Beer Money: A Memoir of Privilege and Loss (19 page)

WYOMING, 2007

(by Eric Stroh)

M
y father, five-year-old Mishka, and I sat at a table having dinner at The Hill, the restaurant where you ate when you weren’t at the club. Dark paneling, starched linen tablecloths, weighty cutlery. A breadbasket heaping with gnarled rolls that resembled tightly wound fists. We’d flown into Detroit for twenty-four hours on our way from New York to San Francisco.

“I can’t sleep,” my father was saying, visibly irritated. “I’m so damned wound up.” He was drinking club soda. Since his divorce from Elisa, his stomach couldn’t take the alcohol anymore. Instead, he took painkillers.

He must have been reading his mail. Usually I was the one who filled him in on the grim news that arrived in the quarterly reports from the family holding company. The most recent had warned that dividends would be entirely eliminated in a few months, leaving my father to live on nothing more than his small pension. Sixteen years after our final listing in
Forbes
, the coffers were empty.

“Dad, you’ll be okay,” I reassured him. But we both knew he had nonnegotiable financial obligations both to my mother and to Elisa. To cover these, he likely would be forced to sell his house in a real estate market depressed beyond recognition by the bankrupt automotive industry, burning up what little he had left in those family trusts that Bill Penner had agonized over twelve years before. My mother would likely forgive the debt, but we were not counting on Elisa, who had left him for another man less than a year ago, to do the same.

My father slathered a roll with butter. “I can’t remember the last time I heard good news,” he said. “Whenever I open a goddamn letter it’s always doom and gloom.”

All the fears I’d ever felt about my own future paled in comparison to what I imagined he must be feeling about his. My father was not equipped, I knew, to live without a substantial income. I wondered if he would spend the rest of his life regretting his choices, or perhaps even wishing that he’d been born into another family, one that hadn’t taken such good care of him, up to now.

That meeting in Bill Penner’s office twelve years before had been the best thing that had ever happened to me. Since then, through my active investing, I’d parlayed a small investment account into a sizeable nest egg. I still had my income from the Detroit real estate trust, but I’d been informed that would soon end. No matter. Striving for something gives life its meaning, regardless of whether we succeed or fail. The problem was, my father had never
had
to strive for anything.

Looking over at Mishka, who was playing with the salt and pepper, I felt deeply grateful this would not be his fate.

My father sipped his club soda. “So—how’s your book coming along?” he asked, suddenly upbeat. “Can I be a character in your great American novel?”

I was writing a novel set in the late-nineties New York art world, with an artist protagonist whose family had lost their wealth. I had stopped making installations years ago. Now I just wrote about artists. “Sure,” I said, to please him. “Or maybe I’ll start a
new
book—with you as the main character.”

“Pipe-smoking old kraut?” he chuckled. “That kinda thing?”

I laughed. “Exactly.”

Mishka was lining the silverware up across the table like a snake.

“He’s a good-looking boy,” my father said, watching Mishka with admiration. “Hope he turns out better than some of
my
kids did.”

Charlie, he meant. Ever since stammering the words “poor Charlie” after we’d gotten the news, I hadn’t heard him mention Charlie except by indirect reference.

“He will, Dad. Mishka will turn out fine.”

“Only it’s harder to control them when they get older,” he said wistfully. “When you don’t even know who their friends are.”

My father ran his hand like a big spider up Mishka’s arm, smiling like a kid himself. Mishka shrieked with laughter and came around the table to hug his grandfather, his blond hair the very color my father’s had been before it turned silver.

“Women—that’s the other problem,” my father went on. “They’re after only one thing. Pick you to the bone.”

“Mom didn’t,” I reminded him.

He lit a cigarette. “Fair enough,” he said.

I’d spent the final year of my father’s marriage agonizing over whether or not to tell him about Elisa’s affair. She’d asked my father for $6 million to build a boat and sail around the world with her new “friend,” and my father had taken this at face value. But when Elisa attended Arkady’s yoga workshop in Mexico, one night at the bar she’d bragged about her liaison. “Eric would do
anything
for me,” she told the group between gulps from her Corona. “Because he doesn’t know about sailor boy.”

My own marriage had been failing at the time. Financial stress had been hard on the relationship, as had trying to run a business together. And taking care of a new baby, I hadn’t had the bandwidth to grieve Charlie properly. I feared sometimes I might be carried away by the torrent of my own anger and sadness, and distance became my new mode of survival, all those unresolved feelings having calcified into a wall that kept everything out, even happiness. The withdrawal from the marriage happened over a period of years, and during that time both Arkady and I hoped the distance was only temporary. Perhaps it had been easier to focus my attention on my father’s problems.

Then one day, when Mishka was almost four, I called my father from an airport and told him that Arkady and I would be separating. “We’ll remain good friends, though,” I added. “Just as you and Mom always managed to.”

“Elisa’s moving out, too,” my father said. He soon filed for divorce, at Bill Penner’s urging, and the round-the-world boat trip was canceled.

We left the restaurant, my father, Mishka, and I, and drove over to my father’s house, the lush summer lawn out front in full bloom. For the first time in thirteen years, there was no need to check my father’s driveway for Elisa’s car, hoping she would be out.

My father had just finished remodeling. “How do you like it?” he asked when we came inside.

I peered into the living room from the hallway and spotted a real skeleton sitting in an upholstered armchair. My father had always been fascinated with skulls and bones, and often had a skull sitting on a bookshelf. “It’s beautiful,” I said, reminded suddenly of his solemn statement about Elisa eight years before: “If anything ever happened to her, I wouldn’t be able to go on living.”

A
few months later, my father, by now suffering from diabetes, noticed an infection in his leg. An infected sore, hardly unusual in a diabetic, could have been treated easily enough. But he decided to let it go—for months. Did he suppose he had lived long enough—or that living without money was a fate worse than death? Perhaps systemic gangrene seemed a better choice than poverty.

Calling me late one night in San Francisco, just to talk, he seemed uncharacteristically at peace. We discussed the weather and my book, avoiding entirely the subject of the business. I told him how much Mishka loved the toy electric car he’d sent for Christmas. For once he didn’t tell me to
“speak English” when I said Mishka instead of Michael, our running joke. We laughed a lot. He seemed almost high, in fact. Unfettered. Something was wrong.

“Dad, it’s late . . . what are you doing awake?”

“I love you, Franny,” he said then.

I told him I loved him, too, and clung to the silence that followed, before he hung up, as if everything we’d ever wanted to say was there in that pause.

When he collapsed on his bathroom floor two days later, Ingrid, his housekeeper, took him to the hospital. He forbade her to call anyone in the family.

One week later, he died alone at four o’clock in the morning.

SELF-PORTRAIT OF ERIC STROH, 2004

I
n my father’s house just before the funeral, I noticed that the skeleton that had been sitting in the armchair was gone. I went and sat in its place, taking in the scene for the last time. Soon everything in the room would change. Several antique handguns sat on top of the mantel. Rare books filled the bookshelves. The eighteenth-century celestial and terrestrial globes flanked the fireplace, and I was transported back to that Easter weekend long ago; I heard my father’s shoes crunching the Manhattan pavement, felt his warm, protective grip on my hand, inhaled the exhaust from the taxis passing us on Park Avenue. My father looked down at me and smiled, just before we crossed the street. “Having fun, Minuscule?” he asked.

Clutching his hand more tightly, I told him I was.

W
hen my family filed into Christ Church—all stone inside with mahogany pews—I kept my eyes down. The damp air seemed to have an electric charge. Feeling hundreds of eyes trained on us as we took our seats in the front row, I clung to the piece of paper on which I’d written my reflections on my father’s talent and character—a crystallization of all his best qualities, but an honest one, one that acknowledged his difficult side as well.

As the minister spoke, I thought about my father’s ashes, which would go into a wall with a bronze plaque inside Christ Church’s rose garden, the same wall where Charlie’s ashes had been bricked in five and a half years before. When I visited Charlie’s place in the wall, I left flowers. For my father, I would leave Cuban cigars.

And then it was my turn to speak. I walked over and took my place at the pulpit. The rustle of programs, with my father’s photograph on the front, filled the church. I looked out at the crowd. Charlie and my father were not among them, and never would be again. With difficulty, I began to read the piece I’d written on the plane. I talked about my father’s talent as an artist, and how photography had been one of the only ways he knew to connect with others. I talked of how difficult he could be at times, but also about the sensitive, generous man who’d been hiding beneath that gruff exterior. I talked of his loneliness, and how, like any of us, he’d only wanted to be happy. His heart had been like the shutter of his camera—opening wide for an instant,
allowing the warmth of his spirit to escape into the room, however briefly.

My eulogy done, I looked up and spotted Elisa in the fourth row, her cheeks wet with tears. Had she recognized those same admirable qualities in my father? And had he felt this? Many of the people in the church had not reached out to my father in years, not since his marriage to Elisa. People were complicated. We failed ourselves, and each other. But we were all here now.

And so, as Elisa’s eyes met mine, I smiled.

O
pen a few windows,” suggested Bobby. He, Whitney, and I had driven over to my father’s house to sort through his collections. “Let’s get some air in here.” Bobby’s dark mustache had flecks of gray, and he wore the rope anklet that marked him as an islander. At the funeral, his eulogy had made light of my father’s punitive parenting style, recalling how, when we were kids, my father had jestingly referred to our house as “
Stalag
Stroh,” after the term used for German prisoner-of-war camps during World War II.

Whitney opened the sliding glass doors leading to the terrace and went out to smoke a cigarette. He was in the midst of a drawn-out divorce and looked tired, his handsome face sagging in the dim winter light. He settled into the chair where just a few months before my father had sat smoking a cigar and balancing Mishka on his knee.

I wandered through my father’s house. Eighteenth- and
mid-nineteenth-century English antiques mixed with sumptuously upholstered chairs and wildlife paintings in gilt frames. I had long ago left behind the world of monogrammed sweaters and award-winning gardens that my father’s classic taste evoked, though my own rooms in San Francisco were peppered with English antiques I’d inherited from Stroh relatives over the years. Never feeling I had the money to properly decorate, I’d been glad to take the furniture, though in my fantasy I lived in a house full of Gerhard Richter paintings, Eames chairs, and sleek sectional sofas.

In my father’s library, framed photographs of all of us at various life stages were mixed in with the books. I felt grateful that Charlie wasn’t there to witness the absence of any shots of him as an adult anywhere in the house. Our studied smiles in the images covered over something else—a weight, an implicit knowledge that soon it would all come undone. And yet I felt a good deal lighter now. In all my weeping for my father over the previous days, I’d finally found the way to let Charlie go, too. Grief was perhaps undifferentiated.

I spotted the Dickens set—the one my father had purchased on our trip to New York when I was six. The gold-embossed spines of the volumes shimmered in the sunlight on his bookshelf. An apparition, a memory long locked away in a treasure chest, beheld once more. The house and most of its contents would soon be gone, just as the brewery was. We’d somehow allowed ourselves to be pinned into place by these things; and in our search for freedom, some of us had self-destructed.

I walked into the living room to find Whitney lining
up my father’s six most valuable oil paintings, leaning them against the back of the sofa. He’d brought them up from the safe in the basement and had removed their protective, acid-free cloth covers, the same gilt-framed paintings he had considered removing from the house just after my father died for fear their value would create an enormous tax burden to the estate. Later, after receiving the appraisal report from DuMouchelles, we realized his worries had been pointless.

“You choose first,” I said. I had my eye on a rain-drenched Paris street scene by the postwar impressionist Edouard Cortès, my heart suddenly racing as if I were bidding at an auction.

I was relieved when Whitney tagged the other Edouard Cortès—of a Paris flower market.

I chose the street scene. And so it went, back and forth, as each of us selected what we wanted. The air around us felt ignited, just as it had in the antique shops my father and I had once frequented. It wasn’t that the paintings were so enormously valuable, but they were echoes, reminders, and this drove us on.

When we’d finished, I moved my three paintings over to my designated corner of the living room, where I’d also placed the most valuable item in the house—a Martin guitar signed by Eric Clapton, bequeathed to Elisa in the postnuptial agreement. The guitar leaned against a chair back, its leather case open on the floor, its caramel-colored surface gleaming like polished amber.

My brothers and I walked out of my father’s front door for the last time, pausing on the stone steps. The shipping
company had been informed of where the contents of the house would be transported. Twenty-two Martin and Gibson guitars were headed to Gruhn’s in Nashville to be sold on consignment, ninety-seven antique guns were being trucked to Bonhams and Butterfields in San Francisco for sale at their next auction, forty Leica cameras were being shipped to Tamarkin Camera in New York, and so on.

With General Motors prepared to declare bankruptcy any day now, the suburban Detroit real estate market was at a record low. Ford and Chrysler, too, were struggling. In just four years, the value of my father’s house had dropped some 70 percent. Nor was it just Michigan that was hurting; in the aftermath of the Lehman Brothers debacle, we couldn’t have chosen a worse time to sell the house and its contents.

Within a few weeks, we would also come to understand that our father’s firearms collection was peppered with counterfeits, the “million dollar” pipe collection was worth all of $50,000, and the guitars and cameras were worth considerably less than what he’d paid.

“I never liked this house,” Whitney said, stamping out his cigarette on the driveway. “Dad was never happy here, that’s for sure.”

Whitney and Bobby stood under the eaves of the house on either side of the front door, as if keeping guard. “Well, Dad lost everything while in this house,” I said. “And what did he have to look forward to?”

Bobby stepped onto the driveway. My father’s favorite son, he’d always remained the most detached from the events that had led us to where we now stood. “It’s the end of an era,” he
agreed. “Let’s just hope there will be some value in all of this when the dust finally settles.”

I pictured the house and its contents vanishing into a cloud of dust, fifty years of accumulation vaporized in an instant. Somehow the image made me feel even lighter. Soon I would be in the clear, taking a child’s tentative first steps away from her parent’s outstretched arms, the joy of walking itself my true legacy.

The three of us drove in silence to River Place for our final meeting with Bill Penner, the January roads lined with soot-encrusted drifts, Detroit’s own Jack White thrashing on the radio, the way Iggy Pop and the Stooges once had, or the MC5. It was an event we’d been dreading for years, the reading of the will, although given that the company would soon be dissolved anyway, there was less to worry about; the Stroh Companies, Inc. shares now worthless, the only wild cards were our father’s settlement agreements with Elisa and my mother. With any luck, his house and the cash he’d left in a bank account would cover those liabilities. Whitney and I were in the midst of our own divorces, and Bobby had just married his third wife. All of us were knee-deep in legal documents already, trying to find new beginnings.

We drove through a residential Detroit neighborhood that looked like a checkerboard with missing squares; whole blocks of abandoned houses had been leveled, while the remaining, occupied houses stood alone like homesteads in
Little House on the Prairie
, each house sometimes an entire block from its next-door neighbor. With a population drop of over 50 percent, the city was returning the valueless land to farmland,
trying to consolidate the occupied area into a more sustainable footprint. No longer could Detroit afford the trash collection, police force, and fire protection in so widespread an area, and the grocery chains had fled the city because of the ever-rising crime, putting vegetables in high demand. Come springtime, grassroots urban renewal groups would be working the fields, planting everything from romaine to rutabaga.

“Just surreal,” I said, staring out the window. “I mean . . . I can’t believe we still own an office building down here.”

Bobby kept his eyes on the road. “John’s trying to get government leases now.” He turned down the volume on the radio. “But the city can’t even afford the infrastructure upgrade to keep the stoplights running—Did you know they’re trying to sell the entire stoplight grid to a private contractor?”

I knew our delayed response to Detroit’s downfall was born of attachment, a resistance to change that was similar to my grandfather’s refusal to water down the beer formula after the war, and to Uncle Peter’s late entry into the light-beer market. All this principled resistance, while in some ways admirable, had ultimately led to the family’s unraveling. Much like the automobile manufacturers here, we simply weren’t nimble enough; we’d waited too long even to close our flagship brewery. And so, twenty-four years later, still stubbornly anchored in the city where we’d made our name, we were subject to the vicissitudes of every economic contraction and political scandal. Our recently resigned mayor, Kwame Kilpatrick—convicted of obstruction of justice, assault of a police officer, racketeering, tax evasion, extortion, and mail fraud—had been the final leveling blow.

Bobby turned up the car heater. We passed more snow-covered fields mixed in with houses, some of them torched. Burning down abandoned dwellings was entertainment in Detroit, like going to the movies. The arsonists would barbecue over the embers, swigging forty-ounce bottles of St. Ides or Schlitz Malt Liquor while sirens raged through the night.

Bobby turned right onto Jefferson Avenue, and heading toward downtown, we passed the site where Uniroyal had stood, its steel-lined walls built during World War II to withstand aerial bombardment. Once it had been a place of wonder as much as danger, the badlands of Detroit, capturing my imagination as a young artist. I’d wanted to make something lasting out of all this waste; I still did. Only I needed an ending, I felt, before I could begin. Perhaps this was it.

Lately I’d been reading articles about other artists who were finding inspiration in Detroit. “I hear a lot of artists are moving here,” I told Bobby and Whitney.

“Can’t argue with the rental rates,” said Bobby.

“I hear the DIA is being renovated,” Whitney chimed in from the backseat.

“And expanded,” I said. “They’re spending, like, a hundred and fifty-eight million or something.”

Funded in its heyday by automotive and newspaper money, the Detroit Institute of Arts housed one of the most expansive collections in the world, ranging from ancient Egyptian works to contemporary art. The new Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit had recently been written up in the
New York Times
, putting Detroit back on the map, artwise. The city seemed overrun with artists setting up studios in abandoned
buildings, showing their work in makeshift galleries, and sipping fair-trade coffee in what looked like domestic war zones. They, too, believed in the redemptive power of danger, these gutsy people, forging a life with no certainties—the kind of life Bernhard Stroh had opted for back in 1850, when the water in Detroit tasted so fresh.

Turning left onto Joseph Campau, Bobby continued down to Stroh River Place and parked next to the river in the same lot where Coleman Young and Uncle Peter had once made their deal. The fact that we still owned and parked in this lot was proof that things had not gone as planned along the riverfront. In every other American city, waterfront lots were prime real estate developed into high-end residential and commercial areas. Not so in Detroit. Our waterfront parcel had actually plunged in value since that fateful day, twenty-five years ago, when those two city fathers shook hands on a future that was never to be.

I looked around at the handful of parked cars studding our acreage of buckling concrete, trying to picture a field of corn in its place. The idea was kind of hopeful. Anybody could see it was time to start over.