When I was in college, my father called me in my dorm room and my brother in his and told us to meet him at the bank right away. Our college tuition was late, and he didn’t have the money to pay what wasn’t already covered by scholarships and student loans. We hadn’t received any warning but found ourselves at the bank, each of us signing onto a credit-­card contract and taking a cash advance of several thousand dollars to pay our tuition. The credit cards had to be in our names because my father’s credit was maxed out, and he didn’t have the money to pay his own bills. I remember being awash in fear that I would be kicked out of college for delinquent payments. My body knew what the threat of creditors felt like. My mom wouldn’t answer the phone because most of the time it was either the mortgage company threatening to foreclose on the house or the electric company threatening to turn off the lights. I learned to live in fear of the ring tone, listening to my mom crying and pleading for more time whenever she did answer. I was happy to sign on the dotted line if it meant I could stay in school and avoid the embarrassment of having to leave college because of debt. My father repeatedly told the story of the sacrifice he made to pay for our college years, as if he would have been able to retire with a condo in Florida and a small fishing shack, his supposed dream situation, if only we hadn’t permanently broken him financially.

During his Republican phase, my father helped me become a racist and a homophobe. In junior high, I would call my older brother Tim a “faggot” when we fought. I didn’t know what that word meant. I had never knowingly met a gay person. But I learned quickly how to be as cruel as my father. Tim was a quiet and sensitive boy who sat in his room and drew and painted all day and night. He rarely dated and had few friends, and I knew how to take him down with one word. When I came home from graduate school and told my father I was gay, he didn’t speak to me for a year.

My father’s racism, if you can write about gradations of racism, is less overt than that of most white people I know in Elkhart, but that isn’t anything to brag about. The rare moments he was home when I was a kid, we would watch our favorite teams, the Indiana Hoosiers and Notre Dame. He would yell at the black players from his recliner, calling them wimps or worse. His early and ongoing training can never be fully undone. My unconscious mind still remembers these lessons as a kind of reflex. Please, I beg my therapist, purge my father and Elkhart and American history from my body.

I don’t want to be a terrible son, a terrible person, but I have been fighting my entire life to unravel my masculinity from his. As my wife and I pull into my parents’ driveway, all I can think about is how to be a man in this impossible situation, how not to be my father.

In my wallet, I carry a photo of Frank D’Amico, Lynette’s father. He’s on a Navy ship during the Korean War, in a white ­T-shirt, his skinny arms and chest wrapped in another private’s arms, two buddies at sea. I didn’t really know how to describe a good man until I met Frank. And I never knew what a father did until he became mine.

In 2009, right after Lynette’s mother died, we moved from Minneapolis to Chicago — two hours from my parents’ home in Elkhart and several hours from Frank and his home in St. Louis. Frank was our first visitor. He came too soon. Our furniture hadn’t arrived. There was nowhere to sit, just a guest mattress on the floor, and food had to be ordered in, which violated our Italian hospitality values. The windows in our old bungalow had been painted shut, and I hadn’t had time to pry them open. The air in the house was thick and “foggy,” as Lynette would complain. I was preoccupied with starting a new job and impatient and agitated, but Frank insisted on coming. He took us to an old Italian supper club, and midway through dinner leaned in to the table to say, “I had to see for myself that you were both O.K., that you moved out of happiness and not grief.” Then he paid the bill.

Image Frank, Carl’s father-in-law, in 1951. Credit... From P. Carl

Frank came several more times to see the theater I was making, even though he didn’t especially like live theater or going out in the evening. But he loved me. He loved Lynette even more.