The Book of Air and Shadows

taken to hanging out with his gang, who had also graduated (as we were shortly to learn) from petty theft to armed robbery.
    That left me to cope with the household and with my sister, Miriam, then fourteen. Miri had already developed the remarkable face she would carry into adulthood, a face whose angled planes acted like those on a stealth bomber to allow undetectable penetration deep into the heart of enemy territory, in this case, the male sex. I made no attempt to actually control her, knowing it would be futile, but I could at least ensure that she had meals and clean garments, and between me and Paulie we were successful (I believe) in discouraging the attentions of guys over thirty. One morning, just before Thanksgiving of that year, Dad did not show up in court, nor did he return home. Naturally we feared the worst, that his mob pals had lost faith in his silence (since it was fairly clear by then that he was going to go down for the top counts of the indictment unless he did a deal) and had acted to forestall this. I recall thinking of him stuffed into a weighted oil drum or resting under the asphalt of a highway and trying to feel sad, and failing.
    But he hadn’t been whacked. After a period of some weeks, the papers reported that he’d been sighted in Tel Aviv. He had skipped bail and followed his mentor, Meyer Lansky, into comfortable exile. Not a card for us, not a call. Later I heard he’d changed his name to something more Hebraic, as encouraged by the Israeli government, although I suppose there are Mishkins enough in that nation. This was all before media frenzy became the rule, and so we only had a couple of reporters come by our house, and Paulie and some of his friends beat the shit out of them, smashing cameras, etc. This was when you could beat the shit out of the press without having it captured on videotape, which made for a more civilized press, in my opinion. Since Dad had put our house and his immovable assets up to make his colossal bail, and he’d skipped with all the cash on hand, we were left essentially destitute. After a decent interval the bailiffs came and took Dad’s Caddy and served us with eviction papers.
    At this point we had a small miracle. I awoke one Saturday morning to the sound of strenuous packing and
Parsifal
on the stereo. Mutti was back, in charge, shouting orders. We kids were marshaled into action, as well as two guys I’d never seen before, German speakers, probably war criminals in hiding that Mutti had dug up somewhere. It was Regensburg 1945 again, Hitler was gone, the Reds were coming, and life had to be whipped into shape from the ruins. I understand that Ukrainian villages cheered the arrival of the Nazis in 1941, and we kids were in somewhat the same state-anything had to be better than what we’d recently experienced, and maternal fascism was at least a known quantity. The Germans had a truck too, and it moved us from our comfortable brick house in Flatbush to a cramped two-bedroom in a high-rise public project out by the Queens borderline.
    So our lives continued without Dad. The salary from the job Mutti obtained as a clerk at King’s County Hospital was just enough to keep us in underwear and bratwurst. We kids thereafter devoted ourselves to living the lives we thought would most piss Dad off: Paul became a stupid rather than a clever criminal; I became a star student (i.e., a schmuck); and Miri, not to mince words, became a slut. In short order, Paul got nailed for a liquor store holdup and went off for his jolt upstate, Miri ran off with a playboy, and I graduated with honors, aced my SATs, and went to Columbia, where I met Mickey Haas. I hope this connects all the dots.
    But I started this long digression by describing my children, and I see I have not yet said anything about my son, Nicholas-Niko, as we call him. For a long time we thought, or rather I thought, that there was something wrong with Niko, some form of autism perhaps, or one of the other childhood syndromes lately invented to provide the drug companies with fresh markets. He failed to walk or talk at the usual times, and I insisted on taking him to various specialists, although his mother maintained that there was nothing seriously wrong with him. In time, his mother was proven correct. He began to talk at around four, and from the start in perfect paragraphs, and demonstrated at around the same time that he had taught himself to read. He is some kind of prodigy, but we’re