The Ice Cream Queen of Orchard Street: A Novel

by Susan Jane Gilman

  “The milk”—Mr. Dinello motioned—“you smell it. Like the perfume.”

  Before he committed to purchasing a case that morning, Mr. Dinello unscrewed a cap right there in the street. Kneeling before me, he placed the bottle under my nose. The milk was like a little quivering moon ringed in glass. “Sniff,” he motioned. Dairy products in those days were terribly inconsistent. One bottle of turned milk could ruin gallons of ice cream. My sense of smell, as you may have surmised by now, is extremely acute. I suppose the Dinellos had noticed this by the way I could always tell what our neighbors were having for Sunday dinner simply by leaning out the air shaft. Instantly, there on the curbside, I could discern that the first seven bottles of milk were fine yet the eighth had gone “off” with an acrid, cheeselike tang.

  “Ah, see?” Mr. Dinello said when I detected the spoiled bottle. “She has the magic nose.”

  Once the sons and grandsons arrived to unload the deliveries, I was put to work in the back room shelling pistachios. The next day I sliced strawberries, then made stacks of waxed-paper cones.

  It was tedious, uninspiring work that I soon tried to syncopate with the thrumming of the machines. Beatrice and Annunziata usually took over once I had left for school, though occasionally Rocco was ordered to help me finish before class. “Why do I have to do chores with her?” he protested.

  “Horse Girl,” he said under his breath.

  “Nincompoop,” I replied.

  “You just want free ice cream.”

  “You just want a free punch in the face.”

  Sometimes we began poking each other. Or tickling. When our boredom fully trumped our animosity, we folded the waxed paper into fans and mustaches and bow ties and scrunched them under our noses and paraded around with them, talking in silly voices, until Mr. Dinello yelled at us to stop making a ruckus and get back to work. If we could not reuse the paper, he said, we were in for big trouble. “This is our livelihood, capisce? Each paper you play with is a penny we lose.”

  Giving me a pinch on my forearm, Rocco would head off to inflict himself on his brothers instead. The four boys in the factory together, they were like wolf cubs, mauling, walloping, and head-locking one another, calling one another names as they waited for the freezer to finish churning.

  “Ai, cazzo!”

  “Ai, stronzo!”

  “Va fa Napoli!”

  Mr. Dinello did not even bother to try to curb them. Sometimes, however, he broke into song as he worked, and they stopped pummeling one another long enough to sing along. I did, too—my voice the only thin, reedy soprano among the tenors and baritones. Addio, addio mia bella Napoli!

  Every chance I could, I lingered by the freezer. When nobody was looking, I ran my hand against the cold, smooth, silver flank of it.

  In the early autumn of 1918, I had just started fifth grade when signs began popping up in windows and on doors, on broadsheets plastered on streetlamps around the neighborhood. Suddenly big public gatherings were being discouraged; taverns, moving-picture houses, soda fountains—even churches—grew empty. Nobody knew what it was exactly, except that it started quickly, with a cough and a fever.

  Il Progresso, our local newspaper, urged parents to heed the health commissioner: Children would be better looked after in their classrooms instead of staying home and running loose. Yet each day at school, more desks sat unoccupied after the bell and dead leaves swirled around the empty schoolyard. At home, Beatrice began coughing. Some health workers arrived at our tenement, covering their mouths with gauze. I remember Rocco crying, and the sensation of icy claws scraping down my spine, and my teeth chattering, and nets of mucus forming at the back of my throat that seemed to strangle me. When I coughed, it felt as if my ribs had been broken all over again. Someone taped a sign on the front door of our apartment. From my illness itself, only a single memory remains: of watching the flocked wallpaper in Beatrice’s room melting like ice cream running down to the floor.

  When I seemed to regain consciousness after many bleary, feverish days, Beatrice had vanished. Annunziata was gone, too. And Pietro. The Spanish flu, doctors were saying—it was leaving the weak but killing the strong. They had never seen anything like it; comparisons were being made to the plague. Mrs. Dinello’s hair, which had been nearly jet-black just weeks before, was suddenly white as salt. “Why the young ones? Why a whole generation but not Salvatore and me?” she moaned, rocking back and forth on the settee.

  And then, no sooner had the funerals been conducted and the bodies buried across the river in Holy Cross Cemetery, which Father Antonucci himself arranged, and the Masses attended, than three telegrams arrived. One right after the other, three nightmarish mornings in a row, each yellow rectangle like a full-body blow, like a percussive blast through the tenement. The third one Mrs. Dinello wouldn’t even touch. She backed away from the doorway as if it were a red-hot poker, shrieking, “No, no, no!” Her wails echoed through the building; the constant, agonized crescendo of them was like the ocean crashing on jagged boulders. She took to her bed. She stopped going to Mass. “What kind of God lets a son die?” she sobbed.

  The grandsons, the three remaining, were hastily consolidated into the Dinellos’ modest triptych of rooms. Their peculiar odors, bulk, and unruly, adolescent hair filled the parlor, whereas I was relegated to the bench again in the upstairs kitchen.

  All the neighbors invaded the apartment, of course. Mrs. Ferrendino’s fleshy forearms jiggling as she set down a tin of sugar. Mrs. Salucci smelling of camphor and looking more tragic than the Dinellos themselves, flinging her brittle self into Mrs. Dinello’s arms with an embarrassing wail: “Oh, Generosa!” Rosaries strung through calloused fingers, incantations whispered, men blearily drinking coffee, smoking tiny stinking cigars. Vittorio, Pasquale, and Rocco sat stonily all in a row on the settee in their starched Sunday clothes, allowing themselves to be kissed and pressed to the women’s bosoms and petted forlornly by the parade of mourners. Tears glittered in their eyes, which they quickly wiped away on their sleeves before swallowing, hard. I sat on a stool in the corner. Most of the visitors hurried straight over to the boys without ever acknowledging me.

  “Why are you crying?” Rocco said, shooting me an accusatory look across the room. “It’s not your family who’s dead.”

  “Leave her alone,” Vittorio said softly.

  “You act like everything here is yours, when it isn’t,” Rocco said.

  “I do not,” I choked.

  “She has a right to be sad,” said Pasquale quietly.

  Rocco turned toward his older brothers. “She doesn’t even like us.”

  “That’s not true!” I cried.

  Yet I wept, in fact, because I had not liked the dead very much at all, and because I felt guilty. I was jealous of all the attention the boys were receiving. All their losses only revived my own. Luigi and Annunziata were never coming back. Nor were my own parents. Nor were my sisters, I realized now. Everyone had been scattered to the wind like ashes. Vittorio, Pasquale, Rocco, and me—we were, all of us, orphans. I wept with them copiously. Yet Rocco was right: I wept not for them but for my own mama and papa and siblings—and for my own forsaken self.

  Still, I refused to let him believe he was right.

  “If you don’t stop hating me,” I whispered to him, “I’ll box your ears.”

  “I’ll box yours first,” he said.

  Later that night, however, and for a long time afterward, Rocco tiptoed into the kitchen. Pulling me onto the floor with him with his blankets and cushions, he curled up inside my arms. “Please,” he whispered hoarsely. Locking my hands as tightly as he could around his waist, he pressed his fists into his eyes and sobbed, his little shoulders heaving like bellows while I anchored him.

  The war ended; all around us was confetti and elation. The gleeful squeals from fire escapes: Oh, Frankie, you’re back! Jazz was suddenly playing everywhere on Victrolas, trumpets and trombones slashing the jubilant air. “Tiger Rag.” “Original Di
xieland One-Step.” Yet at the Dinellos’ we moved through the days as if we were made of rice paper.

  Everyone worked in a soggy, ghostly trance. From dawn until dinnertime. That’s just what you did back then. There was no “grief counseling.” There were no “support groups.” You didn’t bellyache. Perhaps you resumed going to church. Perhaps, inside the confessional, you whispered hoarsely to the priest through the quatrefoils that it was all your fault. Everyone around you always seemed to disappear. First your papa, then your mama, then all your sisters, and now the Dinellos. Perhaps you scrubbed the utensils in the ice cream factory to an obsessive sheen each morning, until your knuckles were raw with absolution. Yet that was it. Most of the time, you simply worked.

  And there was plenty to do, darlings. Prohibition may have been lousy for the country, but it was a godsend to ice cream manufacturers. All those abandoned saloons and barrooms—what was to become of them? Proprietors converted them into even more ice cream parlors and soda fountains, that’s what. Not everybody wanted to risk arrest at a speakeasy in order to have fun. Five places opened within a three-block radius of Lafayette Street alone.

  By 1923, Dinello & Sons had stopped selling ice cream from wagons on the streets entirely. The wholesale market was not only more lucrative but safer. The streets of the Lower East Side were growing choked with automobiles and exhaust. And Mr. Dinello, his back hurt, his knees locked, his eyesight was failing. And his heart, of course, had been butchered.

  He installed half a dozen little café tables in the front of Dinello & Sons, so that people from the neighborhood could come in for ice cream and buyers could sample the products. A wireless, shaped like a church window, appeared on a shelf behind the counter to “give it the atmosphere.” Competition among ice cream manufacturers was fierce. A few parlors in Lower Manhattan were even buying from an outfit in Secaucus now. The biggest challenge, however, came from just a few blocks away on Canal Street, where a Sicilian family had opened Cannoletti’s Ice Cream Company. Mr. Dinello thought their product was junk—“They don’t use the fresh ingredients. All you taste is the chemicals and the air.” Yet the Cannolettis gave the Dinellos a run for their money, if only because they were so aggressive in their marketing. They sponsored little parades. They had banners. All day long one of their ferret-faced sons stood on the street wearing a sandwich board reading CANNOLETTI’S! THE #1 ICE CREAM IN AMERICA and ringing a bell.

  Since ice cream had replaced cocktails, parlors everywhere began competing to see who could come up with the newest and most fabulous ice cream concoctions—sundaes glistening with pineapple and candied walnuts, strawberry phosphates crowned with raspberry sherbet. They named them things like “Hawaiian Paradise” and “Pink Ladies.” Each week was something new.

  One afternoon as I sang along to “Yes! We Have No Bananas” over the wireless, I sensed a great opportunity for myself.

  “I have a suggestion, signore,” I said the next morning. “Can you make a ‘Yes, We Have Bananas’ ice cream sundae? Perhaps with banana ice cream and walnuts? Everybody loves that song. Every time they hear it playing, they could start to think of Dinello’s.”

  Mr. Dinello seemed to weigh the idea with his cheeks, then presented the idea to Mrs. Dinello.

  “Bananas, they are not so expensive,” she conceded, “especially when they are overripe. We might be able to get a lot of flavor for not too much money.”

  They experimented. For the first time ever, I was permitted to help with the production, mashing bananas in a large bowl with a metal spoon. Mr. Dinello made one gallon, then another. Mashed bananas were particularly viscous, it turned out, and their sweetness variable. Any brown spots created blotches and lumpiness. Overall they lent themselves better to sherbet rather than to full-fat ice cream. Mr. Dinello had to keep adjusting the proportions until he finally got it just right. What he had, in the end, was a sort of hybrid. Yet it was delicious.

  We had a few leftover bananas; he told me to peel and cut them lengthwise.

  “Maybe we arrange the gelato between the bananas like this, si?” he said, placing them in a long dish so that they created a sort of boat. Then he spooned strawberry syrup over it and a dollop of whipped cream. When the final product was assembled, gleaming in its dish, Mr. Dinello stepped back to look at it with pride. “‘Yes, We Have Bananas.’ I think she is a very good idea,” he proclaimed. “You make a sign, Ninella, for the window, si? I think she will sell.”

  Sell she did. The flavor I had suggested, darlings, it was a huge hit in the neighborhood, almost as big, in fact, as the song itself. Even without all the toppings, the sheer novelty of banana ice cream itself sparked a craze. Most of our buyers ordered at least one tub of it. Yet the greatest proof that we had done well came not from our sales. Ten days after we’d unveiled our sundae, Pasquale saw a sign outside Cannoletti’s Ice Cream Company reading, YES, WE HAVE BANANAS ICE CREAM, TOO! AND FOR A PENNY LESS!

  “Ninella,” Mrs. Dinello asked me slyly, “what else can you dream up?”

  From a school project I had to do about the League of Nations, I came up with the idea of making a brick of spumoni with pistachio, vanilla, and black cherry ice cream to replicate the Italian flag. That, too, was a hit. To my great delight, Mrs. Dinello even made a point of bringing a slice upstairs for Mrs. Salucci. All of Little Italy, oh, they went mad for it. We lured even more buyers away from Cannoletti’s.

  For Christmas, at my suggestion, the Dinellos made a peppermint ice cream.

  “Maybe we could decorate cones to look like Santa Clauses,” I suggested one afternoon, doodling in my schoolbook.

  “Well,” Rocco said, twisting a rag out over a bucket of bleach. “Aren’t you a great mother of invention?”

  I glanced at him.

  “What?” He shrugged, turning his back to me, scrubbing the counter vigorously. “You’re finally doing something worthwhile around here, Horsey.”

  Demand for their ice cream grew so high that the Dinellos could barely keep up. Their tiny ice cream parlor itself became so popular that they installed one of the neighborhood’s first pay telephones. Families began to make an evening out of placing a phone call. Mothers would buy the children ice cream cones, and everyone would eat while they waited on line. A second vertical-batch freezer, the Dinellos bought. Peach ice cream, they began making. And walnut. And cinnamon. And cherry vanilla. Each week, one of the Cannolettis’ ferret-faced sons stood on the sidewalk of Canal Street, bellicosely ringing a bell to announce their newest flavors. Yet more often than not, the Dinellos noted with satisfaction, these new flavors were just cheaper versions of our own.

  The wintry evening of my sixteenth compleanno, Mrs. Dinello fried up fat meatballs to go in the sauce and arranged golden sfogliatelli on a platter for dessert. Vittorio was engaged to a girl named Carmella by then, and Pasquale was courting as well, so there were eight of us at the table. Ever since the war, the dinner service of twelve plates had largely sat unused above the sink. Abandoned caps still hung on hooks by the doorways, because Mrs. Dinello could not bear to part with them. Religious medals, statues of St. Joseph, St. Anthony, the Virgin Mary, gilt-framed portraits of still more saints had accumulated on every surface of the parlor and kitchen around sepia photographs of Luigi, Vincenzo, and Silvio, transforming the apartment into a progression of shrines. Yet that snowy night, the kitchen felt festive. As we sat down, Rocco grinned at me across the table.

  “After tomorrow you’ll be free, eh, Horsey?” he said, filching a meatball from the plate by the stove.

  “Ai!” Mrs. Dinello slapped his hand. Rocco laughed and popped it steaming into his mouth. “No more school,” he exulted. “You get to join the rest of us now. Sit on that stool of yours. Sniff the milk every morning. Dream up ice cream sundaes all day.”

  “Yes, more school.” Mrs. Dinello frowned, stirring her pot. “She keeps going.”

  “What?” said Rocco. “Why?”

  “Because she’s lame, you idiot,” Pasquale said
under his breath.

  “Girls shouldn’t go to school,” Carmella sniffed. She was a haughty gazelle of a girl whom I disliked instantly. “My papa says it’s a waste.”

  “We see,” Mr. Dinello said wearily, glaring at his wife. “Nobody decides anything yet.”

  Mrs. Dinello looked at him, then at me. After supper she ushered me into her bedroom and shut the door firmly. Her hair had thinned considerably, I noticed. Her face and neck were webbed with loose flesh. Putting a palsied hand beneath my chin, she whispered, “I tell my husband you do not quit school. I tell him we send you to college.”

  For a moment I almost could not dare to breathe, the news thrilled me so—and yet it also wounded.

  “Perché?” I blinked. “Am I not good enough at the shop?”

  “Oh, Ninella.” Mrs. Dinello shook her head. Taking me by the shoulders, she pivoted me toward the oval mirror trimmed with gold braid. “Look at you.” In the tempered glass stood a simple, woeful girl in a brown knotted blouse that seemed to drown her small frame. I had a sharp nose and thick eyebrows. My lips were a thin crease across my face. Overall there was nothing particularly wrong with me—yet there was something unappealing in the way these features assembled themselves. Beautiful girls, I had noticed, had luscious smiles, with lips like ribbons. Their marcelled hair was glossy, their faces like candy and ice cream. They had no dark rings beneath their eyes, no hollows in their cheeks. My chin was pointy and slightly upraised. No matter what I did, I had a vulpine, hungry look.

  “You are plain, Ninella, like Beatrice was,” Mrs. Dinello said, her eyes locking with mine in the mirror. “And Pasquale is right: You are lame. My grandsons, they will marry. Boys always do. But you? It is not like in the old country, where perhaps someone could make an arrangement.”