It never occurred to me when I was young, first in my teens and then in my twenties and even into my early thirties, that my fierce attachments to these other, more sophisticated father figures, the evident pleasure with which I went off with Fred and Horst and the others, the constant references, when I was in college, to my roommate’s architect father, might have any emotional effect on my own father—perhaps because I was accustomed to the idea that my father wasn’t very emotional about anything. His seeming coldness, I told myself at the time, was indeed one of the many reasons I needed
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