Some years later, after Scott's death, we came my father and I to the Field...

Some years later, after Scott's death, we came my father and I to the Field Museum, a long dismal peristyle dwindling away into the howling distance, and inside stood before a tableau of Stone Age Man, father mother and child crouched around an artificial ember in postures of minatory quiet-until, feeling my father's eye on me, I turned and saw what he required of me-very special father and son we were that summer, he staking his everything this time on a perfect comradeship-and I, seeing in his eyes the terrible request, requiring from me his very life; I, through a child's cool perversity or some atavistic recoil from an intimacy too intimate, turned him down, turned away, refused him what I knew I could not give.

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