Word: though
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...into his father's suspect background. The stakes were too high. As a child he based his own legitimacy on his father's identity; if his father did not exist, neither did he. So, he blindly trotted off to Harvard-Yale games with father, who rooted passionately, "as though he had a stake in its outcome." Duke even went so far as to buy English bulldogs to suggest his connection with Old Eli. Despite gaping holes in the Ivy League story--a friend once hailed Duke as a classmate from Penn in Geoffrey's earshot--Geoffrey "preferred this fabulous notion...
...surprisingly, he sympathizes less when his mother errs. Though her offenses were less reprehensible, Wolff bears down on them harshly. When ten-year-old Geoffrey discovers his mother in bed with a grimy ex-Sarasota policeman, he reaches a verdict instantly--"it was all over"--and he catches the next bus to California to set up house for the next 20-odd years with father...
...someone forgive such a man, much less such a father? Wolff recounts the feelings of betrayal, of abandonment, of sheer abhorrence he felt after his father's death. But eventually--or so he claims--he realizes, "I had forgotten I loved him, mostly, and mostly now I missed him." Though it seems more likely that he did not forget his love, that this love never existed, Geoffrey's claim must be respected. Wolff writes to a Mr. Joseph, his Choate headmaster, that his father was "a bad man and a good father," and Joseph corrects him, "Don't ever again...
...this time, in the Court of King Joseph, the Knights of the Varsity Table had been sporting in various and sundry ways. They amused themselves with games of backgammon and dice, and partook of prodigious feats and shared great pleasures with the maidens, though we cannot speak here of the nature of those pleasures, except to say they were the most enjoyable delights imaginable...
...soon, there were only two knights still on horses, though bodies lay all around. And St. John glared at Irving, and neither had shield nor lance. But they rushed at each other and swung their swords so hard that they both fell from the horses; and both animals fell dead. But the two knights jumped up, and they delivered such blows to each other that they were soon both covered in blood. And the minstrels of King Joseph's Court played all the while, and the people threw eggs at them. And St. John, almost exhausted from such battle, took...