chapter 5

The day the bomb was dropped, Felix was playing with this string and inadvertently twisted it into a "cat's cradle" configuration. Newt remembers this as the first and only time that his father tried to play with him, and he remembers that Felix left his study and thrust the cat's cradle into his young son's face. Felix attempted to show Newt all of the parts of the cat's cradle, encouraging him to imagine the string as an actual bed for a cat. Newt, however, was distracted by the smell of cigar smoke on his father's clothes and by Felix's frighteningly large pores, ears, and nose. The sight was so startling that Newt burst into tears and ran out of the house. Angela, Newt's sister, was twenty-two years old at the time.