Daddy shifted his weight in the chair, sipped his drink. He rolled up his sleeves another notch, showing pale bony arms, with fine gray hairs on them and brown spots, like big freckles. The cat sniffed at an ivy leaf.

“The doctor had supervised my first day in the machine; the treatment was a project of hers—later abandoned, as too dangerous. She was like a Nazi, Daddy—a Nazi doctor who had me given to her. She said you had signed the authorization for the treatment.” He looked at his father, sweat pouring down his forehead into his eyes. The afternoon sun was murderous.

His father did not look at him. He raised his drink slowly to his old, pale lips. Then Barney, moving very quickly, reached out and, with the edge of his right hand, knocked the drink from his father’s weak grip. The glass flew across the terrace and smashed into the side of the fence. The cat spun around and fled into the house.

“The doctor said you’d come and see me on the weekend, Daddy. For the first five days I held in my mind a picture of you holding a glass of water for me while I lay under that torture box. But you didn’t come.”

His father turned, shocked by the lost drink, and looked at him open-mouthed. He looked hopelessly old, frail, vulnerable. “You worthless bastard,” Barney said. “You didn’t come. I want you to rot in hell for it.”

“I was sick,” his father said.

“You were not sick, Daddy. You were drunk. You were sitting in your moss-green overstuffed chair in the living room on that Saturday, drinking gin. That was June 17, 1938. It was the worst day I’ve ever lived, and it soiled my life.”

“You’re making a soap opera out of it, like your mother. Doctor Morton did charity work with poor children. She was no Nazi. You’ve built it up in your mind.”

“That’s horseshit, Daddy. The next kid they tried it on died, the poor bastard. After five days of it. I told you that in the car, in Dayton, when I got there on the train after the year in the hospital.”

“I don’t remember…”

“You remember moving out of the goddamned state after you and that flirt in there put me in the hospital, don’t you? And you never…” Barney leaned forward, saying each word carefully. “… And you never wrote me a single word. When I tried to tell you about how I had gone through that treatment and hadn’t cried once, the way you would have wanted me to, you told me to be quiet because you had to drive the fucking car. Daddy,” he said, “I didn’t cry.”

“Those were tough times. It was the Depression…”%

“The Jews in Auschwitz treated their children with more concern, Daddy. Most of them did.” He turned his face away from his father’s and looked toward the Pierre. “Some of them might have been looking, like you were, for somebody to blame.”