In Detroit, Michigan, Hugo Black was a different child from Lee Wheeler. He did not wander or challenge his mother. He heeded the fairy-tale injunction to obey, always finding fault with those storybook children who wandered under bridges only to be eaten by ogres, for they had clearly been given instruction. And yet real children in his neighborhood were disobedient, and nothing happened. Hugo thus grew disenchanted with what he had seen of life. His mother, hearing his morose pronouncements, met them with faint and approving nods, the equivalent of warm rain and rich topsoil.

Mrs. Black herself seemed burdened by an unnamed offense perpetrated by the world, as if, on a certain spring day long past, she had flown down a dock with her parasol and two well-packed suitcases, only to find that the ship had sailed. There it was, receding into the distance, lovely chamber music playing, handsome men of the highest classes making excellent conversation over a formal meal, and the folly of blown champagne corks echoing over Lake Erie without her.

For reasons never enumerated, this was apparently Mr. Black’s fault. Hugo’s father, the professor of engineering who enjoyed railway trains, did not go by “Dr. Black,” which gave Mrs. Black headaches from which she refused to recover until he left for work in the mornings. Further, Mr. Black showed enthusiasm for mechanical devices, equations, thrilling uses of electricity, parlor games, puzzles—in other words, the minor traps of the material world that Mrs. Black endured.

Quietly, Mr. Black took Hugo to the vaudeville house (“Don’t tell Mother”), the Electric Park (“What are we going to do?” “Not tell Mother?” “Good boy”), and the waxworks, the Theater of Blood on Woodward Avenue, where Mr. Black got on one knee to show Hugo where the signs of wax casting were still found, to show that this wasn’t really a dead person but, rather, technology and artistry. Mr. Black did not take him to the nickel dumps of the picture show. Hugo said he did not wish to go, for he’d heard that the working class (he did not know what this was) used the darkness for illicit advances upon each other’s person (he thought this meant they tickled each other, something he definitely would campaign against).

When Hugo was nine, and as rigid and duty-bound if he were forty-five, Mr. Black asked, “Would you like a job?”

Hugo hesitated. When he was confused, he tended to rely on an aloofness. “Peut-être.”

“Right,” Mr. Black sighed. “It involves Jefferson Avenue.”