My father died alone in the hospital in 2009. I was stunned he hadn’t wanted me at his side. He hated to show vulnera bility, of course; still, it hurt that he’d been so stubborn all the way to the end. In my sorrow I realized that the small girl who so loved and admired him had never really left. It was that same small girl who despairingly called his answering machine in Michigan for months, until the house was sold, just to hear his voice on the outgoing message, incredulous that he was no longer there.
When the time came for me, as the executor of the estate, to put my father’s collections up for sale, a crippling fatigue settled in; I yearned to wade in my grief for as long as my spirit needed to, not haggle over consignment agreements and auction contracts. My father had left me the whole of his collections—a nod to the years we’d spent together buying them, and perhaps, as some sort of apology. The gesture, though, was like a loaded pistol; the Stroh Brewing Company had been sold ten years before, in 1999, and my father had spent the bulk of his share of the proceeds. The collections—and the Grosse Pointe house in which they sat—were all that remained of my father’s legacy, and disinheriting my brothers seemed nothing less than cruel.
It felt as if the collections and the money they represented had formed an invisible web in which I’d been caught all my life, and I found myself secretly wishing I could give everything to charity with a single phone call. But as I’d decided to split my father’s possessions with my brothers, or at least their value, assessing, dividing, and selling off the collections was what I had to do. The freedom I’d coveted came only gradually, as things of real value so often do.
Lucky
STROH BREWERY
(Copyright 1973 The Detroit News, All Rights Reserved)
Detroit, 1973
Lock your doors, kids,” my father said as we crossed into Detroit on Jefferson Avenue, leaving behind the wide green lawns and lakefront mansions of Grosse Pointe.
Dropping their MAD magazines on the backseat, Bobby and Charlie sat up at attention. I hugged my Barbie to my chest. We had entered the fear zone. Miles and miles of derelict buildings stretched before us, four-story prewar brick buildings with boarded-up windows, peeling advertisements, and torn awnings. Many of the structures looked as if they once had been rather grand houses or apartment buildings, their graceful stone steps rising up to paneled, arched wooden doors. I imagined women in wide feathered hats coming out of those doors, their uniformed drivers waiting outside in horse-drawn carriages. Now the buildings’ brick walls were collapsing.
We pushed down the plastic knobs at the tops of our doors, listening for that reassuring click of safety, and sat silently for the remainder of the drive to the brewery, as if being quiet might attract less attention to our father’s silver Chrysler.
“We’re only as safe as the locks on our doors,” my father always said.
We knew why—because all the people on the street were black. Men and women walked into liquor stores that had the word LOTTO spray-painted on their awnings, cradling brown paper bags when they came out. Cadillacs crawled along side streets where the houses had been burned in the riots and left to disintegrate. Women wore short skirts in November, their legs muscular and lean above high heels. Men circled in the middle of the road, back and forth, back and forth—angry, wild-eyed, shouting at each other.
I wasn’t as afraid as my father. Sometimes, when my parents traveled with their friends to Bermuda or the Bahamas, I stayed in a black neighborhood in Detroit with our housekeeper, Ollie. I climbed trees with Tony and Dana, Ollie’s grandchildren, and sang gospel at her church. I ate Ollie’s Southern cooking and watched her husband, Raymond, blow cigarette smoke out of his tracheotomy hole. Raymond was dying of lung cancer. I could hear Ollie crying at night through the paper-thin wall and Raymond comforting her by humming old songs, and I wondered why, when it was perfectly safe to stay at Ollie’s, we had to lock our doors to keep the black people on the street out.
“Damn riots,” my father said. “Changed everything. We could hear the gunshots and smell the smoke all the way up in Grosse Pointe.”
They had come the year after I was born, the riots, in 1967. My father said the blacks had changed after that, but of course he wasn’t talking about Ollie. The whites fled Detroit for the suburbs, and the Grosse Pointe police force doubled in size.
“Any nonresident black found within the city limits will be escorted back to Detroit,” I’d once heard a police officer say to a woman who’d complained about black kids swimming at the Farms Pier pool. She’d been dressed in a monogrammed pink-and-green sweater, and her husband’s khakis were cuffed at the ankle, like my father’s. They looked like everyone else in Grosse Pointe, the kind of people who drank cocktails from glasses etched with the motto “You can’t be too rich or too thin,” and whose black cooks and maids were treated entirely differently from the blacks on the streets or at the parks.