Read Online The Ice Cream Queen of Orchard Street: A Novel by Susan Jane Gilman - Free Book Online Page A

scissors and stomped over to me. Grabbing me by the arm, she twisted me around and gave me a hard thwack on my backside. I howled.
    “This is all your fault! Why didn’t you listen?” she shouted.  “The one thing I asked you to do! The one thing! ‘Don’t let anybody touch your coat—’”
    “Tillie!” Mr. Lefkowitz cried.
    With a great sob, I turned and dashed down the stairs and out into the street. I had to find Papa, I knew. It was the only way to set things right.
    The saloon downstairs was long and dark inside. Behind the counter a lone man stood twisting a rag around the inside of a thick glass. “You lost?”
    “I’m looking for my papa,” I panted. “I have to find him. I have to bring him home.”
    He shrugged.
    I looked inside the nonkosher butcher’s, in the shoemaker’s. I ran to a little gambling parlor set down off the street in a basement. I thought that perhaps this was where I’d seen Papa before, smoking outside. I asked a man to go in and look for me. He seemed to be gone awhile. When he finally came out, he said “Sorry, kindeleh .” Just in case, I went in the synagogue next door and one farther up the street—perhaps Papa had had a change of heart?—but they were empty. The tailor’s, the bakery, the barber’s: all closing.
    “Malka, wait!”
    I turned and saw Flora running down the street after me. “Do you see him?” she said.
    I shook my head.
    “Mama, she is going crazy,” Flora said.
    Together, we ran along Hester Street, looking in all the doorways, all the little alleys. It was late afternoon. Peddlers were starting to pack up. Markets were shuttering. I had to find Papa. A terrible feeling mushroomed inside me. If I hadn’t given him the tickets. If I hadn’t begged to go to America instead of South Africa. If I hadn’t kept the secrets. I led Flora down one block, then another, at a frantic pace. I ran into another tavern, a cigar shop, then across toward a settlement house.
    And I would’ve kept going, too, if I hadn’t stopped paying attention to where I was running and dashed blindly off a curb and not listened when Flora shrieked, “Malka!” and, in one terrible, vicious instant, collided with the right front hoof of Mr. Dinello’s horse.
    The horse. Ah, yes, darlings. We’re finally back to that.

Chapter 3
    I awoke someplace greenish, dim . Dusty light, rippling. The pain was excruciating, radiating from my calf, ankle, knee.
    Mama? The taste of mud and hay lingered in the back of my throat. My right leg throbbed terribly. Papa?
    “Ach, ach. Don’t shout. You’ll wake the others.” A voice came: Yiddish, but unfamiliar.
    A broad face hovered over me, bald and wide like the moon. Her jowls jiggled like chicken fat. I screamed. “Shush, kindeleh ,” the voice said. Where was Mama? A hand, big and raw, like a slice of corned beef, reached in and pressed itself to the back of my forehead. Cold, stony knuckles. “No fever. That is good.” She wasn’t bald. It was a white kerchief, I realized, tied tight around her head, with no hair showing at all.
    “Where’s Mama?” I asked again. My chest felt trussed.
    “Shush.” The frowning face vanished. My chin was wet. My nose was running.
    When I touched my leg, my palm knocked up against something hard. Where was my leg? Mama! My voice boomeranged. Beside me was another bed. Something stirred beneath a blanket, gave an animal groan. I screamed. The moon reappeared with its meaty hand curved around a glass of water. “ Kindeleh . Drink this.”
      
    Today Beth Israel is a big, fancy-schmancy medical center that—up until recently—constantly solicited me for money. Up until recently, they loved me at Beth Israel, even though I usually couldn’t be bothered to attend their functions and had no problem letting them know that I thought their fund-raiser was a putz. But back then Beth Israel was simply a “dispensary”—a small clinic run by Orthodox Jews to serve the poorest of us poor on the