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109 THE ALCOHOLIC’S GUIDE TO RUINING EVENINGS 6 At the Millstone we had no father figure, and when a sane adult male drifted into our lives, we swarmed him like a lifeboat. There were two such men in our world—the Tonys. One was Dr. Tony Bianco, himself an orthopedic surgeon at the clinic and head of his own large household of seven just down the road. The other man we looked up to—often literally—was our dentist, Dr. Tony Lund. In Dr. Lund’s waiting room I’d page through the Children’s Highlight magazines, stare at the goldfish in his quiet aquarium, and actually look forward to being with this man who whistled cheerfully as he stuck needles in my head and ran drill bits over the nerve highway connected to the center of my brain. Dr. Lund was simply a likeable person. My father thought so too, and if the insular Roger Sullivan could be said to have had a best friend, it was this talkative, gregarious, huggy man—Tony Lund. He and his wife, Mary, were soon going out for dinner with Roger and Myra, and on one of these outings they gathered for a ride down the Mississippi aboard the Lunds’ houseboat, the Sneaky Pete. It was a small craft, not grand by any means; more like a floating motel room and moored in nearby Winona, Minnesota. Drifting down the river, the vista moved my father to say, “Tony, I’d love to own one of these things. It would add umpteen years to my life.” That was 1964. Dad died in ’66, so umpteen apparently equals two. Roger bought one anyway and our houseboat, the Lethe, was soon bobbing alongside the Sneaky Pete. We’d pile into the family station wagon on Friday afternoons for the hour trip east and by three o’clock the Lethe was in the water and Dad was behind the wheel half in the bag. With enough booze, even a strip-mining executive can go all John Muir on you, and Dad was no different. After a few tumblers of liquid conversation , he’d wax beatific on the timeless beauty of the river and I’d get the THE ALCOHOLIC'S GUIDE TO RUINING EVENINGS 110 “Have you ever really looked at a sunset?” speech, delivered with that condescending earnestness of the florid drunk whose cerebellum is on autopilot. Autopilot would’ve been a nice feature for the houseboat actually, considering the captain was seeing two rivers and trying to drive between them. At the end of one particular excursion my mother could tell Dad wasn’t capable of pulling the boat safely into the dock. “I walked around to the side of the boat where the housing hid me from Roger’s view,” recalls my mother, “and pantomimed our plight to Tony across the water on the Sneaky Pete.” When Tony understood what was happening, he gave the wheel to his wife and did a 007 leap from his deck to ours. Somehow he managed to get Dad away from the wheel to guide us in safely and did it without us kids knowing how close we came to appearing on the local news. It was on the houseboat that Dad first accused Tony Lund of having an affair with my mother. Roger and Tony were relaxing on deck chairs watching Myra walk down the dock to retrieve a life vest when my father said, “Why don’t you just get it over with and screw her?” Tony was a children’s dentist and this may have explained his hesitancy to rearrange Roger’s teeth. It was his good nature, however, to respond with only a gentle, “What are you saying? Don’t do this, Roger.” When I call Tony Lund to learn more about this incident, I can almost hear him shaking his head as he remembers it. “I loved your dad. I really did, but this was, well, it was too much.” Both my mother and Tony are certain Roger’s jealousy surfaced the year before at Rochester’s annual Beaux Arts Ball. It was on this night that Tony, after waltzing with his wife, Mary, asked Myra for a dance. “He was such a marvelous dancer,” recalls Mom. “I could just shut my brain off and go.” Tony takes pains, needlessly, to assure me there was no affair. “But your mother could dance well and I remember what a great time we had...

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