Beer Money: A Memoir of Privilege and Loss (4 page)

Turning down his acceptance to the Rhode Island School of Design, my father attended Michigan State College instead, dropped out after two years, and then, following a stint in the army, joined the family business. Photography, for the
remainder of his life, was relegated to a hobby, while each morning he grudgingly put on a suit and drove to Detroit to the brewing company his family had owned and operated for four generations.

O
ne summer evening, my cousins Pierre and Freddy came over with their parents, my uncle Peter and aunt Nicole. Pierre and I were best friends, born only ten days apart; Freddy was two years younger. We sat in the fading sunlight on the terrace, breathing in a garden bursting with bloom and the raw scent of freshly cut grass, and drank Vernors ginger ale while the grown-ups had cocktails and argued about the brewery. Unlike my parents, Aunt Nicole and Uncle Peter never argued when I was at their house, where I spent many a weekend in the summers, so I knew it must have been my father who started the fight. Pierre and I giggled uncomfortably every time his father made my father raise his voice. We didn’t understand what they were talking about, but we knew his father would always win the argument.

“Times are changing, Eric,” Uncle Peter gently instructed my father. “We have to grow. Have to get bigger to compete, or we’ll continue to lose market share and volume.”

My father frowned through a cloud of cigarette smoke. “
How
big?” he asked his older brother, his striped dress shirt dampening under the arms.

Uncle Peter had once had plans to join the CIA, but he had been run over by a truck and nearly crippled, ruining his
chances. Now, walking with a slight limp, he ran the brewery alongside my great-uncle John, who, after Gari died, watered down the beer formula to suit the post–World War II American preference for milder beer. After that, the company had grown rapidly, acquiring its number one competitor in Michigan, the Goebel Brewing Company.

“As big as we can
get
,” Uncle Peter replied, his jaw set. “Stroh’s and Goebel alone aren’t enough. We have to keep acquiring other brands, other breweries.”

“We need national recognition, Eric,” said Aunt Nicole, in her French accent, her chin-length blond hair pulled back with tortoiseshell combs. She was always chic and sophisticated like that, a
Town & Country
magazine cover come to life.

Our housekeeper, Ollie, and my mother arrived from the kitchen with a hot cheese dip and a platter of Triscuits, and Ollie put the dip down on the table with an oven glove. It was hardly like at Aunt Nicole and Uncle Peter’s house, far grander than ours, where servants brought out French cheeses, bowls of olives, and delicious sliced tomatoes from their garden, drizzled with olive oil.

“Thank you, Ollie,” said Uncle Peter. He always stayed in the kitchen for a few minutes and talked with Ollie, whenever he came over to the house, asking after her family.

“Mr. Peter Stroh is
such
a nice man,” Ollie always said after he’d left, and my father wouldn’t say anything.

But he
was
a good man. Once, after a golfing accident in his garden when a driver swung into my head, Uncle Peter had driven me to the hospital. All the way to the emer
gency room he’d held my hand as I’d bled into a linen towel. “You’re going to be okay, Franny,” he said over and over, his small eyes dewy and bloodshot, and I could see how shaken he was.

The leaf-dappled light had drifted from the terrace to the lawn while the grown-ups talked, and the mosquitoes were starting to nip at my ankles. Finally, my father stood up from the table in a fit of frustration. “And where the hell are we going to get the
money
for all this growth? Our volumes are already starting to decline.”

“Exactly,” said Aunt Nicole. “The competition is gaining ground; we can’t defend our position in the Midwest anymore.” She crossed her bone-thin legs, her gold sandals offsetting her tan to perfection.

“We have to grow or go,” said Uncle Peter with finality. “We’ll borrow the money.”

Everyone fell silent. I didn’t know what “grow or go” meant, but I understood that the company was in trouble, and I felt afraid. Even Pierre had stopped laughing. The acid smell of the hot cheese dip hung on the air. My father walked away, defeated and angry, like the champion runner I’d seen on TV who’d gotten second place in the Moscow Olympics. He walked the garden’s circuit, taking quick drags on his cigarette, absently checking the sprinkler heads. He never liked to sit with any group of people for very long, especially after an argument, and I had that sinking feeling I so often got when my father was unhappy. The evening continued without him, the sun setting behind the trees in bursts of pink and orange, ice clinking
in people’s glasses as the rest of the grown-ups managed to talk on amiably enough.

T
aking my picture was one of the few things in life that made my father happy.

He’d get me to pose against the textured bark of a tree, or the long grass in a field, zooming in close with his vintage Leica, his cigarette dangling as he barked out art direction: “Relax your hand on your knee! That’s right. . . . Now, on the count of three.” Invariably he’d snap the shutter on the count of two.

Once he’d photographed me in our garden just before a party. I stood beneath a towering oak tree, its gloriously gnarled roots dwarfing my tiny feet. I remembered how my feet ached gripping those roots as I crouched down for the shot.

“This time give me a smile,” my father said.

I shifted my weight onto my other leg, my back scraping against the tree. “Ow!” I whined.

My father stood and stamped out his cigarette on the perfectly manicured grass. Sometimes I’d see the gardeners picking up cigarette butts on their way to the flowerbeds.

I tried to stand up.

“Stay there!” my father commanded. “Just a few more.”

He breathed heavily as he looked through the viewfinder. He always tried several angles, smiling at me between each one, while my shins throbbed and my feet went numb. I remember wondering if one day I would also learn to use a
complicated camera like his Leica. Like my father, I wanted to freeze people in time, as if by doing so I might come to understand them better.

“Frances!” my father said then affectionately. “You look marvelous!”

I smiled for the shot and he clicked the shutter.

My father’s photographs were widely recognized as the best in Grosse Pointe. An amateur with little training, he shot the portraits that my parents’ friends sent out in their Christmas cards and framed on their living room side tables, portraits that in years to come their children would take into their more modest houses as keepsakes of an all but bygone era of lakefront estates, Lilly Pulitzer dresses, and big, strapping American cars.

Money was everything in Grosse Pointe. You couldn’t live there if you didn’t have it, and some had a lot more than others. The social hierarchy favored the richest, oldest families who had settled in the area and built Detroit from the ground up—the same families who lived on my street, whose children attended my private school, and who swam at my club. These were my childhood friends, progeny of the Fords, the Fruehaufs, the Chryslers. And despite the age-old taboo, my friends sometimes discussed their families’ wealth.

“We have sixty million dollars!” Alison Goodyear announced poolside at the club one day.

In my nine-year-old mind, I tried to picture $60 million: piles of stacked bills as tall and wide as the Goodyears’ enormous house. I was already aware that if you were rich,
you could be as bad as you wanted and get away with it. My parents lately had been gossiping about Alison’s parents, who were getting a divorce, and about the many boyfriends her mother had been spotted driving around in her new Jaguar convertible. I never saw Alison’s parents when I had sleepovers at her house. We were attended instead by a multitude of nannies and housekeepers. The parents, I imagined, were off pirouetting from the wrecks of sleek sports cars, martini glasses still in hand.

When I told my mother about Alison’s pile of money, she sighed woefully. “That is simply terrible,” she said. “Children should not be talking about money.”

But money was a part of one’s identity. If you lost it, you lost yourself, or so it seemed to me, and throughout my young life I was keenly aware that this is just what we were doing—losing ourselves. “Shirtsleeves to shirtsleeves in three generations,” as the saying goes. Even as children, surrounded by so much abundance, we had been warned there wouldn’t be enough to last.

“One day, the money will go,” my mother often told my brothers and me. “Especially if Dad continues to spend this way.”

Her warnings encroached like a black cloud on an otherwise lovely day, and the fear of having nothing took hold deep within each of us. Where would we go? How would we live? Having nothing seemed as inconceivable as not existing, and the two became inextricably linked in my consciousness. This constant sense of scarcity—a fear of impoverishment that had been part of our DNA before it became a
self-fulfilling prophecy—was a feeling against which my father rebelled with cocktails and ever more aggressive spending sprees.

One afternoon we came home from swimming at the club to the surprising sight of my father sitting behind the wheel of a new Cadillac Seville parked in the driveway. Standing there with one hand on the gleaming silver hood, he waved us out of my mother’s station wagon. He opened the doors and had us smell the rich red leather seats and try the fancy electric windows and the air-conditioning. Three-year-old Whitney, I remember, smudged the glass, and my father barked at him to go inside the house and wash his hands. I felt a sharp pang of guilt as he slunk off.

“Come over here, Franny,” my father said. “I want to show you something.” He popped an eight-track tape in a slot in the dash and suddenly Benny Goodman’s jazz filled the plush interior of the car. My heart swelled as I inhaled the new-car smell. I was flying high on abundance, and on my father’s glorious mood—all the more so because, of course, I knew it wouldn’t last.

My mother frowned and went inside.

Ollie peered out from behind a curtain. She did her best to protect all of us from my father. Often, after crying and begging her on a Friday, Whitney would ride with Ollie on the bus to spend the weekend in her house in Detroit, at the intersection of Seven Mile and Livernois, near to where the riots had erupted and where the sound of gunfire outside still blended unremarkably with the general hum of traffic. Even as a toddler, Whitney was a survivor.
And certainly being cooped up with my father for an entire weekend, my mother off doing volunteer work or playing tennis, promised a roller-coaster ride of unpredictable and treacherous mood swings more threatening than the odd gunshot nearby.

But now, enveloped in the luxury of my father’s new Cadillac, I was happy. My father turned the key in the ignition and began to back out of the driveway just as Whitney was coming out of the house, his little hands dripping wet.

“Want to go for a ride?” asked my father as he turned onto our street—Grayton Road—and began to drive away.

I looked back and saw Whitney’s expression shift from bright expectation to confusion. Clearly, he would not be joining us. My mother pulled him back into the house.

M
y father’s love of cars, photography, and collecting was matched only by his love of movies. Horror films were his favorite, and he took me to see them all, including
Night of the Living Dead
within a few years of its release in 1968. He would routinely screen 35 mm films in our living room, too, inviting guests for Sunday afternoon movie binges that often included the Italian horror classic
Suspiria
, preceded by, say, Laurel and Hardy shorts. We kids would crunch our butter-drenched popcorn, thoroughly absorbed in this or that bloody scene, while the adults sipped cocktails, the sweet smell of gin our frail link to the relative safety of the offscreen world. And all the while my father would be standing by the projector,
glowing with happiness, as
Halloween
or
Dawn of the Dead
unfurled on the screen.

I both loved and loathed horror films. The suspenseful music, the false sense of happenstance, the way two girls would get separated in the forest, guaranteeing their graphic slaughter—it all left me feeling by turns helpless and elated, danger becoming fused with excitement in my young nervous system.

MARY KATHERINE ROBERTSON AND GAIL ROBERTSON, CIRCA 1939

(by Norman Robertson)

M
y mother loved to drive cross-country. She took us everywhere by car—Florida, Martha’s Vineyard, New Jersey—running up the miles on the odometer even during the energy crisis in the seventies. We would stop to nap in rest areas along the highways, the police sometimes knocking on our windows to wave us on. If the trip required an overnight stay and no cheap motels were available, we’d sleep on a community center floor or in the backseat. If my father came along on the trip, we’d stay at a Howard Johnson’s or a Holiday Inn—the lap of luxury—until the car finally rolled into our resort or rental house.

“Why did you
drive
?” my cousins Pierre and Freddy would demand when we arrived at the ocean-side resort on Sanibel Island, candy wrappers and Coke cans littering the floor of our car.

“Flying and then renting a car is a waste of money,” my mother would tell them.

“It’s more fun to drive, anyway,” I would lie. “Besides, we got to go to Disney World.”

Running out of gas was my mother’s specialty. We’d sputter to a stop at the side of the interstate, and she’d take our hands and march us along the shoulder of the freeway to the gas station at the next exit.

A free-spirited eccentric trapped in the life of a 1950s housewife, my mother would have been a hippie had she come of age in the sixties. She spent her childhood in Llewellyn Park, a spacious, wooded residential enclave in central New Jersey, outrunning her oppressive nanny at every turn. Red haired, freckled, and perpetually Band-Aided on both knees, my mother was the tomboy in the family, while her much older sister, Frances, received the lion’s share of their parents’ attention. With her raven black hair and classical features, and her admirable skill on horseback, Frances was the image of the perfect wartime debutante, and was even pictured as such in a 1944 issue of
Life
magazine.

My mother’s father, Norman Robertson, was an engineer of Scottish descent who ran a family business that produced hydraulic pumps for clients like Thomas Edison, the family’s neighbor up the road. An amateur jazz pianist and the life of every party, my grandfather entertained his many friends with Cole Porter while they fed him cocktails at the piano. My grandmother, Mary Robertson, also loved parties, and she and Norman made an especially compatible pair. At the end of the night she would help him home; as a girl, my mother would find her father in the kitchen the following morning, puffy eyed and bathrobed, hunched over a pint of coffee ice
cream. “He craved the sugar,” she told us years later. “But the cholesterol may be the reason he died so young.”

Even during the Great Depression, the family was well-to-do, although my mother never forgot the sight of homeless people lining up at their kitchen door begging for food from the cook. The image made a deep impression, fostering her lifelong devotion to frugality. When her father died in her nineteenth year, in 1952, my mother kept her inheritance invested in the stock market, never spending a penny, except to pay her college tuition. She enjoyed the trappings of wealth but, out of a deep-seated fear of ending up poor, chose to live modestly, often buying her evening dresses secondhand, driving inexpensive cars, and carrying purses until they literally fell apart.

My mother graduated from Sarah Lawrence College in 1956 and met my father just one year later, in September, at my aunt Bettina Stroh’s engagement party. She’d driven her red Triumph convertible over from Chicago, where her sister Frances lived, to Grosse Pointe on a windy day with the top down, a yellow silk scarf trailing behind her, her rebellious red curls cropped short.

“That your little red car parked outside?” my father asked when they were introduced.

She told him it was.

“I’ve got the Mark VI saloon parked near your car.”

“Is that so?” said my mother with a flicker in her striking green eyes. Unable to stand bragging, she must have felt compelled to put the charming but arrogant Eric Stroh in his place. “You’d probably love the Rolls-Royce I’ve got back home in New Jersey.”

Caught off guard by this entirely, my father turned and walked away.

During the engagement-party weekend my mother went out with my uncle Peter, but when she returned for the wedding in December, my father was assigned to drive her to the rehearsal dinner, and by the end of the weekend, she found she preferred my father. “I liked that he was artistic,” she said. “And that we both had a love of photography.”

They were married the following June.

O
llie sat brushing my hair after my bath. “You all are so
lucky
, Frances,” she declared suddenly, surprising me.

“Why, Ollie?” I asked, expecting something really, really big, like Christmas coming early that year.

“Why
? Because, you’s rich peoples. Thas why.”

Rich? I imagined Rolls-Royces and white marble mansions, like the Beverly Hillbillies. People on TV were rich; my friends whose last names I saw on the backs of cars, they were rich, but we weren’t. Nobody else had ever told me we were, so how rich could we be? Besides, my father had said he couldn’t pay the ransom.

Moments later, I confronted my mother. “Mom, are we
rich
?”

My mother’s profusion of freckles seemed to darken, her broad, beautiful face clouding over with something akin to anger, as if I had spoken a four-letter word. “We aren’t rich and we aren’t poor,” she said with firm conviction. “We’re in the middle.”

This was reassuring to me. So we were normal after all, which felt safe; kidnappers only took children from rich parents, not normal ones.

If only I could make Ollie understand. I traveled through the house following the sound of the vacuum cleaner and found her in a bedroom straightening a bedspread. “Mom says we aren’t rich and we aren’t poor,” I told her. “We’re normal.”

Ollie gave me a searching look, then laughed and shook her head. She smoothed the bedspread until every crease was gone.

Later that day, after she’d taken the chicken out of the oven and changed out of her crisp, white uniform into what she called “street clothes,” I watched Ollie walk down our driveway and up Grayton Road toward the bus stop. What she had said to me—that we were lucky because we were rich—was something that she would never have said to my parents, and I wondered if she saw my parents the way I saw the Beverly Hillbillies, not as real people at all.

T
he traffic on Grosse Pointe Boulevard was light on a Saturday. I did not feel the need to turn my head each time I heard a car approaching from behind, straining my neck, to check that my outstretched legs were safe.

“Make sure to hold your legs out,” my mother had warned when I’d climbed onto the book rack behind her bike seat. “Don’t get them caught in the spokes.”

We rode this way often in the summer afternoons, careening the grid of streets, my mother stopping to greet friends she spotted on the sidewalks.

We were headed to the library, where my mother would check out her monthly supply of books. “Ridiculous waste of money, buying books,” she used to say. I loved the library’s musty smell. Paging through magazines, I would be lulled into a trance by the rustling of newspaper pages around me, until my mother finally came to collect me. Down the library steps we’d walk in the afternoon heat to where my mother’s leather-seated old bicycle leaned against the brick of a wall, unlocked. She bungee-corded the books to the book rack before I got on.

“You add almost no weight,” my mother laughed as she began to pedal. “I’d hardly know you were there.”

Through the tree-lined streets we rode, my mother’s freckled thighs slowly pumping our wire-spoked wheels along the pavement, until we arrived home with her armful of books. Ollie would be preparing lunch when we came into the house, chicken livers and green beans or hamburgers spattering grease from the open frying pan.

When I became too heavy to ride on the book rack, my mother bought me a Schwinn three-speed with a red, white, and blue bicentennial banana seat, my most prized possession. Now I could ride anywhere in Grosse Pointe anytime I wanted, so long as I came home for dinner. My friends and I would tear around the neighborhood, barely observing stop signs, or hang around Schettler’s drugstore, eyeing the Revlon products. When we became hungry, we’d head up to one of
the clubs for a meal, signing the chits with our parents’ names. My mother hated getting big bills from the club at the end of the month, so I always felt relieved if my grilled cheese ended up on someone else’s check.

With my new bike I graduated to independence in the blink of an eye, but I would always miss holding on to my mother’s waist, inhaling the gentle perspiration through her starched cotton blouse.

I
n the summertime, my mother spent her afternoons playing backgammon with her friends on the upper deck at the “little” club. Off limits to children under the age of eighteen and located just above the snack bar, the upper deck was a reliable retreat from the demands of parenting while offering a panoramic view of the club’s pool, where Whitney and I spent our afternoons swimming under the idle gaze of the lifeguard or causing mischief in the locker rooms. (My mother subscribed to Dr. Spock’s parenting theories, which included permissiveness and a “trust yourself” approach to the rearing of young children.)

When my grandmother came for her summer visit from New Jersey, she’d sit regally on a chaise by the pool wearing a navy-blue sleeveless dress, clip-on gold earrings, and a banded straw hat.

“Mrs. Robertson
looks
rich,” Ollie sometimes said of my grandmother. “She and your daddy’s mother, Mrs. Stroh. The two of them got the skin of rich folks.”

My grandmother would turn the pages of her Somerset Maugham novel while Whitney and I played Marco Polo or did flips off the diving board with the other kids whose mothers reclined on towel-draped chaises, Johnson’s baby oil slicked over their legs and arms. I would be tormented by the charcoal scent of burgers grilling in the snack bar, or the sight of Dusty Miller sundaes carried out to the pool in tall waxed paper cups—perks of club life that Whitney and I rarely delighted in.

My grandmother always chided my mother in the car after we’d left the club. “Those lifeguards are fast asleep behind their sunglasses,” she’d say. “Someone ought to be minding the children by the pool.”

“You worry too much, Mother,” my mother would reply good-humoredly. “The children are just fine.”

I loved when my grandmother worried about us. “The children look pale,” she would say as soon as she’d arrived from New Jersey, a great wave of abundance sweeping through our house in her wake. Baskets of raspberries and lushly arranged grapes filled the countertops. Lemon cakes and exotic flavored ice creams came out after dinner. (So unlike my mother, who bought only apples, green bananas, and vanilla ice cream at the A&P, avoiding the more expensive shops.) My grandmother outfitted us for the season, too—stiff new shoes for Whitney, a new Lilly Pulitzer sundress for me—and replaced the astringent Dial soaps in the showers with her own creamy Dove brand, and we all laughed out loud in the evenings when my father shouted from the shower, “Gail, where’s my
goddamn
soap?”

M
y mother complained that my father’s compulsive collecting absorbed most of his earnings and Stroh Brewery Company dividends. “Your father’s spending is like a disease,” she would say. But her efforts to curb his spending only made him resentful.

I imagined something eating away at him from the inside, like a tapeworm or a tumor. I wondered if it was contagious, if we’d all caught it; perhaps it was only a matter of time before the scabs would appear, the lost limbs, or atrophied muscles. Soon would we all be in wheelchairs like Uncle Dan, who’d lost all his muscle control like that famous baseball player Lou Gehrig?

Only this disease seemed to travel a mysterious route; bypassing our tissues, it simply hijacked our feelings, our perceptions. A constant sense of anxiety quelled only by the distraction of intense excitement. What was worse, the condition seemed as incurable as my mother’s badgering was relentless, and sometimes I wondered if all that spending might, in fact, be my father’s attempt at remedy rather than the disease itself.

“Always save for a rainy day” was my mother’s oft-expressed motto. She sometimes called our private school to get extensions on the tuition deadlines, or notified the phone company that the payment would arrive late. My mother arranged for us to have the hand-me-downs from her friends’ children and, during the years when my father gave her no money for our vacations because he had spent everything on his collecting, we drove the five hours to my aunt’s house in Harbor Springs.

Though both my parents’ families were well off financially, the Robertsons’ handling of money was far more conservative than the Strohs’, as were their values. My mother had drawn from her inheritance to pay for college; my father had drawn from his to procure a fleet of Jaguars. From a distance, his largesse may have appealed to my mother, initially, but up close the two of them were like runaway trains passing in the night, my father’s reckless spending accelerating with time, even as my mother’s fears escalated proportionately.

After swimming at the club, while all the other children signed chits for hamburgers and Cobb salads, my mother usually took us home for peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwiches and brought us back afterward.

“Why can’t you eat
here
?” our friends would ask and, feeling shamed, I lied and told them that we preferred the lunches our mother made.

I believed my friends at the club were more worthy than I was, and certainly luckier. They ordered club sandwiches and Cokes with a sense of abandon that I envied, while, on the occasions when I was permitted to order lunch, I enjoyed my hotdog and French fries—or my scoop of Stroh’s peppermint ice cream—with a guilty pleasure that bordered on the illicit.

If I questioned my mother’s policy, she reminded me, “The Carmichaels had to resign from the club, you know, because those kids ran up a bill so long, it arrived at their front door in a shoe box!”