“We have to grow or go,” said Uncle Peter with finality. “We’ll borrow the money.”
Everyone fell silent. I didn’t know what “grow or go” meant, but I understood that the company was in trouble, and I felt afraid. Even Pierre had stopped laughing. The acid smell of the hot cheese dip hung on the air. My father walked away, defeated and angry, like the champion runner I’d seen on TV who’d gotten second place in the Moscow Olympics. He walked the garden’s circuit, taking quick drags on his cigarette, absently checking the sprinkler heads. He never liked to sit with any group of people for very long, especially after an argument, and I had that sinking feeling I so often got when my father was unhappy. The evening continued without him, the sun setting behind the trees in bursts of pink and orange, ice clinking in people’s glasses as the rest of the grown-ups managed to talk on amiably enough.
Taking my picture was one of the few things in life that made my father happy.
He’d get me to pose against the textured bark of a tree, or the long grass in a field, zooming in close with his vintage Leica, his cigarette dangling as he barked out art direction: “Relax your hand on your knee! That’s right. . . . Now, on the count of three.” Invariably he’d snap the shutter on the count of two.
Once he’d photographed me in our garden just before a party. I stood beneath a towering oak tree, its gloriously gnarled roots dwarfing my tiny feet. I remembered how my feet ached gripping those roots as I crouched down for the shot.
“This time give me a smile,” my father said.
I shifted my weight onto my other leg, my back scraping against the tree. “Ow!” I whined.
My father stood and stamped out his cigarette on the perfectly manicured grass. Sometimes I’d see the gardeners picking up cigarette butts on their way to the flowerbeds.
I tried to stand up.
“Stay there!” my father commanded. “Just a few more.”
He breathed heavily as he looked through the viewfinder. He always tried several angles, smiling at me between each one, while my shins throbbed and my feet went numb. I remember wondering if one day I would also learn to use a complicated camera like his Leica. Like my father, I wanted to freeze people in time, as if by doing so I might come to understand them better.
“Frances!” my father said then affectionately. “You look marvelous!”
I smiled for the shot and he clicked the shutter.
My father’s photographs were widely recognized as the best in Grosse Pointe. An amateur with little training, he shot the portraits that my parents’ friends sent out in their Christmas cards and framed on their living room side tables, portraits that in years to come their children would take into their more modest houses as keepsakes of an all but bygone era of lakefront estates, Lilly Pulitzer dresses, and big, strapping American cars.
Money was everything in Grosse Pointe. You couldn’t live there if you didn’t have it, and some had a lot more than others. The social hierarchy favored the richest, oldest families who had settled in the area and built Detroit from the ground up—the same families who lived on my street, whose children attended my private school, and who swam at my club. These were my childhood friends, progeny of the Fords, the Fruehaufs, the Chryslers. And despite the age-old taboo, my friends sometimes discussed their families’ wealth.
“We have sixty million dollars!” Alison Goodyear announced poolside at the club one day.
In my nine-year-old mind, I tried to picture $60 million: piles of stacked bills as tall and wide as the Goodyears’ enormous house. I was already aware that if you were rich, you could be as bad as you wanted and get away with it. My parents lately had been gossiping about Alison’s parents, who were getting a divorce, and about the many boyfriends her mother had been spotted driving around in her new Jaguar convertible. I never saw Alison’s parents when I had sleepovers at her house. We were attended instead by a multitude of nannies and housekeepers. The parents, I imagined, were off pirouetting from the wrecks of sleek sports cars, martini glasses still in hand.
When I told my mother about Alison’s pile of money, she sighed woefully. “That is simply terrible,” she said. “Children should not be talking about money.”
But money was a part of one’s identity. If you lost it, you lost yourself, or so it seemed to me, and throughout my young life I was keenly aware that this is just what we were doing—losing ourselves. “Shirtsleeves to shirtsleeves in three generations,” as the saying goes. Even as children, surrounded by so much abundance, we had been warned there wouldn’t be enough to last.