“My father built this packaging facility just before he died, in the late forties,” my father said with pride. “Should have put in a can plant, too, of course. That had to be added later.”
These were some of the only facts he ever shared about my grandfather, who’d died of lung cancer in 1950 when my father was seventeen. Sometimes I wondered if my father had even really known him.
Bobby’s freckles glistened in the rising heat. He pulled at his shirt collar. “I want to sell beer, Dad,” he said, turning to our father. “Can I?”
“Sure, why not?” My father turned and walked us around the length of the bottle shop. I tripped in my winter boots, and Charlie took my hand. Bobby removed his jacket and swung it over his shoulder. He wore a brass Stroh’s belt buckle.
My father unlocked a door that opened onto a long corridor lined with portraits of our beer-making ancestors and their wives—Bernhard, Eleanora, Julius, Hetty. Some of the portraits had been painted by Gari Melchers, a well-regarded American Impressionist who also happened to be my great-great uncle.
My father stopped in front of a painting of Julius Stroh, his grandfather, who gazed quizzically at us through a monocle, severe and determined in his morning coat and cravat.
My father smiled up at the portrait. “I used to sit on Julius’s lap and he would always say, ‘Have you been a good boy today, Eric?’ and I knew I had to lie. ‘Yes, Grandpoppy, I have.’” My father laughed. “The old kraut could be awfully punitive. So could my father, for that matter.”
He flicked open a gold Dunhill lighter, one I recognized from our trip to London the previous summer, and lit his cigarette. He bought the lighter the same day he took me to the Tower of London. I remembered him pointing out the medieval torture devices used on the kings’ disobedient subjects. The chopping block still had the ax marks where real heads had been severed. Afterward, we’d gone to Harrods, where my father had bought me a pile of new summer dresses. But by the time the dresses arrived home, I had already outgrown them.
“What a terrible waste of money,” my mother complained. “Eric, how could you be so reckless? This is why I never buy children’s clothes new.”
My father stood in the dining room, emptied the shipping box, and looked through the dresses, a defeated expression on his face. He had been so excited to see me in them. I’d worn only one blue chiffon dress on the night we’d gone to see Alice in Wonderland at the theater.
We all regarded the painting of Julius hanging menacingly over our heads in its heavy gilt frame.
“Would Julius have spanked us?” asked Charlie.
“Would he have spanked you? You kids don’t know how good you have it,” my father said wistfully.
Next he led us down the corridor to a heavy wooden door that opened to the Rathskeller, a light-filled welcome room for brewery tour guests arranged with red-and-white checkered tables and decorated with Stroh memorabilia—antique beer trays with the old Stroh’s logo, hurricane lamps, air balloons, and giant, brightly painted toy beer trucks—all with Stroh’s Beer decaled in gold. I wanted to touch everything, run the trucks across the floor like my brothers used to do at home, but most of it sat on high shelves well out of reach.
We were the only guests. Everyone who worked in the Rathskeller greeted my father. The bartender, a bald man wearing an apron and leaning against the wooden bar, seemed especially friendly to my father, like all the bartenders at the clubs my father frequented.
“Well, hello, Eric.”
“Hello there, John.”
“You’ve got your brood along with you today.”
“Most of ’em, anyway.”
Whitney, the baby, had stayed home.
“A good-looking lot, they are,” said John.
“Let’s have a drink, kids,” said my father, heading for the bar.
Bobby, Charlie, and I settled at a table and waited quietly. A waitress brought us cheese, crackers, and three Cokes. No one said any more to us, and I began to feel as if the staff in the Rathskeller were waiting for us to leave; they were expecting a tour group “any minute,” I heard John tell my father.
My father came over carrying a pile of T-shirts that said “Stroh a Party!” across the front, and we put them on over our clothes. We sat saying nothing in the too-big T-shirts while my father had another drink. And then, from the factory floor, came the hiss and roar of the flames firing up underneath the copper cauldrons.
Charlie broke into a wide, bucktoothed smile. “Cheers, Franny,” he said, tapping my glass with his. He tossed the Coke back in three quick gulps—a perfect imitation of my father.
THE HOUSE AT GRAYTON ROAD, 1974
(by Eric Stroh)