Beer Money: A Memoir of Privilege and Loss(15)
Charlie wasn’t the only big change under way. The Stroh Brewery was acquiring the F&M Schaefer Brewing Company of Pennsylvania. My father rarely talked about what was happening at work anymore and never wanted my mother to throw parties for his brewery colleagues at our house. He stopped flying to Hollywood, and soon new Stroh’s Beer commercials were on TV—commercials that seemed to surprise my father as much as the rest of us. In one, the outlaw Jesse James held up a stagecoach for a case of Stroh’s. It was exactly my father’s kind of ad, but he walked out of the library after it aired, without saying a word.
In the evenings after work, my father often stayed out at the bars, or ordered pizza to eat in front of the TV while the rest of us had dinner in the dining room. On the rare occasions when he spoke to us at all, it was to shout.
My mother carried on as if everything were still normal, taking us for a swim at the club while she played her backgammon, out for Chinese food once a week, on errands to the dry cleaner, the grocery store, and the bank.
“Do you know what Charlie does in the Marines?” my mother said one evening in August as she placed plates of steak and potatoes in front of Whitney and me. “He wakes up at four a.m. and does a hundred push-ups. Then he cleans all the bathrooms on the base before breakfast.” She forced a smile. “Don’t worry, Charlie’s going to be just fine.”
“Does Charlie like being a marine?” I asked.
My mother gave me a puzzled look, as if liking the Marines were completely beside the point. “He’s there to clean up his life,” she said finally. “Put himself back together.”
My mother’s optimism was contagious, and we all believed in the quick fix the Marines would provide for Charlie. I pictured him picking up the pieces of his life, like so many shards of broken glass, going back to college, and eventually working at the brewery—the path expected of every young man in the Stroh family.
At the end of the summer, my parents flew out to San Diego for Charlie’s boot camp graduation and stayed with friends in La Jolla.
My father was smiling as he loaded their suitcases into the car. “Charlie’s a tough guy,” he said proudly. “It’s not everyone who can get through boot camp.”
On the day of the ceremony, as I heard later, they waited in the auditorium, holding their programs, eager to see Charlie graduate into his new life, desperate to put the whole ordeal behind them. But when the Marines finally filed in, clean and spiffed up in their blue uniforms and broad-brimmed Marine hats, my parents noticed that Charlie was not among them. Confused, my father walked up the aisle to look into the hallway. There was Charlie, stiff with fear in his uniform, handcuffed and surrounded by several federal agents.
My father went back into the auditorium and took my mother out by the arm. Charlie was gone. Done for, they drove back to La Jolla, my mother in tears, my father shocked and humiliated, both of them determined to conceal from their hosts what had happened. Their worst nightmare was unfolding: Charlie’s drug dealing would surely make it into the papers now, especially if he ended up in prison. Everyone in Grosse Pointe would know—everyone everywhere.
My parents hired a Marine criminal attorney and brought Charlie home on bail. He’d been arrested, it turned out, for crimes he’d committed before entering the military; in the Marines he’d managed to stay clean. His officer wrote a glowing letter to the judge about Charlie’s achievements in boot camp and about his changed life.
In the court hearing, taped recordings of our family’s phone conversations were played out loud in the courtroom. The Feds, it turned out, had bugged our phone line for eight months the previous year. My parents sat next to Charlie’s attorney, listening to recordings of me gossiping about boys and parties with my middle school pals. Then came the recorded drug transactions—scores of them.
Ollie admitted to my parents that she had noticed Charlie handing off packages to cars that came up our driveway. My father made inquiries and discovered that the son of some people he knew in Grosse Pointe—another college coke dealer—had reduced his own sentence by tipping off the Feds to Charlie.
After a protracted trial, Charlie got off with a large fine and probation. No prison sentence. As for the media coverage that my parents had feared, it never materialized. The Marines, it seemed, had done the trick. And Charlie still had his four-year tour of service ahead of him.
I sealed my last application inside the envelope along with my finished essay. Everyone else in the family had gone to the airport to pick up Charlie, even my father. My brother was on leave for the Christmas holiday from Camp Pendleton, where he’d been stationed after boot camp.
Outside, I walked in the dark down the winding, snow-covered driveway toward our mailbox, the four envelopes snug in my gloved hands—envelopes addressed to Choate, Groton, Taft, and Brooks. The sky was blacker than I’d ever seen it, and I crunched along the tire tracks in the snow until I came out into the street, where the mailbox stood. As I pulled it open, I imagined myself throwing open the gates of my life. A great wave of hope swelled within my chest. Soon my story would be out in the world. I imagined its debut as a loud, crashing sound, like the aftermath of a bomb. I wondered if anyone else would notice the explosion.
FRANCES STROH, 1982
(by Eric Stroh)
Carrying my trunk and an Oriental rug, my mother and I climbed the cement stairs of the dormitory to the second floor and found my room, a tiny cell with flimsy metal-framed bunk beds, two dressers, and two desks. Old lead-paned windows looked out onto the green rolling hills of western Connecticut, punctuated by clusters of oak trees and, beyond them, the school’s perfectly groomed athletic fields.