"What do you know? You have no idea. No idea about anything. You were with that tramp in Florida, so what do you know?

"Please, Catherine-"

"He stormed out of the apartment and left her crying on the floor. She ran after him.... I tried to stop her... She collapsed on the street and died on the way to Mount Sinai. Her heart was broken. She could take no more. Her poor heart was broken."

"Would you like to rest for a while?"

"No, Doctor. I'm fine. He seemed to change so much in New York. It wasn't a game anymore. In First Grade we had to study a dictionary. Can you imagine that? Abacus. Abandon. Abbot. Abhor. We were only kids. And Mom just sat there, watching us with tears in her eyes. Too afraid to say anything."

"She was weak."

"That's not fair, Mike."

"She never tried to stop him. Just sat in that chair and blubbered. I hated those tears. I hated her weakness. That's why I didn't come to the funeral. I despised her, that's why. And it was a way of getting at him, a way of making him suffer all the more."

"You're wrong, Mike, she always loved you.... When we couldn't say the words, he told us we had two minutes. We could hear the ticking of the stopwatch. Like a bomb waiting to go off. If we knew them, he'd tell us we were lucky. If we didn't, he locked us in our rooms and took away the light bulbs. I used to lie there, rigid in the darkness, too afraid to even breathe. I used to imagine that the words were birds... I could see them... vultures... clawing at my lips. Pronounce. Proof. Prop. Propel. When we were older, seven or eight, I guess, he taught us Latin and Greek. He used to wake us at dawn. He said our brains were more receptive then. Mensa, Mensa, mensam. Alpha, Beta, Gamma, Delta.... He was always much harder on Mike."

"Was there a particular reason for this?"

"Mike was so much like him."

"I guess I just absorbed things faster. Or maybe I was just more scared than Cathy."

"He hated you because he saw that you were brilliant too, that eventually you would surpass him."

"What I could never figure was the contradiction. He wanted us to be 'brilliant', yet, when we did show signs of exceptional achievement, he seemed to hate us all the more. When he wasn't helping us - that's what he called it, 'helping' us - there had to be complete silence while he wrote in those notebooks."

"We couldn't watch TV or bring friends home."

"That's right. Remember Tara? She was Cathy's best friend and I guess I had a crush on her. continue