FATHER'S DAY

By Jesse Birnbaum

Every son wants such a father, every father such a son. Dad in this case is tall, good-looking Clyde Latham, 87, who lives in the dried-up little West Texas town of Spur (pop. 1,300), where the tumbleweed can outnumber the pickup trucks and the restaurant of choice is the local Dairy Queen. The son is Aaron Latham, 53, a Manhattan-based novelist and screenwriter (Urban Cowboy) and, child of Texas that he is, a splendid raconteur.

For some time Aaron had been beguiling his sophisticated New York City dinner guests with the story of how the widower Clyde courted the widow Gussie Lancaster, a childhood sweetheart who more than 60 years before had moved to California. Aaron, pressed by his wife, TV journalist Lesley Stahl (60 Minutes), has spun his tale into The Ballad of Gussie & Clyde (Villard; 176 pages; $19.95).

Latham tells his "true story of true love" in deliberate, prairie-flat language, strewing the landscape here and there with verbal posies and perhaps a few too many quotations from 17th century romantic poetry. Still, the style is right for what is, after all, the sentimental chronicle of two endearing octogenarians behaving at times like teenagers.

At Clyde's invitation, an uncertain Gussie, now 84, visits Spur and shortly agrees to become his temporary "live-in." In Clyde's parlor the two sit in chock-a-block lounging chairs, holding hands, assuring each other without much conviction that they are too old to remarry. Clyde regales Gussie with Texas tall talk ("One day the wind stopped blowing, and all the chickens fell over") and old-timey family stories. He introduces Gussie to the folks at the Dairy Queen. They kiss, they hug. In New York, Aaron frets that his vulnerable father will wither when Gussie leaves.

Sentimental love stories, of course, do not end that way. Gussie stays to marry Clyde, for whom a fond son has written what is surely the mother of all Father's Day presents.

--By Jesse Birnbaum