It was cruel, perhaps, but had the advantage of being simple and credible enough to justify my father’s distance, his harshness, his deliberate refusal to respond to my childish games, my childish mischief, my solicitations, to anything that I made up or did to earn his undivided attention, not his tenderness, which he dispensed as frugally as a skinflint, but merely his simple, ordinary, undivided attention to my existence. Sometimes I succeeded: he would violently scold me or give me an unsparing beating, and those days were some of the most reassuring of my childhood. Those were days when
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