The Ice Cream Queen of Orchard Street: A Novel

by Susan Jane Gilman

  If you went to the schoolyard on Ludlow Street that September, you’d have seen another list, too. The obliterating summer heat turned the Lower East Side into an enormous petri dish of bacteria and infection. July and August were polio season. Diphtheria, cholera, typhoid, rheumatic fever. Every fall, children returned to school to find names written in chalk on the schoolyard wall of all their classmates who’d died over the summer. Esther Lezack. Marta Horvath. Saul Pinsker. You didn’t need Phil Donahue. You didn’t need tabloids. You didn’t need reporters poking around your driveway and reprinting unflattering photos of you looking like Joan Crawford.

  That September of 1913, everyone in the neighborhood would’ve seen another name from my family publicly on display as well. Chalked on the bloodred wall of P.S. 42 in shaky white letters: ROSE BIALYSTOKER—TYPHUS.

  As Mr. Dinello carried me past his neighbors toward the wrought-iron steps, I didn’t know that my family and Mr. Lefkowitz had been in quarantine for most of the summer or that my sister Rose had died. I didn’t even know where Mulberry Street was in relation to Orchard Street. It could have been miles away. The streets, to me, were like oceans of ironwork and brick. I knew only that Mama had vanished—gone off somewhere—in search of Papa, perhaps? And these new neighborhood women were different from the ones on Orchard Street, with their heavy floral perfume and the cut of their dresses and their smells of hair oil, rosemary, coffee, and camphor. The inky sheen of their hair, the fat wattles beneath their chins. I could feel their eyes studying me as if I were a specimen. They didn’t bother to whisper.

  “Look at that leg. No wonder her mother gave her up.”

  “Generosa is furious. As if they don’t have enough trouble?”

  “He claims it’s only temporary. Apparently a tailor over on Orchard is helping to pay for her upkeep. Until she can climb stairs, he says.”

  “Ha! She can climb stairs the day I can fly.”

  “Salvatore’s too good. He thinks he’s doing penance.”

  “So go to confession, then—don’t take in a little Ammazza Christi!”

  The Dinellos had three grown sons, Vincenzo, Luigi, and Silvio. They were all burly, muscled men in overalls and heavy boots; when they clomped up and down the stairs, the whole tenement shook.

  I would learn later that the sons were sandhogs, employed to help dig the tunnels for the new Lexington Avenue subway extending north of Forty-Second Street. Each day they dug down, down into the bowels of the city—with their metal lunch pails and their dented shovels and their St. Anthony medals hanging around their necks—to face off against the bedrock and crumbly earth, the network of sewers and train lines already in place, the potential tsunami of muck and debris. Every evening they returned to the Mulberry Street tenement like heavy phantoms covered in fine gray dust, their overalls caked in mud. Before they even set foot in the kitchen, Mrs. Dinello yelled “Ai, ai, ai!” and made them remove their boots. But even as she pointed to the tracks they left in the front hallway—sloppy kisses of dirt, manure, and cement—she touched herself quickly: first on the forehead, then the heart, then on each shoulder. “Grazie,” she mouthed to the ceiling.

  Silvio and Vincenzo had yet to be married. Brides had already been arranged for them, however. Back in Napoli families who knew the Dinellos were preparing to send their daughters to America, to build a bridge of a different sort. It was simply a matter of money, of time. Yet Luigi, the oldest, was already married to Annunziata, a shrill, industrious woman who’d given birth to four shrill, pummeling boys. The oldest, a skulking teenager named Vittorio, spent most of his time on the streets. A set of twins, Pasquale and Pietro, ignored me. But the youngest, Rocco, did not. He was about my age, perhaps six or seven, wiry and knock-kneed. His eyes were calculating black slots, and he had a cowlick that never stayed down no matter how much pomade his mother put on his head. The animosity between Rocco and me was instantaneous. He seemed to go out of his way to stick his tongue out at me or make a hateful “Bah-ha” sound whenever he saw me. He gave me the nickname “Ragazza del Cavallo.” Horse Girl. Although Mr. Dinello slapped him in the back of the head when he heard this, the name quickly stuck. I overheard the other boys calling me this very matter-of-factly as they clambered down the stairs on their way to school each morning. They weren’t intending to be cruel. They were merely unquestioning and indifferent, which is another type of cruelty altogether.

  If Rocco ever got close enough to me, I decided I’d punch him.

  The Dinellos also had a niece, Beatrice, unmarried, who worked making lace for Mrs. Salucci on the fourth floor. The whole Dinello family lived on the second floor of the Mulberry Street tenement in three of the four apartments. But there was so much activity and movement and noise back and forth it felt more like one big town house. They had the run of the place, and their voices rang through the air shafts, windows, and hallways, filling the building with arguments and laughter.

  They talked not just with their voices but with their whole bodies. When they spoke, they pinched the air, they shrugged at the ceiling, they pointed to themselves, they raised their arms beseechingly to the heavens, they conducted vast invisible symphonies with their arms, they held up their palms in mock supplication.

  Even though I didn’t speak much Italian, I could always glean what they were saying simply by watching them. It was like living in a house full of mimes.

  The day I arrived, Generosa Dinello took one look at me—with my little twisted leg and my brace and my crutches—and started right in on her husband.

  “How many times did I tell you? Don’t buy a horse from the Hungarian—he is crazy in the head!”

  “It wasn’t the horse. I told you. It was the chicken!” Mr. Dinello roared. “The crazy chicken, running loose in the street. She scare the horse. The horse, she was good price.”

  “So this is how you save us money? You bring home a cripple to feed?”

  “What do you want me to do, Generosa? I should leave her in the orphan asylum? Send her away to be locked with the crazy people?”

  “Since when is she our problem?”

  “Since she is. What if it were Beatrice? Look at her, Generosa.” Mr. Dinello waved his arm toward me, as if toward a display. “A helpless little girl.”

  Their word for “little girl” was “ninella.” I’d learned this on the streets. Hearing it now, I sensed my opportunity. Drawing upon the skills I had honed with Flora, I burst into voluptuous tears. I didn’t much like the look of Mrs. Dinello, with her dark, arched brows and grim, frowning lips, but I sensed that her kitchen was far preferable to the place called the asylum. “Please, Mrs. Dinello!” I wailed. “Please don’t send me away. I promise I’ll be good. I promise I won’t eat very much.”

  Mrs. Dinello regarded me. A comma of shiny black hair fell into her eyes. A small gold cross glinted in the crepe gully of her throat. With a deflated sigh, she shook her head. “Fine. You want to take care of a crippled little Ammazza Christi,” she said to Mr. Dinello, “we’ll take care of a crippled little Ammazza Christi.” Pointing at me, she made an eating motion with her hands, then a shoveling motion. “But I don’t care how crippled she is. If she’s going to stay, she’s going to work.”

  * * *

  Not long ago, before refrigeration, ice was more precious than gold. Nothing else could do what ice did, and in most parts of the world it simply didn’t exist. And where it did, it was nearly impossible to harvest, transport, or store. It was the one commodity that could literally vanish in your hand. Not many people consider this today. If I weren’t in my line of business, I suppose I wouldn’t, either. Yet for much of human history, ice was a phenomenon. Ice was elitist. Rare. Powerful. Ephemeral.

  As early as the fifth century B.C., the Greeks apparently sold snow in the markets of Athens. Roman emperors had ice hauled down from the mountains; Egyptian royalty had snow shipped from Lebanon. Yet for all these centuries, the precious commodity of ice could be used only to cool liquids—never to freeze the
m.

  That is, until Giambattista della Porta comes along in the sixteenth century.

  He’s a noble autodidact, this one, and as ambitious as his name. Born to an aristocratic family outside Naples, della Porta is a narrow-faced gentleman, as elegant as a calla lily. He wears frocks of the finest embroidered silk with a ruff like one of those paper frills on a crown roast. As the Italians say, he cuts una bella figura.

  Intellectually, the man is an octopus. Not only is he a playwright but a philosopher, a cryptographer, and a scientist. Meteorology, physiognomy, horticulture, astronomy, physics—everything in the natural world fascinates him.

  Some put della Porta in the same league as Kepler and Galileo. Others, perhaps, categorize him more as a privileged oddball who’s licentious with science, combining bona fide experiments with supernatural dabblings. This is due to della Porta’s most famous book, published in 1558. Natural Magic is a voluminous, illustrated hodgepodge of occult practices, fantastical theories, and genuine scientific experiments. There are formulas for facial rouge and increased fertility. Instructions on how to produce “beautiful” pitted peaches. Descriptions of flying dragons.

  And among its illustrations, theorems, and supernatural claims, there is a recipe for wine that is not merely chilled but frozen. To achieve this, della Porta instructs, one has to immerse and agitate a vial of wine inside a wooden bucket filled with snow and saltpeter.

  Saltpeter: potassium nitrate. Or even simple salt: sodium chloride.

  Salt, you see, makes ice melt faster. When the ice in della Porta’s wooden bucket melts, the heat is transferred away from the contents of the vial. The wine inside the vial grows increasingly colder, until it freezes, while the ice around it grows increasingly warmer, until it melts. Solid becomes liquid, liquid becomes solid. A perfect ballet, a conversion of energy; matter is neither created nor destroyed, merely changing form. Ice to water, wine to ice. Fundamental science.

  Della Porta’s recipe for frozen wine is a hit at lavish banquets throughout Naples. The method for manufacturing ice cream is born.

  And three centuries later, one Mr. Salvatore Dinello faithfully employs this method every morning, six days a week, in a cramped storefront tenement on New York City’s Mulberry Street on the Lower East Side.

  Dinello’s Ices was one of the few small ices manufacturers still operating at that time. Ice cream—or “gelato” as he called it—was Mr. Dinello’s true passion. As I’d soon discover, he made it for the Dinello family on special occasions, rhapsodizing about it as he did the opera. Oh! Fragola! Crema! But for commercial purposes, Mr. Dinello just made Italian ices. These were far cheaper and easier to produce than ice cream, and easier to sell because they contained no dairy. He could move his wagon down Hester Street from the Italian section to the Jewish section of the neighborhood without having to worry about kosher laws impeding his business.

  His production plant, on the ground floor of his building, wasn’t any bigger than Mr. Lefkowitz’s factory, except that the space consisted of a big kitchen and a small office alcove in the back. What I did not fully comprehend then was that Mr. Dinello was a small padrone, an overseer of sorts—a miniature version of the wholesalers who would soon take over the industry. Manufacturing ices and ice cream in tenement apartments had been made illegal back in 1906. And so Mr. Dinello had established a separate little commercial kitchen in the ground-floor storefront and gone through the rigmarole of procuring not only a production license but peddlers’ licenses as well. He rented these out, along with three wagons, for a dollar a day to three other men he’d known back in Napoli. The men paid him an additional dollar and a half per day for the lemon ices he made and supplied to them, which they then sold along designated routes on Canal Street, Wall Street, and over by Broome. Anything they earned above what they paid him, they kept. Mr. Dinello, I would learn, was a generous and honest padrone; the men peddling for him usually took home about a dollar and a half a day after expenses—fifty cents more than most others earned. Today, of course, all of this buys you nothing.

  It was there, in the little office alcove behind the Dinello’s Ices production kitchen, that the Dinellos installed me. Mr. Dinello placed a bench against the back wall. Mrs. Dinello covered it with some wine-colored cushions that she brought down from her parlor. In the courtyard was the privy. “Down here you no have to climb steps,” Mr. Dinello said, lowering me onto the bench.

  Children tell me all the time how they dream of living in an ice cream factory. Well. Good luck to them.

  The storefront’s high ceilings were made of pressed tin, and the big window looked directly onto Mulberry Street, the pushcarts and peddlers and horse carts all clamoring by. Delivery boys, suppliers, neighbors, men from the church brotherhood tromped in and out all day, gesticulating in Italian and Napolese and English and raising a ruckus. At night, finally empty, the cold kitchen crept with eerie purple shadows filtering in through cracks in the shutters. I could hear the scratching of vermin. Occasionally, a dark slink of rats scuttled toward me from a crevice in the corner, their teeth and tails gleaming in the residual light, and I jabbed at them viciously with a broom. The bench itself was narrow and rickety. I had never slept alone before. I missed my sisters terribly.

  On the office wall high above me hung a wooden crucifix with a knotted figure on it, which scared me: I believed it to be some sort of weapon. Beside it, though, was a gilt-framed picture of a bearded father in lush brown robes hugging a rosy infant. Radiant gold rings encircled their heads. Looking at it made me feel sad and forsaken and hopeful all at once. Perhaps, I thought, it was a sign.

  At daybreak I was awoken by the jangle of a horse and an oxlike man trundling up the steps from the street and pounding on the door. Mr. Dinello came hurrying down the stairs in his boots and his smock.

  “Gennaro!” he cried, ushering the panting man into the storefront. “Prego.”

  Gennaro wore a thick leather apron knotted over his coat. A pair of tongs, shaped like calipers, dangled ominously from his belt. He balanced an enormous burlap-covered block on his shoulder. Angling his way into the kitchen, he slammed the block down on the tabletop so hard that the whole room seemed to shake. When he unwrapped the block, he revealed a glistening chunk of ice. Drawing a pick from his belt, he stabbed it expertly through its translucent heart. Like a diamond cutter or a surgeon, he seemed to know exactly where to aim the chisel to create a wholesale seizure of fractures. The ice cracked and cleaved with a sound like breaking tree branches. He jabbed at the ice again and again with staccato movements, turning it to crystalline shrapnel. It was both violent and beautiful to watch.

  While Gennaro cut up one block of ice, then another, Mr. Dinello milled some of the ice in a pewter grinder until it was fine as snow, then scooped it into a large metal canister. Mrs. Dinello and Beatrice hoisted a pot from the stove and poured a cloudy, pale yellow liquid into the canister as well. The room filled with the scent of lemons. The canister was then placed in a large barrel with a crank. Mr. Dinello packed chunks of ice all around it and showered them with rock salt.

  Before they were permitted to leave for school, Rocco and his brothers were enlisted to help wind the crank attached to the enormous barrel. They took turns, shoving and slapping each other in between.

  That first morning, as I lay on the bench at the back of the kitchen, I kept hoping that at some point Mrs. Dinello would notice me and help me to the toilet. But she never did. I felt more immobilized and alone than I ever had at the dispensary. There, I’d had a feeling of being in somebody’s care, enveloped, accounted for. But propped up in the rear office of Dinello’s Ices, trying to hold my urine and pallid with hunger, I was almost a ghost, a silent witness to a hive of activity in which a strange family loved and worked and laughed and argued in a foreign language with their backs to me.

  The boys took turns winding the crank over and over with a spine-slicing creak, rotating the canister of ingredients around and around inside its bath of i
ce and salt, the liquid sloshing and slapping, until it grew quiet. They worked quickly. Most commercial establishments by this time used motorized churns and barrels. But the Dinellos still cranked their large ice cream maker by hand.

  When all the batches of ices were done, they scraped them into frosted metal pails with heavy lids and wrapped them in burlap, then helped Mr. Dinello carry these down to the four wagons.

  After the grandsons had left for school, the other vendors had paid Mrs. Dinello their daily fees, and Mr. Dinello himself had commenced clopping down Mulberry Street with his skittish, Hungarian-bred horse, singing “I-SEES, I-SEES,” the kitchen lay in ruins. Pails, melted ice, sopping burlap, ladles, lemon rinds, a huge sack of granulated sugar…Mrs. Dinello stood surveying the wreckage like a war nurse. She was a sturdy, violin-shaped woman, but her eyes were like black pebbles tossed into the pond of her face, the soft flesh hanging in rings beneath them.

  Sighing, she wiped her hands on her apron and said aloud, “Tutto questo.” All this. Picking up a ladle as if it were a dead mouse, she released it above a zinc pail with a disdainful clatter. I drew in my breath. Only then did she seem to realize I was there.

  “Oh,” she said, frowning. “La ninella. Okay, you.” She flicked her thumb toward the ceiling. “Up.