“I called him as soon as I heard,” I said. I didn’t tell her, though, what Bobby had said: “Charlie was a fool right up until the end.” I knew his callousness toward Charlie was only a defense, like my father’s; still, it hurt to hear it. Bobby’s handling of the situation, like my parents’, disturbed me almost as much as my own behavior did. We’d all distanced ourselves, rather brutally, it seemed to me. Charlie’s neediness reminded us of our own frailties, and we’d hated him for it.
“Poor Charlie,” was all that my father had said when I called him from Big Sur, a whole lifetime of regret in those three worn syllables.
My mother put down her knitting. Her gaze drifted to the crackling logs in the fireplace. She rested her hand on Mishka’s back and closed her eyes.
I went over and spread a blanket across them both.
Broke
WYOMING, 2007
(by Eric Stroh)
Grosse Pointe, 2008
My father, five-year-old Mishka, and I sat at a table having dinner at The Hill, the restaurant where you ate when you weren’t at the club. Dark paneling, starched linen tablecloths, weighty cutlery. A breadbasket heaping with gnarled rolls that resembled tightly wound fists. We’d flown into Detroit for twenty-four hours on our way from New York to San Francisco.
“I can’t sleep,” my father was saying, visibly irritated. “I’m so damned wound up.” He was drinking club soda. Since his divorce from Elisa, his stomach couldn’t take the alcohol anymore. Instead, he took painkillers.
He must have been reading his mail. Usually I was the one who filled him in on the grim news that arrived in the quarterly reports from the family holding company. The most recent had warned that dividends would be entirely eliminated in a few months, leaving my father to live on nothing more than his small pension. Sixteen years after our final listing in Forbes, the coffers were empty.
“Dad, you’ll be okay,” I reassured him. But we both knew he had nonnegotiable financial obligations both to my mother and to Elisa. To cover these, he likely would be forced to sell his house in a real estate market depressed beyond recognition by the bankrupt automotive industry, burning up what little he had left in those family trusts that Bill Penner had agonized over twelve years before. My mother would likely forgive the debt, but we were not counting on Elisa, who had left him for another man less than a year ago, to do the same.
My father slathered a roll with butter. “I can’t remember the last time I heard good news,” he said. “Whenever I open a goddamn letter it’s always doom and gloom.”
All the fears I’d ever felt about my own future paled in comparison to what I imagined he must be feeling about his. My father was not equipped, I knew, to live without a substantial income. I wondered if he would spend the rest of his life regretting his choices, or perhaps even wishing that he’d been born into another family, one that hadn’t taken such good care of him, up to now.
That meeting in Bill Penner’s office twelve years before had been the best thing that had ever happened to me. Since then, through my active investing, I’d parlayed a small investment account into a sizeable nest egg. I still had my income from the Detroit real estate trust, but I’d been informed that would soon end. No matter. Striving for something gives life its meaning, regardless of whether we succeed or fail. The problem was, my father had never had to strive for anything.
Looking over at Mishka, who was playing with the salt and pepper, I felt deeply grateful this would not be his fate.
My father sipped his club soda. “So—how’s your book coming along?” he asked, suddenly upbeat. “Can I be a character in your great American novel?”
I was writing a novel set in the late-nineties New York art world, with an artist protagonist whose family had lost their wealth. I had stopped making installations years ago. Now I just wrote about artists. “Sure,” I said, to please him. “Or maybe I’ll start a new book—with you as the main character.”
“Pipe-smoking old kraut?” he chuckled. “That kinda thing?”
I laughed. “Exactly.”
Mishka was lining the silverware up across the table like a snake.
“He’s a good-looking boy,” my father said, watching Mishka with admiration. “Hope he turns out better than some of my kids did.”
Charlie, he meant. Ever since stammering the words “poor Charlie” after we’d gotten the news, I hadn’t heard him mention Charlie except by indirect reference.
“He will, Dad. Mishka will turn out fine.”
“Only it’s harder to control them when they get older,” he said wistfully. “When you don’t even know who their friends are.”
My father ran his hand like a big spider up Mishka’s arm, smiling like a kid himself. Mishka shrieked with laughter and came around the table to hug his grandfather, his blond hair the very color my father’s had been before it turned silver.
“Women—that’s the other problem,” my father went on. “They’re after only one thing. Pick you to the bone.”
“Mom didn’t,” I reminded him.