And then there was Harvey Krumas, the candidate’s father. Tony used to keep him and my uncle Peter on the straight and narrow, Harvey said last night, as if my dad being a cop meant he monitored people’s lives. It had been a misery of my childhood, parents saying to my playmates, “Victoria’s father is a cop. He’ll arrest you if you don’t behave.” Apparently that was also how Harvey and Peter had seen Tony, not as a person, just a uniform.

“But if you hang out with a prize creep like Arnie Coleman, you probably need someone to keep you on the straight and narrow,” I said out loud.

My voice startled Peppy, asleep on the floor by my side. She twitched and whimpered.

“Yeah, you haven’t seen your birth father for years and years, either, have you, girl?” I leaned over to rub her head.

Father Gribac had been the pastor at St. Czeslaw’s, the church my aunt Marie attended. Actually, nobody had blown up St. Czeslaw’s, but Father Gribac sure had fanned fires of hatred in South Chicago after the riot-filled summer of ’sixty-six. Marie was just one of the crowd of furious St. Czeslaw parishioners who vowed to do everything they could to show King and the other agitators he’d brought with him that they should stay in Mississippi or Georgia where they belonged. She was furious that the cardinal made every priest read a letter to the parish on brotherhood and open housing.

“Our Chicago Negroes always knew their place before these Com munists came to stir them up,” Marie fumed.

Father Gribac read Cardinal Cody’s letter, since he was a good soldier in Christ’s Army, but he also preached a thundering sermon, telling his congregation that Christians had a duty to fight Commu nists and look after their families. We heard all about it from Aunt Marie when she dropped in on my mother a few days after my tenth birthday.

“If we don’t stop them in Marquette Park, they’ll be here in South Chicago next. Father Gribac says he’s tired of the cardinal sitting in his mansion like God on His throne, not caring about white people in this city. We’re the ones who built these churches. But Cardinal Cody wants to let those ni—”

“Not that word in my house, Marie,” my mother had said sharply.

“Oh, you can be as high and mighty as you like, Gabriella, but what about us? What about the lives we worked so hard to make?”