The Ice Cream Queen of Orchard Street: A Novel

by Susan Jane Gilman

  I blinked up at the Dinellos—her with her black hair shot with its streak of silver and her weary eyes—him with his white hair and earnest face, almost pleading with me—the two of them standing before me in their shabby clothes, as the office alcove that I had come to know as home rose behind them, with its well-meaning bench, and its cross on the wall, and its picture of the bearded saint in robes lovingly clutching a child.

  Children sense what adults want to hear; they have an instinct for what will endear them to the people who control their fate. As I stood there in the little ices factory, everything before me suddenly coalesced.

  “I just wanted some money to put in the church basket,” I said softly, “for Jesus, so he will make my leg better. I just want to be a good Catholic”—I started to weep—“like you.”

  It was, of course, a grand, marvelous lie. Yet no sooner had I said it than I half believed it was true. Perhaps it was. Perhaps I did feel a great longing to be like them, to belong. Certainly at that moment I believed in what I was saying the way a drowning man believes in a life raft.

  I had only a vague idea of how the rosary bolstered my case. What it meant for a Jew to go to church or pray to Jesus—it did not really register: I was merely a child, after all. Yet who knows? Perhaps after months and months of living among the Dinellos and their countrymen, I really did want to be like them. Or perhaps I simply had nowhere else to turn. So sue me, darlings: I did what I had to.

  As soon as they heard my preposterous explanation, the Dinellos seemed to melt. The childishness of my reasoning was enough to make it ring true. (“Imagine! She wants to be Catholic so badly she sleeps with a rosary!” I heard Mrs. Dinello tell Mrs. Ferrendino later, with a tinge of bemused pride.) Perhaps, like most people, the Dinellos were easily undone by flattery. Or perhaps they were simply too forgiving, too kind, too buffeted by life’s hardships not to allow me to redeem myself.

  Mrs. Dinello shook her head and looked at me, her eyes welling. “Oh, Ninella,” she sighed. Cocking his head, Mr. Dinello motioned me over. I limped across the warped floorboards with my cane to him and surrendered.

  The Dinellos moved me upstairs to sleep in a room with Beatrice. While I believed at the time that this was designed to help me feel “more Catholic” and more a part of the family, I now suspect it was done to keep a better eye on me. To my great disappointment, Mrs. Dinello announced that the pennies we saved in the jar from my lace-making would be given to the church basket each week instead of used for excursions to the movies. More and more, I was enlisted to help Mr. Dinello in the kitchen before school each morning. As I assembled the ingredients before him, he sang in Italian and winked.

  A few weeks later, clad in a white dress that Mrs. Dinello and Mrs. Salucci had stitched together themselves—and feeling quite regal—the most regal, in fact, that I would feel for many years—I proceeded solemnly up to the font in the corner of the Most Precious Blood Church. Around me were Mr. and Mrs. Dinello, of course, as well as Silvio, Vincenzo, Luigi, Annunziata, and all four grandsons. Mrs. Ferrendino was there, too, and the Piccolos, and the DiPietros, and even a sour-looking Mrs. Salucci. Just as Father Antonucci had shown me he would, he bent me gently over the rim.

  It had been suggested to me beforehand that I might like to take a “more Christian, more Italian” name for my baptism. “Perhaps Maria,” Father Antonucci suggested. “Since it is close to Malka. You could be Malka-Maria.”

  “Maria, she is a beautiful name.” Mrs. Dinello nodded. “My grandmother was Maria-Teresa.”

  “No,” I said solemnly.

  Mrs. Dinello and the priest exchanged an anxious look.

  “I don’t want to be Malka at all,” I said.

  Malka. Maaall-kah. It scraped across my brain like my cane against the sidewalk and dragged after me like the deadweight of my leg. It rang in my head like the mockery it had become in the schoolyard. It came to me in the voice of my mother, furiously announcing that “all this” was my fault. Malka was the “violent” and “insane” girl who almost got locked away. Malka was the bigmouth who caused nothing but tsuris. Malka was the Ammazza Christi, the hellbound, the dirty Jew. “Please,” I begged Mrs. Dinello and Father Antonucci, “can I have a new name altogether? An American one—the same as the beautiful girl in the moving pictures.”

  Scarcely more than a year after I had arrived at Ellis Island with my family from Vishnev, Father Antonucci said a solemn prayer in Latin and eased my head down into the marble basin of sacred water. As he scooped it over me, it ran through my hair like fingers, bathing my neck and pooling in the little wells of my clavicle. As he righted me, it soaked into the lace of my collar, ran down my arms, and fell about my feet in tiny, sparkling molecules, a rain of liquid diamonds washing away everything, rinsing me clean. Everyone cheered, everyone clapped.

  I had entered the church Malka Treynovsky Bialystoker. I emerged, however, Lillian Maria Dinello.

  The legend of my American life had begun.

  Chapter 6

  Just days before the civil trial, a man named Robin Leach telephones. He has refused to go through my publicist, my secretary, my army of lawyers. He insists on speaking to me personally, and he has the most extraordinary English accent. It is like a parody of Cockney. He bellows so loudly through the receiver, I assume he thinks that I am deaf. At first I’m convinced it’s all a hideous prank. But no. Leach really is his last name. And he really is hosting a new television show called Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous, slated to air next year. He asks: Might I be willing to open up my home in Bedford to his cameras? The fact that I’m currently under indictment doesn’t seem to bother him in the least.

  “What we’re looking for is ‘champagne wishes and caviar dreams’ as they translate into home furnishings, luv,” he explains. “Viewers don’t care a whit about scandals. In fact, scandals are good, providing they’re the right sort. Here’s what they do care about, though: mirrored walls, leopard-print furniture, satin bedsheets, crystal chandeliers, and indoor swimming pools. And the more gold plating on anything, the better. Your late husband, for example, did he happen to own any gold-plated golf clubs? Do your sinks have any gold-plated faucets? What about your loo? Any chance the handles are gold? It’s extraordinary, the amount of interest people will have in a gold-plated toilet. Also, extra points for home movie theaters, circular water beds, wet bars, wine cellars, grand pianos in any color other than black, fur vaults, pinball machines, and Jacuzzis. And multicar garages, those are the real money shots here, if you forgive my saying so, luv. You wouldn’t happen to own any DeLoreans or Lamborghinis, say, would you?”

  “Lamborghini, what is that? Some sort of pasta?” I say. So sue me: I am being a wisenheimer. I know what a Lamborghini is, thank you very much. However, I always purchase American only.

  “What about Cadillacs?” I say. “Do they still count for something?”

  “That depends. We prefer gold, silver, or magenta.”

  My home in Bedford, I suspect, is not nearly as extravagant as Mr. Leach believes it to be. Our old spread in Palm Beach, with its Italianate fountains, tennis courts, and the rotunda—that would have been more to his taste. “Really,” I tell him, “we have only two pools and a sauna now. Except for the bar and the ballroom, it’s all rather sedate.” This television concept seems completely meshuggeneh to me. You want to go through my closets? Show viewers my crystal drawer pulls? Yet this Mr. Leach is trafficking in the same experience, I realize, that I had as a tiny girl walking through the streets of Hamburg. We all want to press our faces up against the glass. Peel back a velvet curtain. Peek inside.

  And why shouldn’t I be proud?

  Besides, this Robin Leach says, his producers will pay me handsomely to participate.

  Well then. Every bit can help defray my legal costs. And if I’m being hounded by cameras anyway, why not use it to my advantage? Who turns down a paycheck?

  “If we do this, however, a few rooms are off-limits,” I tell him. B
ert’s old dressing room, for one. And my “souvenir parlor.” Over the years it seems, I have crammed it full of those marvelous little individual jars of raspberry jam and marmalade they always serve me with breakfast over at the Waldorf. Washcloths acquired from the Hilton. Ashtrays from the Plaza. Butter knives and teaspoons from Delta. TWA. Marvelous luggage tags and porcelain saltshakers from the Concorde. Matchbooks from the Sherry-Netherland. Assorted guest soaps. Plastic swizzle sticks. Coffee stirrers. Sugar cubes. Hundreds of ketchup, salt, and soy-sauce packets from restaurants. Paper napkins. They are often sitting there just for the taking! So sue me: You never know when you might need something like these in a pinch. Still. I suspect it’s better only to show the public my Chagall.

  “Send over the paperwork,” I tell Robin Leach, “and the monetary offer in writing.”

  “No, absolutely not. You can’t do it, Ma,” Isaac declares over lunch.

  “Says who?” I say. “Who asked you? Mr. Big here. You haven’t even finished stealing my estate, yet already you’re acting like my landlord.”

  “I’m not trying to steal your property, Ma. I’m trying to protect it. And your reputation.”

  “Mrs. Dunkle, I have to side with your son on this,” says my lawyer, Mr. Beecham, squeezing a half-moon of lemon into his Perrier, cupping his hand around it so it doesn’t spray across the tablecloth. All around us, I know, other diners are sneaking glances at me. It is only a matter of time, I suspect, before some paparazzi start gathering in the street outside. “Right now the last thing you want is for the entire world to see you showing off your mansion on television,” Beecham says in a quiet voice. “We need people to be sympathetic.”

  “I don’t want sympathy,” I sniff. “I want them to fear and respect me.”

  “Ma, you think they’re going to respect someone who paid eighty-five thousand dollars for a doghouse that’s a replica of Versailles?” Isaac says.

  “What country did you grow up in?” I look at him mawkishly. “Of course they will. This is America, for Chrissakes.”

  “Lillian, if I might weigh in here,” Rita says gently, patting my son’s tweedy cuff. She has not touched her poached salmon, though it is the most expensive dish on the menu. My daughter-in-law. Suddenly she is a paragon of concern again. It is she, I suspect, who has urged Isaac to return from their summer home to meet with me and my lawyers before the trials. Perhaps she has planted a spy among my staff.

  “Look, we’re in your corner, Lillian,” she insists. Oh. When have I heard this before? Canny, sharp-eyed Rita, with her expensive feathered haircut, her glittering gold necklaces nestling in her clavicle, her fancy degree from UPenn. Who pushes food around on her plate and owns a Cuisinart when she never even cooks anymore.

  After Bert died, Rita became my new best friend for a while. “Come on over on Thursday, Lil, and I’ll make my famous lasagna for you. We’ll get some girl time alone in the kitchen.” She offered to take me shopping each week at Saks. Accompanied me to my internist, my pulmonary-cardiologist, my physical therapist. Scheduled weekly appointments for us together at my beauty parlor. “Now that Jason’s a teenager, he doesn’t need me anymore,” she’d said helplessly. “Come have tea with me at the Plaza?” Stupidly, I had actually begun to entertain the possibility that Rita genuinely liked spending time with me. The pocketbooks I bought for her. And that expensive John Kloss underwear—sixteen dollars for a brassiere without any lace on it? “You’re such a comfort to me,” she had said once, squeezing my arm as we burrowed into the wind together on Fifty-Seventh Street.

  Yet I should have known better. That conniver. She was just making sure I was indisposed. Out of the office.

  Now she taps the last of her Tab into her glass and says with asperity, “Rich guys can own two hundred sports cars, Lillian, and everyone simply calls them ‘collectors’ or ‘enthusiasts.’ But if a woman has a hundred pairs of shoes, people are like, ‘Who the hell does she think she is?’” Reaching across the table, she touches her fingertips to my forearm. “I just don’t want you to give them any more opportunity to bad-mouth you.”

  Yanking my arm away, I glower. The problem with my daughter-in-law is that she is often right. Rita is far shrewder—and savvier—than my own son: pepper to Isaac’s salt. But she’s like a magpie, too, Rita. Wave anything shiny in front of her and that’s all she fixates on. Ambition. Single-mindedness. Desire. Consumption. I recognize them all in her. I know them only too well myself.

  “You just don’t want me to embarrass you, is all,” I say bitterly, setting my fork down with a clatter. “You’re all in cahoots. You just don’t want the feds to seize everything I own before you get your hot little mitts on it.”

  “Ma,” Isaac says.

  “I built this fortune, not you.”

  * * *

  My husband, Bert, had the jaw, cheekbones, and torso that one usually finds sculpted in marble inside a Greek temple. His long-lashed eyes were set deep in his face, a serif of hair curled over his forehead. He was so dashing, darlings, he might as well have worn a pilot’s scarf draped permanently around his neck.

  The day he crashed our ice cream truck into the fire hydrant off Merrick Road all anyone thought was that a movie star had careened into their midst. What a movie star would be doing driving a Dunkle’s Frozen Custard truck through Bellmore, Long Island, never occurred to them. Nor did they seem to mind that in swerving up onto the curb, he’d blown out the tire. The truck was now stuck with its front wheels on the sidewalk and its back fishtailed out into the street, blocking all the traffic to the beach, the little music box we’d installed in it playing a tinny version of “The Blue Danube” over and over. The fire hydrant, crushed against the side of the truck, had been ripped from the pavement, so that the pipes beneath it shot water up into the air like a geyser. Yet no one seemed to pay this any mind either.

  “Oh, my God, Hazel, look!” someone shouted. “It’s Douglas Fairbanks Jr.!”

  “Where?”

  “There! In that truck!”

  “Doris, no. You’re mad.”

  “See? Look!”

  “Oh, my word. That’s not Douglas Fairbanks. That’s Errol Flynn!”

  They seemed to believe it was all a stunt for some movie being filmed with hidden cameras. Within minutes, perhaps a dozen people—mostly women—gathered around our truck, smiling and fanning themselves in the midday sun and pointing giddily and shouting, “Mr. Flynn, Mr. Flynn! Oh, my word! Errol!” One woman angled for his autograph.

  I was thrown beneath the dashboard when we swerved. After we jerked to a stop, however, my main thought wasn’t for myself—I felt no pain—but rather for the truck. Please, I thought, let nothing too terrible have happened. Bert leaped out of the cab. For a moment he stood paralyzed in the street in his white apron and little white cap, unsure whether to come around to my side, or to get back in behind the wheel, or to respond to the squealing, waving women.

  “Bert!” I hollered. “Come help me down!”

  The women in the street stepped back reverently to let him pass. “Where do you think the movie cameras are?” I heard one say.

  “L-L-L-Lil, I’m so sorry—oh, here, let me help you,” Bert said, opening the door. The spray from the hydrant had drenched him. His white shirt and apron were matted to the plates of his chest. Bert had been a stutterer as a child. Whenever he was nervous, his stammer returned. “Are y-you all r-right?”

  My cane had fallen onto the floor beneath the dashboard. “H-here, d-doll,” he said quickly, fishing it out. With my arms looped around his shoulder, he helped me down gallantly onto the running board, then onto the sidewalk. I was unhurt. His wet skin and hair sparkled in the sunshine. He appeared freshly dipped in bronze. “Oooh,” a woman sighed rapturously.

  For a moment Bert and I stood there in dismay, assessing the damage. The water fountaining up against the truck from the hydrant was like blood gushing; I had an overwhelming impulse to stanch it. The front right tire was rapidly deflating.
The truck listed like a shipwreck.

  Merrick Road was the main thoroughfare. Several cars were now stalled behind us. A few of them began to honk, horns bleating like sheep. It was the Fourth of July weekend, and the little thermometer Bert had pasted to the inside rim of the window read eighty-five degrees.

  “For God’s sake, Bert!” I cried.

  “L-L-Lil, it’s just a t-tire,” he said. “It can be fixed.”

  “Oh, really? How?”

  “Just g-give me a minute, will you?”

  “Veer left, I told you. Left. Why didn’t you listen?”

  “I did turn left!”

  “You call this left?” I motioned to the lopsided truck collapsing against the right side of the curb. “Every time I say left, you turn right. I say right, you go left. What the hell am I supposed to do? Say right when I want you to go left?”

  Bert hung his head. “You can’t just yell directions at me like that.”

  “I WASN’T YELLING!”

  As we stood facing each other in the visceral heat, the small crowd of locals watched us expectantly, as if it were theater. “The Blue Danube” kept playing, but slower and slower as the music box wound down. Finally Bert leaned through the front window and snapped it off, which was a relief. The water from the fire hydrant diminished from a great spray to a constant burble, like a pulse.

  I sighed and gestured at the truck. “What are the chances it can still run?”

  By this point a couple of the drivers stuck behind us had turned off their ignitions and climbed out of their cars—a Hudson, I remember, and a canary yellow Nash roadster that looked like an overstuffed armchair—people drove purely for pleasure in those days—and they came over to have a look.