But I would be lying if I said that I didn’t still hope for a few wild moments that Fox would laugh and clap me on the back and refuse my offer. That he would say, “I don’t know what came over you, Jerry, but I know I can count on you not to behave like this again. You are a fair man. I know that, and I want you to stay.” He said nothing of the sort. I suppose he no longer believed anything of the sort. I suppose he had no reason to.

When Isaiah was killed, I flew home from Boston, my eyes dry, my throat burning. I took a cab to our old apartment and found my mother there before the sink, cleaning it diligently with Comet, just as she always did. “Mama?” I said, my voice shaky with sorrow.

She turned from the sink, her eyes blazing, and embraced me. “Jerome. My boy. My good boy come home.”

“Mama, what happened?”

She sat down heavily at the kitchen table, sighed, looked out the window. “I’ll be damned if I know. I tried to do right by you boys, but that Isaiah, he was hardheaded. You know.”

“I know.”

“I couldn’t tell him nothing. Then he started getting in trouble all the time. Wouldn’t listen to me for nothing. You were the one, Jerome.” She looked at me slowly, her eyes lost and foggy. “You were the one I could save.”

At the funeral, neither of us wept. We stood in dry-eyed silence, holding hands. Everyone complimented us on how strong we were. I think of that often. That moment. I wonder if there was some way I could have saved him, had I been a different man. I wonder if he did the only thing he could do—there was no one willing to save him. And perhaps not everyone can save themselves. I wonder if my mother taught me as well as I always thought she had.

I told her about my retirement from Chelsea on one of my rare visits to her nursing home in Chicago. She was surprised—“You a little young yet, ain’t you?”—but she took my explanation of fatigue and a desire to have more time for scholarly pursuits at face value. She has never understood that I am not a major scholar. I did not tell her the disgrace I had brought upon myself. I let her continue to believe that she had raised at least one honorable man.