The Wrong Kind of Money

by Birmingham, Stephen;

  The world’s most primitive tribes, furthermore, drank without suffering from hangovers. They drank for days on end to glorify their pagan deities, and then passed out. But they awoke not with headaches or dry throats but with a sense of having been purified, renewed, redeemed, forgiven, blessed. It was only civilization that brought guilt to be associated with overindulgence in drink. Hangovers were nothing but an expression of guilt. All this was part of Noah’s father’s philosophy of liquor.

  The distilling process was very similar to another ancient art, the making of bread, or “the other staff of life,” as his father used to call it. The same chemical processes were involved. In fact, his father liked to tell the story of how, early on in his career, some ingredient—no one ever knew what it was—had fallen into a vat of whiskey at Jules Liebling’s first distillery, and whatever it was had turned the whiskey, which still tasted like whiskey, an unappetizing purple color. Rather than throw out the vat, his father had suggested filtering the tainted whiskey through slices of bread. It worked, and the result was a clear, rich golden hue. “It took about four loaves of Wonder Bread at eight cents a loaf to do it,” his father would say with a laugh. “We’d saved eighty bucks’ worth of rotgut.”

  His father’s mind was a vast repository of arcane liquor lore. He even knew the formula prisoners used to make Jailhouse Punch, which was also simple. You took a few slices of bread and soaked them with the canned orange drink they gave you at the prison breakfast table. In a few days fermentation would begin. Then you strained the resulting mess through a T-shirt. “It doesn’t taste like much,” his father said, “but it does the trick for the inmates.” His father went so far as to claim that something very like the distilling process was what had caused the first organisms to emerge from earth’s primordial ooze. Thus, in his mind, distilling was linked to Creation.

  And so, with notions no more complicated than these, the former bartender had become a distiller. Of course, it didn’t happen overnight. At Jules’s bar in the little provincial town of Baie St. Paul, in Canada, one of his best customers had been a man named Henry Ingraham, the last of a dissolute line of Ingrahams, who had inherited a small, unproductive distillery on the banks of the St. Lawrence. “Henry could have made his own whiskey,” Jules Liebling used to joke, “but it was easier for him to drink at my bar.” Henry liked to drink rather a lot, and he preferred Jules’s bar because Jules offered him a particularly generous line of credit. After several years, when Jules politely suggested that the time had come when Henry might consider paying his bar tab, a deal was struck. In return for the deed to Henry’s distillery, Jules would forgive Henry his bar bill, and give him free drinks for the rest of his life. As luck would have it, that life lasted barely six months longer. Henry Ingraham, drunk, was gunned down one night in the streets of Baie St. Paul. The murder was never solved but, as it turned out, there were many other people in the town to whom Henry Ingraham owed money. No one ever suggested that Jules Liebling had anything to do with it. Why would he have? Henry’s debt to Jules had been satisfactorily settled.

  A little research—rather scanty, if the truth be told—revealed that the Ingraham distillery had been in the family for several generations before the intemperate Henry lost it. To Jules the Ingraham name had a respectable, Presbyterian ring to it, and so his first bottles bore the label “Ingraham’s Fine Whiskey … Since 1789.” Later, when “age” became a selling point for whiskey, Jules’s labels began to read, “Ingraham’s Fine Aged Whiskey … Since 1789.” If customers thought the whiskey had been aging in oak barrels for over a hundred years, that was all right with Jules. Today the Ingraham Corporation letterhead bears the words “Distillers of Fine Spirits Since 1789,” and five years ago the company made a promotional splash when it celebrated its “bicentennial”—“Two Hundred Years of Trust and Quality.” Promotion of promotions, saith the preacher. All is promotion. It illustrated another maxim of Noah’s father’s: “If you say something loud enough and often enough, it becomes the truth.”

  Actually, the Ingraham label did not appear until 1917, when Jules launched it. He was twenty-three, had no more than a fifth-grade education, and had been bartending since age fourteen. These are the bare facts. None of them made its way into Jules Liebling’s paragraph in Who’s Who in America, though when the small western college that accepted Noah after he left his signature in the wintry New England snow presented his father with an honorary doctorate of science degree, he liked to be introduced on speakers’ platforms as “Dr. Jules Liebling.” If he could not be Sir Jules, then Dr. Jules would have to do.

  Poor Pop, Noah thinks. Poor Pop? Back in 1917 he was on his way to becoming very rich. Around the corner was Prohibition. Jules always said that he had seen it coming, and perhaps he had. Once, when asked by a reporter for the secret of his success, Jules had answered, “The three P’s—Packaging, Promotion, and Prohibition.” He also once called Prohibition, with a wink, “The most important development in modern American history—more important than the atomic bomb.” In fact, he claimed, Prohibition was responsible for the Bomb. “Prohibition created the Roaring Twenties,” he said. “The Roaring Twenties created the Great Depression. The Great Depression created the Second War, and the Second War created the Bomb. Think about it!”

  As for packaging and promotion, Jules had always believed in what he called “classy stuff.” Classy was one of his favorite adjectives. Prohibition may not exactly have been a classy period in our nation’s history, but to those who were around and willing to take advantage of it, it had turned out to be a nice little thing, and Jules Liebling was one of them. Jules was savvy enough to realize that Prohibition would never be enacted in the province of Quebec. The wine-loving French would never stand for it. And he soon discovered that Americans—even those who could not really afford it—would pay any price he and his friend Meyer Lansky asked, and they set their prices somewhat arbitrarily, for good liquor. With Prohibition the money came rolling in, and it has never really stopped.

  And so, when Prohibition ended, Jules Liebling moved down to New York and built a castle called Grandmont in Tarrytown on a hill overlooking the Hudson River and the Tappan Zee, where Noah and his brother and sister grew up, and where they were taught, by nannies and governesses, that then: father was the kindest and wisest man in the world, their mother the most beautiful woman, their home the most secure and graceful, and they themselves the most fortunate of children. Now, of course, at age forty-eight, Noah is cynical enough to know that none of this was really true. When had he begun to realize that, though Grandmont was the scene of many grand entertainments, his parents had no real friends? Though Grandmont was surrounded by other sumptuous homes and estates, the Lieblings had never met their neighbors. Down the road lived the Duchess de Talleyrand-Perigord. On the next hill lived various Rockefellers. Noah’s family did not know these people. Nor was Noah’s family invited to join any of the various neighboring clubs where these people swam, played golf and tennis, and sailed their boats in summertime. Instead, Grandmont had its own pool, tennis courts, nine-hole golf course, and boathouse. Somehow, Noah thinks, his father must have felt like Jay Gatsby gazing across the bay at the inaccessible green light at the end of Daisy Buchanan’s dock, but without one of Gatsby’s great advantages: Nobody knew, exactly, what Jay Gatsby did for a living. Everyone knew what Jules Liebling did. Sheer money was not enough.

  And why, Noah wonders, whenever he is thinking thoughts like these, do his thoughts inevitably turn back to money? Why should a man earning the salary Noah earns be beset by money worries? And yet he is. Beset. Besieged. Money is like somebody’s law. Is it Parkinson’s? It is the law that states that the more closet space you add, the more clothes you will have to hang there. The more bookshelves you put up, the more quickly you’ll run out of shelf space. The higher you promote a business executive, the higher you must continue to promote him until he reaches such a level that he can no longer do the job. Money was like that. The
more you had, the more you seemed to need. “Money’s just a way of keeping score,” his father said. Not to Noah.

  To Noah, the expenses of his family seem to keep spiraling upward in a kind of endless Laffer curve. In his mind he ticks them off. To begin with, more income means more taxes. The maintenance on the River House apartment has now reached six thousand a month, and the end is nowhere in sight. Certainly it will never go down. Plus there are the periodic assessments, which Noah himself, as the building’s president, is now in the difficult position of imposing. Each assessment seems bigger than the last. He and Carol employ only two servants, Mary the maid/housekeeper and Edna the cook, and in terms of staff the Lieblings operate a household that is modest by River House standards. But add another five thousand a month for these two worthy ladies. Their daughter, Anne, attends what surely must be the most expensive college in the world, twenty-five thousand a year tuition, plus five thousand more for room and board, plus another three for books and equipment, plus library fees, laboratory fees, special lecture fees, infirmary fees, studio fees, gym fees, plus the cost of the little car she needs, plus insurance for a driver under age twenty-one, plus, plus, plus. Running a college, he thinks, must be like trying to run a co-operative apartment building, except that the tenants of a college cannot protest all the extra assessments as they come along. Then there are the costs of Carol’s mother’s care, in that place Carol prefers to call a nursing home, but which is really more than that, since Carol’s mother requires constant supervision. Add another eight thousand a month for that. Plus the cost of ever changing, ever more expensive medications that seem to have turned the poor woman into an ongoing scientific experiment.

  And these expenses he has just listed in his mind are only the fixed, immutable expenses which must be met each month before the members of his little family have even begun to live and feed and clothe themselves, to pay the doctor, the dentist, the butcher, the baker, and the candlestick maker, Rigaud candles. Sixty bucks a pop.

  But would more money make all these worries disappear? Or is it power that he wants—the kind of power over his company that his father once had, and that his mother now has, the power of a clearly defined majority stockholder? He used to think that that was it, but now he is not so sure. And of course Carol was right, the power would come someday, it was only a matter of time, a question of patience. And patience, after all, is a virtue in itself.

  And yet, you see, all that is not enough. There is something more that is just beyond his grasp. And yet, he thinks (and he is thinking all these things as he thinks of most things, while waiting for sleep to overcome him, to fell him with its golden bullet), there is still something restless and thirsty inside him that nothing—not the comfortable and safe apartment, not money, not power, not his job, his wife, his friends—is quite able to satisfy. It is as though there is a volcano that seems to be bubbling now inside him, on the verge of eruption, and what Noah wants is neither definable as love, or money, or knowledge, or a certainty of the future, but is a thing that cannot be expressed in any concrete terms, a thing with feathers. I have no offering, no grail, he thinks. But no, that is not it, either, for offerings or grails are not hard to come by if you want one. It is simply this: For the past two, or maybe three, years he has been unable to look forward to next week. So many next weeks have been the same as last weeks, and there is very little hope now that anything of importance or great joy will ever happen in any of them. Next week is sales conference. That is supposed to be important, and in one sense it is. Noah has an important presentation to make at this particular sales conference. A lot of the company’s future hangs on it. A big investment is at stake.

  Okay, but next week is also home again when sales conference is over, no different. Next week is also next year, and again no different, except for another birthday. And on and on the years arise and speed, over the past. You got out of the taxi, paid the driver, crossed the sidewalk to the gracious canopy that announced your building, crossed that stark marble foyer to the elevator, smiled at the elevator man who knew your floor, and returned to the apartment where you lived and slept, sometimes, with your wife, especially in the summer when it was warm outside and cool in the house.… And there she is, her breathing soft and regular now, in the other bed. And yet he is thinking of the scent of a young girl’s dark hair, and the taste of her hair when he brushed his lips against it. “That wasn’t meant to be funny,” she said.

  He reaches his hand under the covers of his twin bed, and begins the gentle, loving process of his hand on himself that will ease the path to sleep.

  On his bike, defying death without goggles or a helmet, he had charged, at full speed, up a mountainside, jumping rocks and outcroppings, to the top, where he had stopped, suspended, left foot on a rock, in neutral but gunning the engine at full throttle to survey all the Berkshire foothills that lay in the distance and were waiting to be conquered. On his bike he had felt free.

  And yet, still glimmering in his mind, is Aesop. Every Aesop fable had a moral at its ending.

  Like most married couples who have been together as long as Noah and Carol, they do not always tell each other the truth. This is not to say that they lie to one another. Outright lies are too dangerous. It’s just that they don’t always tell each other the full truth about certain matters. After all, there are times when the full truth just complicates things. The full truth can be time-consuming, leading to unnecessary arguments and mindless tautology. Noah, for example, did not tell his wife the whole truth about his meeting with his mother that evening in the library. There seemed to be no point in telling everything that was said, especially since tonight’s meeting was not much different from a similar meeting a year ago, or a year before that. What happened tonight was this:

  They sat in the pair of wing chairs facing each other, and his mother said, “I’m ready to turn the business over to you, Noah. I’m even readier than I was last year when we talked about it. The time has come.”

  “I see,” he said guardedly, because he was pretty sure he knew what was coming next.

  “I’m going to be eighty-three,” she said with a sigh. “I’m too old for this stuff. An old woman shouldn’t be running a business like this. A woman shouldn’t be running a business like this to begin with. This is a man’s business, your father always said so. I want to put you in the driver’s seat, Noah, where your father wanted you to be when you were ready for it. You’re ready for it, and everybody knows it. My presidency was only meant to be an interim thing, and that interim’s gone on long enough. I’m ready to turn over my shares to you, according to the terms of Pop’s will. The lawyers have drawn all the papers up. Everything is ready for my signature.”

  “I see,” he said.

  “However—”

  “There is a condition,” he said.

  “Yes.”

  “Same as last year’s? And the year before that?”

  She nodded.

  “Sorry, Mom, but your terms are unacceptable,” he said, and started to stand up, “Your terms have always been unacceptable. As far as I’m concerned, this meeting is over.”

  “Now, wait a minute,” she said, holding out her hand. “Sit down, Noah. I intend to get to the bottom of this once and for all. Just what have you got against your aunt Bathy?”

  “I won’t have your sister working for this company. That’s it. There’s nothing more to say.”

  “Why not? She did wonderful things for this company over the years she worked for us. She can still do wonderful things. You’re letting a valuable talent go to waste, Noah, by not finding something for Bathy to do. She could be a brand manager. She could be a regional sales rep—”

  “Sorry, Mom. The answer is no.”

  “But what’s your reason, Noah? Is it stubbornness, or is it—”

  “For one thing, she’s too old. She’s past retirement age by now.”

  “Old? If she’s too old, what does that make me?”

  He said noth
ing, merely gave her a sideways look.

  “People don’t have to retire just because they reach retirement age. Look at your own father. He didn’t retire when he reached retirement age. He retired by dying.”

  “Then let’s just say I don’t believe in nepotism,” he said.

  “Nepotism! You’re the personification of nepotism! Where would you be if you weren’t Jules Liebling’s son?”

  “Unemployable? Is that what you’re saying, Mom? I don’t happen to agree.”

  “Then why? Why won’t you find a position in the company for her?”

  “Let’s just say I don’t like Aunt Bathy, Mom.”

  “That’s ridiculous! You used to be crazy about her when you were growing up! And she’s always adored you!”

  “It’s a long time since I was growing up. My opinion of the lady has changed.”

  “But why? Why?”

  “Look,” he said. “Let me put it this way. If I’m going to run this company, I’m going to run this company, and I’m going to run it my way, without a lot of my relatives hanging around.”

  “Bathy wouldn’t be just hanging around. She’d be working hard, contributing a lot. And it’s not a lot of relatives. It’s just one woman—my baby sister.”

  “One relative is too many. Sorry.”

  “Or is it just because this is something I happen to want you to do?”

  “Yes,” he said, “that’s part of it, I suppose. Because it will look as though you’re still running things from behind the scenes. Think of what the press will say—‘Mother Resigns Presidency in Favor of Son. Mother’s Sister Named to Important Post.’ That will get a lot of laughs in the trade, won’t it?”