The Ice Cream Queen of Orchard Street: A Novel

by Susan Jane Gilman

  At seventy-five years old, I, Lillian Dunkle, am a convicted felon. I can appeal, of course—though it’s likely I’ll have finished serving my sentence before the new trial can even be set. I will fight, I suppose, if only to restore my good name. Yet part of me, darlings, simply wants it to be done with. Frankly, I am getting so tired of battling.

  I agree to begin my incarceration just after Labor Day. West Virginia, I tell myself, is pretty in the autumn. During the Depression, Bert and I slept there in our truck beneath auburn-leaved trees, wreathed in mist, in the sweet, fragrant wood smoke of morning.

  I have journeyed from Russia to the United States. From poor to rich. And now I will be given a number and a uniform. Jason, he looks as if he might break down right there in the courtroom. Rita grips my hand so hard I think she will crush my metacarpals. “Oh, Lillian,” she keens. Isaac, he hugs me and hugs me as he has never hugged me in his life. I smell his soapy antiperspirant, the musky fibers of his Pierre Cardin jacket. His arms are like baked bread. It is still surprising to me how substantial he has become. All my life, I have longed for my son to embrace me like this, to call me Mama and draw me to him. Yet now it is too much to bear. “Please,” I say, disengaging. “Shoo. All of you. I’ll meet you in the lobby.” Unable to look at their devastated faces, I get busy collecting my scarf, my pocketbook. Yet as soon as their footsteps retreat, I am stricken. Why did I push them away? My God, I can’t help it, I realize: It is like a terrible tic. A reflex. Despite the court officers standing by, hoping to hurry me along—the loneliness I feel is gut-wrenching. I glance around miserably. Only one spectator remains in the gallery.

  Harvey Ballentine stands in the last row of pewlike benches. He is dressed in a crisp blue linen jacket, though beneath it he looks cadaverous. He is clutching a crinkled brown paper grocery bag from Gristede’s. As I make my way toward the door, he steps out into the aisle. “Lillian,” he says in a soldierly fashion.

  “Well, look who’s here.” I swallow. “You came to gloat? To make sure they’re really locking me up?”

  “Why, however did you guess? In fact, I’ve got all the munchkins queued up, right outside. Really, Lillian.” He rolls his eyes theatrically. “I only gloat when I’ve had a triumph.”

  The corners of his eyes crinkle like crepe paper. I still have trouble getting used to Harvey’s face without its clown makeup, without its florid youth. The deflated, grayish jowls, those veiny cords of his neck.

  “Well then. Walk me out.” I am surprised how my legs are trembling. Leaning into each other, the two of us are as rickety as chopsticks. I struggle not to smile, not to betray my extravagant gratitude. “So, now you decide to show up?” I say.

  “I know. I know. Ambushing is so déclassé. But I kept calling your apartment, and no one ever—”

  I stop. “You better not have come here to pity me, Harvey.” I thump my cane on the floor. “Because if you did, I am going to box your ears.”

  “Oh, honey. Puh-lease.” Harvey holds the door for me. “I’m only here to antagonize you. I promise.

  “Although,” he adds coyly, coming to a standstill in the corridor, “with all those marauding hordes out there—those dreadful, tacky reporters—I did figure—well—.” Rummaging through his brown paper bag, he pulls out a red plastic clown’s nose and a child’s insipid birthday crown—the type they sell at dime stores, made out of glossy gold cardboard with a string of elastic like a garrote. “I thought maybe we could face them down together, if you wanted. But now I don’t know. What do you think?” He puts his hand on his hip and twists his mouth into a sideways comma. “Too cutesy? Too camp?”

  I look at him wickedly. Harvey Ballentine. My Spreckles the Clown. “To hell with ’em,” I say, motioning for the crown. “They want a ‘media circus’? So we’ll give them one.”

  When we finally make it past the great spanking machine of the press, my lawyers and family are amassed by the curb. A line of town cars is waiting, but I wave Harvey over to my Cadillac. “That was marvelous,” I say. “Come. I’ll give you a lift.”

  “You sure?” He clutches his bag in front of him like a pillow. Already he has pulled off his toy clown nose. The photos of the two of us that will appear in the papers and on the evening news: I can only imagine.

  “Jason, darling.” I turn to my grandson and nudge him out of the backseat. “Go ride up ahead with your parents. Harvey and I have business to discuss.”

  As Hector maneuvers the car away from the courthouse, I tap Harvey on his kneecap.

  “You’re too skinny,” I say. “We’re getting you a knish.”

  “Ugh, Lillian. You know I hate those things.”

  “Okay, a cannoli, then. Something. I feel like a drive.”

  I have the urge to go to Whitehall Street and the South Ferry terminal, to the final, wind-battered tip of Manhattan, to overlook the glittering harbor, the Statue of Liberty, to stand on the very spot where my parents and sisters and I first disembarked and blinked out into the dissipating American sunshine seventy years ago. The pull of all those ghosts, the last gasp of comfort, of nostalgia, of delirious freedom, is magnetic. But the whole area is a mess now. Construction everywhere. Landfill is being shipped in from New Jersey and packed along the Hudson. A brand-new neighborhood is rising along the waterfront in the shadow of the World Trade Center, a complex of buildings with the inelegant name of Battery Park City. A winter garden, supposedly, there will be, and a marina, and a fancy-schmancy promenade. One of Hector’s brothers-in-law, from El Salvador, he tells me, is on the construction crew.

  So instead I order him to thread the Cadillac north. “Come.” I nudge Harvey. “Let me show you.”

  Orchard Street smells of dry-cleaning fluids and sizzling Chinese food. The low, ugly tenements are still there, I discover, but many of them have dented metal fire doors now, doughnuts of fluorescent lights buzzing spastically in the vestibules. Music like Jason’s pulsates from a window; the entire block seems to throb with it. Discount stores sell lurid polyester clothing made in Taiwan. A few woebegone signs in Hebrew letters still swing rustily above the windows, but most are in Chinese. “I thought it was right here,” I say as Harvey and I disembark from the backseat. Suddenly I cannot be sure. Everything has been repainted, some walls obscured by graffiti. “I think it was here. We lived upstairs, on the top floor. Six of us in one room. Chickens squawking in the courtyard. Shared privies in the hallways.”

  Harvey squints up and nods dutifully, though I am growing flustered. Old age is so humiliating, darlings. After a while, there is simply no camouflaging your deterioration, and no one ever sees all the strengths you’ve acquired along the way. I point shakily to a façade. This was the tenement, was it not?

  Over on Mulberry Street, we scarcely fare better. Little Italy has shrunk to a few blocks that seem to have become a parody of themselves. Red-white-and-green striped signs boast AUTHENTIC ITALIAN CUISINE JUST LIKE MAMA’S! Shops everywhere sell chains of livid pepperonis, murky bottles of olive oil. A man in a porkpie hat with a portable Hammond organ plays “That’s Amore” for a gaggle of tourists. The ground floor of the Dinellos’ tenement is now an expensive-looking “cappuccino bar.” Beside it: a Laundromat with a flashing, chiming pinball machine. I keep waiting to feel something monumental, yet all I feel is foolish and frail.

  Anything that has survived the wrecking ball, it seems, has done so by being reinvented. Renovated. Reborn somehow.

  Back in the car, Harvey and I eat our cannolis in silence, the bubbled gold shells shattering as we bite down on them. Swallowing, I glance out the window at the passing buildings, trying to recall the world as it once was, myself as who I had once been. Oh, I had wanted—and gotten—so much! And yet. How unprepared I’d been for the myriad of ways life deformed you, the way grief and rage and bitterness and heartbreak kicked you repeatedly in the gut, sent you sprawling on the pavement. The little girl who had sung her plaintive little songs on the landings on Orchard Street, she wavers and fl
ickers before me like a mirage.

  “Harvey,” I say quietly. “Am I a terrible person?”

  Harvey takes a big, gooey bite of his pastry. “Mm. How, exactly, are we defining ‘terrible’?” When I don’t respond, he says diplomatically, “Well, honey, you’ve certainly had your moments.” He licks a dab of ricotta cream from the crescent of flesh between his thumb and forefinger. Folding his slip of translucent bakery paper neatly into quarters, he drops it back into the box. “But bad, good. Good, bad. I mean, isn’t that everyone?”

  I give his hand a little squeeze, even though he is a germophobe.

  “One thing, though?” He swivels around on the leather seat to face me. “This ‘facility’ you’re going to, Lil? Well, I was thinking. You should probably approach it like sort of a spa.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “Okay, like rehab. Think ‘Betty Ford with a prison motiff.’ I mean, they have meetings in those places, Lil, same as everywhere else. And they are anonymous—”

  “You’re saying I have a problem, Harvey? You actually think I drink too much? Ha. Excuse me, but that’s you. Don’t you go confusing me with all of your craziness,” I snap. Yet as soon as these words are out of my mouth, I know the falsity of them. Of course I have a problem. For Chrissakes, darlings. I hit a small child on live television. Certainly, certainly, this sort of behavior—well, for starters, it is not good for business.

  “I’m just saying, Lillian,” Harvey says delicately, “that if one day you decide maybe you do want to change? Well, where you’re going could help.”

  * * *

  The night before my lawyers escort me down to prison in Alderson, West Virginia, Isaac and Rita propose going out someplace special for dinner. “La Grenouille? La Côte Basque? You name it, Ma.”

  “And have everybody in the dining room sit staring at me while I eat foie gras?” I sniff. “No thank you. I prefer we just gather at my apartment. Send out for Chinese.”

  Jason arrives early with his records, a small Styrofoam cooler balanced on his shoulder. His muscles flexed showily. Sunglasses gleaming. “Mom and Dad’ll be over in a few,” he announces, dropping the carton with a thud on the kitchen floor. “They sent this ahead. Ta-da. Fresh from the freezer.”

  Inside is a selection of Dunkle’s newest Deluxe Premium Ice Cream. The pints have fancy gold swirls on the lids. Just looking at them makes me dizzy.

  “This one is awesome.” Jason tosses a container in the air, then catches it. “Madagascar Vanilla. Ka-cha!”

  “Well, aren’t you in fine spirits?”

  “I’m trying to be,” he says winsomely, removing his sunglasses, setting them carefully on the counter. He bends over the cooler. “I think you’ll like this one, too, Grandma. Java with Cream, though it’s really just coffee. Oh, and Chocolate Truffle.” He looks around distractedly. “Where do you keep your spoons? You got a tray?”

  “Oh.” I chuckle. “Are you waiting on me now?”

  “I thought before Mom and Dad get here, the two of us could have a special little going-away party of our own.” Wiggling his eyebrows, he draws a twisted cigarette from the pocket of his black jeans.

  “Oh, tateleh.” I touch my hand to his cheek. It burns like dry ice. “Thank you. But I think it’s best I keep my wits about me now.”

  He nods solemnly, tucks it away. For a moment we just regard each other, breathing. “Grandma,” he says quietly, “are you scared?”

  “Oh, I haven’t given it much thought,” I say breezily. Though, darlings, I am lying. My heart, it is a furious bird. God only knows what sort of thuggishness, violence, or squalor awaits me. Already I have received death threats in the mail. “I hope you choke. The inmates should cut you. Die, bitch. Die.” Crazies, of course, and my lawyers have assured me that this minimum-security facility has a high degree of civility. Still. Perhaps it is good that most of America has seen my right hook on television. Papa, he may have given me something useful after all.

  I am old now. Certainly, this is not how I ever planned to live out my last days, and I cannot bear to think about it for too long. Yet the prison guidelines have informed me that there are mandatory jobs to be performed—in the kitchen. The library. This comes as an enormous relief. In addition, I have been getting ideas. The problem with this fancy-schmancy premium ice cream that my son is now struggling to hawk is that it simply replicates our competition. Dunkle’s needs to do something bolder, wittier. With MTV and these portable Walkmans kids are listening to—why not make premium ice cream named after pop musicians? From the records Jason has played for me, I have taken notes: Grandmaster Fudge. Bananarama Split. U2ootie Frutti. I cannot imagine that a prison can be much worse than a tenement to work in. So no doubt, I will stay occupied. There is always, always something more to invent, darlings.

  “Why don’t you go out on the patio, and I’ll set us up the snacks,” Jason says magnanimously.

  A glass casement door leads from the kitchen. Sunny has not been here much over the summer, so the window boxes and small potted trees have grown dry in their enormous terra-cotta planters, giving the terrace the feel of an overgrown Roman ruin. A faint, warm, late-summer breeze ruffles across the sky. Bert and I bought this penthouse precisely for the view. Looking west, you can see the billows of Central Park, the reservoir set in it like a lozenge of blue topaz. Beyond it, the skyline of the Upper West Side stands sentry, sun radiating from behind the water towers and spires. I lower myself into a wrought-iron patio chair. It really is so lovely out here, even with the fine coating of powdery black soot, the incipient roar from the city.

  Jason steps carefully outside with a tray balanced in his hands. He has brought out all five pints of ice cream, along with spoons and two of my Murano glass dishes from Venice that are supposed to be purely decorative. No matter. My grandson, he is clearly trying.

  “Well, isn’t this lovely, tateleh.”

  He grins. “We aim to please.”

  My poor grandson. He appears genuinely upset that I am going to prison. He is so solicitous—and such marvelous fun! It is a shame, perhaps, that I will not be leaving him any of my fortune.

  Just today, when I met with my lawyers to finalize my affairs, I amended my will. Jason, he will be getting my record collection and thirty-five thousand dollars. Just enough to launch himself in this world—as a kung fu clown, or a performance artist, or any other meshuggeneh thing he aspires to if he decides to eschew the family business. Yet no more. I am doing him an enormous favor, darlings. It’s always best, in the end, to earn your own money. With nothing to work for, you simply don’t work. My grandson is clever, and my grandson is creative. I want to keep him that way. My share of the Dunkle’s Ice Cream Corporation—still worth several million, even now—will go to my domestic, Sunny. God knows she’s earned it. And so not everybody will be able to say that I’m “the world’s worst boss” in the end, thank you very much.

  Isaac, as the president of Dunkle’s, has seized more than his share already, of course. But Flora’s care is provided for, until the end of her days. As will hospital costs and legal bills—God forbid it comes to that—for Harvey Ballentine. A chunk, I’ve decided, too, will go to his GMHC as well, if only to rankle my publicist.

  But otherwise, the rest of my fortune? Whatever the government doesn’t seize, I’m leaving to my dog.

  Jason finishes arranging the dishes on the table. “Before we dig in, why don’t I go inside and put on some tunes, Grandma?”

  “Splendid,” I say. Petunia leaps onto my lap. “Prop the door open and turn the hi-fi all the way up so we can hear it.”

  As he saunters back toward the kitchen, his shoulder blades press through his T-shirt like small, fine wings.

  Across the gulf of Park Avenue, the city rises, the whole jumble of windows and rooftops aflame with gold light from the late afternoon sun, lives upon lives crammed into compartments of plaster and steel, nestled inside high-rises and tenements and great monoliths of glass. Families borne her
e on the water, transported through the air, in terror or hope, pulsating with yearning. Well, good luck to them all. A swoop of pigeons scatters like glitter in the air, fluttering down onto ledges and cornices, alighting on the heads of disintegrating angels carved into the limestone.

  Jason ducks out the kitchen door. “Grams, what do you want to listen to?” Gamely, he holds up a few of my albums. “You want Benny Goodman? Some Billie Holiday? Some Johnny Cash?”

  I close my eyes and tilt my face toward the sun, catching the last warm kiss of it on my face. “Nah, play something different. Play something new, tateleh,” I tell him.

  Surprise me.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  This book would not exist without the vision, patience, and brilliant stewardship of my editor, Helen Atsma. Nor would it exist without my agent, Irene Skolnick, who has guided me sagely for years. Nor would it exist without Jamie Raab, Allyson Rudolph, Tareth Mitch, Caitlin Mulrooney-Lyski, and the staff of Grand Central Publishing, who continue to champion me.

  Doing my research, I had the great good fortune to be taken in by the generous, warmhearted Zaya Givargidze, owner of the Carvel ice cream store in Massapequa, New York. He not only showed me the ropes of his business but allowed me to work behind the counter and in the kitchen. A huge New York shout-out goes to him and to his staff: Vincenza Pisa, Samantha Spinnato, and Keri Strejlau.

  My cousin Susan Dalsimer has been invaluable as an editor and adviser when I was lost in the wilderness—as have my friends and fellow writers Marc Acito, Elizabeth Coleman, Carla Drysdale, Anne Korkeakivi, and Maureen McSherry.

  The glorious Lisa Campisi, Emanuel Campisi (a.k.a. Big Manny), and Frank DeSanto assisted with All Things Neapolitan, as did the sainted Luigi Cosentino (a.k.a. Louie)—co-owner of Gemelli Fine Foods in Babylon, Long Island. A major grazie mille to all—and to my beloved Franco Beneduce, in memoriam—for his inspiration and life force.