Beer Money: A Memoir of Privilege and Loss(11)
MARY KATHERINE ROBERTSON AND GAIL ROBERTSON, CIRCA 1939
(by Norman Robertson)
My mother loved to drive cross-country. She took us everywhere by car—Florida, Martha’s Vineyard, New Jersey—running up the miles on the odometer even during the energy crisis in the seventies. We would stop to nap in rest areas along the highways, the police sometimes knocking on our windows to wave us on. If the trip required an overnight stay and no cheap motels were available, we’d sleep on a community center floor or in the backseat. If my father came along on the trip, we’d stay at a Howard Johnson’s or a Holiday Inn—the lap of luxury—until the car finally rolled into our resort or rental house.
“Why did you drive?” my cousins Pierre and Freddy would demand when we arrived at the ocean-side resort on Sanibel Island, candy wrappers and Coke cans littering the floor of our car.
“Flying and then renting a car is a waste of money,” my mother would tell them.
“It’s more fun to drive, anyway,” I would lie. “Besides, we got to go to Disney World.”
Running out of gas was my mother’s specialty. We’d sputter to a stop at the side of the interstate, and she’d take our hands and march us along the shoulder of the freeway to the gas station at the next exit.
A free-spirited eccentric trapped in the life of a 1950s housewife, my mother would have been a hippie had she come of age in the sixties. She spent her childhood in Llewellyn Park, a spacious, wooded residential enclave in central New Jersey, outrunning her oppressive nanny at every turn. Red haired, freckled, and perpetually Band-Aided on both knees, my mother was the tomboy in the family, while her much older sister, Frances, received the lion’s share of their parents’ attention. With her raven black hair and classical features, and her admirable skill on horseback, Frances was the image of the perfect wartime debutante, and was even pictured as such in a 1944 issue of Life magazine.
My mother’s father, Norman Robertson, was an engineer of Scottish descent who ran a family business that produced hydraulic pumps for clients like Thomas Edison, the family’s neighbor up the road. An amateur jazz pianist and the life of every party, my grandfather entertained his many friends with Cole Porter while they fed him cocktails at the piano. My grandmother, Mary Robertson, also loved parties, and she and Norman made an especially compatible pair. At the end of the night she would help him home; as a girl, my mother would find her father in the kitchen the following morning, puffy eyed and bathrobed, hunched over a pint of coffee ice cream. “He craved the sugar,” she told us years later. “But the cholesterol may be the reason he died so young.”
Even during the Great Depression, the family was well-to-do, although my mother never forgot the sight of homeless people lining up at their kitchen door begging for food from the cook. The image made a deep impression, fostering her lifelong devotion to frugality. When her father died in her nineteenth year, in 1952, my mother kept her inheritance invested in the stock market, never spending a penny, except to pay her college tuition. She enjoyed the trappings of wealth but, out of a deep-seated fear of ending up poor, chose to live modestly, often buying her evening dresses secondhand, driving inexpensive cars, and carrying purses until they literally fell apart.
My mother graduated from Sarah Lawrence College in 1956 and met my father just one year later, in September, at my aunt Bettina Stroh’s engagement party. She’d driven her red Triumph convertible over from Chicago, where her sister Frances lived, to Grosse Pointe on a windy day with the top down, a yellow silk scarf trailing behind her, her rebellious red curls cropped short.
“That your little red car parked outside?” my father asked when they were introduced.
She told him it was.
“I’ve got the Mark VI saloon parked near your car.”
“Is that so?” said my mother with a flicker in her striking green eyes. Unable to stand bragging, she must have felt compelled to put the charming but arrogant Eric Stroh in his place. “You’d probably love the Rolls-Royce I’ve got back home in New Jersey.”
Caught off guard by this entirely, my father turned and walked away.
During the engagement-party weekend my mother went out with my uncle Peter, but when she returned for the wedding in December, my father was assigned to drive her to the rehearsal dinner, and by the end of the weekend, she found she preferred my father. “I liked that he was artistic,” she said. “And that we both had a love of photography.”
They were married the following June.
Ollie sat brushing my hair after my bath. “You all are so lucky, Frances,” she declared suddenly, surprising me.
“Why, Ollie?” I asked, expecting something really, really big, like Christmas coming early that year.
“Why? Because, you’s rich peoples. Thas why.”
Rich? I imagined Rolls-Royces and white marble mansions, like the Beverly Hillbillies. People on TV were rich; my friends whose last names I saw on the backs of cars, they were rich, but we weren’t. Nobody else had ever told me we were, so how rich could we be? Besides, my father had said he couldn’t pay the ransom.
Moments later, I confronted my mother. “Mom, are we rich?”
My mother’s profusion of freckles seemed to darken, her broad, beautiful face clouding over with something akin to anger, as if I had spoken a four-letter word. “We aren’t rich and we aren’t poor,” she said with firm conviction. “We’re in the middle.”