The Ice Cream Queen of Orchard Street: A Novel

by Susan Jane Gilman

  Plus, he could hold his liquor. Trust me: This is a quality you want in a mascot.

  “It seems he’s capitalizing on his relationship with you now by trashing it, same as everyone else.” Sheila sighs.

  “Oh. Is he now?” My tone is haughty, though I feel my face growing hot. Harvey Ballentine and I drank and laughed and gossiped on the set together for seventeen years. He was one of the only employees I never fired, in fact. One morning when a little girl on the show vomited all over his floppy shoes, Harvey simply pulled off his rubber nose and threw it across the room as soon as the camera cut away. “That’s it!” he cried. “Get me a bucket. Somebody please get me a bucket! Look at me. Look at this mess. I’m wrung out. I’m done. These little fuckers are killing me!”

  Five months he had left on his contract. But did I sue? No, I did not. Severance I even gave him. Plus free dry cleaning! Certainly he, of all people, should not turn against me. Yet I can only imagine. Harvey. That tongue of his. He could slice people up like a chef at Benihana.

  “Here’s what he’s saying, and I quote—” Over the line, I hear Sheila’s cigarette lighter click, and she pauses to inhale. “‘In my prior life, I worked with Lillian Dunkle, playing Spreckles the Clown on her Sundae Morning Funhouse. They call her the Ice Cream Queen, but she’s more like the Ice Cream Mussolini. Talk about a dictator! All that woman is missing is a balcony and a pair of epaulets. After dealing with her and her insane demands for seventeen years, taking on Ed Koch and the Reagan administration for the GMHC should be a cakewalk.”

  The telephone receiver goes heavy in my hand. From the earpiece Sheila’s voice continues to rasp across the velvety green lawn. Harvey Ballentine. I feel my eyes welling. You of all people!

  “What’s GMHC?” I swallow.

  “The Gay Men’s Health Crisis. Some group of fairies in the Village lobbying for better health care. Apparently Harvey Ballentine is their new spokesman, which is why he’s getting all this attention now. Uh-oh,” Sheila says suddenly. “Lillian, did you ever know Harvey was a homosexual?”

  “Did I know? He was a man. In show business. You tell me.”

  “But when you hired him, you never asked?”

  I pick up a crust of toast, then toss it back down on the china. Harvey. We used to drink Sazeracs together. The night Andy Warhol invited me to a party of his at Studio 54, it was Harvey whom I asked to accompany me. We sashayed through the velvet rope together and got our picture taken; for months afterward he yakked about it. And the morning his mother died, I gave him my car and my driver.

  “Nobody asked back then, for Chrissakes, Sheila. It was 1963. But of course I knew. We all knew. The man swanned around in his Spreckles the Clown costume like Carol Channing.”

  There is a silence.

  “Lillian,” Sheila says finally, “I think we could have a bigger PR problem on our hands than just a former employee bad-mouthing you.”

  “I should make a new line of ice cream flavors, you know,” I say bitterly. “‘Betrayal.’ ‘Ingratitude.’”

  “Your former ice cream clown is presenting himself to the media as an open homosexual. Working for a group dedicated to fighting this crazy gay cancer. And all the while he’s associating himself with you. Your ice cream. And your television show for children. Where for years he shook hands with the kids—”

  Petunia whimpers up at me. For a moment I do not say anything.

  “Oh, for Chrissakes. He was a clown, Sheila. Even his nose was encased in rubber.”

  “Look, all I’m saying is, nobody knows how it spreads. Right now it’s just the Haitians, the homos, and the hemophiliacs. But this AIDS thing terrifies people. A teacher at my nephew’s school was fired just because someone spotted him at a pride parade dressed as Zsa Zsa Gabor.”

  Suddenly I have the childish notion that maybe if I just shut my eyes, all of this will go away.

  “What I’m saying is, you don’t want this guy associating himself with Dunkle’s Ice Cream right now, okay? Another boycott will likely kill your business. And with the IRS and everyone else going after you…”

  I hold the telephone receiver away from my ear and nuzzle Petunia. As if I don’t have enough breaking my heart. As if I’m not pacing the floorboards at night already. A shiver of misery runs through me. The Mussolini of Ice Cream. He’d really said that?

  “Contact your lawyers, Lillian,” Sheila says. “Protect yourself.”

  * * *

  In the spring of 1929, Bert and I, we were in the first blush of our marriage. It should have been delirious. I should have felt sylphlike, ecstatic. Bert Dunkle had married me! Yet as dawn filtered into our little room from the alley and Bert drew me toward him on the damp mattress, gliding his hands beneath my nightgown, my mind played over the images of the Dinello boys dismantling their shop behind our backs.

  In the evenings after work, Bert and I climbed up onto the roof on Thompson Street to watch the sun set behind the water towers—the sky turning violet, the skyscrapers downtown illuminating like an inverse sort of dawn. As Bert knitted his fingers through mine and kissed me hotly on the neck, however, I couldn’t help it: My glance swung east toward Brooklyn, my thoughts careening into the traffic toward where I imagined the freezers being installed in the new Candie Ice Cream factory across the river.

  Bert was now a full-time mechanic. Me, I had managed to get beadwork at a dress factory on Norfolk Street, in a large room crammed with girls, penned in by grubby, opaque windows. We had enough to get by, and our lives as newlyweds had a haiku-like poetry to them. Moving pictures at the Lyceum on Saturday nights. Cracker Jacks and orangeade by the carousel. Once a customer of Bert’s gave us tickets for a Broadway show, Grand Street Follies. Me, stirring bean soup on the stove top in the evenings, reading aloud from the Tribune to Bert, a single bulb casting haunted, coppery light across the floorboards of our tiny apartment. I suppose it should have been enough.

  Yet each time I passed a drugstore on Broadway with cardboard cutouts of banana splits and ice cream sodas taped to its front window, I could not resist ducking inside. “Excuse me,” I would say, shuffling up to the counter. “But what brand of ice cream do you serve?”

  Behind the spigots was invariably some boy with an insistent Adam’s apple or an overbite. If he said Swankee’s or Schrafft’s or “someplace out in New Jersey, I think,” a rocket of triumph ignited within me. But if he said, “It’s Candie Ice Cream,” my stomach dropped down into itself like it was falling through a trapdoor. “Oh, really,” I’d say loudly, eyeing the customers seated within earshot, digging their spoons into their parfait glasses. “I hear that Candie Ice Cream has had trouble with spoilage lately. Rancid milk. Bugs in the ice cream. That sort of thing. Have you had any complaints here yet?”

  The Candie Ice Cream Company had designed a little logo, their name spelled out with a red-and-white peppermint swirl in the center of the C in “Candie.” Every time I saw it on a sign in a window, I arrived back home at Thompson Street in a vicious state, slamming the drawers in the kitchenette, raising a ruckus with the pots and pans as I cooked dinner.

  “You mustn’t go into the ice cream parlors anymore, Lil.” Bert sighed, rubbing my leg. “Looking backward, it won’t do any good.”

  The fact that my new husband did not share in my outrage only increased my fury.

  That terrible afternoon when the Dinello boys discarded me, Bert had sat beside me on our bed, stroking my arm up and down with the back of his hand.

  “Well,” he said unhappily, “that’s the corruption of capitalism for you.”

  “That’s it?” I cried sharply. “That’s your response?”

  He fumbled, his face reddening. “I-I-I-I’m sorry. I don’t know what else to do, Lil. I expected more from Rocco. I thought he was our friend. But people are sometimes like that.”

  He touched his hand to my cheek. “You’re the smartest gal I’ve ever met. With you I don’t worry. We’ll manage.”

  Still. Every day, as
I sewed bugle beads onto appliqués, I repeated a prayer in my head the way I had once recited my Hail Marys: Please let the Dinello boys get what’s coming to them. Please make them fail. Please unleash something monumental to destroy them.

  So sue me: My prayer was answered. The only problem, however, was that it nearly destroyed Bert and me as well, along with the rest of the nation.

  By 1932, 1 million people in New York City were unemployed out of a workforce of 3.2 million. You do the math. And over the next couple of years, it only grew worse. People were starving, darlings. Not just us immigrants. The men in the breadlines along Broadway were dressed in the elegant ties and vests that my neighbors had stitched in sweatshops for Wanamaker’s and Gimbels just a few years earlier.

  And all those ice cream parlors that once concocted “Jubilee Sundaes” and “Lindy Cones” for Charles Lindbergh? One by one they soaped up their windows. Once Prohibition ended, it destroyed much of what was left of the ice cream industry. Soda fountains reverted back to taverns and bars. If people had an extra nickel in their pocket, they preferred to ease their troubles with a whiskey rather than an ice cream cone. I can’t say I blamed them.

  I stopped seeing the Candie Ice Cream logo around much at all. Three, four, five weeks passed without a single sighting. One day, passing one of the few ice cream parlors left on Sixth Avenue, I could not help myself. Stepping inside, I asked the proprietor, “You don’t happen to serve Candie Ice Cream here, do you?”

  The man shook his head. “Nah,” he said, twisting a rag out over the sink. “Schrafft’s.”

  “Not Candie?” I said. “Their quality is no good?”

  He shrugged. “No good? They’re just not around anymore.”

  Given all the troubles in the world, darlings, you might think it was undignified to gloat. Yet that evening when Bert came home, he found a cup of Schrafft’s chocolate ice cream waiting in the tiny icebox down the hall for the two of us to share.

  “What is this for?” he said.

  I grinned. “I just felt like something sweet tonight,” I said.

  With the Dinellos vanquished and Bert in my arms, I should have felt content. Yet by now we were simply too hungry. In the spring of 1934, Bert’s garage shut down, and I was out of work myself. One wretched evening we dined on a small, greasy fish Bert caught in the East River using a fishing line I had shoplifted from a five-and-dime. “You know, doll,” Bert said, dabbing one of the fine bones onto the side of his plate after he’d sucked off the last bit of flesh from it. “The landlord tells me there are apples growing upstate. Potatoes on Long Island. You think we should take to the road?”

  From the garages and junkyards, he’d learned that a bakery was going bankrupt, selling off its trucks. And then, of course, it became inevitable. We would need something to sell, after all, as we moved from town to town.

  By then, darlings, I fairly hated ice cream. I would have been happy never to see it again in my life. Yet it was portable. It was what I knew. And, frankly, the idea of making ice cream again when the Dinello boys had failed at it? It added a delicious, irresistible sting to the plan.

  Ice cream shops were auctioning off their batch freezers, their old cases of gelatin and flavorings for nearly nothing. All Bert and I needed was seed money.

  “We can sell my wedding ring,” I said.

  Bert “invested” this bit of cash the only way he knew how—at craps games underneath the Manhattan Bridge, in primeval cellars in Chinatown. Men. Even in the hardest of times, they will always find enough money for what I call “the three B’s”: betting, bosoms, and booze.

  Bert doubled, then tripled our money.

  “Do we really need a table?” he said laughingly one evening, glancing around our spartan little room—with its warped floorboards and leaky faucet—for something else to sell.

  “No,” I said. “We can be like the ancient Romans and eat on the bed.”

  The two chairs, a small vase, our books, our mirror—anything we hadn’t sold for food already, he pawned.

  One rainy night it was nearly dawn when Bert finally burst in. “Lil!” he cried. He no longer had his coat. A sense of foreboding broke over me. Yet he set a large leather case on the bed, then picked me up and spun me around.

  “You won?” I cried. “How much did we get?”

  “Not money. Something even better.”

  Unlatching the case, he revealed two luxurious rectangular trays striated with tiny disks. Wristwatches. Swiss made, on polished alligator bands with gold buckles, their casings gleaming gold and silver in the dim light from the window, their faces as white and fine as porcelain.

  “We’re going to make a fortune with these, Lil. They even told me the name of a big-time dealer on Rector Street who would take them!”

  “Where on earth—”

  “I was down, Lil, eighty, eighty-five dollars—I had to give up my coat at one point. Oh, doll, I didn’t know how I was going to come home to you. But just when I thought I was going to lose it all, a guy shows up late to the game. His brother-in-law, he says, is a longshoreman down at the docks, and though he doesn’t have enough cash to see us, he has a few of these cases that just happened, he says, to fall off a pallet while some cargo was being unloaded.”

  I looked down at the velvet trays before me. There were sixteen watches in total, each meticulously strapped to the lining by two little velvet strips with snaps on the ends. Carefully, I unfastened one. It was elegantly crafted, scarcely bigger than a half-dollar, the metal cool and weighty in my hand. A watch like this, I imagined, could sell for perhaps twenty or twenty-five dollars.

  “Bert!” I cried as I wound it. I wanted to set every single one ticking at once in a chorus of victory. “Do you understand that we may have three or four hundred dollars here?”

  “I know! I know, Lil! My hands were shaking so hard, but I just blew on the dice and rolled them!”

  I held the watch to my ear. “Shush.” I smiled, putting my finger to my lips. “I want to hear what money sounds like. Go stand in the corner,” I ordered, laughing.

  Fine watches, I’d been told, were like rich people themselves: You could barely discern them working. Yet even when I put the watch directly on my ear, I heard nothing.

  Bert saw me frown. He picked up another watch to wind it, and the back fell off. And that’s when we saw what he’d really won. Sixteen empty watch cases. Not so much as a gear or a spring inside them.

  Every cent we had in the world was gone.

  We looked at each other, then at the case full of junk. I should have been furious. I suppose I was. I recall the sensation of my legs buckling. But the world before me suddenly got very clear, like the mirrored face of a pond after all the ripples have subsided; I could see across and through to the bottom, to what needed to be done. It was not a terrible thing, really, just a passing on from hand to hand, being a go-between. Since the scam did not originate with us, I told myself, we could not truly be held responsible. We could always profess that we ourselves did not know.

  “That’s it,” I told Bert. “We’ve done it your way. Now we’re doing it mine.”

  As I knew from my days back on Orchard Street with Flora, it was always best to rehearse first.

  Bert was miserable, opposed to the plan. “It’s just not right, Lil,” he kept saying.

  “Do you know what is not right? That guy who took you for a chump with these watches. And that you didn’t have the good sense to examine them first. We are not going to starve because he’s a gonif and you’re a shmendrik.”

  I sang him his lines. Dutifully, he sang them back. Over and over again.

  Then, for the entire week, I refused to let him shave.

  The man on Rector Street had an office in the back of a storefront. A handwritten card taped to the door read simply E. LAZARRE. PAWN/BUY/SELL/JEWELRY/CASH/IMPORTS. E. Lazarre, I realized, was known throughout the Lower East Side for his willingness to loan money to almost anyone, anytime, at exorbitant rates. He was
not someone to be trifled with. Rumor had it, in fact, that he’d once amputated a man’s thumbs with a cigar cutter. Yet, as we stood before his lair, what choice did we have?

  Bert and I had arrived late on Friday afternoon, when I’d hoped the pawnbroker would be tired and the light would be dim. I was right on both counts. The man in the dusty shop was slow-moving and wet-eyed, surrounded by mountains of relinquished heirlooms, musical instruments, rifles, even a silver tea service. The loot was stacked so high it appeared ready to topple over. Bert stepped timidly into the cramped office with all his charm and anxiety. “Are y-you Mr. Lazarre?” he said. The tremor in his voice lent him a marvelous air of unexpected innocence. We had recently arrived from Europe, Bert stammered to the man; his uncle back in Vienna had given him some watches to sell to help launch us in America. He had been told that “a Mr. E. Lazarre” could possibly help him get a good price?

  I opened the heavy case, flashing the watches polished to a rich, oily sheen. Mr. Lazarre had the same initial reaction that we did. Dazzled by the contents and their luxurious packaging, he took out one of the watches and held it, reveling in the weight of it, the feel of it in his chubby hand. My pulse beat furiously.

  “We are so sorry to disturb you with this,” I added. “But we did not know where else to go, and a man on the street—”

  I could see Lazarre’s left eye twitch as he assessed us, concluded that we were bumpkins, and rapidly calculated how to best exploit this. Without even bothering to wind the watches, he announced, “These are not bad. But it’s hard times here, you know.” He shook his fleshy head. “I’m sorry. There is not a big market for wristwatches right now.” He made a great point of sighing and tsking and putting the watch back down and arranging his face into a look of helplessness.

  Bert, he gave Mr. Lazarre his best man-to-man hapless nod. “I-I understand, sir,” he said. “We will try elsewhere.”

  Me, I let my eyes tear up on cue, just as I had all those years ago with the pushcarts.