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At this point we had a small miracle. I awoke one Saturday morning to the sound of strenuous packing and Parsifal on the stereo. Mutti was back, in charge, shouting orders. We kids were marshaled into action, as well as two guys I’d never seen before, German speakers, probably war criminals in hiding that Mutti had dug up somewhere. It was Regensburg 1945 again, Hitler was gone, the Reds were coming, and life had to be whipped into shape from the ruins. I understand that Ukrainian villages cheered the arrival of the Nazis in 1941, and we kids were in somewhat the same state—anything had to be better than what we’d recently experienced, and maternal fascism was at least a known quantity. The Germans had a truck too, and it moved us from our comfortable brick house in Flatbush to a cramped two-bedroom in a high-rise public project out by the Queens borderline.

So our lives continued without Dad. The salary from the job Mutti obtained as a clerk at King’s County Hospital was just enough to keep us in underwear and bratwurst. We kids thereafter devoted ourselves to living the lives we thought would most piss Dad off: Paul became a stupid rather than a clever criminal; I became a star student (i.e., a schmuck); and Miri, not to mince words, became a slut. In short order, Paul got nailed for a liquor store holdup and went off for his jolt upstate, Miri ran off with a playboy, and I graduated with honors, aced my SATs, and went to Columbia, where I met Mickey Haas. I hope this connects all the dots.

But I started this long digression by describing my children, and I see I have not yet said anything about my son, Nicholas—Niko, as we call him. For a long time we thought, or rather I thought, that there was something wrong with Niko, some form of autism perhaps, or one of the other childhood syndromes lately invented to provide the drug companies with fresh markets. He failed to walk or talk at the usual times, and I insisted on taking him to various specialists, although his mother maintained that there was nothing seriously wrong with him. In time, his mother was proven correct. He began to talk at around four, and from the start in perfect paragraphs, and demonstrated at around the same time that he had taught himself to read. He is some kind of prodigy, but we’re not really sure what kind. I admit now that I have never felt entirely comfortable in his presence. To my shame. When he was six, before our home dissolved, he used to come into the little room that I used as a study or den and stand staring at me and would say nothing at all when I asked him what he wanted. Eventually, I used to ignore his presence, or try to. I imagined sometimes that he could see into me, into my deepest thoughts and desires, and that he, alone of my family, knew then how perfectly rotten I was.

He goes to Copley Academy with Imogen and has special tutoring in mathematics and computer science, at both of which he excels. Izzy the Book thus struck, in a fashion, across the generations, skipping me, for I never received more than a B- in the few math courses my education required. Niko is a solid, grave little man, and in his features he has already started to resemble his paternal grandfather, the dark, canny, opaque eyes, the schnoz, the wide mouth, the thick curling dark hair. As far as I know, he has never learned anything from me. The last time I tried it was at the pool, when I attempted to teach him to swim. Not only did I fail, but my efforts sent him into a hysteria so profound and long lasting that no one has ever tried to teach him again, and he remains a terrified sinker. On land I suppose he is reasonably happy; Copley is the kind of place where, if you are not disruptive, they leave you alone. They don’t give out grades, and they charge twenty-eight-five a year. I don’t begrudge this in the least, as I make a good living. I bill on average seven-fifty an hour, and my annual billings are usually well in excess of two thousand hours per