This is a very short story - only about 1,000 words - but it does so much in such a short space that it threatens to make longer stories seem desperate for attention. In summary, the story concerns a last meeting between an estranged adult son and his father. Two passages resonated with me above the rest, and I'll provide a brief comment on each here.
The first is a luminous sensory description of the father by his son: "He put his arm around me, and I smelled my father the way my mother sniffs a rose. It was a rich compound of whiskey, after-shave lotion, shoe polish, woolens, and the rankness of a mature male. I hoped that someone would see us together." So loaded. I've rarely read such an intimate description by one male toward another, let alone one by a son to a father. The narrator loves his father completely, unashamedly - he even wants someone to see it.
But wait - then I explore the substance of their meeting (or, at least what I can from what the son reveals of it). He has not seen his father for three years and in their extended dinner together, he all but fades away while his father drinks and bosses waiters - does everything to impress his son, and all his son can do is follow him along. I couldn't help getting a suppressed "better them than me" feeling from the narrator.
Which leads to the second passage that struck me: "I knew that when I was grown I would be something like him; I would have to plan my campaigns within his limitations." So sad. He went into the meeting with the knowledge that he could not rise above his father. And, throughout the course of the story, he does not seem to. In the end, he actually escapes through the back door; he addresses his father as "Daddy," again and again. A grown man calling his father "Daddy"like that hits my ear wrong - its syrupy and sycophantic. There's probably some love in there, but a kind of sad acceptance seems to loom over it. By the third time the narrator calls his father "Daddy," as he says goodbye, perhaps he hears himself saying it and sees the oppressive stasis that he's in. There's no mention of why that meeting was the last time the narrator saw his father, but I like to think that, in their last moment together, the decision approached the narrator to end that kind of relationship the only way he knew how: abruptly, physically, completely. His father was not a man for discussion. I then leave the story with a mixed feeling of hope and doubt: will this man repeat the same pattern, as he sentenced himself at the story's opening? Or will he perhaps see this parting as a chance to realign himself with himself?
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