“B-b-b-but, Lil,” Bert said forlornly, “I-I-I-I—”
I polished off the drink in a single swallow, then another, though neither made me feel the least bit better. Pressing the intercom, I barked at our doorman to hail me a cab.
Isaac and Rita had just returned from their honeymoon. They were living in a new apartment building off Lexington Avenue.
“How could you do this?” I hollered as I stormed into their parlor. Hundreds of dollars they had spent on furniture, yet the room was chilly and stark. Chairs like tweedy mushrooms. A brick of brown Naugahyde for a couch. “Your father is a bumbling, half-deaf illiterate. This, we all know. But you?”
“Ma, please—what are you talking about?” Isaac held up his hands in front of him, as if shielding himself. Boxes of wedding gifts sat on an ugly Danish Modern side table: chafing dishes and casseroles still nestled in tufts of paper.
“A man’s name is Kroc—so you assume he is a crock? Well, guess what, bubeleh? Now, someone is going to supply ice cream to this Mr. Kroc and his three hundred and twenty-one McDonald’s franchises out there in Illinois. But it’s not going to be us. So thank you very much. You’ve just created a huge window for our competition. Any competition.”
A terrible idea came upon me then like a seizure: Was it possible, somehow, that the Dinello family had finally gotten back into the ice cream business? All these years I kept waiting for them to roar back to life like some mythical beast, grown exponentially stronger and hungrier from adversity, accumulating energy like a cyclone. The first detective agency I’d hired to track down Papa, they’d had nothing much to report on the Dinellos either. A frozen-vegetable company out in Mineola. A furniture outlet in Howard Beach. Yet still. I kept waiting, reading the trades. It was only a matter of time. Frozen vegetables could be a stepping-stone. The Dinellos would come back to haunt me yet. I was sure of it. McDonald’s was the perfect opportunity.
“What the hell is the matter with you?”
“Ma,” Isaac said defensively, “what was I supposed to do?”
“Well, for starters, did it never once occur to you that perhaps I, of all people, should have been there?”
My son blanched. The same guilty pallor spread across his face that he used to get as a little boy whenever I caught him by the ice box, eating U-bet syrup from the jar with his fingers.
“Ma, it was at the Men’s Bar at the Biltmore—so even if—I mean, it’s not like you could have—”
“Oh? So you couldn’t have asked him to change the venue? Hold it someplace that allows women?”
Isaac gave an incredulous little yelp. “Come on, Ma. Nobody does business like that. I mean, what was I supposed to say? ‘Excuse me, Mr. Kroc, but my mommy wants to come along’?”
Hurrying into the foyer, I yanked my coat from the closet. I heard his footsteps behind me, but I jabbed the elevator button and refused to turn around.
For months afterward, just as my parents had once refused to speak to each other, so I boycotted my son. If I needed to tell him something, I did so pointedly through Rita. Only the trauma of the Cuban Missile Crisis compelled me to begin talking to him again. The one thing Castro, I suppose, has ever been good for.
Yet even after my miraculous grandson was born two years later—on Thanksgiving—and Isaac and I resumed having lunch together on occasion—every morning, as soon as I arrived at the office, I made sure that Mrs. Preminger reported directly to me. Not just everything in my schedule book but in Bert’s and Isaac’s as well. Every meeting, every dinner invitation. Every goddamn dentist appointment. Nothing, nothing at all, would be allowed to slip past me again.
One particular morning after hosting the Funhouse, I arrived at the office to find Mrs. Preminger waiting for me in the reception area with a troubled look on her face. She had aged, I saw suddenly. Her flesh was like stewed chicken. I wondered suddenly if she was about to give notice. For years she had been secretly X-ing out the days on her calendar, writing in tiny, cramped figures at the bottom just how many she had left until her retirement.
“What is it?” As I unknotted my Hermès scarf, I sensed a disturbance, a disruption of molecules in the air.
“There was a young man waiting here for you when I arrived this morning,” Mrs. Preminger said, following me back toward my office. “I told him you were still at the television studio, but he refused to leave. He said it was urgent. He said he’d wait all day if he had to. I put him in the conference room to keep him out of the way.”
“Let me guess,” I said with irritation. I was wearing a new navy blue Chanel suit, and the chain stitched into the back was rubbing against my neck, which was bothersome. “He wants a job. With the foundation.”
A few years earlier, Dunkle’s had set up a charitable foundation—for tax purposes, of course, but also to build upon our work with the March of Dimes. The Albert J. and Lillian M. Dunkle Foundation funded mobile children’s health clinics that regularly made visits to slums and rural areas. Recently, lots of young men had been approaching Dunkle’s asking to work for our foundation’s clinics as medics or drivers. They didn’t seem to understand that the foundation was in a separate office over on Seventh Avenue. They wanted a job yet never did even the most basic homework. Nine times out of ten, it seemed to me, they were not so much looking to help poor children as to avoid the draft. To be classified as a Conscientious Objector. To use capitalism and charity to avoid fighting Communism. Such chutzpah—it was astonishing.
“Why didn’t you send him over to Seventh Avenue?” I asked Mrs. Preminger. “They’re the ones who should be dealing with this.”
“I tried, Mrs. Dunkle. He claims this matter is personal.”
“It’s always personal.” I sighed, wriggling out of my coat.
“Mrs. Dunkle,” Mrs. Preminger said carefully, the severe black helmet of her hair—a wig, I realized—shifting subtly on her head. “He says he’s your brother. Samuel.”
“My brother?” I pivoted as if I’d been slapped. “That’s impossible. My brother, Samuel, died sixty years ago in Russia.”
Inside my office I poured myself a drink. My hands were trembling, making the rim of the bottle rattle against the glass. Clearly it was a prank. An elaborate practical joke. “Allen Funt,” I said out loud. “You cocksucker.” The host of Candid Camera on CBS—he’d had it in for me ever since I was selected to give the opening remarks instead of him at the North American Broadcasters Association luncheon two years earlier at the Pierre. Now Funt was paying me back, no doubt, setting me up and recording me on a hidden camera to embarrass me for one of his show’s “Celebrity Candids.” Send in an impostor pretending to be my long-lost brother from Vishnev. Let the high jinks begin. That bastard. Spare me your idea of wit, I thought.
One detail perplexed me, though, and made the back of my neck prickle. Who in the world had tipped Allen Funt off about Samuel? My brother had died before I was born. I had barely even mentioned him to Bert.
Mrs. Preminger rapped lightly on my door. “Mrs. Dunkle?”
The young man she ushered into my office could not have been more than eighteen. His sleepy, indolent face had a bee-stung quality to it, with red-rimmed eyes. He was dressed in a cranberry-colored Ban-Lon sweater with a tie peeking out: A boy’s idea of dressing like an adult. His hair was slicked severely to one side like a marionette’s. I could imagine a production assistant styling it with Brylcreem.
“Okay. Who are you?” I said, standing.
The young man hurried across the office, extending his knobby hand. Even from behind my desk, I could smell the chemical wash of his sweater.
“My name is Samuel, Mrs. Dunkle.” His voice was deliberate in its enunciations, and there was a faint false inflection to it, like an amateur aspiring to be a Shakespearean actor, to give himself more gravitas. “I’m afraid I’m your brother.”
“The hell you are.” I looked him up and down disdainfully. “Tell Allen Funt or whatever wisenheimer sent you over that I don’t hav
e time for this nonsense.”
“I’m sorry. Your half brother. Just half,” he said quickly, correcting himself, his eyelashes fluttering rapidly, like insects. “‘Hank,’ your father? He’s my father, too. My mother is Josie. Wife number three? Well, four if you count the common-law one.” He had a rash from shaving, I saw, on the underside of his jaw, merging with the sprinkle of red pimples salting his chin and left cheek. “I’m sorry. She said not to come, but I did anyway.”
I sat back down in my chair and glared at him. “If you’re my half brother, I’m Marie of Romania.”
Samuel pulled out his wallet. “See? I have my driver’s license. And my draft card—”
“Of course you do.” I glanced at them. “They say ‘Samuel Pratt.’ Nice try. Mrs. Preminger!” I shouted, not bothering with the intercom. “See this young man out, please?”
“Oh, but Dad, he goes by Pratt now, these days,” Samuel said quickly. “When he and my mother got married, he insisted on taking her maiden name instead. Mama said it was his way of proving that she was not just another wife to him. Right before the wedding, she said, Dad told the clerk his last name was Pratt, while she said hers was Bailey. So they both became Pratts afterward. So that’s mine and my sisters’ name.”
He stood before me breathlessly, as if he had just run up a hill.
Unfortunately, something about this story—either the way Samuel related it or the tale itself—sounded disturbingly like Papa. I could in fact see him making up some cockamamie story, rushing his girlfriend down to some clerk’s office, and paying off some secretary perhaps, in order to erase one identity and replace it quickly with another. Twenty years ago: That was just around the time he had forged all those checks from my account. It would explain why my detectives had come up with nothing. “Hank Bailey?” they’d said, handing me the folder. “Poof. Gone. No record of him at all.”
“I wouldn’t have come to you now at all, except that Dad—our dad—he’s very, very sick,” the boy said.
“Oh?” I said archly. “Is he?”
“Really, truly.” In his animated, ham-fisted way, Samuel began pouring forth a great convoluted story. The words “diabetic,” “Paterson,” “bankruptcy,” “amputation,” “beef stew,” “foreclosure,” and “cocktail waitress” whisked by like bits of debris circling a drain.
I stared at the boy, this Samuel Pratt, searching for some inkling, some physical echo of my father in him. He looked like Papa not at all, and yet he didn’t not look like him either. Was this little shmendrik really my half brother?
Then something else struck me. Sisters, he had mentioned.
Twenty years ago Papa had already had four wives. He had replaced Mama and me and my sisters without a backward glance, his whole past life from Russia, with a new, improved version here in America. How had it not occurred to me in all this time that he might have had other children as well? Yet that he had recycled the name of his first, dead son was particularly galling.
“And with the hospital bills, and Dad needing such expensive medications,” Samuel continued, his Adam’s apple bobbing as he spoke, his hands sandwiched between his knees, his eyes fixed on the wall behind my head. “He’s eighty-four and has no insurance. The wheelchair, the X-rays. And that’s not counting…well, the car we had, the Pontiac, it died, you see, so we were hoping—my mom, and I—well, I was hoping that since you’re a big television star—that maybe you might—”
“Stop,” I said. “Your sisters. How many of them are there?”
“Um, two. But they don’t have any money either. You see—”
“Do they have names?”
“Peg. Peg and Coralee.”
Not Rose or Flora at least. Yet they were out there somewhere, these girls, Peg and Coralee, with their farm-fresh, all-American, Christian names. Girls who no doubt had faces like strawberries and cream. I could see them dressed in freshly ironed skirts and headbands, swishing into a bright yellow breakfast kitchen, calling my father not Papa but Daddy, planting a good-morning kiss sunnily on his cheek as he winked at them over his plate of bacon and eggs. Two daughters who had grown up with him taking them to the seaside and the circus, buying them gumdrops and birthday cakes and bicycles. I instantly hated these girls with more ferocity than I had ever hated almost anyone.
As if he could sense the thoughts unspooling in my head, Samuel seemed compelled to mention quickly that Coralee had two children and a drunken husband who worked as a janitor, and that Peg’s husband was stationed in Chu Lai. As he went on, I saw all too clearly that yes, this young man—the yarn he was spinning, the desperate glitter in his eye, the dogged persuasiveness, the determination to separate me from my money—he was Papa’s progeny all right.
And his mother, this Josie Pratt, of course she had fallen on hard times—of course! The American childhood I would never have, clearly that was not enough for her brood. These shysters had their greedy eyes trained on far more. Samuel’s little visit here this morning was only a reconnaissance mission. For all I knew, Josie had been keenly aware of what Papa was doing when he’d taken her name. There must be no presumption of innocence here. Soon enough, I suspected, all these Pratts would come knocking on my office door with squalling babies in their arms, eviction notices stuffed in their purses, arms in gauze slings—a parade of long-lost stepmothers and half sisters and aunts and God knows who else, looking for a handout. They would bleed me dry. Just like Papa had.
My heart quickened, punching my chest like a fist. “Get out,” I said.
“I’m sorry?”
I pointed to the door. “Go. Vamoose.”
“But, Mrs. Dunkle. Our father. He’s dying,” Samuel said with distress. “Please, I’m trying to explain. He needs your help.”
“He’s helped himself plenty over the years,” I said. “Over twenty-five thousand dollars by my last count. So basta, as we say in Italian. I’m done.”
Saying these words, I realized I meant them. Clarity broke over me like a wave. Why, nothing I could do or give to Papa would ever be enough. He had simply never wanted me. For years, I had been waiting for him to reappear somehow, somewhere, so that I might finally redeem myself, resuscitate his love for me. How I clung to this rope! But his love, it had never existed. Some parents never really liked their own children. I knew this too well myself.
Papa chose other wives, other daughters. He took what he could from me, from Mama, from my sisters, then left, discarding us like orange rinds. Broken toys. Unopened books. That was simply that. I could replay the misery and injustice of it over and over, like a broken record. Or I could simply get back to work.
Samuel looked like a roulette wheel sent spinning. He grabbed the back of a chair to steady himself. “Please. I’m asking you. I’m begging you, Mrs. Dunkle. Without your help,” he said hoarsely, “Dad is going to die.”
“Die? Please. The man has nine lives, nine wives, and a different name for each one. Spare me the melodrama.”
He was crying now, this Samuel, tears leaking down the front of his pockmarked cheeks, catching on his pimples. Oh, but he was good. He would not give up. I had to give him credit. Papa had trained him well. “Mrs. Dunkle. Please. I don’t know where else to turn. I’m 1-A, my mother is ailing, my sisters are broke. And one of them, Peg, did I mention, she is pregnant again? I know Dad is sometimes difficult. And not the most reliable. And he’s caused my mom some heartache over the years. But, Mrs. Dunkle, he’s going blind. His kidneys are failing. I don’t know what else to do. You’re his family.”
“Family? Family?” I said acidly. “How do you even know that? Do you have any proof?”
“What? Mrs. Dunkle, Dad talks about you all the time. You’re his big successful daughter, he always says. In the hospital he watches you on TV. Every Tuesday and Friday mornings. Six-thirty A.M. sharp. Even though he can barely see anymore, he still points at the screen when he hears your voice. He boasts to all the nurses.”
I clamped my hands over my ears. “Shut u
p. Shut up!”
Samuel’s doughy, nubbled face contorted into something belligerent. “I can’t believe you. ‘Help the children.’ ‘Stop the polio.’ You have everything in the world—but you won’t give our dad a single cent on his deathbed?”
With a furious sweep of my hand, I sent everything on top of my desk clattering violently to the floor. The boy jumped back, stunned. Yanking open my top drawer, I pulled out one of our coupons good for a free Nilla Rilla ice cream cake, then slammed the desk shut so hard the whole office shuddered. “You want something? You want something, you little prick? All of you still haven’t gotten enough from me? Fine. Here!” I shouted, thrusting the coupon into his hand. “Go! Throw yourselves a goddamn party!”
Chapter 14
Glenlivet. Campari. Courvoisier. With their musical names. Each with a particular, seductive promise. The caramel burn of cognac. Vodka’s bracing, metallic bite, like frozen chrome. Dubonnet, the color of melted garnet, a comma of lemon peel bobbing in the tang of it. Such elegant anesthetics. The first sip, always, like a silk glove run lightly across the back of my hand, dispersing in me the way dye diffuses in cotton. Slowly, a rose unclenches. A bandage unfurls.
I held the liquor on my tongue like a lozenge and threw my head back. Closed my eyes. Jiggled the glass, feeling the satisfying heft of it in my hand, the ice cubes rattling like maracas.
Isaac had once criticized me for keeping a little bar in my office on an antique sideboard. “Nobody is doing this anymore, Ma,” he said when he first saw the cut-glass decanters assembled on the tray, each with a little silver nameplate hung around its neck like a dog tag. “What did you do to this place anyway?” He glanced around. “It looks like Versailles.”
“Exactly,” I agreed. When we’d had our Manhattan offices renovated, I’d ordered the walls of my office covered in pink silk brocade the color of strawberry ice cream. I spent more time in there than at home, so why not? “An Ice Cream Queen deserves her own palace, thank you.” Petunia leaped onto my lap, and I offered her a sniff of my glass. “Don’t give me that look,” I said. “Do you know for how many years I slept on a bench in a storefront?”
The Ice Cream Queen of Orchard Street: A Novel Page 37
