Free The Dying Animal by Philip Roth

only myself over the wall. If I'd taken him, had that even been possible, it wouldn't have made sense because he was eight years old and I couldn't have lived the way I wanted to. I had to betray him, and for that I am not forgiven and never will be.
    This past year he became an adulterer at the age of forty-two; ever since he's begun showing up unannounced at my door. Eleven, twelve o'clock at night, one, even two in the morning, and there he is on the intercom. "It's me. Let me up, ring me in!" He argues with his wife, storms out of the house, gets in the car, and, despite himself, he winds up here. After he'd grown up, we hardly saw each other for years on end; for months we didn't so much as speak on the phone. You can imagine my surprise at his first midnight visit. What are you here for, I ask him. He's in trouble. He's in a crisis. He's suffering. Why? He has a girlfriend. A young woman of twenty-six who recently came to work for him. He runs a little company that restores damaged works of art. That was his mother's occupation until she retired: art conservator. He went into her field after getting his Ph.D. from NYU, joined forces with her, and now the business is quite successful, with eighteen people working for him in a SoHo loft. A lot of gallery work, private collectors, auction houses, consultant to Sotheby's, and so on. Kenny's a big, good-looking man, dresses impeccably, speaks authoritatively, writes intelligently, converses easily in French and German—out in the art world he's obviously impressive. But not with me. My deficiencies are at the root of his suffering. Put him anywhere near me and the wound within begins to hemorrhage. At his work he's active, healthy, solid, not insufficient in any way, but I have only to speak and I paralyze everything strong in him. And I have merely to remain silent while
he
speaks in order to undermine everything that makes him effectual. I'm the father he can't defeat, the father in whose presence his powers are overwhelmed. Why? Perhaps because I wasn't present. I was absent and terrifying. I was absent and entirely too full of meaning. I failed him. That's sufficient reason to make a calm relationship out of the question. There's nothing in our history to impede the filial instinct to lay every impediment at the father's feet.
    I am Kenny's Karamazov father, the base, the monstrous force with whom he, a saint of love, a man who must behave well all the time, feels himself wronged and parricidal, as though he were all the brothers Karamazov in one. Parents play a legendary role in the minds of their children, and that my ordained legend has been Dostoyevskian I know from as far back as the late seventies, when I received in the mail a copy of a paper Kenny had written as a Princeton sophomore, an A paper on
The Brothers Karamazov.
It wasn't hard to ascertain the book's relevance as an exaggerated fantasy of his own condition. Kenny was one of those overheated kids for whom whatever he read had a personal significance that eradicated everything else germane to literature. He was by then wholly preoccupied with our estrangement and, inevitably, the focus of his paper was the father. A depraved sensualist. A solitary old lecher. An old man with his young girls. A great buffoon who sets up a harem of loose women in his house. A father who, you may remember, abandons his first child, ignores all his children, "for a child," Dostoyevsky writes, "would have gotten in the way of his debaucheries." You've not read
The Brothers Karamazov?
But you must, if only for the amusing portrait of the profligate wickedness of the shameful father.
    Whenever Kenny would come to me distraught back in his adolescence, it was always over the same issue. It still is: something has threatened his idea of himself as a punctiliously upright person. One way or another, I would encourage him to modulate that idea, to temper it a bit, but suggesting that would make him furious and he would turn