Having had a brief fling as a modern dancer, Ellie was working part-time as a   Pilates instructor, filling in her income with work as an office temp. Five years younger than me, she was approaching 40, and, as far as I could see, utterly unsettled in life, though she did not seem particularly concerned about it. Last year I made a shade under three-quarters of a million dollars. I mention this because a few years ago I asked Ellie if I could possibly help her out with a few grand a month. She thanked me but said she was doing fine as it is in a way that made it clear that the subject of accepting money from her older brother wasn't really open for discussion.

I loved my sister without being especially close to her, if you can understand that. My two kids, Sarah and Aaron, especially loved their Aunt Ellie. Every Jewish kid needs a crazy aunt, and for them Ellie filled the bill nicely. Ellie and I had our own Aunt Sally, my mother's younger, also unmarried, sister who danced the hora more wildly than anyone else at Jewish weddings and bar-mitzvah parties, and fed us popcorn and Jell-O for dinner when she stayed with us during those times when our parents went out of town by themselves. Our kids didn't see all that much of their Aunt Ellie, but they didn't seem to need to see much of her to love her.

Ellie and I stopped on the way to The Drake for an early dinner at a restaurant on Halsted Street called Vinci. We had pasta dishes, and I ordered a bottle of Cabernet Sauvignon. Awaiting our food, we settled into discussing Topic Number One.

"So Steven," Ellie said, "what's your take on our old man's hot new sex life?"

"Truth is," I said, "I can't get my mind around it. If you'd called and said Dad had knocked up a woman 40 years younger than him, or was running for the United States Senate, this I could have taken in. But our father being gay, that's something else again."

"Pretty wild," Ellie said. "On the other hand, why not? I mean who knows what secret desires people carry around. Most people take these buried desires to their graves, where they get buried for good. Not our father. Give him credit for that."

"I'm not sure that credit is what is at stake," I said.