At 8am, I wake up in my brother’s old bedroom in Connecticut, on my father’s 95th birthday. Downstairs, I find my brother sitting with his nine-month-old twin sons, looking broken. I stare at the empty chair where my father is normally to be found. I walk out of the room, and back in again. Two little identical heads track my movement.
“Where is he?” I ask.
“Playing tennis,” my brother says. “We should go and watch.” It is, he assures me, a thing to see.
Half an hour later, a small delegation arrives at the town courts: me, my brother, his four-year-old son and the middle one. On court number 3, we find four old men standing frozen in postures of readiness, as if posing for a daguerreotype.
“40-15!” one of them shouts.
“What?” shouts my dad.
This exchange is repeated several times. Eventually, my father serves. The game acquires surprising pace, given that nobody covers much ground. One player never moves at all, but whenever the ball encroaches on his personal space, his racquet shoots out to meet it. The point ends with a short lob loaded with such cruel back spin that it threatens to recross the net by itself. My brother was right: this is a thing to see.
They play for another 40 minutes in 35-degree heat. At the end of the match, the other members of the foursome present my father with a trophy with a little tennis player on top. Then we all sing happy birthday. Players on adjacent courts, including a group of children having lessons, join in.
That afternoon, I drive my father to my sister’s house for lunch. As we pass the Methodist church, he points to a spot on the pavement.
“That’s where everyone from school would meet to fight,” he says. “I recall one particular bout – Florence Parker versus Sylvia Needles.” He grows wistful thinking about two girls in bloomers punching each other.
The next day, a party is scheduled at the little boathouse over the road. The arrangements are identical to the celebration we planned for my father’s 90th birthday, which was cancelled at the last minute – to his great relief – because it coincided with Hurricane Irene. This year, the weather will not rescue him.
As preparations mount, I’m assigned the task of preventing the twins from killing themselves for an hour. Their ability to invent deadly pastimes in a room mostly emptied of dangerous objects is prodigious. And there are two of them.
I employ a parenting strategy I have not used in many years: lying on the floor to block their exit, while letting them amuse themselves by sticking their fingers in my eyes. One of them tries to feed me a toy car.
“No, thank you, George or John,” I say. He is insistent. Out of the corner of my eye, I can just see his brother trying to pull the fireplace poker from its stand.
The party is scheduled to start at 6pm. Our first guest, a neighbour of about my father’s age, shuffles through the boathouse door at 5.30.
“I came early so I could get a good parking space,” he says. Behind him, I can see his car sitting in the middle of the road.
I pour the man a drink. Food is hurriedly ferried over from the house. More guests arrive: friends, relatives, the tennis players from the previous day. By 6.30, the party lacks only one thing: a guest of honour. Nobody can find my dad.
“He went swimming,” my brother-in-law says.
“Now?” I say.
“He was waiting for high tide,” he says.
