Poor Tony's flight up Prospect

Sprinting for his life in broken heels with Ruth van Cleve's talons a millimeter from his boa, Poor Tony is ambushed mid-flight by the first of two involuntary images of his father — the man beating his own head and shoulders in grief for "his symbolically dead son." The phrasing does the theme's work: Tony is not dead but dead-to, disowned into a figure of speech, mourned as a loss rather than a person while still alive and running. The flash arrives unbidden, at the moment of most extreme bodily terror, which is the scene's grim rhyme with how sons in this book keep meeting their fathers — never by choice, always as a thing that surfaces when the self is stripped down to animal panic.