“Max, darling, I’d like to take your father upstairs.” Other than a brief conversation in the receiving line after the ceremony, he’d succeeded in his mission to avoid his parents. But he couldn’t avoid this. “Max, darling, I’d like to take your father upstairs” was code for “Your father is drunker than usual and about to embarrass us.” Max and his mother had an unspoken agreement to put aside their differences and join forces to extract his father in these sorts of situations.
