The Ice Cream Queen of Orchard Street: A Novel

by Susan Jane Gilman

  Gently, she gathered my thick brown hair in her calloused hands, arranged it carefully over my shoulder, and smoothed it. I had been secretly hoping to bob it. Now I felt ashamed.

  “You must get an education. You may not be bellissima, but you are smart.” She tapped her index finger against the side of her temple. “They say this is not good for a girl. But if you are going to work your whole life, it is better to work with your head than your hands.”

  She squeezed my shoulder.

  “You still help with the gelato after school. But you keep studying. There are things you can do that our boys—ai! They have no head for. As long as you learn, you will have a place with us, capisce?”

  Hunter College for Women was up on East Sixty-Eighth Street. As it was public, girls from all over the city attended, many of them immigrants like me. “Most of our students here go on to become secretaries,” the guidance counselor informed me. “That said, Miss Dinello, to be a secretary one needs to be obedient, quiet, and highly refined in her appearance. I daresay you would be better qualified for teaching, which comes more naturally to the garrulous Italian girls like yourself, I find, and the Jews. Best to leave the secretarial work to the Irish and the Protestants.”

  “I’m here to help my family with their business,” I informed him. “I plan on taking chemistry and accounting, thank you.”

  Biology I also registered for. And literature. Oh, how I adored college! Though I often kept to myself, one girl offered to bob my hair; another taught me to smoke. “You may not be able to carry a tune,” another said when I failed the auditions for the chorus, “but you certainly have pluck!” I was invited to join a playwriting group, the poetry discussion, the jazz lovers’ society, the Young Socialists of America. There was a Victrola in the library, so girls who had records at home brought them in and we gathered to listen rapturously over lunch. Oh, we were mad for the music! Ethel Waters, Eddie Cantor, Bessie Smith—they were all big then. Al Jolson singing “California, Here I Come.” Sometimes we cleared the tables away and girls practiced dancing together to “Tea for Two” and Paul Whiteman’s “Charleston.” Once they pulled me in from the sidelines. I managed as best I could with my cane.

  Yet soon I found I needed more books and school fees. I was loath to ask the Dinellos for any more money, so I began to hire myself out as a tutor some evenings.

  The Henry Street Settlement House sponsored a literacy program for new immigrants, and the Sons of Italy offered night classes for Italian war vets. I was younger than most tutors they cared to hire, but I spoke both Italian and still some Yiddish.

  “We never see you anymore,” Rocco said with a smirk whenever I came into the factory to help. “What? You’re too smart for us now?”

  I looked at him dryly. “I can’t pay for textbooks with ice cream cones.”

  “Oh,” he said, nudging his brothers, “she can’t pay for books with ice cream cones? Did you know that? I didn’t know that. I thought you could.”

  “Yeah, but you’re just a cazzo.” Pasquale grinned, whacking him on the backside with a dish towel.

  “Yeah,” said Rocco, mashing his hand into Pasquale’s face. “Not like Miss Smarty-Pants here.”

  Three evenings a week, after finishing at Hunter, I took the Second Avenue El downtown to the settlement houses. One evening at Henry Street, a tall, sallow Jewish man approached me after class. “Miss Dinello, do you have a moment?” he said. “A friend of mine needs help writing a letter, but the nudnik is too embarrassed to ask. Would you mind? I can pay for your time.”

  Pulling on my coat, I followed the thin man down the stairs. “I’m Mr. Shackter,” he said affably. “I told him to wait in the foyer.”

  Lingering near the umbrella stand was a young man in a shabby felt coat. His long, slender hands held his hat nervously by the brim, and he leaned forward inquisitively, as if he were nearsighted. Indeed he was facing the wrong direction, away from the staircase, as we descended. When Mr. Shackter called to him, he blinked around, startled. A thick curl, dark as syrup, fell over his forehead. He smiled in relief; his deep green eyes turned lambent. With his strong cheekbones and cleft chin, he looked sculpted, almost magisterial. He was easily the handsomest man I had ever seen in my life.

  “Get over here, you shmendrik.” Mr. Shackter chuckled, beckoning to him. “I found you a letter writer.

  “Miss Dinello,” Mr. Shackter said, presenting the young man to me with a flourish, “this is Albert Dunkle.”

  * * *

  Now that it had become apparent that Errol Flynn had not, in fact, arrived in Bellmore, the small crowd that had gathered around our dying truck began to dissipate. It was clear to me we had to act quickly.

  “Bert!” I hollered. “Toss me the keys.” Hobbling around, I struggled back up into the front. I opened the cold-storage cabinet, set up the cones, and leaned out the doorway facing the road.

  “ICE CREAM, FROZEN CUSTARD! HOMEMADE, DELICIOUS!” I shouted. My voice was surprisingly resonant. “ICE CREAM CONES! VANILLA! CHOCOLATE! AND STRAWBERRY!” I cried. “TRY THEM ALL AND SEE WHICH YOU LIKE BEST!”

  One of the men who had stopped to examine our truck—the dapper one with the yellow roadster—sidled over, wiping his brow with a handkerchief.

  “Make hay while the sun shines, eh?” he said, flicking his thumb up toward the sky. “Not a bad idea. Wait a minute. I’ll go ask the missus.” A woman in a red-and-white polka-dot dress had stepped out of the car and stood fanning herself in the tall sea grasses along the roadside. She sported pert red high heels, I noticed, and a matching red alligator pocketbook. “Ellie!” the man called out. “What flavor custard you want?”

  The farmer whose roadside stand we had nearly run over shrugged. Beneath his overalls he was shirtless. “Why not? I’ll take a vanilla,” he said, digging into his pocket and sliding five warm pennies across the top of the cabinet.

  A woman with two pigtailed girls approached. “One strawberry and one vanilla, please,” she said, unsnapping her little purse. Her fingers trembled. “They’re a nickel apiece, you say?”

  I handed one cone to each wan little girl, both of whom gave an awkward sort of half-curtsy while saying, “Thank you, ma’am.” As their mother led them away, I realized that all the other onlookers were returning to their cars and shops. A quarter in total was all I had just earned. Inside the cold cabinet, both the vanilla and the strawberry were beginning to melt around the edges. Even with the doors and windows open, the truck was heating up quickly.

  “How about an ice cream for yourself, too, ma’am?” I called after the mother. “Fresh and delicious. Please? You’d really be helping me out here.”

  My words had a pleading quality, which I despised, and the moment they were out of my mouth, the woman’s face became a rictus of embarrassment; a trapped look took hold of her. Only then did I notice that she was clad in a hand-sewn dress, the cotton worn so thin it was nearly translucent. That dime she had spent; it had been the last coin in her purse.

  “It’s on the house,” I said quickly. “For every two cones you purchase, you get one free.” I smiled and hoped I sounded genuine and magnanimous. I hated to give away any of our product—it triggered an actual physical reaction within me, an ache in my solar plexis—but my desperation and pushiness had shamed me, and now it seemed imperative to redeem myself. “A special. To commemorate the Fourth of July. Please, any flavor you like.”

  As one should always do when selling something, I did not wait for her response. I held a cone up grandly and proceeded to bend down into the freezer with my scoop. “Our strawberry is looking particularly good today. Does that suit you? Or would you prefer chocolate?”

  “Oh, Mama, get chocolate,” said one of her daughters excitedly. “So we can taste it, too?”

  “Chocolate it is,” I boomed, smiling intensely. “Excellent choice.”

  The woman shook her head. “Please. I can’t.”

  “Sure you can. It’s free,” I said, holding
the cone. “Buy two, get one free.”

  As she took the cone gingerly, she regarded me with a mixture of gratitude and distrust. Yet the man in the yellow roadster—who had already made quick work of his chocolate cone—called out, “Really? Why didn’t you say so?”

  His wife had already climbed back into the car and was in the process of tying a chiffon kerchief over her hair to keep it in place while he held her strawberry cone for her. “I bought two custards already.” He waddled back toward me. “So I get an extra one, too, right?”

  I shot him a vicious look and cocked my head promptingly in the direction of the young mother. Yet he paid me no mind. You greedy stronzo bastard, I wanted to say. You little gonif. Yet I thought about my big mouth and all the trouble it could cause. I glanced over at Bert, kneeling beside the front wheel of the truck.

  “What will you have, sir?” I said tightly.

  “Hmm, let’s see.” The man leaned back on his heels. My hand was clenched around the ice cream scoop. “You said the strawberry is good?”

  As he headed back to his roadster, he held up his free ice cream cone like the spoils of war. “Ellie, three for the price of two!” he shouted.

  A small traffic jam had formed behind our stalled truck, and his words were like a match igniting a long fuse on the road. Deals like this: No one had ever offered them before. Ice cream for free? Families and drivers who had stopped their engines in the heat now climbed out of their automobiles and hurried up to the truck.

  “Is it true?” they said, their faces bright with incredulity and delight. “If I buy two, I get an extra one?”

  Before I could protest, a line formed before me. One of the shop owners came out and leaned in her doorway, squinting at the spectacle in the chalky sunshine.

  “Only because it’s the Fourth of July,” I insisted. I wiped my forehead with the back of my wrist and took a deep breath. “You, sir. What will it be?”

  Six cones he wanted, three vanilla, a chocolate, and two strawberries. Twenty cents he counted out in corroding, greenish pennies. Barely enough to cover the cost of the ingredients. Chocolate, strawberry, vanilla—another dime in my apron, another two cents lost. A whole extended Irish family arrived in a jalopy. Word spread faster than I could work; with each order I bent deeper and deeper into the freezer, sweat blooming at the base of my back as I scooped. The ice cream was getting so soft it was difficult to curl it into a ball; it was filling up the four-ounce metal scoop without a bit of air and dripping down the sides of each cone as soon as I released it. It might as well have been dripping money. Our profits were evaporating before my eyes, yet I could not think of what else to do. The sun was making the pavement glisten and melt. Eventually, I suspected grimly, we would just end up having to simply give away all the remaining, half-melted ice cream anyway.

  As I glopped the ice cream onto the cones, I glanced around Bellmore. It was not a town so much as a sprinkling of structures that loosely followed Merrick Road between the junction of the parkway and the new access road to the beach. On our right stood a row of small storefronts that seemed to have been constructed mainly out of driftwood—a souvenir shop, a farm stand, a general store with signs for Coca-Cola and “live bait.” Two weather-beaten picnic tables sat in a clearing to one side under a lean-to made from a tattered sail. On the left side of the road, I could see a one-room white clapboard post office and a pharmacy with a Closed sign hanging in the door. Farther down, set back a ways, a few houses with front porches dotted lanes on either side. A church steeple rose in the distance, closer to the railroad, a good half a mile north. Yet that was it. Beyond Merrick to the south, the land quickly descended into a marshy plain giving way to dunes and sea grass and finally to a small marina and a bright finger of steel-blue bay glittering on the horizon.

  The sound of a radio crackled from the souvenir store. Bing Crosby singing “Pennies from Heaven,” his voice staccato with static. An American flag, bleached by the sun, jutted out above the window. The proprietor continued watching me from her doorway. She was tall and rawboned, her pale arms and legs dotted with angry red mosquito bites. A ribbon of dirty blond hair fell over one eye. As the latest batch of customers headed back to their cars, carefully maneuvering their mouths around their ice cream, her dull eyes trailed after them, then swung over to me. “Wow,” she said flatly. “Quite a hustle you’ve got going there.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “Buy two, get one free? Whoever heard of such a thing?”

  I shrugged. “Without our generator, all this is going to melt soon. In an hour or two, it won’t be worth anything.”

  “Smart.” She nodded, squinting out at the line of cars rippling in the heat. “Wish I could draw a few customers in myself.”

  “It’s tough times,” I said.

  “Don’t I know it.” Sighing, she shifted her weight from one hip to the other and glanced back into her store. “Not too many people looking to buy souvenirs these days. I told my husband, ‘Donald, why are folks going to pay a dime for a seashell that they can find on the beach for free? You think they can’t paint “Bellmore, Long Island” on it themselves if they want?’ But he has ideas, Donald. Unfortunately, all these ideas, you can’t sell them and you can’t eat them.”

  I laughed. “Husbands,” I said. “Mine just drove us into a fire hydrant.”

  The blond woman glanced at Bert slyly. “I saw,” she said. “He’s really your husband?” She brushed her hair from her eyes. “Gosh, he looks just like Errol Flynn.”

  Her surprise that Bert was my husband, it was like everybody else’s surprise when they saw us together, yet still, it always stung. I thought to make a cutting retort. But something else occurred to me. “You’ve got a radio? You have electricity in there?”

  The woman fanned herself with her hand and nodded.

  I tilted my head at her. “I don’t suppose you could let us run a line from your outlet to our generator here in the truck?”

  She shrugged. “Donald’s out back. Let me get him.”

  She disappeared, and another couple appeared before me. One chocolate cone and two vanillas, they wanted. Ten more cents.

  Donald was a gaunt man with stubble on his face and sweat staining his old hat. He appraised me baldly, then the truck. The look on his face communicated to me that he did not think much of either.

  “You’re selling frozen custard, the wife says?”

  “Yes, sir,” I said, giving him my frankest smile.

  “And you want to use my electricity?”

  “For our generator. To keep it from melting. Only until we can get our truck fixed,” I said. “And we’ll pay for whatever power we consume, of course.”

  When I spoke, Donald looked not at me, but peered around the truck. “Let me talk to your husband.”

  I smiled. “It’s all right,” I said. “I can do the talking.”

  “Naw,” he said. “I don’t do business with women.”

  Swallowing hard, I sucked in my cheeks. “Bert,” I called crisply. When he didn’t respond, I struggled down from the truck with my cane.

  “What you got there?” Donald gestured at my leg. “You sick? You got the polio?”

  I frowned. “Bert?” I called again. He was under the truck. “Bert! Come here!”

  When he wriggled out from beneath the chassis, Bert was covered in axle grease. He looked like a chimney sweep. “This man here, he has electricity in his store,” I said. “He won’t deal with me. Can you please see if we can hook up our generator?”

  “Oh, that w-would be a lifesaver,” said Bert, scrambling up. I untied my apron and he mopped himself off with it as best he could.

  “B-Bert Dunkle,” he said, extending his hand as he came around the back of the truck.

  I could tell by the way Donald straightened up that he was surprised to see such a virile and good-looking man appear. His mouth hung open slightly as he stepped forward to meet Bert’s grip. “Donald Corwin,” he said slowly. “Dunkle. What kind o
f a name is that? You Irish?”

  “Mr. C-Corwin. I cannot tell you how grateful we are.”

  “Well, hold on,” said Donald.

  Bert smiled his earnest, movie-star smile. Like sunlight hitting water. “I cannot tell you what a great, generous turn you’re d-doing us. You are saving our business. We’ve got eighteen gallons back there, and w-with all this h-heat—”

  “Well…” said Donald, “I don’t normally—”

  “Lil, isn’t this marvelous?” said Bert. “Mr. Corwin, w-we cannot thank you enough. You and your l-lovely wife, Mrs. Corwin, over there.” He motioned to the blond woman still standing in the doorway. I hadn’t realized that Bert had noticed her. Yet of course he had. “Your s-sort of kindness we will never forget.”

  He grinned and rubbed his hands, as if it had all been settled. Yet no one made a move. An uneasy silence bloomed. Mrs. Corwin glanced from Bert to her husband. Donald looked at Bert expectantly, then finally at me.

  “Bert.” I nudged him.

  “Oh, of course,” Bert said, chuckling with embarrassment. “H-how could I forget? As soon as we hook up the generator, we’ve got three flavors today. Please, have as much ice cream as you want. For as long as w-we’re here. It’s the l-least we can do. Now, I guess I should get started right away. We don’t want it to melt.”

  With that, he leaped into the truck and hauled out the generator. He called to the other man who had been fiddling with the tire, and the two of them rapidly began running cables from the cold-storage cabinet out the back of the truck toward the front door of the store.

  “Um,” Donald said to me after a moment, scratching the back of his head, “I thought, in terms of compensation—”

  Before I could answer, his wife came over and gave him a deliberate poke on his shoulder. “I thought you don’t do business with women,” she said.

  “Now, Doris,” he said.