Beer Money: A Memoir of Privilege and Loss by Frances Stroh Page B

junior high—or to boarding school. And since Liggett hadn’t taken me back after I’d been expelled from Taft, I’d matriculated at Grosse Pointe South High School the previous summer.
    “Public school,” my mother had lamented, “Oh, Frances . . . that really is an embarrassment.” I reminded her that Bobby and Charlie had also served time at South High after their boarding school expulsions. So I was in good company.
    As I approached my cousins’ house I could see both Uncle Peter’s and Aunt Nicole’s cars parked in the driveway, along with that of Gwendalyn, their Jamaican cook who had often made me cinnamon toast when I was a child. I’d be propped up on a stool as she chattered about her life in Jamaica in her intriguing accent, a whole wall of refrigerators humming behind me.
    Nearly every house on the street had a fleet of cars—an American car to drive downtown to work, a pair of foreign cars in the garage for the weekends, the wife’s car, the nanny’s car, the cook’s car, and the gardener’s truck. It seemed one simply could not have too many cars.
    I looked across the golf course at the uneven line where the horizon met the sky. Objects were once again becoming themselves as the acid wore off, contained inside predictable borders, the colors of things once again muted. The leaves on the trees had stopped glistening like wet diamonds. Grass was grass; golf carts were golf carts.
    I passed Henry Ford II’s neo-Georgian estate where the Hugo Higbies had lived before him. Then I drove out of the gated entrance to our cul-de-sac, the armed guard waving me through from his mini brick fortress, and down one block to Lakeshore Drive.
    I turned left, having no idea where I was headed. All I wanted was to drive along the expanse of the blue lake, listen to Fleetwood Mac, and smoke.
    Peppering Lakeshore Drive—once the jewel of Grosse Pointe, with its sprawling lakefront estates built as summer houses in the first quarter of the century with automotive money—were scores of Mafia palaces. Most of the grand, old houses had been leveled, the properties subdivided. Few could afford the staff to run them. New houses had gone up on smaller lots. I studied their red-tile roofs, stucco walls, and flags of Italy flapping at full mast in the brisk wind off the lake. Mafia and automotive money now shared property lines, and everyone had bumper stickers pleading “Buy American.”
    The sun dipped low, setting the lake on fire, while above it a sky of blue glass began to crack with stars. I knew I should be home studying for my algebra test the next morning. But I’d had to get away from the sound of my father’s voice.
    I turned the car around by the yacht club and started heading back. The lights of Windsor were just coming on across the lake: Canada—our unlikely neighbor. My father had once taken me to Niagara Falls. We’d spent the afternoons in the wax museums looking at life-size wax replicas of famous actors, then on barstools in the saloons where I’d sipped Shirley Temples and feasted on salty peanuts while my father had cocktails.
    Now my father’s favorite bar was Gallagher’s. Ever since Stroh’s had expanded nationally by acquiring Schlitz and Schaefer, he’d begun to feel peripheral at work. I sometimes wondered if he’d been replaced without actually being fired. I knew he’d had no involvement in the new popular “Alex the dog” ad campaign, starring a golden retriever who fetched a can of Stroh’s Beer from the fridge for his owner, then drank it himself.
    Then, when my father’s brother Gari was suddenly paralyzed by a riding accident, leaving him in a wheelchair with only slight movement of his neck, like Christopher Reeve, my father had declined even further. The two brothers had never seemed close, getting together only once or twice a year, but the accident had come as a huge blow to the entire family. Now I understood that my father felt things, deeper down, that he didn’t