Beer Money: A Memoir of Privilege and Loss(58)
My father had just finished remodeling. “How do you like it?” he asked when we came inside.
I peered into the living room from the hallway and spotted a real skeleton sitting in an upholstered armchair. My father had always been fascinated with skulls and bones, and often had a skull sitting on a bookshelf. “It’s beautiful,” I said, reminded suddenly of his solemn statement about Elisa eight years before: “If anything ever happened to her, I wouldn’t be able to go on living.”
A few months later, my father, by now suffering from diabetes, noticed an infection in his leg. An infected sore, hardly unusual in a diabetic, could have been treated easily enough. But he decided to let it go—for months. Did he suppose he had lived long enough—or that living without money was a fate worse than death? Perhaps systemic gangrene seemed a better choice than poverty.
Calling me late one night in San Francisco, just to talk, he seemed uncharacteristically at peace. We discussed the weather and my book, avoiding entirely the subject of the business. I told him how much Mishka loved the toy electric car he’d sent for Christmas. For once he didn’t tell me to “speak English” when I said Mishka instead of Michael, our running joke. We laughed a lot. He seemed almost high, in fact. Unfettered. Something was wrong.
“Dad, it’s late . . . what are you doing awake?”
“I love you, Franny,” he said then.
I told him I loved him, too, and clung to the silence that followed, before he hung up, as if everything we’d ever wanted to say was there in that pause.
When he collapsed on his bathroom floor two days later, Ingrid, his housekeeper, took him to the hospital. He forbade her to call anyone in the family.
One week later, he died alone at four o’clock in the morning.
SELF-PORTRAIT OF ERIC STROH, 2004
In my father’s house just before the funeral, I noticed that the skeleton that had been sitting in the armchair was gone. I went and sat in its place, taking in the scene for the last time. Soon everything in the room would change. Several antique handguns sat on top of the mantel. Rare books filled the bookshelves. The eighteenth-century celestial and terrestrial globes flanked the fireplace, and I was transported back to that Easter weekend long ago; I heard my father’s shoes crunching the Manhattan pavement, felt his warm, protective grip on my hand, inhaled the exhaust from the taxis passing us on Park Avenue. My father looked down at me and smiled, just before we crossed the street. “Having fun, Minuscule?” he asked.
Clutching his hand more tightly, I told him I was.
When my family filed into Christ Church—all stone inside with mahogany pews—I kept my eyes down. The damp air seemed to have an electric charge. Feeling hundreds of eyes trained on us as we took our seats in the front row, I clung to the piece of paper on which I’d written my reflections on my father’s talent and character—a crystallization of all his best qualities, but an honest one, one that acknowledged his difficult side as well.
As the minister spoke, I thought about my father’s ashes, which would go into a wall with a bronze plaque inside Christ Church’s rose garden, the same wall where Charlie’s ashes had been bricked in five and a half years before. When I visited Charlie’s place in the wall, I left flowers. For my father, I would leave Cuban cigars.
And then it was my turn to speak. I walked over and took my place at the pulpit. The rustle of programs, with my father’s photograph on the front, filled the church. I looked out at the crowd. Charlie and my father were not among them, and never would be again. With difficulty, I began to read the piece I’d written on the plane. I talked about my father’s talent as an artist, and how photography had been one of the only ways he knew to connect with others. I talked of how difficult he could be at times, but also about the sensitive, generous man who’d been hiding beneath that gruff exterior. I talked of his loneliness, and how, like any of us, he’d only wanted to be happy. His heart had been like the shutter of his camera—opening wide for an instant, allowing the warmth of his spirit to escape into the room, however briefly.
My eulogy done, I looked up and spotted Elisa in the fourth row, her cheeks wet with tears. Had she recognized those same admirable qualities in my father? And had he felt this? Many of the people in the church had not reached out to my father in years, not since his marriage to Elisa. People were complicated. We failed ourselves, and each other. But we were all here now.
And so, as Elisa’s eyes met mine, I smiled.
Open a few windows,” suggested Bobby. He, Whitney, and I had driven over to my father’s house to sort through his collections. “Let’s get some air in here.” Bobby’s dark mustache had flecks of gray, and he wore the rope anklet that marked him as an islander. At the funeral, his eulogy had made light of my father’s punitive parenting style, recalling how, when we were kids, my father had jestingly referred to our house as “Stalag Stroh,” after the term used for German prisoner-of-war camps during World War II.
Whitney opened the sliding glass doors leading to the terrace and went out to smoke a cigarette. He was in the midst of a drawn-out divorce and looked tired, his handsome face sagging in the dim winter light. He settled into the chair where just a few months before my father had sat smoking a cigar and balancing Mishka on his knee.
I wandered through my father’s house. Eighteenth-and mid-nineteenth-century English antiques mixed with sumptuously upholstered chairs and wildlife paintings in gilt frames. I had long ago left behind the world of monogrammed sweaters and award-winning gardens that my father’s classic taste evoked, though my own rooms in San Francisco were peppered with English antiques I’d inherited from Stroh relatives over the years. Never feeling I had the money to properly decorate, I’d been glad to take the furniture, though in my fantasy I lived in a house full of Gerhard Richter paintings, Eames chairs, and sleek sectional sofas.