the back and shook my hand. ‘Hi, Charlie,’ he said. ‘Hi, boy. I’d like to take you up to my club, but it’s in the Sixties, and if you have to catch an early train I guess we’d better get something to eat around here.’ He put his arm around me, and I smelled my father the way my mother sniffs a rose. It was a rich compound of whiskey, after-shave lotion, shoe polish, woolens, and the rankness of the mature male. I hoped that someone would see us together. I wished that we could be photographed. I wanted some record of our having been together. We went out of the station and up a side street to a restaurant. It was still early, and the place
was empty. Te bartender was quarrelling with a delivery boy, and there was one very old waiter in a red coat down by the kitchen door. We sat down, and my father hailed the waiter in a loud voice. ‘Kellner!’ he shouted. ‘Carbon! Cameriere! You!’ His boisterousness in the empty restaurant seemed out of place. ‘Could we have a little service here!’ he shouted. ‘Chop-chop.’ Ten he clapped his hands. Tis caught the waiter’s attention, and he shuffled over to our table. ‘Were you clapping your hands at me?’ he asked. ‘Calm down, calm down, sommelier,’ my father said. ‘If it isn’t too much to ask of you – if it
