True Confections: A Novel by Katharine Weber
Author:Katharine Weber
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Family-owned business enterprises, Family Life, General, Candy industry, Fiction, Religious
ISBN: 9780307462558
Publisher: Random House, Inc.
Published: 2009-09-15T21:48:08.539000+00:00
IRENE’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.
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.
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