Moving to the country had liberated us both, I see now, from the small-town grid and those masters of righteousness. The shopping fell to us, and my father favored a roadside grocery store that was owned and run, it was rumored, by a former Alton gangster. Like my father, Arty Callahan was tall, melancholy, and slightly deaf; his wife was an overweight, wisecracking woman whose own past, it was said, had been none too savory. My father loved them, and loved the minutes of delay their store gave him on the return to our isolated country home. Both Mr. and Mrs. Callahan took him in the right way, it seemed to me, with not too much of either amusement or gravity; they were, all three, free spirits. While he talked to them, acting out, in gestures and phrases that had become somewhat stylized, his sense of daily peril, I would sit at a small Formica-topped table next to the magazine rack and leaf through Esquire, looking for Vargas girls. I would sneak a look at Arty Callahan’s profile, so noncomittally clamped over his terribly false teeth, and wonder how many men he had killed. The only gangsterish thing he did was give me ten dollars—a huge amount for an hour’s work—for tutoring his son in algebra on Saturdays, when I was old enough to drive the car there.

We had traded in our car for a slightly newer and more dependable one, though still a pre-war model. By the time I went off to college I no longer feared—I no longer dreamed—that my father would be savaged by society. He was fifty by then, a respectable age. Living his life beside him for five years, I had seen that his flirtation with disgrace was only that, not a ruinous infatuation. Nothing but death could topple him, and even that not very far, not in my mind.

THE CATS