Beer Money: A Memoir of Privilege and Loss(5)
“I know, Dad,” said Charlie, as if he’d heard my father say this many times.
Bobby and Charlie studied the men who loaded the hops into the vats. Bobby brushed his auburn curls out of his eyes. At twelve and fourteen, my brothers were big boys and, with their tweed jackets and corduroys, seemed nearly ready to don their own business suits. Fair skinned and freckled, like my mother, Bobby went to a boarding school in Connecticut called Kent—the same name as my father’s cigarette brand. Charlie, too, would soon go away to school. He shared my father’s coloring—straight blond hair, blue eyes, rosy skin— none of which stopped my father from favoring Bobby, his firstborn.
“Dad, can I have that job?” Charlie asked excitedly, pointing down at a man who took the temperature of a glass of golden liquid.
“Sure, Chas,” said my father, “maybe some summer when you’re in college.”
Where would I work at the company? I wondered. I’d seen only one woman since we’d arrived—at the reception desk. “What about me, Dad?”
My father smiled his Hollywood smile. “You? You’re going to be a movie star, right, Franny?”
This was one of our inside jokes. My father adored old movies—anything with Humphrey Bogart, Fred Astaire, Bing Crosby—and their beautiful leading ladies: Lauren Bacall, Ingrid Bergman, Audrey Hepburn.
We crossed into the bottle shop, where an endless procession of dark-brown bottles were filled with beer, labeled, and sorted as they traveled through a mechanized assembly line—a miniature of the one I’d seen at the Ford plant on a school field trip. I watched, fascinated, as the bottles marched along, like ants, toward some mysterious place where they would be loaded into cases and trucked away.
“My father built this packaging facility just before he died, in the late forties,” my father said with pride. “Should have put in a can plant, too, of course. That had to be added later.”
These were some of the only facts he ever shared about my grandfather, who’d died of lung cancer in 1950 when my father was seventeen. Sometimes I wondered if my father had even really known him.
Bobby’s freckles glistened in the rising heat. He pulled at his shirt collar. “I want to sell beer, Dad,” he said, turning to our father. “Can I?”
“Sure, why not?” My father turned and walked us around the length of the bottle shop. I tripped in my winter boots, and Charlie took my hand. Bobby removed his jacket and swung it over his shoulder. He wore a brass Stroh’s belt buckle.
My father unlocked a door that opened onto a long corridor lined with portraits of our beer-making ancestors and their wives—Bernhard, Eleanora, Julius, Hetty. Some of the portraits had been painted by Gari Melchers, a well-regarded American Impressionist who also happened to be my great-great uncle.
My father stopped in front of a painting of Julius Stroh, his grandfather, who gazed quizzically at us through a monocle, severe and determined in his morning coat and cravat.
My father smiled up at the portrait. “I used to sit on Julius’s lap and he would always say, ‘Have you been a good boy today, Eric?’ and I knew I had to lie. ‘Yes, Grandpoppy, I have.’” My father laughed. “The old kraut could be awfully punitive. So could my father, for that matter.”
He flicked open a gold Dunhill lighter, one I recognized from our trip to London the previous summer, and lit his cigarette. He bought the lighter the same day he took me to the Tower of London. I remembered him pointing out the medieval torture devices used on the kings’ disobedient subjects. The chopping block still had the ax marks where real heads had been severed. Afterward, we’d gone to Harrods, where my father had bought me a pile of new summer dresses. But by the time the dresses arrived home, I had already outgrown them.
“What a terrible waste of money,” my mother complained. “Eric, how could you be so reckless? This is why I never buy children’s clothes new.”
My father stood in the dining room, emptied the shipping box, and looked through the dresses, a defeated expression on his face. He had been so excited to see me in them. I’d worn only one blue chiffon dress on the night we’d gone to see Alice in Wonderland at the theater.
We all regarded the painting of Julius hanging menacingly over our heads in its heavy gilt frame.
“Would Julius have spanked us?” asked Charlie.
“Would he have spanked you? You kids don’t know how good you have it,” my father said wistfully.
Next he led us down the corridor to a heavy wooden door that opened to the Rathskeller, a light-filled welcome room for brewery tour guests arranged with red-and-white checkered tables and decorated with Stroh memorabilia—antique beer trays with the old Stroh’s logo, hurricane lamps, air balloons, and giant, brightly painted toy beer trucks—all with Stroh’s Beer decaled in gold. I wanted to touch everything, run the trucks across the floor like my brothers used to do at home, but most of it sat on high shelves well out of reach.
We were the only guests. Everyone who worked in the Rathskeller greeted my father. The bartender, a bald man wearing an apron and leaning against the wooden bar, seemed especially friendly to my father, like all the bartenders at the clubs my father frequented.
“Well, hello, Eric.”
“Hello there, John.”
“You’ve got your brood along with you today.”