(2 of 2)
As Woodie slowly pieced himself together, his home disintegrated. Heywood Sr., a large, rumpled man of prodigious appetites, prided himself on looking like an unmade bed. It was a bed that welcomed many female visitors. The warring Brouns kept the marriage alive by retreating to separate houses. Woodie shuttled between them until he was forced to choose between parents. He opted to live with his father, a decision that merely added to his misery and guilt. A year after the divorce, in 1934, Ruth was dead. Broun Sr., a lifelong atheist, converted to Roman Catholicism shortly before his death at 51. He left behind a bewildered preppie who, for years afterward, wanted only "to set up a house where my parents could go on living, a place with three floors and a basement, one floor for each of us and a basement where we could all get together."
Whose Little Boy Are You? is that basement. Here, three souls continue to skirmish in a classic recollection of liberalism carried to the point of tyranny. Perhaps in her reading, Ruth Hale ran across another observation by Oscar Wilde: "Children begin by loving their parents. After a time they judge them. Rarely, if ever, do they forgive them." This is one of those rare and rueful times.
—By Stefan Kanfer