The story made headlines in both the Chicago Tribune and the Sun-Times. Love triangle, middle-class Jewish families, prominent lawyer, it all made for a fine, if short-lived, scandal. That my father was then president of the men's brotherhood at Ner Tamid Synagogue added a nice touch to the proceedings.

My father pleaded guilty, throwing himself on the mercy of the court, which didn't show him any. The judge, a man named Edgar Rosen, emphasised that my father's being a lawyer, and hence an officer of the court, made his attempt to arrange a murder especially egregious and sentenced him to twelve years in prison. Too bad my father couldn't have been more patient, for Herb Lippman died of prostate cancer a year after he went off to prison. Two years following her husband's death, Sylvia Lippman married her dentist, a widower named Arthur Greenstein.

The trial took place at the beginning of my senior year of high school. I have since come to divide my life B.J. and A.J. — that is, before and after my father went off to jail. B.J. I was sailing along, a good student, in the best clubs at school, and going with a cute boy named Arnie Kramer, whose family lived on Lake Shore Drive. A.J. I lost interest in school, dropped out of my clubs, and though Arnie Kramer was kind enough through those awful days, I decided it was best if I broke things off with him. I was so ashamed that I didn't want to see, or be seen by, anybody.

At the time of the scandal my brother Lee was in his second year at the University of Wisconsin, a large school far enough away from Chicago for him not to feel so directly wounded by the squalid publicity our father had brought down on us. Or so at least I thought at the time. But the scandal may have hit Lee even harder than it did me. Lee idolised our father; he was planning to go to law school so he could join his firm.

Everyone has heard stories about the special closeness between fathers and daughters. In our family it didn't quite work that way. My mother devoted much of her attention to me, my father most of his to Lee. If you had asked me what I thought about my father before the scandal, I would have said, in the adolescent language of the time, "He's cool, my Dad, a neat guy." The truth is, I didn't know him very well. He had god-like status in our household. "Get your father a drink of water," my mother would say. "Get Daddy's slippers." "Don't wrinkle the newspaper. You know how your father hates a crumpled paper."

My father worked a long day, and many evenings we sat down to dinner, my brother, my mother, and I, in our kitchen without him. When he was home, we always ate in the dining room, with cloth napkins.