by Jay Quinn
Frank didn’t turn but lifted his hand to wave his son onward toward the table. Once Karl was seated opposite him, Frank studied him searchingly from under his bushy eyebrows. “Have you come out to keep me from being lonesome or to nag me about Sven?” he asked tiredly.
Karl met his eyes and held his gaze openly, without challenge. He took a sip of his coffee before responding. “I just couldn’t take the thought of you brooding out here by yourself.”
Frank nodded and rolled his highball glass gently between his palms. “Look, Son, I don’t need you to feel sorry for me. If you’re out here out of pity, you can go back inside with no hard feelings.”
“I don’t pity you, Dad,” Karl said honestly. “I don’t understand you sometimes, but pity? Never.”
Frank leaned back in his chair and crossed his legs. “I’ve outlived my relevance,” he said with a smile. “That’s probably the hardest thing to take. It starts when they force you to retire. Then you get to spend the next twenty years or so realizing that what you have to offer the world isn’t worth a dime.”
“I don’t know about that, Dad,” Karl said, then added with disarming candor, “I think what you have to offer the world has a kind of integrity, even if it does go against the grain.”
“Well, you’re the only one,” Frank said. “You haven’t spent your spare time writing any letters to the editor yet. You know the ones, they’re the kind of old-fashioned, right-thinking, commonsense ideas that go straight into the Old Fart file.”
“Maybe you’ve just been sending them to the wrong paper,” Karl suggested.
His father laughed at that, then took a sip of his scotch. “No, Son, I was born in time to be hungry in the depression, help rebuild Europe after World War II, and even usher in the age of the personal computer. But all that experience is just footnotes now. The world is all about right now, not about back then.”
“Tell me about it,” Karl said evenly. “I’m at the point in my life where it’s all about what can you do for me tomorrow. And there’s a long line of bright young men and women on my heels, marking time to get where I’m at.”
Frank nodded knowingly. “I’ve been there, boy. But I’ll tell you one thing, it’s a hell of a lot more like living than what I’m doing now.”
Karl felt the soothing warmth of the coffee mug in his hands and searched for something to counter his father’s point of view.
“Karl, I’m sorry you and yours got pulled into all that stuff about Sven,” Frank shifted unexpectedly. “But it is what it is. Pretty soon, your mother will be out of it and your brother and I can quit each other. There’s not much feeling there on his part, and I accept I’m to blame for that.”
“You are hard on him, Dad. Sometimes cruel,” Karl said, knowing that what his father said about Sven’s feelings was true. “It’s just, he’s my little brother and I love him. You make it hard not to choose sides.”
Frank waved Karl’s words off like a bothersome fly. “You’re right to take up for your brother. I don’t give a damn about that. I just want you to respect my point of view.”
Karl took a sip of coffee to stall and craft his answer carefully. “I can understand, given what you feel is right, how you can disapprove of his life. But what I can’t respect is how you treat him. And I think the reason you treat him the way you do has more to do with his relationship with Mom than it does with him being gay.”
Frank grunted, then said, “You aren’t wrong. Ever since he was born, Annike has been totally absorbed with his every burp, fart, and hangnail. She taught him Swedish, and that’s all fine, well, and good, I guess. But all that accomplished was building a private world that shut me out. No, Karl, you’re right, it is more about their relationship than his gayness. But understanding why I feel the way I do doesn’t change anything. I find it very difficult to like my youngest son, and I don’t care if he knows it.”
“Then there’s nothing more to discuss on that subject,” Karl told him, consciously giving up. “Next topic of conversation: I need to know how you feel about the end… about how you want Mom to go. And how do you want to go when the time comes to make the hard decisions?”
Frank nodded. “It’s all spelled out in the will and the other papers. I was planning on sending you a copy of all that stuff to keep against the day before we move to Palladian Gardens. You’ll be the executor of the will. But since you’ve asked, both your mother and I want you to pull the plug when the time comes. No extreme measures. Our doctors have copies of our living wills in their files. You need to know we have cemetery plots next to each other at Our Lady Queen of Heaven Cemetery. The funerals are already preplanned and paid for. All you have to do is show up, and you don’t even have to do that if I’ve managed to piss you off even more by then,” he concluded with a chuckle.
“Oh, Daddy,” Karl said, reverting to the familiar name he’d used before his own burgeoning adolescence had abbreviated his father to just Dad, “you could never piss me off that badly. Don’t you know that?”
Frank smiled. “I don’t know, boy, I ain’t dead yet.”
“Let’s talk about something a bit more pleasant,” Karl said smoothly. “Do you think Mom will be well enough to come for Christmas at our house this year? I know we usually come down here, but with Melanie probably in New York and you guys down here, why don’t you come to Cary? Geographically, we’re in the middle.”
Frank smiled ruefully and shook his head. “Karl, I don’t know if I’d be able to deal with your mother in an airport now—and by then, it will be doubtful. And, honestly, when you get to be my age, you really want to be home in your own bed. Let’s wait on any talk of Christmas for now. I don’t want you beholden one way or another. I can’t imagine that fighting the crowds is any picnic for you and Caro, either. Just promise me you’ll visit whenever you can. It doesn’t have to be a holiday. I’ll enjoy seeing you whenever you can spare the time to put up with me.”
Karl nodded, accepting the obvious, but said, “I promise I won’t abandon you just because you’re in that tiny apartment in Palladian Gardens. Okay?”
“Son, by now and for the future, let’s just consider any chance we have to get together to be a gift. No promises,” Frank told him.
“Okay, Dad,” Karl said. Karl understood that his father was, in his own way, telling him he couldn’t make any promises and was past needing more requests. Time, in many ways, had run out.
“Just remember the phone rings both ways,” Frank added, before he took a sip of his drink and scanned the perimeter of the yard. His eyes rested on something, and he consulted his watch and chuckled. He pointed toward the opposite corner of the backyard, where the dead trunk of a royal palm stood inexplicably in the manicured landscape. “Look,” he said with a smile, “Lucy and Ricky have made it home.”
Frank followed his father’s pointing finger. Sitting side by side on the trunk of the old palm, two brightly colored parrots, each nearly two feet tall, nested together. Karl couldn’t believe it. The parrots had been nesting there since they’d moved in forty years earlier. Karl had been the one to name them after the Ricardos, whose television show was a family favorite. Somehow the pair of birds had managed to survive and thrive, after all that time, in the same spot. Karl knew that parrots mated for life in the wild and could live for ninety years or more.
“There’s something you can count on never changing,” Frank said with satisfaction. “Oh, to be an old parrot and not an old man.”
Karl registered the wistfulness in his father’s voice and his eyes burned with tears. He found much in his father to disapprove of, but there was much more to him that Karl felt a deep and abiding love for. The world was moving on, but his father was tired of moving with it. Karl knew that at some point in time, his father had decided to plant his feet and resist the momentum that moved events and beliefs beyond his capacity to adapt. In so many ways, his father was simply waiting to die, and there was nothing Karl could do or say to make the wait more bearable.
As Frank watched his parrots fondly and sipped at his scotch, Karl made a mental note to start to resist his own subtle stance against the pull of time. He didn’t want to spend his last years as his father had, marking the days by the delivery of the morning paper, and the weeks by doctor’s appointments and the occasional haircut. But he knew the comfort in the path his father had taken. Karl already knew the peace of arriving home Friday evenings at six and not leaving the town house again until seven-thirty on Monday morning. He and Caroline had already begun to wrap their evenings and weekends tightly around each other, enjoying in their seclusion the absence of stress that came with their strides through the workday week.
Like his father’s table on the lanai, Karl had a table on the second-floor deck off the town house’s kitchen. A vivid picture came to his mind: he saw himself sitting, grayed, slump-shouldered, and defeated, drinking there alone in the day’s dying light. Rejecting that mental picture fiercely, he almost uttered “No!” aloud. Panicked and heart racing as he sat opposite his father now, he didn’t know what he could do to change that predictable picture, but he swore he would.
“Dad,” he said softly.
Frank broke his gaze from the parrots, who were garrulously going over their day in a series of squawks and beak nudges, to look at his son.
“Dad,” Karl repeated as he searched his father’s face, “tell me you’re going to be okay.”
Frank looked at his son’s face with a mixture of love and pride. “I’ll be fine, Karl. And so will you.”
Curiously comforted by his father’s simple assurance, Karl nodded gratefully and finished his coffee before it grew cold.
When Frank and Karl returned to the house, they found Melanie still conversing with Annike in French, and Caroline readying dinner. Frank made himself another drink, something Karl noticed he did with eager anticipation of what seemed to have become a pronounced habit. Rather than call him on it, Karl let it slide and joined him in a glass of scotch.
As the evening shadows darkened the house, the lamps were turned on and the roast filled the house with the pleasurable scent of dinner, and everyone relaxed for the first time all day. His mood well lubricated, Frank grew loquacious, but his rambling stories and recollections were happy ones. He cast a spell of nostalgia with stories of the family that Karl, Caroline, and Melanie were hearing for either the first time or the four-hundredth, but their freshness or familiarity neither jarred nor cut. There were even recollections of Sven that revealed a fondness on Frank’s part.
As the evening played out, Karl took his father’s place as storyteller and deft griot of the family’s past. His take on family history as the oldest child brought memories and perspectives that his audience found telling in ways unique to each of them. The texture of the past became more velvet and less burlap. Frank and Annike seemed to draw its familiar surface around themselves as comfortingly as a quilt. Lulled by drink, good food, and fond conversation, both of them began to fade gently. They were happily tired, and their fatigue showed as their movements slowed, their heads and shoulders drooped, and their smiles grew drowsy and light.
Caroline and Melanie took care of the dinner cleanup and left Karl to reminisce with his parents in the living room until, at last, it came time to leave them. As Karl stood, Annike sighed and said, “I wish you didn’t have to go.”
“Me, too,” Frank said sleepily, and made his hesitating way up and out of his chair. Gallantly, he extended his hand to his wife and helped Annike to her feet.
“It has been a wonderful day.” Melanie sighed. “I’m so glad I came.”
“You should be,” Karl said teasingly. “I’ve seen all the tape tags with your name on them. I believe Mom and Dad have fully furnished your apartment. What is Andrew going to say about all this?”
Melanie laughed happily. “Right now, Drew has a sixty-inch LCD TV, his stereo, a queen bed, and a couple of bar stools, and he’s perfectly happy. I think he’ll be pleased by how generous Gramps and Grandmere have been.”
“Who took the clocks?” Annike asked suddenly.
Caroline, Melanie, and Karl each looked at one another questioningly. Finally, Karl said, “Evidently, Sven will take them. He told me he wanted them if none of us did, and it looks like none of us does.”
Frank rubbed his chin thoughtfully and said, “It’s probably better that he takes them. He knows how to take care of them, and he does appreciate them.”
Even considering the scotch’s dulling of Frank’s cutting tongue when it came to Sven, Frank’s comment surprised them all, considering his outspokenness earlier in the day.
“Are you sure you don’t think he will sell them?” Annike asked tartly.
“No. He won’t,” Frank said evenly. “Anybody who makes a forty-mile round-trip visit once a week to keep them wound wouldn’t sell them. He loves those clocks.” Frank chuckled and turned to Melanie. “Missy, you have to promise me you’ll take them when it’s time for Sven to give them to you. It’s important they stay in the family, okay?”
In reply, Melanie simply walked over to her grandfather and gave him a peck on the cheek. Awkwardly, Frank put his arms around her shoulders and drew her close. Karl watched as he closed his eyes and held her for a long moment before abruptly letting her go and stepping away from her toward the front door.
“You need to get on the road and let the old folks get some sleep,” he said gruffly.
“Dad,” Melanie said, holding out her hand, “give me your keys.”
Rather than argue, Karl considered the sole drink he’d shared with his father and the glass of wine he’d had with dinner and fished in his front pocket for his keys. Handing them to his daughter, he said, “Thanks, Mel. I don’t have my glasses, and I can’t see that well at night.”
“You’re getting old, Son,” Frank chuckled.
“So am I,” Caroline joined in. “I hate driving at night anymore.” With that, she turned to Annike and gave her a warm hug. “Good night, my dear mother-in-law,” she said with genuine affection.
“I’ll see you all at mass tomorrow morning?” Annike asked commandingly.
“Of course,’’ Karl said as he hugged his mother.
“We’ll be here til tomorrow morning if we keep dragging this out,’’ Frank said as he turned once more to the door.
With warm chuckles, they all made their way outside. Frank and Annike waited on the walkway to the house as Caroline, Karl, and Melanie busied themselves getting into the car and buckling up. After another chorus of good-nights, Melanie cranked the engine and backed into the street. Karl watched his parents until they drove away. Then, sighing, he laid his head back against the headrest and said, “I don’t know about you guys, but I’m exhausted.”
“So am I,” Caroline admitted. “When you see family only once a year or so, there’s so much emotional freight to collect that it’s unbelievable.”
From the driver’s seat, Melanie chuckled. “I feel like I’ve been on a roller coaster. I had no idea Gramps was so emotionally labile.”
“That’s a mighty fine word.” Karl snorted. “Pain in the ass is probably more succinct. But I have to admit, once Sven left and he got a little scotch in him, he turned into a different person.”
“Something he said really struck me,” Melanie said thoughtfully. “When he told us we should love and accept him for who he is, it really made me think. I mean, we’re all pretty liberal, and he neatly turned our own attitude back on us. I guess he has a point.”
Karl shook his head. “He knew exactly what he was doing. But I do have to say, I think he feels assailed on all sides by the change that’s occurred in his lifetime. He made me wonder at what point you get sick of adapting and accommodating your point of view to the world’s. He’s become an anachronism, and he resents it.”
“You’re not wrong, Karl,” Caroline said from the backseat, “but I think that’s a male thing. For all her supposed mental troubles, Annike has the more flexible worldview. I th
ink women tend to be more adaptable to change in general.”
“All I have to say is, if I ever get to the point where I start writing letters to the editor and become so rigid in my thinking, I’m giving you the legal right to smother me in my sleep,” Karl said determinedly. “I don’t want to be like Dad when I get old.”
Melanie raced through a yellow light as she neared the on-ramp to I-95. “I don’t think you’ll ever get to be as bad as Gramps, even though you did vote for Bush,” she teased.
“Don’t worry, Karl,” Caroline consoled him. “I won’t let you become rigid and irascible.”
“When it comes to Sven,” Karl said tiredly, “Dad isn’t irascible, he’s just plain cruel. It’s a combination of jealousy over Mom and his own homophobia, and he admits it. But he also admits he doesn’t intend to change.”
“Their dynamic was set a long time ago,” Melanie said carefully. “I think they’re both so used to it that they just follow the script. But I have to say I think Gramps is cutting off his nose to spite his face. Uncle Sven is a wonderful man. My life would be poorer without him.”
“Melanie, for God’s sake, slow down,” Karl said as Melanie gunned through yet another yellow light. “I don’t mean to be critical of your driving, but I want to get to Sven’s in one piece.”
In response, Melanie took her foot off the gas and coasted to a speed nearer the limit before putting her foot back down. “I’m sorry, Dad. Subconsciously, I think I’m just trying to get as far away from what we’re discussing as I can. My bad.”
“Well, Frank’s treatment of Sven aside,” Caroline said cheerfully, “all in all, it wasn’t a terrible day. Your mother did well. To tell you the truth, I couldn’t help but wonder if she would break down in some way, given all the turmoil today. From what you’ve told me about her little fugues, I didn’t know.”
“I was a bit on edge about that myself,” Karl admitted. “But she held on all day. And did you see her stand her ground when Dad came up with that bizarre accusation about something that happened forty years ago? She didn’t give him an inch.”