Free The Ice Cream Queen of Orchard Street: A Novel by Susan Jane Gilman

didn’t coddle their children back then. They needed you to walk? You got up and walked. If you didn’t, they left you sitting. What if the Cossacks came? You had better be able to run.
    Nowadays? Don’t get me started. People name their offspring Tiffany, Brittany, Courtney—all this baby royalty. Everyone pretends their kids are little aristocrats. I want to say to them, What did America fight the War of Independence for? Or, worse yet, the hippies. Lotus. Crocus. Who the hell knows where they get these farkakte names for their kids. One of Rita’s friends named her son Bodhisattva. Bodhisattva Rosenblatt. Can you imagine? Rita always says, “It’s no big deal. They call him ‘Bodi,’ is all.” Please. And the newspapers say I’m abusive to children?
    Besides, nobody ever loves you the way you want.
    For days—weeks—I lay in that dispensary. Mama, Mama , I wept. But she never came back. My voice bounced unheeded off the ugly waxed floors, the bare walls. Other patients complained. The nurses tried shushing me. Please, Mama , I sobbed. I promise I’ll be good. I promise not to eat any food. I promise to be quiet. Please, Mama , I wailed. I’ll find Papa. I cried the way only a child can, feverishly, hysterically, until I hyperventilated, my lungs and throat scorched from sobbing. Please, Mama, I’m sorry.
    Please, Mama. I’ll be useful.
    Nurses glided in and out, regarding me sadly. As they changed my bandages and put a salve on my heat rash, they tsk-tsked and tenderly touched the backs of their hands to my brow. I slapped them away.
    A rabbi who smelled of pipe tobacco and fried potatoes appeared. He was enormous. I screamed until he left. I want Mama! Probably there was a social worker, someone from a settlement house. I seem to recall a white blouse, a braided gold pin on a collar. Mama! I howled. It was hard to throw a tantrum with a broken leg and a bandaged chest, but I managed. I want Mama!
    Finally I lost my voice.
    The days grew hotter and hotter until the heat was its own animal. It hung over the beds in the infirmary, stalking and tormenting us like a predator. Even with the transoms and the windows cranked open, patients around me moaned. Sweat pooled beneath my bandages. Everything felt peed in. I itched, tore at my damp sheets. The smell of bedpans and ointments turned rancid.
    Eventually the doctor sawed off my heavy cast and exchanged it for a lighter one and a brace made of metal, leather, and wood. “Where’s Mama?” I rasped. Each morning a nurse hoisted me out of bed by my armpits and held me upright until my contorted, throbbing foot grazed the floor and my heels sat atop her own feet. Moving slowly, she tried to coax me to walk in tandem with her, her feet guiding my own. Pain shot up my hip; my ankle seemed to buckle. The weight of the brace was almost unmanageable. I balked. When one of them tried to bully me into taking a few steps, I bit her.
    After that, no one seemed inclined to continue my physical therapy.
    The family has nothing. They’re fresh off the ship.…Come over here expecting charity, did they? Oh, the worst of the worst. They give all of us Jews a bad name.…But she’s only a child… Nu? Did you see those teeth marks she left? Not so much a child as a dybbuk…The place for the cripples? She has to have been here a year to qualify.…Gouverneur’s full up.…But what are we supposed to do? Send her to beg on the streets? Well, if that leg of hers doesn’t heal properly, there’s always the sideshow at Coney Island.…Oh! Gertie! (Laughing) You’re terrible!
    Leaning languidly in the doorway, fanning themselves with folded ladies’ magazines and copies of the Yiddish Forward , the nurses didn’t even attempt to whisper.
    Slowly, a thought began to dawn in me: The reason my mother wasn’t coming back was because she was off looking for Papa. She’d left Mr. Lefkowitz’s apartment on Orchard Street to search for him. And my sisters had gone along to