, MALKA. TO THE ASYLUM UPTOWN.”

  “Oh, Gertie,” another nurse scolded from across the room. “Don’t scare the child.”

  Gertie glanced at her—then at me—with irritation. “WE CAN’T TAKE CARE OF YOU HERE ANYMORE, MALKA. WE NEED THE BED FOR OTHER PATIENTS WHO ARE MORE RESPONSIVE.”

  I didn’t understand this. I had tried to be quiet, to be good. Certainly I wasn’t singing or being a wisenheimer or keeping secrets. I wondered how Mama and Papa would be able to find me once I was moved. “Promise?” I whispered feebly. “You’ll tell Mama where I am?”

  Gertie frowned and eyed me with a sort of pity. “Oh, your mama knows, kindeleh. Who do you think is sending you? The orphan asylum is where all the women put children they can’t care for any longer.”

  Yet just then, in the corridor outside my ward, the staff seemed to be arguing. Several languages collided at once. Mi dispiace.…Oh, Mr. Aaronson, please. Let the child…kindeleh…Per favore. È per il bambino. Devo aiutare.…He can’t be serious.…Do you have a better suggestion? Gertie appeared in the doorway and pointed to my metal bed, frowning. A stooped man entered the ward. His face was fleshy and sad, though his gleaming mustache was twirled up hopefully at the ends. He moved heavily. When he reached my bedside, he gave me a wan smile.

  “I sorry,” he said. “I no speak the English so good. No Hebrew.”

  Hearing his voice, I sat up as best I could. I studied his face, the grandfatherly folds of it.

  “You remember me?” he asked.

  Without his apron and his cap, he looked smaller somehow, older.

  Slowly, I nodded. “The ices man?”

  Mr. Dinello smiled sheepishly. “How you are feeling? Your leg? Is she no good?”

  “My foot is better.” My voice was shattered again, barely above a whisper. I was so happy to see him, though, to have a visitor—someone I vaguely knew—that I tried to be on my best possible behavior. Pulling aside the sheet, I showed him my unbandaged foot, bright pink and inverted slightly. “My sides are better. My leg still hurts.” I showed him my brace. “Look.” I knocked against it. The hollow sound appealed to me. I’d taken to amusing myself by beating out little tunes on it and seeing how long it took to annoy people.

  “Have you seen my mama?” I asked.

  Mr. Dinello got an uncomfortable look on his face. He glanced around the ward. In the bed nearest mine, a little girl sang in a small, plaintive voice, “Turn Off Your Light, Mr. Moon Man.” Another lay facing the wall, sniffling. Perspiration soaked into Mr. Dinello’s collar where it rubbed against his neck. He put his hands on his knees, drew in a deep breath, and arranged his face into a smile.

  He said, “You come with me, ninella, yes?”

  * * *

  My son, he brings me a new television, a Sony Trinitron thirty-four-inch color, along with one of those brand-new gadgets they have now that can record any show you want on a large cassette. “It’s called a VCR, Ma,” he says. He tells me I can tape Dynasty and Dallas and watch them whenever I want with this VCR. But I don’t care for it. It has a separate remote control that has nothing to do with the controls for the television, and to program it you need an adviser from NASA. “For this you paid good money?” I say.

  Yet now that I’m often confined to my house in Bedford, I do find myself sitting in Bert’s antique wing chair—the one I had reupholstered in lilac last year—in front of the big new Sony. This, I like. At four o’clock every afternoon, I order my domestic to bring me a little something sweet for the mouth—a gin and tonic, a bowl of our premium Rocky Road and vanilla fudge—plus the cold sliced sirloin for Petunia. Then Petunia and I settle in together to watch Donahue. Such a handsome man! His show is quite the theater. All these confessions—forbidden love affairs, children secretly put up for adoption, grown men telling their mothers they’re feygelehs on national TV. Surely it can’t be worse than anything I ever did. But what strikes me most is that it’s clearly entertainment for people who have grown up with privacy.

  The day I arrived on Mulberry Street, everybody already knew. Mrs. DiPietro, t
he widow with the orthopedic shoes and a different-colored rosary for every day of the week. Mrs. Ferrendino, who never stopped perspiring and whose enormous forearms flapped as she fanned herself in her housedress. Mrs. Salucci, the cadaverous, slit-eyed lacemaker who offered vicious opinions on everything whether you asked for them or not. Every neighborhood has its yentas. They arranged themselves around the front stoop like the three Furies, watching as Mr. Dinello carried me up the stairs as if I were a tiny bride, my arms clutching his neck, my right leg jutting out in its brace. I had never been stared at so in my life. Their faces pressed in so close to me I could see their enormous pores, their errant eyebrows, their stained, dilapidated teeth. “Ai, ai, ai!” they exclaimed, running their hands over the wood of my crutches as we passed them.

  The whole neighborhood had heard about the accident, of course. Some of them had even witnessed my mother stomping down the street afterward on her way home from the dispensary. They claimed she had actually kicked Mr. Dinello’s horse in revenge, then shrieked at Mr. Dinello that he’d ruined her baby, that her child was now lame, that he was responsible. What was she supposed to do now—with three other mouths to feed and no husband in sight? Did he suppose she could just carry me up and down four flights of steps every day? How on earth was she supposed to make a living with an invalid child? They’d seen my mother make a V with her fingers and spit through them at Mr. Dinello. He’d apparently stood there miserably, saying nothing.

  Most likely they’d also seen the name Herschel Bialystoker plastered on lampposts and store windows. Every month posters in Yiddish, Italian, and English papered the neighborhood with names and short descriptions of all the men who had deserted their families or gone missing: LOST. SEEKING. LAST SEEN. It was epidemic. In all those ridiculous fairy tales about immigrant life, poor-but-happy families pull together to launch a rag business—that turns into a tailor’s shop—that turns into Ralph Lauren. Please. You half expect butterflies to be fluttering, elves whistling on the fire escapes, and everyone to burst into song. I have no use for that sort of nonsense. On the Lower East Side, families shattered like glass bottles. Men up and left all the time.