True Confections (33 page)

N
OT THAT ANYONE
other than Julie and Jacob has asked, but I was not on the loading dock when the explosion occurred, because my BlackBerry signal was weak and I had jumped down into the parking lot to get more bars so I could look at my email while the papers burned. So I wasn’t injured.

I
F ANYONE IS
going to be accused of acting with fraud and malice, it shouldn’t be me. (And in memory of Miss Solomon and in
honor of all that she taught me, I would like to point out that one doesn’t act “with fraud and malice,” one acts “fraudulently and with malice.”) There is no extant evidence that I have done anything malicious or fraudulent. And despite the explosion, everything I wanted to destroy was in fact successfully incinerated. I could have spared myself all the ridiculous attention this fire has brought if I had only used our shredder. It would have taken me a few hours, and that would have been that. But there is no beauty in shredding, no grace.

W
HAT
I
BURNED:
all the documentation and correspondence I have described in this affidavit, and much more that I haven’t described. All the significant files of Zip’s Candies, going back to 1924. I’m not crazy. Nothing that affects day-to-day operations is gone. Copies of our tax returns and current personnel files have been retained. All the invoicing, all the billing, accounts receivable, everything to do with the ordinary business of the factory, that’s all intact. All current contracts and documentation pertaining to the plant operations are untouched.

I burned every scrap of paper about the numerous lawsuits over the years, all the litigation, all the settlement agreements, all the correspondence about stolen recipes and agreements of nondisclosure with Hodgson relatives and a few others. I burned the stolen Peanut Charms recipe scribbled in pencil in Eli’s slashy scrawl on a yellowed Hodgson Sweet Shoppe envelope. I burned all the drafts of wills, letters of intent, promissory notes, agreements about company loans to family members that were never repaid. I burned all the notes about the creation of the Ziplinsky Family Trust (a highly ironic name for a legal instrument, when you think about it).

I burned the agreement between Howard and Sam, promising
Howard the business if he married me and stayed in New Haven until he was forty-five years old.

I burned all the blackmailing letters with pretty Madagascar stamps on the envelopes from Huxley to Sam, starting with infant photos of Newton in 1976, the ones from 1982 with photos of Edison, and the more recent ones as well, with photos of Howard and his sons and their mother, his second cousin Huxley, who claimed, in childish print on the back of the photo, to be the true love of his life. May I just say that even though it’s not literally incest, surely this attraction is a little incestuous? Maybe if you’re a Ziplinsky, nobody but family is ever really good enough.

I burned all the correspondence from 1946 concerning a planned agreement between Julius and Eli, granting each a 25 percent interest in the other’s holdings. This was to be the first step in Eli’s ambitious plan to follow the Hershey’s model of ownership interest in suppliers. The Ziplinsky/Czaplinsky brothers would form a mutually beneficial alliance. If Milton Hershey found it worthwhile to grow sugarcane in Cuba, then Zip’s Candies would have its own cacao and vanilla in Madagascar. Sam told me about this. He found both copies of this agreement on Eli’s desk the day he found Eli dead in his office. Eli had just signed and dated the documents earlier that same day, a few minutes before closing time, on that Friday afternoon, with Rosalie Fleischer, his secretary in those years, domiciled at 266 Orange Street, New Haven, Connecticut, as his witness. Sam never sent Julius his executed copy, though Julius outlived Eli by two years.

Sam buried the contracts in the safe, and when Julius wrote in response to the news of Eli’s death, inquiring about the agreement they had made, Sam took his time writing back, and when he did, he was deliberately vague, saying he didn’t really know
much about this matter but would look into it, and then he made sure to put inadequate postage on the letter, which he addressed with slightly wrong spellings. The delay in the correspondence bought several months. Julius wrote again, and Sam replied just as slowly and vaguely. He really hadn’t decided what to do, Sam told me, he just hadn’t yet come to any conclusion about whether or not it was in the best interest of Zip’s Candies to honor the agreement, and so there were a few more such letters back and forth, and then Julius died.

Sam didn’t destroy those contracts when he should have. And so I have done it for him. They’re gone now. Everything is gone, everything on the loading dock burned to ash in that aromatic, white-hot blaze.

F
IRE DESTROYS
. B
UT
fire also can cleanse and purify. Fire is life, but fire also is damnation. We speak of fiery passions, fiery tempers, flaming arguments, flaming assholes, flaming homosexuals. Ellie Quest-Greenspan said that Jung saw fire as a symbol of transformation. Dr. Gibraltar told me that Freud believed fire symbolizes the libido. Well, duh. Freud thought that human beings were wired to piss on flames, only some of us end up being relegated to the domestic sphere because we can’t. He wrote that it is “as though woman had been appointed guardian of the fire which was held captive on the domestic hearth, because her anatomy made it impossible for her to yield to the temptation of this desire.”

L
ANGUAGE HAS THE
ability to express and to conceal. The sentence is one of the great inventions we’ve got, as elemental as fire and the wheel. Sentences like the ones I have been using can
enlighten and enhance meaning, or deny it and undermine it. Sentences such as the ones Irene has used to level all of her baseless, mendacious accusations tell her story, not mine. Irene calls my words wild. Are my words wild? I certainly hope so. Keynes said words ought to be a little wild, for they are the assaults of thoughts on the unthinking. Think! Think, Irene! This,
this
is my story.

I
HAVE BURNED
all the documents, the real ones and the ones I made up. Trust me, or don’t trust me. Either way, they’re all gone now. According to some sentences I have been reading, Alice Ziplinsky embellishes. She is unreliable and she makes things up. She has a distorted sense of the events that surround these conflicts, and she has acted with fraud and with malice. She was responsible for fiscal mismanagement over the past decade when in a position of unwarranted authority. Alice Ziplinsky is unwilling to turn over documents and threatens to destroy them. Her actions have caused the company to lose value at a sensitive time when potential buyers will be alienated, thereby precluding the completion of a preliminary agreement for an unnamed large corporation to make an offer to shareholders for the purchase agreement concerning Zip’s Candies premises as well as full license to produce Little Sammies, Tigermelts, and Mumbo Jumbos.

If I am that Alice Ziplinsky, then perhaps there never were any documents such as the ones I have described. Who knows what I burned? Maybe I have made it all up. Maybe I’m losing it, like Frieda, and all I burned were old meaningless invoices and bills. Nothing of what I have described in all my many precise sentences is legally binding without documentation.

Where’s the evidence? Am I reliable, as Sam asked me that
first day? Who has been more reliable over these years? Who, who has ever been more loyal to Zip’s Candies and the Ziplinsky family?

Nobody will ever know which signatures of Sam’s are really mine. Comparisons of everything he signed in the last twenty years of his life would be meaningless. Whose signatures match, his to his, mine to mine? The testamentary Ziplinsky Family Trust instrument has been accepted by the Probate Court of New Haven. The appeals were denied. What’s done is done.

H
OWARD OWNS
15 percent of Zip’s Candies. I own 35 percent. The Ziplinsky Family Trust owns the other half of the business. Samuel Ziplinsky’s grandchildren share equally in the Ziplinsky Family Trust. That is the letter of the law, but it is also the spirit of Sam’s intentions. How many slices of this pie are there?

It’s not three, Irene; it’s five. Each grandchild—Newton, Ethan, Jacob, Edison, and Julie—owns 10 percent of Zip’s Candies. Whether we agree in the end that Howard is the third trustee of the Ziplinsky Family Trust or I am, the five grandchildren are the beneficiaries, and in this Howard and I are in rare agreement. Did you believe, Irene, that you could count on my rage over Howard’s betrayal to blind me to fairness? Did you think I would be as greedy on behalf of my two children as you have been on behalf of your son? That greed by proxy has no influence. Fortunately Ethan doesn’t support your position. Nobody does. And beyond my sense of fairness, my clarity on this matter is that much sharper because of my unwillingness to agree with you, Irene, about anything at all, if I can possibly help it.

Newton and Edison are Howard’s children, Howard’s issue. The trust language could only have been clearer if Sam had
named each of his grandchildren individually, but that’s not relevant. There are five grandchildren, five living issue of Sam’s two living children.

And as to your outrageous, faux-generous “offer”—can’t you see it’s not yours to offer, Irene?—that Newton and Edison could share a quarter interest in the trust? That’s absolutely out of the question. Either they are Howard’s issue, or they are not, and since they most certainly are (and your suggestion that we demand paternity testing is pathetic and mean and pointless; just look at them!), they are each entitled to full recognition as a grandchild of Sam Ziplinsky’s, and an equal share in the Ziplinsky Family Trust, whether you like it or not. I would have thought you would be pleased to have two brown nephews. Apparently, when it gets personal, your greed trumps your sanctimonious virtue.

Sam recognized that giving Newton and Edison their fair share would be the best way to bind Howard to Zip’s Candies, if not to me and to his life here. Ownership of Zip’s Candies binds us all together, except for you, Irene, and you’ve been fully compensated. These were Sam’s intentions for his family and for his business.

Can we move on now, with malice toward none, with charity for all? Can we strive to finish the work we are in, to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves, as Abraham Lincoln suggested so long ago in an admittedly different but certainly not ungermane context?

W
HICH BRINGS ME
to a significant Zip’s Candies decision. And in case it isn’t clear by now—we’re not selling! With my 35 percent ownership plus Jacob and Julie’s combined 20 percent, we three Ziplinskys control more than half ownership of the
company. They don’t want to sell. Not now. The Bao-Bar is a huge success, with exponentially increasing sales every month. It’s not clear how much longer we will be able to keep up with orders at this rate, and the time is coming very soon to expand our production capabilities. As it is, we’re running Tigermelt production on that line only two or three days at a time every fourth week. The Bao-Bar has become the tail wagging that cat. It’s an exciting development for Zip’s Candies, both because it’s extremely profitable and because it’s a completely new product developed by the fourth generation of the family, who are prepared to take Zip’s Candies into the future and make it their own.

W
HEN
P
RESIDENT
O
BAMA
was sworn in, and I watched George W. Bush as he stood there during the ceremony, grimacing and smirking and shifting his weight like a child enduring church, I found myself thinking about Howard’s unconscionable breaking of his word to me in 2000 that he wouldn’t send his DKE brother those congratulatory Little Sammies. And as Julie and I watched the inaugural pageant on television over our reheated leftover vegetable chow fun, seeing those two little girls with their mother gazing adoringly at their father, feeling the weight of that historic moment, like so many of us who felt betrayed for so long by the policies and actions of our government, I was moved, and I was proud. Dignity and grace have been missing for too long.

Julie, well aware of the history of that inscribed photo of W. on the wall in my office, asked me if I was thinking of sending some candy to the White House to welcome the Obama family. We looked at each other for a long moment. How could I? And I came to a realization. I have been thinking about it ever since
that January day. Now, seven months on, I am certain. The time has come to end production of Little Sammies.

Of course it has. I have discussed this with Julie and Jacob, who agree. It’s become an embarrassment to pretend they’re fine, to act as if those who perceive Little Sammies to be racist and vulgar should lighten up and not be so PC. For all these years as a Ziplinsky, and as a representative of Zip’s Candies (Sam used to tell every employee and every family member that we should never forget that every day, in every way, we were each Zip’s Candies ambassadors), I have taken the position that Little Sammies are amusing, they’re retro, it was Eli’s innocent misperception, of course we’re not racists, so how can our candy be racist?

But Little Sammies are really not okay. “Say, Dat’s Tasty!” is not an acceptable slogan any longer, and it hasn’t been for years. It’s time to put Little Sammies on the shelf next to Amos ’n’ Andy and Al Jolson in blackface. We’ve had a good run, but it’s over. We are better than that. We can do better than that.

We won’t simply stop production of our most successful line. This is the perfect moment to introduce a new product. We won’t have to start from scratch. We have almost everything we need to go into production very quickly, after announcing the end of Little Sammies, and before we do that, we should run a final production limited edition of a few hundred thousand, with a commemorative wrapper designation, 1924–2009, which will sell like hotcakes.

The farewell to Little Sammies will be an excellent platform for the launch of our new line, which we will be able to run on the Little Sammies equipment. If our wholesalers and retailers aren’t smart enough to make big buys of our new line, we can scrounge up some slotting-fee money to get the product out there in key markets, and I am certain it will succeed. I have an
instinctive feel for these things. It shouldn’t be difficult to generate excellent publicity for this transition, with Julie and Jacob speaking for the company as the next generation. It becomes a human interest story, a classic American success story. Eli’s great-grandchildren take Zip’s Candies into the future. I will announce my intention to step down within the next five years. We will court the candy bloggers. Julie will know the best way to do that.