Ira's purity of desire for intimacy outstrips whatever sense he may have of traditional notions of morality, or even recognition that a "liberated woman" in his modern times might not wish to be viewed constantly as a sexual object. For Ira, any female who comes into view — physically or via memory — is a subject for detailed sexual fantasies and seduction: Good sex is true worship; bad sex is distorting and distorted religion. And somehow, although he claims to be an equal opportunity admirer, a reader never finds Ira in bed with a decidedly homely or overweight paramour.

Father-son bonding arises as Ira moves to protect John from Fiona's fixations and rages. When John is old enough to have a fascination for trains, Ira and he spend Saturdays riding the trains in and around New York — even though Ira commutes to and from work by train five days a week. Ira is not beyond including a day with a lover in the father-son train schedule, and he frequently assures John that going to Mass with mother is simply a means to help counter her fits of insanity. Thus, while Ira expresses great love and concern for his son, the vision of life and of relationships with women that he can convey to the boy is simply his own — nothing broader or more balanced than what he himself lives out.

Fiona enacts the wounded woman cycle in the story. Abused as a child and recalling the scenes of abuse as an adult, she alternates between feeling incapacitated by the early exploitation and being a domineering, manipulative, raging emotional abuser herself. Although she never cites the phrase directly, she lives out the Old Testament maxim that "The sins of the fathers are visited upon the children to the third and fourth generation."