Four Roses With Father

It was almost 12:30 a.m. as I pulled up to the end of the long driveway beside the staid and prestigious old house where I had grown up in the toney and uber-wealthy outskirts of Greenwich, Connecticut. Despite the late hour I wasn't surprised to see that the lights were still on inside the study. Whether he had fallen asleep in his deep leather chair with a book in his lap or if he was still awake - browsing some well-thumbed novel by Vidal or Mailer - was another question. My father’s sleep schedule was anything but on schedule lately, mainly due to all the meds.

I parked my old Honda Accord beside his new Cadillac and the flood lights automatically flickered on as I ascended the steps to the back porch, letting myself in through the rear door to the kitchen with the key I was given back in high school. There was music coming from the study down the hallway but I couldn’t quite name it. Mahler’s Second Symphony?

As I entered the study a short time later I saw him slumped in his favorite chair, his unshaven chin resting on his chest, eyes closed. Since my mother died four years ago and he sold his place in London and returned home he was the sole occupant of this spacious manse but he increasingly spent his time here in just this one room. I gently shook his shoulder and after a moment he raised his head and looked at me. The older folks in our family have always said that I am the spitting image of my father, but I have never seen it so clearly as I did in that one moment.

“Charles. Well...what are you doing here? What time is it?” He squinted up at the clock above the fireplace. “Are Jeannie and the kids here too?” He straightened himself up in the chair and looked towards the doorway to see if anyone else was present in the room. I placed a gentle hand on his shoulder.

“It’s okay, Dad. It’s just me. Jeannie and the kids are back home in Philly.”

He relaxed and slumped back down into the chair, the sudden but ephemeral light in his eyes dimming again quickly now. He rubbed his temples and looked at me, confused, disoriented.

“So what’s the occasion, Charles? To what do I owe the honor of this unexpected visit?”

“Well, I guess I just wanted…well, I just wanted to stop by for a drink, Dad.” I smiled.

He just stared at me, blinking.

“I had to come up here on business tonight and I just couldn’t sleep at the hotel. Too much on my mind, I guess.”

He continued to stare at me.

“Besides,” I added. “When was the last time we sat down together with a bottle of Four Roses?”

At this his eyes softened and a thin smile emerged on his face. “You’re right, Charles. It has been far too long. Sit down and let me be a proper host.” He began to rise from the big leather chair but again I placed my hand gently on his shoulder.

“I’ve got it, Pops. You sit tight and I will be right back.”

A few minutes later I returned with a burnished copper tray bearing a bottle of Four Roses single barrel bourbon, a small ice bucket and two snifters and I placed it on the credenza behind him. The glasses were already poured so I handed him one and took the other for myself. I held my glass out towards him and as we gently clinked the rims I offered a brief toast.

“May it all be worth it in the end,” I said, then raised my glass and drank. “And I also just wanted to say…well, Estrovia!, I suppose.” I couldn't get the right words out.

He stared back at me for a moment, pondering my awkward toast, then he just smiled and drank from his glass too. After that we talked for a while and in the end we talked long enough for each of us to drink four short glasses of bourbon. I told him about all of my problems, which in the end were really just one problem and, as always, that problem was money.

I never came right out and asked for help and he never offered it, which was our custom. I had been raised with advantages that most children never enjoy; from elite prep schools to private country clubs to summers on Martha’s Vineyard and early acceptance at Princeton. But on the day I graduated from college my father handed me a check for $10,000 and told me that I was on my own. I was his primary heir and would inherit most of his estate upon his passing, but he made it clear that I would see little more than greeting cards between now and then, and he had unfailingly kept his word on this.

It was almost an hour later when he started to nod off but I managed to get that fourth glass of bourbon into him first. This last one was heavily spiked with Dilaudid, a powerful painkiller that I had taken from his medicine cabinet upon my arrival and crushed to a fine powder. I had discreetly added a fairly heavy dose to each of his first three drinks, confident that the iced bourbon would mask the taste, but this fourth glass contained all of the remaining powder and I thought that he would taste it for sure. Perhaps, in the end, he did.

When his chin finally sagged to his chest I sat there for a while, just looking at him. I felt no desire to touch him or to kiss his cheek or anything like that, which is not to say that I felt no love or affection for the man. When the CD we had been listening to reached its end I returned the bottle of bourbon to its place, washed the glasses, ice bucket and tray and put everything away. As I exited the house through the backdoor the time was 2:12 a.m. With any luck I would be back home in Philadelphia before Jeannie and the kids woke up.

Before I left I returned to the study and shut off the lights, but just before I did I softly uttered, “I just wanted to say thanks for everything, Father. I love you.”

Heading south on I-95 I wasn’t really thinking about my dad. He had lived his life. It had its ups and downs, more highs than lows, but it ceased to have any real meaning some time ago. He was now mostly like some aging version of a fairy tale dragon, curled up on a bed of hoarded gold, slumbering his days away while the townsfolk toiled in the fields and starved through the winter.

Well, perhaps me and Jeannie and the kids weren’t exactly toiling in the fields or starving through the winter, but we could be doing a whole lot better than we were and soon we would be. Soon my kids would enjoy the same privileges that I had known growing up. I loved my dad, but his time had come. It was time for others now. I would never be the man that he was. I knew that. But maybe my kids would see me a bit differently now. After all, I was doing this for them, wasn’t I? At least that’s what I told myself.

And so, if one day many years from now my son Jason should suddenly appear by my side in the middle of the night, when the light and life have all but drained from my eyes, I will happily drink a few glasses of Four Roses bourbon with him too, and perhaps listen to Mahler’s Second, and then leave life to the living.

Thank you, Father. You will always live on in my memories.

THE END