was framed by bouquets of lollipops, chains of candy canes, and beribboned boxes of chocolates. Could it be the Web site of an über-Stasi goon turned American entrepreneur? When I read the “About Us” page, I figured it was safe, though certainly not a given, to assume that QC Sweets was owned by my man Manfred. “About Us” was actually a long welcome letter that wound up with, “We think you’ll find sugar and spice and everything nice here at Queen City Sweets, the home of sweet deals!!” It was signed Richard (“Dick”) Schroeder, President, a name which definitely had a Teutonic ring. Because you couldn’t take a guy who had even a little German accent and call him Ciaran O’Connor. Of course not. You’d call him Richard Schroeder.
If life were like art—or at least like Spy Guys—we’d cut to a sign saying WELCOME TO CINCINNATI in an airport. There would be a rear shot of Javiero as His Highness carrying an elegantly well worn Vuitton garment bag over a hooked index finger and Jamie schlepping a too large suitcase close to bursting. In the next scene Jamie would be sitting in Dick Schroeder’s office wowing him not just with her hot body, but with her near-encyclopedic knowledge of candy-making and distribution that she’d mastered in twelve hours of reading. As Jamie was getting Dick to fall in love with her and reveal state secrets (ours and the East Germans’), HH would be collecting the gossip on him from the youngest daughter of the Duchess of Blenningshire, who had married a Cincinnati potato chip tycoon.
But life wasn’t like art. Sure (as my mother-in-law once observed in a birthday card accompanying a pen and pencil set), I was the creative type. Yet for all my supposed imagination, I couldn’t come up with a way I could meet Dick Schroeder—assuming he was the person who had once been Manfred Gottesman. Could I drop into his office on Corporate Drive and ask if he knew anything of the whereabouts of his former American Manners and Mores teacher, Lisa Golding?
Bottom line, Dick Schroeder didn’t look like much. But when you have nothing, not much starts looking good.
Chapter Nine
THE OFFICE SUITE in which my mother worked was too blue to be gray and too gray to be blue. Whatever its color, it was calming. If your psyche was unsettled, there were few other venues in all Manhattan so kind to frayed nerves as her gray-blue waiting room with its up-close and arty photographs of seaweed growing out of a sandy ocean floor.
Inside, her diplomas and certifications hung behind the slab of pale blue slate that was her desk. The other three walls of her office featured more undersea pictures, but taken by a different photographer from those outside. Starfish this time, and not just the usual five-armed guys: such diversity! Shells with spikes, shells like brown velvet. My favorite had always been a pinkish one with twenty arms. The creature seemed to me to be ridiculously lovely, as much flower as animal. But these starfish photos were murkier than the seaweed ones in the waiting room; you could see the undulations of water, tiny explosions of sand rising from the seabed. Three, however, had shafts of sun shining through the deep water gloom. That set them apart from the others. Despite the murk, if you looked in the right direction, you could find some light.
My mother stood out in the watery gray-blue. In all her life I’d never known her to wear anything that could blend into that color. Decoration was background. She was foreground. We were sitting on her analyst’s couch, which was upholstered in nubby gray silk. She sent it out to be recovered every August so those patients who wanted to lie down during their sessions wouldn’t be distracted by smells and smears of other patients’ hair products as she herself had been during her own psychoanalysis. She could have gotten a couch covered in leather or a dirt-hiding tweed, but while she approved of the moral fiber of people who bought
If life were like art—or at least like Spy Guys—we’d cut to a sign saying WELCOME TO CINCINNATI in an airport. There would be a rear shot of Javiero as His Highness carrying an elegantly well worn Vuitton garment bag over a hooked index finger and Jamie schlepping a too large suitcase close to bursting. In the next scene Jamie would be sitting in Dick Schroeder’s office wowing him not just with her hot body, but with her near-encyclopedic knowledge of candy-making and distribution that she’d mastered in twelve hours of reading. As Jamie was getting Dick to fall in love with her and reveal state secrets (ours and the East Germans’), HH would be collecting the gossip on him from the youngest daughter of the Duchess of Blenningshire, who had married a Cincinnati potato chip tycoon.
But life wasn’t like art. Sure (as my mother-in-law once observed in a birthday card accompanying a pen and pencil set), I was the creative type. Yet for all my supposed imagination, I couldn’t come up with a way I could meet Dick Schroeder—assuming he was the person who had once been Manfred Gottesman. Could I drop into his office on Corporate Drive and ask if he knew anything of the whereabouts of his former American Manners and Mores teacher, Lisa Golding?
Bottom line, Dick Schroeder didn’t look like much. But when you have nothing, not much starts looking good.
Chapter Nine
THE OFFICE SUITE in which my mother worked was too blue to be gray and too gray to be blue. Whatever its color, it was calming. If your psyche was unsettled, there were few other venues in all Manhattan so kind to frayed nerves as her gray-blue waiting room with its up-close and arty photographs of seaweed growing out of a sandy ocean floor.
Inside, her diplomas and certifications hung behind the slab of pale blue slate that was her desk. The other three walls of her office featured more undersea pictures, but taken by a different photographer from those outside. Starfish this time, and not just the usual five-armed guys: such diversity! Shells with spikes, shells like brown velvet. My favorite had always been a pinkish one with twenty arms. The creature seemed to me to be ridiculously lovely, as much flower as animal. But these starfish photos were murkier than the seaweed ones in the waiting room; you could see the undulations of water, tiny explosions of sand rising from the seabed. Three, however, had shafts of sun shining through the deep water gloom. That set them apart from the others. Despite the murk, if you looked in the right direction, you could find some light.
My mother stood out in the watery gray-blue. In all her life I’d never known her to wear anything that could blend into that color. Decoration was background. She was foreground. We were sitting on her analyst’s couch, which was upholstered in nubby gray silk. She sent it out to be recovered every August so those patients who wanted to lie down during their sessions wouldn’t be distracted by smells and smears of other patients’ hair products as she herself had been during her own psychoanalysis. She could have gotten a couch covered in leather or a dirt-hiding tweed, but while she approved of the moral fiber of people who bought
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