The Ice Cream Queen of Orchard Street: A Novel

by Susan Jane Gilman

  I poured myself a scotch and Isaac his now-customary Tab. How I raised a teetotaler, I will never know.

  “Trust me. Everyone always kvetches at first.” I handed him his soft drink. He set it down on the glass table, untouched. “Back when we first introduced the Fudgie Puppie and the Nilla Rilla? You’re too young to remember, but, oh. Everyone was a critic. ‘No one will eat anything shaped like a dog or a gorilla,’ they said. ‘The cake molds are too complicated.’”

  I took a sip of my drink. Johnnie Walker Black only gets better with time. “Have you seen the latest earnings reports?” I pressed the button on my intercom.

  “Ma, of course I’ve seen them,” Isaac said. Picking up his glass, he realized it was dripping condensation and looked around distractedly for something to wipe it up with. His paper napkin had fallen on the floor. My son, I thought as I watched him reach for the Kleenex box on my desk. He was a mirror: Passive. Impenetrable. Reflecting the qualities of whoever stood before him. With Rita he was acquisitive, striving. In Bert’s presence he had been warmhearted and hale. Around me? He was parsimonious. Prickly. So difficult to love. I supposed I deserved it, though it made me unbearably sad. The things I had dreamed for him—for us. For once, couldn’t he just acquiesce and remain open to me and my ideas? Why, we were almost there! Could he not see it?

  “Within a week or two, all this grumbling will disappear. Trust me,” I said. “Everybody will realize just how much goddamn money they’re making on these things. And not one customer will have gotten drunk from them.” I pointed my glass at him. “I’m telling you. Being a visionary means waiting for the rest of the world to catch up.”

  Yet a week later my son appeared in my doorway again looking even more frazzled. Recrimination seemed to emanate from him like radio waves.

  “Ma, let’s take a walk down to my office,” he said. “I need you to see something.”

  Leading me past the particleboard cubicles and clicking typewriters, he ushered me through the frosted-glass wall and nudged his door shut. After Bert died, Isaac had convinced me to move our headquarters to this new building on Sixth Avenue because it afforded us more space for less money. Yet every day I regretted it. New York City was becoming nothing but a forest of ugly, obsidian boxes with polarized windows. Our own offices were like space capsules, hermetically sealed, cut off from everything, floating high above the city. All filled with ghastly modular furniture designed by Swedish depressives. Isaac’s “couch”: a slab of black leather punctuated with buttons. Scarcely better than the bench back at the Dinellos’. Who the hell could even sit on it?

  “Here,” he said quickly, pulling up a padded office chair and settling me in. Pictures of him, Rita, and Jason at Disney World smiled down from frames on the walls. “Where’s my scotch?” I said. “And would it kill you to put maybe a flag and a house plant in here?”

  “Pamela,” Isaac ordered, pushing a button on his phone, “would you please bring my mother and me some coffee, please?” He came back around and handed me a letter printed on lemon-colored paper. “We need to discuss this.”

  It was from an organization called “Defenders of the Family” out in Colorado Springs. It was headed by a minister named Hubert Elkson. Reverend Elkson was one of those newfangled preachers who looked like a department-store mannequin and hosted a syndicated television show. Every Sunday morning he railed against flag burning and called for school prayer while an address flashed on-screen for donations.

  Now, it seemed, the Reverend Elkson had issued a press release:

  “DEFENDERS OF THE FAMILY” TO LAUNCH NATIONWIDE BOYCOTT OF DUNKLE’S ICE CREAM.

  The Reverend Hubert Elkson announced today that “Defenders of the Family” is calling upon its “Flock of the Faithful” to boycott Dunkle’s Ice Cream. He told the Baptist Press:

  “Dunkle’s new Shake-Ups are an obscenity. They are corrupting the children of America by giving them a taste for alcohol in the guise of an ‘innocent’ milk shake. Yet there is nothing ‘innocent’ about alcoholic ice cream, particularly when it comes in flavors like White Russian and Kamikaze, which brazenly glorify Communism and our enemies during World War Two.”

  “Is he insane?” I threw the flyer down on the table.

  A crease formed in the center of my son’s forehead like a seam. Turning his ballpoint pen end over end between his fingers, he looked at me plainly.

  “This is serious, Ma. Elkson’s congregation is apparently a very pious bunch.”

  “Oh, ‘pious,’ my tuches. I met this reverend last year at a fund-raiser for Ronald Reagan. All the guy could talk about was how our television shows were competing in the same time slot. He’s running a racket, same as everyone else.”

  Isaac held open his hands helplessly. “Maybe so. But I have to tell you, Ma. For a ‘family-friendly’ chain like ours to suddenly start running risqué ads for booze-flavored milk shakes? NBC is already concerned that Shake-Ups may not be the best product to have advertised during its top Sunday morning kiddie show. And now churches are threatening to picket us?” Isaac picked up the morning’s newspaper and tossed it glumly across his desk. “Prince Charles just got engaged. All we can hope is that nobody will be paying attention to anything other than him and Lady Di all week.”

  I sat back, astounded. “You actually agree with this prick?”

  “All I’m saying is that for a sizable number of Americans, Ma, he may have a point.”

  “Please. I will not have our company blackmailed into changing our menu because some idiot cannot read a goddamn label. There’s not a drop of alcohol in anything. And don’t tell me that this has anything to do with Christian morality. I was raised by Christians. The people who took me in were the nicest, kindest people in the world. And they wouldn’t for a minute—”

  I clamped my hands over my mouth.

  “Why, those sons of bitches,” I murmured. “Those stronzi.”

  “What? What is it, Ma?”

  I struggled to get up, then yanked open Isaac’s metal office cabinet, looking for the Yellow Pages. “I need a private investigator. A new one.”

  “Ma, what are you doing?”

  “They must have an in with a Protestant church now. Or they paid off someone in Colorado. Oh, I should have known—”

  “What? Who?” Isaac said with confusion.

  “People from the past, bubeleh. Who have a vendetta. From before you were even born. Those bastards. I knew they would pull something. For years, oh, they’ve just been waiting.”

  Isaac’s face grew pained. “Ma, you’re not making sense. I can’t talk to you when you’re like this.”

  I set down my glass. My son’s eyes were the same dark brown as mine, yet the right one had a band of yellowish hazel radiating from the pupil like a slice of pie. His cheeks were now covered with gray, velvety stubble. So often, I supposed, he’d had to weather me like a season of storms. I drew in a sharp breath. For some reason the office was wobbling slightly. Perhaps it was because we were on the forty-first floor and there was wind off the Hudson.

  Isaac had a novelty game on his desk that he’d inherited from Bert: a rectangular frame with five metal balls suspended from it in a row of matching pendulums. I reached over, pulled one back, and released it, sending it knocking against the others.

  “I know who’s behind all of this,” I said.

  For a bunch of devout Christians, Reverend Hubert Elkson’s flock certainly had a lot of idle time on its hands. The very next morning, our franchise owners in Cleveland and Denver, in Mobile and Atlanta, in Dallas and Pittsburgh, arrived at their shops to find protesters camped out in beach chairs, waving crucifixes and signs reading STOP CORRUPTING KIDS WITH VICE CREAM! “BOOZE” IS NOT A FLAVOR! And, simply, DRUNKLE’S. Reverend Elkson appeared on the evening news on all three networks: “Dunkle’s Shake-Ups exemplify the moral decay of America,” he told reporters. “What’s next? Selling children french fries flavored with tobacco? Pizza that tastes like marijuana?”

&
nbsp; Unfortunately, it seemed that the only person in America who did bother to familiarize himself with the ingredients of our Shake-Ups was some lunatic vitamin guru out in Berkeley, California. “Dunkle’s ice cream is dangerous and immoral,” he announced on his health-food program, syndicated to no fewer than fifty-seven public radio stations across the country. “Have you read the ingredients, people? When you hear all the chemicals you’re eating, you’re going to boycott Dunkle’s ice cream, too—as a confection of the military-industrial complex.”

  That weekend, on Saturday Night Live, a fat comedian dressed up as me in a wig and a housecoat. “Hi, I’m Lillian Dunkle, the Ice Cream Queen of America,” he said in a chirpy falsetto. “Trust me, boys and girls. There’s no alcohol in our Shake-Ups whatsoever.” Opening a Dunkle’s milk-shake cup, he poured a large mound of white powder out onto a mirror and began snorting it up with the straw. “See? Only a hundred percent medicinal-grade Peruvian cocaine!”

  “Oh, Lillian,” my publicist said, massaging the bridge of her nose when she reviewed the tape on Monday. “This is not good.”

  Our sales, they began to plummet.

  Over the Fourth of July weekend, the very pinnacle of our season, nearly half our franchises reported heavy losses. Grocery-store sales went way down as well. For the first time in twenty-three years, we had trouble getting co-sponsors for the children’s goodie bags on Dunkle’s Sundae Morning Funhouse. “I’m sorry,” said the account man at Mr. Bubble, “but, Lillian, if I may be blunt, your product is literally considered poison right now.”

  “Ma, let’s pull the product,” Isaac pleaded.

  “No,” I cried. “I will not let those bastards win. Not Rocco, not Vittorio—”

  “What? Who are you even talking about?”

  “Just you wait. I’m not taking anything off the market. I’m getting to the bottom of this.”

  Two, three times a day, I began telephoning my newest private investigator, an incessant gum chewer named Nick, who lisped slightly. “Look, Mrs. Dunkle, I told you. I’ve been combing through everything I can find. So far? Nada. No charitable donations to Elkson. No connection to any other ice cream companies, dairies, or the vitamin guy either. I’m sorry, but there doesn’t seem to be any link between these two families and this boycott at all,” he said. “Unless they’re some of those Jesus freaks sitting out there in the parking lots themselves.”

  “Keep looking,” I ordered. “This is them. I know they’re doing this to me. D-I-N-E-L-L-O. Make sure you’ve got it spelled right.”

  The headlines continued. And on the TV: reports of the spreading boycott. A local Little League coach in Tennessee led a “Dumping Dunkle’s Day,” in which an entire town emptied Shake-Ups down a sewer.

  One after another, our franchises started to close.

  Now even my pills would not let me sleep. Every night around 3:00 A.M., I lurched awake in terror, glistening with sweat: Isaac had been a small boy again; crowds were stringing him from a tree, chanting “Kill the Jew” in Russian. I was a little girl running desperately through the cobblestone streets, when my leg suddenly came off and rolled past me like a wheel.

  “Goddamn it,” I said aloud, stumbling into the incubator of my kitchen. As I sat drinking a scotch, trying to calm myself, my chiffon nightgown plastered to my armpits, I wondered: How had it all come to this?

  The shining land I fell so deliriously in love with so many years ago in a movie house in Hamburg. Ah-MEH-rih-kah. With all its abundance and ingenuity. We’d won two world wars and put a man on the moon, for Chrissakes. Yet now people were becoming unhinged by a milk shake? When had this country gotten so small-minded and ingrown and frightened?

  What the hell had happened to us?

  I finished one drink, then another. Squinting through my empty glass, I turned it like a kaleidoscope. The overhead light in my kitchen blurred through the lead crystal. I spied my newest rhinestone-encrusted cane propped against the counter, its sparkles smearing and refracting in the light. My cane. It had been with me longer than anything else in my entire life, I realized. So what if I had begun treating it like jewelry? At least no one could accuse me of not making the best of my handicap.

  With a jerk, I set down the glass and struggled to my feet. I did not know why the idea had not occurred to me earlier. Hobbling into my study, I grabbed the receiver off my antique telephone and called MKG. Of course, since it was three o’clock in the morning, their service took a message. Then I telephoned Isaac at home. “Wake up! Wake up!” I hollered into his new answering machine. “I am having such a brilliant idea, I think I may have a heart attack.” I hiccupped. “You call me back.”

  I arrived at the office at daybreak positively carbonated with excitement. Admittedly, most of the notes I had scribbled down on my personal stationery at 3:00 A.M. were now illegible. Yet my vision was crystalline of what needed to be done, of the brand-new publicity campaign that Dunkle’s was going to launch, of how we were going to turn our predicament around into a trump card.

  Since no one, it seemed, ever arrived at the goddamn office before 10:00 A.M. now, I started in on the work myself. Oh, I was brimming with inspiration! My heart beat so frantically, in fact, it seemed only sensible to quell it with a bit more scotch. After pouring myself a tumbler, I got busy sketching on a legal pad. The possibilities came to me so quickly my hands and fingers seemed to tangle. I kept dropping my pencil. Goddamn arthritis. Writing was suddenly like embroidering lace.

  “Sinfully delicious,” I wrote. Beneath this I sketched a mischievous-looking devil. So sue me: I’m no artist. Yet the idea itself was brilliant. Mae West, I thought suddenly as I staggered over to my sideboard for a refill. Where the hell was the pencil sharpener? Mae West: Hadn’t she once said something along the lines of, “When I’m good, I’m very, very good, but when I’m bad, I’m terrific”? That would be our new tagline. Was such a line even copyrighted? Where could I find out precisely what she’d said? I should call my lawyers, I decided. Yet as I was reaching for the receiver, I knocked over my Rolodex. Little cards everywhere. Then I stopped. Mae West. Why not actually use her? Or, better yet—oh, darlings, I was a genius—why not feature all the famous bad girls and renegades throughout history? Lady Godiva. Galileo. Oscar Wilde. Rosa Parks. Elvis, when he first appeared on television—oh, the outrage he sparked! People said he was the devil! These could be Dunkle’s new poster children! Surely there existed a way to doctor up famous portraits to make it look as if scandalous and rebellious people throughout the ages were eating our ice cream. Why, Eve herself could be shown in the Garden of Eden eating a Dunkle’s ice cream cone instead of an apple! And the Marquis de Sade—why the hell not?—with a chocolate milk shake! And who was that tedious Scandinavian filmmaker, the one accused of pornography? Oh! And that kidnapped girl—Patty Hearst. Would she be willing to pose with a Fudgie Puppie? A singer. Orange hair. Moon boots…his name was eluding me. Suffragettes, of course! Evel Knievel…My thoughts were a torrent. No matter. Graphic designers could do so much nowadays with Xeroxes and silk-screening. I could envision it perfectly. Black-and-white pictures, with only our ice cream cones, sundaes, and Shake-Ups colored in bright relief.

  My God: It was lunchtime! Why had no one—not even my own son—bothered to return my calls? Collapsing into my swivel chair, I dialed Isaac again, though I found I was having trouble hitting the correct buttons. I kept punching them, over and over.

  “Where have you been?” I bellowed. “Come down here this minute. Your mother is a genius, darling. I’ve figured it all out. A whole new campaign. It’ll redeem Shake-Ups and the whole goddamn company. Already I’ve put in calls to MKG. Oh, and the Bettmann Archive. Do you know how marvelous they are over there? The assistant, he sounds exactly like Ernest Borgnine—”

  “Ma, listen.” Sometimes, when he stammered, my son sounded exactly like his father.

  “You’ll be so proud of me. They’re assembling a portfolio. The most magnificent photographs for us. I’ve arra
nged it personally. Oh, darling. Wait until you see—”

  “Ma. Stop.” Isaac’s voice was suddenly like a gavel. “Just stop. Please. Sit. Wait for me.”

  A moment later he appeared breathlessly in my doorway. With his hands on his middle-aged hips, in his plaid tie and mustard-colored sports coat, he surveyed the piles of drawings strewn about, the notes scribbled on pads and napkins, the discarded lunch tray, the empty bottle of Glenlivet atop the bar, the wastebasket that had somehow been overturned, spewing clumps of balled-up paper across my carpet. I must admit that despite all its fine antiques my office did look ransacked. It was because of the goddamn move to this ugly new building. In our old headquarters, pink silk walls I’d had. A palace.

  “Ma?”

  A wave of vertigo came over me. I stepped back unsteadily. My eyeglasses shifted on my nose.

  Gently, Isaac lifted the tumbler out of my hand. “Stop, Ma.” He clasped both my hands firmly in his, staying me. “It’s over. I’ve pulled them. It’s done.”

  After that, whenever I appeared in the office, a peculiar hush settled over it like a snowfall. The delivery boys, the account managers, the secretaries swishing past me in the corridor murmured, “Hello, Mrs. Dunkle,” with eerie deference. I suppose the image of me sweeping all the desktops clear with my cane that afternoon was embossed in their memories. So sue me: I had been very upset.

  The southern corner of the office, where my traitorous son had installed himself, I refused to set foot in now. The new advisory board he appointed in secret while Rita had lured me away to all those beauty-parlor appointments. The new lawyers he’d hired. The way he’d fired Edgar and MKG behind my back. His radical “restructuring.”

  “This is a coup d’état!” I hollered. “I built this empire. Not you!”