He had shed twenty pounds during his ordeal, and his clothes no longer fit him. Busy with catering and the folding chairs, Mira had failed to think of this until two hours before the bris. Brodman shouted, though it still hurt to shout, and threatened to go in his stained robe. Mira, who for fifty years had met his temper with implacable calm, continued to field phone calls while packing up platters. Then she left the apartment without a word. Brodman heard the door close, and stoked his rage with the thought that she had left without him. He was about to pick up the phone to scream at Ruthie when Mira returned with a maroon silk shirt and brown pants from the upstairs neighbor, whose wife she sometimes had coffee with. Disgusted, Brodman tossed the silk shirt onto the floor and roared. But soon the anger went out of him like the heat in a house with old windows, leaving only helplessness and despair. Twenty minutes later, he was standing downstairs, in ballooning silk sleeves, while the doorman hailed a cab.

It was winter now. The taxi made its way through the gray streets of the city where Brodman had lived all his life. Buildings smeared past the fogged window. Mira had nothing to say to him. In the lobby of Ruthie’s place, he stood waiting in borrowed clothes, surrounded by Mira’s plastic bags. She had ridden up in the elevator to get help. Brodman thought of turning to go. He pictured himself making his way home through the chilly streets.

Seventeen years ago, after his father died, Brodman had been sideswiped by a debilitating depression. It was a black period, and at the bottom of it he had thought seriously of taking his life. Only after his father was gone did Brodman discover what his powerful presence had obscured. An ambivalence, like a fault line, that now threatened to topple everything that had been built over it. No, more than ambivalence. An objection. Not to his father, whom he had loved. But to what his father had asked of him, just as it had been asked of his father, and his father before that, and back and back through the chain of relentless begetting. No, he was not angry! he bellowed in the therapist’s office. “I simply object to the burden!”

“Of what?” she asked, pen poised, waiting to copy it down in his file.

After a month, the insomnia and the migraines stopped, and he began slowly to recognize himself again. For months afterward, he was shaken every time he remembered how close he had come to giving up. Inhaling the smell of fresh horseshit in Central Park, seeing the skyscrapers loom up above the tree line, he felt overcome with gratitude. The museums along Fifth Avenue, the yellow taxis in sunlight, music—these things made his knees weak, as if he had just safely crawled back from a ledge. Finding himself in front of Carnegie Hall, or one of the dazzled theaters on Broadway right as the audience spilled out, still abroad in another world, Brodman felt embraced by life. The bitter taste of his objection had passed. But some part of him had gone with it. He had been damaged by the dissent, and could never again be what he had been. It must have been then that it began: the slow drain of understanding that dried up his once fertile mind.