That sound did something to me that thirty-two years of smaller cruelties never quite had.

It ended something.

And it began something else.

I have thought a great deal, since, about that applause, because it is the part of the story that people find hardest to believe, and the part I most need them to understand.

They can believe a cruel father.

Cruel fathers are common.

What they struggle with is the four hundred people who clapped — the ordinary, well-dressed, presumably decent guests who watched a man push his daughter into a fountain and responded by applauding.

How, people ask me, could a whole room do that?