FADE AWAY

1 0 8 Y F A D E A W A Y J A M E S G O R D O N B E N N E T T Last month, my octogenarian father tumbled into a sand bunker after trying to reach a par five in two. The nine-hole course is inside the gates of his Florida retirement compound, and he can literally drive his electric golf cart home. Which he did. He also neglected to mention anything about his little fairway mishap to my Vietnamese stepmother. And if one of his playing partners hadn’t called to ask how the old soldier was holding up, Tuyen would probably still be in the dark. But as soon as she put the phone down, she had him dropping his plus fours. A bruise on his hip had already blossomed into a Rorschach inkblot, which my father, ever the stoic, tried to make light of (‘‘Looks like Scotland, the birthplace of golf’’). Two minutes later, the next-door neighbors saw what they thought was a giant bottle rocket shoot out of the carport. Tuyen had failed to unplug the electric cart’s extension cord and proceeded to run every light between their duplex and the compound’s emergency clinic. On Monday, I called the orthopedic specialist at the Veterans Hospital in Pompano, and he sounded so deferential that my heart dropped. I thought my father hadn’t made it o√ the table. ‘‘My uncle was with the General in Vietnam,’’ the doctor said. 1 0 9 R ‘‘Your father’s a legend. But then I’m not telling you anything you don’t know already.’’ He wasn’t. As an army brat I was forever being regaled with war stories by soldiers who’d served under him (‘‘the Ancient Naminers,’’ my sister Dale, the English major, called them). I’d be spraying shoes in the bowling alley when some Special Forces type would smooth a five-dollar bill out on the counter in front of me. ‘‘Ice in his veins. Nothing rattled him. We would have followed him into a fresh Cu Chi tunnel.’’ But the specialist argued that ‘‘going for the green’’ was only the proximate cause of my father’s injury. ‘‘You jump out of a plane as many times as he must have,’’ the doctor surmised. ‘‘Your acetabulum takes some pretty serious pummeling.’’ Shortly after my father was able to dispense with his walker, Dale called me with an update. ‘‘You won’t believe this one,’’ she said, sounding even more wired than usual. ‘‘They’re dropping ten grand on one of those educational package scams.’’ The V.A. Center o√ered overseas trips for veteran seniors. ‘‘And you’ll never guess where they’re going.’’ ‘‘Vegas?’’ ‘‘Jerusalem,’’ and then she paused as if the thought of the old man in the Holy City left her speechless. ‘‘I mean, let’s get real here. Daddy’s about as spiritual as Dick Cheney.’’ It wasn’t until I’d hung up that it registered on me why my sister had seemed so edgy over the phone. I’d forgotten about my brother-in-law, the anesthesiologist, being back in the doghouse. Dale had come across someone suspiciously listed as ‘‘RN Betty’’ in Michael’s BlackBerry. A private detective (recently on more or less permanent retainer) had developed an incriminating dossier on ‘‘Ms. Boop.’’ I waited until Tuyen reported that my father was once again swinging a golf club in the backyard before considering flying down to see them. That was when Anne, the woman I was living with, suggested that I should probably find my own place when I got back. I’d moved in with her right after I was let go as a middle school substitute teacher. Since my place was too cramped for a pet (she has a rescued greyhound) and hers has a great view of the 1 1 0 B E N N E T T Y state’s art deco capitol building (the one with Huey Long’s statue out front), I U-Hauled my stu√ over to her shotgun house in Spanish Town, a historic district with its own Mardi...