True Confections (21 page)

It seems to me to be a rather limited and almost fetishistic way for them to define themselves, even though they claim their lives are more open and free than those of us monogamously inclined heterosexuals, who may be less open and free but who at least don’t have to spend so much time codifying the nuances of our relationships with our various sexual partners. Frankly, when Julie and Kelly start explaining to me all over again about poly this and poly that, I just want to say to them, Polly put the kettle on, and we’ll
all
have tea!

In other words, Julie is hardly living a life of DAR rectitude. And she does have all those facial piercings (and some others I don’t want to know about), which always make me feel a little faint if I look at them too closely, though when I catch myself casting sidelong, sliding glances at Julie and Kelly, I feel guilty and inadequate and cowardly. Surely a mother should be able to gaze lovingly at her own child. What has become of my sweet little girl, who cried when I read
Are You My Mother?
to her at bedtime (it is, admittedly, a tearjerker), and later lovingly nurtured a pair of long-lived frogs (she named them Herbert and Cumulus), who dwelled in a tank in her room for eleven years? Julie used to be a kid for whom it seemed the world would be her oyster. She and Kelly are very devoted to each other, but I regret the way each seems to support the other’s sense of being wronged by the world.

I am certain the ranks of the DAR have been filled over the years by numerous spinsters in Boston marriages, but nobody talked about it. Every time the Revolutionary War came up in my studies, my mother would stress with a certain pride that our heritage made us eligible for DAR membership, though to give my mother her due, and my father too, it should also be said that
at our dinner table the DAR was mostly mocked and ridiculed and held up as the enemy, because they wouldn’t let Marian Anderson sing at Constitution Hall in 1939. So we wouldn’t have dreamed of joining, my mother and I, not in a million years—but we were eligible! The satisfaction in that! It was a bond of disdain that Frieda Ziplinsky surely would have understood.

The Ziplinsky family has an uneasy relationship with the heritage of ambition and success handed down not so long ago by that entrepreneurial goniff, Eli Czaplinsky. I think they should embrace it, the whole thing. The shadiest person in my family’s history, the darkest sheep (until me), would be Margaret Shippen—Peggy, as we call her, as if she had been over for dinner just last week and not dead in her Tory grave since 1804—good old cousin Peggy, my first cousin six times removed, who married Benedict Arnold. Family lore has it that Peggy Shippen was poor, naive Benedict Arnold’s downfall, her greed for status and her ceaseless desire for pretty things being what drove him to his treasonous betrayal. I suppose it is reckless of me to provide such obvious material about my background under these circumstances when questions of loyalty and betrayal are so prominent, but this is the fact of my heritage, which is not to say that sometimes the apple rolls quite far from the tree.

T
HE STORY OF
Eli Czaplinsky coming to America and making his fortune is so much more real to me than the textbook history lessons that are my heritage. Everything about him has always intrigued me—his arrival at Ellis Island, the whispered connection to the murder of Kid Dropper Kaplan and his hasty exodus to New Haven, the touchingly naive if hugely misguided inspiration of
Little Black Sambo
for his three candy lines. But what
about the undocumented interlude in Eli’s life, when he first arrived in New Haven? How did he survive when he stepped off the train here in August 1923?

The official Zip’s Candies history refers to his employment by the Armenians selling their chocolate-covered coconut patties. But before that he found work doing odd jobs for a pair of elderly spinster sisters, Emma and Dora Hodgson, who presided over a sweet shop on Chapel Street that was locally famous for chocolate-covered cherries and their unusual chunks of chewy nougat brittle, which they called Peanut Charms. They let Eli sleep in the back room for four months, and he learned from them all sorts of useful skills, from tempering chocolate to making fondant fillings for bonbons and mastering the alchemy required for cooking up delectable batches of caramel kisses from sugar, molasses, milk, butter, and salt.

All the Zip’s Candies dead files have languished for years in a welter of sagging cardboard boxes in a corner of the factory basement. You can learn a lot, reading through the old files of a family business that has been documenting itself for better or worse since 1924. The Hodgson files, for example, had a folder devoted to a settlement agreement made in 1956, when Sam had to pay twenty thousand dollars to their only heir, the son of their brother who had married and moved to Ipswich. The Hodgson nephew, prompted by the growing success of Zip’s Candies, had brought a suit alleging that the original formulation for the Tigermelt center was derived from the secret recipe stolen by Eli for those long-gone Hodgson Peanut Charms.

Sam told me about this claim over lunch one day so long ago the kids were still in elementary school and it would be years before they would have to decide if they wanted to work in the business. But he had brought it up, the question of the next generation, as he did from time to time. I never wanted to make
Jacob or Julie feel that they were expected to work for Zip’s Candies, but from the time they could walk they both loved going to visit the factory, and as they grew older, they appreciated the social value of being in a candy-making family. For every school fund-raiser, for every auction benefit, New Haven Country Day could count on Zip’s Candies for generous support. One year, we donated the top raffle prize, a Zip’s Golden Ticket, which granted the winner free candy from Zip’s every day for a year, up to ten pieces each day. Howard loved being admired for our support of all those school events. We were good citizens of New Haven Country Day, despite my many skirmishes over the years with various faculty and other parents over a range of small issues.

When the kids were little, I thought I might have a second chance in life to develop some friendships among the parents of their friends and classmates. But from nursery school on, I would feel drawn to people, their kids would get along well with my kids, we would start out with nice exchanges, playdates, outings, a few sleepovers, but then sooner or later the adult relationship would go off the tracks.

I have come to recognize that many people are both hypersensitive and judgmental. Apparently I can be too much for a lot of unimaginative people. I have always been very responsible for children in my care. But my altruism can be misunderstood, whether it takes the form of serving perfectly wholesome beef stew to a malnourished little second grader friend of Jacob’s whose vegan parents were practically starving him, or giving a much-needed haircut to a kindergarten classmate of Julie’s who was over for a playdate. That pixie cut really did improve the little girl’s appearance. She had looked like Cousin It. I have no idea why her silly mother cried like that. It was just hair.

Howard usually shrugged off these minor dramas when he
heard about them, but he was quite irked with me when the kids were in the upper school and the parents association got involved with a Halloween campaign to post “No Candy Here” signs on the doors of known sex offenders living in New Haven neighborhoods conducive to trick-or-treating. Although I had certainly not volunteered for this, it was somehow assumed that as candy makers we would want to be involved in this ridiculous enterprise. I thought it was a terrible idea, one that seemed like harassment to me, and was possibly not even legal. And in any case, I didn’t like the smugness of this virtuous shaming one bit.

The week before Halloween, I received in the mail a large envelope containing a list of fourteen names and a map of the Whitneyville section of New Haven, with fourteen marked addresses and fourteen “No Candy Here” signs to distribute accordingly. On Halloween night, children who were drawn to the “Candy Here” signs displayed at those fourteen addresses were rewarded with generous quantities of Little Sammies, Tigermelts, and Mumbo Jumbos. The signs were recognized, however, and later that night a group of perhaps a dozen indignant vigilante parents came to our door to pick a fight. Julie and Jacob weren’t home yet, having been given permission to go to parties, it being a Saturday night (the second best night of the week for Halloween candy sales), and the trick-or-treating had subsided.

Howard answered the door with a bowl of Zip’s candies, and instead of the almost-too-old final goblins of the night, he was confronted by this angry posse eager to tell him exactly what outrageous thing I had done with that list and those signs. People can be ridiculously judgmental and small-minded.

W
HEN SHE WAS
in high school and had spent three summers working at Zip’s, Julie told me I had hurt her feelings when I suggested, in response to a great seventh-grade report card, that with her powers of observation and her wonderful writing skills she might consider journalism. She admitted that for a long while after that she felt rejected by me, because this must have meant I didn’t want her working at Zip’s, that I was trying to keep her out with this diversionary suggestion, as if she was unsuitable for and unworthy of the family business. I was, of course, very sorry that I had given her that impression. As a parent I have always wanted my children to know how interested I am in their lives. It’s what I wished for and never had. But of course each generation compensates for early deprivations by imposing new, different ones on our children.

T
HIS TALK WITH
Sam about the next generation coming into Zip’s Candies led to a chat about Eli’s earliest days in New Haven, and the Hodgson sisters, and the subsequent claim. Sam told me where to look for the files on the settlement agreement if I was interested. Of course I was interested, as he knew I would be. This is why he told me things he never told anyone else. He also told me (I have my scribbled notes from that day right in front of me, in notebook #19, because I certainly did not burn my notebooks, and I can quote what he said) that while there was never any admission on the part of Zip’s Candies when they paid off the nephew with this go-away money that bought a nondisclosure agreement, he believed that Eli did copy the recipe for those Peanut Charms.

“Eli was hungry,” Sam said to me. “Hungry people don’t always do the right thing. We’re doing well, so we’re not that hungry, so we can afford to do the right thing. The problem
comes when people are well-fed for so long that they forget what hunger feels like, and then they also can start to forget what the right thing is. So the trick of it,” he told me, picking up the check and studying it, having now eaten all our shared French fries while I was taking his words down in my notebook (I noted this too, in the margin—“S ate most of the ff again”), “the trick of it is to find the balance between being too hungry and not being hungry enough. And a rich man has to work very hard to find a way to make sure his children are just a little hungry.”

He stopped my writing hand, wrapping it in his big knuckley paw, which was a strangely intimate gesture between us. Though he didn’t smoke his cigar at Clark’s, he always had that soggy, half-smoked unlit cigar in his mouth or in his hand, and so for the rest of that day my hand smelled strongly of his perpetual cigar, that corky odor I wasn’t crazy about in his lifetime. Sam’s office had a unique miasma, a blended aroma of the sweet candy-factory air and that sour cigar smoke, which I continued to taste for a long time whenever I had been in there for something. Sometimes it lasted into the evening hours, as if molecules of cigar smoke and chocolate and burnt sugar had lodged up my nose and in the back of my throat and on my soft palate.

Sam’s own taste buds had been numbed by his years of cigar smoking, which sometimes led to arguments, especially when he sampled the Tigermelt center blends, since he always thought we needed to salt the fried peanuts more heavily. (“Everybody likes salt,” he used to argue if he happened along as a batch of Tigermelt nougat filling was being blended. “Even if they say they don’t. If two candies are very similar, and one tastes a little saltier, people will prefer that one. Always put in a little more salt.”) Now that he is gone I miss that cigar smoke very much. I have more than once followed down the street a prosperous
stranger puffing on a Macanudo, just to have a few stolen moments of breathing in that familiar aroma.

So I looked up when he stopped me from writing, and he said gently, “Alice, kiddo, you’re the best thing to happen to this family. Howdy doesn’t know how lucky he is. He thinks he makes his luck, but he has never been hungry enough to make his own luck. We gave him everything, after we lost his brother, and that was a mistake, because nothing was a struggle for him, everything came to him too easily. Frieda wouldn’t hear me for many years, and I couldn’t fight with her. She just wanted her Howdy to have what he wanted, when he wanted it. There was so much pain about Lewis. Howdy never learned how to make a plan to get what he wanted on his own, or how to do without. He never learned to wait, he never had to earn anything he got. He grew up believing that this was how life works, and he didn’t realize that for other people there is much more struggle, much more conflict. Now maybe Frieda regrets this, because she sees what kind of man he is, but she doesn’t say. He’ll never be Lewis.”