John, who had married a wealthy woman, cleared his throat. “Those of us who need support,” he intoned, brows raised in seeming concern, “will have to turn to our parents.”
My father shot Elisa a theatrical look of alarm. She grinned wanly and patted his knee. My mother did not lift her eyes from her knitting. Charlie crossed his arms and sank into his chair. I was proud of him, though, for speaking up. Many of us had watched our parents’ generation spending the family wealth all our lives, but only Charlie had showed the courage to ask, “What about me?”
I leaned back into my seat and stared up at the ceiling. Every time I attended a Stroh business weekend, I swore I’d never attend another one. I felt forever caught between wishing we’d just hurry up and lose it all, and hoping we could save ourselves. But John’s response to Charlie’s question seemed to make it perfectly clear there would be no road back.
At lunch, everyone steered clear of Charlie. I walked over and sat down in the seat next to him.
“Hey, Franny,” he said, his mouth full.
“How’s the pasta?” I asked, knowing the food would be perfectly tasteless.
Charlie pulled his napkin onto his lap when he saw me do it. “Not bad. Better than that goose last night.” He laughed. “Hey, I like Arkady, though. You know? He’s a good guy. I just couldn’t stick around after dinner. Mom was too nervous. I can’t stand being around her when she’s like that.”
I spotted my mother at a table across the room with Nicole and Pierre. “What did you think of the meeting?”
“Nothing new, right?” said Charlie. “This ship’s been sinking since I can remember.”
“No kidding.”
“Anyway—sorry about the goose,” he said. “Arkady worked like hell on that meal. It really wasn’t his fault.”
“He likes you, too, Charlie.”
Later, back in San Francisco, Arkady would tell me that Charlie had pulled him aside and said, “You take care of my princess, okay?”
MAPLE LEAVES, 2000
(by Eric Stroh)
I left Michigan on a bone-chilling morning. My mother took us to the airport, and Arkady flew on to New York to see his brothers.
My mother waited with me at the gate for my flight to San Francisco. She sat knitting a baby blanket for her friend’s grandchild and talked about how awful the weekend had been with Charlie there. After the meeting, she told me, he’d gotten drunk and made a scene in the lobby of the River Place Inn, shouting at the people checking into their rooms about Jesus and redemption.
“It’s just dreadful, how he acts when he’s been drinking,” she said, her knitting needles clicking away in a steady rhythm. “It’s terribly embarrassing. Poor thing, he just can’t control himself. It’s like Jekyll and Hyde.”
I listened as she knitted herself back together with absolute truths, the baby blanket draping over her lap as it ever so slowly grew. She had reconstructed the weekend so seamlessly, I almost found myself believing it, too: Charlie was the problem.
The day before, the hotel had called my mother about his minibar bill, which the family company had a policy of not covering.
She had called Charlie immediately. “Charlie, your minibar bill is a hundred and sixty dollars. How can you possibly drink that much in two days?”
“YOU’RE A FUCKING BITCH!” he’d shouted, my mother told me. The rest she wouldn’t repeat. My mother had hung up the phone, dialed the front desk of the hotel, and given them Bill Penner’s number.
“He was drunk,” she explained now as the gate filled with people. “Look, he’s very sweet when he’s sober, but . . . when he’s drunk, it’s simply terrible.”
Seeing how drained my mother looked, how the events of the weekend had worked her over emotionally, I pitied her nearly as much as I did Charlie. I only wished she could see the truth: that all the brushes with the law, the boozing and the drugs, the slow-motion suicide—these were Charlie’s cries for help. Even now. He was challenging her. Challenging her to love him. In spite of everything, he was still her child.
The crowds milled past us on the way to their gates. Listening to the boarding announcement for the first-class passengers on my flight, I knew I had about ten more minutes before it was my turn to board, and I could put this weekend behind me.
My mother suddenly tensed and dropped her knitting. “There’s Charlie,” she said in a hollow voice.
There he was, not twenty feet from us, trailing through the airport, glancing around absently, unshaven and seeming almost lost. His ruined face struck me now as open and curious—an expression of almost childlike innocence.
Startled, we instantly looked away—perhaps because we were tired, or because he wasn’t the person we’d spent the morning re-creating in our thoughts. Standing there as a physical fact, he was just a person in the world with a hangover and a plane ticket—a brother, a son. And yet someone to be kept at a distance. My mother and I looked at each other, ashamed.