The Ice Cream Queen of Orchard Street: A Novel

by Susan Jane Gilman

  That evening Mrs. Dinello herself brought my supper plate down to the storefront.

  “Tomorrow we take you to school,” she announced, setting down a bowl of soup. “You sew for Mrs. Salucci afterward, when you get home.”

  The school’s attendance office smelled like brown soap. A beefy administrator with a monocle and his arm in a sling gave us forms printed in Italian, Yiddish, and English. When it became clear that Mrs. Dinello could not read them, a secretary was summoned to translate. A prim woman named Graziana entered. Mrs. Dinello gave a cry of glee. It turned out that Graziana had grown up in Avellino, right outside Napoli, just one village over from Mrs. Dinello.

  After much commotion and gossip, Graziana dipped her pen into a little jar of blue ink and prepared to write.

  “Family name?” she asked.

  Mrs. Dinello looked at me quizzically. In all my time in her house, she had not known. And neither, really, did I. Was it “Bialystoker” or “Treynovsky”? I said them both.

  “Excuse me?”

  I repeated, “Bialystoker? Treynovsky?”

  The secretary looked at Mrs. Dinello with exasperation. “Bialy, I think,” Mrs. Dinello said finally, pointing to the form.

  “B-I-A-L-L-I?” the secretary spelled aloud as she wrote. She showed it to Mrs. Dinello. Mrs. Dinello shrugged.

  “Given name?” said Graziana.

  “Malka,” Mrs. Dinello said.

  “Age?”

  “Rocco, he just turned eight,” Mrs. Dinello said. “She is maybe six?”

  The secretary regarded me dubiously. “She looks very small.”

  “Six is the age for school, yes?” said Mrs. Dinello. “It is the age for reading?”

  “You do not know her birthday?”

  Mrs. Dinello looked at me.

  “My mama, she said I was born when it was very cold,” I volunteered.

  “January,” Mrs. Dinello said. “She was born January twelfth. Write that.” She pointed to the form. “Compleanno di mio padre. It can be hers, too.”

  “I will put 1907 as the birth year,” Graziana offered. “That makes her seven instead of six. Seven is better because she is so small. This way no one will question her.”

  By the time my son, Isaac, was enrolling in school, of course, I was required to provide his birth certificate. And by the time Rita applied to private elementary schools for Jason, oh, the rigmarole she had to go through! Tax returns, those shysters wanted, and even a psychological evaluation. “What will they ask for next?” I said. “A blood sample? The kid is six, for God’s sake.” Today, if one of our franchises wants to hire a sixteen-year-old to scoop ice cream for a summer, the management is required to provide more information than my entire family was asked to supply at Ellis Island: Social Security numbers, education history, past employers, health-insurance forms, character references, liability waivers.

  But back then? Public schools were designed to be great “civilizing” factories for the onslaught of us “heathen” immigrants. Administrators were used to families showing up with nothing at all. And because a school secretary happened to have come from the same part of Italy as Mrs. Dinello and had grown weary of walking uncomprehending immigrants through the registration process again and again and again that year, she just wrote down whatever caused her the least amount of hassle, and that was that. Nobody doubled-checked those things. In an instant it was decided that I was born on January 12, 1907—a full year before I had, in all likelihood, ever existed.

  In 1914 it was not uncommon to see children who were hideously deformed. Faces were still pitted from smallpox. Eyes were milky and blinded from scarlet fever, limbs gnarled and shriveled from polio, necks paralyzed at disturbing angles from diphtheria. Flesh was sometimes puckered and scarred from when small children, as babies, crawled too close to an open fire. Fingers, even hands, went missing from factory accidents. Otherwise-healthy children had rotting teeth. Beauty was harder to come by, darlings. Life infected you early.

  Yet children themselves were no less cruel.

  The day I limped into the schoolyard with my cane, bathed and neatly dressed in my good, secondhand navy church dress, a gang of children I had glimpsed on Mulberry Street surrounded me. The tallest one, a hatchet-faced girl with inky slits for eyes, planted herself in front of me, blocking my way farther into the yard.

  “What’s your name?” she demanded.

  I looked at her plainly. “Malka,” I said. “What’s yours?”

  “Malka?” The girl gave a contemptuous laugh. “What kind of name is Malka?”

  Two boys standing behind her, wearing tweed caps and knickers but barely taller than me, gave a little hoot. “Malka!” they shouted, as if it were the most preposterous word they had ever heard.

  The tall girl crossed her arms across her brown coat. It was ill-fitting, too tight on her. It looked as if her entire body were erupting from the miniature garment limb by limb. “Rocco says you’re some little Ammazza Christi who ran under his grandfather’s horse,” she said.

  I did not know what to say to this. “It was an accident.” I glanced around the schoolyard for Rocco or the twins.

  “Ammazza Christi—Christ killer!” said one of the boys. Lunging forward, he swiped my cane. I tottered and almost fell, but not quite. The other children gave a vicious laugh as I stood on one leg like a stork, trying to maintain my balance. The boy danced around with the cane, doing a sort of jig.

  “Hey!” I cried. I tried to put my full weight on my right leg, but a dull, burning pain ran up it. I looked around frantically. I realized I was too far from any wall or railing I could grab onto. “That’s my cane! Give it back!”

  “Give it back!” the boy mimicked gleefully. “My name’s Malka!” With that he began limping about grotesquely with the cane. “I’m Malka the gimp Jew!” The other children laughed. “I’m Maaall-kah,” he taunted, drawing out the syllables of my name with the exaggerated drag of his right leg. “Maaall-kah. I’m an Ammazza Christi! I killed Jesus. I’m going to helllllll.”

  “Maaall-kah, Maaall-kah, Ammazza Christi!” the other boy and another girl with long, tight braids began chanting. “You’re going to he-elll!”

  I had no idea, of course, what they were talking about. “I’m not going to hell!” I shouted. “I’m going to South Africa!”

  I did not know what had possessed me to say this, or why. The sheer strangeness of my response seemed to stop the children in their tracks.

  “What?” said the tall girl in the shabby coat, squinting at me. “What did you say?”

  “I’m going to South Africa. To join my parents. Give me back my cane!”

  For a moment the tall girl regarded me with incredulous fascination. Then her face scrunched into a look of malicious delight. “Your parents are not in Africa, stupid!” she cried. “Everybody on the whole block knows your papa ran off and your mama’s in the lunatic asylum!”

  “What?”

  “The crazy house,” said the boy mildly, looking not at me but up at my cane, which he was now attempting to balance upended on his open palm. He danced about, seeming to chase after it. “The sanitarium. Where they put all the insane, dirty Jews.”

  “That’s not true!” I shouted. “You’re lying!”

  “It is true,” said the girl. “Your mama is pazza.”

  “The police, they took her away,” sneered the boy. “Mrs. Salucci said so. She said even some Jew tailor said so—”

  At that instant I was suddenly not aware of my throbbing leg or my difficulty standing. I raced forward and punched the boy right in the face as Papa had taught me. “Liar!” I hollered. My leg buckled then, but he staggered back startled, one hand on his jaw, his eyes filling with tears. “Give me my cane!” I shrieked. Throwing it down with disgust, he turned and ran. I snatched it up. I was suddenly aware that I was crying, but I whirled around with my fist still clenched in time to see the tall girl and the two other children slowly back away from me.

  “She
is crazy like her mama,” the tall girl murmured. “You are crazy like your mama,” she repeated to me directly, tauntingly, though her voice was leached of power.

  “Come on, Angela,” said the second boy, pulling at her arm.

  “We don’t play with crazy, dirty Jews,” she announced. “Maaall-kah.” She turned away.

  I stood blinking tearily at the three of them, then looked down at my cane. I brushed the dust from it and from my blue dress and my brown coat and tried to straighten myself up as best I could. I was crying so hard my nose was running. “Maaall-kah!” I heard a voice call. From above me on the landing, the smaller girl with the braids stuck her tongue out at me one last time before the heavy red school door swung shut behind her.

  Of my first day in class, I remember nothing: not the lessons, the teacher, the alphabet written on ruled lines across the blackboard. All I could think about was Mama. What the children in the schoolyard had told me—was it true?

  After dismissal I did not wait outside for Rocco and the twins as instructed. When I asked a peddler how to get to Orchard Street, I was surprised to learn that it was just a few blocks away. All this time it had been so near! As I crossed Chrystie, then Forsyth Streets, I noticed the signs suddenly began appearing in Yiddish again. Yet Orchard was on the other side of Allen Street, a broad boulevard cleaving the neighborhood; it was so wide it might as well have been a great river. I fought the impulse to shut my eyes as I stepped off the curb and limped as fast as I could through the traffic. Perhaps there was a streetlight or a traffic warden. There must have been. Yet I recall weaving amid rattling cars, the horse-drawn coaches whisking by me in a furious blur, the oncoming streetcars clanging ominously as they drew closer, the Elevated roaring overhead. Once I was safely on the opposite corner, I saw a Star of David adorning a brick-faced building. Orchard, the peddler had told me, would be down the block, on the right. I was approaching from an unfamiliar direction. Carts jiggled by. Harried women pushed past in their shawls. But by then, I had a dawning sense of knowing again where I was. Peddlers called out, “Four cents a bissel.” My heart beat as I turned onto my old block.

  The noise was horrific, even greater than on Mulberry Street, the market going full force. Amid the ruckus I almost missed the saloon and the butcher’s; more signs had gone up in my absence. But there they were. I stared up at the Orchard Street tenement, hoping, for one impossible moment, that Mama and Papa might be at the window, looking down. In an instant they’d see me, call out my name joyously, wave me upstairs. It would all have been some horrible misunderstanding, they would explain, just a terrible dream. But the façade of the building loomed before me indifferently. I looked around, hoping to see someone from the neighborhood who could come to my aid. My right leg throbbed. My foot felt numb. I’d walked more than I ever had since my accident.

  The front entrance was set off the street by a flight of eight metal stairs. Two women I didn’t recognize were sitting on them with their knees spread wide beneath their skirts and toddlers balancing in the robed space between their legs. Whispering to each other, they laughed grimly. When I asked them if Mr. Lefkowitz was there, they looked at me blankly without bothering to shift aside, so I had to navigate around them with my cane. Inside, the vestibule was humid with the stench of boiled cabbage, urine, chalky plaster. The corridor rang with a cacophony of voices. I couldn’t pick out a single one. The dark, narrow stairs rose steeply; they seemed far more daunting than the ones at Mulberry Street.

  When I finally reached the top floor, I steadied myself, swallowed, and listened for a moment. Slowly, I knocked on Mr. Lefkowitz’s door. A woman I had never seen before answered. Her hair was pulled back in an unraveling bun, and the delicate skin around her nose and eyes was raw pink. As she frowned at me, I noticed her belly pressing out insistently beneath her dark muslin dress. A small, sticky-faced child with matted hair clung to her skirts.

  “Yes? What do you want?” she said sharply in Yiddish.

  “Is Mr. Lefkowitz here?”

  “We have no work available,” she said. “I keep telling you children. Go look elsewhere.”

  “I’m just looking for Mr. Lefkowitz,” I pleaded. “I don’t need work.”

  She crossed her arms. “My husband is out.”

  A man pushed past her then and tromped out into the hallway, carrying a tin lunch box. He pulled his hat down over his eyes and grunted as he hurried down the stairs.

  “We’re full up for boarders, too,” the woman said curtly. I heard a baby start to cry. The woman’s face developed a drowning look. “Try across the street,” she said, moving quickly to shut the door.

  “I’m looking for my mama,” I said, gripping the knob. My voice was suddenly palsied with tears. “Please. Does Mr. Lefkowitz know where she is? Or my papa? He went away, but maybe he’s come back here?”

  The woman glanced back toward the bedroom, where the baby’s cries were growing. “I’m sorry. I don’t know anything about a missing family.”

  “My sisters? Bella and Rose and Flora?”

  At this she grimaced. “Flora,” she said flatly. “Flora is your sister?”

  “Yes. Do you know her? Do you know where she is?”

  The woman looked me up and down, taking in my secondhand coat and navy blue dress with its white collar that Mrs. Dinello had carefully mended, now covered in dust from the streets and the schoolyard, and my hair frizzing out in filaments from my disheveled braids. I saw her swollen eyes quickly flutter over my cane, my worn black shoe on my crippled right foot, twisting inward.

  “Flora is out,” she said quickly. “But you can’t stay here. You have to be gone. We have too many mouths to feed already.”

  “Flora is here?”

  “Your father has not come back. Your mother—I’m sorry.” She shook her head violently, as if trying to banish a terrible thought. “You have to go. Flora, I told her to get some onions. Some celery. Maybe you can find her at the markets downstairs. We are managing as best we can, you understand? But you cannot come back here.”

  Mama-Papa, Mama-Papa—the rhythm in my head beat furiously as I hobbled down the filthy stairs. Which peddler might Flora have gone to? Where was everybody else? Outside, Orchard Street swam before me in my distress, all the crowds and peddlers blurring together. Yet then, as if a beam of light had been angled down upon her from the heavens, I saw a little blond head bobbing amid the sea of dark hats, tweed caps, and kerchiefed heads filling the streets. “Flora!” I shouted. “Flora!”

  When she saw me, her mouth grew as round as an apple. She nearly dropped her basket and raced toward me. In an instant her arms were wrapped around me. She had no coat, only a shawl of gnarled wool draped across her tiny shoulders. Her hair was lank. Her once dairy-fresh face looked strangely shrunken. I could see a bluish vein streaking down from her left temple like a scar.

  “Malka, you’re alive! You can walk!” she cried. “They said you were lame!”

  “I learned! I only need a cane now!”

  “Where have you been? Oh, Malka!” Flora jiggled before me on the balls of her feet as the words tumbled out of her. “I’m so glad you’ve come back! Oh, Malka! Rose is dead. She had the fever. We all did. We were in quarantine. They put a big sign on our door, and tape, and one of the nurses, she climbed up on the roof and sent down food for us in a basket on a rope. And we had medicine—”

  “Rose is dead?” I said. “Where? Forever?”

  “Because we were in quarantine, we couldn’t even go to the funeral or sit shiva. We were all crying, and Mr. Lefkowitz covered the mirror with the fabric for the coat linings. Mama was crying so hard she started to choke. First she was calling, ‘Rose, Rose,’ but then she started wailing for Zeyde, too, saying over and over, ‘The Cossacks, they killed him,’ and then she was shouting, ‘Samuelah, Samuel!’ and saying again and again how you were as good as dead, too, because all your bones were broken—and then she started screaming horrible things, just terrible things that made no se
nse at all, and then she started to hit herself on her head with the wall, and there was blood, and the rabbi had to come—”

  “Flora, where is she?”

  “And then she started destroying the parlor. Oh, Malka. She was hitting the rabbi and smashing things with the fire poker. And the rabbi, he fell on the floor! And she threw the iron out the window! Out the window, Malka! It hit the chicken coop in the yard and made a hole in the roof! And she was ripping up fabric with her hands and throwing the scissors, and she kept shouting, and she wouldn’t listen to us when we begged her to stop. Mr. Lefkowitz’s sewing machine, she tipped it over. Mr. Lefkowitz, he made Bella and me hide in the bedroom, but we could still hear! Everything was crashing, and the neighbors were shouting and banging on the doors. And then, Malka, the police came! And even though Mama was supposed to be in quarantine, the police, they took her to a hospital. A special hospital, they said. Very far away. And she is not allowed to come out. Mama is like a dybbuk, Mr. Lefkowitz says.”

  When Flora finished, she breathed in huge gulps of air. We sat down heavily on the stoop. She grabbed my arm and clutched it.

  “But you can walk, and you came back!” she said, her eyes shining. She propped her head on my shoulder. “I am so happy to see you.”

  For a moment I sat there. Orchard Street seemed to carousel around me.

  “Mama’s gone?” I whispered, trying to envision it.

  Flora nodded solemnly. Her lower lip trembled.

  “The woman upstairs,” I said slowly. “She says I can’t come in the house.”

  Flora glanced at me darkly. “She’s Mr. Lefkowitz’s new wife. She came from Lodz to marry him after Mama went to the hospital.”

  “She seems mean.”

  Flora shrugged. “She cries a lot because she has another baby coming and there’s no food.” Flora looked at me. “Except soup, with celery and onions. And sometimes I make eggs.”