Daddy took a long swallow before answering. His throat trembled with the gin going down. “I suppose it is Limbo. There’s nobody to tell you anything. You’re free to come and go and to change around, but it doesn’t mean anything anymore. Nothing means anything at all. It just goes on.”

“That’s how you lived,” Barney said.

“Yes,” Daddy said. “Maybe it’s Hell. I don’t know and I don’t care.”

Barney sat down and cried a moment. The tears came simply and easily; he mourned for his father’s lost life and for his own, unable now to tell them apart. “You blew it, Daddy,” he said. “Why did you have to blow it? Why didn’t you shut her up? Why didn’t you hit her in the face?”

“I wasn’t a brute,” Daddy said. “And she was too much for me.” He finished off the glass and handed it back. “Barney,” he said, “to tell the truth, you were too much for me. I’m no father. Nobody taught me to be a father. They talked about responsibility and I didn’t know anything about a noisy kid with a diaper full of shit. They told me about the love of a man for a woman but I didn’t know what to do with that neurotic bitch. She talked all the time. It was like she walked around rubbing herself. Twitching. And she aroused me so much. At the movies she would put her hand in my pocket and squeeze me and then we’d go home and she wouldn’t let me touch her.”

There were tears coming down his father’s cheeks and his face was bright red. He seemed only fifteen years old now, and was wearing a frayed white shirt with no collar, and knickers. “I would go to the bathroom and… abuse myself.”

Barney had never talked to anyone in his life this way. He was covered with goosebumps. “I jacked off in that bathroom, too,” he said, with the words coming easily, relievingly. “Afterward I’d look in the bathroom mirror and I would hate myself. I was disgusted. I thought if you ever found out you would never speak to me again.”

His father’s voice was very youthful now. It was the voice of a boy at puberty, cracking into high pitch from time to time. “I could never get that part of myself clean enough.” For a moment he looked as though he were going to vomit. He was about ten years old now, and smaller. “And I never wanted any of that… disturbance.”

“I know,” Barney said. “I know how that feels.”

Daddy held out his short arms and looked at them. He was wearing a middy blouse and short pants. There was no hair on his arms and the hair on his head was neatly combed, jet black. Then he looked toward Barney shyly. “This is the way I like to be. This way or old. I don’t want the things in between.”

Daddy stood there in front of him as a child, scrubbed and slightly pretty. He looked up at Barney, shook his head. “I don’t want to be a baby. Not yet.”