While he was in Stateville, my father never wrote to Lee or to me, though each month on her return from her visits to him my mother would say that he wanted her to fill him in on what was going on in our lives. Lee went with my mother on a few of her visits. He reported his sadness at our father in prison clothes. (The day he went off to prison, the Sun-Times ran a picture of my father with a caption that read, "Natty attorney swaps pin-stripes for prison stripes".) His sleek black hair had turned grey, Lee told me, his face seemed wrinkled and even a touch pinched. He promised Lee that once he was out of jail he would make it all up to him and to me. I wondered just how was he going to do so. He would be fifty-seven when he got out of jail, and as a convicted felon, he was disbarred and thus unable any longer to practise law.

During the eight years my father was in prison, Lee dropped the idea of law school, and instead went on to get a Ph.D in clinical psychology. He opened his practice in Highland Park. I finished up at the University of Illinois at Chicago with a teaching certificate, and got a job teaching civics at Lane Tech High School. Lee married soon after graduate school. I lived with my mother, as I continued to do until she died. I went out with a few men, but nothing serious resulted. My brother the therapist believes I am gun-shy about men after what our father did to our mother, and he may be right.

Out of prison, my father hustled around to find work. His old connections weren't any longer much interested in being connected with him. The best he could find was a job as a salesman at Syd Jerome, a men's store on LaSalle Street where he used to buy his expensive Oxford-brand suits. He was now selling the suits he could no longer afford to buy. His once perpetually tanned and creamy skin was now gaunt with a touch of greyness — was it prison pallor? — that never left him. His dazzling wardrobe never again looked quite right on him. At Stateville, he did what we were told is called "hard time." He made license plates and worked in the laundry. My mother reported that his cellmates while he was there included an arsonist, a rapist, various thugs and thieves. He never spoke about how he was treated by other prisoners, at least not in my presence. About his sex life during those years, I prefer not to think.

The Belden-Stratford Hotel, an older residential hotel across from Lincoln Park, was where my father settled once out of prison. I remember hearing that Colonel Jacob Arvey, the man who helped Adlai Stevenson win the Democratic nomination for president in 1952, once lived in a penthouse at the Belden-Stratford. My father had a single room there with a bath and kitchenette. With whom he spent his time, I have no notion. If he had any women in his life, I knew nothing about them either.