Nailles described the party to Tony, who knew most of the guests. The boy wondered if his mother would have fallen asleep and if he would be spared the carnal demands, encouragements, exclamations and cheers that he heard so often from his parents’ bedroom. He hoped his mother had fallen asleep. There was some preference in the air, some enjoyable and yet self-conscious sense that they were playing out the roles written for them as a Father and a Son. Love was definitely what Nailles felt, and where a more demonstrative man in another country would have embraced his son and declared his love, Nailles would not. Nailles lighted a cigarette and coughed. The cough was racking, phlegmatic, it shook him pitilessly and brought the blood to his face. It declared, much more than anything else, the difference in their ages. Tony wondered why he didn’t stop smoking. If he stopped smoking he might stop coughing. In the discord of his father’s cough, in its power to briefly enfeeble him, the boy was reminded unsentimentally of the facts of sickness, age and death. But his father, he thought proudly, looked and acted much younger than his age; much younger than Don Waltham’s father or Henry Pastor’s father and Herbert Matson’s father. His father played no game admirably but he could still knock his way through an ice-hockey scrimmage, score occasionally at touch football and ski intermediate trails. He was forty-two. This time of life seemed to Tony bewildering, antique and hoary. The thought of having lived for so long excited him as an archaeologist is excited by a Sumerian or Scythian relic. But his hair was thick and there was no gray in it, his face was lined but it was not puffy, he held himself well and he had a flat stomach. His father was unusual, Tony thought, and went on to think, complacently, that he would inherit this unusualness; he would be the unusual son of an unusual father spared the usualness of gray hair, baldness, obesity and fussiness.