Abner died in 1918, having spent his final decade and a half in forced retirement, wandering the halls of the River Rouge house he had bought back out of his first year’s dividend as board chairman and muttering to himself about family ingratitude. The sight of the belching chimneys of the Ford Rouge plant outside his windows must have seemed to him the final insult.
Harlan’s wife, the debutante daughter of a failed NewYork banker who had blown out his brains with an English dueling pistol when his books were opened, was barren. To compensate her for this lack, her husband—in his only known act of human compassion—granted her request to construct a house that would reflect the status of one of Detroit’s first families on Lake Shore Drive in Grosse Pointe. He could hardly have realized the size of the Pandora’s Box he had opened. For months, materials arrived at the River Rouge docks by the shipload: slabs of marble from Italy, oak timbers from Germany, ceramic tiles from Mexico, carved mahogany panels from the Brazilian rain forest. From Spain came an entire eleventh-century chapel, dismantled stone by stone and packed in numbered crates for reassembly in the garden. A 1,600-piece chandelier landed from a villa in France, each crystal pendant individually wrapped in blue tissue and placed in boxes lined with shredded newspaper. Tapestries from Berne and rolls of carpet from Tehran and Cairo went directly from the hold of the S.S. Mauritania into a warehouse on East Jefferson to await installation. Behind the materials came the craftsmen: Greek stonemasons; Belgian cabinetmakers; Florentine sculptors; and an army of painters, carpenters, and bricklayers whose foreign chatter drowned out the general din of construction like the excited babble of immigrants at a train station. And above the peaks of the other houses in a community not known for the modesty of its dwellings rose the shining slate gables of Xanadu, sheltering thirty-six thousand square feet on a twelve-acre lot studded with stately oaks that had witnessed Chief Pontiac’s siege in 1763.
No sooner was the manor house at The Oaks completed, in 1922, than the Crownovers set sail for Europe. While Harlan met with financiers and industrialists in London, Paris, Weimar, and Rome, wife Cornelia descended upon the museums and auction houses. Back home, servants worked far into the night opening and unpacking crates she had shipped. Into the foyer they carried a marble bust by Michelangelo of a prosperous Venetian merchant; over the arch in the Great Hall they hoisted an eleven-by-twenty-foot Tintoretto of Babylonian maids bathing in a spring, encased in a bronze frame weighing half a ton; along the walls in the parlor they arranged the only known complete set of Louis Quatorze chairs outside the palace at Versailles; and from the west wing to the east, starting at the rooftop observatory and ending in the vast flagged basement, maids in white aprons and footmen in breeches and leggings filled shelves with porcelain vases from Pompeii, jeweled masks from Constantinople, Athenian reliefs, Gothic shields, Viennese miniatures, Portuguese lace, and a curious jewelry box made of native Corsican woods, said to have been a gift to Josephine from Napoleon to commemorate their betrothal.
Following a party in celebration of the return of the master and mistress from abroad—attended by the Henry and Edsel Fords, the Horace Dodges, the Walter P. Chryslers, the Pierre DuPonts, and deaf old Thomas Edison in his rumpled evening clothes with stubby yellow pencils poking out of the vest pocket—The Oaks featured prominently in Harper’s, The Literary Digest, and newspaper rotogravure sections throughout the country. Like Hollywood’s Pickfair and the Astor House in New York, the mansion with its seventeen bedrooms, two kitchens, and tiled ballroom became a set piece for the New Gilded Age and the place to stop for persons of note on their way between coasts. Charlie Chaplin stayed there while researching Modern Times. Herbert Hoover, resting during his whistle-stop campaign for the 1928 Republican presidential nomination, shot pool in the game room with Harlan and discussed the stock market. Johnny Weismuller swam in the Olympic-size pool. All through Prohibition the champagne gushed from the stock in the cellar while the grace and charm of Cornelia Crownover contributed to the inebriation of the guests and softened the regret of the morning after.
With Repeal came Depression. Retrenching after his 1929 losses on Wall Street, Harlan slashed wages and increased hours at his plants in Detroit, Dearborn, and along the river. When the fledgling American Federation of Labor and United Auto Workers hit the bricks, Crownover Coaches locked them out, replacing the strikers with non-union labor. Picketers assaulted the scabs on their way through the gates and punctured the radiators of trucks carrying coiled steel and hardwood planks to the loading docks. Pinkerton detectives waded into human seas with truncheons, splintering wrists and staving in skulls. Retired bootleggers struck back with brass knuckles and blackjacks. A Lewis gun mounted on a tripod fired orange tracers into a crowd blockading the assembly plant in Wyandotte. A Remington rifle resting on the hood of a Packard snatched a security officer out from under his cap at the foundry on East Jefferson.
In 1938, pressured by his directors and the threat of a federal investigation, Harlan Crownover signed a three-year contract with the union guaranteeing wages and overtime pay. Sixty-five now, embittered in spirit and his eyesight failing, he lapsed into semi-retirement, placing the company’s day-to-day operation in the hands of his closest confederate, a former Wunderkind he had hired after his father’s ouster to oversee the transition from carriages to convertibles.
His wife had other plans. Four years after finishing The Oaks and crowding it with treasures, she had found the house strangely empty. What was needed, she had decided, was to fill its stately rooms with the laughter of children. In the fall of 1926 the Crownovers had adopted a nine-month-old boy whom they named Abner IV. Two years later an infant girl, Caryn, had joined the household. From an early age the daughter received lessons in ballet and the piano, while the son was drilled in the arts of responsibility and leadership. Only twelve and a half when his adopted father stepped down, young Abner was incapable of taking his place, but his mother was determined that when the time came he would not be overlooked.
Meanwhile the Wunderkind shone. A youthful and energetic fifty at the time of his promotion, Francis Brennan caught the scent of gunpowder from the east that summer before the invasion of Austria and went to bat lobbying for defense contracts in Washington. The news that Henry Ford had gotten there first didn’t faze him. By Pearl Harbor he had completely overhauled the downriver plants and, subcontracting from Ford, set them to work around the clock, cranking out cockpits and bridges for the B-29 bombers and Liberty ships Henry was putting together at Willow Run and Rouge. On D-Day, thirty percent of the materiel pouring onto the beaches at Normandy contained parts manufactured by Crownover.
Postwar prosperity was especially kind to Detroit and those companies that had transformed it into the Arsenal of Democracy. Rolling fat on government allocations, the automobile industry re-geared its factories for a generation of returning veterans and their families. On the occasion of their son’s twenty-first birthday in 1947, Cornelia petitioned Harlan to place Abner on the board of directors. The old man demurred. In his middle seventies, gaunt, blind, and absentminded, Harlan held that a man like Brennan who had grown up with the industry was better qualified to direct the company than a son who lacked both experience and the Crownover blood. Further argument only strengthened his resolve. Since he had learned from Abner II’s mistake, controlling interest—and the decision as to who would mind the store—remained with him. Months would pass, and a suit pressed by Cornelia to have Harlan declared mentally incompetent to direct his business affairs, before he relented. Henry Ford was dead. The patriarchal system of commerce Harlan’s grandfather had created nearly a century earlier was defunct, its place taken by a corporate ant heap with its swarms of faceless cyphers in gray suits. He had neither the strength nor the will to fight it any longer. In his spidery, old-fashioned hand he signed his name to a document releasing his proxy to Cornelia. Brennan resigned the next morning, and on the morning after that Abner Crownover IV, displaying the black armband he would wear to hi
s father’s funeral that afternoon, took his place behind the president’s desk.
The irony was, the old man was right. Snapped up by General Motors, Frank Brennan took over the Buick Division, which quickly outsold the corporation’s other four divisions combined. Abner, following a brief and desultory period of indoctrination, began to spend most of his time in his box at Briggs Stadium, cheering on the Tigers, of whom he became a part owner in 1961. Eager young executives soon learned that an investment of fifteen minutes with the box scores in the Free Press sports section each morning paid off better in encounters with their employer than two hours with Dow Jones. Older colleagues called him “L’il Abner” behind his back and updated their resumes.
This weakness at the top did not pass unnoticed outside the company: One who took note was Roger Gashawk. Preferring to be addressed as Sir Roger—despite the confiscation of the family baronetcy by the British monarchy—this sixty-year-old owner of a Chelsea perfumery came to the United States in 1952 with his two grown sons and a stupendous claim: He was the great-grandson of Abner Crownover I and Abner’s English wife. At a press conference on the steps of Detroit City Hall, Gashawk announced that because his mother’s grandfather had failed to obtain a divorce before taking a new mate, the American marriage had no basis in law, rendering all of Abner’s U.S. descendants illegitimate; therefore, on behalf of himself and his sons, Sir Roger had filed suit in Probate Court to secure majority ownership of Crownover Coaches and all personal properties currently in the possession of the Crownover family.
This was a serious threat. When an army of genealogists retained by the Crownovers’ private counsel were unable to discredit Gashawk’s assertions, a distraught Abner IV turned for advice to his mother. But that old lady declined, wishing only to be left to her duties as caretaker of the mansion in Grosse Pointe: In that role she would approach her centenary, donning a powder-blue dress and frothy jabot to conduct the local television audience on a tour of the last stately home associated with Detroit’s auto-pioneering past.
Rescue came from an unexpected source. Abner’s sister Caryn, best known in area society for her patronage of the arts, arranged a meeting with Gashawk at the Book-Cadillac Hotel, where after some argument she persuaded the attorneys to leave the room and emerged ninety minutes later to announce a compromise: In return for abandoning a litigation guaranteed to run many years and exhaust the war chests of both camps, Sir Roger and his sons would sit-on the board of directors and accept joint ownership of a block of shares in Crownover Coaches equal to Abner’s. This kept control of the company in the American branch of the family while dividing the responsibility of operation between the indifferent U.S. heir and the more attentive Gashawks, who had bought a bankrupt English perfume distillery and made it a player in the cutthroat European market. Both sides benefited.
Caryn, wed recently to a successful young investment counselor named Ted Ogden, had as a child quickly mastered the rudiments of Swan Lake and the Steinway in the conservatory at The Oaks while eavesdropping on her brother’s business management lessons in the library across the hall. What she learned, combined with a gift for strategy, had proven valuable to her husband during late-night conversations in the master bedroom of their large airy house on Lake St. Clair, and impressed shrewd old Sir Roger at the Book-Cadillac. Mutual acquaintances of Caryn and her brother thought it a cruel trick of gender that Abner should have inherited the orb and scepter while her talents were squandered on hundred-dollar-a-plate dinners to support the Detroit Symphony Orchestra.
She, however, was sanguine. When late in the 1960s her shrink—a pinch-faced woman several years Caryn’s junior with the look of a bra-burner about her—suggested she drank heavily to compensate for being forced to stifle her natural abilities, she considered the explanation; but the truth was she had been adopted into a family of imbibers. Her father had fueled himself on boilermakers from his days on the loading dock until he died of a cerebral hemorrhage thirty minutes after signing over his proxy to her mother, and no small amount of the champagne that flowed so freely all through Prohibition at the huge white elephant of a house down the street had found its way into Cornelia’s long-stemmed glass. No, Caryn’s habit was strictly recreational. She had experienced no withdrawal symptoms during her pregnancy, when her obstetricians had placed the Fear of Deformity in her regarding the evils of alcohol in gestation. And she envied no man. Little Opal, a surprise gift at age thirty-nine to a woman whose husband’s sperm count had been pronounced borderline hopeless, was compensation enough for anyone. Abner had his baseball team, Cornelia her mausoleum, Robin and Cedric Gashawk their late father’s legacy. Caryn had her daughter. And she didn’t have to worry about the Japanese.
It had been a comfort that Opal had missed the shootings New Year’s Eve. Sobered instantly, her mother had flown to the child’s bedroom as soon as things cleared and wept grateful tears to find her sleeping quietly with both arms wrapped around her big Snoopy doll. A new security system involving intercoms and invisible lasers had gone in the next day, and hang double time for the holiday labor. She’d hoped all that “Murder City” horror stopped at Eight Mile Road. Now she was contemplating taking Opal to the house in Palm Beach two weeks early. Ted could join them there after his January meetings were finished.
Caryn was seated in the bay window looking out on the frozen lake, nursing her first highball of the afternoon, when the governess came in holding Opal’s hand. The six-year-old was wearing the emerald dress Caryn had chosen to go with her red hair. Her large eyes and small sharp face had come from Ted, but she owed that bright copper top to her mother. Caryn kissed her and trilled over how pretty she looked and checked her platinum watch and declared they were late for their visit with Grandmama—not that time meant anything to the ancient woman wandering among her lacquered chests and two-hundred-year-old stopped clocks—and helped the governess get her into her little white suede coat and fur hat and boots. Looking at the result, Caryn wondered why any woman would choose a lifetime of work over five minutes of motherhood. She finished her drink, called down for the Lincoln, and fixed another while she was waiting.
As the gunmetal stretch swept out of the cul-de-sac with the snowy-haired chauffeur at the wheel, Wolf swung down his sun visor, obscuring his face. He had parked the blue Duster behind a delivery van by the curb and slid into the passenger’s seat, where anyone who saw him would assume he was waiting for the driver to return and waste no time on him. In a black felt coat with his long hair gathered inside a Giants cap he looked older, and more Italian than Indian. He had gotten only a brief glimpse of the little girl before her mother bundled her into the limo’s back seat and climbed in after, but he was pretty sure he would recognize the red haired tyke when he saw her again.
Before starting the motor, he read his rubberized scuba diver’s watch and noted the time in the pad beside him on the seat. When he flipped it shut, the Indian in full feathered headdress on the cover scowled at him. Big Chief tablet. Wilson’s little joke.
PART TWO
The Empty Bag
Chapter Nine
HALF ASLEEP, CHARLIE BATTLE GROPED UNDER HIS grandmother’s silk counterpane, found one of Thea’s breasts, and grazed the nipple with the ball of his thumb until it became as firm as a rubber eraser. She mewed and slid a hand down his stomach to his genitals, where her fingers seemed to wake up and apply themselves. Soon he was on top of her and sliding inside.
Suddenly she caught her breath. Battle opened his eyes and saw his wife’s pupils glittering in the moonlight reflecting off the snow outside the window. He stopped moving. “Charlie, I think your uncle’s up.”
“So what? So am I.” He resumed his rhythm.
She placed a palm against his chest. “You’d better check on him. I can hear him moving around.”
He said shit, rolled off her and out from under the spread, found his robe and slippers, and put them on. In the livingroom he snapped on the overhead light and tapped on the door
to his uncle’s bedroom. “Anthony, you all right?”
There was no answer from inside, only the sound of a drawer closing and another one opening. He tapped again, then tried the knob. The door was unlocked. He opened it.
The bedside lamp was on. Anthony Battle, big and bulky and naked, the way he’d slept for as long as his nephew could remember, was on his knees in front of the chipped dresser Thea had found at a garage sale on Livernois, rummaging inside the bottom drawer with both hands. He needed a trip to the barber. Charlie noticed for the first time that his uncle’s shaggy hair was almost all white. The skin of his buttocks hung like wrinkled bunting. Charlie asked him what he was looking for.
“Boy, you been playing with my lucky trunks? I’m gonna paddle your ass you done went and lost them. I gots a bout with Leaping Larry Shane today. That white motherfucker can stand right in front of you and kick you in the chin with both feet.”
“Larry Shane’s dead, Unc. He got killed in a car crash ten years ago. We went to his funeral, remember? Anyway, you’re retired now. No more bouts for you. Why don’t you go back to bed?”
“What you talking about, retired? When I retire I’m taking the game with me.”
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