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His parents had not meant to abuse him; they had meant to love him, and they did love him. But Oliver had come late in their little pack of offspring, at a time when the challenge of child rearing was wearing thin, and he proved susceptible to mishaps. He was born with inturned feet and learned to crawl with corrective casts up to his ankles. When they were at last removed, he cried in terror because he thought those heavy plaster boots scraping and bumping along the floor had been part of himself.
One day in his infancy, they found him on their dressingroom floor with a box of mothballs, some of which were wet with saliva; in retrospect, they wondered if there had really been a need to rush him to the hospital and have his poor little stomach pumped. His face was gray-green afterward. The following summer, when he had learned to walk, his parents had unthinkingly swum off...