Beer Money: A Memoir of Privilege and Loss (18 page)

MAPLE LEAVES, 2000

(by Eric Stroh)

I
left Michigan on a bone-chilling morning. My mother took us to the airport, and Arkady flew on to New York to see his brothers.

My mother waited with me at the gate for my flight to San Francisco. She sat knitting a baby blanket for her friend’s grandchild and talked about how awful the weekend had been with Charlie there. After the meeting, she told me, he’d gotten drunk and made a scene in the lobby of the River Place Inn, shouting at the people checking into their rooms about Jesus and redemption.

“It’s just dreadful, how he acts when he’s been drinking,” she said, her knitting needles clicking away in a steady rhythm. “It’s terribly embarrassing. Poor thing, he just can’t control himself. It’s like Jekyll and Hyde.”

I listened as she knitted herself back together with absolute truths, the baby blanket draping over her lap as it ever so slowly grew. She had reconstructed the weekend so seamlessly,
I
almost found myself believing it, too: Charlie was the problem.

The day before, the hotel had called my mother about his minibar bill, which the family company had a policy of not covering.

She had called Charlie immediately. “Charlie, your minibar bill is a hundred and sixty
dollars
. How can you possibly drink that much in two days?”

“YOU’RE A FUCKING BITCH!” he’d shouted, my mother told me. The rest she wouldn’t repeat. My mother had hung up the phone, dialed the front desk of the hotel, and given them Bill Penner’s number.

“He was drunk,” she explained now as the gate filled with people. “Look, he’s very sweet when he’s sober, but . . . when he’s
drunk
, it’s simply terrible.”

Seeing how drained my mother looked, how the events of the weekend had worked her over emotionally, I pitied her nearly as much as I did Charlie. I only wished she could see the truth: that all the brushes with the law, the boozing and the drugs, the slow-motion suicide—these were Charlie’s cries for help. Even now. He was challenging her. Challenging her to love him. In spite of everything, he was still her child.

The crowds milled past us on the way to their gates. Listening to the boarding announcement for the first-class passengers on my flight, I knew I had about ten more minutes before it was my turn to board, and I could put this weekend behind me.

My mother suddenly tensed and dropped her knitting. “There’s Charlie,” she said in a hollow voice.

There he was, not twenty feet from us, trailing through the airport, glancing around absently, unshaven and seeming almost lost. His ruined face struck me now as open and curious—an expression of almost childlike innocence.

Startled, we instantly looked away—perhaps because we were tired, or because he wasn’t the person we’d spent the morning re-creating in our thoughts. Standing there as a physical fact, he was just a person in the world with a hangover and a plane ticket—a brother, a son. And yet someone to be kept at a distance. My mother and I looked at each other, ashamed.

“Let’s say good-bye to him,” I finally said, halfway out of my seat.

My mother’s hand clenched my forearm. “No, Frances. I can’t take anything more.
Please
. Just . . . let him go.”

I turned my head, stricken, and watched Charlie wander off to his gate, disappearing into the crowd. He glanced our way but his eye never caught mine. Had he seen us? Perhaps it didn’t matter. The moment was lost. I gathered my purse, boarded my flight, and just before takeoff vomited in the jet’s toilet.

It was the last time we ever saw him.

CHARLIE STROH, 1970

(by Eric Stroh)

T
he phone rang out into the sun-filled room and I answered quickly, taking care not to disturb the baby next to me on the sofa. It was Charlie’s voice on the line.

“Franny! I’m at the Hyatt in Dallas,” he said. “With my new lady friend. Here—talk to her.”

I lay on my side with the phone balanced at my ear. My tiny, blue-veined son slept in the hollow of my armpit. Suddenly, an unfamiliar female voice greeted me, and we exchanged friendly words before Charlie returned to the line. “Her old man’s threatening to kill me,” he said with an unmistakable thrill in his voice. “He’s circling the parking lot in a Hummer—with a shotgun in the front seat.”

“Maybe you should call the police,” I said, my body tensing. Mishka squirmed in the crease of my arm and began to cry. I wondered if Charlie was just high, or whether there was in fact a real threat. Arkady was cooking borscht in the kitchen, and I nearly called out to him.

“Did you get the flowers?” Charlie suddenly asked. “Those were Roxanne’s idea.”

I looked over at the flowers sitting on a table, a mélange of pink roses, baby’s breath, and daffodils. “I love them,” I told him. “You’re the only one who sent me flowers.”

“Yeah? Well, I can’t wait to meet my nephew,” said Charlie, his voice bursting with pride. “I’ll come visit you in June. I promise.”

Though Charlie had never come to see me in San Francisco, we talked on the phone reasonably often. A few years before I moved here, he told me, he’d taken a floor of rooms at the Fairmont Hotel and thrown a raging party. Good times.

“I’m going to hold you to that, Charlie,” I said, before getting off the phone, almost believing he would come. “Okay? So I’ll see you in June, then.”

Charlie had taken to migrating from one Dallas hotel to the next, moving on when he’d worn out his welcome. Bill Penner, who by now had become a father figure for him, not only paying the bills but also offering him much-needed guidance, was the only one who knew his whereabouts on a consistent basis.

“Charlie’s a damn nice guy,” Bill would say to me over the phone when I’d call him to check on Charlie. “Shame he doesn’t have a better relationship with your dad.”

My father’s attitude toward Charlie had only further soured over the years. In his mind, this second-born son seemed to represent all his own failures as a human being. “I wish I could push a button and just make him disappear,” my father said more than once.

Both my parents had completely detached themselves from Charlie. “I
had
to create distance,” my mother said. “It’s
the only way I can live.” It was three years since she’d spoken with him—since the family meeting.

J
une came and went in a blur of sleepless nights, with Mishka feeding every two hours. In my delirium I would flash to his April birth, the midwife coaxing me out of our bathtub and onto the bed as I labored, coaching me in her heavy German accent to
push
. Arkady brought aromatic herbs and berries from the kitchen, distracting me from the agony. And the breaks between contractions had felt glorious, an intense endorphin high—what I imagined heroin must be like.

When Mishka arrived, Arkady and I looked at each other and laughed out loud, then cried. The midwife placed our baby’s body on my stomach, and my love flared, fierce and unconditional. Then she sewed me up by the light of our living room lamp with the shade removed while Mishka blindly navigated my chest.

I never remembered to call Charlie about his visit; maybe I’d never really believed it would happen. We could go years, after all, without seeing each other. The distance had come to feel . . . normal.

And then, one windswept day in July, the phone rang. All day something had felt off—a weight, a fatigue, something beyond the usual. Mishka was napping in the bedroom, so I picked up in my writing office.

“Frances,” said my mother, her voice tight. “How are you?” It wasn’t a question.

“Fine,” I said.

Then she told me, her voice artificially calm, matter-of-fact, that Charlie was dead.

H
e’d been staying at an Embassy Suites Hotel in Dallas, on the tenth floor.

According to the police report, Charlie had called the front desk of the hotel shouting for help. Someone was chasing him, he’d insisted, trying to kill him. The hotel sent the police up to his room to investigate. When two policemen arrived, they found a “paranoid man who believed he was being pursued.” Opening the closets for Charlie, they reassured him that he was alone in the room and safe. Charlie seemed calmed. One of the policemen patted him on the shoulder, told him to “take care,” and then they left.

The police took the elevator down to the lobby, spoke for some minutes to the hotel manager, and then exited the hotel. At the very moment they stepped outside, a large mass tangled in a white sheet fell from the sky, landing onto the pavement in front of them with a horrible thud. They looked up. Torn bedsheets, tied together and fashioned into a makeshift rope, dangled from the balcony of a room on the tenth floor.

M
y mother sat knitting in the living room of my apartment, her face sagging in a way it never had, the eyes
uneven, the skin of the cheeks thickened. Mishka was draped across her chest, asleep. “It wasn’t suicide,” she said, her knitting needles clicking. “He was trying to escape.”

“Who said it was suicide?” I asked.

We’d all assumed, on the basis of the police report, that Charlie had been attempting to escape his imaginary pursuer by making a rope out of bedsheets and lowering himself off the balcony.

“One of your cousins,” said my mother. “But it
wasn’t
.”

I watched my mother cradle Mishka with her arm as she knit him a blanket. Her first grandchild. This visit, long planned, had taken on a dual purpose, and she looked at once totally wrecked and wholly content.

“I know it wasn’t,” I said.

I was stoking the logs in the fireplace, thinking of that line apocryphally attributed to Mark Twain, “The coldest winter I’ve ever spent was a summer in San Francisco.”

Arkady had driven the three of us to Big Sur the day after receiving the news. In the evening I’d walked with our new baby down some stone steps to a hot spring, resting him inside his Moses basket, and looked up at the sweeping dome of stars. Waves crashed on the sides of the cliffs below, one after the other. It all felt vast—the sky, the rocks, the ocean—vast and oppressive.

“The service will be in Grosse Pointe in September,” my mother was saying now. “He’s being cremated.”

I didn’t want to know any details about the body, what condition it had been in, how it had been shipped back to Michigan. Nor did my mother ever think to mention these things. Bill Penner, I imagined, had handled everything.

“Helluva nice guy,” Bill said when we spoke just after I received the news. I could tell he’d been crying. “I’ll sure miss him.”

“So will I.” I myself had been unable to cry. I kept telling myself we’d always known something like this was coming. But the guilt I shouldered now was, in truth, too much to feel.

“Have you spoken with Whitney?” asked my mother.

I crossed the room and sat down in a chair. “He’s holed up in Missoula,” I said. “Getting a couple of summer school credits to finish college.”

“He was so upset he had his girlfriend fly out to be with him,” said my mother. “He’s taking this very hard.”

For all his bravado, Whitney could be deeply sensitive. I remembered how we’d both cried quietly in the car the year before, just after we’d visited Uncle Peter, who’d been diagnosed with a brain tumor.

The three of us had sat together in Peter and Nicole’s living room while Nicole talked on the phone upstairs. Outside the bay window the golf course burst with savage green, cruel beyond measure in its vibrant health. Peter sat quietly in his tweed jacket and gray flannels, slightly shrunken, unable to make the usual conversation. The poor man was stunned, having received the terrible news only days before.

“You’re going to be okay, Peter,” I told him, putting my hand on his, echoing his words to me all those years before.

He looked at me with those warm, small eyes for the last time. “Thank you, Franny,” he said, managing a smile.

Four months later, he died.

Mishka gurgled and my mother adjusted him gently. I poked at the logs to get the embers going again.

“And Bobby? Have you spoken with him?” my mother asked.

“I called him as soon as I heard,” I said. I didn’t tell her, though, what Bobby had said: “Charlie was a fool right up until the end.” I knew his callousness toward Charlie was only a defense, like my father’s; still, it hurt to hear it. Bobby’s handling of the situation, like my parents’, disturbed me almost as much as my own behavior did. We’d all distanced ourselves, rather brutally, it seemed to me. Charlie’s neediness reminded us of our own frailties, and we’d hated him for it.

“Poor Charlie,” was all that my father had said when I called him from Big Sur, a whole lifetime of regret in those three worn syllables.

My mother put down her knitting. Her gaze drifted to the crackling logs in the fireplace. She rested her hand on Mishka’s back and closed her eyes.

I went over and spread a blanket across them both.