True Confections (13 page)

“I mean my mom sang it for the commercial, and he went with her and sang that last line.”

“Wait, you’re kidding. Frieda sang it? That was
her
voice I heard in the commercial when I was little?”

“She wrote it, she played the piano, and she sang it.”

“Wow.” A whole side of Frieda I had not yet glimpsed, her glam secret inner Kitty Carlisle.

“Yeah, she was inspired by the Chock full o’Nuts lady, whose husband owned the company. So first Mom talked Dad into running a radio commercial, and when he agreed to that, she worked out a deal for Little Sammies to sponsor baseball games on local AM radio for a season. Then she wrote the jingle, and then she went to the radio station in Bridgeport to record it.”

“And how did Jimmy Ray get involved?”

“There was this other black guy at Zip’s when I was little, Dave Washington. He and Jimmy used to work together in shipping—maybe they were cousins or something—and I think my mom overheard them singing doo-wop harmonies together while they stacked boxes. When I was a kid, I thought they were the coolest guys in the world. Whenever I went to the factory,
those guys were so happy back there, singing and jiving. Dad always ignored their craps games, because they got their jobs done. Jimmy Ray got a hundred dollars and he got the whole day off, too.”

I wondered even then if Howard knew how he sounded when he said things like this, or if he really had no clue that there was a hint of Massa on the plantation loving the sound of the happy darkies singing their charming spirituals while totin’ dat barge and liftin’ dat bale.

D
INNER THAT NIGHT
with Frieda and Sam was startlingly lively. Frieda’s cooking was downright exotic compared to my mother’s, plus these Ziplinskys talked avidly about everything they ate, which was somehow just not done in my family. I loved gossiping about the delicious food, I loved the jokey conversation, and I loved them, even if Frieda was determined to remain uncharmed by me. (I even kind of loved that, when it was still new, still a challenge I thought I could meet.) After dinner we watched
Maude
on television (Frieda was excited that Maude was so clearly Jewish) while Sam nodded off in his chair and Frieda kept jumping up during commercials to wash dishes.

Howard and I went back to his airless apartment on Chapel Street, where we lay naked in his bed and talked and laughed until very late, listening to the obscene shouts of the transvestite prostitutes who used to frequent his corner, clustering every night in their bulging hot pants in front of the regrettably named Gag Junior’s Lunchette, until it got so late that even they finally gave up and went home, as the sky was graying with dawn.

We fell silent. Something shifted. We turned to face each other and lay there under the tangled sheet, not speaking, just tracing each other’s bodies with a light fingertip. Howard’s
touch made me feel safe. We looked into each other’s eyes in the dim light from the window and then we each leaned toward the other until our foreheads just touched, as if this were a familiar ritual of intimacy. He looked into my eyes, and I felt so deeply seen and known. I will never be that seen and known again. I roamed freely over the hills and valleys of Howard’s clavicle with grazing fingers, walking an itsy-bitsy spider across his furry obliques, and everything else was still, stiller, stillest, until suddenly he laughed and rolled on top of me. We were so tender with each other, everything was so clear and present, and we made love for what was then only the eighth time, and it was the first time Howard told me he loved me.

You see? I remember everything.

T
HE DAY
I
FIRST
walked through those factory doors, about half the Little Sammies line and the entire Tigermelt line still ran on the original machinery Sam’s father, Eli, had cobbled together to start his candy factory in 1924. Establishing Zip’s Candies in New Haven was the fruition of Eli’s American dream, the Zip’s literature will tell you. He had a brainstorm and then he followed his passion to manufacture the three candies he was inspired to create after he happened to pick up a copy of
Little Black Sambo
that had been left on a table at the Ottendorfer Branch of the New York Public Library on Second Avenue.

And so the fate of Zip’s Candies has twice depended on someone’s happening to pick up and read something discarded by another. Of course, the influence
of Little Black Sambo
on our product line has been in, then out of, and is now back in the official Zip’s Candies history. These days, the political incorrectness of Little Black Sambo, that huge headache in the sixties, has been trumped by the appeal of Little Sammies to nostalgic baby boomers who, like their parents, grew up with them. What is even more of a market for us these days is the next generation of ironic hipsters, who have discovered for themselves the retro coolness of Little Sammies.

“Say, Dat’s Tasty!,” dropped from the Little Sammies wrapper for twenty years, was added back in 1999 for what was intended only to be the seventy-fifth anniversary limited-edition
wrapper, but then we kept that wrapper, minus the seventy-fifth anniversary designation, when “Say, Dat’s Tasty!” became a hip catchphrase first used by the rapper Krazy Koon, along with his famous signature gesture, that one extended index finger twirled comically against his cheek. The phrase and gesture were perpetuated all over the place, on radio and on television talk shows (thank you, thank you, David Letterman), and then high school kids everywhere started using the phrase and gesture sarcastically. William Safire wrote a column about the etymology of the phrase “dat’s tasty,” with citations from minstrel shows and a particular radio episode of
Amos ’n’ Andy
during which the Kingfish exclaims, “Mm, ain’t dat tasty!” over a succulent piece of fried chicken. Now of course it’s all over the Internet; there are countless “Dat’s Tasty!” and “Say, Dat’s Tasty!” tagged videos on YouTube, and those words pop up on all sorts of other blogs and websites (my daughter, Julie, who has the self-conferred title of Zip’s Web mistress, keeps track of these things). Just now, when I Googled “Dat’s Tasty!” it produced 547,862 results. Some of these are vulgar and therefore extremely problematic references, but Julie and Jacob have persuaded me that it’s all good, as they say.

T
HE COMPANY IS
proud to tell you that Eli Czaplinsky, a Hungarian Jew, an orphan who arrived at sixteen with his older brother, Morris, at Ellis Island in 1920, was a pushcart peddler with ambitions to do better with the rest of his life than sell caramels and boiled sweets on Orchard Street in all kinds of weather for two or three dollars a day. The company history certainly doesn’t mention the third and youngest brother, Julius, left behind with cousins in Budapest at the last moment when the two older brothers realized they wouldn’t have enough
money for the three of them to travel to Danzig, book passage, and procure enough food to survive the ocean crossing in steerage on the SS
Karpinski
, the dilapidated vessel that brought them to America.

The company history doesn’t explain that Eli liked to go to the Ottendorfer branch library near the rooming house on East Seventh Street where he and Morris shared a room (and a bed) quite often—in fact, nearly every day—not because of his love of books, but because it had a nice toilet in a warm room in the basement, which he preferred to the foul communal toilet in a shack in the courtyard behind their tenement. Owing to a peculiarity of its endowment, half of the library’s collection was in German. Eli would from time to time take a book from the shelves and struggle through a few pages, trying to make the most of German’s proximity to Yiddish. More appealing to him were the three Yiddish newspapers to which this library branch carried subscriptions. These were much nicer to read than all the German books with their formal language that had nothing to do with everyday New York life. Eli would visit the public library, the official story goes, to read these newspapers in a familiar language, and to take home a new children’s book each week in order to teach himself better English so he could get ahead in America. (It was his casual perusal of
The Tale of Tom Kitten
that led to his lifelong use of the surprising phrase “I am affronted” if something offended him.)

Also not in the official Zip’s Candies history are any details about what happened to Eli after Morris died in the diphtheria epidemic that swept New York in 1921 and Eli was left alone in the world to fend for himself at age seventeen. He became a tough street kid, still roving the Lower East Side hawking caramels, bull’s-eyes, blackjacks, and root-beer barrels from his pushcart, but now also running errands for a bootlegger called
Little Augie. Eli was one of the Little Augies, as the street gang was called.

It was a way to be safe and to make some extra money, and nobody was suspicious of the sweet boy with the big smile selling candy from his pushcart, which made him a very useful errand boy, and who can say what else might have been in the bottom of that pushcart? Eli transported guns from here to there, and more often than not there were hefty bundles of cash as he made his rounds peddling sweets, collecting from Little Augie’s customers along his route. Sam would tell me about these things, but then he would half take them back, always concluding with a remark to the effect that nobody really knew for sure what Eli did for Little Augie, and maybe he just left New York to get a fresh start and everything about the money and the guns was an exaggeration, and anyway, it was all a long time ago. I note with interest the relationship between the names “Little Sammies” and “Little Augies.”

W
HENEVER WE TALKED
about Eli—Sam and I—he would always say the same thing, in the same way, with a rueful shake of his head: that Eli rarely told him any significant details about whatever it was he did to get by in New York. Once, though, Eli described to Sam how he bought his first good shirt at Wanamaker’s department store, the kind of shirt a gentleman would wear, with money he and Morris had made all in one day, when they had the idea of hawking sweets in Union Square at a union rally commemorating the tenth anniversary of the Triangle Waist Company factory fire. Eli and Morris circulated through the crowd shouting out, Remember the victims! Buy a Triangle Toffee! Which perhaps misleadingly suggested that their proceeds would benefit a union fund of some kind.

It was a cold and blustery March afternoon, and Morris had a bad headache and a sore throat. By the end of the day, he was too hoarse to speak at all. The next morning, Morris was feverish and couldn’t get out of bed, and within a week he was dead and Eli was wearing his new shirt from Wanamaker’s to stand at his brother’s grave and say a Kaddish. Sam said that Eli always wondered if Morris had caught the diphtheria germ in the Union Square crowd, or if he was already infected and had perhaps spread his germs among all those people, including the many children for whom their toffees had been purchased.

What is established fact, if not the sort of detail Zip’s Candies has featured prominently in its literature over the years, is that Eli left New York in great haste at the end of August 1923, because he witnessed the murder, in front of the Essex Market Courthouse, of a gangster called Kid Dropper Kaplan, who was at the time in police custody. The Little Augies were implicated in the killing, and let’s just say there is reason to assume that Eli may have been more than a witness and it was a good time to disappear. All the rest of his father’s life, Sam told me, even long after Augie Orgen and Louis Kushner and Lepke Buchalter and all the rest of them were locked up in jail or safely dead and buried, Eli got nervous and changed the subject abruptly whenever anything about this time in his life before New Haven came up.

That August day in 1923, the day Kid Dropper was himself dropped by a bullet in the back, Eli went straight to Grand Central Terminal. Sam told me this story many times over the years, often over lunch at Clark’s, where we would go for a quick grilled cheese and a shared order of French fries, just the two of us, to take a break from the din and tumult of the Zip’s floor and, no question, to have a relaxed conversation unsupervised by Frieda. Sometimes we shared a chocolate milk shake, too.

Write this down! he would command me. You’re the only smart one who’s got an interest, kiddo, so you’re the only one I’m telling this to. Am I telling it too fast? he would ask, without slowing down, as he recounted yet another bit of weird Ziplinsky family lore, or as he expounded on his philosophies of the candy business, or as he theorized about some nuance of nougat-making. And I would, I would write it all down, in one of the notebooks I always carried for just this purpose. I have those notebooks, all twenty-two of them, dated and numbered, on a shelf at home. We had lunch at Clark’s once or twice a week for twenty-three years, until just before Sam died, when he wasn’t really able to eat the kind of food they serve at Clark’s, except for maybe a cup of soup. Their avgolemono soup is outstanding.

Sam loved his soup. He loved a lot of things. He loved life. I really miss that man. I have always had to deal with the way Frieda bore me so much inexplicable animus over the years, long before she had any specific reasons to dislike me. But her coldness was tempered for me by the genuine and deep connection I had with Sam, from that first day. Our mutual love really had nothing to do with Howard, strange as that sounds. Of course Sam was soon enough my father-in-law, and then my children’s grandfather, but I really loved him for himself. And I know he loved me. And we all know there is concrete proof of this. He was of perfectly sound mind when he made his final decisions. He was an astute businessman and an astute judge of character, and so he anticipated the need to protect me as he did. He’s been gone eleven years now, and I miss him every day.