What did it mean that Adletsky and Dame Siggy had reached a great age, that they were honored as multibillionaire Jews, and that they were what Chicagoans call ‘notables’? Or else, in the language of myth, ‘heavy-money Yids,’ representatives of the powers of darkness and the secret rulers of the world?

Much later in the day, talking to Amy about Mr and Mrs Adletsky, I said, ‘Okay, they’re in retirement. They’ve got nothing but leisure, and it’s a pastime with them to bargain with Bodo Heisinger, to chaffer and haggle. Early this morning, they left the house and rode downtown through the blizzard in their stretch limo. They sat in the luxurious salon interior. Then for two hours they fenced with Madge and Bodo … There was no occasion to look outside – to see the people whose mad doings the papers are always reporting …’

‘What are you out to prove, Harry, with an introduction like this?’ Amy said.

‘There is no leisure for anybody,’ I said. ‘Retirement is an illusion. Not a reward but a mantrap. The bankrupt underside of success. A shortcut to death. Golf courses are too much like cemeteries. Adletsky would never stoop to golf. He was right to wheel and deal as he had done from the age of two till ninety-two.’

This sort of speculation had always made Amy uncomfortable. I was already talking like this in high school. She didn’t really listen. She saw this as one of my bad habits, and maybe she was right. My theorizing had from the beginning come between us. ‘You aren’t really the way you sound,’ she sometimes said. ‘You’ve read so many books, but surprisingly, face-to-face you aren’t bookish – you’re regular.’

Berner, her first husband, by whom she had had two daughters, had made no theoretical statements. He was a gambler. As a young wife, she went with him to football games in Soldier Field, to hockey at the stadium. ‘I enjoyed it,’ she said. ‘Not your kind of thing, Harry. You’re a university type – you’re studious, you don’t look like a highbrow but you are one.’ She didn’t like me to claim superiority. On the other hand, I was an oddball, she said. I looked so curiously self-contained. ‘You never let on to more than one-tenth of what you really think or know. You used to be a Marxist. Weren’t you, for a while? What ever happened to the book you wrote on What’s-his-name …?’

‘On Walter Lippmann. Nobody would take it. It never was published.’

Berner, whom she married when she got her BA, inherited a small raincoat factory. He gambled it away. He took a bank loan on the house in Oak Park, and soon Amy and her girls were homeless. Berner disappeared for a good while. She obtained a divorce. The children were still quite young when she married Jay Wustrin.

‘Berner didn’t even abandon us,’ she said. ‘He barely noticed that we were there.’

‘He didn’t need to have a family. He only needed to desert one. I fail to see how it was possible to leave you, Amy. You were a great beauty.’