Close though we were, I didn't have the nerve to ask my mother if she suspected my father was having a love affair with Sylvia Lippman. The two families didn't see each other socially, though the Lippmans were also members of Green Acres and Ner Tamid Synagogue. Nor could I bring myself to ask if she knew of any earlier love affairs my father might have had. A good part of my anger against my father is that he betrayed my mother. I also used to think it would have been less awful if he had planned to carry out the murder of Herb Lippman on his own. Hiring someone else to do it felt worse, crummier somehow.

Once the scandal broke, we never returned to Ner Tamid. A month or so after my father went to prison we were informed by letter that our membership at Green Acres had been allowed to lapse, and we were not invited to renew it. Not that we had the money to do so.

A powerful money-earner, my father was also something of a sport, which is a generous word for spendthrift. Confident that he could always bring in lots of money, he had saved little of his substantial earnings. He had Cubs and Bears season  tickets. He was an avid picker-up of restaurant checks. He took us on Miami Beach vacations, on which we always always flew first-class and stayed at the best hotel of the day (the Saxony, the Fountain Blue, the Eden Roc). Every couple of months or so he went with his buddies to Vegas. I remember him saying that they used to comp his room and flight. He didn't mention that they only did this for what in Vegas they called high-rollers, of whom he must have been considered one. Then there was the money he had to have spent on his love affairs. My father never looked on money as a problem. "Don't worry," he used to say with his confident smile, when my mother would occasionally mention the high cost of something or other, "there's more where that came from."

After my father went to prison, Lee had to leave the University of Wisconsin and enroll at the University of Illinois in Chicago. My mother, as I mentioned, had to get a job. Any plans I might have had about going away to school were squashed, and, like Lee, I took the El down to the University of Illinois, west of the Loop. We had to sell our comfortable house on Lunt off Francisco and move into a two-bedroom apartment with one bathroom on Washtenaw Avenue just south of Devon. Lee had a room of his own; my mother and I shared the other bedroom. We had come down in the world, and with a thump.