HE NEVER IMAGINED he was the child of other parents or what it would be like to be the child of other parents. He never thought his parents didn’t want him, even when they complained about him. When he failed at something he thought it was his fault, not his parents’. He thought that his parents wished him well: in fact, that his mother would give up her life for him and that his father perhaps would not go so far but almost. He never considered what it would be like to have children himself. When he married he used condoms to relieve his wife of the responsibility of birth control, which she thought sinful. After a year they occasionally took a chance without a condom. One such time he said to his wife, “I think we did it”; and a few weeks later her pregnancy was confirmed. He broke the news to his parents by singing at their dinner table, “M is for the million things you gave me…” In the first years of their marriage they lived on an island set aside after the war for veterans going to school; it was served hourly by ferry; sometimes, lying abed while his wife and daughter were on the mainland, he pictured his wife running for the ferry, child in arms, jumping to get aboard, and falling into the propeller. He worked for an encyclopedia at the time, and when the project reached Z he was let go. His parents visited him and his wife; his father offered to contribute a weekly sum until he found another job but said that it should be understood this was only being done because a child was involved. He bounced a ping-pong ball through the interview; afterward his wife said she had never been so embarrassed. He and his wife never got enough sleep after their first child was born. At night when the baby went to sleep they would stay up late to enjoy the freedom, then take turns tending it when it woke. He would change a diaper, warm a bottle, for thirty minutes jostle the crib and hum; if the child hadn’t gone back to sleep he would return to bed and his wife would take over. The arrival of a second child made things easier: either the children amused one another or he and his wife had exhausted their anxiety over child rearing. One winter morning when he was walking his younger child, a girl, six, plump, and goggle-eyed, to school, he wept: that this child did not have an abler father and that he had not had an abler father. He slipped on the ice and hoped that that would explain the tears if the child noticed them. When his wife asked him to leave home he told his children that he and their mother would no longer be husband and wife but that he would always be their father. The children watched him carefully; he wept throughout the talk. Before he moved out the younger child drew for him a picture of herself sad. He gave it to his mother, whose eyesight was failing; she said it was very nice and hung it in her bedroom. While his children were growing up he stayed in cheap apartments, which one girl friend described as student-sties. When the older child was out of school and the young one near it he allowed himself to fall in love, with a woman much younger than he. Occasionally, feeling great tenderness for her, he would tell her he wanted to have a child with her, and he would picture another daughter like his own but with the advantage of a more experienced father and parents closer together. Now that things do not go well with him and the younger woman, he pictures a son whom the mother would enlist in disputes with him and who would tell him he is useless and should die; sometimes he sees himself dying while the son is young, the son growing up homosexual, becoming famous, and biographies pointing out that the boy was raised by the mother. When he notices the exhaustion of new parents he will congratulate himself that at least in this respect he did the right thing in life by not starting a second family. When his daughters, who will have had many attachments, marry late and the likelihood of their bearing children is past he will have a sense of relief. He will wonder whether they ascribe their childlessness to their early family experiences, also whether they will ever understand how much more important parents are to children than children to parents.