The Ice Cream Queen of Orchard Street: A Novel

by Susan Jane Gilman

  “You can’t help us at all?” I said woefully.

  Lazarre’s eyes glinted with both panic and greed as Bert reached for the case. “Look…” He sighed with exaggerated reluctance. “I hate to see newcomers in a predicament. I can pay fourteen, maybe fifteen dollars apiece. But no more. Purely as a favor to you, of course. A sort of welcome-to-America gift.”

  Bert looked at him with resignation. “I see. My uncle, he told me he b-believed they were worth twenty-five or thirty.”

  The man frowned, turned the watch over. All the air went out of the room. “Swiss,” he said, reading the mark. “I’d like to help you if I can. But as I said…” He sighed again, with great, exaggerated effort. “Eighteen apiece, perhaps, if they’re in good working order, of course.”

  Almost absentmindedly, his chubby fingers moved to the side of the watch to wind it.

  That’s when my leg buckled and I tumbled to the floor. “Oh, my! Oh, my!” I screamed in agony.

  “Oh, n-n-n-ooo!” Bert exclaimed. “Oh, dear. Your leg. I’m sorry. We better go,” he told the man. “My w-wife is in a—”

  “No!” I groaned. “Please. I can’t walk anymore today. Just take the money. Or not. Just—I need to lie down.” I continued moaning most unpleasantly. Mr. Lazarre came around the counter. Together he and Bert helped me to my feet. “Thank you,” I gasped. “Please. Can we go?”

  Not wanting to see such a bargain hobble out the door, Mr. Lazarre said hurriedly, “Wait. I’ll only be a minute.” In his haste he took the wrong key for the safe and had to double back.

  “D-d-doll, are you sure you’re okay?” Bert said worriedly. “We don’t have to do this now.”

  “Oooh,” I moaned. “I think it’s my calf. Can we find a taxi?”

  “Here you go,” Mr. Lazarre said quickly, huffing back to the counter. “Two hundred eighty-eight dollars.” Each bill he counted out was like the pluck of a harp.

  Bert snatched up the money as I collapsed against him. “Thank you so much,” he said, grabbing me under the armpit and hustling me out the door.

  Back in the street, he did in fact hail a taxi. For the entire ride back up to Thompson Street, as the world jiggled by, neither of us said a word. We just sat there, staring straight ahead, panting.

  Now we really did need to leave New York—and quickly.

  Yet our business, it was launched.

  * * *

  Yonkers, Tarrytown, Peekskill. Bert drove while my fingers smudged the Sears map, our preposterous truck rattling through towns as we surveyed the landscape, looking for children, for playgrounds, for country clubs—anyplace with picnic tables where people might have a nickel to spare for an ice cream cone. The evenings when we could, we rented a room in a boardinghouse. Yet mostly we slept on the floor of the truck in a bedroll, the doors flung open, or on a blanket on the hard ground outside, mosquitoes and fireflies hovering about us in the viscous summer air. Our necks and backs crimped, our muscles felt like tourniquets from hoisting cases of milk, hauling tubs of ice cream to the little window at the side of the Divco truck, scooping and standing and scrubbing from morning until sunset.

  Chappaqua, Katonah, Brewster. From town to town we lurched, playing our tinny music box, the two of us bellowing, “Ice cream! Ice cream! Homemade ice cream! Sweet and cold! Delicious and nutritious!” out the windows like opera, like the traveling circus we had become, our cheeriness masking our desperation. In each county we had to suss out where local dairies and suppliers were—and how to purchase just enough milk and cream and sugar and eggs to last us from day to day with little left over or spoilage. Often we survived by eating whatever remained of our inventory at the end of the day.

  “At least no one ever has to c-cook,” Bert said, chuckling wearily as we sat on the running board with our shoes off and our feet splayed in the dry grass, scraping the dregs from the pails with our spoons. Ice cream for breakfast, ice cream for lunch, ice cream for dinner. We made only three flavors at most. Vanilla and chocolate or strawberry. Me, I was quickly sick of all of them.

  Rhinebeck, Poughkeepsie. Albany. Churchyards and picnic grounds. Esso stations. As we drove upstate, I found myself looking not only for dairies but for sanitariums. We came across two. As we pulled up to the gates, my heart pounded furiously; I made Bert wait in the car. Would she really be there after all this time? What would she look like? What would I say?

  Yet neither asylum had any record of my mother. “Tillie Bialystoker? No, I’m sorry. No one by that name here that I can see.” The disappointment I felt was girdled by a peculiar sense of relief.

  Come autumn, we headed south. Somehow Bert maneuvered that Divco bakery truck all the way down to Virginia, through the Carolinas, the roads barely paved. We were in rural America now, and in our hunger and fatigue it materialized before us like a hallucination. Who’d ever seen tobacco fields before? Shanties crammed with families who looked as parched and eroded as the land. Stained tents flapping in the hot wind. Desiccated trees. Bone-jutting children in the road. Weary men who’d walked from as far away as the Allegheny Mountains looking for work. Our voices and even our gestures set us apart. Still, the dairymen and grocers were grateful for our business. And everyone likes ice cream. Only three cents a cone we charged.

  Bert and I, we did not starve. Our truck, with the ice cream freezer that Bert had hooked up to the engine—miraculously, it continued to work. Each day we had just enough power. Each day we manufactured just enough ice cream. Sometimes only vanilla. Yet always enough to keep us fed during the worst of the Great Depression.

  That is, until the morning we careened into the fire hydrant in Bellmore, Long Island.

  * * *

  By the time Bert figured out a way to jerry-rig extension cords from the freezers to the generator to the main electrical outlet in the Corwins’ shop, the other drivers had returned to their cars. They started their engines and slowly moved out from Bellmore in a solemn procession. The yellow Nash roadster. The Hudson. Two Model-T’s. A few of the children waved as they passed, dust kicking up in their wake.

  A sense of desolation set in. We were stranded in a hamlet on the edge of a marshland. A lone car would appear on the road and wobble past without stopping. It was well after one o’clock in the afternoon. Only the generator chugged on the sidewalk, making a racket. Donald stabbed a large beach umbrella into the grass beside it to keep off the sun.

  “Got some tools and junk in the back,” he told Bert, pointing to a crawl space under the porch. “Might as well have a look.”

  While the men poked around for something for repairs, Doris and I cleaned up the inside of the truck.

  “Anything in here you can salvage?” she said.

  The gallons in our freezer shimmered in liquidy circles like tubs of pastel paints. All of our ice cream had melted. The freezer, it had simply been turned back on too late.

  “It’s going to take awhile for the ice cream to recongeal. If it freezes again,” I said with despair. “It’s likely all ruined.”

  “Well?” Doris glanced around helplessly. “Can’t you just put it back in this ice cream maker of yours?” She rapped on the casing of the vertical batch freezer. “Now that you’ve got electricity. Can’t you just pour in all the melted stuff and refreeze it?”

  It seemed dubious, yet I supposed we could try. “Why not?” I gave a bitter laugh. “We have nothing left to lose. You don’t mind?”

  Bending over the storage freezer, Doris lifted out the tub of melted strawberry with a grunt. “Heck, anything not to spend another minute staring at Donald’s doodads.” She laughed. “I’d drive off in this contraption myself if I could.”

  After we ran the melted ice cream through the machine again, I dipped a spoon in. This twice-frozen strawberry ice cream was not only still edible but unusually silky, closer to the gelato the Dinellos and I used to make back on Mulberry Street with the hand crank. “Tell me what you think.” I gave a spoonful to Doris.

  “Mmm.” She nodded
agreeably. “I don’t think anyone will be the wiser.”

  We had salvaged the ice cream somehow—yet now there were no more customers to be had. Bellmore was deserted. The farm stand selling strawberries and the general store had shut down for the rest of the weekend. It was the Fourth of July, after all. A hot breeze ruffled through the empty fields around us. Nothing but seagulls. The throb of insects.

  Just then, however, a lone car passed our truck, slowed, pulled over to the side of the road, and jerked to a stop. A middle-aged woman climbed out and hurried over, her pocketbook jiggling from her forearm, sweat jeweling her hairline.

  “I’m so sorry to bother you,” she said, “but would you happen to have an extra pint I could buy? My husband left our picnic back in the pantry. And I’ve got two hungry children—”

  “Will cones do?” I said. “I’ve got a fresh batch of strawberry, made right here.”

  “You’re making ice cream?” she said. “Inside the truck? How funny. Cones would be fine. Cones would be better. Do you have four?”

  Doris scooped out two and stepped down onto the road. “I’ll bring these over for you, ma’am.”

  “Oh, my word. What do I owe you?”

  The woman’s car was a voluptuous new Pierce-Arrow, gleaming in the sun like claret.

  “They’re seven cents apiece,” I said.

  Without blinking, the woman counted out the coins and thanked me profusely. I handed her the second pair of cones. One of them was already starting to drip; she licked it hungrily. She paused, holding the ice cream in her mouth without swallowing, her eyes half closed. She seemed to be considering it. For an instant my heart kicked. Perhaps it was spoiled after all. Yet the woman swallowed and came back to life. “Mm!” she exhaled. “Pure heaven. And so creamy!”

  As she hurried back to her car, I heard her exclaim as she handed over the cones, “Right here on the roadside!”

  I exhaled, puddled with relief. Then, as if it had been choreographed, another car trundled down Merrick Road. After seeing the giant Neapolitan brick of our truck, this driver stopped, too.

  “Excuse me. Would you happen to be selling ice cream?” his date called out from the passenger seat.

  As I was pocketing another fourteen cents, another car slowed to a halt. And another. Each car on its way to the beach slowed at the bright spectacle of our truck, the other cars parked haphazardly along the roadside, the families sitting at the shaded picnic tables with their pale pink ice cream cones. They all pulled over, too.

  You have to understand, darlings. Back then you could drive for miles without seeing a single place to eat. Highways were new, empty ribbons of asphalt running through pastures and woodlands. Perhaps there would be a gas station at a junction, or a juke joint, or a luncheonette near a railroad station. Yet a roadside ice cream stand? It was a novelty.

  “Isn’t this a hoot?” Doris giggled as we struggled to fill all the orders. Soon we had to holler for Bert to get a garden hose and clean out the freezer so that we could run the other melting flavors through it, too.

  That Fourth of July, Bert and I sold the rest of our inventory at seven cents a cone. The Corwins, however? All day long customers wandered aimlessly through their shop. They pressed Donald Corwin’s seashells to their ears and fondled his ashtrays, then set them back down indifferently. In the end, all the Corwins sold was a deck of playing cards and three books of matches.

  That evening, when it became clear that our truck would not be fixed until Monday, Doris prepared us supper and insisted we spend the night on their back porch. The Corwins lived in a single room behind their store with a small kitchen on one end and a lumpy, iron-framed bed pushed against the wall. Everything smelled of mildew, of the distant, salty sea. “Please. It’s no bother at all,” Doris said with an intense smile at Bert. “Heck. I can’t remember the last time we had such excitement around here.”

  After eating a dinner of fried potatoes, we all sat outside. Donald leaned in the doorway, chewing on his pipe. Doris sat on the steps in her gingham apron, staring out at the darkening marshes. Bert and I sat side by side on their little wooden porch swing, gently rocking, our hands clasped on my good thigh. Far in the distance, a few fireworks exploded over the bay, starbursts of red and silver. We watched them bloom, then rain glitter down over the black water. All of us were quiet. Yet everyone was thinking.

  By the end of that weekend, we had a deal. As soon as Bert repaired the Divco truck, he painted it silver and handed over the keys to the Corwins. As they set off for Fresno—where Doris had a sister—they stopped to post some signs along the roadside outside Bellmore: DUNKLE’S FAMOUS ICE CREAM STRAIGHT AHEAD!…GETTING HUNGRY? DUNKLE’S FAMOUS ICE CREAM IN 5 MINUTES!…DUNKLE’S FAMOUS ICE CREAM: YOU’RE ALMOST THERE!

  The fates had finally begun to smile on us. For what Bert and I had not realized—as we busied ourselves painting the outside of the Corwins’ former shack with thick bands of pink, cream, and beige and installing our ice cream maker inside the old souvenir stand—was that not one full week later the Triborough Bridge would open. Spanning both the East and the Harlem Rivers, it linked Manhattan, Queens, and the Bronx for the very first time. And it funneled all their drivers directly onto parkways leading to the beaches of Long Island.

  President Roosevelt himself inaugurated the bridge with a motorcade. Overnight, sleepy Bellmore was inundated with traffic. Coming from as far away as New Rochelle and Croton, scores of Model-T Fords, Packards, and Hudsons pulled over to gawk at our whimsical shack painted to look like a giant Neapolitan ice cream brick. In the roasting heat, hundreds of families climbed out onto the roadside, stretching and fanning themselves, clamoring for our ice cream.

  The first Dunkle’s Ice Cream shop was born.

  Recently, on my television show, I asked the children how ice cream was made. They sat there in their absurd kiddie bell-bottoms and explosive flowered minidresses—with those irritating Lender’s Bagel necklaces that our co-sponsor gave them roped around their necks—and answered, “You mix ice with cream?”

  How this country put a man on the moon, I’ll never know.

  “Wrong,” I said. “There is no ‘ice’ in ice cream at all. It’s called ‘ice cream’ because it’s cream that’s frozen.”

  In fact, the last goddamn thing you ever want in ice cream is ice itself. We manufacturers constantly struggle to keep our product from crystallizing. The worst thing in the world is when ice cream develops that rash of frost that makes it gummy and stale.

  Here’s what we do want in ice cream, though, which nobody ever seems to grasp:

  Air.

  Whenever you make ice cream, you have to freeze the ingredients while whipping them full of air at the very same time. Air is the secret ingredient—just as it is in meringue or chocolate mousse. Air is what gives ice cream its butter-cloud consistency, its magical texture.

  It’s also—why be coy?—what creates our profit margin. The more air you can whip into ice cream, the more you can stretch your other ingredients. We manufacturers call this final, whipped-up ratio of ingredients-to-air “overrun.” Too little overrun and your ice cream is dense and gluey. Too much and it’s as insubstantial as a soufflé. The challenge is to pump as much air into your ice cream as you can without sacrificing its texture, flavor, or richness.

  Air. For weeks after we’d arrived in Bellmore, Bert and I, we were haunted by the taste of that wonderfully rich, airy confection we had manufactured by accident when our truck crashed into the fire hydrant. Alone out there in the marshes—without any newspapers or books—my husband, he became fairly obsessed with it. “Lil, there has got to be some way to replicate that ice cream without having to melt it first, then refreeze it,” he said.

  Using the Corwins’ ’27 Ford, Bert made several forays to junkyards in Queens and transformed the back porch of our shack into a machinist’s shop. He bought an old, smaller freezer, a set of bellows, vacuum tubes, motor parts. My husband got so engrossed some evenings that he ne
ver came to bed. I could hear him thumping around on the floorboards on his knees, grunting as he pried apart casings. Fuses blew. Tubing burst. Ice cream clogged or came out runny. Every minute change that Bert made to his design, he had me record in a notebook for him like a scientist.

  “Almost,” he kept saying. “I think with just a few more adjustments…”

  One morning he woke me up at dawn, holding out a small dish of shiny vanilla and a teaspoon. “Lil.” He smiled. “Try it.”

  Bert’s prototype was a thing of beauty, darlings, though it was unlovely to look at. No bigger than an icebox, it sprouted tubes and an accordion compressor and had dials strapped to it with wiring. Yet its small hydraulic pump could swirl out buttery, heavenly ribbons of soft ice cream directly into a cup or a cone. It pumped so much air into our ice cream that our profit margin, I realized quickly, would likely more than double.

  Although the ice cream formula itself had to be recalibrated—it required more stabilizers and corn syrup in place of cane sugar, I discovered—it ultimately saved us so much time and hassle. It could be stored in bottles in our icebox, then poured directly into the machine as needed. Bert’s invention: Oh, it was miraculous! All weekend long we tried it out on our customers. “Here,” we said, handing them first a spoonful of vanilla ice cream made from our traditional freezer, then one from Bert’s. “Why, that second one’s even better,” they agreed.

  “It’s like frozen velvet,” one woman proclaimed. “It doesn’t burn your mouth with cold.”

  Yet, having watched the Cannolettis steal my ice cream flavor ideas for years, I knew better by then. As soon as Bert and I had streamlined his machine and perfected its “secret soft ice cream formula,” we drove to Manhattan and hired a patent lawyer.

  Dunkle’s Famous Soft Ice Cream. In chocolate and vanilla. Word spread from car to car, town to town. People drove for miles to taste it.

  After we closed up for the evening, I poured all the change from our cash register into a milk pail. Scooping up handfuls of coins, I let the copper and nickel rain through my fingers in a triumphant, metallic clatter. Giggling like a child, I pressed two dimes to my forehead and let them stick to my damp skin like jewelry. “Bert! Look!” If those Dinellos could see me now. And Mama, I thought. Married. To a dashing, inventive man no less. With our very own ice cream business. And two patents pending. Me. The useless little meeskite with the limp.