The trip to Florida happened long before I even had my learner’s permit, and we made it in his brand-new car, a creamy white Aston Martin DB-4. He had picked it up in England along with an orange marmalade appeasement for my irate mother and a blue Pringle cashmere sweater for me that was so soft it invited my grade school teachers to pet me like an animal.
The purchase of the Aston caused a significant disruption in my parents’ marriage, which a friend once likened to a building in which a crucial foundation stone was really two powerful magnets with the wrong ends pressed together, the marital edifice held together by the pressure of the surrounding brickwork: the family, the land. My frugal mother objected to the expense, the ostentation, and the unilateral nature of the purchase, and my father’s response to her upset was to ignore it. When my mother pressed home to him the financial consequences of buying such a car, his solution was to noisily replace the two measured ounces of good whiskey he drank every evening with tall glasses of weak iced tea. By his arithmetic if he did that for the rest of his statistically probable life, he would pay for his half of the car. My mother gave up.
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