True Confections (18 page)

Irene has always been satisfied just coasting. In every part of her life, really. She got good grades at Brown, which she manages to mention very, very often, because it is one of her only achievements that wasn’t entirely bought and paid for. She met Arthur Weiss in their junior year; they married right after graduation, and they divorced after eleven years together, when Ethan was five. Arthur is now a successful anesthesiologist (how often those two words go together!) living in Princeton with his second wife (his former office manager) and their children.

Irene has made a career out of discovering herself since the divorce. She is always totally obsessed with her projects of the moment, and even now when we are barely speaking I still get email bulletins about her sensitive responses to world disasters and her deep personal awareness of global warming and the need for worldwide sustainability. I find her very silly. I suspect Ethan does too.

It’s a miracle he has turned out to be as decent as he is, with those parents. He was a monstrous child, “self-regulating,” rather than disciplined in any way whatsoever, so he was always cranky and sleep-deprived, always whining, always eating sugary things right before meals, always having tantrums, always demanding the next thing and the next thing. And Irene’s attempts to civilize him were always situational, with no underlying consistency or ethic.

“Stop smearing your cupcake on the sofa, Ethan, sweetie,” she would say, only after I was clearly reaching the end of my tether, though under ordinary circumstances I was reasonably patient with most kids. “Your aunt Alice doesn’t like it when you do that.” I felt guilty disliking that child as much as I did. One shouldn’t loathe toddlers, should one? But he was a disaster.

To his credit, Ethan would clearly prefer to stay the hell away from both of his parents as much as he possibly can these days, and he’s turned into a reasonable adult. Neither of my kids is especially close to him, their one and only American first cousin.

This brings me to the Madagascar cousins. Darwin and Miriam have no children. Darwin’s sister, Huxley, had a baby a few months after Howard and I were married. I remember hearing about it from Frieda, who mentioned it several times, in a rather conspicuous way, in retrospect. Was she testing me, to see what I knew? Newton (don’t those Czaplinskys have the
craziest names? Where’s Copernicus Czaplinsky?) was an only child for a long while, until his younger brother, Edison, was born, soon after I had Jacob.

Because Newton was five years older, Jacob never really got to know him the way he became close to Edison during those summers they worked and played together on the plantations. Jacob and Edison, though both born in 1982, were not technically of the same generation, since Newton and Edison were actually Howard’s second cousins, making them second cousins once removed to my kids.

I know that parsing who is a first cousin once removed as opposed to who is a second cousin is excruciating for most people, who couldn’t care less. It’s a particular skill you develop at an early age in a family like mine. To be a Tatnall is to have an anxious desire to have precise knowledge about your degree of relatedness to Benedict Arnold’s wife. But it’s important to understand these Ziplinsky relationships with clarity, given the situation we’re in now. The obsessive scrutiny and analysis of the family tree with which I was raised turns out to be a somewhat more useful skill than, say, scrimshaw, after all.

I
NEVER WENT
to Madagascar. I always meant to, and most people who know a little bit about our family story—Eli’s amazing reconnection with his long-lost brother, who settled in Madagascar during the war, the fortuitous way the families found each other just before Eli died because a cacao broker with whom they both did business happened to notice and comment on their similar names—assume quite naturally that I have been there. People who heard about the Madagascar family would tell me they envied me the exotic trips they assumed I had made, and I would usually gloss over it and change the subject,
unless pressed, when I would have to say with some awkwardness that it had never worked out for me to go there, though everyone else in the family has spent time on the family cacao and vanilla plantations.

That’s not quite true. It is more accurate (and painful) to admit now that I allowed myself to be kept away. The human heart has an amazing capacity to know and not know at the same time.

In the first years of our marriage, Howard would travel to Madagascar once or twice a year, often during the rainy season, which can be dangerous, with mudslides and flooding. It is certainly not a brilliant time for tourism, he pointed out on each occasion when the possibility of my accompanying him arose. He always told me I should go in another season, for sure, maybe in the fall, maybe in the spring, and we spoke of making such a trip together, but the years kept passing. His photographs were beautiful. The immense baobab trees lining the road leading to one of the cacao estates looked as if they grew in a Delvaux landscape.

Then I had babies, and they were too young to travel to a place like that, a malaria zone, and also too young to leave for more than a few days, not that there was anyone I would have trusted to take care of them. With whom would I have left Julie and Jacob when they were growing up? Irene? Frieda and Sam, so Frieda could brainwash my children to regard me, the one non–blood Ziplinsky, as an outsider the way she did? Now
that
would be evidence of irresponsibility! It might have been different if I’d ever had any close friends, the sort of people who very naturally love your children and are eager to take care of them so you can travel, but I have never cultivated or maintained friendships.

And then as the kids grew older there was always something urgent and unmissable of theirs on the schedule, and when Howard would go, it never seemed like the right time to leave our kids, or to leave Zip’s, where I was very much a cog in the machinery, especially with Howard away. And it never felt right for me to consider making a trip on my own to go to this difficult, remote place to stay with these relatives I didn’t know, beyond the one strange encounter at our wedding.

Over the years, Julie and Jacob and I enjoyed the times when Howard was in Madagascar, where he went every six or seven months. His absence was relaxing, because I had fewer domestic requirements for daily living without him. I suppose it is a cliché, the way I was a contented and unsuspicious wife who used to enjoy the luxury of my temporary solitude when Howard was on those Madagascar trips. I became indulgent about letting the kids stay up late on school nights, a secret violation of one of Howard’s most serious theories of parenting. It was always clear to me anyway that his motives for maintaining strict bedtimes were based on his preference for the end of the evening to be unencumbered by the needs of children, not about any true philosophy of child development. It was a break for me when I didn’t have to honor Howard’s food preferences, which ordinarily had me preparing elaborate meals most nights of the week. When he was away, the three of us would depend on takeout Chinese food or pizza, in rotation with another Daddy’s-away tradition of ours, which was what the kids happily called “breakfast-dinners.”

On those nights we would have scrambled eggs and bacon, or French toast and sausages, or pancakes with sautéed apples and bananas swimming in maple syrup. Although Howard didn’t manifestly endorse Frieda’s belief that women who served
their children scrambled eggs or French toast for dinner were all alcoholic Protestants, my doing this made him uneasy. What’s more, the three of us would change into pajamas and robes and slippers before we ate our breakfast-dinner. This would not have suited Howard at all.

W
HEN
E
DISON WAS
twelve, he came to stay with us in Connecticut during a school break in the monsoon season. He was a beautiful boy, with an almost angelic look to him. I had never met his mother (and I never will—why would I want to meet the sperm embezzler who has taken away the life I deserved, the life I worked so hard for, the life I earned?), but I imagined her to look as fiercely exotic as her brother, Darwin. The fuzzy snapshot of her that Edison kept under his pillow (I found it when I made his bed) confirmed that. Those half-Czaplinsky, half-Malagasy offspring are remarkable genetic upgrades, I have to admit.

Edison was paler and more Caucasian in his features than I remembered his uncle Darwin being, but he had those startling blue eyes that run in the family, and that same fierce island look about him, like a young warrior who is coddled in his youth but will one day be challenged and hardened to face the responsibilities of manhood. He definitely didn’t look Caucasian (I realize I am dwelling on his appearance), especially in February, in New Haven, Connecticut, where he seemed to glow with a tropical radiance against the New England grayness. He was amazed and horrified by the snow and ice, and he was miserable in the cold.

Edison was a sweet boy, polite, eager to pitch in, undemanding (though he didn’t like a lot of our food and was happiest at any meal with a banana and a big bowl of rice), but he was very
timid around me. He would always cast his eyes down when I spoke to him. I couldn’t decide if this was a cultural imperative or something specific to his awkwardness around me. He was more relaxed around Jacob and Julie, whom he was meeting for the first time, since Jacob was also twelve and would make his first Madagascar trip the following summer, and Julie was then only ten.

It was difficult to get anywhere with him conversationally, because he was so shy with me. One morning while I watched him tuck into his banana and rice, I asked him if he had any brothers and sisters, and he replied, “Newton,” in a whisper. That was the name of his older brother. Howard explained to me that Newton, who was some six years older than Edison, was beginning to take on some of the administrative tasks of the Czaplinsky cacao plantations, working for his uncle Darwin.

Edison was almost clingy with Howard, in a babyish way for his age, though what did I know about how a twelve-year-old Malagasy boy should comport himself? Whenever I tried to hug him he stiffened up and tolerated me politely, but it was like hugging a cooperative chicken. I wondered if it was considered unmanly to accept a woman’s affection if she isn’t your mother, let alone if she’s a strange white woman, whether or not you have been told she is in your family. I asked Howard what his cousin Huxley was like, wondering if Newton and Edison’s mother was very undemonstrative. I realized I had never heard a word about her in all these years. I cannot stress enough how out of focus the Madagascar family was always kept. Howard was very vague in his reply. Perhaps, too, there was residual resentment among the Czaplinskys over Julius’s having been left behind? And about Eli’s failure to find him over all those years in Budapest? I asked Howard about both of these issues more than once, but he told me dismissively that I was looking for
trouble, and that most people don’t carry grudges the way I think they do.

A few times in the course of those weeks, I heard Edison call Howard “Baba.” When I asked Howard why, Howard told me it was just a nickname he had with the Czaplinsky boys, because when Newton was a baby, he hadn’t been able to say “Howdy,” and had used baby babble when he greeted Howard: “Babababa.” And then it just stuck all these years, so it was natural for Edison to call him that as well, since that was what he grew up hearing Howard called by his older brother. While true, that was an incomplete answer.

And so the years passed, and Jacob began to go to Madagascar each summer. Julie never wanted to go that far away from us, plus she had developed a terrible fear of lightning on Madagascar, having heard the story of Lewis’s death. Julie was an anxious child with a number of phobias, not only a fear of thunder and lightning (Astraphobia, murmured Dr. Gibraltar) but also a fear of lightning bugs and any other bioluminescent creatures that might light up anywhere near her; after his first Madagascar trip, Jacob had described seeing on the dock in Antsiranana harbor some bizarre glow-in-the-dark sea creatures from the deep that been inadvertently landed, entangled in a fisherman’s nets.

Julie also had some significant allergies and easily triggered asthma, which at times made Howard impatient, because he thought she brought it on herself with her unnecessary anxieties. He felt that it would be unwise for her to go to that potentially difficult and primitive place, when something could go really wrong, as the family knew so well. And so the women in the family didn’t go to Madagascar, just the men.

With Jacob on Madagascar for those two months each summer, having his independent time among his cousins, a summer visit for me became problematic, because, and Howard felt
strongly about this, I would have been crowding Jacob. It would be unfair, a real Jewish mother thing, like something Mrs. Portnoy would do, for me to follow him there. Even Frieda had given Howard that freedom. The first time Jacob went to Madagascar, the summer he had just turned thirteen (having dropped out of Hebrew school after deciding against a bar mitzvah, a choice we let him make, which gave Frieda immense, grim satisfaction), Howard flew there with him and got him settled in, returning to Connecticut two weeks later, while Jacob stayed all through the summer and made the journey back on his own, just before school started, very pleased with his independence. After that, Jacob went on his own every summer as soon as he finished school, changing planes in Paris, returning over Labor Day weekend most years, until college, when his American life started looming larger, with friends, girlfriends, and internships breaking the pattern.

Was there a moment when I figured it out? There were so many moments, and yet I kept not knowing, and not knowing, over three decades. Did everyone in the family know the truth except for me? Did Irene know? She only went to Madagascar herself that one time when she was a kid. And she has always been remarkably uncurious about other people’s lives unless they had a direct effect on her. Maybe she didn’t. I can’t believe she wouldn’t have wanted to lord it over me in some way if she did. The Ziplinskys are notoriously bad at keeping secrets, though this was one Howard managed to hold on to for a very long time. Sam knew. Irene’s argument that he didn’t know, and so his intentions for the trust could not possibly have been meant to include Newton and Edison, is shamefully meretricious. Of course he knew. That’s why he made the deal with Howard, promising him the business if he married me and stayed in New Haven and worked at Zip’s. Ironically, given the lengths to
which everyone went to conceal the truth from me at the time, I believe that had I known, I would have agreed to marry Howard just the same. I would have helped Frieda and Sam keep Howard. I would have been willing to go along with it. They didn’t have to use me.