“See you Monday morning, Mr. Previn,” the driver said.

When Ira spotted me, his heavy cheeks contracted, turning his eyes into puffy slits. “What are you doing here, young woman? I thought Judge Grigsby told you there was nothing in that old case.”

I guess to a ninety-year-old man fifty looks young. “That’s what everyone says, but I’m like the cat in that old song: no matter how many times the ship goes down or the rocket blows up, I keep coming back.”

“This is beginning to look like harassment. I can have an order of protection issued.”

“Of course you can. You can join Stella Guzzo behind a barrier, trembling at my footsteps.”

Ira scowled.

“It’s this pesky business about why Sol Mandel undertook Stella’s defense, and why he insisted Joel do the heavy lifting,” I said. “Rory Scanlon said it was to put some backbone into your son. There was a lot of bullying in that office, and it’s not—”

“Joel couldn’t take the heat. He never could take the heat. His mother and I believe in public schools, but we ended up sending him to a private school because he didn’t know how to stand up to boys who taunted him.

“You don’t give in to them, I told him this time and again. If I’d been that sensitive I’d have crumpled the first time I went up against the Machine. A few schoolyard insults, they were nothing compared to the threats and hang-up calls I’ve gotten my whole life.”

His cheeks puffed out and in like the bellows of an old pedal organ. “His mother and I, we wanted him to be proud of the life we were making. We marched in Selma, we marched in Marquette Park, and instead of being thrilled at making history, all he wanted to do was ‘fit in.’ As if a boy like him could ever fit in!”

I felt my mouth twist in disdain and tried to straighten it. It was hard to listen to one of my own heroes talk so contemptuously about his only child.

“I can’t see how forcing him to defend Stella would have given him a deep and abiding respect for principles of social justice. Why not get him involved in some of your own work—weren’t you acting on behalf of Guatemalan asylum seekers back then?”

Ira leaned heavily on his cane. “Mandel & McClelland didn’t do that kind of law, and Eunice and I agreed that Joel would wither if we tried bringing him into our firm. In the end, we had to, of course, because he couldn’t make it anywhere else. I can’t retire, not the way men who live to my age usually do, because—”

“Because you’d miss the applause you get for showing up in court and tying witnesses into knots.”

I hadn’t seen Joel come out of the office. Ira said, “How dare you, sir? That’s—”

Joel cut him off again. He’d apparently overheard most of our conversation, because he added to me, “If you really want to know how I ended up defending Stella, Mandel and McClelland liked to pit their associates against each other. Genteel blood sport, no physical blows exchanged. We’d meet in the conference room, go around the table, everyone got thirty seconds to pitch how they saw the case. Then we’d all leap on the pitch and tear it to shreds, trying to score points with the partners. I got good at shredding, but not as good as Spike. Mr. McClelland liked Spike, he took him to the downtown office where he started making the connections that carried Spike to Springfield. And so Mr. McClelland would feed Spike the good cases before we ever got to the conference room.”

“That’s the voice of envy and insecurity speaking,” Ira puffed. “You imagine because you couldn’t—”

“I don’t have a good imagination, as you’ve kindly told me many times. A big case came into the office, the kind of thing we hardly ever had a crack at, a class-action case involving the women at the local Buy-Smart warehouse. I stayed late to work on my pitch.” Joel’s lip curled into a sneer. “I didn’t talk to you about it—I thought if I could make the winning pitch without your help it would prove to you that I wasn’t a loser and a whiner and a crybaby and a drunk and whatever other epithets you like to use about me.”

An elderly woman came up the street, using a cane herself. She stopped to greet Ira, reminded him they had an appointment.

“Let Ms. Murchison into the office, Joel,” Ira rasped, “and let’s not hear more of this nonsense.”

“Ms. Murchison, go inside and make yourself comfortable. Ira will be in soon.”

Joel spoke to the older woman with unexpected gentleness, took her arm while he unlocked the door. Once she was inside, he stood with his back against the door, facing his father, who was stumping up the walk toward him. Bernie was silent, her vivid face turning from father to son, her brow puckered with trouble at their argument. I put a comforting arm around her.

“This isn’t nonsense,” Joel said. “This is something you haven’t wanted to hear all these years, but you can hear it now. Your friend Sol, he wasn’t a nice man, and neither was his partner. You can say all you want about South Chicago being a hard place, and lawyers needing to be tough to stand up to the grime and corruption, but those two enjoyed seeing associates like me humiliated. They wouldn’t get their hands dirty themselves, but they liked having someone like Spike on board to make it a fun game for them!”

“That’s—that’s such a perverted version of the lives of two good men,” Ira puffed. “You couldn’t handle the job and so someone else had to be in the wrong, never you! You’ve been like that since a child. I golfed with Sol Mandel a hundred times, we were on the board of Har HaShem together—”

“I know. He was a saint and I have a dibbuk in me,” Joel said. “You said you don’t believe McClelland fed Spike, but I’m telling you, I witnessed it. Pay attention. Stand up straight and listen.”

That seemed to be a repetition of words he’d heard from his father more than once; Ira turned red, but subsided.

“The night I stayed late putting together an argument for the Buy-Smart women, Spike was working late, too. Every now and then he’d make some crude crack about how even if I got the case, I’d be a fool in the courtroom—fall over my feet because I was too fat to see them, or get a mistrial for making a pass at the judge—like you, Spike and Mandel and the others assumed I was queer and they loved to rub it in. By and by, McClelland came in. He went to his office and Spike, giving me this shit-eating grin, went in with him. McClelland’s office shared a wall with the women’s toilet, but Annie and Thelma, they were the only two women on staff and neither of them was in, so I went in and heard their whole conversation through the grate.”

“Sneaking into the women’s toilet, no, not even that was beneath you,” Ira said.

“I heard McClelland feed Spike his presentation,” Joel shouted. “I heard that, and then I got to be part of the process of watching Spike win the chance to take the case to trial. Which he lost, even with McClelland in the second chair, and then I realized, after he ran for office and became our state rep, that Spike wanted to lose the case. Buy-Smart gave him campaign contributions. The whole thing was a fucking racket.

“And that’s what happened with Stella. We all had to make our case, and I didn’t want to take part. Was I a crybaby? A queer crybaby, not big enough to play in the big leagues? Didn’t I know about Gideon v. Wainwright? Stella might be an unpleasant defendant, but she deserved counsel. This was how lawyers proved themselves, but if I wanted to sit in a corner and masturbate over Annie instead of pulling my weight in the firm—apparently I could be queer and in love with Annie at the same time! And so on it went and so of course, whiny crybaby that I am, I caved under the pressure. Not like you: you would have stood up to Spike and Mandel and McClelland like you did to Richie Daley and the Machine when they came after you. Just like you did to George Wallace in Selma. But not me. And now, by God, I am going to have a drink, and fuck you, Ira Previn. Fuck you and fuck all those like you.”