Beer Money: A Memoir of Privilege and Loss (14 page)

I knew John believed in me the way I’d once believed in myself, but it felt too late somehow; I just couldn’t rally any more optimism around the prints, or, in fact, much of anything. “Those prints cost eight hundred pounds apiece to make,” I said dismissively. There was no way I could afford three more.

Instead, I was working on another video installation, panning my camera across still images of landscapes I’d found in books. Edited together, the effect was that of the view from a train window, a dizzying assemblage of nameless places passing by—only I was finding that gaining perspective on false constructs was a far simpler feat in art than in life itself. In life, the false constructs themselves tended to take over.

“Anyway, I’m going home for Christmas,” I told John. A kind of masochistic curiosity had seized me, and I’d booked an airline ticket. “Maybe I’ll make those prints after I get back,” I added, though I knew I wouldn’t. I could feel something closing off inside of me, the drive to make pieces waning, and well before I’d gotten the recognition I’d so badly wanted. Being in favor had always been my mode of survival and, later, the brittle foundation on which I’d built my creative life, my independence. Now, though, all that had changed. I’d need to find something else to lean on.

LONDON, 1996

(by Tanja Merz)

M
y first night back in Michigan the sky dumped a magical foot of snow, and the morning cast a pale-blue light across my room. Hearing my grandmother’s voice downstairs in the kitchen, and catching the scent of coffee, I sank back into the pillow supremely comforted.

I’d been woken by the shrill voice of a neighbor dropping off a present at my mother’s door. “It’s supposed to snow
three feet
before Christmas,” the voice had caterwauled. “
Three feet!
”

And then, “Gailie, close the door,” my grandmother had shouted from the kitchen, silencing the voice. “
I’m cold!
”

It was my grandmother I had missed most of all during my year and a half abroad. Where my parents had fallen short when we were young, my grandmother had always been ready to step in, nurturing us, sometimes even spoiling us.

Smiling at her high-pitched laughter down in the kitchen, I quickly dressed, brushed my hair, and went down to greet
her, taking in the French perfume, even from the top of the stairs, that always marked her—Joy by Jean Patou.

Passing through the dining room, I could see her sitting at the kitchen table in the next room, regal in her puffed mink hat and mink coat, which she had draped over herself like a blanket. She always complained of the cold in my mother’s house. Her wispy white hair had been styled, perhaps just the day before, at the hairdresser she liked here. At eighty-nine years old, her still-beautiful face was free of wrinkles, thanks to her daily masks of drugstore cold cream.

“There’s
Frances,” said my mother with a big smile, as if introducing me on one of those festive afternoon talk shows.

“Hi, Granny,” I said excitedly, bending down to kiss her.

My grandmother looked up, her soft brown eyes bright and expectant, but her smile quickly faded. “What have you
done
with your
hair
?” she cried. She turned back to my mother for an explanation.

My mother said nothing.

“It’s short, Granny. That’s all.” I knew she was prone to outbursts of scathing criticism, but thus far I had avoided being a target myself. I turned on the kettle for tea, trying to ignore her condemning gaze.

“But it’s just . . .
awful
,” my grandmother said. “Look at you! You used to be so beautiful, Franny, and now . . . now you’re just a plain Jane!”

The last time she’d seen me I’d been a long-haired golden blonde, it was true, but in London I had wanted to shed my past, to create myself anew, my hair getting shorter and blonder with each salon visit. I poured the hot water into the
mug and dropped in a tea bag. “Granny, come on, it’s just that you haven’t seen me in a while. I’ve
changed
.”

My grandmother brightened. “Well, have you met anyone nice over there?”

I knew what “nice” meant. Marriageable. At thirty, I’d been over the hill in her book for a good five years now. “I’ve met a
lot
of nice people,” I said with a smile, dodging the question. I certainly wasn’t going to launch into a discourse on the British sensibility of unrequited love.

“And what about the Fulbright crowd?”

“I’m not going out with any of them, if that’s what you mean.”

She turned to my mother. “I just don’t understand this at all,” my grandmother said. “She had the world by the tail!”

“Take it easy, Mother,” said my mother. “Frances is doing all right.”

“All right?
” I protested.

“What kind of art does she do, anyway?” asked my grandmother.

“I don’t know, Mother. Something with video.”

My own mother didn’t know how to describe my art, but I couldn’t blame her—I had trouble putting it into layman’s terms myself. I left the room, carrying my steaming mug of tea with me. “Granny, look, I don’t expect you to understand my choices,” I said from the doorway. “But I hope you’ll at least try to respect them. Okay?”

“I
want
to understand you,” she said. “It’s just I don’t!”

I went back upstairs to my bedroom and crawled under the covers. Flurries of snow blew outside the frosted windows.
My mother had moved to this more modest house when I’d turned twenty-two, and noise traveled. I could hear them continuing the debate downstairs, my grandmother irate, my mother doing her best to pacify her.

My grandmother had always been my greatest fan, spoiling me in a way my mother never had. She was the one who provided the piles of fresh fruit, new winter coats, the trips to the toy store—indulgences my mother generally discouraged. My grandmother’s love, it seemed, never wavered. Once I’d started college, she took me on regular shopping trips in New York, even setting me up with a personal shopper at Saks Fifth Avenue. We’d go from one department to the next, piling clothes into the personal shopper’s arms. I could point to any garment or accessory, and she would carry it back to a private dressing room, where all the things would be waiting when I came in. That same night, I’d wear one of my new outfits downtown to have drinks at the Odeon, check out a band at CBGB, and head to an artist’s loft party in the Bowery with a gang of friends. The following day, I’d meet my grandmother uptown at the Colony Club for lunch wearing one of the more conservative dresses she’d bought me. I could surf both worlds comfortably, but lower Manhattan, that was my thing.

“Promise me you’ll never take the subway,” my grandmother would say after lunch at the Colony Club, handing me an envelope full of twenties and hailing me a cab on Park Avenue. “I
wish
you wouldn’t always insist on staying
down
town.”

My grandmother stubbornly held out hope that I’d fall
into the life she imagined for me: married at twenty-four, say, to a good Upper East Sider, summering in Nantucket or the Vineyard, holding whatever club memberships, maybe even becoming the kind of killer bridge player she was. Now I understood that all the pampering, all the exclusive vacations and beautiful clothing, had been an active attempt to secure this future for me. Clearly, it had not come to pass. In her eyes, then, I had failed. I was single, an artist; I had opted out of the society that was my birthright. Had I become a painter, at least, perhaps the blow might have softened somewhat. A painter was the kind of artist people understood. Renoir, Monet, Picasso. You know. “Frances is the next great painter,” they could have said at cocktail parties.

“You aren’t so worldly, Frances,” my mother sometimes told me, meaning, I think, that I didn’t steer my opportunities to any particular outcome; I was a bit of an idealist. I’d always taken this as a compliment, though I was fairly certain it hadn’t been meant that way.

Whitney and Bobby arrived in the afternoon, Whitney from Palm Beach, his L. L. Bean duffel bag freshly dusted with Michigan snow; while Bobby was just coming from across town. Bobby had recently become a Grosse Pointer again, having moved from Dallas to work at the brewery headquarters. I’d primped in advance of their arrival, now morbidly self-conscious about my appearance, but also excited to see the men in the family, to whom the women’s attention would now, thankfully, turn.

“You look every bit the artiste,” said Bobby when he saw me. Alright—that was more like it.

“Frances, looking good!” said Whitney. “Step outside for a smoke?”

We huddled by the garage door in our sweaters, minimally shielded from the gusting snow. A station wagon crawled along the street and skidded at the stop sign.

“This
Christmas is gonna be a fucking joy ride,” Whitney said with a wicked smile, dragging on his Camel.

Because of our father and Elisa’s elopement, he meant. We were all going out to Jackson together—a trip my father had clearly planned to get us acquainted with Elisa. We were leaving the day after Christmas.

First, though, we were scheduled to see my father and Elisa, right here in Grosse Pointe, the following day. “Change is in the air,” I told my brother.

“No kidding.” Whitney tossed his cigarette into a snowdrift and rubbed his hands together. “As if it weren’t bad enough, Mom moving to this grim little house.”

Whitney and I went inside to find Bobby and my mother talking at the kitchen table. Whitney’s loafers squeaked on the kitchen’s plasticized tile floor; he smirked in my direction. I knew he missed the old house—its proximity to the forest where we played as children, our cousins Pierre and Freddy nearby, the familiarity of every curve on the road when he sped his car home after a high school party. I understood. I missed those things, too. The old house had been part of the old life, the life we’d lost, bit by bit, after the divorce.

“Too many memories in this place,” my mother had said just before she sold it.

At the new house, a 1950s brick box, we might see a neigh
bor doing gardening work, inflating a baby pool, or firing up a grill, activities we’d rarely seen on Provencal Road, where gardeners, cooks, and hired pool cleaners were the norm.

But my mother loved that her new neighbors kept an eye on one another’s houses, talked to each other over fences, and dropped off tins of cookies at Christmastime. Perhaps she felt less isolated here. It agreed with her. And since marrying Lloyd, who was now in Oregon visiting his son, she seemed to have dropped ten years from her age. She looked slimmer and happier, though her chronic insomnia over the years had left dark circles under her eyes.

Whitney went upstairs to unpack. After his shower, the scent of Bay Rum aftershave floated in the hallway. My grandmother put extra wool blankets at the ends of our beds and turned up the heat.

Charlie, my mother informed us, had gone to Mexico for the holiday. “It’s for the best,” she said flatly, her eyes trained on the pot of Campbell’s soup she was warming at the stove.

M
y mother had arranged a meeting for us downtown for the following day with Bill Penner. “You need to get the facts,” she said. She meant about the financial implications of my father’s elopement. Her thirty-year settlement agreement with my father would not be disrupted, but my brothers and I had no such binding agreements. “You all have to face this.” One might have thought, from her tone, that we were headed for the guillotine.

We dressed for the occasion, I in a black-and-white checked double-breasted jacket with black pants and heeled boots; Bobby and Whitney, sporting blazers, ties, and gray flannels. We met in the trust department of our family bank in downtown Detroit, an entity designed to keep the family-trust management under our own roof. Nearly all the Stroh Brewery Company shares were held in multiple generation-skipping trusts for the protection of the company and the family—at least that’s how my grandfather, etc. planned it. These trusts kept the brewery assets intact so that subsequent generations of Strohs might continue to own and manage the business while also paying out quarterly distributions to the family shareholders and their spouses. Within our nuclear family, my father was the only shareholder.

Bill Penner, an attorney with the big Detroit firm Butzel Long, agonized over a pile of documents at the head of the boardroom table as we filed in, his skin stretched too tightly over his clearly exhausted face. He looked up with reddened eyes. “Thanks for coming down,” he said in a tone that could only be called funereal. “I wish it were under better circumstances.”

We all shook his hand and sat down. Bill had grown gaunt with age. Whitney had once remarked that he looked as if he “summered on Three Mile Island,” and I couldn’t help but laugh. Now I felt badly; this man seemed so genuinely concerned about the situation we found ourselves in, so determined to do whatever he could to help us.

“I’ve been reviewing the trusts that benefit your father,” he said soberly as he flipped through a thick document. “And, well . . . Afraid I don’t have very good news.”

The air left the room. Bobby wiped his brow and gave me a long-suffering look that said,
Here we go . . . again
.

“As you know,” Bill continued. “Your father and Elisa did not sign a prenuptial agreement before they wed. That in itself is troubling. The other piece of unfortunate news, though, is this: two of the four generation-skipping trusts that benefit your father give him a power of appointment over the income, meaning that he can—or even, from a legal standpoint, may
have
to—appoint that income to Elisa after his death.”

I felt the raw taste of fear at the back of my throat.

Whitney leaned back on the rear legs of his chair, his hands white-knuckling the edge of the mahogany table.

Bobby looked up from his notepad. “Let me get this straight, Bill. Our father may have to leave Elisa his trust assets? I don’t understand—that money was made by his father and
grand
father.”

Bill nodded. “That’s correct. And just to be clear, he may leave only the income from the trusts’ assets, not the assets themselves. Those, of course, will pass to your children.”

We had no children. And even if we had, Elisa would receive the income for the entire span of her lifetime. My brothers and I would be passed over entirely, lending the term “generation-skipping trust” an unpalatable new twist. Until now, I had never given the trusts much thought. I was young, and artists, well, they were always just scraping by. And so I had learned to romanticize my bohemianism, if only to cope with a lifestyle that afforded few of the luxuries I’d enjoyed in the past. In fact, until very recently, I had been perfectly happy on my chosen path, self-abnegation included. But now
I realized that the Stroh trusts—psychologically certainly
—
had always, in truth, served as something of a safety net for me. I’d never had to cope with serious uncertainty. All that had changed now. And not just because of my father’s impetuous behavior.

The vast majority of the Stroh Brewery’s value had virtually disintegrated while I’d been holed up in my art studio in London, wrestling with esoteric issues of point of view in my video-installation pieces. For several years, every major brewer in the United States had been undercutting its competition with price reductions, and Stroh had been forced to follow suit; with no margins and no cash, our business was tanking. In a desperate last attempt to stay afloat—and with the help of another massive loan—the Stroh Brewery acquired the G. Heileman Brewing Company, a brewery in even direr straits than our own. The marriage was a poor one, and our combined sales continued to drop. Yet the Stroh board went on paying the family shareholders the large income to which everyone was accustomed. Indeed, my father’s lifestyle seemed to grow more lavish by the minute, with grander houses, fancier boats, and showier cars. His denial was contagious; even Bobby, Whitney, and I assumed our businesses must be faring better than reported at the annual family business meetings. For years, we’d all flown cross-country to attend these meetings—a requirement of all shareholders, present and future—under the assumption that the trusts would be there and that we, as future shareholders, were ultimately responsible for our stake in the company. Now it was clear we’d never had any control over the company’s destiny, let alone the trusts.