Charlie struggled with his schoolwork, often having to retake tests, catch up on reading, and endlessly practice word pronunciation with my mother, and yet he was a favorite among his teachers. In hushed voices my parents sometimes referred to him as “slow,” but he never received any educational testing or special attention at school. My parents’ expectations were simply lower for him than for Bobby, and they deemed Charlie’s approval-seeking behaviors as natural for a child with his lesser intelligence.
My father’s nicknames of “Chas” for Charlie and “Nit-Wit” for Whitney made his allegiances clear; among his sons, Bobby was the crowned prince. He laughed at Bobby’s jokes, encouraged his rare-beer-can collecting, and praised his term papers. Charlie could only trail in Bobby’s shadow, awkwardly adopting his hobbies and witticisms. The gentler of the two older boys, and the lesser student, Charlie suffered the brunt of my father’s unpredictable moods, absorbing his scathing criticism and bullying until he escaped to the relative safety of boarding school.
As for my mother’s oblivion to our problems, this was contrived, she later told us, to protect. “If I had intervened, Dad would only have been that much harder on all of you.”
The youngest of three brothers, my father was known as an eccentric boy who would sit on the street curb smoking cigars and mouthing off to kids who passed by. He’d spend his afternoons alone watching nickel Laurel and Hardy movies at the Punch and Judy Theatre, then go home to shower and change into a coat and tie for dinner. When he arrived, his much older brothers, Gari and Peter, would be sitting in the living room with their mother as she sipped her cocktail, awaiting their father’s arrival from the brewery, while the cook prepared the usual four-course dinner in the kitchen. No one ever took much notice of my father as he came into the room, save for when the Brylcreem he used in his hair rubbed off on the sofa upholstery, and his mother would shout, “Get off that sofa, you little pest!”
His father, Gari Stroh, who ran the brewery, was forever preoccupied with problems at work, particularly during World War II, when hops and wheat were being rationed. He refused to water down the family beer, thereby sacrificing quality of taste, as the other U.S. brewers had done to keep volumes up. A man of principle, he also had a fierce temper, and my father rarely talked about him. “I was intimidated by my father,” he once told me, “and avoided him as best I could.”
My grandfather’s sternness may have stemmed in part from his guilt over a terrible injury he’d caused his younger brother, John, when they were children. One July afternoon the two boys played in the garden of their Italianate mansion on the Detroit River, taking turns at target practice with a new archery set, while their nannies took tea in the shade of the terrace. Julius, their father, was holding court at a brewery board meeting; Hettie, their mother, was taking a nap before dinner. My grandfather loaded the bow, testing its flexibility, while eight-year-old Uncle John disappeared behind the tree to fetch the stray arrows. Gari aimed at the target, but his finger slipped and the arrow shot sideways, bouncing off a tree’s trunk and piercing young John’s right eye. The bloody scene that followed, combined with the wrath of Julius, became as legendary as it had been traumatic. For the remainder of his life, John wore a glass eye in his right socket, while Gari wore a sheath of self-recrimination.
My father mostly went unnoticed as a child. When he wasn’t alone at the movies, he spent his time with a nanny while his mother and her sister, Louise, enjoyed martini lunches at the country club. His parents, however, still tried to exert control over his activities. My father loved country and bluegrass music, for instance, but was forbidden by his parents to listen to “hillbilly music” at home. At least the driver who brought him to school allowed my father to play country music in the car.
Photography, my father’s second great passion, was discouraged as well. After being accepted to the Rhode Island School of Design at age eighteen, my father sought his mother’s advice.
“If you go there,” she told him, “I’ll always feel ashamed. Can’t you find another college?”
Susie—she insisted her grandchildren call her “Susie,” so as not to feel old—had never overcome the embarrassment she felt growing up in the midst of Philadelphia society as the daughter of an artist. Her father, my great-grandfather Nunk, a kind-natured antique dealer and hobbyist sketch artist, often painted the furniture in his shop with early American floral motifs. Susie had always aspired to more—to wealth, glamour, social position.