“I’d be interested to know, if you feel like telling me.” I felt almost like a mother again, cajoling a child. And yet of course I knew he had to range from anger to sadness to childishness; what struck me was my own strength, that I could sit, quite calmly and in control, seeing this normal person and saying to myself, “Yes, so now he’s angry, soon he’ll be childish and then we’ll go back to self-pity.” It was not that he was being analyzed, coldly, like a laboratory experiment; it was just that I could see it.

“All right then. Here’s what’s been happening. Just since you left, of course. Most of it because you left.

“I’ve hired a housekeeper, full-time and live-in. In fact, I’ve hired several and fired them, and I’d like to fire the one we have now. It’s a tough job, and I can’t seem to find anyone who’s up to it; the kids need special understanding, and no one seems to have enough to give to children who aren’t their own. I’ve been trying to figure out whether it’s better to keep on firing them until I find a good one, or to keep on the one we have, even though she’s not really what they need, because whenever one goes they get more insecure.

“They cling. They stick around the house, and they follow me around all the time when I’m home. It drives me crazy, one of them is always behind me or ahead of me, or else I see them at the windows, watching me.” He paused, waiting for me to say something. It was expected, a penance.

“Yes, well that’ll be because I left. Of course it would have made them insecure.” I was at a distance, nodding, and all of it was quite obvious, the situation there, and yet I was unrelated to it. He could see that, and the resentment was there, the feeling that I had caused it all and then cared nothing about it; and the self-pity, for he had been stuck with looking after it and picking up the pieces.

“Well,” he mocked, a tone I had never heard from him before, “that’ll be because I left.” Then came anger again: “And you don’t care, do you. You just think, ‘Well of course they’re insecure, they’d have to be, and yes, it’s my fault,’ but you don’t care, you don’t care what your own children have suffered. It’s incredible,” he was shaking his head. “I can’t believe the person you must be, to just be able to sit there and not care. Who did I live with all those years, who did I think I knew? It’s grotesque, it makes me sick.” He was white and furious.