Must one hate one’s father if one loves one’s mother? Edward’s answer, given without hesitation, had proved to be “yes.” In the marrow of his bones even when he was a small child he had been aware that she was stifled, that something that should have been free and glowing was bound back, held still by a marriage where passion had not been able to transcend almost complete incompatibility. What it had done to Isabel Cavan was to make her long above all for a life without strain, for peace, for a relationship without ecstasies but also without tensions. She had always been the peacemaker, moving between her father and mother like a little thread, sewing them together again, unwilling to allow them the separation both perhaps deeply desired. What had it done to Edward, this marriage he had entered into and suffered as if it were his own—even as quite a small boy. It had made his loyalty intransigent and narrow, deepened him, tightened him, matured him—and, in the end, murdered him. It was the wall before which he sat, in his fifties. Whatever his friends across the river might say about the state of the world, the tensions—we find our way out into the world from childhood. The pattern is set there. And his pattern had been to witness, to suffer wholly with and for his mother, but to be unable to act to save her. To be a witness, what could suggest a more terrible responsibility? To have no human responsibilities such as marriage and children had been to her, but to be left, naked, the witness always, the one who is aware and can do nothing?

For a brief time in college it had seemed that he would be able to free himself, but his mother’s death, the illness kept from him at her wish, so that he might accomplish all that he dreamed that year in Oxford—that had locked the prison door fast. You can’t save people from their lives, Isabel said to herself. Mother was wrong there—binding him hand and foot where freedom had been her intention.… Well, he was out of the prison now.