True Confections (17 page)

And so I have always called Howard, Howard, and I am the only one to do so. He even wanted Jacob and Julie to call him Howdy, instead of Dad, but both of them called him Daddy when they were little, and these days they call him Pop, or, when they are speaking to me, sometimes they simply refer to him as “my father,” or “your ex-husband.”

Therefore, Howard, his actual given name, is, in effect, my private nickname for him, since nobody else uses it. Dr. Gibraltar said that this impulse of mine, this refusal to call Howard by the name he wants me to use, my too-rigid insistence on addressing my husband with a formal adult name instead of a childlike nickname, was a way of avoiding my own id-driven desire to regress to that child I was who was so frightened by everything about the
Howdy Doody
show. Ellie Quest-Greenspan helped me see that I have spent all these years fruitlessly addressing Howard’s inner adult in the hopes that he would respond as Howard the grown-up instead of Howdy the child. She said that when she looked at Howard she could clearly see his ungoverned and endlessly needy wounded inner child, the Howdy who was splashing in that river with his big brother that
terrible day when he witnessed Lewis’s death, a stuck, wisecracking Peter Pan with car keys and a credit card and a fractured heart.

S
O MUCH HAS
now changed in the family, in our situations and circumstances. But I want to be clear about something. I really had no clue for nearly thirty years that mine was not a happy and contented marriage with the mutual intention to grow old together, the best is yet to be. I didn’t know that those were the best years of my life. And those years with Howard were happy years, with a comfortable intimacy between us, a good work relationship, and an endless variety of ordinary, pleasant family activities.

We took a family trip to Vermont every summer, just before Labor Day, staying at the same farm, where the kids could gather eggs and watch the milking and help roll out piecrusts with the farmer’s wife (she used canned pie filling, but in its way, that, too, was part of the authentic experience). We spent happy days at the beach in the summer, we drove down to the Bronx to go to Yankees games, we went skiing at Butternut in the winter. Howard is a graceful skier, and he taught the kids to ski with infinite patience and humor. We laughed together all the time. For so many years, there was always that eye to catch at those moments of mutual recognition, especially in our shared pleasure in our children, as for example the time we were driving home from an entirely rainy and muddy Vermont trip and the whole family had become irritable, and then we overheard this from Julie and Jacob as they squabbled in the back seat:

“You’re ovnoxious,” said Julie self-righteously.

“It’s not
ovnoxious
, it’s
ibnoxious,”
Jacob retorted with all the superiority and confidence in the world.

Z
IP’S
C
ANDIES HAS
been in a state of flux for too long. It is only thanks to my loyalty and hard work that stability has been maintained while the internecine battles have raged. Not that I am waiting for anyone other than my own children to send any gratitude my way. But nobody in the family can claim to have been impoverished by the outcome of Howard’s and my divorce settlement or the way the courts have denied the challenges to Sam’s estate. Meanwhile, all the attorneys have certainly prospered.

I do resent the continuing insinuations about the nature of my relationship with Sam. He was my father-in-law. He was my children’s grandfather. Our relationship was one of mutual love and respect. He recognized my aptitude for the business. He appreciated the spirit and energy I brought to Zip’s. Surely my tireless efforts over the years to make Zip’s Candies grow and prosper are not the usual hallmarks of a gold digger. Surely a gold digger would be first in line to cash out and would hardly go to so much trouble to preserve the family business. How could any reasonable person deem my actions “irresponsible” or “dangerous,” let alone “duplicitous” and “manipulative”? (Not to mention the outrageous statement that I’m the one with the “vicious temper.”) I have been a more loyal Ziplinsky than anyone.

It is inevitable, I suppose, in Irene Ziplinsky’s world, when viewed through her lenses of jealousy and suspicion; a sexual connection between Sam and me would seem like the obvious explanation for his favoring me so generously. I suppose, too, it is a mark of my outsiderness that I see this assumption as perverted and offensive, insulting to me and insulting to the memory of Sam Ziplinsky, rather than logical. I have nothing more to say about these vile assertions.

No, actually, I do have one more thing to say about these vile assertions. Shame, shame, shame on you, Irene Ziplinsky Weiss, sitting there smugly in your $7 million log cabin in Telluride with your fond belief that you have, in your words, “stepped outside the economic factor” with your solar energy and your composting toilet, spouting your virtuous fair trade, sustainable, organic, free-range, antibiotic-and hormone-free, handwoven, sanctimonious crap. He always loved you like a daughter, because you
were
his daughter, as hostile and rejecting and critical as you were. Sam was a devoted father.

He loved both you and Howard, and he came to love me—his son’s wife, his daughter-in-law—for good and honorable reasons. I don’t know why this is so unbearable for you, but I recognize that it is, and I am sorry you feel so diminished and threatened by something that has never been about you at all. Sam’s bequests weren’t final report cards. It’s time to stop acting as if I cheated and got an undeserved A, while you dutifully turned in all your homework on time yet somehow failed.

I
AM CERTAIN
that Sam’s decisions were very considered. His longtime lawyer and adviser, Ben Gottesfeld, won’t take my calls and hasn’t been very helpful to any side in this situation, preferring to step back and leave all his options open. I’m disappointed in Ben, who used to be more of a mensch, and I do think Sam misjudged him. But I am certain that Ben wouldn’t have let him make mistakes in the execution of his intentions. Especially given the way Sam and his mother were left to deal with the consequences of Eli’s not having had a will, Sam was clearly focused on taking care of his family and seeing his legacy passed down just the way he wanted it.

By leaving 25 percent of the Ziplinsky Family Limited
Partnership (which owns Zip’s Candies) to Howard, Sam obviously thought he was protecting the legacy of the family business, handing stewardship and prosperity down the line to the next generation. He often said to me, Blood is thicker than water, but business is business. I have certainly wondered if Sam was somehow assuming that Howard and I would stay together and our interests would therefore continue to be one and the same. He knew what Howard had done. I have proof of that, or I did, anyway, before the fire. Maybe Sam hoped, like Howard, that I wouldn’t figure it out for a long, long time. Or maybe he intended to provide me with an independent source of wealth and security, come what may. After all, he could have simply left Howard half ownership of the Family Partnership. Or he could have named us as joint owners of a half interest, with right of survivorship. But he didn’t do either of those things. He broke his agreement with Howard, to reward him with the business if he stayed long enough. Sam knew the score, and I believe this was his way of trying to offer me some compensation and balance. It was a gesture of gratitude.

Either way, in our divorce settlement, given community-property laws in Connecticut, and given our history, and given the terms of the divorce (Howard’s position was
vacuus a crur subsisto in
, according to Charlie, in other words, without a leg to stand on), whether or not any portion of the business was already in my name had no bearing, and I was entitled to half of Howard’s interest in Zip’s.

Howard claimed at the time of Sam’s death that his father had promised to leave him a controlling interest in the company. Howard said that he and Sam had a deal they had made at the time of our wedding. Whether or not this is true, and I have reason to believe that it is, though of course I never said a word about that during our divorce proceedings, it simply doesn’t
signify, since it wasn’t in any of the provisions in Sam’s or Frieda’s estate. Apparently, Howard didn’t know that his father had actually drawn up a contract for this agreement. Sam himself said to me more than once that a verbal agreement isn’t worth the paper it’s written on. It is certainly worth no more or less than a draft of an unsigned contract.

Owing to some tricky math of the kind they do in Superior Court, our settlement agreement when we divorced awarded me a little less than half of Howard’s 25 percent of the business—as we all know, in addition to the house and an equitable portion of our other assets, I was given two fifths of his share of the partnership, in other words, 10 percent of Zip’s. Which is why today I am the largest single shareholder of the Ziplinsky Family Limited Partnership.

I am really, truly not some destructive, power-hungry monster who has invaded the precious family in order to seize control of the business, notwithstanding Irene’s hilarious remark to me outside the courtroom last time we appeared for a hearing, when she muttered at me, “Ours was a decent family before you entered it.” I’ll say it again: Sam chose to leave me 25 percent of the business. That’s the way the cookie crumbles. I have only been a Ziplinsky for three fifths of my life, unlike all natural-born Ziplinskys, but now I own two fifths of the Ziplinsky Family Limited Partnership, which is to say two fifths of Zip’s Candies, and unlike most natural-born Ziplinskys, I have earned it.

M
AYBE
I
NEED
to explain the outrageousness of Irene’s claims more clearly. Sam left Irene a portfolio of stocks and bonds worth almost half the paper value of Zip’s Candies, which was, as he made clear in very precise language, compensation for not giving her any ownership of the family business. However, her only
child, Ethan, as a grandchild, has a share in the Ziplinsky Family Trust, which now, with Frieda’s death, goes to the beneficiaries. The trust owns half of Zip’s Candies. Under the terms of the trust, the CEO of Zip’s Candies is one of the three trustees of the trust, and I maintain that with Howard’s departure, I have been functioning in that capacity ever since, which means that I am, by definition, one of the three trustees of the Ziplinsky Family Trust.

Irene’s son, Ethan, being a beneficiary of the trust, owns a share of the family business. And so despite the dispute about who exactly are the beneficiaries of the trust, which is at the heart of this mess, no matter what else Irene might claim, there is simply no validity to Irene’s belief that she has been unfairly treated. And meanwhile, irony of ironies, all the discovery documents make evident that Irene is the richest of us all, despite her poor-mouth campaign. Why choose to be pathetic and victimy and undignified? Why the determination to be seen as someone who has been cheated and disinherited?

Frieda’s death also ended the regrettable tradition at Zip’s of distributing big, unearned quarterly checks to Howard and Irene equally. Not exactly the definition of sound management practice. Howard has always drawn a good salary with benefits, and there were all kinds of over-and under-the-table benefits, but until he left, he worked hard for the business. He put in his hours, and he was kind and fair to his employees; it could be said that those quarterly payments were a reasonable bonus.

But Irene was just a parasite with a no-show job on the so-called Zip’s “board,” which “met” once a year at Passover. You would think she would have some pride. She’s fifty-six years old! Surely the time has come for her to stop thinking of Zip’s Candies as her personal Xanadu, from which she has been inexplicably exiled.

Now she is an angry baby denied her bottle. No more having
our bookkeeper pay her credit-card bills, no more having our accountant do her tax returns for her, no more sending imperious holiday emailed lists to the office with names and addresses of people to whom we must send gift boxes of Zip’s Candies “from” Irene. She has been tempered and molded and enrobed and drizzled and cooled and wrapped and extruded right off the end of the line. And I canceled her company ExxonMobil Speed-pass, too.

I
RENE’S ENTIRE OTIOSE
connection to the business was really only ever about her own status and prosperity. She has used her money over the years to fund a wide variety of half-baked do-good, feel-good enterprises of the moment. The sad truth is that Irene could have done anything in the world if she’d had the motivation. But Irene never gets traction on anything for very long, and she has never had any singular abiding passion. She’s never been hungry enough to succeed at anything that required persistence. I know I can be like a dog with a bone, but my God, she has the attention span of a gnat. She’s too self-involved to be reliable in ordinary ways, which is why she has never had a real job, though she allegedly worked in the office at Zip’s each summer while she was in high school, before I came along.