The following Epilogue closes a story which appeared previously in this column and which now appears below.

One of the questions I have been asked is, "How did you survive a childhood like that?" The answer is: "I didn't. I'm not really here at all." Not that lost little boy, anyway. This is another me, at the other end of life. Someone else e-mailed me, "I'm sitting here with tears streaming down my cheeks." To this I have already replied personally to him: "Nearly drowned in mine as I wrote it. I saw him clearly in my head, i.e. my Italian friend, and realized for the first time, from my perspective as an aging gay, how beautiful he was, how precious was his life, how bruising that experience must have been for him, as though my father were kicking him right out of life's door. Oh, would that I could go back and lift his head into my lap again and kiss his naked scalp and make him well. He would have been a good man for the world to know. He died two months later, still only 19 (dead not because of what my father did, but Dad forbade me to attend the funeral). My father lived to the age of 77. I never liked him very much, but he was my father, and that was that. Perhaps the greatest joy of my life was to discover, when I found my mother and escaped to her at 16, that I was infinitely more like her than like him. Actually, it made me more clearly understand my father's continuing mixture of animus and love toward me. He loved me in theory, as a father should, but my face, my personality and most of my character were so like my mother's that my very existence constituted an immutable reproach for the crimes he had perpetrated against her. My mother had long since forgiven him, having found glorious happiness in a second marriage and two more sons (my half-brothers), and even expressed a desire to see my father again. But my father's wrongfully self-righteous way was to blame and to hate. He went into paroxysms of rage when I called him from her home in another state to say that she would like to speak with him and say hello. He banged down the phone. After that, we had no communication for several years. But I was blessed by having inherited my mother's forgiving heart. I developed a relationship of sorts with my father in later life and even came to admire my "wicked" stepmother for her loving care of him in his last, long illness. After my father's death, I became her one and only true friend in what turned out to be her lonely and unhappy old age. She begged my forgiveness time and again for the things she had done to me before my escape at 16, and each time, I gave it to her with a kiss. She died in her sleep last year."