The Ice Cream Lady
by Leonard Henry Scott
I itched so badly I could barely stand it, deep inside my legs, my arms, my chest and face. My God, my face! Everywhere my skin crawled with virus. and hideous measle bumps had taken over my body. My lungs ached and I could hardly breathe. Measles with pneumonia, nice combo. I was six.
“Don’t scratch! You’ll make it worse and you’ll get scars and pits everywhere,” my mother said as she sat beside me on my bed with a comforting arm and a damp washcloth to cool the fever.
* * *
The previous year, my dad’s mother came to visit all the way from Poplar Bluff, Missouri. I had never met her before. Although I had seen pictures of her in the photo album, there were none taken with me. I remember one picture of her in particular. She wore a light-colored dress and was smiling broadly beneath the confident tilt of her wide-brimmed fedora hat. My grandmother was a small, sturdy woman well-honed by the vagaries of country living.
And I recall a particular picture of my mother on a visit to Poplar Bluff. It was of a skinny, very young-looking new mom in a summer dress hovering over her infant son like a protective angel. The baby was my brother, named “Little Walter,” after my father. There was something very serious and oddly prophetic about the look in my mother’s eyes.
There were other pictures of them in the album: grandma holding baby Little Walter; Little Walter at an older age running around in the yard; the three of them standing together under a tree. My dad — “Pop” — wasn’t in any of the pictures; he was the photographer. But there was a separate picture of him with his ever-present pipe, leaning casually against that same tree in white slacks and a white shirt with the sleeves halfway rolled up.
“She really doted on Little Walter,” my mother once said years later as we sat together looking through the photo album. “Your grandmother loved him so much. When he died...” She stopped and stared at the pictures for one very long moment. “She was very upset.”
All at once we were on another page, and she was cheerfully chattering on about the photo of some distant cousin whose name I had heard; Willie or Wilbur, I think. But I had no clue how we were related. My parents rarely talked about Little Walter, but a large, framed, brown-faded photo of him had always hung over the head of their bed as a silent memorial. He was a pleasant-looking infant in baby booties and a long gown. He died at the age of six in 1937. He had pneumonia, just like me.
* * *
The doorbell rang. I heard it and then footsteps toward my room. I was in and out of sleep.
“And how are you, young man?” Dr. Lind was a large, amiable fellow who towered over me with his big smile. He had come all the way from ritzy Grand Concourse, a wide, tree-lined boulevard filled with majestic art deco buildings rife with curved and geometric windows that swept improbably around their corners.
He listened to my heart with his stethoscope and asked me how I was feeling.
“My throat is sore, and I itch.”
“I know it’s hard. But try not to scratch. I am going to give your mom something for those bumps that should help with the itching. You’ll be better soon.”
He gave me an injection and a reassuring pat on the shoulder. And then he left to talk to my parents in the living room. Although I could hear the low rumble of their conversation, I could not discern what they were saying.
Dr. Lind was wrong, because it wasn’t hard to not scratch; it was impossible. And for many years into my adulthood until it finally faded away, I had one little pockmark near my mouth that could have been a remnant from the measles. Every time I looked at it in the mirror, I remembered my mother’s cautionary words. The little pit could have been caused by measle-scratching, or maybe from the chicken pox, which I got the very next year. Back then, we got everything.
* * *
By the time she got around to meeting me, my grandmother, Elizabeth, was an old woman, not at all like the sturdy, hard-boned lady in the wide-brimmed hat. The intervening years since that old sepia photo had shriveled her down to a frail wraith. She could sit only in a straight-backed chair and gaze through the large double-hung bedroom window that overlooked my mother’s garden in the backyard in the Bronx. Her thick, curly white hair would catch the sun.
I remember her eyes especially. Those large, steady, staring brown eyes could warm your heart or caution your soul. She was a gentle, soft-spoken person. But her eyes were an antidote to sassiness. If she gave me a certain look, she could scare the pants off me.
* * *
“They’re coming to my house,” I said on the sidewalk.
“Really?”
My buddies, Carl and Bernard, were suitably impressed.
The ambulance remained well past the time when the slow evening shadows had crept all the way across the street. The circling ambulance light grew deeper and redder, resonating in the darkness. Its luminous glow bounced along the fronts of all the houses and the small, silent vigil of neighbors who had gathered in their front yards.
It was important that the ambulance was there, and I felt special. It was like having a personal visit from a high official or even the Queen. When the ambulance left, the people in it took my grandmother with them. And I never saw her again.
* * *
I was in and out of feverish consciousness, coughing and itching. It felt like someone was sitting on my chest. I was awake, then I was asleep, again and again, and I had no sense of time.
“I’m going to lose him.”
“No, no, my dear.”
It was Mrs. Perkinson, an older woman, a widow who rented our upstairs apartment with her son who was a chiropodist. She had given me my first ABC book, which I still have. She and my mother were talking in the hall by the stairs. I could hear them in the middle of a clear conscious moment.
My mother was disconsolate. “I’m going to lose him, just like little Walter.”
I could hear her sobbing softly as she spoke with Mrs. Perkinson. I’d never heard her cry before, and I didn’t know what to make of it.
In 1959, Jack Douglas published a book, titled My Brother Was an Only Child. It was a very funny and popular book. But ironically, although my brother was actually an only child, it was not funny at all. It was sad. He died before we ever got to meet each other. Every year on Memorial Day, Pop would drive us out to Brooklyn to visit his grave in Cypress Hills Cemetery.
* * *
My mother feared she would lose me, but she didn’t. And in the fullness of time, it was I who lost her. If I had lost her all at once on a particular day — the way I lost Pop — I would have grieved and recovered. But instead, sadly, I lost her in pieces in the most tragic way; her mobility and her independence to a stroke; both of her legs to diabetes and, finally, her mind. All of this slow dying took several years. I felt completely helpless, and it was painful to watch as she slowly faded away. But of course it was more painful to her.
In the final months, she would look at me and her — unfocused? — eyes would roam about the room. But she would not speak or respond in any way. And I couldn’t tell if she was still there, somewhere inside behind the mysterious glint of her wandering eyes, or if she was entirely gone. I had failed to save her. And the depth of the sadness that I still feel; the grief and the unremitting guilt can never be properly articulated, even now.
And maybe, just maybe, this experience could provide some insight into how my grandmother might have felt when my brother died. She had doted on him so much and was very unhappy when he suddenly got sick and died. She was all the way over in Poplar Bluff, Missouri. She could do nothing. She was too far away.
* * *
But now, I have survived the carnage of this life long enough to inevitably become “an old fart with his memories and his Pall Malls,” as Kurt Vonnegut once observed. Yet, despite the ever rolling tide of years, one small part of me remains stuck in time as a sick little boy, itching and trying not to scratch, feverish and hoping not to cough up my insides while my worried mother sat on the edge of my bed doing all she could to comfort me.
“Mom, do we have any ice cream?”
“No, so sorry, we don’t. But I will get some tomorrow. I promise.”
I’d had my tonsils removed earlier that year, and I was in the hospital overnight. That evening my parents brought me some ice cream. I was so excited. But when Pop offered me some in a little spoon, I was all smiles until it rolled down my throat, like ice-cold liquid fire.
But now, although I coughed constantly and heaved up mucus from my lungs by the quart or so it seemed, my throat did not feel like one tender, long-open wound. So, I thought this time would be different, not like the hospital. Any soreness in my throat would be soothed by the icy cool feel of ice cream. It would feel so, so good sliding down my throat; so cool and refreshing. And on that night, I wanted ice cream more than I had ever craved it before in my life.
* * *
And it was on that very night something truly strange happened, yet it didn’t seem so at the time. I have revisited this event over and over throughout the years and have been unable to get it out of my mind. But it’s like a memorable foggy night, although you can clearly remember the night there is no way to recall what might have been hidden in the fog.
Deep into the bottom of the night, I suddenly awoke for no particular reason. All about my room was dark and silent. I had a window, but the blinds were closed and the curtain drawn. Across the alley, six feet from the outside of my window was another building. So, even if the blinds were open, no light from the sky or the moon could intrude. I sent my eyes around the room but there was nothing to see save shadows and darker shadows, outlining vague shapes of things that had lost their meaning in the darkness.
And it was so quiet.
Slowly I became aware that someone was standing next to my bed, an erect but silent shadow barely distinguishable from the night itself. If I had thought about this at all — but I didn’t — I would have concluded that the silent figure was my mother.
She did not speak, and her face was consumed in shadows. I sat up in bed for a time. And there, all at once in that darkened room, I had ice cream. I could feel the coolness of the small bowl as it was placed in my lap. There was no light, but none was needed. I ate all of the ice cream, and the only sound was the soft clatter of the spoon against the sides of the bowl. My mother did not say a word as she waited beside my bed. And when I was finished, she took the bowl and the spoon and left.
It was vanilla ice cream, cool and sweet. My throat was not sore at all, and the ice cream had a wonderful taste. I don’t recall what, if anything, I might have said and, when she had left, I slid down under the covers and went to sleep.
* * *
The next morning as I recalled what had happened during the night, I still didn’t think it was particularly unusual. My mother didn’t speak at all during her visit. It was late at night; our two rooms were close together, and Pop was asleep. My mother did deeply believe that night-time was a quiet time, and she often moved stealthily about the house at night.
However, I did find it odd that she didn’t turn on the light and that I couldn’t see her face at all in the shadows. But the ice cream itself was sufficient to entertain most of my thoughts. I was grateful for it, but when I thanked my mother that next morning, she said that it was just a dream and assured me that she would get some ice cream when she went to the store later in the day.
It wasn’t a dream. I had vanilla ice cream. It was sweet and cool. I could taste it still. I could feel it inside of me. My lips were sticky with its sweetness. And it was on that very morning with the wonderfully sweet taste of vanilla ice cream still in my mouth that I began to feel better. And as the days passed, I continued to improve until I was completely well.
I thought about the incident from time to time over the years and even then, as a child. The shadowy figure seemed in my memory to have been somewhat small and thin. I was certain it was a woman. I couldn’t see her face, and she was so very quiet throughout. My mother said that it wasn’t her. And, upon reflection, she did seem smaller than my mother. But if it wasn’t my mother, who was she? Sometimes if I awoke in the dead of night, I would scan the room as best I could, squinting through the darkness to see if she was there. She never was.
People didn’t just come wandering into our house. One of my clear constant recollections of childhood was the nightly sound of rattling keys as my dad went through the house checking all the doors. There were loaded guns in certain places. I knew where they were, but I never touched them.
Through all the many years of my life, the memory of that night never went away. It never faded or changed. From time to time I would bring it up with my mother. Each time, she would steadfastly maintain that I must have been dreaming. But I know I was not. The taste of that ice cream was there. And it came back again and again. Ice cream often causes a repeated taste. There was nothing I had consumed that could have passed itself off for ice cream: not the soft-boiled eggs, not the soup, not the juice.
It has taken me years and much reflection to realize what truly happened. And now, I am completely convinced that the visitor to my room that night was the spirit of my grandmother. She came to do for me what she had been unable to do for my brother, Walter. And she gave me some ice cream, a gesture of love and support, the kind of thing that a grandmother would do to comfort a sick child.
* * *
A death notice in the New York Times from 1969 reported that Dr. Lind died at the age of 63. Dr. Lind was a kind and caring physician. He had delivered me in Bronx Hospital in 1941 and was my only doctor during my formative years. My mother would take me to his office to be examined until I was big enough to go by myself. I would ride two buses, and I liked going there. Grand Concourse was a beautiful area, where the rich people in the Bronx lived.
I’m sure Dr. Lind saved many people during his 35-year medical career. Although I don’t know how he died, the relative brevity of his life confirms that even physicians are subject to the same blind dispassionate luck of the draw that affects us all. For despite all of his skill and training, he was still unable to save himself just a little longer.
* * *
My grandmother, Elizabeth, was very upset when my brother, Walter died. Perhaps she felt that if she had not been so far away in Poplar Bluff, she could have helped to save him. The only time that I had ever seen her in my life, was when she came to visit us in the Bronx and died in my house. Maybe her spirit lingered there after she died. Or she could have returned to visit because I was sick. I don’t know how those things work. But I do know that deep in the middle of that particular night when I was sick and six years old, she visited me and gave me ice cream.
When Dr. Lind visited, he gave me a shot of penicillin, a miracle drug that didn’t exist when Little Walter died. People would probably say it was the penicillin that brought me back to wellness. Undoubtedly that is true. But I think it was also the ice cream.
Thank you, Dr. Lind, of course, and thank you, Grandma, as well. Thank you for saving me. And, Mom, thank you most of all for giving me my whole life and everything that I have.
Copyright © 2025 by Leonard Henry Scott
