John Cheever's extraordinary story "Reunion" is about a father and son. Three years before today, the father abandoned his family. The son can't "process" this; he needs to believe that his father has noble reasons for his actions, because a father is a father.
Taking a last stab at parenting, the father agrees to meet his young son at the information booth in Grand Central Terminal. He has his secretary make the arrangement (or perhaps he has paid a friend to impersonate a secretary). He repeatedly alludes to his "club"; he says, "We just don't have time to visit my club." These allusions do the opposite of their intended job; they make the father look pathetic.
What follows is a series of embarrassing moments in which the father dumps his self-loathing on waiters and waitresses. He fights with one about the drinking age. He has a tantrum, later, because he is told he cannot clap his hands in the presence of the staff. At another establishment, the father speaks fake Italian and sits at a reserved table. This is finally so mortifying that the son says, "I have to get my train."
Then Dad went up to a newsstand and said, "Kind sir, would you be good enough to favor me with one of your god-damned, no-good papers?" The clerk turned away from him. "Is it asking too much, kind sir," my father said, "for you to sell me one of your disgusting specimens of yellow journalism?"
"I have to go, Daddy," I said. "It's late."
"Now just a second, sonny...I want to get a rise out of this chap."
"Goodbye, Daddy," I said, and I went down the stairs and got my train, and that was the last time I saw my father.
We're left to infer what happens; maybe the father fully devolves and becomes untraceable, or maybe the son realizes that severed ties are the best route to take. The story is better because of the sense of understatement and mystery. It's hard to imagine a sharper portrait of ambivalence.
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