The Ice Cream Queen of Orchard Street: A Novel

by Susan Jane Gilman

  I did not need to explain myself to anybody. Three hundred and two Dunkle’s franchises we had now, plus the supermarket freezer line, plus the latest contract with the U.S. military, again for a hefty profit, thank you. Even after Vietnam, VA hospitals continued to serve our brand. My television show now aired live for three hours, too—albeit once, on Sunday mornings only—rechristened as Dunkle’s Sundae Morning Funhouse. Several times a month, I also appeared as a guest star on Hollywood Squares, sitting in for Karen Valentine, Rose Marie, or Charo. I enjoyed this greatly. Plus the monthly column I “wrote” for Good Housekeeping, “Lillian Dunkle’s Delectable Frozen Desserts,” featuring dozens of imaginative ways to serve ice cream using Jell-O molds, meringues, pastel-coated almonds, canned peaches. Always with my picture in a box to the side. No less than Scribner had compiled my recipes and published them. Two bestselling cookbooks, I had now.

  So what if I had an extra cocktail or two during the day back at my office? Sometimes I liked to steady the nerves. A little fortification. Certainly I’d earned it.

  For Bert’s seventy-fifth-birthday party in Palm Beach, I’d ordered not only top-end scotch, vodka, and gin but cases and cases of Moët Impérial champagne to be passed on silver trays and to be poured freely from fountains by the gazebo.

  Now, from the patio, I watched the pool boy ladle the surface of the pool with a long-handled net like a parfait spoon.

  “Skim!” I shouted, motioning. “Don’t scoop!” I didn’t want debris swirling around, getting sucked into the filters. “These guys get paid by the hour,” I said to Isaac. “Earlier this morning the nursery delivered topiaries that looked like Easter eggs, those dingbats. How hard is it to trim a bush into a goddamn circle? I’ve had to order them all reclipped. They botch things up on purpose, you know, to run up overtime.”

  I picked up my glass and rattled the ice cubes. Isaac leaned forward on the padded lounger beside mine, rubbed his paper-white, hairy ankles, and blinked out at the ocean, the fractured glare of it. His pate shone at the back of his head. How did I suddenly have a middle-aged son? Distantly, I heard the thwock of a tennis ball bouncing off the clay; Bert was on our court playing with David Lambert, the new head of accounts at Promovox. Lambert had flown down yesterday with Wife Number Three. “Tre,” I called her. The stupid girl did not speak Italian, so she believed this was a term of endearment. Her real name—who the hell could remember?—was something that ended with an i. “Mindi”? “Staci”?

  The Lamberts were staying in the guesthouse at the northern edge of Bella Flora, the smaller one with the rotunda and the hot tub outside. With all the money we paid their firm, you’d think they could afford a hotel. Yet Bert had insisted. And since he was the birthday boy, who was I to begrudge him?

  I shrugged and tilted my glass back to get the last of the Sazerac at the bottom. “Sunny!” I shouted. I had no idea where I’d put my bell. “You want?” I asked Isaac. He shook his head. “And some pistachios,” I announced when Sunny arrived with the shaker to refresh my drink.

  I turned to Isaac. “Why don’t you drink? It’s happy hour.” I pointed to my little gold Bulova. “See. Eleven A.M.”

  “Ma,” Isaac groaned. He removed his glasses and massaged the bridge of his nose.

  “I’m just kidding.” I whacked him playfully on the side of his knee.

  Why didn’t my son ever appreciate me? My humor. The fact that I was a wisenheimer. Even at thirty-eight years old, he was still so guarded around me, so stingy with his affections. When he was a little boy, my leg and my cane frightened him. Yet even now, at almost six feet tall, he cowered. Certainly he had never been fearful of his father. I could hear them laughing jocularly on the tennis courts sometimes, just whacking a ball around for fun, talking more than playing. I saw their robust, pounding bear hugs whenever Isaac first arrived, Bert tousling Isaac’s hair, Isaac grinning, saying, “Hey, Pop, still lookin’ good.” Their steak lunches back in New York each week. Their little trips now in the sailboat with Jason to Peanut Island. Always without me.

  Around me Isaac just acted scalded. As if he had been the one wronged? Oh, how I wished he would kid with me, fence with me, push back a little, even. Show some backbone, some goddamn chutzpah for once. Frankly, I didn’t know what was worse: that I was often surrounded by thieves and liars and incompetents—or by obsequious, easily intimidated hand-wringers who tried skirting around me. Even my own son. Especially my own son. Was there no one who could simply deal with me normally?

  “I’m sorry, Ma. You’re right.” Isaac took a deep breath and spread his hands out atop his knees. “I’m just worried, is all.”

  “Please,” I said with irritation. “We’re not discussing Umlaut this weekend.”

  “Umlaut” was the nickname I’d given to another ice cream company. I had made it our policy never to dignify our competition by uttering their real names. There was a brand, for example, sold mostly in supermarkets, that promoted itself as being “simple” and “all natural.” Since its logo was a mint leaf, I referred to it only as “Leaf.”

  Umlaut, as I called it, was a company that was making waves lately because it produced a “super-premium,” high-fat ice cream with a nearly unpronounceable name—two a’s, an umlaut over one of them, and a hyphen, for Chrissakes. It was supposed to be Danish—there was even a map of Scandinavia printed on its containers—yet the goddamn stuff was really manufactured by two Jews in the Bronx. What a bunch of shysters. But people were eating it up, all right—literally. Umlaut had a new Chocolate Chocolate Chip ice cream that a food writer in New York magazine had described as “transcendent,” if you can believe that. Sure, with 17 percent butterfat, why wouldn’t it be? With 17 percent butterfat, you could make ice cream out of dog shit and everyone would think it was heaven.

  Until recently, pints of Umlaut ice cream were sold only in health-food stores and gourmet delis. Yet several months ago the company had announced it would be opening franchises across America—just like Dunkle’s. Starting right in our own backyard, no less. Brooklyn.

  “So I’m just wondering, Ma”—Isaac sighed, leaning forward on his lounger—“if developing our own luxury ice cream might not be the best way to go right now. Beat them at their own game.”

  “We’ve got double-digit inflation, and we just came out of an oil crisis. Who the hell’s going to pay extra for ice cream?” I said.

  Isaac studied the backs of his hands, the smooth tapers of his fingers. His wedding ring was a sheen of scuffed gold. No calluses. No blisters in the half-moon of skin between his thumb and his forefinger from cranking a handle.

  “A lot of people seem to be buying it,” he said unhappily.

  “With seventeen percent butterfat and almost no overrun? No artificial anything? Top-dollar ingredients? Sure, why not?” I threw up my hands. “Let’s develop a recipe that costs a small fortune to manufacture and makes your father’s patented ice cream machine completely obsolete. What a brilliant idea, bubeleh. Let’s just flush our entire business model right down the toilet.”

  “I was thinking we start small. A test, is all. A few premium flavors in targeted markets. That’s how Häagen-Dazs manages—”

  “Umlaut! Umlaut! That’s what we call them in this house, do you understand? Umlaut! Don’t roll your eyes at me.”

  We sat there watching the workers move a ladder from the base of one palm tree to another, winding garlands of lights around the trunks. “Ma, I’m just suggesting,” Isaac said after a moment.

  “This discussion is over.” I stood up defiantly, bumping the glass table as I did. “This Umlaut is nothing but a fad. ‘Luxury ice cream’? Boysenberry? Carob? Are those even flavors? Who the hell eats that? In three years, I’m telling you, they’ll be bankrupt.” I reached for my cane. “Now, excuse me. I’ve got the caterers.”

  Yet something else occurred to me, and I could not resist turning around. “You know,” I said tartly, “none of this would be a problem now if you’d simply bothered to do
that business with McDonald’s.”

  Bert’s seventy-fifth birthday. Dunkle’s fortieth anniversary. America’s Bicentennial. They all coincided beautifully the very same year. I had been planning this gala for ages, right down to the ice cream–scented guest soaps in the bathrooms. Two hundred and fifty-six people were coming—including the Annenbergs, Laurance Rockefeller, Valerie Perrine, Merv Griffin, Bob Hope. As a special surprise for Bert, I secretly hired the Dave Brubeck Ensemble to play during dinner. The singer Barry Manilow, who wrote a new Dunkle’s jingle for us a few years back, was coming to perform some of his hits as well. Quite a name, that boy had made for himself recently. Dionne Warwick would be singing, and Neil Diamond, too. Crystal Gayle. All friends I had made through Dunkle’s Funhouse. Children’s entertainment was such an icebreaker; performing for seven-year-olds stripped away stars’ egos. Plus, people felt relaxed around me. I pinched their cheeks. I told them to “eat a little. Have a little something for the mouth.” I was homey. I was impressed by no one. I was everyone’s Italian-Jewish mother that they’d never had before. (Dr. Ruth Westheimer, that bitch. She’s begun stealing my act now, in case you haven’t noticed.)

  I had spared no expense for Bert’s party—unusual for me. Peacocks would roam the gardens. Mimes would serve hors d’oeuvres. After the five-course dinner, there would be a fireworks display on the beach heralding the giant Baked Alaska birthday cake. Such a gala must be befitting the Ice Cream King of America and his queen, after all. No one less than Halston himself had designed my dress for me (with a matching little outfit for Petunia, of course). Lanzo was flying down specially to do my hair.

  As the day wore on, however, I found myself getting increasingly irritated. Could you blame me? Twenty-one acres along the beachfront we had, yet everywhere was a ruckus. Hammering. Shouting. Drilling. Workers finishing up the installation of the dance floor, rolling tables thunderously down the ramps. It was like a tropical sweatshop. The truck with the extra generators did not show up until noon.

  To keep him surprised—and out of my hair—I had banished Bert to the guest villa at the southern edge of the property. To keep Jason from moping about in his special, petulant, twelve-year-old’s way, I had Isaac take him out in the motorboat for lunch. Yet even though both Rita and I warned them not to stop at those bayside fish shacks for lunch, my grandson had consumed an entire basket of fried clams. He was now prostrate on the floor of the green marble guest bathroom, vomiting through his braces. Isaac and Rita stood over him yelling at each other. In the middle of all this, Sunny stumbled breathlessly up the stairs holding the telephone again. It was my new publicist, Roxanne. The editor at People magazine had apparently just asked if their photographer and reporter could come to Bella Flora earlier than planned. They wanted to photograph the grounds before any guests arrived. “Now they ask this?” I snapped.

  Amazingly, a photographer from Women’s Wear Daily was also expected. Bert’s seventy-fifth birthday was turning out to be one of the “in” invites of the season, which I found particularly gratifying. After all, Bert and I were considered terribly nouveau riche down here. Nobody said it to my face, of course. Yet I was no dummy, darlings. Our being millionaires, television personalities, philanthropists—these meant nothing in Palm Beach. They wanted you to have sailed in on the Mayflower just to sip a gin and tonic at their goddamn B&T Club. But what did I care? I was proud to be “new money.” Everything Bert and I had, we built ourselves. Not like some folks, sucking off the teat of their dead ancestors, pretending that it was some great achievement to lie around doing nothing all day but making snide remarks about other people’s clothing and bloodlines. As far as I was concerned, I had my own “social register.” If you hadn’t earned your reputation yourself, frankly, I didn’t want to know from you. Laurance Rockefeller being the exception, of course. We’d done business with him on the philanthropy front and supported his brother’s run for governor of New York. Besides, given that it was also the Bicentennial, it only seemed fair that we had a few American luminaries represented. President Ford himself had sent down a proclamation declaring both Dunkle’s Ice Cream and Bert himself “National Treasures.”

  Yet my earlier conversation with Isaac kept needling me. Super-premium ice cream.

  “Where the hell is Sunny?” I barked as I emerged from the elevator back onto the main floor. Florists were fussing over the arrangements in the grand entry hall. The wrought-iron banisters snaking up the marble staircases had been draped with cascades of white roses, dendrobium orchids, white amaryllis, swaths of white silk organza. They looked like dripping lace.

  “I want more color in those. Get some pink and violet in there. All this white looks like a goddamn funeral.”

  “Mrs. Dunkle,” Sunny said nervously, motioning to the front salon. “Your husband is looking for you.”

  Bert was standing over by the grand piano, gazing fondly at a baby picture of Jason in a gilt frame. “Doll, there you are.” He smiled expansively, setting the picture back down on the wrong shelf. He was still in his tennis whites and his terry-cloth headband. Three-quarters of a century old, and still he followed a punishing morning exercise regime that his no-good father had instilled in him back in Vienna. I supposed this was not a bad thing. Bert’s skin was looser and leopard-spotted now with age, of course, and he’d shrunk about an inch or so, yet my husband had kept that marvelous basic physique that he’d had almost fifty years ago when I first saw him standing in the lobby of the Henry Street Settlement. An Adonis still. His hair was leonine, white. His face glinted with happiness, with symmetry.

  “You’re supposed to be under quarantine,” I said. “Isaac will come fetch you in the golf cart when it’s time.” I didn’t want Bert ruining his tuxedo by walking across the lawn.

  “Come with me to the villa, doll.” Bert reached out and ran his papery fingertips down the gooseflesh of my arm. “Let’s spend some time together before the party starts and everything gets too busy.”

  I looked at him with exasperation. What was wrong with this man? Two hundred and fifty-six people we had coming. “I can’t. There’s too much to supervise.”

  “Lil. Isn’t that what we’re paying the party planners for? The caterers? The staff? Come. Let’s you and I have a little lunch together.”

  “I don’t want lunch. I have no appetite before social events. You know that.”

  “So we’ll have a little swim.” The southern guesthouse, it had its own private pool, overlooking the beach. I thought back to our honeymoon in Atlantic City, all those years ago; we owned a piece of that same oceanfront now, albeit a thousand miles south.

  “Bert, please. Parties don’t plan themselves.”

  He gave me such an innocent, wounded look, I felt monstrous. “Fine. I’m only going because it’s your birthday.” Yet I made little attempt to hide my resentment, my impatience.

  He already had the golf cart waiting. When we arrived at the guest villa, I saw that Dimitri, our boy, had prepared a luncheon for us and set it out on the patio table beneath the large yellow umbrella, angled in the direction of the sun. There was Waldorf salad, cold poached tarragon chicken breasts, fresh seeded rolls. A bottle of Soave Bolla sweating in a Lucite ice bucket. Bert liked to drink this after tennis, though I did not care for it. A Sazerac awaited me instead.

  “My, this is lovely,” I conceded. “You arranged all this?”

  Bert helped me into my chair, very gentlemanly. “At all these grand parties,” he said, “we never get any time alone together.”

  “I suppose I could pick a little,” I said, eyeing the cold chicken.

  The sea breeze tickled us over the low dunes and made the tablecloth flutter. Bert, in between sips of his pale wine, kept reaching over and squeezing my hand. He began to speak about a sailing trip to the Keys he wanted us to take with Isaac and Rita, about the upcoming election—he was not sure, at that point, if he was more partial to Carter or to Ford. Carter was a Democrat, yet Ford we knew personally.

/>   As Bert began to stammer out the pros and cons of both candidates, however, I found I was no longer listening. No matter how much of my Sazerac I drank, I still could not stop thinking about my conversation with Isaac. The whole beauty of ice cream was its democracy. Always, always, it was cold and sweet and affordable for everyone. Suddenly elevating it to a luxury? Why, that went against the very essence of ice cream itself. You might as well start charging money for water.

  Yet there was a problem, darlings. For you see, I had secretly tasted this “super-premium” ice cream. Both the “transcendent” Chocolate Chocolate Chip and the vanilla. And oh, they were a revelation. Umlaut’s ice cream was unctuous. Buttery. With a concentration of flavor that, frankly, put our own product to shame. Eating it, I had the sickening premonition that such a product could revolutionize entirely what people desired—and expected—from ice cream. For once my son was right. There was reason indeed to be worried.

  “Bert?” I cut him off midsentence as he was elaborating on how charming he had found Rosalynn Carter. “You’ve tasted Umlaut by now, haven’t you?”

  He concentrated on cutting his chicken with the side of his fork and did not look at me. “W-w-w-w-w-w-w-w-w—” he said.

  I set down my utensils, sat back, and crossed my arms, the wind fierce in my hair. “Do you think we should be developing our own luxury ice cream brand?”

  He chewed thoughtfully. “You mean with higher butterfat?”

  “And minimal overrun. Fancy ingredients. No artificial additives.”

  Bert tilted his head from side to side noncommittally.

  “Our son, he seems to think that luxury ice cream is the wave of the future,” I said. “That we should start competing with Umlaut the same way they’re starting to copy our franchises.”