The Wrong Kind of Money

by Birmingham, Stephen;

  “No, but my mother is. Yes, I guess you could say my mother’s funny. She’s funny that way. That’s a song, isn’t it? And incidentally, they don’t call them inmates. They call them residents. Or guests. And it’s not called the funny farm. It’s called an inn.” Why is she chattering with him like this, as though he were an old friend? “I got some bad news there this afternoon,” she says. “That’s why I wasn’t concentrating on my driving the way I should have been.”

  “Bad news about your mom? I’m sorry to hear that. I lost my own mom just a month ago, so I know how you feel.”

  “I’m so sorry, Officer.”

  “Only forty-two. Too young. Cancer.” He walks around to the front of her car, looks at the collapsed fender, and checks the bridge railing. Then he returns to her window. “No damage done to the railing,” he says. “I’d have to ticket you if there’d been any damage done to that. Just some of your green paint scraped off. But it’s going to cost you a few nickels to have that front end of yours repaired.”

  “A few nickels …”

  “It’s a shame, too. Nice car like that. Tell me something—did you have your seat belt fastened?”

  “No, as a matter of fact, I didn’t.”

  “I could ticket you for that, too.” His face is very serious, frowning. “But the fact is, I didn’t actually see you driving without your seat belt. The first time I saw you, you’d already gotten out of the car. So I couldn’t stand up in front of a judge and swear I saw you driving without a seat belt, could I?”

  “No, I guess you couldn’t, Officer.”

  “You got far to go, ma’am?”

  “East Side of Manhattan.” Yes, she guesses that’s where she’s going. At the moment, at least, there seems to be nowhere else to go.

  “Well, you’d better get on your way. You’d better get home before dark. It’s dangerous driving around at night with only one headlight. Would you like me to escort you home, ma’am?”

  “Oh, no, thanks. That’s very kind of you. But I’m fine now.”

  “Anything else I can do?”

  “No, thanks—unless—”

  “Unless what, ma’am?”

  “You don’t happen to have a cigarette, do you?” she asks him.

  “Sure,” he says, and reaches in the side pocket of his Union cavalry jacket. “Marlboro okay?”

  “Anything!” she says with a little laugh.

  He shakes one loose from his pack, offers it to her, and lights it for her with a match, and she sees the gold wedding band on his ring finger. Somewhere, she thinks, there is a very lucky woman.

  “Thank you,” she says. “And thank you for letting me off without a ticket, Officer. You’ve really been very kind. I think, more than anything, what I needed was just somebody to talk to. I think that’s why I had the accident. I need somebody to talk to.”

  “Don’t mention it, ma’am. Now, you just drive carefully—hear? And fasten that seat belt.”

  “I will. I promise.”

  He gives her a snappy little salute, touching the brim of his cowboy hat with the tip of his index finger.

  “Good-bye, Marlboro Man,” she says with a smile as she rolls her window back up again.

  She watches him in her rearview mirror as he walks back to his car. Then she buckles her seat belt, starts up her car again, and continues on across the bridge, the lighted cigarette clenched tightly between two fingers of her gloved hand.

  20

  Night

  A letter from Jules Liebling to his son Noah, dated June 12, 1974, about six months before Jules died:

  Dear Sonny,

  The trouble with the booze business is there’s not a damn thing to it. It’s got no glamour. It’s got no class. Any damn fool could make a few million bucks doing what I’ve done for a living, and don’t let anybody tell you different. Now the wine business is something else again. “Vintners,” as they call themselves, are very lah-di-dah. Those snobs out in the Napa and Sonoma valleys go off riding to the hounds. If I tried riding to the hounds, they’d laugh me off the horse. Don’t ask me why the hell this is. Making wine and making booze involves pretty much the same damn process. Boil the water out of your wine, and you’ll get brandy. The only difference between selling wine and selling hooch is that the hooch makes more money.

  If you get a kick out of making money, as I’ve always done, you’ll get a kick out of this business. If you don’t, better find yourself some other line of work, like be a college professor.

  You’ll hear some people talk about the “distilled spirits industry” as if it was some sacred thing that’s been around for centuries. That’s bullshit. It hasn’t. The motion picture industry is older, and so, almost, is television. Both those industries are complicated. Ours isn’t. I can tell you everything you need to know about booze in about two pages.

  Until the present century there was no booze industry as such. People made booze, of course, but it was strictly a home operation. The guy with a still in his cellar or backyard made his hooch and peddled it to his neighbors. Then somebody got the idea that booze should be taxed. Taxation created the industry because you needed volume production and national distribution in order to fight the Feds. Taxation also created two new booze-related professions: moonshining and smuggling. The booze maker had a choice: either go along with the revenuers, or hide from ’em. I chose the former course because it seemed a hell of a lot easier.

  But these new professions probably account for the fact that, in the public mind, people in our business are still considered to be crooks or lowlifes, or else ex-crooks and ex-lowlifes. Well, a lot of ’em damn well are.

  Years ago, your ma asked me, “When are the nice people in New York going to accept us! When are even the nice Jewish people in New York going to accept us?” (Her folks were supposed to be some of those people.) My answer was: “When there’s a cold day in hell—though they’ll always accept our money.” She’s more cynical now. She’s maybe even more cynical than I am, and I’m pretty damn cynical.

  Any kid with a chemistry set can make booze. Just put some water in a boiler and bring it to a boil. Meanwhile, set out your hogsheads. Add some corn meal and water to your boiling water, and mix it with an iron paddle called a mashing oar. This is called soaking the corn. Add more boiling water and keep on stirring. This is called scalding the corn. Next, add rye and stir some more. This is called mashing in the rye, and at this point the whole mixture is called the mash. It looks like hell; and stinks.

  Next, cool the mash off by adding cold water. Then add yeast, and the mixture is now ready to work, or ferment. At this point your mixture is called stuff, or beer. When the fermentation is over, the mixture is said to be ripe, or ready to be put into the still. Your stuff gets poured into a trough leading to a condenser, and the condenser is charged—meaning you light a fire under it. Keep stirring, while the still is being pasted—its joints stopped up with paste to keep steam from escaping. As soon as the mixture boils, the liquor that runs off is called the singlings, also called swill or pot ale.

  Charge up another condenser, called the doubling still, and repeat the process. Then repeat again, and keep repeating until your booze has reached the proof you want. Aging in barrels reduces bite. But a lot of people like their whiskey raw.

  So there you have it, sonny—all the secrets and mysteries of our industry.

  My greatest achievement in this business was getting John F. Kennedy elected president of the United States. I suppose you wonder how I accomplished that.

  Well, it started back in ’24 or ’25, when old Joe Kennedy was just getting started in the business. He didn’t have the experience that some of my other customers had, and he was always looking for shortcuts and trying to cut corners. Joe was a very impatient man. I’ve never known a man so impatient to make money, and that impatience of his made him a lot of enemies. He came to me one day complaining that a lot of my shipments weren’t making it to his men who were stationed to receive them along
the South Shore.

  I said to him, “Joe, I’ve got a suggestion for you. Ever hear of a corduroy road?”

  “No,” he said. “What’s that?”

  I explained to him that a corduroy road is a road made out of a bunch of logs lashed together with heavy rope or cable. It’s a device used by the military to provide the wheels of heavy vehicles with traction when they need to get through muddy terrain.

  You see, there were only so many places along the South Shore where you could back a truck down from the highway to the water’s edge, and load up the shipments of cases that came across the lake by boat at night. What the revenuers and hijackers—and a lot of the revenuers were hijackers as well—had learned to look for was the marks of tire treads in the mud. They’d station themselves in these places and lie in wait at night, waiting for the trucks and boats to come in and transfer the shipments.

  I said to Joe, “Make yourself a few corduroy roads, but make ’em reversible. Sod one side of your road with grass and weeds. By day, your road will look just like a grassy stretch. Then, at night, when a shipment’s due in, flip your road over and back your trucks down from the highway. It’ll make your transfers a lot faster, too, and easier.

  Well, old Joe took my suggestion, and he had no more problems. The money started rolling in. So you see—if I hadn’t helped old Joe Kennedy make his fortune, he wouldn’t have been able to buy his son a seat in the House, then in the Senate, and finally the presidency of the United States. But did old Joe ever thank me for what I did for him and his family? Never! Your mother and I weren’t even invited to the White House for his son’s inauguration!

  I’m only telling you all this because, if you decide to stay in this business—and I hope you will, because I want it to be all yours one day—I want you to do so with your eyes wide open, under no illusions that what you do will get you the Nobel prize. Just give Uncle Sam his share, and you’ll stay out of jail. I did. That’s the only piece of advice I have for you, after more than half a century in booze. Your loving old—

  Pop

  P.S. Better burn this letter. If it fell into the wrong hands, I could be crucified. And I sometimes think I’ve been crucified in this life enough already.

  But he didn’t burn the letter. It was one of the few letters he had ever received from his father.

  And now he sits in the visitor’s chair in his mother’s library at 1000 Park Avenue, waiting for her. It is after eleven o’clock at night, and the big apartment seems even bigger, and strangely empty and silent, with all the servants either in bed or gone for the night—too big for one old woman. He hears her slippered footsteps approaching down the long gallery, and her footsteps sound heavy and slow.

  She comes into the room, wearing a pink wool dressing gown over a white nightie, her hair in rollers, and the rollers secured in a pink chiffon scarf tied in a big bow, the whole getup suggesting a large pink rabbit. He stands up. “I hope I didn’t get you out of bed, Ma,” he says.

  “No, no. I was watching Jay Leno. He isn’t very funny, or maybe I’m missing something. I told your secretary to ask you to come by no matter how late it was. Sit down, Noah.”

  He sits again in the visitor’s chair, though she remains standing. “He was so unfunny that I was able to write an entire press release while he was doing his monologue.”

  “Press release?”

  “I’ll get to that in a minute. Meanwhile, my spies tell me you did very well with your pitch for the Ballawhatchmacallit.”

  “Spies? I didn’t know you had spies, Ma.”

  She winks at him. “Of course I have spies,” she says. “Did you think your old ma could run a business this size without spies? I have spies in every corner, spies at every meeting. Your father always had spies. You’ll need spies, too, when you take over. I also heard you changed my president’s message a little.”

  “I did a little editing, yes.”

  She waves her hand. “Doesn’t matter. Nobody really listens to those damn things, anyway. They’re just a formality. But I hear your Ballachulish pitch went really well. And it won the blind taste test, too.”

  “You’ve finally got it right, Ma—Ballachulish. Yes, I think it went well.”

  “Good. Get the salesmen excited. That’s the first big step. Get the salesmen excited, and they’ll get the wholesalers excited. Get the wholesalers excited, and they’ll get the retailers excited. All this is important to do before you buy a line of advertising. But that’s not what I really want to talk to you about, Noah.”

  “Oh? And what’s that?”

  She sits down opposite him. “Bathy,” she says.

  He sits back in his chair and crosses his legs. “I see,” he says. “Bathy again. I think we’ve been down this road once or twice before, Ma.”

  She holds up her hand. “Not this road we haven’t, Noah,” she says. “Not this particular road. To begin with, I know why you’ve always resented Bathy so.”

  “Oh?” he says.

  “To put it bluntly, you once walked into a bedroom at Grandmont unannounced, and found Bathy and your father in what is sometimes called a compromising position. Correct?”

  “Hell, yes! You’re damn right I did.”

  She sighs. “You’ve always been so secretive, Noah,” she says. “You keep things to yourself too much. Why didn’t you tell me about this a long time ago? I’ve given you every opportunity. Why didn’t you share your feelings about this with me at the time? We could have discussed it, like the two grown-ups we’re supposed to be.”

  “Discussed it? What the hell are you talking about?”

  “I mean, you should have told me about it at the time. It wasn’t my place to bring it up with you. But if you’d just told me what you saw, I could have given you a very simple explanation.”

  He stares at her in disbelief. “Ma—are you and I talking about the same event? I’m talking about walking into the old man’s bedroom and find him fucking your sister. That’s what I’m talking about! And later he lied to me. He told me I hadn’t seen what I thought I saw. But I know damn well what I saw. He was terrified that I’d tell you about it.”

  “Was he? I doubt it. I’m sure he knew that I was well aware of what was going on, after all those years, though your father and I never discussed it. There was never really any need to. There are too many things to discuss in a marriage that are necessary. There just isn’t time to discuss unnecessary things. But I suppose it might have been a little upsetting to you, finding out like that. I’ll admit that.”

  “Upsetting? I was disgusted—disgusted with both of them. Just totally disgusted. Sick to my stomach. I ran back down the hall to my room and threw up.”

  “Poor Bathy was terribly embarrassed by the incident. What woman wouldn’t be? Barged in on like that!”

  He shakes his head. “So you knew about this all along.”

  “Of course. But you should never barge into a person’s bedroom without knocking first. It’s bad manners. A person who does that gets to see what he deserves to see. Besides, you were supposed to be away at college. I was in New York. Your father and Bathy thought they had the house to themselves. I often arranged that sort of thing for them. It was all part of the arrangement we had together.”

  “An arrangement,” he says dully. “I knew ours was a screwed-up family, but I didn’t know we were that screwed up. You tolerated that? You’re pitiful, Ma. You’re really pitiful.”

  “Pitiful?” she says sharply. “I am not pitiful. Triumphant is more the word. I won the battle. Bathy was your father’s mistress. I was fully aware of it. I approved of it. I endorsed it. It had been going on for a long time—since before you were born, in fact. It was an agreement we had, Bathy and I, and it worked out to the benefit of all concerned. All. Including you.”

  “Endorsed it,” he says.

  “All but put my John Hancock on it! It started out as a simple experiment at first. We didn’t know whether it would work or not. But your father needed me for
certain things, and he needed Bathy for certain other things. He needed us both, and we both needed him, and Bathy and I also needed each other. She and I said, very well, let’s try it. Let’s see if it works. And, as it turned out, it worked very well.”

  “A ménage à trois,” he says.

  “No, it wasn’t that at all. A ménage à trois, as I understand it, is three people involved in a three-way sexual relationship. Ours wasn’t that at all. It was more like a blueprint for living and working happily together. It was an arrangement that made your father happy, and made me happy, and made Bathy happy. I won’t go so far as to say that Bathy saved my marriage. But she certainly helped make my marriage happier than it had ever been before, and happier than it ever could have been without her. If you’d understood this, you could have spared yourself a lot of anger, and tearing around the countryside on your motorcycle, mad at the world.”

  He looks at her. “That wasn’t why I tore around the countryside on my motorcycle,” he says. “It was because I enjoyed the feeling of power.”

  “Well, anyway, now you know the story. And stop and think. If it hadn’t been for Bathy, none of you children would have any of the things you have today. There would have been a divorce, and then what would have become of me? I had no one else besides your father—and Bathy. I can even say that if it hadn’t been for Bathy, you probably wouldn’t even be standing in this room today. We owe everything to Bathy. So you’ve no right to feel betrayed. Bathy is the one who was betrayed.”

  “Betrayed? How?”

  “I got to keep my husband. She didn’t. I got to have his children. She didn’t. I inherited this company. She got no Ingraham stock at all.”

  “I guess the old man just got tired of her in the end,” he says.

  “No! That’s not true. You made him make a choice. You gave him an ultimatum. You said you’d never work for Ingraham as long as Bathy worked here, too. You cost Bathy her job, so you owe Bathy a lot, too. It was either you or her, you said, and he simply loved you more, needed you more, wanted a son to carry on the business more than he wanted anything else. When he explained this to Bathy, she understood because she loved him, and because she loved you, too. But even after she retired, and even after she no longer lived with us, she remained a powerful part of your father’s life. In fact, a strange thing happened during those last years of his life. The three of us became even closer. The sexual attachment—well, that simmered down, of course, as those things always do, as the years went by. But something even more powerful appeared in its place—a love, an incredible sense of closeness that’s hard to describe, except that it seemed as though the three of us had one soul. It was a wonderful free feeling, now that sex was no longer a part of it, and yet at the same time we seemed to have become almost unbearably dependent on one another. We were bound together by an invisible cord of love, and of memories, too, and of things there was no longer any need to talk about. Just things we knew and had shared in the past. Yes, I think he knew that I knew about him and Bathy. But there was no longer any need for blame, or forgiveness, or anything like that. It was peacefulness. It was understanding. It was happiness. And happiness—I’m convinced of it—is the bird in the hand.” She touches her eyelids, first one, then the other, with the sleeve of her pink dressing gown.