“But I didn’t believe that none,” my father said. “I seen her eyes, her angel eyes.”

So he waits for her. He gets off work early, cleans himself up nice and sharp, Brylcreems his hair back, takes the bike down to that fancy street, parks smack in front of the house, and waits. And waits. He sees a curtain twitch, someone knows he’s there, good, he figures. And he waits, waits until darkness falls and the streetlights start to glowing and night covers the city like a blanket. It is midnight when he leaves, but the next evening he is back, parked in the same spot, waiting. Waiting.

“And then I saw her.”

The big red door opens, she steps out, closes the door carefully behind her. She is dressed again all in white, but there is none of the brash confidence in her face now. She is nervous, worried. She walks toward him, glancing back once and then again at the house. A curtain is pulled slightly aside. The old man is watching, my father knows, and my father doesn’t care.

You can’t be here, she tells him, her gaze down at her feet.

I came for you.

You have to go.

Come out with me.

I can’t. I have to go back.

Tomorrow night, then, he says.

No.

I won’t go until you agree.

She raises her face. Her eyes are red, and there is a darkness on the ridge of one cheek. A bruise? he wonders.

I can’t, she says.

Tomorrow night.

Not here, she says.

I’ll park around the corner. Tomorrow night.

She doesn’t say anything, she stares at him for a moment and then moves her head slightly, an almost imperceptible nod. Before he can respond, she turns back to the house, runs back across the street, up the steps, through the big red door. Gone.

But the next night, as he promised, he is waiting around the corner, waiting for her, and as she promised, she comes. She doesn’t say a word, she simply climbs onto the seat behind him, grabs him around the stomach, leans her chin on his shoulder. Together at last, they roar off into the night.

“And that’s how it started,” said my father, lying on his bed in the hospital, his eyes closed, either from the pain of his condition or the sweetness of his past.

“Did you see her a lot?” I said.

“It went fast. I knew places to dance, to drink. She liked to drink.”

“And when your dates were over?”

“I took her back.”

“To the house. To the old man?”

“Yes. Back. By ten. Every night.” And every night he shudders as he watches her walk along that same narrow street, up those same stone stairs, through the same red door, into the blackness of the old man’s house. Whenever he asks about the old man, she won’t answer. She is his secretary, is all she says. The bruise? She was clumsy. The reason she only would meet him around the corner? She likes to maintain her privacy. He begs her to quit, to get a new job, to do something else, someplace else, so they can be together alone, without her fear. She only shakes her head sadly, shakes her head and says it is time for him to take her back. Back to the house. By ten. Back to the darkness. The old man. Every night. Until one night.

“I did it on purpose,” said my father.

They are drinking, dancing. She is holding him close. He can feel her body pressed against his, her breasts, her knees. Her flesh and bone seem to melt, to mold into his so that nothing can fit in between. She leans her head on his shoulder. Her eyes are closed, her breath is warm on his neck. There is a clock on the wall. He knows it is time to leave, they have to leave now to make her curfew, but he doesn’t tell her. They continue dancing, song after song as the minute hand spins its way slowly on and the hour slips past ten.

When she notices, finally, he expects her to be scared, distraught, angry. But she simply blinks and swallows and asks for another drink. And it is that easy, like stepping over a line painted on the road, crossing the line and not looking back. That night he doesn’t take her to the old man’s house. He takes her to his apartment, a small walk-up hovel in a failing North Philadelphia neighborhood. The place is just off Broad Street, not six blocks from the very hospital where now he lay, fighting for his life.

He closed his eyes in the hospital bed and remembered, the feel of her skin, the taste of her mouth, the way her tongue brushes his, gently at first and then more roughly, more urgently. This he didn’t tell me, this he didn’t have to, its reality lived in the very pain scrawled across his face. She unbuttons her shirt, steps out of her white pleated skirt, unhooks her garter. Even as he lay there, struggling for breath, his emotions leaving him unable to speak, it was not so hard to see. The first time with a true love is different in every way from what my father had experienced in those brothels in Germany, or the quick blow jobs from local girls between the trash cans in North Philly alleys.

He let out a soft gasp. “Perfect” is all he said. “Perfect.”

And it was, it always is, in the remembering. And in the quiet after, as her head rests on his chest and she murmurs in her sleep, he knows this is what he wants, my father, the feel of his angel’s hair on his chest, the feel of her body leaning upon his, rising and falling with each delicate breath she takes, the taste of her tongue still intoxicating his brain. This is what he wants, all he wants, for the rest of his life, forever.

“Oh God,” he said, remembering, perhaps, his prayer as he lies awake through the night with her, staying awake to savor it all, desperate not to lose a second. He had never been a religious man, my father, he always claimed he left the mumbo jumbo to his own pious father, a cobbler who spent his life pounding on the last or praying at the neighborhood shul, but here, now, in this room, this bed, with his true love sleeping on his chest, he prays. My father prays that this night, this perfect night of true and unyielding love, will never end. My father prays that he and this girl, this angel asleep on his chest, will be together, forever.

“Oh God.”

My father lay on his hospital bed, alone except for the son who never forgave him for being what he had become, lay with his eyes closed remembering, I was certain, remembering his prayer and the night God failed him for the final time.

Chapter 17

WHEN I WAS a kid, we used to head out to the creek by the railroad tracks, catch crawfish, stick them in a cup, prod and poke them for no better reason than to satisfy our sad, sadistic impulses. That’s sort of the idea behind a legal deposition.

“I understand, Mr. Manley,” I said, “that you own a partial interest in a strip club on Columbus Boulevard called the Eager Beaver.”

Derek Manley sucked his teeth. “Just a small piece.”

Derek Manley was quite a big man to own only a small piece. Tall and thick and looking like he had swallowed a basketball, he leaned heavily onto the oaken table of our shabby little conference room, his meaty hands rubbing one against the other. He had the air about him of a guy who had secrets, who had connections, who lived life hard. And to say his bulbous nose was mottled was to say Hoffa was hard to reach. His nose was a Jackson Pollack painting.

Manley sat beside his lawyer, a small bespectacled man named John Sebastian, who looked like a scared lion tamer sitting next to his big cat, unsure what unspeakable piece of horror his pet would unleash next. Beth and I sat across from them, perfect prodding position. Between us was a pitcher of water and a fetid plate of Danish. At the head of the table, taking down every word, was our court reporter, a nice old lady with blue hair and fast hands.

“How small a piece of the club do you own?” I said.

“Just enough sos I can tell the girls I’m an owner,” said Manley.