I put the lamp down. “Already?”
“Business isn’t getting any better.” He helped me plug in the lamp under a table stacked with photography magazines. “And our real estate’s in the damn toilet.”
The riverfront development, he meant. Businesses were leaving the city in droves. We’d already lost the apartment building and the hotel to foreclosures. “It’s amazing,” I said. “General Motors is making cars in Mexico, and somehow the Strohs are still stuck in Detroit.”
“Damn right,” said my father. “And instead of advertising our core brands, your uncle Peter throws tens of millions into biotechnology. Nice move, hunh?”
On a recent family business weekend in Durham, North Carolina, I’d toured the impressive research center we had built in the Research Triangle Park. We were developing a drug, apparently, to treat septic shock, but I knew the likely success rate of such a venture was close to zero. “More money down the drain,” I agreed.
“We’ve been de-listed at Forbes,” added my father, his voice taut. “We’ll be broke before we know it.”
His stress was contagious—I could feel my own heart rate picking up. I tried to calm my breathing as I adjusted the light. My mother often worried about the fact that I was an artist; she still held out hope I would go get an MBA and get serious about my life, make some money, and drop all this art silliness. The chronically bad company news made me wonder suddenly if she was right.
“We’re headed for a big fall,” my father said with an air of finality. He sat back down in his chair and lit his pipe, drawing on the smoke with rhythmic breaths to get the embers going.
He’d been sober eight years now and seemed settled in his life, often seeing my mother for dinner and even traveling with her on occasion. In many ways, they still operated as a couple, my father maintaining my mother’s car, my mother doing his laundry. I found their continuing friendship as reassuring as the bad company news was persistently alarming, and I know my father did as well. After their divorce, my parents had managed to brick together another foundation that seemed to bolster all of us—or at least Whitney, Bobby, and me. As long as those bricks held firm, I imagined we could live our lives productively and with resilience, even if the company itself fell apart.
I looked around at the room. Leather furniture with nail-head trim, antique chests of drawers, valuable volumes on the bookshelves, blackamoor figures flanking the fireplace mantel. How could we have been so clueless? Sexism and racism seemed to permeate everything, especially our beer ads. I’d watched our Schlitz Malt Liquor and St. Ides commercials targeted at inner-city African Americans and felt embarrassed about the stereotyping. These ads weren’t helping sales either.
No question, we were headed for a big fall. I imagined the repo man loading everything in my father’s library into a truck and driving away. The money had never been mine and probably never would be, yet the fear was as familiar as air; we’d always been on the precipice.
“Oh, well, enjoy it while it lasts, Dad,” I said, turning on the camera. “‘It doesn’t get any better than this, right?’”
My father smiled and exhaled a cloud of smoke.
SOUL EXTINGUISHER, 1992
(by Frances Stroh)
On a hot, windless day that everyone called “earthquake weather,” I sat in an editing room at the San Francisco Art Institute and pieced together my family’s answers to my interview questions, trying to imagine the psychological effect on the viewer when all six narratives overlapped. I knew the visual effect of six talking mouths in one room would be captivating. In the tapes, Whitney’s and Charlie’s veneers cracked quickly, their upper lips beading with sweat, voices leaking bitterness. Bobby and I were subdued, philosophical, bent on humor. My parents were distant and instructive, looking down on their children from lofty heights, particularly when talking about Charlie.
“The problem with Charlie is he never grew up.” My father paused and puffed on his pipe. “We wish it were different, but it isn’t. If you asked him today, he’d deny that he has any problems with drinking and drugs. He’d say, ‘Oh no, I don’t have a problem.’”
My father went on to share an exercise he himself had learned in rehab. “You make a list of things you like about yourself in one column, and in another column you list the things you don’t like. Then you study the list and figure out what you can change about the things you don’t like. Some things you can’t change, but most things you can.” He drew on his pipe with a certain satisfaction, talked about how he “took the cure,” then went on to admit that he still drank while on planes.