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  To my father and Victor

  PROLOGUE: GALAHAD

  When I was a boy, my father, during our weekly phone conversations, used to tell me stories about the mythical kingdom of Camelot. I am not certain how closely his versions adhered to the canonical legends, but I think he got the basics right: there was King Arthur, an orphaned peasant boy who pulled the magic sword, Excalibur, from a stone; there was the wizard Merlin, Arthur’s adviser, and Guinevere, his beautiful queen. And then there were the Knights of the Round Table—a gang of impressive but indistinguishable men who, unhindered by domestic life, upheld the moral order of Camelot and protected it from evil. The most valiant of Arthur’s knights, my father told me, was a mysterious figure called Lancelot. He came from nowhere, lived alone, and spent his days wandering the forest looking for someone to fight.

  At the time, I was living with my mother and older sister in an unfinished apartment building in downtown Brunswick, Maine; my father lived five hours away, in an old farmhouse called the Birches, in the Champlain Islands of northern Vermont, with a white woman named Martha and her five children. I knew the Birches well: the property stood a few miles down the road from the house where I was born, the same house, just months ago, my mother had left behind to start a new life in Maine.

  My mother had come to America from a small village in rural Thailand—she’d met my father, a soldier, on a military base during the Vietnam War—and every year, for about three weeks, she took us back to visit. I knew much less about where my father had come from; the Camelot stories were his way of acquainting me with his cultural origins, origins that, he said, came from a place called Great Britain.

  To connect himself with this lost heritage of men, my father had begun taking riding lessons at a local stable. I liked the image of my father atop a horse. Though I knew that he was not a real knight, I understood that he’d been a soldier of some kind, and the combination of horsemanship and war made me believe that my father belonged to a special class of men. During one of our phone conversations, my father told me he’d recently been thrown by his horse—an accident that, he said, could very well have killed him. As I pictured my father soaring through the air, I reminded myself that, despite his recent absence from my life, the sound of his voice was proof that he was alive. So the image of my father falling was replaced by a vision of him rising to his feet, adorned in a suit of armor.

  When I told my mother about my father’s fall—thinking that she would want to know that a man we both loved had survived a near-death experience—she paused before responding. I was, by then, used to my mother’s delayed comprehension. But the nature of my concern, that my father—a man who had left our family to live in the house of another woman and her five children—had been injured while galloping around a stable on a horse, would likely not have made sense to her even in Thai.

  My mother dismissed my concerns with the same pragmatic indifference she employed in her work as a psychiatric nurse at the local hospital. Every night at ten o’clock, she would leave our apartment for an eight-hour shift, only to return the next morning to relieve a babysitter and deliver my sister and me to school. She slept only two or three hours a day. My sister and I had invented a game called “I need to sleep!” in which one of us would lie in bed while the other person would tiptoe around it. Any noise and the sleeping mother would explode upright and scream, “I need to sleep!” and the game would be over.

  Somehow I still believed that my mother’s fatigue had something to do with a failure to adapt to our American life. Every time she took my sister and me back to Thailand, the twelve hours of time difference cast her past and present worlds in stark opposition. All night, my sister and I lay awake beneath the white drape of a mosquito net, telling each other jokes or listening to the sound of my grandfather snoring, waiting for the first call of a rooster, or the opening bars of the Thai national anthem erupting from public speakers, to signal the arrival of first light. During the day, we wandered around our family’s village—a dusty collection of stilt houses gathered along a muddy canal—paying respects to slow-moving old people whose mouths dripped red with betel-nut juice. That these people were introduced to me as blood relations, and that they seemed to know me, expected something from my mother, and always asked after my father, only made the dream of my mother’s past more impossible. Whenever we returned to Maine, I always felt less certain about my relationship to that place than when I’d left.

  * * *

  By the time I was in second grade, my sister and I began to spend our summers at the Birches. I do not know what emotions my mother put aside before allowing her two children to be cared for by her former best friend; perhaps, finally able to get some sleep, she was glad to see us go. On the days my father arrived, my mother would take extra time to comb my hair—“Like a prince!” she said—and dress me in a button-down flannel shirt with a clip-on necktie. But she often packed my bags full of soiled socks and underwear (a phrase that my sister and I always mimicked as “sock and underwears”), perhaps to remind my father and his new lover that our dirty laundry was theirs to clean.

  * * *

  During drives to Vermont my father would continue his stories. In his version of the Arthurian legends, few of the knights had children, but he did reveal that Lancelot had a son, whose name, he said, was Galahad. How Lancelot had raised a son while serving his king was a mystery to me, but my father assured me that Galahad was the purest and most righteous of any knight at the Round Table. It was Galahad, after all, who, before ascending to heaven, had been the only knight virtuous enough to behold the Holy Grail.

  “What’s a Holy Grail?” I asked my father.

  He nodded solemnly, then held his hands before him as if supporting an invisible ball. “It’s a big cup. A cup of God.”

  A cup of God. “What color is the cup?”

  My father paused. “Gold.”

  Yes, I thought. Of course. I looked out my window, at the rolling contours of the Green Mountains scrolling along the highway, until I saw him: a young white knight with a sword at his hip, rising through the clouds in a beam of light, bearing the golden Grail skyward like a sports trophy.

  Later, toward nightfall, as we followed Route 2 past hazy glimpses of Lake Champlain, past the swamps and apple orchards and cedar forests of my former life, I felt the silent spell of destiny moving through me. As we turned onto the long gravel driveway, the windows of the old farmhouse glowed with soft candlelight, and the tilting barns rose above fields of cow corn like the walls of a fortress. To be free from the sleepy shadow of my dark-haired mother filled me with a magical sense of power; to be on my own, under the care of my father, told me that manhood was not far off. I knew nothing of what deeper emotions were at work inside me; nothing of the past that would curse my father’s love; nothing of how complicated love could become when woven through a loom of race, culture, and war. Then, I believed only i
n the truth of what lay before me: that the willow trees bowing to my arrival were the sentinels of my father’s kingdom.

  * * *

  During the day, while my father worked in Burlington as a drug and alcohol counselor, my sister and I stayed home with Martha, whose five children, the youngest of whom was six years my senior, paid me little attention. While my sister spent entire days in her bedroom, reading thousand-page novels without breaking to eat, I spent my mornings guiding a small LEGO knight on a plastic horse across the mountainous topography of my bedspread, to the hummed soundtrack of “Stairway to Heaven,” which I heard on my stepbrother’s boom box every night. Then I would wander outside, snooping in old pig sheds and chicken coops, examining the gravestones in a cemetery across the street, exploring the barn where a farmer named Burt kept his cows in exchange for winter plowing and fresh milk. In the back of the barn stood a rickety wooden ladder that led up to a hayloft, where, among litters of feral kittens and handfuls of hairless baby mice, I discovered a small pile of boxes that my father had not unpacked since his recent move. In one box: several boring photo albums from his boyhood in Needham, Massachusetts; in another: a yearbook from Middlebury College, dated two years before he met my mother. At 220 pounds, six foot two, my father had the build of my He-Man action figures, but his profile—angular and chiseled, stern and serious—looked nothing like my chubby, round face.

  Hidden behind the boxes was a long wooden cylinder, painted black, with red tassels hanging off the handle. I paused before picking up the object. Right away, I knew that the object was a sword; right away, I knew that the sword—curved slightly, like the ceremonial elephant tusks in my mother’s closet—was of a different species from the Excalibur of my father’s stories. Then I removed the sheath. The blade was rusted and dull, but I could feel its danger running through my hands like electricity. I spit on my finger and ran it over an inch or two of text engraved just above the hilt. It was the same flourishing but unreadable script that I had seen on letters from my aunts that occasionally arrived at our apartment in Maine. I studied the writing, half expecting that I might be able to decipher its meaning, half imagining that it might bear the name of a soldier whom my father had killed during the war. I took one last look, then hid the weapon precisely where I had found it.

  When my father came home from work that night, I did not mention the sword. By that time of day, my sister and I were usually droned out on television—Star Trek reruns, or double features of DuckTales—but out of the corner of my eye, I always watched the way my father kissed Martha each evening, the way she rejected his affection with embarrassed repulsion. But I saw the hidden hypocrisy in their love: often, early in the morning, I heard Martha crying in the bedroom—a whimper that I at first mistook for sadness, only to later see my father’s powerful white body striding down the hallway.

  With the last hours of daylight, my father liked to mow the lawn—one of the few jobs that did not require the kind of manual skills he lacked. Or else, I’d play in the yard while my father practiced a form of Korean martial arts that he’d been studying for several years under a young master in Burlington. Some nights he’d throw me batting practice with tennis balls, using the barn as a backstop. Or else, if arguing with Martha—which was often—he’d take me to the stable where he rode horses. His horse looked nothing like the horse I’d imagined: it was tall and dark and violent looking, an adversarial beast who resisted my father’s every command. My father rode stiffly, unsure of himself, clenching the reins in tight fists. As I sat on a bench watching him ride, I chewed on white strips of paint that I’d peeled off the corral fence, diffusely choosing between what angered me more: that my father had created in my imagination a vision that did not exist, or that I had been so eager to believe a lie. When the lesson was over, his teacher led me around the corral on a deferential little pony named Duke.

  Afterward, I often asked my father to take me on drives along the shore of Lake Champlain—a choppy dark pasture of wind-beaten water that stood beneath the heavy granite shadow of the Adirondack Mountains—until we drove up the dusty dirt road that led to our old house. It belonged to someone else now—strange cars were in the driveway—but my parents, yet to be legally divorced, owned several acres of the adjacent field. He pulled off the road, and together we walked into the field, to the top of a hill where, in the pale dusk, you could see across the field to our old home. As waist-high grass moved along the tree line like liquid, I sat in my father’s lap and asked him what he planned to do with the land. But even after he explained that a farmer wanted to buy it, and mow it, and put it to good use, the sense that the land would forever be mine did not leave me. Then the sky began to shift and change shape, and a column of golden light poured through the clouds and touched the earth, and I was sure that I was seeing the exact image of God, and when I told that to my father, he seemed impressed and nodded in agreement, then wrapped his arms around me a bit more tightly.

  * * *

  Each night, Martha would cook a large meal for the whole lot of us: my father, five stepsiblings, my sister, and me. Before eating, my father liked to offer a long meditation about how happy he was to have us with him, a moment of confession that made my cheeks burn and that drove my stepsiblings wild with hungry irritation. Dinners—casseroles and potatoes, pasta and homemade bread or biscuits, sometimes fried bass that my stepbrothers caught from the lake—were so different from the hastily assembled cabbage-broth, egg-drop noodle soups that I ate under my mother’s care, and I remember feeling confused by my total absence of guilt when it occurred to me that I preferred meals at the Birches over quiet dinners in our apartment in Brunswick.

  Then we’d spend evenings in the living room, watching eighties movies on a recently purchased VCR. My father had little discretion about what sex or violence passed before my eyes. To this day, I can still picture the topless woman standing in a lit doorway in Clint Eastwood’s Tightrope, can still transport myself to the subway scene at the end of Tom Cruise’s Risky Business as if I were standing right there on the platform. As for the violence, it came primarily in movies about the Vietnam War—Platoon, Full Metal Jacket, Hamburger Hill—but it did not once occur to me that the war in the movies was the same war that had brought my parents together. In many ways, the violence was more perplexing than the sex: while the sex always took place among similar-looking people, the violence was always inflicted upon disillusioned white men who wandered through steaming jungles, hunted by endless hordes of nameless soldiers in black pajamas who, in the rare instances when I saw their faces, reminded me a bit of my uncles.

  One night, my father brought home a movie that he was particularly eager to share: the film was called Excalibur and was, he said, based entirely on the legends of Camelot. I felt great excitement as the video loaded—to see Camelot in full color would prove to me that my father’s stories were true. But Excalibur was not the movie I’d expected: I could not tell one knight from another. I could not tell who was good and who was bad. There were wars, at night, upon flaming battlefields, between anonymous men in dented armor who killed one another for reasons I didn’t understand. And there was a great deal of sex in Excalibur, too: In one scene, a knight in full armor made love to a naked woman while a small child stood watching. In another, Lancelot and Guinevere—there was no mistaking it—had a secret encounter in the forest until, in the middle of the night, Arthur came upon his best friend and his wife and drove Excalibur between their naked bodies, nearly killing them both.

  I looked around the living room for some validation that I was not alone in my confusion, but by then, my stepsiblings and sister had all retreated upstairs, while my father remained in his chair, legs spread wide, casually eating ice cream from a coffee cup. Martha sat at the end of the couch, as far from my father as possible, carefully stitching an elaborate quilt that I had seen her working on long before my parents’ separation. As Excalibur continued, I knew that the only hope for Camelot now would be the redeeming a
rrival of Galahad, as promised by my father, but even after the credits rolled, the virtuous young knight from my father’s stories never showed up. The only boy in the movie was the cherub-faced young Mordred, bastard son of Arthur, who, in the final scene, rides into battle in golden armor only to drive a spear through his father’s chest.

  “Wow,” my father said. “What a story. What a story.” He rose from his chair, asked me if I wanted some ice cream. Later that evening, I lay with my father in bed singing our nightly songs. “Peace I Ask of Thee O River” was always followed by a Korean Buddhist prayer that my father had learned from his martial arts teacher. As I chanted the empty syllables (kwan say am bo true saw), it occurred to me that neither my father nor I understood their meaning.

  * * *

  Toward the end of June, my father presented me with a gift: a pair of matching yellow T-shirts—one for him, one for me—that read CHEERIOS across the chest and, on the back, in tall capital letters, our nicknames: LANCELOT and GALAHAD. My father had ordered the shirts off a cereal box with the hope that we could wear them together to the annual Fourth of July celebration downtown—the seminal event of the Champlain Islands summer, which began in the morning with a 5K footrace and ended with an old-fashioned country parade.

  My father’s shirt fit beautifully across his muscular frame and shoulders. While many of my friends’ fathers had grown doughy and round in middle age, my father, at forty-five, still had the biggest biceps of any man I knew, still carried himself with the focused self-seriousness of an athlete in training. I was the shortest and smallest boy in my second-grade class, and my shirt hung off my wiry frame like a bright yellow curtain. But I was eager to wear something that testified that my father and I shared the same blood. With my straight black hair, and skin that was almost as dark as my mother’s, I was becoming aware that I looked less like my father’s natural son than any of my three stepbrothers.