Mile High by Richard Condon

against all women for all of his life. He never stopped seeking revenge upon every one of them for what his mother had done to his father and what she had done—the greater betrayal within the lesser one—to him.
    Eddie West saw his mother as a coldly beautiful snarler who spoke in a mysterious code that separated her from the rest of the world. The Dance itself and her aborted world triumphs as a dancer were in imagination totally achieved by her because they had been denied her. She paddled on her back in a limpid pool of wistful fantasies, always looking back to where she had almost begun. She transmitted her own frustration to her son and gave it form for him. Frustration at never being able to get through to her, at having to hear her speak a language that he thought no one else could speak, describing with disdain and emasculating indifference a world he could neither enter nor imagine. He would beat upon walls because he could not beat upon her. In his boy’s mind, then within his deserted adolescent consciousness, he thought of all women as repositories of some enormous secret that could not be dislodged unless it were shaken out or beaten out or stamped and kicked and strangled out. The discovery of this secret, this enigma, would explain the mystery of women and prove the key to open the mile-high doors that separated one vital part of him from the other deadened part with which he was forced to live.
    When she left him it was not that something wonderful and irreplaceable had vanished, leaving him unloved and alone. While she was with him he felt more unloved than after she’d gone. His father loved him and proved that every day, then proved it again and again. But when his mother went away without revealing the engima’s explanation and thus releasing the lock within the mile-high doors, his frustration multiplied itself, then squared itself, broadening, lengthening and deepening until the enigmas (more of them and all of them) were sunk at the center of a gigantic cube that was his “peculiarness,” standing alone on the barren plain of his existence at the geometric center of his frigid brain.
    When she was gone he convinced himself that it was not just his mother who was alien and hateful and the creator of frustration and pain, but all women, because the only opposite of his mother was his father, his father and the people his father brought to see him—heavyweight champions of the world, famous actresses, high-riding jockeys, Presidents of the United States, all activists, people who revealed, never concealed, amiable, outgoing, attentive and interesting. As the years went on he thought he had forgotten everything he had felt so keenly in that first month of nights after she had gone away, but the pain of the frustration had settled deeply into the cold mists inside his head, so deeply that he was not aware it was still there. Except that he hunted women, preferring the compliant, extroverted, instantly surrendering, totally available. And when, as it happened several times in his life, these total availables suddenly revealed an antic selfishness that thwarted him, the gigantic old frustration was dragged out of his head. He had then to shake, strike, stamp and strangle to try to rid himself of the old locked-in secret. Although he thought later that he had at last seen a glimpse of the explanation with his own wife, the echo of his mother’s meaning-within-no-meaning was still heard.
    His father’s public essence was strong and whole, but the boy could not match its splendid shape with the grotesque private form his father assumed inside the house, and thus was never able to see his father whole. Outside, the father was a giant figure, all-powerful, feared/loved. People came to him to try to realize their fortunes through him; the singers sang sweetly and the magicians their wonders did perform. But inside the house this majesty shrank into gabbling garrulousness that