The Ice Cream Queen of Orchard Street: A Novel

by Susan Jane Gilman

  And the stench!

  Manure, hay, chicken shit, urine, beer, frying grease, chalk dust, coke, coal—even decomposing animal carcasses. Crossing Forsyth Street, we had to step over a dead horse lying in the gutter, infested with maggots. All of these odors hung noxiously in the air, mixing with the pierce of kerosene, camphor, and turpentine from the cobblers and the tanneries. Fumes of queasy-sweet gasoline billowed from new cars rattling noisily up the avenues. And since none of the tenements had bathtubs, these odors, in turn, mixed with the gamy smell of thousands of strains of human perspiration. Yeasty, fungal skin. Rose water. Decaying teeth. Dirty diapers. Sharp, vinegary hair tonic. The New York Post recently made a ruckus about how I spray Shalimar in my bathrooms, my trash cans, even Petunia’s doghouse. The “Spritz Witch,” they called me in a headline. But since when is it a crime to deodorize? You grow up in a tenement, darlings, then tell me what you’d do.

  As we wandered through the neighborhood that first morning, Bella pinched her nostrils and rasped, “So, Malka, this is the promised land? Did anyone ever tell you and Papa how horrible it would smell?”

  As the week wore on, we found we were eating scarcely better than we had back in Vishnev. We had a piece of bread for breakfast, a piece of bread for lunch with a boiled egg shared between the four of us, and a piece of bread for dinner with soup that Mama made from carrots and onions.

  To keep from getting too faint with hunger, I pooled my saliva in my mouth, then swallowed it and chewed the insides of my cheeks. Sometimes I’d pluck at the air and say to my sisters, “Let’s pretend we’re eating roast lamb.” Bella and Rose ignored me, but Flora was willing to play. She and I would pretend to chew nothing—but we chewed it with relish. Or I’d divide a piece of bread crust between us and say, “Let’s pretend this is honey cake with apples,” and we’d chew luxuriantly and rub our bellies with exaggerated motions and say, “Mmm. Isn’t this the most marvelous cake you’ve ever eaten?” We did all of this reflexively, the same way we got used to relaying messages between our parents.

  For our first Sabbath in America, Mama made soup with chicken necks for all of us, Mr. Lefkowitz included. After she lit the candles and said the prayers, she made an announcement: “Next week you’re all going to have to go to work.” She pointed at me and each of my sisters individually, so as to make no mistake. “All of you. Anyone who doesn’t earn doesn’t eat. It’s as simple as that. You don’t like it? Then you can thank your papa.”

  Bella found work as a day maid. Rose got hired as a baster in a dress factory; she awoke before dawn and returned only at dinnertime.

  But for Flora and me, it wasn’t so easy. Just two years earlier, the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire had killed 146 young immigrant girls. New York had become swept up in a fever of labor reforms. Sweatshop owners, factory foremen—suddenly they refused to hire children as little as Flora and myself. “Look at them.” The foreman frowned when Rose brought us to her factory. “They can’t be older than five. I can’t have that kind of trouble here now.”

  But for Mama this was no excuse. “Out,” she said, hustling Flora and me through the door. “Don’t come back until you have something. Either you work or you starve.”

  Flora and I stood out on the landing. “Malka,” she said, her eyes filling with tears, “what are we going to do?”

  Flora was a year or two older than me, but just as small. She had a lovely, milk-white face, sad blue eyes, and a high forehead, which gave her a bleached, sleepy look. Her lower lip always trembled as if she were about to cry.

  I shrugged. “We have to find work.”

  I looked down the dim, narrow hallway of the tenement. It seemed to me that a door was the place you were supposed to start. But for the life of me, I couldn’t think of what I was supposed to say or do. Did I just knock? Was there a place where children went to learn what to do? What could I offer anyone? I hadn’t yet learned how to cook or to sew like my older sisters. Back in Vishnev, Flora and I had gone to the well sometimes with Mama. We had helped sweep and dust and hang out the washing and peel onions and set the table. But what could anyone pay us for? We were going to starve, Flora and I, and I realized it was all my fault, for letting Papa change the tickets.

  Slowly, we made our way down the stairs, one grim step at a time. Flora was sniffling; I tried not to cry myself. When we reached the next floor, I thought of what Mama had said to me back in Vishnev: At least you can put that big mouth of yours to some use.

  I walked over to one of the doors and knocked on it. “Hello!” I shouted. “Does anybody in there want to hear a song?”

  There was no answer.

  I walked to the next door.

  I pulled Flora down another flight of stairs and knocked again. And again. One woman opened her door and yelled at us in a strange language. Another shooed us away. I knocked on another door, then another. We were getting hungry now and starting to panic. People shook their heads. My pounding went unanswered.

  Finally an elderly man opened his door. “Who’s making such a ruckus?” he said. He had eyeglasses perched halfway down his nose. Flora lingered behind me.

  I took a deep breath. “Do you want to hear a song? It costs a penny.”

  The man crossed his arms. “You don’t say,” he declared.

  “Mama says that if we don’t come home with something to eat, we don’t come home at all.”

  “Oh,” said the man, frowning. “Well. That sounds serious.” He reached into his pocket and took out a penny. “Do you both sing?”

  I shook my head. “Only me.” I added quickly, “Flora dances, though.”

  “Malka!” Flora whispered.

  “Just twirl,” I whispered back. “For another penny,” I told the man.

  The sides of his mouth twitched faintly. “Well,” he said, leaning against the doorframe. “One penny for the singer and one penny for the twirler. So okay, then. Let’s see.”

  Standing there in the narrow, urine-scented corridor, I was utterly at a loss. I hadn’t thought beyond knocking on the door; I hadn’t imagined we would actually get a reply. But then one of the little songs I’d invented back in Vishnev came to me. As loudly as I could, I belted out “Why I Love Chicken.” It went something like “I love chicken…chicken hearts and chicken soup.…I love chicken, the way it jiggles on the spoon.…” For a moment Flora just stood there, staring incredulously as I sang. I glared at her. Belatedly, she started to twirl.

  The man at the door began to clap along but quickly gave up, as my song had no consistent rhythm. My voice went higher and higher; it warbled with a life of its own. A moment later he halted me in midnote, Flora in midtwirl. “Why don’t we do this?” he said with a sigh. “I’ve paid you a penny to sing and a penny to twirl. Now I’ll pay each of you a penny to stop.”

  We had four cents. Flora and I had earned our first meal in America.

  Slowly, my sister and I became known as the Little Singing, Cleaning Bialystoker Sisters. For while we were boarding the ship to America, it seems, our family name had been changed. In all the hubbub, the steward checking our tickets had asked us where we were from. Since most villages in the Russian Pale were so small, they weren’t even on a map, Papa had been coached to answer simply “Bialystok,” the biggest, best-known city in the region. Confused and harried, the clerk simply wrote “Bialystoker” after Papa’s name. Now we were no longer the Treynovskys. I was Malka Bialystoker.

  For a penny here, a nickel there, Flora and I did errands for our elderly neighbors while singing little songs. Most of these I made up myself, about the very people we were working for: “Mrs. Nachmann Has Pretty China Dishes” was one. “Helping Make the Challah” was another. So sue me: They were not Greatest Hits. Still, word got out around the tenements: You could pay us to sing or you could pay us to be quiet. I suppose we were a novelty act, a charming little joke. With so much sadness and hardship around, the adults liked the cheap entertainment, the innocence of two little girls.

  For a
nickel Flora and I scrubbed Mrs. Nachmann’s dishes. For two pennies we climbed out the Sokolovs’ window onto the fire escape to hang their laundry on the line running across the courtyard. For two pennies we carried the Levines’ settee cushions up onto the roof—it took a couple of trips—and beat the dust and fleas out of them in the broiling sun with our fists. For a nickel we swept Mr. Abromovitz’s kitchen, stomped on the cockroaches, kept the rat holes stuffed with rags soaked in lye, and dusted as best we could. We hauled the scraps from Mr. Lefkowitz’s floor downstairs to the rag man. We helped Mr. Tomashevski—an infirm old man from the Ukraine who lived on the second floor next door—by heating up water for him to soak his bunions in.

  Per Mama’s orders we made ourselves useful. In nickels and pennies, we earned our keep. If we could just bring home enough, I thought, maybe Mama wouldn’t be so angry all the time. Maybe she and Papa would start talking again. Maybe she would forgive me.

  Flora and I would try to find as many odd jobs as possible until the late afternoon. Then, per Mama’s order, we did the shopping. It was better to go late. Although the produce was well picked over, we were more likely to get a bargain. I quickly learned which peddlers charged a penny less here, a half cent less there—and how to haggle.

  “When I pinch you,” I instructed Flora, “cry. Not loudly. Then say, ‘Oh, Malka, I’m so hungry.’ Okay?”

  I made her practice. Then I approached a vegetable cart. “Excuse me, sir. How much are the potatoes?”

  “Two cents each, three for five.”

  “Oh, dear.” I frowned in what I imagined was an extremely grown-up, exaggerated fashion. I held out my palm with three dull pennies in it. “Mama needs two. But this is all we have.”

  The peddler shook his head. “Tell Mama the potato peddler’s got to eat, too,” he said.

  “What about a small one and a big one for three?”

  The peddler frowned. “There are no small potatoes.”

  “Please, sir?” I pleaded, opening my eyes extra wide. “I’ve got three more sisters and Papa. Mama won’t let me come home with only one potato.” Then, discreetly, I pinched Flora on the arm. She started crying, just as I’d coached. “Oh, Malka, I’m so hungry,” she wailed. And then, although I hadn’t planned to, I found that I was crying myself. It was surprisingly easy, given that I was truly hungry and could envision Mama, the wallop she’d give me. “Please, Mama, don’t be angry with me!” I wailed. Flora looked genuinely distressed. The peddler looked exasperated. Rolling his eyes, he made a surrendering gesture at the three coins in my palm. “Okay, okay. Two for three.”

  “Oh, thank you!” I sang. Flora gave a little twirl.

  They say that whenever you have a sister who is prettier than you, you have a tragedy. Vicious neighbors back in the shtetl used to whisper that Flora had the blood of the Cossacks coursing through her. How else to explain the blue eyes and blond hair? The delicate, goyishe features? The dairymaid skin?

  The Lower East Side was teeming with shivering, wolf-eyed children. Its merchants were barely getting by themselves. Flora’s beauty—combined with the fact that she did and said absolutely everything I told her to—earned us an extra scoop of rice thrown in the sack, a discounted parsnip. And we were no dummies, my sister and I. We played it right up. We became marvelous performers. Oh, you should have seen us. Not like the other kids, mewling and begging so pathetically. We really figured how to work it. On the streets of Lower Manhattan, I got my first great education in marketing. Be shameless. Be different. And appeal to the emotions—never the head.

  I picked up English quickly. I even picked up a little Italian. Words everywhere, they were like musical notes. Yet being on the noisy streets—that never, ever stopped being noisy—with their peddlers shouting, “Carrots, fresh carrots!” “Pickles! Half sours!” “I-SEES! I-SEES!”—and the dizzying smells—of fresh-baked bread, of pungent garlic, of potatoes frying somewhere in butter—all this was its own particular type of torture.

  And so one afternoon I bought those cherry ices from Mr. Dinello. Oh, they were a revelation: Flora and I, we’d never eaten anything so sweet and so cold before. The iciness, laced with the sugar and the tartness of the cherries—it blossomed, then dissolved on our tongues. It was like eating magic.

  Another time I bought us half a baked sweet potato. Oh, heaven, too! And a kasha knish. I made sure to take Flora a few blocks away from Orchard Street so as not to be seen. Then she and I devoured our bounty, scalding and doused with sweet mustard, while hiding beneath a stoop.

  Later that evening Mama demanded an accounting of everything we’d bought—“I know what things cost. I’d like to know where those extra two pennies are.”

  Flora panicked. “Malka bought a knish,” she said.

  I stood there blinking. Mama backhanded me across the face. “Stupid, stupid!” she cried. “You want that all of us should starve to death from your selfishness?”

  I started to cry. I looked around the kitchen for Papa, but he was gone. He seemed to be at Mr. Lefkowitz’s less and less in the evenings. Sometimes Flora and I spotted him in the streets in broad daylight, smoking and joking with groups of men gathered around various storefronts with stairs leading down into basements. A few evenings, as we made our way home, I thought I’d even seen Papa in the tavern downstairs, though I couldn’t be sure. When I managed to catch his eye at the dinner table once, he winked at me. I kept hoping he might ask me to take another walk with him, or to practice punching. I kept hoping that he might give some indication of when we might leave Orchard Street for a place more like the one we’d seen together in the moving pictures. But he never did. When I tugged on his sleeve and said, “Papa?” he sometimes looked at me blankly for a moment, as if he’d forgotten which daughter I was.

  Occasionally, late at night, I could hear him and my mother whispering fiercely—“You spent all of it?” “I told you, Tillie. It pays five to one!” This meant that they were speaking again, which gave me some relief. But mostly I just saw Papa’s back, bent over the ironing board, or the top of his head disappearing down the stairway, or his figure, in the distance, a blur in the shadows of men.

  “I’m sorry, Mama!” I cried when she slapped me. “I was just so hungry.”

  “Oh, you were, were you? Then go eat some of that gold off the pavements. Go drink from those fountains of milk you were talking so much about.”

  One night Papa didn’t come home at all. “He’s out drunk somewhere, is where he is,” said Mama. She had made egg noodles for dinner; my sisters and I were allowed to share his portion. He was home by breakfast, however, so we didn’t get to have his bread.

  Two nights later he was gone again. This time my three sisters and I shared his boiled egg.

  At dawn, Bella left for her job on Chrystie Street, Rose left for the factory. By the time Flora and I finished our breakfast of bread and milk, Papa still hadn’t returned. It was Friday. “It’s not enough he gets drunk and gambles away all his earnings?” Mama cried. “Now he should show up late for his job and get himself fired as well?

  “Go,” she ordered me and Flora. “Work as much as you can today so we won’t all of us be out on the street.”

  When Flora and I returned that afternoon, we found our mother furiously hacking away at a piece of fabric with her scissors. She hacked it entirely to bits, then snatched up another and started in. Little patches were flying everywhere, spraying around her, falling at her feet. The girls from Lodz sat with their piecework untouched, staring at her in horror. Mr. Lefkowitz himself was standing behind Mama, trying to stay her wrist without getting clipped himself.

  “Tillie, please,” he said. “Leave it be. Go look for him.”

  My mother continued clipping away violently. “He wants to play games? Let him play games.”

  Mr. Lefkowitz pulled two pennies from his pocket and hurried over to my sister. “Flora,” he said with exaggerated care. He knelt down and looked her straight in the eyes, as if she were a book he
was reading. “I think your mother could use some parsley for the Sabbath. Why don’t you and Malka go to buy some? And on your way, look in the saloons, and the barber’s, and anyplace else you might think of where your papa might be.”

  Suddenly Mama threw down her scissors and stomped over to me. Grabbing me by the arm, she twisted me around and gave me a hard thwack on my backside. I howled.

  “This is all your fault! Why didn’t you listen?” she shouted. “The one thing I asked you to do! The one thing! ‘Don’t let anybody touch your coat—’”

  “Tillie!” Mr. Lefkowitz cried.

  With a great sob, I turned and dashed down the stairs and out into the street. I had to find Papa, I knew. It was the only way to set things right.

  The saloon downstairs was long and dark inside. Behind the counter a lone man stood twisting a rag around the inside of a thick glass. “You lost?”

  “I’m looking for my papa,” I panted. “I have to find him. I have to bring him home.”

  He shrugged.

  I looked inside the nonkosher butcher’s, in the shoemaker’s. I ran to a little gambling parlor set down off the street in a basement. I thought that perhaps this was where I’d seen Papa before, smoking outside. I asked a man to go in and look for me. He seemed to be gone awhile. When he finally came out, he said “Sorry, kindeleh.” Just in case, I went in the synagogue next door and one farther up the street—perhaps Papa had had a change of heart?—but they were empty. The tailor’s, the bakery, the barber’s: all closing.

  “Malka, wait!”

  I turned and saw Flora running down the street after me. “Do you see him?” she said.

  I shook my head.

  “Mama, she is going crazy,” Flora said.

  Together, we ran along Hester Street, looking in all the doorways, all the little alleys. It was late afternoon. Peddlers were starting to pack up. Markets were shuttering. I had to find Papa. A terrible feeling mushroomed inside me. If I hadn’t given him the tickets. If I hadn’t begged to go to America instead of South Africa. If I hadn’t kept the secrets. I led Flora down one block, then another, at a frantic pace. I ran into another tavern, a cigar shop, then across toward a settlement house.