Alloy

to commingle; debase by mixing with something inferior (v)

Al was nervous about meeting Annie's father. The old man had bought, managed, and sold three successful alcohol corporations and became a reclusive billionaire in a mansion that had been in Annie's Protestant lineage for generations. Being unemployed, Catholic, and engaged to Annie didn't help Al's nerves.
The three of them ate dinner in the great dining room of the mansion where signs from liquor companies from recent and distant history hung next to crosses and stuffed elk heads and bear claws and a series of old painted portraits that included a likeness of Luther.
Al felt a growing need to say something after the salad portion of the dinner passed without conversation.
"So, Mr. Ferguson, may I ask you what you're secret is...I mean, with your wild success as a businessman, you must have some ideas about success or achieving one's goals?"
Annie's eyes widened at Al and she looked horrified at the reality of this broach and watched as her pale father, who was wearing a white undershirt and a blue bathrobe and large brown-rimmed glasses, asked Al,
"Wild?"
"Y-yes," Al stammered, "I mean, your success and all..."
"Hmph," Annie's father said, "wild."
Then a long silence sat among them, punctuated only by the clicking of soup spoons and intermittent slurping.
"If you really want to know I put spiced water in the whiskey and all the goddamn rest of it,"Annie's father broke the quiet, "Halved production costs and the drunk fools couldn't tell the difference and we kept prices where they were and tripled revenue."
Al nodded and made some sort of noise that was supposed to indicate his interest. Then the old man rose from his chair, making it clear that he wasn't wearing pants, and he shuffled over to Al's side and stood over Al and raised his old fist in air and brought it down in a striking motion on Al's right hand, which was laying flat and unprotected on the table.
Annie gasped. Al felt a slight shock of pain.
Annie's father had stabbed his son-in-law-to-be with a little medical needle and the old man's eyes squinted at the trickle of blood that peeped through the rupture in Al's skin.
"You're goddamn blood is red," he said. Then he looked over at Annie and then up at all his liquor signs and at the crosses and at the stuffed elk heads and at Luther and then back at Al, who was holding his stabbed hand in a napkin.
"The whole damn world's mixed up if you ask me," said Annie's father as he shuffled back to begin the main course.