Free Portnoy's Complaint by Philip Roth

finds that his father's ordinary day-to-day vulnerability is somewhat aggravated by the fact that the man's wife (or so they tell me) has very nearly   expired, and so Alex the little prick takes the opportunity to drive the dagger of his resentment just a few inches deeper into what is already a bleeding heart. Alexander the Great!
    No! There's more here than just adolescent resentment and Oedipal rage-there's my integrity! I will not do what Heshie did! For I go through childhood convinced that had he only wanted to, my powerful cousin Heshie, the third best javelin thrower in all New Jersey ( an honor, I would think, rich in symbolism for this growing boy, with visions of jockstraps dancing in his head), could easily have flipped my fifty-year-old uncle over onto his back, and pinned him to the cellar floor. So then (I conclude) he must have lost on purpose. But why? For he knew- I surely knew it, even as a child-that his father had done something dishonorable. Was he then afraid to win? But why, when his own father had acted so vilely, and in Heshie's behalf! Was it cowardice? fear?-or perhaps was it Heshie's wisdom? Whenever the story is told of what my uncle was forced to do to make my dead cousin see the light, or whenever I have cause to reflect upon the event myself, I sense some enigma at its center, a profound moral truth, which if only I could grasp, might save me and my own father from some ultimate, but unimaginable, confrontation. Why did Heshie capitulate?   And should I? But how can I, and still remain true to myself Oh, but why don't I just try! Give it a little try, you little prick! So don’t be so true to yourself for half an hour!
    Yes, I must give in, I must, particularly as I know all my father has been through, what minute by minute   misery there has been for him during these tens of thousands of minutes it has taken the doctors to determine, first, that there was something growing in my mother's uterus, and second, whether the growth they finally located was malignant . . . whether what she had was . . . oh, that word we cannot even speak in one another's presence! the word we cannot even spell out in all its horrible entirety! the word we allude to only by the euphemistic abbreviation that she herself supplied us with before entering the hospital for her tests: C-A. And genug! The n, the c, the e, the r, we don't need to hear to frighten us to Kingdom Come! How brave she is, all our relatives agree, just to utter those two letters! And aren't there enough whole words as it is to whisper at each other behind closed doors? There are! There are! Ugly and cold little words reeking of the ether and alcohol of hospital corridors, words with all the appeal of sterilized surgical instruments, words like smear and biopsy . . . And then there are the words that furtively, at home alone, I used to look up in the dictionary just to see them there in print, the hard evidence of that most remote of all realities, words like   and vagina and cervix , words whose definitions will never again serve me as a source of illicit pleasure . . . And then there is that word we wait and wait and wait to hear, the word whose utterance will restore to our family what now seems to have been the most wonderful and satisfying of lives, that word that sounds to my ear like Hebrew, like b'nai or boruch -benign! Benign ! Boruch atoh Adonai , let it be benign ! Blessed art thou O Lord Our God, let it be benign ! Hear O Israel, and shine down thy countenance, and the Lord is One, and honor thy father, and honor thy mother, and I will I will I promise I will- only let it be benign !
    And it was. A copy of Dragon Seed by Pearl S. Buck is open on the table beside the bed, where there is also a half-empty glass of flat ginger ale. It's hot and I'm thirsty and my mother, my mind reader, says I should go ahead and drink what's left in her glass, I need it more than she does. But dry as I am, I don't want to drink from any glass to