Page 27 of Twice
I wanted to say music, which was the only thing that really interested me. But with my father, there were only two acceptable answers. Lawyer or accountant.People will always be suing each other,he would say,and they’ll always need to count their money.Steady work. That’s what you want, Alfie.
“I don’t know, Dad,” I said.
“Youstilldon’t know?”
“I’msorry.” I exhaled in frustration. “What didyouwant to do when you were my age?”
He shifted his hands on the wheel. His voice dropped.
“I wanted to be an opera singer.”
I did a double take. “Really?”
I knew my father had a good voice. It was deep and resonant, and when my mother was still alive, he would sing to her now and then. Sometimes, when he’d reach the end of the song, he’d spread his arms out wide and get really loud, and I swear I could see his voice bounce from one wall to the other. He did this once when we lived in Mombasa, and when he finished singing, there were five villagers at our door, asking if everything was all right.
“Don’t act so surprised,” he said, staring straight ahead. “I knew my stuff. I listened to Beniamino Gigli. And Björling. I even took lessons for a while with a man who’d met Caruso.”
“So you were good?”
“I wasn’t bad.”
“Why didn’t you do it then?”
“What?”
“Become an opera singer.”
He glared at me.
“Something called World War II, remember?”
I looked down at my feet. I knew my father had fought in the South Pacific. Infantry division. He didn’t talk about it much.
“But what about after the war?” I said, softly. “Couldn’t you have been an opera singer then?”
“After the war, things were different.”
“Oh.”
I paused. Perhaps I’d miscalculated my father’s disapproval of the arts.
“You know,” I said, “maybe I could study music at college?”
“Don’t be stupid, Alfie,” he said.
?
We never did see Disney World. My father drove there, took one look at the massive line of vehicles trying to enter the parking lot and grumbled, “You’ve got to be kidding me.” He turned the car around and headed south. He wasn’t the most patient man in the world.
We wound up driving four more hours, all the way to Miami, with me staring out an open window, hot wind blowing on my face. I was thinking about Wesley, which made me quiet, and I guess my dad thought I was upset about skipping the Magic Kingdom, which I wasn’t.
“Tell you what,” he said when we reached the Miami citylimits. “Let’s go to the zoo. They have a big zoo here. What do you think?”
What I thought was,The zoo? What am I, five years old?
What I said was, “Yeah, sure.”
I had no idea how that trip would change my life.
