‘I’m Bessie’s husband.’ And by neither temperament nor training was he suited to be that alone. ‘You know what I am now?’ he told me sadly on his sixty-fifth birthday. He had nothing to do and she had everything to do - and that wouldn’t do. (Don’t talk to anyone in my family about cleaning - we saw cleaning in its heyday.) But then my father retired from one of the Metropolitan Life’s big South Jersey offices, where he’d been managing a staff of fifty-two people, and the efficient, clear-cut division of labor that had done so much to define their marriage as a success gradually began to be obliterated - by him. For years he had believed he was married to perfection, and for years he wasn’t far wrong - my mother was one of those devoted daughters of Jewish immigrants who raised housekeeping in America to a great art. “His obsessive stubbornness - his stubborn obsessiveness - had very nearly driven my mother to a breakdown in her final years: since his retirement at the age of sixty-three, her once spirited, housewifely independence had been all but extinguished by his anxious, overbearing bossiness. When we lay waste, when we efface, it isn’t with raging fists or ruthless schemes or insane sprawling violence but with our words, our brains, with mentality, with all the stuff that produced the poignant abyss between our fathers and us and that they themselves broke their backs to give us.” We have teeth as the cannibals do, but they are there, imbedded in our jaws, the better to help us articulate. “We’re the sons appalled by violence, with no capacity for inflicting physical pain, useless at beating and clubbing, unfit to pulverize even the most deserving enemy, though not necessarily without turbulence, temper, even ferocity. You just hock him until he comes to his senses and does it.”

He would have told you that you can lead a horse to water and you can make him drink. … He had no idea just how unproductive, how maddening, even, at times, how cruel his admonishing could be. “He could never understand that a capacity for renunciation and iron self-discipline like his own was extraordinary and not an endowment shared by all. The end of one era, the beginning of another.” I am fifty-five, my father almost eighty-seven, and the year is 1988: “Do as I say,” I tell him−and he does it. I then spoke four words to him, four words that I’d never uttered to him before in my life. It’s a beautiful day and you can’t sit around inside like this with the shades drawn and so on. “−Look, put on your sweater and put on your walking shoes.

Patrimony by Philip Roth