The Friday Afternoon Club: A Family Memoir

by Griffin Dunne

His hands were shaking, but he managed to pull something out of his blazer pocket. It was the Bronze Star. “Did you know your old man was given a medal of honor?” Then he told me how he got it: the two wounded soldiers, the bombardments, Hank, being called the Golddust Twins, the squeezing of his two fingers. His voice cracked and then found its footing, and cracked again throughout his telling. I thought of getting out of my seat to hug him but didn’t want to interrupt his flow. “I don’t know where that came from, Griffin,” he told me. “That impulse to run toward the enemy for those guys, but Hank and I didn’t give it a moment’s thought. I can’t believe that was me…but it was. I did that. That was me…” I picked up his medal and he watched me. The ribbons were crisp, the colors still vibrant, and the thick bronze metal weighted with the gravitas it deserved. I pictured my father as a boy half my age and two inches shorter, surviving in conditions I knew only from novels by Vonnegut and Mailer. How could I have been surprised that he would defy an order to retreat to save a wounded comrade? His reporting had brought him death threats and blackmail attempts. He was an Irish terrier in a Turnbull & Asser shirt, who struck fear in the hearts of those who had it coming. An image crossed my mind so absurd that I smiled. As Dr. Dunne tries to beat the sissy out of my father, the defiant little boy yells out the last line of Now, Voyager: “Don’t let’s ask for the moon, we have the...