The Ice Cream Queen of Orchard Street: A Novel

by Susan Jane Gilman

  Her blue eyes suddenly appeared fathomless.

  “I miss our game,” she said softly. She mimed eating with a fork and chewing. “Mmm. My, isn’t this chicken delicious?”

  “Oh, and the potatoes,” I said, rubbing my stomach, “with parsley?” I pretended to pass her a plate. “Here. Won’t you have some more?”

  “Oh,” said Flora. “Don’t mind if I do.”

  “The Dinellos have a lot of bread,” I said. “Maybe I can bring some for you. But just for you. Not anyone else.”

  “Who are the Dinellos?”

  “Do you remember the ices man? With the horse? They let me live with them now. I work for them. We make ices and lace. Today I went to school, too.”

  Flora looked down.

  “The kids there,” I said. “They called me a dirty Jew. But Mrs. Dinello, she bathes me every week, just like Mama.”

  “Mr. Lefkowitz, after Mama went away, he let me live with him, too,” Flora said softly, picking at a bit of gum on the step. “He told that lady with the blouse that he lost one little girl and that was enough. He promised to take care of me. But I have to work so we can eat. Mrs. Lefkowitz, she is not happy to have me. But I once heard Mr. Lefkowitz tell her that I bring more money into the house than her own children do and that he did not ask for them either.”

  “Do you go to school?”

  Flora shook her head. “Mama, when she was being a dybbuk, she broke Mr. Lefkowitz’s sewing machine. And he had to pay the butcher for the roof of the chicken coop and the chickens that got killed, too. So he has no business and no money left. I make gloves with him at Mr. Metusowich’s factory. I shop, too, because Mrs. Lefkowitz’s condition is too delicate, she says. It’s no fun without you, though. I sing or twirl sometimes, but…” Her voice trailed off. She suddenly looked as if she would cry.

  “I wish Mama and Papa would come back,” I whispered.

  “Me, too,” Flora said.

  “Do you think they will?”

  Flora shrugged, stared out at the street. “These men come in and out all night. They even sleep on the kitchen floor,” she said.

  “Where’s Bella?”

  “She got a job living with a family as a maid. But just before the High Holy Days, they moved to a place called the Bronx, so she went with them.”

  A peddler trundled by, hauling a wooden cart behind him laden with small, knobby apples, the remains of the day, picked over and fermenting. The wheels made a kissing sound in the mud, and a cloud of flies trailed after it. Flora and I watched, hoping an apple or two would roll off the cart without him noticing. The sky was darkening to the color of a bruise, but the streetlamps had not yet been lit.

  “Mr. Dinello makes gelato,” I said. “Ice cream. It’s the best food in the world, Flora. When we make it next time, I can try to bring you some.”

  Flora nodded dolefully, her eyes fixed on her shoes, which, I saw only then, were held together with string.

  “I thought you were in South Africa,” I said. “That you and Mama and Papa and Bella and Rose had all gone back without me to be with Uncle Hyram.”

  “I wish we were all there!” Flora said with sudden distress. “Why did you switch the tickets? Why did you make us come here?”

  I bit my lip and looked down and twisted the hem of my dress around my index finger.

  “It’s all your fault, Malka!” she cried, turning to me reproachfully.

  “It is not! Don’t say that!” I gripped my cane.

  “It is too! Mama even said!”

  “She did not!”

  “Did too!”

  “Did not!”

  “How do you know?”

  We were both standing now, panting, our faces wild and red with fury.

  “You’re stupid!” I said.

  “You’re stupid!” Flora shouted.

  “You’re stupid!” I shouted. “You’re not even going to school.”

  “I am not stupid,” Flora sobbed. “You’re ugly! And lame!”

  “You’re a dirty little Jew!” I said.

  “You and your big mouth cause nothing but tsuris!”

  I whirled around and tried to limp off. Yet my legs were sore and trembling, and my right knee buckled. I dropped halfway to the ground. Then I felt Flora upon me, wrapping her arms tightly around my thin coat, sobbing. “Oh, Malka, I’m sorry. I am so, so sorry. Please, Malka, don’t go.”

  And I was crying, too, loudly, baldly—“Oh, Flora!”—and clutching her equally hard, so hard, in fact, that it felt like our bones, our muscles, our very heartbeats were fusing.

  We arranged a plan to meet every Friday after school, when Flora’s sweatshop closed early for the Sabbath. We picked a spot on the southeast corner of Allen Street under a Yiddish sign for a defunct funeral home, where we were certain no one would see.

  I do not recall exactly why we felt that our meetings needed to be clandestine. Perhaps it was because we were children, and children like to be sneaky. It makes them feel smarter and more powerful than the adults around them. Yet mostly, I suppose, we were afraid. If either the Dinellos or the Lefkowitzes discovered we were meeting, we imagined, they would think we did not need them anymore—or that we would both want to live with them—and cast us out as a burden. Indeed, the Dinellos must have known that Flora existed somewhere, and yet I was convinced that telling them about her would amount to a form of betrayal or ingratitude. Which it was, I suppose, in that Flora and I were plotting to run away together.

  At Metusowich’s sweatshop Flora had overheard the older workers talking about places called “Vaudeville” and “the Jewish Rialto,” a string of Yiddish theaters on Second Avenue. A singer named Sophie Tucker apparently earned more than a thousand dollars a week performing there. “A thousand dollars a week! Not bad for a good Jewish girl from Tulchyn, no?” Mr. Metusowich had said, chuckling. “And such a meeskite, too. Not pretty at all!”

  As soon as my leg was fully healed, Flora and I decided, we would perform together at the Jewish Rialto, too. Flora would dance, and I would be the singing meeskite. If we earned a thousand dollars a week ourselves, perhaps Mama would feel better and not have to stay in the sanitarium. Bella would no longer have to work as a maid, and we could find an apartment for all of us in the Bronx.

  The first day when Flora and I stood huddled in the doorway of the abandoned funeral parlor, I taught her to sing “Addio.” I had tried making up more little songs of my own as well, but after hearing the music on the Victrola, tunes like “Why I Love Chicken” no longer held much interest. Flora, oh, she had such a pretty voice! Like Mama’s. As we sang, “Addio mia bella Napoli. Addio, addio,” she managed to pronounce the Italian beautifully—far better than I could, in fact. But when I said we should make up a little dance for her to go with it, she smiled weakly. “I’m too cold today, Malka.” She pulled her shawl around her. “Do you think maybe we can find something to eat?”

  Indeed, though she had been born first, I was now slightly taller, my shoulders wider. I could feel her ribs whenever she hugged me.

  All week long I endured my lessons and my sewing by thinking of her. Each morning the schoolyard awaited me like a Roman arena. Children ringed it, hooting, “Maaall-kah, Maaall-kah,” while someone—usually Angela and the boy I had punched, Tommaso—played keep-away with my cane and mimicked my limp. Occasionally I hauled off and punched one of them, but they quickly grew wise and nimbly danced out of my way as I swung, which only increased the jeering. My teacher, Mrs. Trafficante, was scarcely kinder. So sue me: I had trouble remembering to raise my hand before speaking. The lessons excited me, sparked my curiosity. One could chew on numbers and English, gulping them down like a food. “That spells ‘hat,’ Mrs. Trafficante! H-A-T, hat!” “The president of the United States of America is Woodrow Wilson, Mrs. Trafficante! I know this! And before him it was President Taft! They told us on the boat!”

  “Do you talk like that at home?” she cried, thwacking me across my left palm with her ruler. “Ar
e you so rude as that to your own parents?”

  But back at the Dinellos’, I was becoming more agreeable. Like a prisoner on the brink of parole or a worker who secretly knows he will soon be leaving his position for a more lucrative job at a better company, I grew more forgiving, more profligate with my affections. I said “per favore” and “grazie.” When Mr. Dinello wiggled his bushy white eyebrows in time to “Alexander’s Ragtime Band,” I allowed myself to laugh out loud. I accompanied the Dinellos to church each Sunday without dawdling or sighing aloud too often.

  “Ninella,” Mr. Dinello said one afternoon as I helped him add the sugar to the gelato and mix it. “Your leg, she is not so bad anymore, si?”

  When I nodded, he reached over and tousled my hair.

  Yet all the while, I was stealing from him. And his neighbors. I had stolen so much that I’d had to loosen another floorboard in the office. It didn’t come up as easily as the first, and the plank stuck out a little when I put it back, but with all the men tromping in and out the whole day—delivering goods, demanding money, bringing over receipts, smelling of cigars, smelling of hair tonic, speaking mellifluously in Italian—I could not imagine how anyone would notice.

  Mrs. Dinello had stitched for me a little school satchel made from a sugar sack, just as she had made for Rocco, Pietro, and Pasquale. On Friday mornings before school, I’d quickly loosen one of the floorboards and stuff as many items as I could bear to part with into the sack, along with the apple she gave me for lunch and the tablet and pencil provided to me by the school. As soon as my lessons were over, I made my way to the Hungarian junk man on the corner of Elizabeth and Hester Streets, where he parked between his rounds. For the brown shoelaces he gave me a nickel, for the rubber ball three cents. The wooden comb earned me a nickel as well. When I handed him the tin of mustache wax, he turned it over in his hands. “Where did you get this?” he asked, eyeing me. “It is brand-new.”

  I quickly thought of Luigi and the Victrola. “I won it,” I told him. “In a card game.”

  Each week I took whatever he paid me—perhaps seven cents or a dime in total—and brought it to Flora.

  “Oh, Malka,” she wheezed. She always seemed to be panting, my sister, hungry for air. “Let’s go. Before all the peddlers leave.”

  As fast as we could, we walked to Hester Street before the markets shut down for the Sabbath. Spicy chickpeas scooped into folded squares of newspaper were one of our favorites. So were baked sweet potatoes and boiled eggs, served straight from chipped enameled pots boiling above tiny grills on carts. These filled you up most. Whenever I could, I let Flora have the extra few chickpeas or the bigger half of the potato. I kept intending to let her have it all for herself, but often I was just too hungry. Still, I always let her alone have an apple or a pickle, and I watched her devour it with a mixture of longing and pride. “Flora, I promise,” I told her, gripping her hands. “Next time I’ll bring more.”

  One Friday, when I sold the cache of Mrs. Salucci’s sewing notions that I had accumulated over the course of the winter—two spools of white thread, a wooden thimble, and two dozen straight pins—for fifteen cents, Flora and I managed to buy a half dozen potatoes and a chicken carcass for her to bring home to the Lefkowitzes on top of everything we’d eaten ourselves. Oh, the feeling of that! The bounty!

  “Malka,” Flora rasped, hugging me tightly when it was time to go. “I’m so happy you’re here. Promise next week you’ll come back, too?”

  “Cross my heart and hope to die. Stick a needle in my eye.” I’d learned this phrase in the schoolyard. “You promise me you’ll come back?” I squeezed her hand.

  “Cross my heart and hope to die. Stick a needle in my eye,” she wheezed. And then, because neither of us could stand to watch the other walk away, we counted to three in unison, then shouted, “On your mark, get set, go!” At which point we were both supposed to hurry off in opposite directions down Hester Street as fast as we could without looking back.

  “Whoever looks back will be cursed, so don’t do it,” Flora said, wrapping her shawl around herself and sniffling with a little laugh. She tossed her golden head and bobbed away. She was so good and careful. She walked slowly—almost as reluctantly as I did—but she never turned around.

  Yet I, of course, always did.

  Springtime was approaching. Mr. and Mrs. Dinello spent more time in the kitchen, readying it for another season of penny-ices production. However, they had been put on warning by the local health department: Using the same little glass cup for each customer to lick clean was not hygienic. In fact, it was illegal. Penny-ices carts were quickly becoming extinct; more and more peddlers were selling ice cream manufactured in big commercial plants—sometimes in the form of ice cream bricks, served in paper-wrapped slices for a nickel—for an even smaller fraction of the profit. More and more, candy stores were opening up around the neighborhood, too, selling ice cream. Beyond the Lower East Side, drugstore soda fountains were flourishing. It was rumored that there were even more soda fountains in New York City than saloons.

  For a while the Dinellos engaged in a great debate over what to do. Did they shut down production and begin purchasing from a larger company? Should they expand the flavors and products they made? Invest, perhaps, in a motorized ice cream maker?

  “We already have equipment. She works good enough. We make good ices. Everybody likes them,” said Mr. Dinello.

  “But how are we serving them?” said Mrs. Dinello. “What do we do? Pass around a spoon?”

  “We sell the cones. Like everybody else.”

  Eleven years earlier, right there on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, another Italian immigrant, Italo Marchiony, had filed a patent for a mold he had invented to make little edible ice cream cups out of waffle mix. For a while, in fact, these cups had made him one of the most popular ices men in the neighborhood. At one point, just a year before the Dinellos themselves arrived in New York, Marchiony had upward of forty vendors working for him in the Wall Street district, selling his ices in his wafer cups. He believed he had invented the ice cream cone.

  Yet what he had patented was actually a flat-bottomed cup. Soon after, no fewer than five other vendors each claimed to have invented the “real” ice cream cone during the 1904 World’s Fair in St. Louis.

  An immigrant pastry maker named Ernest Hamwi claimed he’d invented the ice cream cone from crisp wafers he baked called “zalabia.” A Syrian immigrant, Abe Doumar, claimed that one evening at the fair he suggested that a waffle vendor turn his penny waffle into a ten-cent cone by adding ice cream from a neighboring stall. He himself then began selling these “Syrian ice cream sandwiches.” Still another Syrian immigrant, Nick Kabbaz, claimed that he and his brother Albert created the first ice cream cone at the fair when they decided to fold flat little cakes into cones. (Kabbaz went on to become president of the St. Louis Ice Cream Cone Company.) A Turkish immigrant, David Avayou, said that no, it was actually he who had introduced ice cream cones. He had first seen ice cream served in paper or metal cones in France, he claimed, and thought it would be better if such cones were edible. “I spent three weeks and used hundreds of pounds of flour and eggs before I got it right,” he insisted. And finally there were Charles Robert Menches and his brother Frank, of St. Louis. Their family claims that the two invented the ice cream cone at the world’s fair when they saw a lady roll a waffle around a scoop so that it was daintier to eat.

  Whether the Dinellos were aware of the debate raging around ice cream cones remains a mystery. Their own debate revolved around whether to use them at all.

  Mr. Dinello was partial to the cones. “I try one. She is delicious. The children, everybody, they can eat the ices, the gelato, and the cone, too. The idea, she is a good one.”

  But Mrs. Dinello, who, like my own illiterate mother, could add three-digit numbers in her head, insisted that it was not cost-effective. “The cones? They are too expensive to buy. We don’t have that kind of money.”

  “
So? We have a kitchen. We make them ourselves!”

  “With what, Salvatore? The molds, they cost. And the ingredients?”

  “So we get another loan from Carlo, from the brotherhood. We buy a mold. We take the flour. We take the eggs. We add di latte—”

  “Oh, flour, eggs, and milk. You think these grow on trees, Salvatore?”

  “I talk to Giovanni the grocer. He make us a deal—”

  “Giovanni the grocer, he is a lowlife. He is like a Sicilian. He is crazy in the head. We are not getting milk and flour from Giovanni—”

  “So we ask Vito the baker, or Savio—”

  “Ai, ai, ai! For their prices you should just make cones out of paper dollars and serve ices in those!”

  Mr. Dinello’s hands froze in midair. He stared at her and moved his mouth in such a way that his white mustache seemed to tilt from side to side. “Generosa,” he said, “that is not a terrible idea.”

  Which is how the Dinellos came up with the idea of serving their Italian ices in little paper cones. They experimented first with newsprint, which got too soggy and bled, then parchment and simple white tablet paper, which was too hard to manipulate and, Mrs. Dinello calculated, far too expensive. Brown wrapping paper used for packages came apart when it got wet. Finally they settled on using the same paper as the butcher down the street did. Thin but lightly waxed, it was supple, strong, and cheap. Mr. Dinello could purchase it in bulk on a roll, then cut it into squares and twist them into little cones himself for each serving.

  Somebody else, of course, eventually patented the waxed-paper ices cone and the Dixie cup and the machines invented for mass-producing them. Somebody else, as it so often goes, got all the money and the credit. But trust me, darlings, it was the Dinellos who invented it first. I know this: I watched them do it myself.

  And with the new inspiration for the cones, Mr. Dinello, he began to dream a bit more. Why not make strawberry ices as well? Or chocolate? Or grape? Why not sell gelato, too, and expand what Dinello’s Ices had to offer, particularly in light of the new candy shop that had opened on Mott Street selling ice cream cones?