At the new house, a 1950s brick box, we might see a neigh bor doing gardening work, inflating a baby pool, or firing up a grill, activities we’d rarely seen on Provencal Road, where gardeners, cooks, and hired pool cleaners were the norm.
But my mother loved that her new neighbors kept an eye on one another’s houses, talked to each other over fences, and dropped off tins of cookies at Christmastime. Perhaps she felt less isolated here. It agreed with her. And since marrying Lloyd, who was now in Oregon visiting his son, she seemed to have dropped ten years from her age. She looked slimmer and happier, though her chronic insomnia over the years had left dark circles under her eyes.
Whitney went upstairs to unpack. After his shower, the scent of Bay Rum aftershave floated in the hallway. My grandmother put extra wool blankets at the ends of our beds and turned up the heat.
Charlie, my mother informed us, had gone to Mexico for the holiday. “It’s for the best,” she said flatly, her eyes trained on the pot of Campbell’s soup she was warming at the stove.
My mother had arranged a meeting for us downtown for the following day with Bill Penner. “You need to get the facts,” she said. She meant about the financial implications of my father’s elopement. Her thirty-year settlement agreement with my father would not be disrupted, but my brothers and I had no such binding agreements. “You all have to face this.” One might have thought, from her tone, that we were headed for the guillotine.
We dressed for the occasion, I in a black-and-white checked double-breasted jacket with black pants and heeled boots; Bobby and Whitney, sporting blazers, ties, and gray flannels. We met in the trust department of our family bank in downtown Detroit, an entity designed to keep the family-trust management under our own roof. Nearly all the Stroh Brewery Company shares were held in multiple generation-skipping trusts for the protection of the company and the family—at least that’s how my grandfather, etc. planned it. These trusts kept the brewery assets intact so that subsequent generations of Strohs might continue to own and manage the business while also paying out quarterly distributions to the family shareholders and their spouses. Within our nuclear family, my father was the only shareholder.
Bill Penner, an attorney with the big Detroit firm Butzel Long, agonized over a pile of documents at the head of the boardroom table as we filed in, his skin stretched too tightly over his clearly exhausted face. He looked up with reddened eyes. “Thanks for coming down,” he said in a tone that could only be called funereal. “I wish it were under better circumstances.”
We all shook his hand and sat down. Bill had grown gaunt with age. Whitney had once remarked that he looked as if he “summered on Three Mile Island,” and I couldn’t help but laugh. Now I felt badly; this man seemed so genuinely concerned about the situation we found ourselves in, so determined to do whatever he could to help us.
“I’ve been reviewing the trusts that benefit your father,” he said soberly as he flipped through a thick document. “And, well . . . Afraid I don’t have very good news.”
The air left the room. Bobby wiped his brow and gave me a long-suffering look that said, Here we go . . . again.
“As you know,” Bill continued. “Your father and Elisa did not sign a prenuptial agreement before they wed. That in itself is troubling. The other piece of unfortunate news, though, is this: two of the four generation-skipping trusts that benefit your father give him a power of appointment over the income, meaning that he can—or even, from a legal standpoint, may have to—appoint that income to Elisa after his death.”
I felt the raw taste of fear at the back of my throat.
Whitney leaned back on the rear legs of his chair, his hands white-knuckling the edge of the mahogany table.
Bobby looked up from his notepad. “Let me get this straight, Bill. Our father may have to leave Elisa his trust assets? I don’t understand—that money was made by his father and grandfather.”
Bill nodded. “That’s correct. And just to be clear, he may leave only the income from the trusts’ assets, not the assets themselves. Those, of course, will pass to your children.”