crash, he sold his stake in the company for $17 million.
7
I stayed with Robert in Detroit for a little over two months. It took me that long to build up the nerve to move out, into a 1930s double-decker not ten blocks away, on a street in which about half the buildings had burned down. Also, I was waiting for Walter to come up from Indiana. We had a plan of living together for a while.
For most of that time I had a pretty good time. In the morning, I went over to work on the house, which had broken windows and a leaky roof but looked presentable enough. Squatters had burned garbage and newspapers in the downstairs fireplace, and there were burn scars around the hearthstone. When I picked at the paint job a layer of wallpaper tore away with it. There was another layer underneath, leafy and yellow and rough to the touch, like the wallpaper in my grandmother’s house in Puyallup. As a kid, I used to rub my thumb against the grain; it made your elbows shiver.
One summer in high school I volunteered for Habitat for Humanity, and a bunch of us middle-class teenagers stripped walls, sanded floors, and painted a run-down row of old Victorians outside of Denham Springs. Plumbing and roofing were beyond us, but we helped and watched. I kept thinking about that summerand what it meant that fifteen years later I was fixing up one of these down-and-out places for myself.
There was no running water, and the toilets started out bone-dry. But the pipework seemed to be intact, which was lucky—people stole copper. Instead of grass, the garden grew mattresses, tires and broken bricks, but this kind of work I could do myself, with gloves on, and I spent most dry mornings wheelbarrowing junk from the backyard to the front. On wet days, the house felt pretty depressing since the upstairs living room ceiling dripped—not much, but enough to fill a bathtub someone had dragged under the drip. I spent maybe half an hour emptying this out, bucket by bucket, throwing the dirty water down the toilet. The damp smell wouldn’t go away, and every sunny day I forced open the crack-paned windows at the front and back to get a breeze going through.
I didn’t like hanging around after dark. Also, I wasn’t in much hurry to move in. Mrs. Rodriguez, the cook, laid out hot lunch for us every day at Robert’s house, around the twenty-seater mahogany table in the dining room. So I came back for lunch. I looked forward to this walk all morning. You could see the neighborhood shifting from street to street. Burned-down houses were replaced by boarded-up houses were replaced by empty houses with for sale signs in the window. By the time I got to Robert’s house I had climbed about two-thirds of the way up the class ladder.
ROBERT FLEW HOME REGULARLY TO see his new baby and also traveled around to drum up sponsorship. In his opinion, Detroit could be useful as a model for urban regeneration only if it made money. Somebody had to get rich off it, and it was his job to persuade investors that they would. A certain amount of money he waswilling to put up himself, and didn’t mind losing it either, for his own sake, but the only clear-cut way of judging this kind of scheme was by the profit it made. So it needed to be profitable.
Beatrice served as his deputy whenever he went out of town. We saw a lot of each other those first few weeks since we both lived in the house. She had become an efficient and organized person who could deal with lawyers and manage a large staff. My second day there I saw her dismiss one of the real estate agents Robert had been using to buy up properties—an unhappy, smiley, middle-aged man.
“I don’t want to talk to you,” she said. He kept trying to explain himself. “You may be right. You may even be honest, though I doubt it. But I’ve spent enough time listening to you already. Out, out,” she said, gesturing and laughing by this time, the laugh of a pretty woman who gets her way. And he walked out.
She suspected
7
I stayed with Robert in Detroit for a little over two months. It took me that long to build up the nerve to move out, into a 1930s double-decker not ten blocks away, on a street in which about half the buildings had burned down. Also, I was waiting for Walter to come up from Indiana. We had a plan of living together for a while.
For most of that time I had a pretty good time. In the morning, I went over to work on the house, which had broken windows and a leaky roof but looked presentable enough. Squatters had burned garbage and newspapers in the downstairs fireplace, and there were burn scars around the hearthstone. When I picked at the paint job a layer of wallpaper tore away with it. There was another layer underneath, leafy and yellow and rough to the touch, like the wallpaper in my grandmother’s house in Puyallup. As a kid, I used to rub my thumb against the grain; it made your elbows shiver.
One summer in high school I volunteered for Habitat for Humanity, and a bunch of us middle-class teenagers stripped walls, sanded floors, and painted a run-down row of old Victorians outside of Denham Springs. Plumbing and roofing were beyond us, but we helped and watched. I kept thinking about that summerand what it meant that fifteen years later I was fixing up one of these down-and-out places for myself.
There was no running water, and the toilets started out bone-dry. But the pipework seemed to be intact, which was lucky—people stole copper. Instead of grass, the garden grew mattresses, tires and broken bricks, but this kind of work I could do myself, with gloves on, and I spent most dry mornings wheelbarrowing junk from the backyard to the front. On wet days, the house felt pretty depressing since the upstairs living room ceiling dripped—not much, but enough to fill a bathtub someone had dragged under the drip. I spent maybe half an hour emptying this out, bucket by bucket, throwing the dirty water down the toilet. The damp smell wouldn’t go away, and every sunny day I forced open the crack-paned windows at the front and back to get a breeze going through.
I didn’t like hanging around after dark. Also, I wasn’t in much hurry to move in. Mrs. Rodriguez, the cook, laid out hot lunch for us every day at Robert’s house, around the twenty-seater mahogany table in the dining room. So I came back for lunch. I looked forward to this walk all morning. You could see the neighborhood shifting from street to street. Burned-down houses were replaced by boarded-up houses were replaced by empty houses with for sale signs in the window. By the time I got to Robert’s house I had climbed about two-thirds of the way up the class ladder.
ROBERT FLEW HOME REGULARLY TO see his new baby and also traveled around to drum up sponsorship. In his opinion, Detroit could be useful as a model for urban regeneration only if it made money. Somebody had to get rich off it, and it was his job to persuade investors that they would. A certain amount of money he waswilling to put up himself, and didn’t mind losing it either, for his own sake, but the only clear-cut way of judging this kind of scheme was by the profit it made. So it needed to be profitable.
Beatrice served as his deputy whenever he went out of town. We saw a lot of each other those first few weeks since we both lived in the house. She had become an efficient and organized person who could deal with lawyers and manage a large staff. My second day there I saw her dismiss one of the real estate agents Robert had been using to buy up properties—an unhappy, smiley, middle-aged man.
“I don’t want to talk to you,” she said. He kept trying to explain himself. “You may be right. You may even be honest, though I doubt it. But I’ve spent enough time listening to you already. Out, out,” she said, gesturing and laughing by this time, the laugh of a pretty woman who gets her way. And he walked out.
She suspected
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