I hand my father a beer. “Cheers, Dad.”
“Cheers, son.” He takes a drink. “Good show.”
I’m already halfway through my fourth beer since we boarded the ship. I’m tipsy and a little seasick. “Fantastic show,” I say.
Dad and I have been getting drunk together all week. Our drink of choice is Kalik, “The Beer of the Bahamas.” Dad has been cool since the moment we landed in Nassau. After we got to our hotel room, he handed me a Kalik from our mini-bar and said, “Drinking age is eighteen here, son. Who am I to defy native customs?”
It took me a solid twenty-four hours to feel comfortable drinking in front of Dad, maybe twice that long before I felt comfortable power drinking in front of him. We saw Kool and the Gang live in concert last night during the Oldsmobile gala at Merv Griffin’s Paradise Island Resort. The band surprised everyone with their crispness and showmanship, reeling off an amazing set of their greatest hits: “Ladies Night,” “Get Down On It,” “Fresh,” “Cherish,” “Joanna,” “Too Hot.” As the evening drew to a close, this glistening embodiment of late-seventies funk segued finally into “Celebration”—the greatest song ever, although no one over the age of eight admits to liking it anymore—as I segued into a mosh pit of forty- and fifty-something car dealer wives groping me on the dance floor.
Today is our last full day in Nassau. Oldsmobile chartered us a Spanish Galleon for the day. It isn’t a real Spanish Galleon, rather a diesel trawler sheathed in a not-even-close-to-authentic facsimile of a Spanish Galleon. The three masts are decorative—about half as tall as they should be—although a small sail is raised on the aft lateen rig advertising the charter company’s name and phone number.
“Kool and the Gang aren’t the Commodores,” Dad says, “but they were fun.”
In addition to being one of the few decent bands Dad likes, the Commodores have a special place in Dad’s heart because the priest at Grandma Eleanor’s funeral gave a eulogy in which he claimed Eleanor’s life was analogous to the song “Three Times a Lady.”
Talk about a reach.
“Hey, Pops, speaking of the Commodores, did you know Grandma Louise used to tell me black singers grew beards because all black men have bad acne?”
Dad chokes on a swallow of beer, coughs, and hits his chest. “She did not tell you that.”
“Oh yes she did.”
“She was just raised in a different time, Hank.”
I look around to make sure no one is within earshot. “Dad, the other night when we all went to her house for dinner, Grandma told me that NAACP stood for ‘Niggers Are Actually Colored Pollacks.’”
Dad chokes again. “Hank, Louise’s sister married a Pollack!”
“So that is the part you find offensive?”
Dad pats me on the shoulder. “Take it easy on her, son. She took your Grandpa’s death pretty hard, same as your mother.”
The taint of death still sticks to all of us. Grandpa Fred, my mother’s Dad, died in October. A retired Eli Lilly chemist, he had a hand in the development of Prozac, or at least I claim he did. I know Mom and Aunt Claudia were two of the first children in the country to get the Salk polio vaccine, which is almost as interesting.
The doctors said it happened at about six thirty in the morning. Grandpa Fred finished his daily three-mile walk, his seventy-four-year-old swimmer’s physique easily mistaken for a man twenty years his junior. After his walk, he picked the last of his vegetables, at least the ones that had withstood the freak October blizzard earlier in the week. The vegetable garden—a half-acre plot of tomatoes, green beans, radishes, green onions, zucchini, and peppers—was where Grandpa sought refuge from my paranoid schizophrenic grandmother. Grandpa entered the kitchen through the backdoor and grabbed a cup of coffee on his way to the kitchen sink. In the middle of washing a giant zucchini, he was struck down where he stood by a pulmonary embolism. Grandma called Aunt Claudia, Mom’s sister, first. She and her husband, Uncle Howard, showed up. Uncle Howard tried to administer CPR. But Grandpa was already gone.
Dad puts his arm around me and squeezes. We let the moment dissipate. A steel drum band starts up aft of us near the helm.
“Thanks, Dad.”
“For what?”
“For the trip, this time with you.”
“You don’t have to thank me. Spending a week with my oldest son is a privilege, just as being your father for nineteen years has been a privilege.”
“Laying it on a little thick there, aren’t we?” I create some separation, giving him the customary you’re-cramping-my-style push-off.
“Hey!” Dad says.
“What?”
He pokes me in the chest. “You too old to give your dad a hug or something?”
“No.” I grab his shoulder and squeeze, leaning in for a one of those awkward man hugs. I ease back. “There, you happy now?”
Dad smiles. “We should do this more often.”
“Hug?”
“Well sure, but not just that.”
“We should go to the Bahamas, get plastered, and play blackjack more often?”
“No.” He slaps me on the shoulder. “And remember what I told you. This weekend—the drinking, the gambling—that’s between you and me.”
“Got it.”
“What I’m saying is we should hang out more—me and you. Father and son. Or at least talk more.”
“We talk, Dad.”
“Not enough. You’re your mother’s son. She knows things about you I’ll never know.”
“It’s not like that, Dad.”
“It isn’t?”
“Oh, make no mistake. I’m a certifiable mamma’s boy.”
“That’s my point.”
“But it’s not that I don’t want to confide in you. You and I come from two very different worlds, and I think we’re just now trying to figure each other out.”
“We’re not that different, Hank.”
“You don’t think so?”
“No.”
“You were raised poor by two alcoholic parents and shared a room with your grandma until you were sixteen. You’re the only kid from your fourth grade class to have a college diploma. You’re hardened, yet full of conviction and hope. You’re a good man.”
“And you, Hank?”
“I don’t even see myself as a good anything. I’ve had a great life handed to me, and I’ve crapped on most of my opportunities. I was drunk both times I took my SAT, I got arrested and suspended from the wrestling team, and I didn’t even attempt to fill out my Notre Dame application.”
“You act as if you were born with a silver spoon in your mouth, Hank. We’ve had some lean, tough times, especially when you were little. Uncle Mitch could tell you some stories.”
“Uncle Mitch could tell us a lot of stories,” I say.
“What do you mean by that?” Dad says.
Goddammit. Fucking Kalik. “Nothing,” I say. “I mean, uh, is Mitch doing okay? You talk to him at all?”
“Not for at least a year.”
“You miss him?”
“I guess, maybe, I don’t know. Mitch is not the guy I grew up with anymore. Some things came out in the annulment proceedings, things that changed the way I looked at him.”
My chest tightens. A small but noticeable panic attack. “What things?”
Dad takes a long sip of Kalik. “Things I should have seen. Things maybe I did see but never chose to acknowledge.”
Is it really going to be this easy? Am I just going to say to my father here and now, “Well, my memories of childhood are tempered by the sensation of Uncle Mitch’s hands cupping my balls. Are those the things you’re talking about?” Or maybe I’ll say to him, “My godfather used to molest me right in front of you and Mom under a blanket while we all watched The Muppet Show together on Sunday nights. Is that what you never chose to acknowledge?”
“Uncle Mitch is gay,” Dad says.
“What?”
“He’s always been gay. I just never wanted to admit it. You remember us ever joking about Mitch serving the shortest tour of duty in the history of the Vietnam War?”
“Vaguely. An accident during Army basic training or something like that?”
“If by ‘accident’ you mean being caught in the shower in a compromising position with his staff sergeant.”
“Holy shit.”
“Yep.”
“Dad, I…I don’t know what to say.”
“What can you say?”
“So that’s the reason Aunt Ophelia got the annulment?”
“Because of the Army incident?”
“Well, yeah,” I say.
Dad takes another sip of beer. “Unfortunately, Ophelia has known from the very beginning about that. She got the annulment because Mitch has been having homosexual affairs behind her back for the last twenty years.”
“Just affairs?” I ask, my question more of a challenge. Come on, Dad. Connect the fucking dots. I have to give Mitch some credit for the misdirection. He’s recast his role in our little morality play. He’s not a guy into little boys—he’s merely a gay adulterer. He outed himself to protect himself. Yeah, maybe Dad did detect the occasional furtive glance or maybe even an inappropriate gesture or two. But it’s still a whole lot easier to rationalize someone who’s lost and searching than someone who relishes being the predator.
“I would think twenty years of affairs is pretty good justification, Hank.”
Okay, so Dad isn’t connecting the dots. Time for a new approach. “What’s Mom say about this?”
“She doesn’t know.”
“What?”
“I’m not even supposed to know. The terms of the annulment were confidential, and Mitch and Ophelia were sworn to secrecy.”
“Mitch told you the day after he was in our driveway, didn’t he?”
“Closer to a week after, but how would you—”
I cut Dad’s words off with a hard, chest-to-chest bear hug. I actually hug my father all the time—granted, less than he would like and more than I would prefer—but this hug is different. It’s desperate, it’s knowing. Dad hugs me back, like he always does, only now I’m the one who isn’t letting go. I’m holding on, hoping that I can somehow tell Dad about Mitch through osmosis.
“You okay, son?”
I can’t tell him. In a way, Mitch has died in Dad’s eyes. That has to be enough. I can hear Mitch in my head. “So that’s what this has come down to, son? You’re willing to break your father’s heart, just like that?”
No, I’m not willing to do that. Uncle Mitch still wins.
I let go and straighten my shirt. The steel drum band continues playing on the deck. Dad is marching, two fresh Kaliks in hand. He hands me my last beer on the island. “Cheers, son.”
“Cheers, Dad.”
“Hank?”
“Yeah?”
More questions? Has he finally figured it out?
“You were drunk both times you took the SAT?”