The year I entered high school, my father took up golf. He joined a country club in Northbrook called Green Acres, so we saw less of him than we formerly did on weekends, though sometimes we would meet for Sunday night family dinners at the club. He was a handsome man, my father, dark, naturally slender, a dapper dresser. How many love affairs he might have had before that with Sylvia Lippman I haven't any idea. I wouldn't be surprised, though, if there had been quite a few.

The story of why my father had been willing to go so far as to arrange the killing of Sylvia Lippman's husband never came out at the trial. Maybe Herb Lippman found out about his wife's love affair and forced her to call an end to it. Maybe he threatened my father, physically or with scandal. Who knows? I never saw Herb Lippman, but Sylvia Lippman, whose photograph often appeared in the papers when the scandal broke, seemed to me rather disappointingly plain. What attracted my father to her I don't know either.

Not long after my father went to prison, I asked my mother what it was she originally saw in him. When they met, he was twenty-seven, she twenty-four. They married a year later. He was, she told me, a man on his way up. Like most women of her generation, my mother hadn't gone to college, though she was bright and had a quick mind. She took the commercial course at Marshall High School. She was working as a secretary and bookkeeper for a used-auto parts company, Warshovsky & Sons, which was where she met my father, who was defending the company in an accident claim case against it.

"Your father seemed so knowing," my mother told me. "He knew the world, and how to get around in it. He had all the answers. I felt protected in his company. Also, twenty-four in those days was getting old for a single woman. He was a very eligible bachelor, your father. He was obviously interested in me, so I grabbed him. The more interesting question, I suppose, might be what he saw in me."

I didn't find that question interesting at all. My mother was good-looking-tall, with auburn hair, a good figure, the kind of woman other women of that day called "stunning". She was good-hearted, without a touch of snobbery, and a sound judge of other people. Her only misjudgment in this last department, that in picking out a husband, turned out to be a serious one.

"This may sound strange," she said to me, "but even now I don't entirely regret having married your father. Not only did your brother and you come out of the marriage, but being married to a successful man can be a real boost to a person's self-confidence. I know it was to mine. I hope you someday get to experience it, too, Ann." Unmarried in my early fifties, and unlikely to marry, ever, I never have experienced, nor probably ever will.