Not long after I moved to New York I renewed contact with my father in Delaware, at first to touch him for cash, then I started going down to visit him on weekends with increasing and more relaxed frequency as it became apparent that we were more or less congenial, especially if I listened and he did the talking (an arrangement I’ve all-too-frequently been conned into). We settled upon what I regarded as a fair exchange: I came down on the weekends and listened to his blather and he parted with sufficient C-notes to help me out with my rent. He’d managed somehow to save a bit, not that he was living the life of a Howard Hughes, or even Reilly; he drove a limping Fiat and his home was a dark and smoke-redolent apartment above a camera store on Delaware Avenue. He, who in his halcyon days had beheld the glories of Europe from her church steeples, across the rooftops of Venice, the Vatican and beyond, had a view—or would have had, if he’d ever cared to raise the dirty yellow blinds—of a streetcorner liquor store and its ragged clientele, who frequently broke into thunderous disputation, or song, especially at night, so Dad kept the blinds down and the radio permanently on. But with the blinds permanently drawn, even during the day the interior of the apartment was hard to navigate in the urine-tinted light. Obstacles were always waiting to pounce: chairs upon which towered dusty objets of indeterminate nature, spare sideboards or occasional tables hidden under snowdrifts of unused bed sheets, bath towels and washcloths, never-emptied packing crates, suitcases full to bursting of handyman’s tools awaiting their maiden usage. On the coffee table in the living room, the stacks of reel-to-reel tapes, magazines, and technical radio and TV manuals towered so high that when we sat on either side of the table after a slap-up feast of lukewarm canned ravioli or take-out pizza we were mutually invisible except as upcurling ribbons of pipe or cigarette smoke. From my father’s direction would emanate explosive coughing fits, loud throat-clearings, and embittered monologues on life and the universe, delivered in his tobacco- and whiskey-cured baritone. Whiskey, usually Canadian, occasionally Irish, flowed freely, along with a poisonous American “malt liquor,” or fortified beer, called “Olde English,” popular among the customers of the liquor store opposite and which for some reason my father thought was actually from England and therefore bound to be good (as a dyed-in-the-wool paddy he had the breed’s sneaking, forelock-tugging, but never publicly-confessed, reverence for all things British).

            Like Hitler, Dad had a great repertoire of table talk, and like Kingsley Amis's Lucky Jim, I had a considerable repertoire of funny faces, with names for the best ones: The Giant Rat of Sumatra; Gordon of Khartoum; the Heroin Addict; and so on. In the course of the average paternal jeremiad, hidden behind the wall of tapes and magazines on the coffee table I could easily go through all these faces, and often took the opportunity to do so. But by the time I’d been going down to Wilmington for six months or so I developed a wry and guarded affection for the old badger. I took him seriously when, more or less sober, he told the simple stories of his own life, not the grand epics starring himself with Eisenhower and Montgomery, but the memories of his impoverished schooldays and his hawk-eyed mother and humble father and the small but rock-hard tragedy of his younger brother George Dana, who grew up in Dad’s worldly shadow and never married and worked in the same savings and loan society all his life and never left Wilmington except to come to Florida to visit us once when I was 3 or 4—a sad, unfulfilled, small-town character out of Thornton Wilder or Edwin Arlington Robinson. (Or John McGahern.)

     “Stupid bastard never even went to Philly,” observed Dad. (Philly is about eighteen miles from Wilmington.) “What a stupid bastard.”

      My father died at the end of 1980, shortly after delightedly learning that President Carter had been defeated in the general election. Such excess of good news (he loathed "that grinning Georgia cracker") may have done him in. Three weeks earlier I’d helped him move from the Delaware Avenue lair into a modern, airy apartment that overlooked a narrow ribbon of the Delaware River. The new place was too sterile for him, despite the heavy tobacco odor and grime-sheened possessions we imported from his old flat. It was no good. He disliked his new digs, but then he disliked everything at first; no doubt he’d have adjusted to it in time. But he had no time left. His wan brother, my uncle George, called me one night at my New York flat and told me Dad had had a stroke and was in the Veterans’ Hospital in Wilmington and wasn’t expected to live through the night. Not unaware of the inherent drama of the situation, I took a night train from Penn Station (fortunately, I had just enough for the fare) and spent the next three days at the bedside of my dying father, who was only just capable of recognizing me, being otherwise twisted and distorted like an old tree root by the stroke. He stared at the ceiling most of the time, but in a final moment of lucidity just before he died, he hoisted himself up on one elbow and cleared his throat as I’d heard him do so many times and said casually, as if making conversation over pre-dinner beers: “You know, I always meant to tell you, son, we Boylans are descended from an Irish princess.”

     I didn’t know what to say, not being aware of any princesses in our Monaghan hog-farmer bloodlines. He stared for a moment, and then fell sideways, as if shot. He was dead at 72. Not a great age, but not too bad, considering.