Vanilla, with rainbow
The first faint sounds of tinny music were like a dog whistle to us neighborhood kids. We’d freeze in place, then dig frantically into our pockets for a dollar or turn towards a nearby brownstone to shout, “Mom!” My excitement, though, was always undercut by a slight sense of dread as I waited for the noise sure to follow: that of a sharp knuckle rapping on a pane of glass.
This would be my great grandmother, perhaps the only paper-thin 88-year-old as thrilled by the arrival of the ice-cream truck as a husky pre-teen.
I tried to ignore the tapping, hoped it would stop even as I knew it wouldn’t. Maybe one of my cousins would respond, or my sister — maybe even mom if she happened to be sitting out on the stoop sipping a Manhattan Special, a sweet espresso coffee soda that despite its name seemed to be sold exclusively at corner delis in Brooklyn’s Italian enclaves.
A plausible case could be made for not being able to hear her taps even as they grew more insistent. After all, they emanated from the third-floor window of a brownstone on a street saturated with sounds: the cries of kids at play, endless games of running bases, freeze tag, stoop ball, ring-a-levio and the sadistic Johnny on A Pony; the barking laughter and sharp curses of bored tattoo-drenched wise guys in sleeveless undershirts. They sat on folding chairs outside their linoleum-floored social club for endless hours, waiting for who knows what to happen. It never did.
And of course there was the growing volume of the Mister Softee jingle as the truck turned the corner onto our block. We lived then on a short street capped at one end by the perpetually clogged Brooklyn-Queens Expressway, at the other by Frankie’s deli — which in addition to milk, eggs and ham-and-cheese heroes extra mayo sold sweaters and transistor radios out of boxes that “fell off the backs of trucks.” We kids would run tabs at Frankie’s, which he’d tabulate in pencil on sheets of brown butcher paper and hand over to our mothers each Saturday.
My friends would rush to the ice cream truck, but I had a stop to make first. I’d look up to where my great grandmother sat on a worn cushion on the windowsill, a bony bird in a faded housedress. And she would open the window and yell down, “Scottso.”
She called me Scottso for a reason that felt, to her, unassailable in its logic: if my mother — having married and divorced a man whose Italian heritage was diluted by Irish, German and Scottish blood — wouldn’t give her children Italian names, my great grandmother would. Thus, I was Scottso. My sister, Lee Ann, she called Lee — if not technically an Italian name at least one that ended with a vowel.
While she tolerated the rechristening of her children, my mother drew the line at indulging her grandmother’s many old-world superstitions, these beliefs perhaps the heartiest survivors of her early-1900s immigration from Ischia, a volcanic island off the coast of Naples. They included her conviction that my left-handedness was a sign of evil — “sinestra” she would mutter as she tried to smack the fork from my hand when I twirled spaghetti. She told my mother to tie my left arm to my side, believing it would force me to adapt to her right-handed right-headed world. Mom, thankfully, declined the advice.
I walked towards my family brownstone, a four-story building home to three generations over whom my great grandmother served as benign ruler. The window would rattle up in its frame, loosing a rain of brown paint flakes. And a folded dollar-bill would flutter down like a tipsy moth.
That dollar had one purpose: the purchase of a vanilla cone with rainbow sprinkles.
While my maternal grandmother was a straight-out-of-central-casting stern Italian matriarch, as round as she was tall and capped by a steel-wool bun of hair, my great grandmother was a puff of air. A surprise given her appetite.
Deep into her 90s, she started each day by setting a battered pot of water to boil on the stove, its lip bridged by a strainer holding ground espresso beans. These she scooped from a can of Medaglia D’Oro, whose red, white and green can was as familiar a presence in the kitchen as the roaches that scattered under the sink each time the light was flicked on in the night.
Into this pot of coffee she added a cup of milk and a half-dozen tablespoons of sugar. At the kitchen table, its lace cloth protected by a layer of cigarette-scarred plastic, she opened a cellophane sleeve of Social Tea cookies. She buttered them generously before assembling them into sandwiches that she’d dip into her prehistoric latte, softening them for easy passage through her gums.
By the time I retrieved the dollar and crossed the street, I’d be sixth or so in line. At the window, I’d order her cone then treat myself to a chocolate with chocolate sprinkles. With both dripping down my hands I’d climb the stoop, be buzzed into the cool, dark foyer and follow the curve of the wooden bannister to the third floor.
I’d cross through my great grandmother’s dining room and bedroom on the way to the parlor at the front of the railroad apartment. She perched in the window there for hours at a time, one of a half-dozen elderly female sentries keeping a protective eye on our block at any given moment. Big Red, Fat Freddie, Punchy and the rest of the marginalized mobsters on the corner couldn’t identify or communicate outside threats half as quickly or efficiently as this flock of eagle-eyed immigrants.
My great grandmother — Domenica was her poetic name, although she signed legal papers with a shaky X — was mother to five daughters and one son, with a backstory largely lost to history. Taking the cone, she would reach out with another crumpled bill, which she pressed into my palm. A reward for completing my mission.
No, grandma, it’s okay, I’d say. My mother didn’t want us to take money from her, money she didn’t have and at the same time didn’t need. “Shhsh, Scottso,” she would say as a bit of mischief sparked in her eyes. “Take. Take. But don’t tell your cousins.” And I’d pocket the bill, already deciding whether to spend it on Spider Man comics or a pack of baseball cards.
This average, remarkable wisp of a woman lived until she didn’t, her death communicated to me while I shivered in a phone booth on my college campus.
Who was she, really? What was it like for her to raise six kids in a country far from home? To outlive her husband by decades? Was she content? Lonely? How did it feel to witness a parade of miracles in a lifetime where horses gave way to cars which sprouted wings and then tipped heavenward to escape the grip of gravity?
I wish I knew; I was too young then, too self-involved to ask.
But I know this: that woman took daily delight in the magic of a vanilla cone rolled in rainbow sprinkles. And I know this, too: I’m grateful to have served for a time as her reluctant delivery boy.
