Beer Money: A Memoir of Privilege and Loss(52)
“Socks or underwear, though. That’s what I do every year.” My mother gave me this same advice every so often. I had yet to follow it.
“Come on, Mom, realistically how many pairs of socks and underwear does he need?”
“At least he’ll know you were thinking of him.” She dropped the pie from her oven glove onto the counter, knocking off a bit of crust. “Poor Charlie. He was never as smart as the rest of you. I spent years helping him with his speech, helping him learn all the things that came naturally to you and Bobby, and Whitney. He got a great deal of attention. More than all the rest of you put together, in fact.”
“Yeah, well, Dad was pretty hard on him,” I said. I flashed to Charlie quickly gathering up all the Indian beads on the bed as my father’s footsteps came down the long hallway, toward his room.
“Genes play a much larger role in how we develop than environment. The more I look around, the more I see this.” My mother sliced the pie and brought two plates over to the kitchen table. “When Gari and John married Susie and Lou, there just wasn’t enough variety of genes.”
For as long as I could remember, I’d been hearing my mother say the Stroh family’s paltry gene pool came from those two brothers marrying two sisters—Susie and Lou, who drank martinis as if they were water. I myself leaned more toward the nurture side of the nature versus nurture debate.
“Dad picked on the defenseless ones, if you ask me,” I said. “Bobby and I turned out okay because he liked us better, don’t you think? I mean, we could stand up to him, for one thing.” Bobby had once told me a story about throwing a baked potato at my father in the course of an argument, which caused my father to back down with a sort of respect.
My mother chewed her pie. “I still think nearly all of it’s genes.”
“Genes are very important,” Arkady agreed. “They decide almost everything.”
I looked at my boyfriend as he loaded the dishwasher and for a moment wondered what planet he was from. Of course that’s what had attracted me to begin with—his utter certainty about things.
I took a bite of pie and thought about all the years of misplaced blame in our family. Whether it was the business going down the tubes or Charlie’s demise, no one wanted to take responsibility; even our genes seemed little more than convenient scapegoats.
“You’re probably right,” I told my mother. I didn’t have the heart to challenge her; the truth would be too much to bear.
“I know I am,” she said.
DETROIT, CIRCA 1972
(by Eric Stroh)
At eight thirty the next morning, the family assembled in a meeting room in our office building at Stroh River Place to await the presentations. Forty of us—cousins, aunts, uncles, brothers, sisters, and parents, whether related by blood or by marriage—sat united in our morbid curiosity about the fate of the failing business, as well as our current or future financial interests.
The room hushed when Charlie entered, and you couldn’t blame anyone. In the glaring light of day, he looked like a homeless man as he ambled through the room, his skin leathery and blotched, eyes gazing vacantly ahead, making eye contact with no one—a homeless man dressed up for church by community do-gooders. His large nose appeared to have taken over his face, a face cut into an apple and left to dry. The blue oxford shirt from Whitney’s closet seemed to constrain his gestures, while the gray flannels and loafers he’d also taken from the house no longer fit his diminishing frame. He pulled out the chair next to mine with difficulty, catching the white tablecloth and disturbing the glasses of water at each place. The acidic fumes of stale alcohol rose off his skin and breath.
I felt at once shame and compassion. This was my brother, even if many of the people in this room could hardly recognize him. Yet I was ashamed of what he’d become, as if his state somehow reflected on me. And recognizing my own wish to escape implication made me feel only worse. Waiting for the meeting to begin, Charlie crossed his legs and fixed his eyes on the overhead projector.
I wasn’t sure how much he would be able to take in. Surely, he’d been absent for so long that the perils of the Detroit real estate market, the pension fund, and our biotechnology interest would mean little to him.
My cousin John, smart in a blue blazer and perfectly tailored gray flannel trousers, walked to the front of the room. Having replaced Peter as the board’s interim head in 1997, he still acted as our CEO and chairman. He welcomed the group and, smiling, began his opening presentation.
“Allow me to state the obvious: the fact that we continue to meet in this building—in a city that is literally falling apart all around us—is not exactly good news.”
Everyone laughed grimly. At dinner the night before, Bobby had characterized the situation with brilliant shorthand, “Replacing Peter with John was like rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic.”
Bobby had nailed it, though his metaphor left out any hint of responsibility. The fact was the Stroh Companies, Inc., board, as well as the family members who’d elected them, were responsible for this shipwreck. They had placed that fatal iceberg right in their own path.
“If we could pick this building up and put it down somewhere else, anywhere else,” John continued, “we’d be okay. But for better or worse, our real estate holdings are in Detroit.”