And yet his daughters hadn’t been cowed by him. They had done what they wanted to do. His own children had not suffered under the same filial yoke as he. An only child, Brodman had no more been able to betray his parents than kick them in the face. Their lives had rested on his back like a house of cards. His father had arrived at Ellis Island as a scholar of ancient languages, and come out the other end as a Hebrew teacher. His mother had become a housecleaner for well-to-do Jews in the Bronx. When Brodman was born, she’d stopped working, but in her mind she went on navigating rooms, staircases, corners, and corridors. In his early years, she would get lost traversing those spaces. Can a child understand that his mother is losing herself? Brodman had not understood. After she was taken away, he was alone with his father. With grim piety and meticulousness, his father had schooled him in what was expected. Every day at dawn, Brodman had watched him bind himself for prayer in the cold light from the east. When he left the house for work, he remained stooped, like the curve he’d taught Brodman to draw for the Hebrew script. Never had Brodman loved his father more than in those moments, though later he wondered whether what he had taken for love was partly pity, mingled with the desire to protect his father from further pain.

After three months they brought his mother home, and propped her on pillows with a view of the water stain on the ceiling. The pale-blue skin was stretched taut over her ankles and shone. Brodman cooked for her and fed her, and then studied at the table under the flypaper, listening for her dry coughs. When his father came home, he put the food on the table for him. Afterward he mopped the oilcloth clean and took down the Hebrew books with their crumbling leather spines. His father’s lips moved soundlessly, his broad-nailed finger searching out the passage. Abraham bound Isaac once so that Isaac would go on binding himself forever. Each night before bed Brodman checked his bindings, the way a man double-checks the doors and windows of his house. When he left the apartment, he locked the door quietly behind him, and on his back he carried his mother, with her blue ankles, and his stooped father, and their parents, too, dead in a trench at the edge of a pine forest.

But not his daughters. Had they sensed the price he’d paid, and learned from him after all—he with his old books, stunted by duty? All through their childhood, his father’s sepia face had looked miserably down on them from the living-room wall. But they were going to have none of it. They had turned and walked briskly away in the opposite direction. They’d thought nothing of rejecting what he cherished. They had not revered him. From Carol he had received only disdain, and from Ruthie indifference. He had been enraged at them for it, but at bottom he’d envied how they stood up for themselves. Only when it was too late did he come to understand that they were no happier than he was, and no more free. At nineteen, Carol had been hospitalized. When he went to her, she was strapped to the bed in a straitjacket. He had underestimated her condition, and taken her a book of stories by Agnon. Embarrassed, he left it clumsily on the table. She looked up at the ceiling, as his mother had once looked up.