The Ice Cream Queen of Orchard Street: A Novel

by Susan Jane Gilman

  The address on West Twenty-Second Street is not what I expect. A shabby brick low-rise with a cheap new glass door and a landslide of Chinese takeout menus littering the vestibule. Beneath a buzzer labeled H. BALLENTINE, the letters GMHC have been added on a piece of masking tape.

  Harvey is already awaiting me on the landing, leaning against his doorframe, a pearl gray cat slinking in figure eights around his ankles. I have had trepidations about telephoning him—about coming here in person. Yet here I am.

  It is odd. I am his former boss. Although Harvey worked for me for seventeen years, I have never once been to his apartment. And several years have passed. Without his clown makeup, Harvey looks strangely denuded and gaunt. Thinner than I recall. Instead of his satin balloon pants and goofy bow tie, he is dressed simply in a faded T-shirt that clings to his chest like plating. Shredded blue jeans hang from the struts of his hip bones. His pale feet are clad in silk Chinese slippers. Though his grizzled face glints with boyishness, it is sunken. He must be close to fifty now.

  “Well, color me indicted,” he says tartly, one hand on his hip. “How are you, Lillian?” His voice still has its snide, musical quality. Though it is more subdued than I remember, something in his tone, just as it did decades ago, tickles me.

  “I believe that’s ‘the Mussolini of Ice Cream’ to you, is it not?”

  Harvey clamps a hand over his mouth. “Oh, my God. You read that? You actually read that? I am so sorry. I was totally misquoted.”

  “Were you, now?”

  “Well, no. It’s actually exactly what I said. I just never dreamed you’d read it, is all,” Harvey says flippantly. “You know. At your highly advanced age.” I assume he is teasing me as always, yet his smile is icy, short-lived. “Come,” he says abruptly, swiveling. “Let’s get this little melodrama over with, shall we?”

  He waves me into his living room. A small desk is pushed up against an exposed brick wall. An electric typewriter sits purring amid stacks of manila folders. Propped above it is a bulletin board covered with newspaper articles, press releases, mimeographed lists. On the other side of the room, a pair of plum-colored velvet curtains have been drawn back to reveal a voluptuous bed sitting on a sleeping platform. A doll-size kitchenette runs along the wall by the door, half concealed by another velvet curtain, this one a dull harlequin gold. But this, I realize, is it. Harvey’s entire apartment. A single room. Overlooking the street.

  He rummages through a cabinet above his tiny stove. “May I offer you some tea? You know I don’t drink anymore. And judging from that latest performance of yours, honey”—he looks me up and down—“you probably shouldn’t either.”

  I draw myself up. “Well, aren’t you Mister Rogers all of a sudden? No tea, thank you. I’m perfectly fine.”

  “Oh, thank God.” Harvey tosses a tin back into the cabinet with a clatter. “That tea is actually dreadful. Like drinking potpourri. Besides”—he crosses his arms and looks at me squarely—“I’d prefer not to draw this out, Lillian, if you don’t mind. Just say your piece and go, all right?”

  I lean heavily on my cane. “Excuse me?”

  “I don’t know why you’ve insisted on coming here. You’re not my boss anymore, you know?”

  “Harvey,” I say, “you’ve got a lot of goddamn nerve.”

  He gives a little, incredulous yelp. “Me? Me? I’ve got a lot of nerve? Already this week I’ve been chewed out by your publicist, Lillian. And your lawyers? Faxing me over a cease-and-desist order. Twice?” Suddenly he is animated, his hands fluttering like birds. “You know, I’m not going to fight it, Lillian—not because I agree with it—I absolutely do not—it’s horrible, and it’s a travesty—but because, frankly, I simply don’t give a shit anymore, do you understand? You want me to stop saying I was Spreckles the Clown for seventeen years? Fine. You got it. It’s erased. It’s done. It’s expunged from my résumé.” Harvey slaps himself theatrically on the forehead. “Whoops. See? I just hit myself on the head. Just gave myself total amnesia. Spreckles the Clown? Who on earth is that? It’s like it never happened at all.”

  I glare at him indignantly. Finally I say in a low voice, “What the hell did I ever do to you?”

  He blinks at me. “Excuse me. Was everything I just said somehow not enough?”

  “All I ever did was put you on television. On billboards. Drink with you during every ghastly, goddamn show we did together. The Christmas when your mother died? Did I not give you an extra week off? And take you to that party with Andy Warhol that you couldn’t stop blabbering about? Why, I paid you severance—severance, Harvey!—when it was you—you, you whiny little ingrate—who walked off my show in a tantrum!”

  For a moment we stand there, panting at each other across his miniature table.

  “What the hell did I ever do to you,” I say, “except give you a job and put up with your nonsense for seventeen goddamn years? Wait, I have to wash my hands again! Don’t get any chocolate syrup on me! And this is the thanks I get? You call me a dictator in New York magazine? ‘The Mussolini of Ice Cream’? Persecuting me in the press along with everyone else?”

  Harvey’s face suddenly grows livid. “I’m persecuting you? I’m persecuting you, Lillian?” He clutches his temples, then flings open his hands. “Is that all you can think about? Oh my God. Your fucking reputation? Men across this city are dying like flies, Lillian. Do you not get this? Young, beautiful men in their prime—their entire lives ahead of them—they’re falling sick and dying horrible, torturous deaths. And is anybody doing anything? Certainly not our mayor—who’s so deep in the closet he’d rather let every last gay man drop dead before he utters a word! Certainly not our public health department. Certainly not our president. The New York Times devoted more ink to that Tylenol scandal than to the fact that hundreds of people are dying within a mile of their office!”

  Harvey stands before me, wild-eyed. “Three men in this building alone, Lillian. Right here. On the floors around us. A math teacher on two. An opera singer, with a voice like an angel, in 4B. And a nineteen-year-old kid—a nineteen-year-old—whose parents in Utica disowned him, kicked him out into the street like a dog—they’re all dying. Right here. Right now. And yet you, Lillian Dunkle—just one or two wisecracks to the press—God forbid some little smart-ass like me sometimes chooses to frost his cakes a little when he speaks—and boom! Suddenly you’ve got your lawyers and your publicist all calling me up, night and day, threatening to sue, because you’re worried I’m making your ice cream company look bad? ‘We don’t want this gay plague and homosexuality associated with Dunkle’s and children’s television,’ your publicist told me. That’s right. Don’t give me that look, Lillian. Those were her exact words. Here? See. I wrote it down on a notepad. Yet even this apparently is not enough for you. You’ve got to come down here yourself, in person, the big Ice Cream Queen of America, just to berate me like you do everybody else. Just to make sure that, ooh, I’m not going to embarrass you and your ice cream!”

  His face becomes a landslide then. He bends over the sink in his kitchenette, clutching his abdomen. A ragged sob rises from his throat.

  Spreckles the Clown.

  I watch his knobby shoulders heave up and down, up and down. From outside, a car alarm begins whooping insanely, then stops. Harvey’s cat slides soundlessly past us and disappears through a narrow door; a moment later I hear scratching in a litter box. The clock on the stove ticks off the seconds. The minutes. A faint rumbling of the subway deep beneath the street becomes audible, then fades.

  I clear my throat.

  “Harvey, I want to know,” I say quietly. “Are you sick?”

  He continues standing with his back to me. He draws in a long sniffle, then jerks on the faucet and runs his hands quickly under the water before pressing them to his eyes.

  When he turns around, he looks as if he might cry again. “I don’t know, Lil,” he whispers, his voice cracking like plaster. “There’s no way to tell if you’re sick with this th
ing. Until, of course, you are.”

  Blinking up at the ceiling, he struggles to contain himself. “They say, ‘How can we even test for something when we don’t know what it is?’ But then they look at me, Lillian. And I see it. In that invisible cartoon bubble floating above their heads: It’s your own damn fault, you sick little faggot. A plague on all your houses.”

  I stand there, still in my coat, regarding him. Slowly, I unsnap my pocketbook and take out my checkbook. “May I?” I point to his little desk in the corner. I go over and pluck a ballpoint pen from a glazed ceramic mug by his phone.

  Rose’s name printed in white chalk on the side of the school. My mother, going crazy from the grief, unable to contact me because of the quarantine. Me, waking up from that hallucinatory fever in Beatrice’s room, only to find her gone, half the tenement empty.

  “You know, there have always been plagues, Harvey.” I sigh, ripping the check from its fibrous spine. “And nobody ever has a goddamn clue. They blame and they blame, those idiots. The Black Plague on the Jews. The Spanish flu on the Spanish. Polio on ice cream.”

  Limping over, I hand Harvey the checks—one to him, one to his organization.

  Harvey looks at me, then down at the slips of paper. He tries to feign indifference, though the amounts are extraordinarily generous, thank you.

  “So.” With difficulty he swallows. Waving the checks in the air with a little flourish, he tries to sound flirtatious and acerbic and diffident again. “Hush money?”

  I pick up my pocketbook and turn away stiffly. I cannot bear to look at him any longer. “I will be damned if another epidemic threatens my business,” I sniff.

  Back in the car, I struggle to keep my hand steady as I dutifully record the amounts in the balance section of my checkbook. Staring up at the forlorn brick building one last time, I yell at Hector to start the Cadillac already and drive me uptown, leaving Harvey Ballentine and his fax machine and his soft, pearl gray cat trembling alone in their one little room full of velvet.

  * * *

  Of course, I never did manage to see Bert before he shipped out. And Papa, after that drunken night in New Jersey, he vanished again.

  Yet, following months of anguishing radio silence, with no postcards or phone calls arriving whatsoever—and me with no idea where on earth my husband was stationed—the war finally ended. And when Bert did come home from his “undisclosed location,” it turned out that we did not need a string of franchises in a fledgling desert resort called Las Vegas. We did not need Papa and his “friends” investing in our company at all. Dunkle’s thrived more after the war than during it.

  All those returning veterans? Many of them had already eaten our ice cream aboard aircraft carriers and submarines, in mess halls and hospitals. Already they loved our product. Arriving home in Williamsport and Chapel Hill and Sandusky and Beaver Falls, they were only too happy to open their own Dunkle’s franchises. What better antithesis to warfare than a bright new candy-colored ice cream parlor? In honor of their homecoming, I even concocted several special flavors: Welcome Back Walnut. Victory Vanilla. Armistachio. GI Love Chocolate. A simple gesture. But the soldiers, oh, they went mad for it.

  Like many of them, however, my own husband came home from the war an enigma. Although he had not seen combat, spending months and months making fifteen hundred gallons of ice cream each day in a huge concrete shell bobbing in the middle of the Pacific—all the while listening to war planes tearing overhead and the incessant hammering of machinery reverberating through the steel hull—the stress of it had reconfigured his internal wiring somehow. His hearing in one ear had been damaged. Words and verbal communication had receded from him even further, making him appear foggy at times—even “simple.” He could sit in his armchair by the window for hours, drinking a glass of rye while the radio played too loudly, his eyes fixed on a taxi, perhaps, slowly maneuvering down the wet, leaf-matted street. I in turn watched him from the kitchen doorway with trepidation. I felt I had to decipher him now the way that Henrietta’s husband, Walter, had once deciphered intercepted cables from the Germans.

  Like so many couples, too, Bert and I had forgotten how to be together—how our bodies interlocked in bed, how our morning rhythms in the kitchen and bathroom syncopated like musical instruments. “Oh, excuse me,” we said. “Did you want the toothpaste? No. Please. You first.”

  To my great relief, Bert did seem to have lost his appetite for radicalism. “I don’t know, Lil,” he said plainly one night as we were having cocktails, “any extremism just seems dangerous and oppressive to me now. When people follow any leader—any set of ideas blindly…” His voice trailed off.

  Such an odd thing about servicemen, though: During the war they spent all their time penning letters to their wives, mothers, and sweethearts, longing for home, rhapsodizing about the smell of fresh-cut lawns and dancing the Lindy hop and eating their wives’ famous meat loaf. Yet as soon as they returned, they couldn’t bear to stick around their families. Every Thursday, Bert and Walter Mueller and a few other vets went out for dinner at Luchow’s, then headed over to Fifty-Second Street to listen to jazz. In loud nightclubs, where little conversation was required, Bert apparently came alive again, tapping his feet to Coleman Hawkins at the Three Deuces. Bobbing along to Louis Prima at Jimmy Ryan’s. Musicians I would have loved to hear myself, thank you, with him on my arm.

  “I don’t understand why you have to go out every single week,” I sniffed. “It’s expensive, you know.”

  “We can afford it now, doll,” Bert said, sliding on his good jacket. “What’s all our money for, if not this?” He tugged at his sleeves, adjusted his cuff links.

  Yet it was more than money that bothered me, of course. All the rumors about how army men had behaved: the “comfort women.” The cocktail girls. The Tokyo roses and French femmes fatales. These stories trailed after veterans like phantoms, swirled around them like clouds of ash and perfume.

  I observed my husband hawkishly. The conversation with Papa kept playing over and over in my head: Why did men cheat? Why do your stores offer twelve different flavors of ice cream? At the beauty parlor one morning, I ordered my hairdresser to dye my hair blond. It came out coppery instead, but it was still a marvelous improvement; indeed, it infused my face with light, making me look thoughtful and regal instead of sullen. Bert let out a long, slow whistle when he saw me. My hair, he had always said, was my “crowning glory.” Thick and satiny. Now it shone like cognac, and he ran his fingers through it, nuzzling it, squeezing me around the waist. “Lil, you only get better-looking with age,” he said. “Not too many women can have that said of them.”

  Yet gold hair, I worried, would simply not be enough.

  When Bert went out carousing with his new buddies, I listened in a torturous half sleep to the clock on our bed stand ticking like a metronome. I could not rest until I heard the metallic clack of the lock turning. Often it was two or three in the morning when Bert thudded through the darkened kitchen, tossed his keys cavalierly onto the Formica counter, and negotiated his way around the furniture. When he finally lurched into bed beside me, he smelled of cigars. Acrid, floral cologne. Apricot brandy. Face powder. Sauerkraut. Stale leather. Beer. I was afraid that if I rolled over, he would perhaps admit to something reckless and impetuous that I did not want to hear. Trying not to swallow, I pretended to be asleep, letting him lock his sweaty arms around my waist and press damply against my back. Soon he began snoring. Yet me, I remained awake, blinking at the window sheers fluttering from the curtain rod like ghosts, mushrooming with the fumes from the street.

  In the mornings Bert stood before the mirror looping his silk tie over and under, whistling along to Fats Waller on the Victrola as if absolutely nothing were wrong. “Hey, doll,” he said mildly. Occasionally he made a playful grab for my buttocks as I maneuvered around him in my slip toward the bathroom. I was not sure how to interpret this. Was it guilt? Residual lust left over from some showgirl? Or was it possible he still ca
red for me?

  Of course I went through his pockets. His slim leather appointment book. Eavesdropped on his phone calls. There was never any definitive proof—but then, I suppose, I was careful never to look too closely. For the day after my father had abandoned me in the parking lot of Rickie’s Round-Up, I returned to the apartment on Forty-Ninth Avenue feeling wretched and humiliated. And standing by the window, nursing my hangover, I had made a vow: No one would ever, ever walk out on me again.

  My marriage, I decided, I would treat like our business. I would simply do whatever it took. I would turn a blind eye. I would keep my big mouth shut and not ask my usual torrent of questions. I would chew off my own tongue if I had to.

  One morning Bert sat on the edge of the bed, a shoehorn in one hand, a brand-new wing tip in the other. “Lil, I’ve been thinking. I need to discuss something with you.”

  My leg went heavy. I slid awkwardly onto the flouncy, quilted stool of my dressing table and gripped its scratchy edge. “Oh?” Adrenaline sizzled through me like a jolt of electricity. I knew already what Bert was going to say. I could imagine the onerous words. I could see his mouth shaping them, in fact, before they rose in the air, like a moving picture that had fallen out of synchronization with the sound reel. This was finally it. My heart thudded with misery. Oh, dear God. Do not let him leave me.

  “Lil,” Bert said gently. “What do you say we buy a house?”

  “A house?”

  “Someplace nice, up in Westchester or out on Long Island. With a pool, maybe, or a garden.”

  My voice broke in a peal of preposterous, relieved laughter. For this he had nearly given me a heart attack?

  “What on earth would we do with a house, Bert? We’re barely ever home. I spend all my time at the factory.”