Beer Money: A Memoir of Privilege and Loss(2)
The Collections
FRANCES STROH, 1973
(by Eric Stroh)
New York City, 1973
The shopkeepers of my youth were eager men and women who would turn up the lights and smile extravagantly when my father and I walked though their doors.
“Hello, Mr. Stroh” echoed through the dusty chambers of Madison Avenue antique stores, Broadway camera dealers, the elite pipe shops of London. My father always addressed the shop owners by their first names, as if they were old friends, while they led us toward elegantly appointed back rooms. Armored doors opened into velvety interiors with the most prized discoveries of the season: a pair of nineteenth-century celestial and terrestrial globes; an engraved gold-and-silver-plated antique firearm set. My father handled the items with confidence and familiarity, a cigarette hanging off the corner of his lip, the muted excitement in the room making my breath uneven.
I remember one of our trips to Madison Avenue, when I was six. My father and I stood in the back of the shop inspecting a pair of ivory-inlaid revolvers. The dust in the room spun around in a beam of light from the window. The shop owner broke the silence with chatter, perhaps trying to ease any guilt he imagined my father might feel at spending such excessive sums.
My father interrupted him. “Are the holsters original? I bought fakes in Chicago once.”
“Those are double loop Western holsters, Mr. Stroh, by A. M. Nash. A hundred percent antique.”
My father ran his thumb over the embossed leather, scratching the finish with his thumbnail. “Patina’s good,” he said.
The shop owner nodded. “You won’t find a better set.” His few strands of hair, combed over an expanse of receding hairline, had been carefully gelled into place. He walked over to a dusty shelf of books and pulled out a volume. “Oh, and I meant to call you about this Dickens series, Mr. Stroh.” He opened the gold-embossed leather-bound book. “It’s a first-edition collection of the totality of Dickens’s novels, circa 1880. Twenty-nine in all.”
My father put the holsters down on a table and took up the volume. “A Christmas Carol!” he said, smiling over at me.
I leaned against a silk-upholstered divan and dug my hands deeper into the pockets of my Sunday overcoat, a vague feeling of dread constricting my throat. We had watched A Christmas Carol three Christmases in a row in the library, our tree sparkling in the corner of the living room, glasses of eggnog sitting on coasters next to us. I watched the movie only to please my father. The truth was, I always had terrible nightmares afterward, my sleep haunted by the three ghosts.
As he looked through the volumes, my father’s face succumbed to that expression I’d seen so often on these shopping trips, the sort of glow I’d seen on worshippers’ faces at Christ Church as they sang from the hymnbooks, and I knew my father would buy the Dickens set no matter the cost, putting him in a good mood for at least a few hours or, if I was lucky, the entire day.
Afterward, my father and I walked over to Park Avenue in the brisk April wind to have lunch at the Regency Hotel, my father’s English leather shoes grinding the pavement as I struggled to keep up with him. He took my hand and led me across the street against a throng of rushing people. My father pointed up at one of the tall buildings. “That one there?” he told me. “It’s the most expensive apartment building in the world.”
The limestone building rose up toward the sky, as if primed to launch, with perhaps a thousand windows. Power surged from its interior, as if the game of the world—a monstrous game of Monopoly always under way—were being played day and night by its inhabitants. The air around us seemed to crackle with excitement, and I felt at once proud that my father knew such things and disappointed to be only passing by. I wished we could go inside the building’s walls of polished stone, ride the elevator to the top floor as we had at the Empire State Building, and look out on the world.
“Maybe you’ll even live there someday,” said my father, sensing my fascination.
I felt thrilled. And doubtful. Though my father constantly bought expensive things, my mother often worried that we couldn’t afford them. “Really?” I asked tentatively. “I could live there?”
“Sure.” My father smiled. “You can do anything you want. All it takes is money.”
I could feel the solid warmth of my father’s hand as he led me along the sidewalk to lunch; his happy mood seemed to promise me the world.
We walked through the marble-floored lobby of the Regency Hotel into the dining room and were seated and given menus. Plates traveled past us to other tables in the hands of black-tied waiters. My stomach knotted with hunger. The menu looked like the one at our country club—lamb chops, filet mignon, whitefish. My father glanced around for the waiter.
“I’ll have a hamburger, extra well done, please,” he said when the waiter arrived. The waiter raised an eyebrow. “That’s right, cook it like a hockey puck.”
My father turned to me. “My daughter would like a hot dog, French fries, and a Coke.” With the exception of the Coca Cola, the items he ordered were not on the menu.
The waiter came by with a tray of rolls and placed one on each of our plates with a set of silver tongs. Perfect balls of butter sat atop crushed ice in a silver bowl.
“How about we swing by Schwarz after lunch?” my father asked me. He took a roll and slathered it with butter. “Then we’ll have tea at the Plaza.” His light-blue eyes fixed on mine, and I felt a rush of excitement. He’d remembered.