“You’d like the country,” he said in a voice that held excitement and a challenge. “And so would Hilary.”

“Valerie.”

“Yes, of course. Valerie.”

“I suppose I could find something to do in Israel?”

“Do? You’d be my assistant.”

“In the Army?”

“Army!” he scoffed. “The least I should be getting out of this is a full professorship at Hebrew University.”

He looked glazedly into the middle distance, dreaming of a future way beyond anything he had known in the past. “It’s an opportunity—” he lowered his eyelids, the better to savor the impossible dream that was about to come true. “The kind that doesn’t come often—to achieve greatness. World-class renown.”

The passage of the years had done nothing to diminish his ambition. He said, “I’ll teach you all you have to know.”

The offer came too late. As of that moment I knew I no longer wanted to walk in his footsteps, to shadow his substance, to replicate his life.

“You too?” I asked.

“Me too, what?”

“The big fish bone.”

“What are you talking about?”

I didn’t amplify. How could I tell him that even, at long last, as he accepted me, I couldn’t accept him? Here he was on the tenure track all over again, digging for fame, yearning for stardom. This immaculate warrior, this servant of God and master of Byron, was a blood brother of Chatterton throbbing to save the human race from self-destruction whether they liked it or not; of Grady driven to shelter the homeless with houses of shit whether they liked it or not; of Abdul caught in a snare of meanness as he carved a niche for himself in the Asso pantheon by flogging his people into the twenty-first century whether they liked it or not; even of Derek with his genius for ineptitude, seeking a peacock throne, bringing art to the masses whether they liked it or not. All of them puppets of their own passion, whose goal was to look out on the lesser world from the cover of People magazine. All of them motivated not by the love or the virtue of what they did but by a craving for celebrity, and so entrapped that they’d rather have been notorious than unknown.

“I’m still waiting for your answer,” my father said.

“Thing is,” I said, “I’m not very ambitious.”

“What’s wrong with ambition? Particularly when it’s in the service of mankind?”

In the service of mankind. A ringing dedication, shrill, clear, and dangerously self-deceptive. Perhaps my experience was limited, but I’d never known a honcho who didn’t feel that his all-consuming mission wasn’t in the service of mankind. All of them saw themselves as God’s partners, whether in the pursuit of peace or plenty, beauty or truth.