The Ice Cream Queen of Orchard Street: A Novel

by Susan Jane Gilman

  I shook my head violently to dislodge the very thought. Pressing my hand to my heart, I recited what I kept telling myself like the prayers of a rosary: I had simply done what I’d had to do. I had protected our livelihood. I had protected our business. I had protected my son. Anybody else in my position would have done exactly the same.

  After a moment the fibrillation subsided. I reached over to pour myself another glass of Great Western. But the bottle, I found, was now empty.

  By 1945, Dunkle’s ice cream was being eaten by troops at Fort Bragg and Fort Dix. On tankers in the Pacific. In PXs in the British Midlands and evac hospitals in France. Yet at home I was feeding Isaac suppers of scrambled eggs or chicken broth in order to economize. For Bert, you see, had happily agreed to fulfill our government contracts for mere pennies on the dollar. When he’d shown me the numbers he’d negotiated with the War Department, I almost had a coronary.

  “Bert, how could you possibly settle for so little? We’ll earn practically nothing! Bupkis!” I cried, pressing my fingertips to my temples. “Companies spend their lives trying to land a government contract! We should be getting rich now!”

  “That’s just it, Lil,” Bert said quietly. “I thought you’d be proud of me. I don’t want us to get rich like this. Certainly not off our boys, fighting and dying to defeat Hitler. Certainly not off a war.”

  So now, even though my husband owned a prestigious ice cream company—with what should have been a big, fat, lucrative government contract—I found myself no better off than the girls in our neighborhood who worked as telegraph operators. Welders. Assembly-line laborers at Premco Industrial Tool & Die.

  A city of women. That’s what Dunkle’s had become. And our apartment building on Forty-Ninth Avenue as well. With so many men away at war, mothers, sisters, sisters-in-law, and daughters all moved in together to share expenses, child rearing, ration coupons. The building took on the perfumy, gossipy feel of a girls’ dormitory. Every afternoon muffled broadcasts of Amanda of Honeymoon Hill and Frank Sinatra records could be heard echoing throughout the hallways, along with feminine shrieks of I told you so! and, huffily, I’ve just about had it. Rows and rows of pale pink bloomers, putty-colored girdles, and cheap lemon yellow nighties snapped in the wind from the clotheslines like the flags of a nation of women.

  Since I occupied the ground-floor apartment overlooking the building’s victory garden, I soon grew accustomed to seeing my neighbors tromping back and forth with their tomato plants and pinking shears. Eventually, as they came to regard me as just another neighbor, they began rapping on my kitchen window and inviting themselves in. Henrietta Mueller, who lived directly upstairs, often plunked down at my table and helped herself to coffee and cake. “So how’s tricks, Ice Cream Lady?” she’d say in her husky voice before lighting a cigarette and yelling at her son, “Otto! Stop hitting your sister and go play with Isaac!” Henrietta was sharing a bed with her mother-in-law in Apartment 2C, which is why, I suspect, she lingered at my place any chance she got. Her husband, Walter, had first been stationed aboard a frigate off the coast of Labrador, intercepting cables from the Germans. Now he was serving in the Philippines.

  Oddly, there was something comforting about all the traffic and chitchat and hubbub; it reminded me of the tenements. Yet when the postman turned on to Forty-Ninth Avenue each day, you could hear the collective intake of breath. Everyone congregated around the front stoop in a hush, watching anxiously as any woman who received a letter read it first to herself, then shared the most crucial parts aloud.

  —My Herbert, he’s in a field hospital in Liège. He writes, “Thank you so much for the playing cards, Estelle. I’m making us a bundle playing the other guys at poker, and the nurses are teaching me to speak French!”

  —Oh, listen to this, listen to this. “Dear Betty, I miss you so much, I have created my own constellation of you in the sky, so when I look up every night, I can see your face shining down on me.”

  —“Dear Marj. My leg is on the mend. Please don’t worry. Kiss the girls for me, and thank them for the picture. Tell Tommy not to hold the bat too high when he takes a swing.…”

  Bert was not off fighting. He was in coveralls on an air base brandishing a socket wrench. In the end he’d gotten to fight his war against the fascists after all, in his own particular way. Under contract to the military, he traveled from one manufacturing plant to another in Michigan, Florida, Texas—retrofitting and adapting his ice cream machines—then to naval yards and army bases to instruct men how to operate them. When the shortage of army mechanics grew severe, he was given a special dispensation and trained to repair tanks, jeeps, even airplanes. Long before the Ice Cream Barge was commissioned, he was in demand, my husband, moving from one base to another as an ice cream man and a mechanic.

  When Orson Maytree Jr. had approached us in early 1942, there were 1.5 million troops to feed. By 1945 there were close to 16 million. Supplying them with our share of ice cream now largely fell to me. It was I who oversaw all of Dunkle’s operations, coordinating the production, the shipments, the suppliers. Some days I felt as mechanized and worn as our assembly lines. The closest thing I had to an ally was Mrs. Preminger. She was exactly what one could ever want in a secretary: Efficient. Unsentimental. Every day she donned the same worsted skirt and sensible shoes. Whenever our domestic dropped Isaac off after school, Mrs. Preminger kept him out of my hair by feeding him Chuckles and giving him her prized cat paperweights to play with. Like me, she kept a little notebook squirreled away with a running tally of every penny she ever spent. Daily News 5 cents. Ball of yarn 12 cents. Bank deposit $4—which I greatly respected. Her one transgression seemed to be that she secretly played the horses. On her lunch hour, I often found her hunched over the pay phone in the stockroom whispering, “Three on Tallulah Bankhead. Five on Planter’s Punch and one on Okey Dokey to show.” Hanging up, she looked at me mawkishly. “My nephew, Mrs. Dunkle. Poor child has dropsy again.”

  Mrs. Preminger also smoked tiny, stinky cigars wrapped in dark paper that she purchased on the black market through her estranged husband, a man whom she called simply “the Relic.” He brought her bouquets of red carnations and seemed to be in and out of the picture. Since she was older than me by at least fifteen years, I had less trouble seeing Mrs. Preminger as an equal. Together we began to have an extra cocktail or two in the evenings after work, mixing them with top-notch whiskey that the Relic managed to procure.

  I was as well-off as a woman could be during wartime, I supposed, yet listening to my neighbors pore over their precious letters from their husbands made me hideously heartsick. Because Bert, of course, never sent more than postcards—little rectangles with serrated edges and dreamy pastel photos of Galveston, Tallahassee, Garden City. All he ever wrote on the back were smiley faces, hearts, X’s and O’s and “BERT” in his schoolboy scratch. Seeing them filled me with doubt. Frustration. And longing. Oh, he tried, my husband. Occasionally he did manage to telephone. Yet these long-distance calls were just as unsatisfying. “I only have a few minutes, doll!” he’d shout over a line plagued by whistles and static. “Please, tell Isaac I love him.”

  Even though I knew that my husband could not write, I found myself growing resentful. How convenient Bert’s illiteracy happened to be! Where I’d once seen it as merely heartbreaking, it now seemed like a tool he could wield like one of his mechanics’ wrenches. He could enjoy the war unencumbered by any responsibility to report back to me—and unhindered by the specter of his adoring wife and child waiting for him at home. Though, of course, as soon as I had such thoughts, I felt monstrously guilty—he was at war, after all. Yet in my most panicked moments, blinking up at the darkened ceiling in our bedroom, my wildest wifely fears took root: I saw Bert in his jaunty uniform, his fingers dispensing with a cocktail waitress’s featherlight slip, undoing her garters with their intricate hooks. Women in portside honky-tonks running their index fingers seductively around the rims of their martini glasses as he winked a
t them. Really? A chorus girl from the USO giggled coyly, You’ve got a cripple for a wife? Her face just a breath apart from his as he ran the back of his hand along her creamy, glistening legs.

  “Your Bert doesn’t write you much, does he?” Henrietta remarked one afternoon as we were all convening on the steps.

  I felt my back stiffen. “Of course he does,” I said tartly. Suddenly I was aware of my neighbors’ eyes on me, glittering, everyone but me holding a tissuey aerogram. “He sends his letters to our office, is all.”

  The next evening, as soon as Mrs. Preminger left, I sat down at her Underwood. “My darling Lil,” I typed. “I love you so. Everywhere I go, I carry you with me. I know you are a good woman, so smart and clever. And you are beautiful, doll, in your very own way. I miss you terribly.” As I pulled the finished sheet from the carriage, I realized I was weeping.

  When my own airmail letter arrived for me at Forty-Ninth Avenue, I waved it above my head before the rest of the women congregating in the lobby, my thumb carefully obscuring the postmark. “Look!” I cried, tearing it open. “‘Dear Lil,’” I read aloud, and my voice cracked. “‘In Texas today, it’s 102 degrees in the shade. Yet in the smell of the heat and the magnolia blossoms, I can only think of you.’”

  For the duration of the war, my husband sent me exquisitely detailed, tender letters that I generously shared with my neighbors. Often, as I read them aloud, I cried.

  One Saturday, however, Bert telephoned from Delaware.

  “Lil, I’m so glad I’ve reached you!” he shouted over the seashore sound of the connection. “Doll, I’m shipping out.”

  “Shipping out? What do you mean, ‘shipping out’?”

  “They’re putting me on a special barge. One of the machines I designed is on it. The biggest ever built. The guy I trained, who was supposed to go? The last night of his furlough, he got into a bar fight. He’s now in the hospital with a concussion and a punctured spleen. So they have to send me in his place.”

  “A barge? They’re putting you on a barge? Bert, are they even allowed to do that?”

  “It’s called the Ice Cream Barge, Lil. At 0500 I start out for California.”

  “Then where?”

  “I wish I could say, Lil. It’s an ‘undisclosed location.’ Top secret.” He sounded so proud. Yet I felt my panic rising: What about me? And Isaac? And the company? He couldn’t just leave the country like that.

  “But how will I know where you are? How will I know if you’re okay?”

  “Please, Lil. Don’t you worry. This barge, it’s more like a pier. It has to be towed. So I can’t imagine we’ll be going very far at all.”

  “I should hope not.” Piers, by definition, were anchored somewhere. “Will you be able to call at least?”

  There was a pause. “I—I don’t know.”

  “You can’t simply sit on a pier somewhere and not be able to contact me, Bert! What if something happens to you? Or our business? Or our son? If you can’t call, then you have to write me. Henrietta, she gets letters all the time. All the women here do. And at the factory, it’s all the girls talk about—”

  “L-L-L-Lil, please. You know me,” he said miserably. “It’s bad enough—some of the men here, they call me ‘the ice cream hebe.’ And they have me doing all sorts of mechanics. Not just the ice cream. I have to keep up, Lil. Everything has to be done so quickly. I’ve got so many people here doing me little favors already. I just can’t—”

  “Please, Bert! Enough with your meshuggeneh pride already!”

  “L-L-L-L-Lil—”

  “It’s not fair. Do you hear me? You leave me with all this responsibility—these terrible contracts—and a son whining for his papa day and night. But you cannot be bothered to find one person to help you write one goddamn letter?” I was trembling. “Fine. So go, then. Just go. Leave me all alone in this world while you sail off and do hell-knows-what on some goddamn ice cream barge.”

  After I slammed down the receiver, I picked up the coffeepot, then dropped it into the sink with a clatter. I opened the icebox and slammed it shut.

  “Mama?” Isaac called plaintively from the parlor.

  I turned on the faucet and rinsed off the breakfast plates furiously, jamming them, still soapy, onto the drying rack. I did not know what to do with myself.

  “He can’t pay a guy a quarter—just once—to write me one goddamn letter?” I cried aloud to no one. “Do I have to do every goddamn thing here myself?”

  And this “undisclosed location.” An undisclosed location—what on earth could that possibly mean? Then I recalled. That past spring, Mrs. Tilden, on the third floor. Her son had been sent to an undisclosed location. He was a radio operator. On June 8 he was killed during the invasion of Normandy.

  The metal basket of the coffee percolator went heavy in my hand. If a place wasn’t dangerous, then why was it “top secret”?

  A terrible feeling overtook me. A barge capsizing, a roiling ocean swallowing Bert. I saw it clearly. The fates, they would be taking my husband from me—as payment—as punishment for all my sins.

  I had to do something.

  Snatching up the receiver, I tried telephoning Dover Airfield, but the call rang and rang relentlessly, unanswered. Depositing Isaac at Henrietta’s, I hurried to the factory. I stuffed all the cash we had on hand—four hundred dollars—into my pocketbook. Dover was almost two hundred miles away. It was now past noon. The only Greyhound bus of the day had already departed, I discovered, as had the train. Finally, I telephoned Mrs. Preminger. “I need a car and driver,” I said breathlessly. “Can the Relic call any of his people?”

  Cars. Taxis. Drivers. It’s hard to imagine now, darlings, but during the war they were contraband. In Europe the black market was for things like nylons. Chocolates. French wine. In the United States, it was mostly for “black gasoline,” as they called it. Pleasure driving was outlawed, and a speed limit was imposed of no more than thirty-five miles an hour. People were allotted fuel depending on their jobs, the level of their necessity. Even if I asked one of Dunkle’s truck drivers to take me to Dover, we still wouldn’t have enough gas to get us any farther than New Jersey. Those refrigeration trucks, they gobbled up fuel.

  Yet a friend of a friend of the Relic’s, it turned out, knew of an outfit in Williamsburg run out of a bakery. “Gas chiselers” who hoarded gas coupons—real and counterfeit—and had a small fleet of cars and trucks at their disposal whose gas gauges they’d rigged. They loaned these vehicles out or employed them as a private livery service—but at an exorbitant price, Mrs. Preminger warned me. Yet it was chiselers like these who could assemble gasoline, a car, and a driver—good for two hundred miles of travel—with only a few hours’ notice over a weekend.

  Exiting the streetcar on Flushing Avenue, I followed the directions she’d given me to a place called the Starlite Bakery. Its neon sign was switched off, the metal grates rolled down. The air smelled like an incinerator. Around the back a dented metal door stood propped open. I could hear the husky, sandy voices of men laughing inside, a radio playing. Louis Jordan’s “G.I. Jive”—a hit from the year before. With my cane thunking, the men heard me before they saw me.

  “Can I help you?” A man in an undershirt and suspenders planted himself in the doorway. Behind him in the shadows, I could make out a table, a card game in progress, beer bottles on the floor. His thick, smudged eyeglasses sat halfway down the bridge of his nose.

  “Mr. Preminger sent me,” I said. “He told me I should ask for Milton, Ezra, or Hank.”

  The man eyed my cane, my dress. “Right. Right. You’re the lady that needs a ride to Delaware. Watch your step.” He motioned for us to cross over a slat into the little entranceway between the kitchen and the back door. Then he stopped. Clearly we were to go no farther. I could feel the other men’s eyes slide over me from the kitchen; they continued playing cards. Nobody stopped or stood up to greet me—I supposed I was not pretty enough for that. Inside, it was hot and dark and seed
y, and the men had that sour smell of old age and cigarettes about them. It reminded me of the tenements again, the old childhood dangers. It was no place I wanted to be.

  “You say it’s an emergency?” The man pushed his glasses up the bridge of his nose with a greasy finger and squinted.

  I nodded.

  “Did he tell you the price?”

  I considered lowering the amount the Relic had quoted. Yet if you’re going to bargain, you have to be prepared to walk away, darlings. You have to have options.

  “One hundred and fifty,” I said faintly.

  The man nodded “Plus twenty for the gasoline.”

  “Plus twenty.” I patted my pocketbook.

  He ushered me into the kitchen. “Hank, Ezra,” he called out. “Your date’s here, fellas. Which one of you lowlifes owes me more?”

  The men chuckled grimly. “Bailey’s almost down to his shorts,” one of them hooted.

  “Just give me another minute, damn it.”

  “Listen to him. Already seventy in the hole.”

  In the dim light, someone was tapping his fingernails against a beer bottle in time to the radio. I drew my pocketbook against my chest.

  “Gentlemen. The lady here has an emergency.”

  “All right. All right, Milt. Lemme take a leak first.”

  One of the men pushed back his chair with a scrape. “Oy gevalt! I know you!” he cried. “I know you from somewhere.”

  The man was on his feet, pointing at me accusatorily. “I know you!” he shouted.

  My mind slammed into itself, and then I realized. E. Ezra. E. Lazarre. The pawnbroker whom Bert and I had hustled back when we were starting out. The one we’d sold the fake watches to. It was him—it had to be. Though aged and diminished, he was still in the black market. Of course. I was a fool. He recognized me instantly. The ugly girl with the bad leg. There were not too many like me around. I was entirely, wholly conspicuous.