One spring afternoon I was studying on the deck behind the house. The comprehensive exams at the NYU English department were coming up soon. Between meals, I had been working for hours at a time, reading, taking notes, drafting commentaries. Suddenly Jack appeared with a tray. It was lunch—a sandwich and a glass of juice. He put it on the table next to me. “Here you go, Mame,” he said, a little awkwardly. There was no precedent for this. Grateful and more than a little embar-rassed, I thanked him. The impulse was to repeat the thanks, make amends for this gift, for the fact that I didn’t deserve it. But his gesture put a stop to that. He acknowledged the thanks with a muffled “my pleasure” and went back into the kitchen. The sky was clear that day, a few clouds sailing in from the west. Dip chicks and loons paddled by the dock. The New England spring had colored the foliage across the cove with white, pink, and yellow blossoms. The book on my lap dissolved. I tried to get what this meant, what had just happened. My father had served me lunch. The abundant honor was more than I knew what to do with. One thing was clear. Jack was communicating with me. For communication to hold up, it needed a response, not a look of stunned wonder. Jack’s confrontation with the drinking had brought him in contact with people who suffered in ways he hadn’t imagined. Fishing with Nancy and her family at Truro on Cape Cod one summer day after he’d begun recovery, he felt the need to get to an AA meeting. The nearest one was in Provincetown. He drove the ten miles and found himself surrounded by gay men whose stories were harder than his own. “These fellas,” he began, telling John and me about it later. The three of us were sitting in the television room in Noank. Dad was hunched over, thinking, elbows anchored on his knees, hands clasped. “These fellas had a tough time.” Their hard lives had been made harder by drinking. So had Jack’s. The Provincetown meeting and others in Noank showed my father what deep difficulties of being and identity not only gay men his age and younger had had to negotiate: he saw close up at AA the everyday suffering of people he had only “known” by exotic images and stereotypes: people of color, divorced women, socialists, junkies. And he shared his own stories with them, the strife with Frannie, probably the battle memories. The old warrior had begun to set aside the cartoon notions he’d harbored for so long. Startled by familiar pain, he let the mean images go. 

– Excerpted from Fighter Pilot’s Daughter by Mary Lawlor, Rowman and Littlefield, 2013. Reprinted with permission.