In the fourth month of my pregnancy, we drove to Fort Sill, Oklahoma, where David was formally discharged from the Army. As he predicted, his father did disown him, though David stayed in touch with his mother, who eventually convinced his father to forgive him. We moved into a furnished apartment in a dump of a building called the Sherwin Arms on the far north side of Chicago, a block or so from Sheri- dan Road. David got a job working on a trade magazine, and I spent my days walking the few blocks down to Lake Michigan, and drinking coffee in a little shop under the El.

David was getting up at 4.30am to write. He was having some success. Magazines, none of which I’d ever heard of, began to publish his articles and reviews of books. I didn’t have much luck reading what he wrote, though whether I did or not didn’t seem to bother him. He was ambitious. I had never been with, or for that matter before now even met, an ambitious man.

The Goldsteins treated me decently enough. Yet I couldn’t help feeling that they had some- thing else in mind for their only son than a twice-divorced woman with two children. They never questioned me about my past, which, in modified form, David had filled them in on. Only after our son—my third son—Richard was born did we begin to see more of David’s family. Despite their courtesy to me, I couldn’t help feeling an outsider among them. One day I heard my mother-in-law, on the phone, tell a friend that “My goya comes to clean on Wednesday”—David had filled me in on twenty or so words of Yiddish—and I thought, your other goya, your daughter-in-law, is here right now in your kitchen.

Richard was born with the help of a man named David Turow, who believed in induced labour, and delivered my son and five other kids on the same Tuesday. He must have golfed on the other afternoons. David said that in the waiting room the expectant fathers had a pool going on whose child would arrive in what order.

Based on his recent publications, David had been offered a job in New York on a small political magazine. He talked with me about it, but I could sense that he had already made up his mind to take it. And so we moved to New York. Because of the expense of Manhattan, he found us an apartment in a new building in Flushing, in Queens, and soon after I became pregnant with my fourth child. We had no health insurance, and so we joined an HMO in Jamaica, Queens, where I saw a quite nutty OB-Gyno doctor named Ephraim Berlin. I’d heard that soon after my fourth son, Joel, was born, they had to drag Dr Berlin off the premises of the hospital. What I’m getting at is that none of the births of my sons—and a fifth would turn up twelve years later—was an occasion for joyousness.

While we were living in New York, my first two sons, Donald and Allen, arrived for my summer visitation. Van, still in the Navy, now was living in Balston Spa in upstate New York. He had meanwhile remarried, to a woman from Louisiana, and when my boys arrived they were not in good shape. Under some questioning from David and me, we discovered that they were being badly mistreated by their step-mother, Allen especially. She locked him in closets and used to spank him with a hairbrush. The clothes she had sent with them were unpressed and barely clean. Donald’s glasses were held together with Scotch-tape.

“These kids aren’t going back,” David announced. He said that we were going to be in a custody fight for the boys. He told me that from the time he first met me he sensed a dark sad hole in my life because I did not live with my children, and that this was the perfect time to fill in that hole. My first husband’s monstrous wife had given us that chance.

At great expense—three thousand dollars, a lot of money in those days—we won. Donald and Allen came to live with us. Us included Richard and his baby brother Edward. David at this time was twenty-six, I was twenty-seven. Life with four young boys in New York was, in David’s word, “crushing”, and he decided that we would all do better to move back to Little Rock, where he thought he could get a job on the Arkansas Gazette.

I boarded a Greyhound bus with my four kids, and the plan was for David to follow a month later. He needed to give proper notice at his job, and to close up our apartment in Flushing, whose lease would be up in less than thirty days. I was to find a house to rent, and there was enough money for me to hire a nanny to watch the kids.