I was relieved when Whitney tagged the other Edouard Cortès—of a Paris flower market.
I chose the street scene. And so it went, back and forth, as each of us selected what we wanted. The air around us felt ignited, just as it had in the antique shops my father and I had once frequented. It wasn’t that the paintings were so enormously valuable, but they were echoes, reminders, and this drove us on.
When we’d finished, I moved my three paintings over to my designated corner of the living room, where I’d also placed the most valuable item in the house—a Martin guitar signed by Eric Clapton, bequeathed to Elisa in the postnuptial agreement. The guitar leaned against a chair back, its leather case open on the floor, its caramel-colored surface gleaming like polished amber.
My brothers and I walked out of my father’s front door for the last time, pausing on the stone steps. The shipping company had been informed of where the contents of the house would be transported. Twenty-two Martin and Gibson guitars were headed to Gruhn’s in Nashville to be sold on consignment, ninety-seven antique guns were being trucked to Bonhams and Butterfields in San Francisco for sale at their next auction, forty Leica cameras were being shipped to Tamarkin Camera in New York, and so on.
With General Motors prepared to declare bankruptcy any day now, the suburban Detroit real estate market was at a record low. Ford and Chrysler, too, were struggling. In just four years, the value of my father’s house had dropped some 70 percent. Nor was it just Michigan that was hurting; in the aftermath of the Lehman Brothers debacle, we couldn’t have chosen a worse time to sell the house and its contents.
Within a few weeks, we would also come to understand that our father’s firearms collection was peppered with counterfeits, the “million dollar” pipe collection was worth all of $50,000, and the guitars and cameras were worth considerably less than what he’d paid.
“I never liked this house,” Whitney said, stamping out his cigarette on the driveway. “Dad was never happy here, that’s for sure.”
Whitney and Bobby stood under the eaves of the house on either side of the front door, as if keeping guard. “Well, Dad lost everything while in this house,” I said. “And what did he have to look forward to?”
Bobby stepped onto the driveway. My father’s favorite son, he’d always remained the most detached from the events that had led us to where we now stood. “It’s the end of an era,” he agreed. “Let’s just hope there will be some value in all of this when the dust finally settles.”
I pictured the house and its contents vanishing into a cloud of dust, fifty years of accumulation vaporized in an instant. Somehow the image made me feel even lighter. Soon I would be in the clear, taking a child’s tentative first steps away from her parent’s outstretched arms, the joy of walking itself my true legacy.
The three of us drove in silence to River Place for our final meeting with Bill Penner, the January roads lined with soot-encrusted drifts, Detroit’s own Jack White thrashing on the radio, the way Iggy Pop and the Stooges once had, or the MC5. It was an event we’d been dreading for years, the reading of the will, although given that the company would soon be dissolved anyway, there was less to worry about; the Stroh Companies, Inc. shares now worthless, the only wild cards were our father’s settlement agreements with Elisa and my mother. With any luck, his house and the cash he’d left in a bank account would cover those liabilities. Whitney and I were in the midst of our own divorces, and Bobby had just married his third wife. All of us were knee-deep in legal documents already, trying to find new beginnings.
We drove through a residential Detroit neighborhood that looked like a checkerboard with missing squares; whole blocks of abandoned houses had been leveled, while the remaining, occupied houses stood alone like homesteads in Little House on the Prairie, each house sometimes an entire block from its next-door neighbor. With a population drop of over 50 percent, the city was returning the valueless land to farmland, trying to consolidate the occupied area into a more sustainable footprint. No longer could Detroit afford the trash collection, police force, and fire protection in so widespread an area, and the grocery chains had fled the city because of the ever-rising crime, putting vegetables in high demand. Come springtime, grassroots urban renewal groups would be working the fields, planting everything from romaine to rutabaga.
“Just surreal,” I said, staring out the window. “I mean . . . I can’t believe we still own an office building down here.”