I remember Eleanor visiting exactly once during a week-long hospitalization, standing in the doorway in her good coat, unwilling to come closer, saying, “Well.

He’s not a very robust little thing, is he,” as though she were appraising a horse that had come up lame.

That was the water my son grew up in.

Not beatings, not screaming — the Vances were far too refined for anything so honest — but a steady, temperate, bottomless coldness, a sense communicated in ten thousand small ways that he was a defective product the family was too polite to return.

Children raised in warmth don’t know they’re in it; it’s just air.