My Father’s Tuxedo

I was 17 the last time I wore a tuxedo. Think senior prom 1974, and, yes, the laces of my black high-top sneakers did match the stunning pale blue of my ruffled shirt. That’s how charmingly ironic I was back then.

Now I am a man of nearly 47 years with a fine 20-year marriage and two ironic children, both of whom examined my faded prom photo with undisguised pity. They did not find my daring, long-ago fashion statement either charming or ironic, but rather a pathetic display of near-toxic dorkitude. Looking back, I see they are correct.

For me, though, a tuxedo was never something to be worn with a straight face, unless maybe you’re in Stockholm to receive a Nobel, and only then if it’s for chemistry. A tux is appropriate only on the young and stupid, or the old and distinguished, and at the moment I am none of those (though you’d get a different view if you ran “old” and “stupid” past my kids).

That said, I recently found myself lobbying for a tuxedo. Not just any tux, but my father’s well-worn old-dork of a tuxedo. He’s 85 now, shrinking in the way that men do when they no longer have to support a career, a family and the full weight of their ambitions and dreams. It hasn’t fit him for years, and he’s in that liberating phase of life where stuff doesn’t much matter. Plus, since retiring in 1982 after 43 years with The Company, he doesn’t wear anything more formal than Sansabelt slacks. “I can’t imagine another occasion when I might need a tux,” he said--the words of a man acknowledging without regret that he’s in the final laps of a good long run.

I collect family stories the way some people collect coins. My kids are growing up in California, far away from their grandparents in Pittsburgh, and I tell stories to help them understand that they are links in a long chain, that their family connections are stronger than birthday checks and holiday visits. Sometimes they listen. Mostly they don’t. I tell the stories anyway.

An ancient tuxedo had to have a story, I figured, so I asked my father how a onetime Alabama steelworker ended up needing a tux. He said he bought it in 1954, two years before I was born. It cost him about $100, including a shirt, tie, cummerbund, studs and suspenders. By then he had moved out of his father’s appliance business, begun his climb up a long corporate ladder and joined a country club.

His career, like mine, eventually took him far from home. He wore the tux all through his years as a man in full. With the pride of someone who’d climbed out of a deep hole, he e-mailed me a photograph of him wearing it at the Plaza Hotel in New York City. He couldn’t remember the date, but the context helps: He was presenting awards to the designers of the Sears Tower in Chicago and the American Motors Pacer. He also said he was wearing the tux when he collapsed during a dinner in Washington, D.C.--the first hint to him or any of us that he had inherited his father’s diabetes. He was wearing it again a few years later when, at a holiday ball, his gallbladder went.

This wasn’t exactly blockbuster material, as stories go. And, by rights, the tux should have gone to one of my two older brothers. Still, I asked my father if I could have this 49-year-old relic. “Sold,” he said without sentiment.

UPS delivered it two weeks later in a hard-shell fiberglass suitcase, the one I remember my father toting on all those business trips. (“Just keep the suitcase,” he said.) The tux was still in the plastic suit bag from the shop where he’d bought it, and knowing my father, the original sales receipt is probably tucked away in some alphabetized file (“Clothing, Black”). I hung it on my bedroom doorknob and looked it over, noting the fray in the collar and the need to take the jacket in a bit. The pants fit. The suitcase also contained two cummerbunds, two shirts and a little box of cuff links.

I knew right away that I’d never wear this tuxedo. What was I thinking?

I put it back into its suit bag and prepared to hang it, forever, in the darkest corner of my closet. Before I did, I opened the little box. That’s when I finally understood the real value of this suit.

Inside, among the cuff links and tie tacks, was a lapel pin. It read: “Civitan International.” My father attached no significance to its presence in the box, “only an affection for something of the past.” Civitan International, though, is a do-good civic club, a Deep South version of the Rotary or Lions clubs. What I remember most about my grandparents’ home was a wall filled with plaques and citations from the Civitans, honoring the good work of my grandfather, who died when I was 5. This was a little piece of my grandfather that my dad carried throughout his life.

Now the Civitan pin is mine, along with my father’s tuxedo. I’ve decided to have the tux repaired and tailored to fit me--a fabric cast of myself at a stage when I, too, was in the full flush of life. I will affix the Civitan pin to its lapel to mark my grandfather’s link in our chain. Then I’ll put the tux back in its original suit bag and put it in my closet. It will hang there, a story waiting to be heard, until the time comes to pass it along to my son. Maybe he’ll be a man in full by then, with kids of his own who consider him a dork. Maybe, like me, he’ll see no practical need for a suit that, at that point, could be nearly 100 years old.

But maybe by then he’ll want to hear the story, to understand how we are all connected across vast stretches of space and time. Maybe then he’ll listen, and maybe the tux will tell him.