In spite of the shame she felt over her father’s vocation, Susie was Nunk’s favorite daughter, not to mention his most beautiful. With her chiseled features and slim figure, she was the daughter for whom he waited up at night with sandwiches and hot chocolate when she arrived home from parties. When the family could afford only one new dress, the other daughters, Louise and Betty, were inevitably passed over in favor of Susie.
One weekend at a friend’s country house, Susie met the somber and serious Gari Stroh, son of the renowned brewer Julius. Susie’s liveliness and beauty captured Gari’s attention, and the two were married within a year. Nine years later, Gari’s younger brother, John, married Susie’s younger sister, Louise. No longer did anyone need to fret over who got the new dress.
Turning down his acceptance to the Rhode Island School of Design, my father attended Michigan State College instead, dropped out after two years, and then, following a stint in the army, joined the family business. Photography, for the remainder of his life, was relegated to a hobby, while each morning he grudgingly put on a suit and drove to Detroit to the brewing company his family had owned and operated for four generations.
One summer evening, my cousins Pierre and Freddy came over with their parents, my uncle Peter and aunt Nicole. Pierre and I were best friends, born only ten days apart; Freddy was two years younger. We sat in the fading sunlight on the terrace, breathing in a garden bursting with bloom and the raw scent of freshly cut grass, and drank Vernors ginger ale while the grown-ups had cocktails and argued about the brewery. Unlike my parents, Aunt Nicole and Uncle Peter never argued when I was at their house, where I spent many a weekend in the summers, so I knew it must have been my father who started the fight. Pierre and I giggled uncomfortably every time his father made my father raise his voice. We didn’t understand what they were talking about, but we knew his father would always win the argument.
“Times are changing, Eric,” Uncle Peter gently instructed my father. “We have to grow. Have to get bigger to compete, or we’ll continue to lose market share and volume.”
My father frowned through a cloud of cigarette smoke. “How big?” he asked his older brother, his striped dress shirt dampening under the arms.
Uncle Peter had once had plans to join the CIA, but he had been run over by a truck and nearly crippled, ruining his chances. Now, walking with a slight limp, he ran the brewery alongside my great-uncle John, who, after Gari died, watered down the beer formula to suit the post–World War II American preference for milder beer. After that, the company had grown rapidly, acquiring its number one competitor in Michigan, the Goebel Brewing Company.
“As big as we can get,” Uncle Peter replied, his jaw set. “Stroh’s and Goebel alone aren’t enough. We have to keep acquiring other brands, other breweries.”
“We need national recognition, Eric,” said Aunt Nicole, in her French accent, her chin-length blond hair pulled back with tortoiseshell combs. She was always chic and sophisticated like that, a Town & Country magazine cover come to life.
Our housekeeper, Ollie, and my mother arrived from the kitchen with a hot cheese dip and a platter of Triscuits, and Ollie put the dip down on the table with an oven glove. It was hardly like at Aunt Nicole and Uncle Peter’s house, far grander than ours, where servants brought out French cheeses, bowls of olives, and delicious sliced tomatoes from their garden, drizzled with olive oil.
“Thank you, Ollie,” said Uncle Peter. He always stayed in the kitchen for a few minutes and talked with Ollie, whenever he came over to the house, asking after her family.
“Mr. Peter Stroh is such a nice man,” Ollie always said after he’d left, and my father wouldn’t say anything.
But he was a good man. Once, after a golfing accident in his garden when a driver swung into my head, Uncle Peter had driven me to the hospital. All the way to the emer gency room he’d held my hand as I’d bled into a linen towel. “You’re going to be okay, Franny,” he said over and over, his small eyes dewy and bloodshot, and I could see how shaken he was.
The leaf-dappled light had drifted from the terrace to the lawn while the grown-ups talked, and the mosquitoes were starting to nip at my ankles. Finally, my father stood up from the table in a fit of frustration. “And where the hell are we going to get the money for all this growth? Our volumes are already starting to decline.”
“Exactly,” said Aunt Nicole. “The competition is gaining ground; we can’t defend our position in the Midwest anymore.” She crossed her bone-thin legs, her gold sandals offsetting her tan to perfection.