The Ice Cream Queen of Orchard Street: A Novel Read Free

giving us a wide berth. Perhaps somebody tattled; I wouldn’t put it past them. Immigration officials appeared. In an instant my mother and sisters were whisked away into quarantine. “Conjunctivitis,” the doctor explained. Our names were stricken from the ship’s manifest. “All peoples with contagious illnesses are barred from boarding,” the clerk informed my father. “You should know better.”
    My father stared at him. “But what are we supposed to do?” he said. “Six fares. They cost us all that we had.”
    “As soon as your family is better, you can exchange your tickets, Mr. Treynovsky. Other ships sail for Cape Town later in the season. Until then”—the clerk pointed back toward the crowded benches—“you wait.”
    “How long?” my father asked desperately.
    The man shrugged.
    Papa could only find a little place for us on the floor by the wall. We each sat down heavily in the grime, my father and I. He chewed on his bottom lip and stared straight ahead. I knew for a fact we had only a few marks left, barely enough for a week’s worth of food. It was there in my little pocket, along with our tickets.
    “Papa,” I asked, “how long till Mama gets better?”
    He gave a start. Whenever I called him “Papa,” he looked surprised. With four girls in his house, he often seemed to have trouble placing me. In Vishnev, from what I understood, Papa had been a peddler of sorts—a trader, a junk man, always bartering goods from one town to another. There was never the same thing in his cart: One week he’d have kettles, then perhaps cucumbers, then fleece. Often he was gone for weeks at a time. He’d been absent for my birth. He had also been away during the pogrom. This no doubt saved his life. However, during their many arguments, my mother was always quick to shout, her voice palsied with recrimination and fury: Had he been home, he might’ve saved my grandfather. Had he been there to defend us, perhaps our barn wouldn’t have been burned to the ground. How was she supposed to protect a family all by herself ? she wanted to know. In fact, she often insisted, as her hysteria mounted, if my father stayed home a bit more, perhaps she’d have had another son instead of four useless daughters. “Look around you—nothing but four mouths to feed and marry off,” she’d cried. “But what do you expect, with you hardly here? How could a boy baby possibly take root?”
    Since the day she was married, apparently, my mother had been harvesting grievances; it was like a dowry in reverse. Hearing her litanies of woe, my father just threw up his hands and sighed. “What do you want me to do, Tillie? Do I look like God?”
    Now, as I sat beside my father at the detention center, he was like a work of art to me. I’d never seen him in broad daylight before, quite so close up. Throughout the Russian Pale, Papa had been known as an extremely handsome man. The bones of his face, I saw, were strong and pleasingly symmetrical, his eyelashes as long as petals. As I studied him, he seemed to breathe with his whole body. The solid, muscular presence of him in his dark jacket, with his thick, ginger hair curling out from beneath his hat, awed me. My papa. I had never had him all to myself.
    I tugged on his coat. “Papa? Will Mama and Rose go blind? Will Flora and Bella?”
    Sighing, he shook his head.
    “What’s it like to be blind, Papa?” I asked, the words warming in my mouth. “If a person is blind, can they still eat? With a spoon, or only with their hands? Are they allowed to have soup?”
    He gave a mirthless little laugh, then unfolded himself and stood up. His dark, storm-gray eyes darted about. Papa was too restless for his own good, Mama often complained. Even at the Sabbath table he jiggled his leg, drummed his fingers on the tabletop. While other fathers could remain hunched over the Torah for hours, Papa studied for only a few minutes before abandoning it and heading out, looking for something