The Ice Cream Queen of Orchard Street: A Novel

by Susan Jane Gilman

  As Hector guides the car up between the trees to the front, I can see newer, uglier buildings in the back with prefabricated panels the color of orange sherbet. “Oh, Mrs. Dunkle,” Hector calls back from the driver’s seat. “Are you thinking of moving here?”

  “I should fire you for that,” I say.

  If she recognizes me from television, the nurse on duty does not let on. I simply sign in like anyone else. “Malka Treynovsky.” It is the first time in my entire life I have written my birth name.

  “Your sister’s in a wheelchair now, so we’ve moved her to the ground floor for better mobility.” The nurse motions for me to follow, then halts. “Oh, I’m sorry. Would you like a wheelchair, too?” I shake my head. Your sister, she has said. Your. Sister. Yoursister.

  Flora’s room is at the end of the east wing in the main building. The long corridors have the mushroomy, tweedy, sour smell of old age, cafeteria food, and dusty carpeting. Signs stapled to bulletin boards announce “Cabaret Tuesdays” and “Sing Along with Simon Night.” When the nurse raps on the door and says “Florence? Florence, are you there? You’ve got a visitor. Your sister Malka is here,” my heart seizes.

  I hear a thumping, a clack. “Judy,” a brittle, patrician voice calls out. “Could you please help me here?”

  For a moment my pulse beats so furiously I think I might faint. Imagine this: coming all this way, after all these years, only to collapse on my sister’s threshold? Yet the door clicks open and a fat nurse’s aide in white Dacron with the nameplate JUDY bellows, “WHY, HERE YOU ARE. YOU MUST BE FLORENCE’S SISTER. WE HAVE BEEN WAITING FOR YOU. I’VE JUST SET UP SOME TEA FOR FLORENCE. THERE IS A BUZZER HERE.” She points to a button mounted low on the wall beneath the light switch. “I’LL JUST BE DOWN THE HALLWAY IF YOU LADIES NEED ANYTHING ELSE.”

  Then she wheels Flora forward, as if presenting me with a prize.

  My sister.

  Her skin is translucent parchment pulled tight over the fine bones of her skull, crinkling around her eyes and trembling mouth as she smiles at me. Her eyes, still marble blue, are astonishingly bright in contrast to the deadly white of her skin. “Malka?” she says softly. She is dressed in a bubblegum pink sweatshirt with REDONDO BEACH spelled out on it in plaid fabric letters, and a fluffy pale blue blanket is tucked in around her legs. Her white hair is like a baby’s. Corn silk. Flyaway. “Oh, my,” she rasps, rolling her chair up closer to me to get a better look.

  She is not immediately recognizable to me at all. This Flora is an old, tiny, ghostly woman. It is extremely unnerving. Surely, I imagined, I would glimpse at least a remnant of her old self in her face. Yet no. Nothing except for the color of the eyes. Studying her, however, it is apparent that she was once extremely beautiful. In fact, her cheekbones are still high, her eyes bright. Her deportment, despite her tremors, is regal. My sister is a magnificent, faded flower. But her entire body is twitching and quaking slightly, as if being shot through with electrical impulses. With two trembling hands, she reaches out to clasp one of mine. A sickly smell emanates from her: Industrial disinfectant. Sharp, overly floral perfume. And, perhaps, a hint of urine.

  For a second, I feel a bolt of panic. Yes, I, too, am old, darlings. Yet not this old. I have an urge to bat this decay away from me like a swarm of flies, to take a step back. Yet impishly, my sister waggles her finger at me.

  “I know what you look like already. I’ve seen you on TV,” she says in a wry, palsied voice. “But me? Oh, it must be a shock. You’ll have to excuse my appearance. But I decided to give up on vanity during the Nixon administration.”

  Oh. I see suddenly. There she is.

  “My,” I chuckle, limping farther into her room. A small kitchenette and dining alcove are separated from the sitting room by a gentle archway. Everything—the sink, the light switches, the seats—has been slightly lowered to accommodate someone in a wheelchair. With its butterscotch paneling and the green netted light fixture suspended from a chain above the dining table, her “residence” is cozy enough. A hand-crocheted afghan that looks like it’s made of pot holders is draped across an overstuffed sofa. Beyond it a large window looks out on the back lawn and an unused therapy pool flecked with the first yellowed, curling leaves of autumn. Glancing around, however, I feel a flutter of despair. After everything we fled in Russia, and the tenements, this is where my sister ends up? In a cheap efficiency with plastic roses stuffed into a souvenir vase from St. Louis and guardrails on her bed? Nurses tromping in and out? There is scarcely more space or privacy than on Orchard Street.

  “So this is home now?” I say, glancing at the fake potted plant. A little knickknack shelf in the corner. The bathroom with its horrid railings and medicinal stench, lest you forget for a moment that you are in a facility.

  Flora taps on the side of her wheelchair. “Where else am I going to go? Skiing in St. Moritz? Sailing on the QE2?” Motioning over my shoulder with her chin, she says, “At least here I’m with other showbiz folks. For a bunch of old fogies, we’re lively.”

  I look behind me. The entire wall is covered with faded playbills and posters in colorful frames. My sister, I see, was a tap dancer in vaudeville. And a Ziegfeld Girl! Why, she has even been in the movies! Broadway Melody of 1929. Busby Berkeley’s 42nd Street and Gold Diggers of 1933. (“Oh, I was just in the chorus. And was that DP ever a skirt chaser,” she says. “To keep us on schedule, they fed us amphetamines.”) Having learned the jazz clarinet, she also traveled for a while across America with Rayleen Dupree and Her Red-Hot Swinging Sweethearts’ All-Girl Orchestra.

  “That’s how I met my first husband,” Flora says, pointing to the poster for the band appearing at the King’s Café outside Davenport, Iowa. “He was a trombonist. He played with Bix Beiderbecke for a little while, in fact. My, he could play.” Flora frowns. “Almost as well as he could drink, unfortunately.”

  “Your first husband was a lush?”

  “No. Bix. My first husband…well, he was just a bore. As soon as we got married, he expected me to stop performing. So that didn’t last.” Flora looks at me with disbelief. “For almost forty years, I was in showbiz, Malka. And you know, I always thought of you, because you were the one who got me started. Do you remember that little act of ours, out on the landings on Orchard Street?”

  “Of course.” I chuckle. “One penny to sing and dance, another penny to make us be quiet.” The Little Cleaning, Singing Bialystoker Sisters.

  “Well, I tap-danced my way out of the Lefkowitzes’ as soon as I could. We were out in Brooklyn, real slums. Watching the colored kids, I taught myself. For years and years, I was running around the playhouse circuit in gardenias and satin, sequins and bugle beads right up to my bubbies. I think my blood itself turned into cold cream.” Flora’s face melts into a faraway nostalgia. “Then one day I woke up and said, ‘What on earth am I killing myself for in these high heels? I am far too old for this.’ So I stopped dyeing my hair and got a job as a telephone operator. Nobody looks at you, and all day long you can sit.” She points to her terry-cloth slippers, peeking out from the foot pads beneath her blanket. “And I have been wearing sensible shoes ever since. Makeup. Brassieres. Girdles. I finished with all of it.”

  Steering us over to the wall by the kitchenette, Flora points with obvious pleasure to photographs of babies, children, a young man in a uniform. I know nothing of her life, though she knows plenty about mine. Thanks to the media, she is already aware of all the disastrous decisions I made. The laws I broke. The money I owe. The tchotchkes I stole. How I have mistreated my maids.

  I hobble along the wall, perusing the museum of Florence Halloway. A black-and-white print of a man with horn-rimmed glasses standing stiffly in a white tuxedo beside a fountain where bronze fish spit water into the air outside a villa. Snapshots of a gorgeous blonde, whom I surmise is Flora in her twenties, posing at Mount Rushmore. The Grand Canyon. Niagara Falls. A girl in white lace hot pants, a man with a handlebar mustache and plaid bell-bottoms. Babies in bonnets
in a triptych of oval frames. People all holding cocktails squeezing in together in front of a plastic Christmas tree. Seeing them, this bundle of exuberant love, I feel a pang.

  “Are all of these your family?”

  “Mm.” She nods. “Husband Number Two was an Irish Catholic, so we had nieces and nephews coming out of our ears. But they never really approved of me.” Gingerly, she unfolds the glasses hanging around her neck on a chain and struggles to hook them over her ears. I help her. She draws closer to one of the photographs and touches it gently. “Not the Jewish part. But the showbiz part. His mother thought I was a tramp. After Joe died, I never did see much of them.” With a shaking finger, she points to the girl getting married in hot pants. “Molly, my oldest, she is in New Mexico now, working on a reservation with the Pueblo Indians. Can you imagine? Henry…well.” She stares, devastated, at the portrait of the young man in uniform. “I don’t know how Mama could bear losing four.”

  “She didn’t,” I say quietly.

  For a moment we are both silent. I am luckier than I realize.

  “Well.” Flora dabs her eyes. “This,” she says with forced cheeriness, wheeling her chair over to a snapshot of a jaunty man in a fringed jacket and a Stetson, “this is Angus. Husband Number Three.”

  “Flora! You married a cowboy?”

  “Oh, heavens no. That was for a Halloween party. Angus sold medical equipment. Autoclaves. Sterilizers.”

  “I assume he passed?”

  “Nah. I divorced him for Husband Number Four, I’m afraid. Allen. You know”—she wheezes—“you have to keep life interesting.”

  My sister, I realize proudly, is quite the wisenheimer herself.

  “Allen was the best of the worst,” she recalls with a chuckle. “Though I’m not much good as a wife either, in case you were wondering. He passed away in ’76.”

  “Oh, the same year as my Bert.”

  “Your Bert,” Flora says fondly. “You know…” She motions to me and wheels herself over to the little table in the kitchenette, covered with plastic gingham. The nurse’s aide has already poured the water for the tea, which has been steeping too long and is now cold. A few cream wafers are arranged on a chipped plate. “If it weren’t for Bert, I might never have found you again.”

  “Excuse me?” I am settling myself down into the chair, with its cracked vinyl cushion.

  “Years ago,” Flora says, “back when I was performing with a Yiddish theater troupe on Second Avenue, this dashing young man came backstage and introduced himself to me one night after the show. Oh, he looked exactly like Errol Flynn. And he told me his name was—”

  “Albert Dunkle,” I say stiffly. And the teacup goes heavy in my hands. Frieda. “At least I think that’s her name,” Bert had said. “You know how fartootst I get.” She had been the beautiful blond actress he’d been head over heels about. A sickening feeling washes over me.

  “That’s right. Albert Dunkle.” Flora smiles delightedly. “I never forgot it. He was so handsome we told him that he should consider a career in the theater. But when he came to audition for our troupe? Oh, he had the most terrible stutter! It was almost comical. The entire bunch of us fell about laughing.”

  “He was humiliated,” I say icily.

  “Oh, as I recall, he was a wonderful sport about it. Though I never saw him again after that. Not until he began appearing on those ice cream commercials,” she says offhandedly. Her tone eases my distress. Bert had simply been a bit of trivia in her life, one of many commuters standing on a train platform as she shot past. That was it. A side note. My sister has no idea that Bert had been so thoroughly besotted with her—nor that I had already met him by the time he had called on her backstage at the Second Avenue theater. She has no idea that I had been racked by jealousy back then—sickened to death at the thought of him loving her and choosing her over me—and that I’m feeling this same fierce stab of possessiveness and anxiety all over again right here, right now, more than half a century later, in the Performing Artists Home & Hospital for the Aged, even though Bert has been dead and gone for over seven years.

  “Isn’t that a coincidence?” says Flora, struggling to pinch up a cream wafer with her thumb and forefinger. “That I had run into him, way back when?”

  What if I had accompanied Bert to his audition that day? I think suddenly. Flora and I, we would likely have recognized each other, would we not? My whole life, I would have had my sister with me. Yet perhaps, with me there, Bert might not have stuttered through his audition either. He might have won her heart yet. What would have happened then?

  “How could I possibly have known that Lillian Dunkle, Bert’s Ice Cream Queen, was no one other than my sister?” Flora says with amazement, dropping her cookie back down on her plate. “If I had not met Bert all those years ago, I probably would not have been interested in that article about you at all. But Tricia was in here asking what I would like her to read to me. And she was holding up all these magazines. And there was the one with you on the cover. And I thought, why not? It might be interesting to hear about the woman who that charming goofball Albert Dunkle married. And when I heard ‘Lillian Dunkle was originally named Malka Bialystoker’? Oh, heavens. I nearly fell out of my wheelchair.” Flora beams. “Which is not easy, you understand.”

  I look at my sister, the radiant, milkweed slip of her.

  “To think I could have asked her to read National Geographic to me instead.” She grins.

  Ladies and gentlemen. Readers. My fellow Americans. Members of the press. The jury. I have told you all so much already. Some things, just a few, I will keep for myself. Flora and I have almost seventy years to catch up on. Her career, her four promising yet incompetent husbands. Mr. Lefkowitz. Mama, Bella, and Papa (and oh, my residual shame). We tell each other as much as we can, as much as we can absorb in a single afternoon. The light begins to slant across the lawn in great parabolas. Eager, no doubt, to clock out, the nurses on duty grow impatient, interrupting us with greater frequency.

  As the late-summer sun begins to set, Flora herself begins to dim. She grows less coherent, wearier. She starts to repeat herself, then stops, addled, in midsentence, until an uneasy silence comes over us, as if we are a young couple on an awkward blind date. I stare into her glassy, startlingly blue eyes. Her bony palm trembles in mine like a baby bird.

  Finally I say softly, “Oh, Flora. It looks like I’m going to prison.”

  This is the first time I have ever said this aloud to anyone. It is the first time I have even admitted it to myself.

  “Over that little girl?” she rasps. Then her eyes close, and she doesn’t say anything for a little while. Just when I think she has perhaps dropped off to sleep, she sits upright and announces, “But anyone could see it was an accident, Malka. You hit her as a reflex.”

  “No,” I say plainly. “For taxes. They found me guilty in June. Three counts of tax evasion. My sentencing hearing is next week.”

  “Do you owe a lot?” Flora has shifted about in her wheelchair and is studying me with her head cocked.

  I sigh. “More than a lot. So sue me: I was grieving. I got careless. I was missing Bert, and so I started going shopping. And oh, hell. I suppose I misrepresented a few purchases. I suppose I helped myself to a few things. I got cute with the truth.”

  Flora nods sympathetically. “Can’t you just pay it all back?”

  I shrug. “I don’t think it’s simply about the money at this point.”

  “But you’re an old woman. With a bad leg. It’s not as if you’re going to run away somewhere, Malka. They can’t really lock you up, can they?”

  “The judge on this case? He’s tough. He may want to make an example out of me.” I smile haplessly. “In case you haven’t read the papers lately, I am not America’s favorite flavor right now.”

  I look plainly at my sister, the wisp of her. She is the true ice cream princess, I think suddenly. So elegant, even in her decrepitude, with hair like spun sugar. Those blue-glass mar
ble eyes.

  “How long would they send you to jail for?” she asks.

  “I don’t know. Maybe eighteen months. Three years, even? My lawyers say they’ll petition to get it waived for ‘good behavior.’ Though I don’t think I’ve been exhibiting much of that lately, I’m afraid.”

  Flora gives me a wicked little smile. “I saw on the news last night. They say you might have been smoking drugs in the courthouse bathroom?” Shaking her head, she chuckles, not unkindly. “Oh, Malka. Mama was right. That big, fresh mouth of yours.”

  Slipping her palsied hand into mine, she squeezes it and grins. “You always were scrappy.”

  “Flora. Mia sorella,” I say gently. Oh, how I yearn to add, Flora, I am afraid. Flora, I am alone. Flora, I’ve made such a mess of things. Instead I simply shrug. “Okay. So I’m a little difficult.”

  “I’ll come visit you in prison,” she says brightly.

  “Oh, will you, now?” I laugh, glancing at her wheelchair.

  “Of course.” She grins again. “We’ll put on a little show.”

  “Let’s do,” I say.

  “I’ll sing,” Flora says. “You dance.”

  The following Monday another judge bangs his gavel. Like a gunshot it sounds. I am aware of the gleam of handcuffs on the court officer’s belt, someone shouting in the corridor. My sentence is one year plus one day at the women’s federal minimum-security “facility” in Alderson, West Virginia. With credit for good behavior, I can be out in eight months, my lawyer whispers. We approach the bench to determine a time and date for my “voluntary surrender.” My family, standing behind me in the gallery, is stunned. Yet I am not. Those stockades they used to set up in public squares? Everybody loves a pariah, darlings. Who can resist sending me, the Ice Cream Queen of America, to prison?