Beer Money: A Memoir of Privilege and Loss (3 page)

THE HOUSE AT GRAYTON ROAD, 1974

(by Eric Stroh)

O
ur house was full of shiny valuables that we were forbidden to touch. Rare Martin guitars leaned against upholstered chair backs in our living room, as if waiting for cocktails to be delivered. Glossy silver boxes housing monogrammed guitar picks littered the mahogany tabletops. Antique Leica cameras and real guns from the Wild West decorated desktops and bookshelves, where leather-bound first editions of Nathaniel Hawthorne comingled with a first edition of
Through the Looking-Glass
signed by Lewis Carroll.

On occasion, my father would take out his favorite antique revolver, a perfect greyhound of a gun with a long barrel and intricate engravings surrounding its ivory-inlaid grip, and show me how to clean and oil it. Then he would have me reach my finger around the trigger and pull. Afterward he’d open it up and show me why it hadn’t fired; there were no bullets, see.

“John Wayne carried this gun in
How the West Was Won
,”
he’d tell me with pride. My father loved old Westerns. He sometimes dressed the part and walked around the house in boots, spurs, and a cowboy hat, flipping the guns out of their holsters like the outlaw Jesse James. He often told the story of dressing up as a cowboy when he was a kid on Christmas Day, and how his mother had shouted at him to change into a jacket and a tie. “I never forgave my mother for that,” he would say with a faraway look.

If my mother came into the room while my father was showing me how to load the bullets, he’d look up at her and beam. “God, I love my guns, Gail—more than anything in the world.”

“Those
awful
guns.” This was her habitual reply. “How can you love them?” And while the two of them dueled it out with their scripted conversation, I enjoyed the privilege of handling the goods. My parents often talked this way; I usually knew what one would say to the other, a predictability I found deeply comforting. Nor did it concern me, the thought that my father loved his possessions at least as much as he loved us. I took it as a given.

But there was a double standard in our house. While I was sometimes allowed to handle my father’s treasures, as soon as my younger brother, Whitney, could walk, he was punished just about daily for touching my father’s things—spanked, yelled at, and sent to his room. None of us was immune; when I was four I wandered into my parents’ bathroom and ran my father’s razor up my arm to see how it worked. When he found it clogged with hair, he slapped me across the face three times, until I admitted I’d done it.

And yet Whitney had these run-ins with my father more than all the rest of us put together.

One day my father left a fragile clay pipe on a table—well within reach of a toddler’s wandering hands—and then snapped like a mousetrap when Whitney of course broke it.

“Why the hell did you break my pipe?” my father angrily demanded, taking Whitney by the shirt collar.

“Because I did,” said my frightened three-year-old brother.

“Then I’m going to spank you,” said my father.

“Why?” asked Whitney.

“Because I am. That’s why.”

My father and I often went out to a local diner for dinner, just the two of us, while my mother stayed at home to make dinner for the boys. Other times my father and I played a game that I secretly hated, a game ostensibly designed to teach me a valuable skill: how not to get kidnapped.

I still remember the first time he made me play. “
Frances!
” He shouted from the bottom of the stairs. “Time to practice. Step outside, please.”

My whole body tensed at the sound of his voice. I could tell from the sour smell of the air around him that he’d been drinking.

Because we were a known family, because we had a name that made us stand out, it was very important, my father had told me, that I play this game with him. Nothing mattered more than this—not even learning how to swim, or how to read, or how to hit a tennis ball.

“They’ll take you away and we’ll never see you again,” my
father said. “Or they’ll ask for a ransom that we can’t possibly afford to pay.”

“What’s a ransom?” I asked.

“A lot of money—you know, millions of dollars.”

It seemed a terrible curse to have a recognizable name. But to have a recognizable name and not enough money to pay the ransom?—nothing less than a cruel joke.

We walked outside.

“Stand right here,” said my father, his brow unaccountably heavy with anger, pointing to a spot on the sidewalk in front of our house, a six-bedroom Spanish Mediterranean with a sprawling green lawn.

This was a serious game, a game that made my father stern, impatient.

I assumed my position on the pavement, a surge of dread twisting my insides. The facades of neighbors’ houses suddenly became menacing faces; the sound of their gardeners mowing, a barrage of violent sound in my head. No one, it seemed, would be able to save me.

“I’ll go get the car,” said my father, walking across the lawn to the driveway to start the car. Then he drove around the block. Sometime during those two minutes, while I waited alone for the car to reappear from the opposite end of our street, something magical and mortifying happened: my father’s silver Chrysler became someone else’s car, the car of a complete stranger.

My heart jumped at the sight of the approaching sedan, my abductor’s car, as it slowed down upon spotting me, a small blond girl, seven years old, with straight-cut bangs.

“Come here, little girl,” a frightening man with my father’s face called tauntingly from the car. He held a Hershey’s chocolate bar out the window.

I burst into tears and ran away, just as I had been instructed. Kidnappers, I knew, baited young children with candy. But even as I raced up to the front steps of our house, I found no comfort in the familiar. It was the creepy, almost psychotic look on my father’s face as he called out to me, pretending to be someone else, that terrified me.

C
harlie sometimes hid me in his room when my father arrived home from work. We’d sit on his bed and look at books about World War II that he’d borrowed from Bobby, books with pictures of Germans in belted overcoats saluting a man with an Oliver Hardy mustache.

“That’s Hitler,” Charlie would tell me. “The one who killed all the Jews.”

I had seen a picture of the Jews once, naked together in a room with no windows. Their hollowed-out eyes stared right through me, and I’d had nightmares for days afterward. “Let’s not look at that book again,” I remember telling him, and he hid the book underneath the bed.

Then he’d get out the Indian beads—thousands of them, sorted by color—and we’d string necklaces. He’d gently teach me how to tie a knot, or combine the beads in a particular pattern, and, if my knot didn’t work, he never became angry when my beads fell all over the scratchy wool bedspread. He’d
just pick them up, one by one, and drop them back into the storage box. Sometimes we could hear my father shouting at Bobby, or shouting at my mother down in the kitchen, and we’d go on stringing beads as if nothing were happening.

Eventually my father would throw open the door to Charlie’s room, and he’d send me downstairs so he could fight it out with the boys. Afraid, I’d go into the living room where my mother was busy reading a book, and we’d silently listen to my father chasing Bobby and Charlie up and down the long hallway upstairs as if trying to corral a particularly willful herd of cattle. Loud thumps echoed through the floorboards after my father managed to catch my brothers, but my mother never so much as looked up from her novel.

It was as if I were experiencing the blows myself, compounded by a terrible sense of helplessness. To distract myself, I’d get out my markers and a sketchpad and draw movie stars or Bible scenes I’d studied in Sunday school. I’d spend hours getting the face of Humphrey Bogart or Jesus Christ just right, starting over again and again until the eyes, nose, and mouth were perfect. At school I was universally known to be the best artist, and at home I was mostly left alone to do my drawings, an invisible bubble forming around me, blocking out everything happening inside the house.

H
aving formed a close friendship in early childhood, Bobby and Charlie spent most of their time together, with Bobby as the leader. When Bobby built a model of the
Ti
tanic
, Charlie would also build a model of the
Titanic
—only not as well.

One summer evening when they were eight and ten years old, Bobby and Charlie jumped on their bikes and rode up to Rose Terrace, the Dodge family’s lakefront estate, to wait in line for a public viewing of Mrs. Horace Dodge’s open casket. Once inside, they filed past her body and, to the shock and dismay of the other spectators, Charlie reached out and pinched the corpse’s overly rouged cheek while Bobby giggled approvingly.

Charlie struggled with his schoolwork, often having to retake tests, catch up on reading, and endlessly practice word pronunciation with my mother, and yet he was a favorite among his teachers. In hushed voices my parents sometimes referred to him as “slow,” but he never received any educational testing or special attention at school. My parents’ expectations were simply lower for him than for Bobby, and they deemed Charlie’s approval-seeking behaviors as natural for a child with his lesser intelligence.

My father’s nicknames of “Chas” for Charlie and “Nit-Wit” for Whitney made his allegiances clear; among his sons, Bobby was the crowned prince. He laughed at Bobby’s jokes, encouraged his rare-beer-can collecting, and praised his term papers. Charlie could only trail in Bobby’s shadow, awkwardly adopting his hobbies and witticisms. The gentler of the two older boys, and the lesser student, Charlie suffered the brunt of my father’s unpredictable moods, absorbing his scathing criticism and bullying until he escaped to the relative safety of boarding school.

As for my mother’s oblivion to our problems, this was contrived, she later told us, to protect. “If I had intervened, Dad would only have been that much harder on all of you.”

The youngest of three brothers, my father was known as an eccentric boy who would sit on the street curb smoking cigars and mouthing off to kids who passed by. He’d spend his afternoons alone watching nickel Laurel and Hardy movies at the Punch and Judy Theatre, then go home to shower and change into a coat and tie for dinner. When he arrived, his much older brothers, Gari and Peter, would be sitting in the living room with their mother as she sipped her cocktail, awaiting their father’s arrival from the brewery, while the cook prepared the usual four-course dinner in the kitchen. No one ever took much notice of my father as he came into the room, save for when the Brylcreem he used in his hair rubbed off on the sofa upholstery, and his mother would shout, “Get off that sofa, you little pest!”

His father, Gari Stroh, who ran the brewery, was forever preoccupied with problems at work, particularly during World War II, when hops and wheat were being rationed. He refused to water down the family beer, thereby sacrificing quality of taste, as the other U.S. brewers had done to keep volumes up. A man of principle, he also had a fierce temper, and my father rarely talked about him. “I was intimidated by my father,” he once told me, “and avoided him as best I could.”

My grandfather’s sternness may have stemmed in part from his guilt over a terrible injury he’d caused his younger brother, John, when they were children. One July afternoon the two boys played in the garden of their Italianate mansion
on the Detroit River, taking turns at target practice with a new archery set, while their nannies took tea in the shade of the terrace. Julius, their father, was holding court at a brewery board meeting; Hettie, their mother, was taking a nap before dinner. My grandfather loaded the bow, testing its flexibility, while eight-year-old Uncle John disappeared behind the tree to fetch the stray arrows. Gari aimed at the target, but his finger slipped and the arrow shot sideways, bouncing off a tree’s trunk and piercing young John’s right eye. The bloody scene that followed, combined with the wrath of Julius, became as legendary as it had been traumatic. For the remainder of his life, John wore a glass eye in his right socket, while Gari wore a sheath of self-recrimination.

M
y father mostly went unnoticed as a child. When he wasn’t alone at the movies, he spent his time with a nanny while his mother and her sister, Louise, enjoyed martini lunches at the country club. His parents, however, still tried to exert control over his activities. My father loved country and bluegrass music, for instance, but was forbidden by his parents to listen to “hillbilly music” at home. At least the driver who brought him to school allowed my father to play country music in the car.

Photography, my father’s second great passion, was discouraged as well. After being accepted to the Rhode Island School of Design at age eighteen, my father sought his mother’s advice.

“If you go there,” she told him, “I’ll always feel ashamed.
Can’t
you find another college?”

Susie—she insisted her grandchildren call her “Susie,” so as not to feel old—had never overcome the embarrassment she felt growing up in the midst of Philadelphia society as the daughter of an artist. Her father, my great-grandfather Nunk, a kind-natured antique dealer and hobbyist sketch artist, often painted the furniture in his shop with early American floral motifs. Susie had always aspired to more—to wealth, glamour, social position.

In spite of the shame she felt over her father’s vocation, Susie was Nunk’s favorite daughter, not to mention his most beautiful. With her chiseled features and slim figure, she was the daughter for whom he waited up at night with sandwiches and hot chocolate when she arrived home from parties. When the family could afford only one new dress, the other daughters, Louise and Betty, were inevitably passed over in favor of Susie.

One weekend at a friend’s country house, Susie met the somber and serious Gari Stroh, son of the renowned brewer Julius. Susie’s liveliness and beauty captured Gari’s attention, and the two were married within a year. Nine years later, Gari’s younger brother, John, married Susie’s younger sister, Louise. No longer did anyone need to fret over who got the new dress.