The Wrong Kind of Money (14 page)

“What should Cyril have done? Lied?” He'd heard the Cyril story.

“He could have denied everything. That's what he should have done. Denied everything. Sons of bitches never could have proven anything. But your damn fool brother had to confess to the whole thing.”

Noah said nothing.

“Anyway, I want you to know I'm proud of you, son. You're five times the man your brother will ever be. Ten times. Twenty times.”

Noah still said nothing.

“And incidentally, son, what you may have thought you saw the other morning wasn't what you think.”

Noah stared at his father, and then, feeling tears welling behind his eyelids, he turned his head quickly away. He had never known his father to lie to him before. But he knew what he'd seen. And now the only feeling he could summon for his father was a kind of blind, abstract pity. “Okay, Pop,” he muttered.

His father touched his arm.

That summer he would sell his bike. In the fall he would set off for another college in the West.

“Too much success too soon,” he had said to Melody tonight, blaming that. But what of the man who has had too little success too late? Where did one place the blame for this? Among his friends and contemporaries Noah was certainly considered a success. In the Ingraham Building, and within the organization, he was treated with deference and respect. After all, he was the only male member of the family in the company. At the same time—but perhaps this was only his imagination working—he was certain that some of the people who worked with him and under him regarded him with a certain amount of pity. Edith, his secretary, for instance. After all, he was also a man who worked for his mother and who, in the end, followed his mother's orders and did what she said. “Yes, Mom.” He was now, technically, in charge of the production and marketing for all the Ingraham's labels—Ingraham's Royal Charter, Ingraham's Regency Rye, Ingraham's Colonial Gin, Ingraham's Imperial Vodka, Ingraham's Majestic Bourbon, Ingraham's Sovereign Blended Whiskey, and Ingraham's V.S.O.P. Scotch, a twelve-year-old single malt, where the initials stood for Very Special Old Pale. These were the so-called prestige brands, the only ones actually to bear the Ingraham name. These were the labels advertised in magazines like
The New Yorker
and
Town & Country.
These were the brands designed to give the company its high-class image. But, as everyone in the company knew, the real moneymakers were the lower-priced blends that were advertised on outdoor billboards and matchbook covers. When the apartment of the murderer Jeffrey Dahmer was photographed in the press, with an empty pint of Thunderclap Whiskey lying on his bed, no one, fortunately, noted that Thunderclap was also an Ingraham product.

When Rodney King was arrested for drunken driving in Los Angeles, with a .19 alcohol count in his bloodstream, Thunderclap was what he had been drinking.

Thunderclap was ten times as profitable as Ingraham's V.S.O.P., yet V.S.O.P. was promoted as the company's flagship label. These were the ironies of this industry. V.S.O.P. had been the only Ingraham's label to have been granted a Royal Warrant, “By Appointment to Her Majesty.…” and Noah's father had given his other Ingraham brands their royal-sounding names—back in Canada, where he first started—in the vain hope that one day the British monarch might give him that rare thing, a Canadian knighthood.

His father, who had always looked, even if he had not always been, the picture of success, had been both proud and fond of Noah—proud of him for, of all things, that wild biking spree—even if Noah had not always been fond or proud of his father. And before he died, Jules Liebling (
geboren
Julius) had felt assured that he, as Noah's father, would be to a great extent responsible for whatever success in life his son might achieve. Noah knew this was only partly true. Noah had come as far in the company as he had not only thanks to his father, but thanks to his own luck, charm, grace, smile, good looks, poise, and better than average mind. But in Noah's better than average mind he was under no illusions about his father's capabilities. His father had had plenty of luck, but very little charm, grace, good looks, or poise, and his father's mind had hardly been analytical or even very original. In fact, Noah occasionally wondered where it had all come from, all his father's success … all the money.

Perhaps his father's secret was that he never took the distilling industry very seriously. It was, he used to say, a license to steal, a license to print money. The discovery of the science of distilling, if you could even go so far as to call it a science, was lost in history. The ancients had known how to produce their equivalent of booze. Any grain, fruit, or vegetable could be fermented to produce alcohol. The world's most primitive tribes have been doing what Ingraham's does for centuries. Besides alcohol, and various flavorings, the only other basic ingredient was the earth's most plentiful resource—water. All the rest was packaging and promotion, and you had something called the Distilled Spirits Industry. “I betcha even the caveman had his hooch,” his father used to say.

The world's most primitive tribes, furthermore, drank without suffering from hangovers. They drank for days on end to glorify their pagan deities, and then passed out. But they awoke not with headaches or dry throats but with a sense of having been purified, renewed, redeemed, forgiven, blessed. It was only civilization that brought guilt to be associated with overindulgence in drink. Hangovers were nothing but an expression of guilt. All this was part of Noah's father's philosophy of liquor.

The distilling process was very similar to another ancient art, the making of bread, or “the other staff of life,” as his father used to call it. The same chemical processes were involved. In fact, his father liked to tell the story of how, early on in his career, some ingredient—no one ever knew what it was—had fallen into a vat of whiskey at Jules Liebling's first distillery, and whatever it was had turned the whiskey, which still tasted like whiskey, an unappetizing purple color. Rather than throw out the vat, his father had suggested filtering the tainted whiskey through slices of bread. It worked, and the result was a clear, rich golden hue. “It took about four loaves of Wonder Bread at eight cents a loaf to do it,” his father would say with a laugh. “We'd saved eighty bucks' worth of rotgut.”

His father's mind was a vast repository of arcane liquor lore. He even knew the formula prisoners used to make Jailhouse Punch, which was also simple. You took a few slices of bread and soaked them with the canned orange drink they gave you at the prison breakfast table. In a few days fermentation would begin. Then you strained the resulting mess through a T-shirt. “It doesn't taste like much,” his father said, “but it does the trick for the inmates.” His father went so far as to claim that something very like the distilling process was what had caused the first organisms to emerge from earth's primordial ooze. Thus, in his mind, distilling was linked to Creation.

And so, with notions no more complicated than these, the former bartender had become a distiller. Of course, it didn't happen overnight. At Jules's bar in the little provincial town of Baie St. Paul, in Canada, one of his best customers had been a man named Henry Ingraham, the last of a dissolute line of Ingrahams, who had inherited a small, unproductive distillery on the banks of the St. Lawrence. “Henry could have made his own whiskey,” Jules Liebling used to joke, “but it was easier for him to drink at my bar.” Henry liked to drink rather a lot, and he preferred Jules's bar because Jules offered him a particularly generous line of credit. After several years, when Jules politely suggested that the time had come when Henry might consider paying his bar tab, a deal was struck. In return for the deed to Henry's distillery, Jules would forgive Henry his bar bill, and give him free drinks for the rest of his life. As luck would have it, that life lasted barely six months longer. Henry Ingraham, drunk, was gunned down one night in the streets of Baie St. Paul. The murder was never solved but, as it turned out, there were many other people in the town to whom Henry Ingraham owed money. No one ever suggested that Jules Liebling had anything to do with it. Why would he have? Henry's debt to Jules had been satisfactorily settled.

A little research—rather scanty, if the truth be told—revealed that the Ingraham distillery had been in the family for several generations before the intemperate Henry lost it. To Jules the Ingraham name had a respectable, Presbyterian ring to it, and so his first bottles bore the label “Ingraham's Fine Whiskey … Since 1789.” Later, when “age” became a selling point for whiskey, Jules's labels began to read, “Ingraham's Fine Aged Whiskey … Since 1789.” If customers thought the whiskey had been aging in oak barrels for over a hundred years, that was all right with Jules. Today the Ingraham Corporation letterhead bears the words “Distillers of Fine Spirits Since 1789,” and five years ago the company made a promotional splash when it celebrated its “bicentennial”—“Two Hundred Years of Trust and Quality.” Promotion of promotions, saith the preacher. All is promotion. It illustrated another maxim of Noah's father's: “If you say something loud enough and often enough, it becomes the truth.”

Actually, the Ingraham label did not appear until 1917, when Jules launched it. He was twenty-three, had no more than a fifth-grade education, and had been bartending since age fourteen. These are the bare facts. None of them made its way into Jules Liebling's paragraph in
Who's Who in America,
though when the small western college that accepted Noah after he left his signature in the wintry New England snow presented his father with an honorary doctorate of science degree, he liked to be introduced on speakers' platforms as “Dr. Jules Liebling.” If he could not be Sir Jules, then Dr. Jules would have to do.

Poor Pop, Noah thinks.
Poor Pop?
Back in 1917 he was on his way to becoming very rich. Around the corner was Prohibition. Jules always said that he had seen it coming, and perhaps he had. Once, when asked by a reporter for the secret of his success, Jules had answered, “The three P's—Packaging, Promotion, and Prohibition.” He also once called Prohibition, with a wink, “The most important development in modern American history—more important than the atomic bomb.” In fact, he claimed, Prohibition was responsible for the Bomb. “Prohibition created the Roaring Twenties,” he said. “The Roaring Twenties created the Great Depression. The Great Depression created the Second War, and the Second War created the Bomb. Think about it!”

As for packaging and promotion, Jules had always believed in what he called “classy stuff.” Classy was one of his favorite adjectives. Prohibition may not exactly have been a classy period in our nation's history, but to those who were around and willing to take advantage of it, it had turned out to be a nice little thing, and Jules Liebling was one of them. Jules was savvy enough to realize that Prohibition would never be enacted in the province of Quebec. The wine-loving French would never stand for it. And he soon discovered that Americans—even those who could not really afford it—would pay any price he and his friend Meyer Lansky asked, and they set their prices somewhat arbitrarily, for good liquor. With Prohibition the money came rolling in, and it has never really stopped.

And so, when Prohibition ended, Jules Liebling moved down to New York and built a castle called Grandmont in Tarrytown on a hill overlooking the Hudson River and the Tappan Zee, where Noah and his brother and sister grew up, and where they were taught, by nannies and governesses, that then: father was the kindest and wisest man in the world, their mother the most beautiful woman, their home the most secure and graceful, and they themselves the most fortunate of children. Now, of course, at age forty-eight, Noah is cynical enough to know that none of this was really true. When had he begun to realize that, though Grandmont was the scene of many grand entertainments, his parents had no real friends? Though Grandmont was surrounded by other sumptuous homes and estates, the Lieblings had never met their neighbors. Down the road lived the Duchess de Talleyrand-Perigord. On the next hill lived various Rockefellers. Noah's family did not know these people. Nor was Noah's family invited to join any of the various neighboring clubs where these people swam, played golf and tennis, and sailed their boats in summertime. Instead, Grandmont had its own pool, tennis courts, nine-hole golf course, and boathouse. Somehow, Noah thinks, his father must have felt like Jay Gatsby gazing across the bay at the inaccessible green light at the end of Daisy Buchanan's dock, but without one of Gatsby's great advantages: Nobody knew, exactly, what Jay Gatsby did for a living. Everyone knew what Jules Liebling did. Sheer money was not enough.

And why, Noah wonders, whenever he is thinking thoughts like these, do his thoughts inevitably turn back to money? Why should a man earning the salary Noah earns be beset by money worries? And yet he is. Beset. Besieged. Money is like somebody's law. Is it Parkinson's? It is the law that states that the more closet space you add, the more clothes you will have to hang there. The more bookshelves you put up, the more quickly you'll run out of shelf space. The higher you promote a business executive, the higher you must continue to promote him until he reaches such a level that he can no longer do the job. Money was like that. The more you had, the more you seemed to need. “Money's just a way of keeping score,” his father said. Not to Noah.

To Noah, the expenses of his family seem to keep spiraling upward in a kind of endless Laffer curve. In his mind he ticks them off. To begin with, more income means more taxes. The maintenance on the River House apartment has now reached six thousand a month, and the end is nowhere in sight. Certainly it will never go down. Plus there are the periodic assessments, which Noah himself, as the building's president, is now in the difficult position of imposing. Each assessment seems bigger than the last. He and Carol employ only two servants, Mary the maid/housekeeper and Edna the cook, and in terms of staff the Lieblings operate a household that is modest by River House standards. But add another five thousand a month for these two worthy ladies. Their daughter, Anne, attends what surely must be the most expensive college in the world, twenty-five thousand a year tuition, plus five thousand more for room and board, plus another three for books and equipment, plus library fees, laboratory fees, special lecture fees, infirmary fees, studio fees, gym fees, plus the cost of the little car she needs, plus insurance for a driver under age twenty-one, plus, plus, plus. Running a college, he thinks, must be like trying to run a co-operative apartment building, except that the tenants of a college cannot protest all the extra assessments as they come along. Then there are the costs of Carol's mother's care, in that place Carol prefers to call a nursing home, but which is really more than that, since Carol's mother requires constant supervision. Add another eight thousand a month for that. Plus the cost of ever changing, ever more expensive medications that seem to have turned the poor woman into an ongoing scientific experiment.