Knife in the Heart

Outside, the car siren blared at intervals. What set it off or what kept it going he could not tell. His mind found one more parallel metaphor between the world outside and that within. The siren was just like his father, a man he had barely ever known: what set off the emptiness and bitterness of his father's soul, or what sustained it, he could not tell. And somehow, this bitterness, the smoldering anger and self-hate seemed directed toward him, though he knew it was not.

He knew for sure that his father was not the cruel, cold-hearted man he seemed to his mother. He felt it with all his heart, that this poor devil — ruined by circumstances as much as by alternating periods of passivity, over-confidence, and even a penury of spirit, — was, at heart, kind, caring, and even a person full of compassion. He knew it, or he thought he knew it, or wanted to know.

A terrible sorrow filled up his eyes and choked his throat as he saw him get back into his car and drive back to work. He knew somehow that his father (and he could never bring himself to call him 'dad') did not want to go back, but even if he had stayed, what would it have achieved? There would have been naught but more stupid bickering over money and the bills between his parents (as if there were not enough already).

The trouble was that his mother was an unforgiving woman, though indeed well-meaning. All she needed to do was to be more tactful, but she would not, she could not — it was neither in her nature nor was she willing to be more tactful.

For a moment, he was about to cry, to burst into tears. He wanted to cry for his father, for his mother, and perhaps most of all for himself; then, the telephone rang.