Beer Money: A Memoir of Privilege and Loss(57)
He must have been reading his mail. Usually I was the one who filled him in on the grim news that arrived in the quarterly reports from the family holding company. The most recent had warned that dividends would be entirely eliminated in a few months, leaving my father to live on nothing more than his small pension. Sixteen years after our final listing in Forbes, the coffers were empty.
“Dad, you’ll be okay,” I reassured him. But we both knew he had nonnegotiable financial obligations both to my mother and to Elisa. To cover these, he likely would be forced to sell his house in a real estate market depressed beyond recognition by the bankrupt automotive industry, burning up what little he had left in those family trusts that Bill Penner had agonized over twelve years before. My mother would likely forgive the debt, but we were not counting on Elisa, who had left him for another man less than a year ago, to do the same.
My father slathered a roll with butter. “I can’t remember the last time I heard good news,” he said. “Whenever I open a goddamn letter it’s always doom and gloom.”
All the fears I’d ever felt about my own future paled in comparison to what I imagined he must be feeling about his. My father was not equipped, I knew, to live without a substantial income. I wondered if he would spend the rest of his life regretting his choices, or perhaps even wishing that he’d been born into another family, one that hadn’t taken such good care of him, up to now.
That meeting in Bill Penner’s office twelve years before had been the best thing that had ever happened to me. Since then, through my active investing, I’d parlayed a small investment account into a sizeable nest egg. I still had my income from the Detroit real estate trust, but I’d been informed that would soon end. No matter. Striving for something gives life its meaning, regardless of whether we succeed or fail. The problem was, my father had never had to strive for anything.
Looking over at Mishka, who was playing with the salt and pepper, I felt deeply grateful this would not be his fate.
My father sipped his club soda. “So—how’s your book coming along?” he asked, suddenly upbeat. “Can I be a character in your great American novel?”
I was writing a novel set in the late-nineties New York art world, with an artist protagonist whose family had lost their wealth. I had stopped making installations years ago. Now I just wrote about artists. “Sure,” I said, to please him. “Or maybe I’ll start a new book—with you as the main character.”
“Pipe-smoking old kraut?” he chuckled. “That kinda thing?”
I laughed. “Exactly.”
Mishka was lining the silverware up across the table like a snake.
“He’s a good-looking boy,” my father said, watching Mishka with admiration. “Hope he turns out better than some of my kids did.”
Charlie, he meant. Ever since stammering the words “poor Charlie” after we’d gotten the news, I hadn’t heard him mention Charlie except by indirect reference.
“He will, Dad. Mishka will turn out fine.”
“Only it’s harder to control them when they get older,” he said wistfully. “When you don’t even know who their friends are.”
My father ran his hand like a big spider up Mishka’s arm, smiling like a kid himself. Mishka shrieked with laughter and came around the table to hug his grandfather, his blond hair the very color my father’s had been before it turned silver.
“Women—that’s the other problem,” my father went on. “They’re after only one thing. Pick you to the bone.”
“Mom didn’t,” I reminded him.
He lit a cigarette. “Fair enough,” he said.
I’d spent the final year of my father’s marriage agonizing over whether or not to tell him about Elisa’s affair. She’d asked my father for $6 million to build a boat and sail around the world with her new “friend,” and my father had taken this at face value. But when Elisa attended Arkady’s yoga workshop in Mexico, one night at the bar she’d bragged about her liaison. “Eric would do anything for me,” she told the group between gulps from her Corona. “Because he doesn’t know about sailor boy.”
My own marriage had been failing at the time. Financial stress had been hard on the relationship, as had trying to run a business together. And taking care of a new baby, I hadn’t had the bandwidth to grieve Charlie properly. I feared sometimes I might be carried away by the torrent of my own anger and sadness, and distance became my new mode of survival, all those unresolved feelings having calcified into a wall that kept everything out, even happiness. The withdrawal from the marriage happened over a period of years, and during that time both Arkady and I hoped the distance was only temporary. Perhaps it had been easier to focus my attention on my father’s problems.
Then one day, when Mishka was almost four, I called my father from an airport and told him that Arkady and I would be separating. “We’ll remain good friends, though,” I added. “Just as you and Mom always managed to.”
“Elisa’s moving out, too,” my father said. He soon filed for divorce, at Bill Penner’s urging, and the round-the-world boat trip was canceled.
We left the restaurant, my father, Mishka, and I, and drove over to my father’s house, the lush summer lawn out front in full bloom. For the first time in thirteen years, there was no need to check my father’s driveway for Elisa’s car, hoping she would be out.