The Ice Cream Queen of Orchard Street: A Novel

by Susan Jane Gilman

  “Am I interrupting something?” he said with bemusement.

  I crossed my arms. “What’s wrong with my father?”

  “Can we sit?” Pickles motioned to the chairs on either side of Mrs. Preminger’s desk.

  We sat.

  “I’m here on his behalf,” Pickles said.

  “Where is he?”

  “He’s…um, indisposed at the moment.”

  “Is he sick? Is he in the hospital?”

  “No, no.” Pickles shook his head. “Nothing like that. Not yet anyway. I’m not going to mince words, Mrs. Dunkle. Your father—your papa—he owes some very important people a lot of money. And he needs it. Immediately.”

  “Oh,” I said sharply. I leaned back in my chair. Of course he needed money. Of course he did. I felt a shiver of bitterness. “Last time I saw my father was five years ago. With you. He took off with my pocketbook, and I haven’t heard from him since. Not one letter. Not even a phone call. For years I sat waiting. Now he remembers me?”

  Pickles looked at me haplessly. “If that’s how you feel about it,” he said.

  “If it’s so damn important to him, why doesn’t he come here to see me himself?”

  “He can’t come to see you. He’s stuck out in Nevada. His one phone call was to me.” His eyes bored into mine.

  “Papa’s in prison?”

  “Let’s just say that some of our business associates don’t want to let him out of their sight. A deal of his went south, okay? So they’re sort of holding him. As collateral.”

  “What kind of deal?” Though of course I could only imagine. In fact, I had enough of an idea to suspect that it was best not to know. Papa: I could box his ears.

  “He needs to pay them this week,” Pickles said.

  “Five years ago he leaves me in a parking lot. Now suddenly I’m his bank?”

  “Look. It’s your choice.” Pickles shrugged, rising, finally, to leave. “But if your papa can’t come up with the money and you can live with yourself knowing—”

  My heart began pounding. Goddamn it. I pointed to the telephone on Mrs. Preminger’s desk. “Call him.”

  “Call who?”

  “Papa. I want to hear for myself.”

  Pickles shook his head. “I don’t think it works like—”

  “Call,” I commanded, my leg shaking beneath the desk. “They want money? Then let him talk to me.”

  Reluctantly, Pickles took a slip of paper from his pocket, turned the telephone around toward himself, and dialed. “Yeah, it’s Pickles,” I heard him say. “Bailey’s daughter wants to talk to him.…I know, I told her. But she insists she needs to hear it directly.…”

  As he cradled the receiver between his ear and his chin, he shot me an exasperated look. “What’s the phone number here? They’ll have him call you back.”

  After he hung up, he eyed me blankly.

  “Who are you in all of this?” I squinted at him. All these men, these goddamn shysters.

  “Me?” He shrugged with a self-congratulatory grin. “I’m just Pickles.”

  I had the urge to slap him. Instead we both sat staring at the telephone for a few minutes, breathing heavily, as if willing it to ring through telepathy.

  Lo and behold, it did.

  “Papa?” I said into the receiver.

  “Malka!” he cried. “Kindeleh. I am so pleased to hear from you. So pleased, you do not know.”

  “You’re right,” I said. “I don’t.”

  “Really, Malka. Do you think this is the time and the place?”

  “Why not?” Though I had not meant to sound threatening or accusatory, I felt a sudden, peculiar rush. He had to answer me. For the first time, Papa needed what I had.

  “Explain it to me a little,” I said, leaning back. “Humor me. Last time I saw you, you left me stranded. I had to sleep on that waitress’s couch and call a delivery truck to get me home, and I never got to see my husband before he shipped out to the Pacific. For months I waited for a word from you. So, please,” I said, my pulse thrumming in my ears, “enlighten me.”

  “I left you? I left you? How can you possibly say that, Malka? How can you accuse me of such a thing? You were drunk, do you remember? You were drunk, and you were sick. And so I went to find you a doctor, you see. That’s why I left. And I took your purse to pay him, do you understand? I drove and I drove. I drove all the way to Trenton looking for a doctor for you, in fact, my dear long-lost daughter, but by the time I came back—okay, to be honest, I couldn’t find a doctor—but poof! You had just disappeared! You were like Harry Houdini, Malka! So what could I do? Why, you just left me there. Abandoned by my own daughter. Just like that.” For emphasis he snapped his fingers right into the receiver.

  I did not say anything. His words were nothing more than a confection of air. Of course they made me angry—at him, but also at myself, for I realized against all reason that I also wanted desperately to believe them—in all their cartoonish implausibility, in their audacity.

  Papa continued, “But that’s just water under the bridge, okay? It’s just your word against mine, Malka, in the end, and that’s no way for a father and daughter to be, is it? Let’s just let bygones be bygones, all right, kindeleh? I won’t hold it against you if you won’t hold it against me. Just tell me now: How’s my favorite girl? My big success story? I did try your ice cream, you know. Not too long ago I had that vanilla of yours, with the cookie crumbs. I’m not much of an ice cream man, as I told you, but I have got to say—”

  “Papa,” I cut him off. “Exactly how much do you need?”

  He paused. “Uh.” His voice grew faint. I could picture him, glancing around a boardinghouse in Nevada somewhere. “About four thousand dollars.”

  “Four thousand dollars?”

  “Well, four thousand five hundred, to be exact,” he said. “Actually, forty-seven hundred. Forty-seven hundred would be a lifesaver. Wire it. Or, better yet, give it straight to Pickles. Come to think of it, cash—and small bills would be best.”

  “Ha. You think I’m giving forty-seven hundred dollars in cash to a stranger? I’ll write you a check. To you and only you.”

  There was a pause. “Well, that is truly kind, Malka.”

  “This is a loan. Not a gift. You understand? You pay me back all five thousand.”

  “Five thousand? I thought we agreed I only needed four.”

  “You said four thousand seven hundred. Plus the three hundred you stole from me in New Jersey. That makes five.”

  I heard him let out a low whistle. “I told you. I took that money just to pay for a doctor. For you.”

  The man’s chutzpah: It was impressive.

  “Five thousand, Papa. And you pay me back in person. Take it or leave it.”

  “Of course! Of course,” Papa said. “You think I would take charity from my own daughter? In fact, as soon as I sort everything out here, when I get back east again, you and I, we are going to go out for another steak dinner. This time in Manhattan. Someplace really swanky. And I want to meet that husband of yours, too, okay? We’ll talk some real business. Your franchises, Malka, I haven’t forgotten. I tell everybody here, in fact, about what a big macher my daughter is.”

  Some sort of commotion erupted in the background. I heard Papa’s hand clamp over the receiver and muffled voices. When he came back on the line, he was saying, “All right already,” though not to me.

  His voice grew clear again. “So forty-seven hundred, Malka? You can do that for me? For your old papa? Oh, you are a real lifesaver. A real lifesaver, kindeleh. Just like the candy.”

  When I hung up, I glared at Pickles, took out my checkbook, furiously wrote a check to Hank Bailey, tore it off with a fwip, and handed it to him.

  “There. Happy?”

  His grin, from across the desk, was lupine. “Good girl,” he said, folding the paper crisply in half.

  Watching him leave, I had the sickening sense that I would not see Papa—nor my money again—anytime soon.
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  Each day, as I’d suspected, there was no word, no phone call, certainly no letters postmarked Nevada. Yet still, as I limped through the factory each morning and poured bath salts into my tub at night, I found myself reciting the same incantations I had said to myself as a tiny girl on Mulberry Street, defying all reason: Papa, please. Papa, say something. Papa, come back.

  Three weeks later I did get a telephone call. Yet it was from our bank. “Mrs. Dunkle, we were wondering if you still wanted to keep your personal account with us?”

  “Why, of course,” I said distractedly, unclipping my earring. “Why wouldn’t I?”

  “Well, your last check bounced.”

  Snatching up my checkbook, I thumbed through it. “Five dollars and forty-nine cents to the telephone company?” I said. “How is that possible?”

  “No, the most recent one. From last Thursday. For two thousand eight hundred dollars to a Hank Bailey.”

  “What?”

  “Your other checks to him have cleared. But now the account is empty,” they said. “So what would you like us to do?”

  Chapter 12

  A few years ago, when 20th Century Fox was developing some made-for-television movie about my life (those dingbats and time wasters—it never got anywhere), a scene was to be filmed in which Bert and I arrived at the Franklin Sherman Elementary School. First the camera was to pan to a school nurse sitting dejectedly beneath a banner reading FREE POLIO VACCINES TODAY in an empty gymnasium. Then it would cut to our ice cream truck bouncing over the hills in the distance like the cavalry, bells a-jingling.

  While the sound track swelled, word would spread from child to child, classroom to classroom: “The ice cream lady is coming!” Suddenly the gym would be mobbed with children rolling up their sleeves to be vaccinated. The scene would conclude outside our ice cream truck, with Bert and the school principal hoisting me up onto their shoulders amid a cheering crowd. “Together we will defeat polio!” I’d shout, waving my cane triumphantly.

  The Pied Piper of Polio, the film was supposed to be called, or some such nonsense as that. If people think I’m a liar and a thief these days, well then. Clearly, they have never met a screenwriter.

  Polio and humiliation. These, I suppose, are as responsible for my success as much as anything else in the end. For if my very own father had not embezzled from me—on the very same day, no less, that Clark Bauer had dismissed me so nastily from his office—perhaps I never would have gotten the gumption or the inspiration to do what I did next.

  The day the bank telephoned, I went down to its main branch on Twenty-Third Street. There, stamped in my leathery passbook, in purple-blue typewriter ink, the new balance was confirmed: $00.00. My personal checking account. The only money that was mine outright—that Bert had given me to use at my own discretion. Gone.

  “May I see the canceled checks, please?” I asked the teller. The signatures matched mine almost perfectly. “Lillian Dunkle,” with the cockeyed L and the little flourish at the end of the e. Those forgers, oh, they were good.

  Behind a low partition, I could see the bank manager smoking a cigarette, flicking his ashes into a potted palm. Yet I could not bear to alert him. Papa was still my father, after all. A thin flame of hope, of protective, irrational love, flickered within me like a pilot light. Better to hire a private detective, I resolved miserably. Handle it all myself somehow.

  I guarded so many secrets now, darlings. Some were small, like lipsticks I’d pocketed from the display counters at Macy’s (it’s not as if they could sell the testers anyway!). Others were bigger. I had never told Bert that Papa was alive and had resurfaced during the war. Perhaps I feared that Bert might be more willing to leave me one day if he knew I was not an orphan. Perhaps, hearing how Papa had abandoned and robbed me, Bert might think it was my fault. Perhaps he would begin to see me as I believed Papa saw me: as inherently unlovable. A meeskite. A shrew.

  There in the bank, my limbs felt like sandbags. My wretchedness saturated me. Oh, what a fool I had been! Twenty thousand dollars. My entire emergency fund. My financial life raft (in case, God forbid, Bert did in fact leave—or the Cossacks returned—or the Dinellos resurfaced). The only money I could access myself, that enabled me to sleep at night. It had been cleaned out precisely when the polio epidemic was threatening our whole business. I sat down hard on the polished bench. The hall echoed with the particle hush of a library. Its marble floor amplified the shuffling of people waiting on line to withdraw money for the weekend. The bell over the door chinged. Yet all I could hear was Pickles saying Attagirl with that mocking, predatory gleam in his eye. Clark Bauer sneering, Surely even you can understand how detrimental it would be to have a cripple seen trying to reassure the public.

  A little boy peeked out at me impishly from the folds of his mother’s skirt as she stood filling out a deposit slip. A hand clopped him hard on the back of his head. “Jimmy, don’t stare at the cripple,” his mother barked. “It’s not polite.”

  The whole bank glanced at me.

  I dropped my passbook into my purse and stood up straight. “It’s only my leg that’s bad,” I said loudly. “I’m not deaf, you know.”

  And right there, it hit me. The world, it was always going to stare at my deformity. If people believed I’d had polio, so let them. I was done hiding in the shadows, being mistaken for a weakling. A freak. A pushover.

  And I’d be damned if Dunkle’s would go bankrupt either.

  Let those other ice cream makers travel down to North Carolina like carnival barkers, handing out free Popsicles and sundae cups at swimming pools and county fairs, trying to convince the public that their products were safe. Bert and I would launch our own goddamn anti-polio campaign. Yet we would take the exact opposite tack and beat our competition to the punch.

  My husband, he loved my idea as soon as I explained it to him. We agreed that I should meet with the March of Dimes Campaign personally. “Being crippled myself, I do not want my child—or anyone else’s—to suffer the way that I have from this dreadful disease,” I told the organizers. “Which is why my husband and I want Dunkle’s Ice Cream to partner with your foundation.”

  Soon every Dunkle’s franchise in the country displayed cardboard dime collectors by their cash registers and offered two special ice cream flavors as part of our new “Dips for Dimes” campaign. For every scoop of Fight Polio Peppermint or March of Dimes Marshmallow that customers purchased, Dunkle’s donated a penny to the National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis.

  Oh, what a publicity coup this proved to be! In a single ingenious stroke, I established Dunkle’s as the most “trusted” and “wholesome” ice cream company in America. Even as the polio epidemic worsened, our sales soared. For our ice cream alone was now associated with “finding a cure.” We were celebrated in newspaper editorials for our “responsibility and dedication.” For our sunshiny, sprinkle-coated campaign on behalf of handicapped children everywhere. So sue me. Even Bert did not know: All of this was simply born from my desire for restitution, of course. And for vengeance.

  And, darlings, it turned out to serve another vital purpose as well. For in the news each day came reports of the U.S. Senate investigations into suspected American Communists. People in the arts, government, industry—who had once simply attended a socialist rally or a union meeting—were suddenly being targeted. Blacklisted. Disgraced. Guilt by association was enough. Oh, how I worried! Bert and his meshuggeneh politics! What if they came back to ruin us? My husband himself seemed only mildly concerned. “Lil, the last meeting I went to was over twenty years ago. I never once spoke. You know I never signed anything. Why, there’s no proof I ever attended at all.”

  Yet he was utterly unaware, of course, of the petition I’d handed over to Orson Maytree. No doubt it was still sitting in a government file somewhere, just waiting to be rediscovered by some zealous office assistant. Then, signators would be summoned before the committee and compelled to name names. I was certain of it. Somebody
in that Delancey Street basement would likely remember my good-looking Bert. What if Rocco Dinello himself were called upon to testify?

  At any moment, that single sheet of paper could resurface to destroy us. At night it unfolded and flapped before me in my dreams like an ominous bird. Each time the phone rang or a stranger appeared in Dunkle’s reception area, my heart lurched. Had my husband been identified? Was he being subpoenaed?

  Unable to calm my frantic pulse, I finally telephoned Orson Maytree. “Why, Miss Lillian!” he exclaimed. “Just last night the missus had a taste for your strawberry ice cream.”

  “Mr. Maytree,” I said quietly, glancing around the office, though I’d made sure to lock the door, “I was just wondering. Is there any way you might be able to put me in touch with Senator Joseph McCarthy?”

  Now, of course, a huge ruckus is being made about all this in the press. A “rabid McCarthyite,” they’re calling me. “A collaborator in the Communist witch-hunts.” Yet all I ever supplied to the senator, darlings, was ice cream. Vanilla, mostly. Some maple walnut. Each week during the hearings, I secretly paid one of our franchises in Washington to send over a few quarts of the senator’s favorite flavors “as a token of Dunkle’s appreciation.” That was it. And okay, so I once had a tub specially made for him called Better-Dead-Than-Red Raspberry. But Joseph McCarthy was an extremely appreciative man; he always sent over lovely little thank-you notes. (By contrast, Roy Cohn, that cocksucker, once hollered at me, “Is it too much to ask for a few goddamn sprinkles?”) So spare me your outrage. All I did was ingratiate myself. That—along with Dunkle’s very public work for the March of Dimes—was the only way I could think of to cement our reputation as upstanding, loyal Americans.

  For God forbid anyone ever dug up anything on Bert.

  Although scientists would eventually conclude that there was no connection between ice cream consumption and polio at all, by the start of 1954 the debate was rendered moot. Jonas Salk’s wondrous polio vaccine was ready to be tested nationwide. The goal was to have no fewer than a million American children involved in the trials by the year’s end.