True Confections (16 page)

I suppose you could count Irene’s high school abortion as technically having fulfilled the peculiar Ziplinsky destiny of doom for the firstborn child. Please don’t misunderstand me; I served two terms on the state board of Planned Parenthood of Connecticut twenty years ago, and I was tireless in my efforts to keep abortion safe and legal and available to girls like Irene. The offices were in those years located above the New Haven clinic on Whitney Avenue, and some afternoons, on my way out after committee meetings, I would see high school girls in the waiting room, many of them in the plaid skirt and green sweater that was the uniform of St. Mary’s two blocks away. I was the youngest member of the board at that time, and I knew that many of the older board members were motivated by their fond dedication to a lifted-pinky and benevolent sort of eugenics. These dowagers in Lilly Pulitzer dresses and Mother’s pearls worked like busy little bees providing birth control to the lower order, poor people and “minorities.” Until 1965, all birth control was technically illegal in Connecticut. In its way, it was admirable if misguided work. Sometimes people do the right things for the wrong reasons.

Anyway, Irene had an abortion three years before
Roe v. Wade
made abortion legal in Connecticut. Howard only told me about his sister’s abortion when she was pregnant with Ethan. She had just begun eleventh grade at the Day Prospect Hill School, and Howard was a sophomore at Yale. Apparently her
boyfriend (or boyfriends, who knows) had no awareness of her pregnancy. Howard even paid for Irene’s abortion. (I find that creepy, the way it suited her to have him take the responsibility as if he was the father.) He set it up with a doctor he found because one of his Yale freshman-year roommates had been through it with his Smith College girlfriend. Never let it be said that the chief benefit of a Yale degree is being a Yale alumnus. Those Ivy League educations really prepare you!

Howard drove Irene to Springfield on the appointed day. He left her off at a certain intersection, as instructed, and watched her get into the green Buick that pulled up a moment later, and then he waited on that corner six hours later for her to be dropped off. In the intervening time Howard took himself to a German restaurant festooned with hideous beer steins hanging down from the ceiling like Prussian stalactites. It was October, and they were having a game festival, with partridge and elk and bear on the menu, so he ordered a bear steak and a mug of sudsy lager, but a group of people at the bar were singing drinking songs in German, and when his food came, he couldn’t eat it. Was he the only person in the restaurant who wasn’t there for the monthly meeting of the Springfield branch of the Baader-Meinhof Gang?

With a great deal of time to kill, Howard then went to visit the site of the apparently historic first Indian Motorcycle factory. (He had always wanted to own an Indian 101 Scout, and when I bought him one, a beautiful, cherry red, restored 1930 101 Scout, for his thirty-fifth birthday, despite my very reasonable fears about head injuries, I did so with the hope that this would satisfy Howard’s chronic adolescent need to flirt with danger.) It began to drizzle, and it got dark, and Howard sat with an unread history text in a donut shop near the appointed intersection, and there he waited and waited for Irene to reappear.

She was almost two hours late, and he had begun to imagine that she was dead and he would be blamed. How could he face Frieda and Sam and tell them they had lost another child because of the carelessness and stupidity of their only remaining child, the dumb one? Irene threw up in his car on the drive back to New Haven, Howard went to a party that night, where he drank until he passed out, and they never, ever spoke of that day again.

If Irene is outraged that I have just provided these private details in this account of family history, then I can only suggest that she review her own choices, which have led to the necessity for the whole truth of this document.

S
AM TOLD ME
more than once, usually in the context of memories of the family’s anxious vigil when the draft lottery numbers were announced in those Vietnam years (Howard got lucky each time, with very high numbers in the years when he had no deferment), that he felt terribly guilty about his younger brother’s death, which he always believed contributed to Eli’s fatal heart attack not so long after. Sam had been ineligible for military service, being nearly entirely blind in one eye, a trait he inherited from Eli.

Howard did not have this familial refractive amblyopia, which would have kept him from military service even with a low draft number, but Irene did. She says this is why she has never worn eye makeup, because she can’t see with her blind eye when her good eye is closed, so it’s very difficult to apply makeup, but she has also said at other times that she never wears eye makeup because of animal testing, and there was a year at Brown when she was militantly opposed to makeup since it represented the tyranny of the male fantasy of woman as whore,
because cosmetics are designed to enhance and exaggerate the secondary sex characteristics of the female, and lipstick in particular is used because it makes women’s lips look labial. That was the same year she stopped shaving her legs and under her arms. All that ended when she started going out with Arthur. As is so often the case with Irene, who can say what the truth is?

I
N ANY CASE
, Sam was the only heir to the Zip’s Candies empire. What he made of it was his legacy to the family. Given how he was forced to take on the huge responsibility of running the business when he was twenty-two, when his father died so unexpectedly, Sam’s stewardship of Zip’s Candies was almost not a second-generation passing of the torch so much as it was in many ways simply the continuation of everything Eli had started. There was much more of a next-generation feeling when Howard took over in 1998.

Running a candy company was probably not what Sam would have really wanted to do with his life had he not been born into it. But Sam never had a chance to have any other kind of vision for himself. His life’s work was simply to do everything he could to honor his father’s vision and ambition, and to support his mother. Keeping Zip’s healthy, making Zip’s bigger and better, little by little—that was the only thing he know how to do, the only thing he could do, after Eli died.

I asked Sam once, over one of our hundreds of grilled cheese sandwiches, if he had ever thought of not going into the family business at all. After a moment’s reflection he admitted that he would have loved teaching, and perhaps coaching high school baseball, but then he interrupted himself to declare that he really couldn’t remember even imagining any other life. He was proud to have been so successful with Zip’s that he could offer that freedom
he never had to his children and grandchildren, whom he claimed were welcome to go anywhere and do anything they wanted to do, with his blessing.

That said, and said sincerely, and often, I do think he would have been devastated if in his lifetime there were no heirs apparent named Ziplinsky, whether by blood or by marriage. “Candy makes people happy,” Sam used to say as a way of summing up and moving the conversation past a challenging moment, “and I make candy. So my business is to make people happy. Who could ask for anything better?”

Zip’s Candies might make people happy, but it doesn’t make the Ziplinskys happy. I take peculiar solace in finding myself part of a great American tradition of troubled candy families. At an awards dinner during a candy and snack show in Atlanta last year, an inebriated vendor told me fascinating details of two Mars family divorces, which make my situation seem like a piece of cake. And let us reflect for a moment on Hart Crane’s suicidal leap into the sea from a ship sailing between Havana and Florida at age thirty-three, in 1932. His father, Clarence, had invented Life Savers candy twenty years before, inspired by the recent innovation of round floatation lifesaving rings on ships.

When he sold it in 1909, Clarence Crane’s Ohio maple-sugar business was the largest maple-sugar producer in the world. He started the Queen Victoria Chocolate Company after that, and he went on to develop hard peppermint candies for the summer season, when business slowed because chocolate melted in the heat. Crane was inspired to create a new round shape for his peppermint candies by a glimpse of a hand-operated pill-making machine at the Cleveland pharmacy where he bought his flavoring extracts. He formed his round, flat peppermints on a machine adapted for the purpose. The finishing touch was a
small hole punched in the middle of each one to create Crane’s Pep-O-Mint Life Savers, packaged in cardboard tubes depicting a sailor tossing a life preserver to a pretty girl, “For That Stormy Breath.”

But the Crane family hardly profited from this innovation, as the rights to Life Savers were soon sold for only $2,900 in 1913 (doesn’t every family have at least one mythic lost family fortune?), and Clarence Crane went back to chocolate, which did not interest his poet son one bit.

As Hart Crane removed his topcoat and in his pajamas climbed over the railing of the SS
Orizaba
, “tilting there momently, shrill shirt ballooning,” did he note the irony? He was last seen swimming toward the horizon. His body was never found.

I
T’S A GOOD
thing Sam never lived to see the family at war this way. Though of course it was his death that set the crisis in motion. Howard must have known, if he thought it through, that everything would come to light sooner or later, but Howard has not exactly made a name for himself as the man who thinks things through.

I
SHOULD EXPLAIN
why I am the only member of the family who doesn’t call Howard by his nickname, Howdy. Actually, I am the only person in his life who doesn’t call him Howdy. It’s like the way Beaver Cleaver’s mother was the only one to call him Theodore. Everyone knows Howard as Howdy. It’s printed on his Zip’s Candies business cards. I have been Mrs. Howard Ziplinsky for more than thirty years now, but you wouldn’t
know it. If I identify myself that way when charging something, or phoning in an order, there is always a puzzled silence, followed by a correction: Oh, you mean
Howdy
Ziplinsky. Okay, thanks, Mrs. Ziplinsky! Have a nice day!

When Howard and his older brother, Lewis, were little, they loved to watch
Howdy Doody
on television on Saturday mornings, and Sam started calling them Buffalo Bob and Howdy Doody. I don’t know if Lewis was called Buffalo Bob for very long, or if it was ever shortened to Buff, or Bob. I wonder now if Sam realized that he was assigning Lewis the part of the responsible adult while Howard was designated the unserious puppet. Nobody talks easily about Lewis. Because he died the way he did at fourteen, every memory of him seems to be encoded with that inevitability, as if he lived his short life hurtling toward his death, and so the fact of his death retrospectively colors every fact of his life.

In his childhood, Howard was called Howdy until it caused some bullying in seventh grade and he made everyone drop it. He signed his name with a very serious “Howard M. Ziplinsky” all through junior high and high school. But when Howard went to Yale and his DKE frat brother George W. Bush started calling him Howdy, though it may have been intended as a put-down, Howard went with it, and soon everyone, even his professors, was calling him Howdy.

It’s a friendly name, I admit, an openhanded, slap-you-on-the-back, pleased-to-meet-ya! kind of name, but it doesn’t work for me. I tried to call him Howdy when we met, but it’s not really a very respectful name, and then, soon enough, it didn’t feel like a very romantic or sexy name either, and I just never could say it and mean it. If I called him Howdy it came out with a forced casualness. (And as a name, it’s a bizarre one for an adult Jewish man from New Haven, isn’t it? Wouldn’t you
expect it to be the nickname for a broncobuster from Oklahoma, at least?) Long before Howard started being a little too eager to tell people that his nickname had been conferred at Yale by that incompetent who occupied the White House for those eight long years (which of course isn’t quite true), I had ceased calling him anything but Howard.

“Howdy” suggests goofiness to me, jerkiness, clowning. And as a child, the few times I happened to see it in reruns, I was genuinely frightened by the
Howdy Doody
show. It seemed sinister to me, the idiotic Howdy puppet itself, with those cruel freckles, and the supporting cast was unspeakably creepy, from the Flub-a-Dub thing (which had a duck’s bill, cat’s whiskers, a giraffe’s neck, and spaniel ears, on a dachshund’s body, with seal’s flippers, and a pig’s tail, plus an elephant’s memory), to that big-headed Princess Summerfall Winterspring. Clearly, the show’s writers had a weird obsession with blending and hybridizing, and it gave me the willies. But then, I was a child who didn’t want my vegetables touching on my plate. My mother used to be irritated with me when I told her I didn’t like food with ingredients. I have never liked things that begin and end and begin again. I have always liked clearly defined borders and boundaries, lots of space between one thing and another thing. I hated the pushmi-pullyu in
Dr. Doolittle
. I traded with Beth Crabtree in seventh grade to avoid doing a report on the Minotaur, opting instead to take her far more manageable assigned topic, Daedalus and Icarus. Even now, I don’t like ligatures in type, and I don’t care for succotash. When Jacob went through a grade school Transformers obsession, I managed to tolerate them, but it was a huge relief when he lost interest and we could donate his collection to a homeless shelter.

But really, there was nothing to like about the
Howdy Doody
cast of characters. I hated them all: Clarabell the Clown, Chief
Thunderthud, Phineas T. Bluster, Dilly Dally, and let’s not forget the obscure sister, Heidi Doody. (I admit that at times my secret nickname for Irene has been Heidi Doody.) And they all lived in Doodyville, which was a name that frankly embarrassed me, growing up as I did in a household where we didn’t speak baby talk but called things done in the bathroom by their proper names, urination and defecation. (In elementary school I was horrified to discover all the pee pee poo poo talk that went on in my friends’ households. Barbara Roth’s family called it wizzy and push, for God’s sake.) And another creepy thing about
Howdy Doody
was the frantic laughter from the Peanut Gallery, which was like the sound of a fever dream.