I almost — almost — felt sorry for him, in that single instant, and I have had to be honest with myself about why.

It was not compassion, exactly.

It was the recognition of something like tragedy, even in a man who deserved very little of my sympathy.

Because my father was not, I think, born cruel.

He was born into a world that told him, relentlessly and from every direction, that a man is what a man is worth, and he believed it the way a fish believes in water, so completely that he could not see it as a belief at all.

It was the plain truth to him, as obvious as gravity.