City of Blows

PROLOGUE

Solomon Rosenthal arrived in Chicago with two brothers from Latvia just after the turn of the twentieth century. They went to the stockyards, where trains from the west and south deposited herds of a scale they’d never imagined. The country was slaughtering and butchering the way it would learn to make cars and sewing machines. Solomon took work on the killing floor. Unlike his brothers, however, he didn’t drink, and he saved his money. When he found a wife and they had a child, he was always home for dinner. He noticed in his son, Isaac, an incipient intelligence, even a quiet wisdom. A stern sadness emanated from the boy too, but far from troubling Solomon, this reassured him, because in the Fuller Park tenements, and certainly at the slaughterhouse where he was employed, evidence abounded for seeing life as essentially unfair, and those whose outlook tended toward the hopeful, adults and children alike, seemed of lesser mental stuff. Make of it what you would, life was mean.

In time his son’s sadness turned hard. The more young Isaac learned, the more he questioned, and the more he questioned, the less it all made sense, and this infuriated him. As he reached his teens, he began to take the frustration out on his father, whom he considered weak and insufficient, but even this Solomon didn’t mind. The adolescent’s wrath simply continued to expose a wisdom that eventually would serve him. The boy’s rages in fact came to delight his father, and this was all the more infuriating to Isaac. By fifteen he would scream what an idiot his father was to have squandered an entire life in service of slaughterhouse owners who paid barely a subsistence wage for work that was likely killing him—that he was like the cattle himself being slaughtered for the consumption of others—and Solomon would laugh with impervious pride.

You’re right, dear Isaac, he would say. May neither you nor any you make ever be like me. Go out there and run that world that makes you so angry. Right these wrongs. You and your children and your children’s children.

Isaac graduated from high school third in his class and then attended college, the first of the family ever to do so in any city or village in any country on any continent. Solomon died during Isaac’s second year at the University of Illinois, prematurely no doubt, as his son had predicted, from decades of toil on the killing floor from which he was never promoted.

As he stepped to shovel dirt on his father’s casket, Isaac Rosenthal knew one thing: he would do as his father had wished. Neither he nor his progeny nor their progeny, so long as he had control over it, would ever play the giddy submissive. His home, should he raise children, would be one of exacting discipline, scant frivolity, and some degree of certainty not only about how the world functioned but about how best to avoid becoming the victim of its graceless whims. Such questions that were asked would be answered, and if not, reasons rehearsed to determine why attempting to do so would be folly. He would prepare his children for what he perceived America was becoming. And if one was smart, disciplined, careful, and uncompromising, this would mean being a part of something extraordinary for those at the top, even if quite the opposite for those below.

PART ONE

CHICAGO

Jacob Rosenthal had been to many pools on many Sundays to watch his father’s ungainly negotiations with water. In their previous neighborhood the park schedule limited these outings to late spring and summer when weather allowed. But just blocks from their new home on Maxwell Street, Jacob was exposed to the oxymoronic novelty of a vast enclosure that brought indoors what he’d heretofore believed could only occur outside. And with this marvel came smells and sounds he would associate with this day for the remainder of his life.

It was February of 1950. They’d entered through the front door on a street turgid with blackening snow, and moved to the showers and adjacent lockers to prepare for the usual ritual of Jacob watching his father traverse the pool’s length ten times—five one way, five back—after which they’d steam, shower, and finally venture out once more, perhaps to the butcher for his mother, or to the cobbler or tailor, and then for lunch, where they’d sit in austere silence. His father was short and slender and, unlike many of the other dads, still had most of his hair, none of it yet gray. Jacob was also small and lean but didn’t yet show the tendency toward quiet rage that had transformed his father as a teen. Because of this, Jacob’s slightness of frame caused him to be considered frail, a condition manifesting psychologically as well that Isaac Rosenthal had been vowing of late to eradicate in his only son.

The locker room itself, thick with the heat of the oil-fed furnace blasting air throughout, smelled of the chlorine that permeated the place, the eucalyptus of the two steam baths, the sweat of those slumped in those baths, and the stubbornly pervasive waft of excrement—each fragrance unmistakable, the coalescence intimating to Jacob the terrible mysteries of adulthood. As for the men themselves, they were, almost to a person, with the notable exception of Jacob’s father, thick, slow moving, beleaguered. Carpeted with hair, they plodded the wood-slatted floor pallets deliberately, their morose cocks drooping from shags of haphazardly powdered curls. If there were other boys, eye contact was glancing. Nor would they exchange words, even in those rare instances when the fathers encouraged it, for here among the men, in the heavy mist of their effusions, something sacred was being exposed, and though it was surely unclear how, matriculation into this grave fraternity was certain, and only then would its secrets be known. The boys sensed that they too, like the naked figures lumbering among them, would one day be responsible for families, businesses, communities of their own.

When Jacob’s father reached into his satchel and produced not one pair of bathing trunks but two, Jacob sensed danger.

Put these on. You’re swimming today.

I don’t know how.

Which is why you’ll do it.

The sheer illogic of the interchange, especially to a seven-year-old, epitomized the indecipherable contradictions of adulthood that caused in Jacob the meekness that so frustrated his father. It was provisioned with both ambiguity and clarity, with blatant incoherence and inevitability. He would swim because he couldn’t.

Suffused with dread, he found a set of eyes among the penises floating by. They belonged to a blond boy maybe a year younger who’d witnessed the interchange and did the rare favor of allowing Jacob’s eyes to find a sympathetic place. Such connections were almost nonexistent for Jacob. He did have a sister, undoubtedly home with his mother gathering clothes for the Sunday wash, but she was three years older. Though much was expected of her, her own experiences were of such a dramatically different sort that while there was plenty of empathy between them, she had no sense what it was like to be Isaac Rosenthal’s only son. At school Jacob performed well, but almost invisibly, his frailty so prodigious he wasn’t really worth the trouble of those boys just beginning to test the compulsion to hurt and destroy. Most of Jacob’s humiliations took place in the home or on excursions with his father where others could not witness them. Jacob had the impulse to go to the fair-haired boy, take him by the hands, and not let go.

Isaac smacked him on the pate.

What are you doing? Get the other leg in your trunks and let’s go.

The pool itself was not particularly big and was perpetually crowded, at least on Sundays, leading Jacob to wonder how his father navigated swimming its length. Two lap lanes had lately been cordoned off, but in these a preponderance of more agile swimmers discouraged entry. As father and son walked the vast atrium, the smell of chlorine overwhelmed all else, as did the din of male voices of every age. Isaac took Jacob by the hand and marched him directly to the pool’s edge.

Now, I want you to listen to me. I’m going to let go of your hand and enter the water. It’s shallow enough for me to stand, which is what I’m going to do. You’re going to jump into my arms, and then I’m going to teach you to swim. Is that clear?

Unintended hostilities encroached from all sides: the stiflingly chlorinated air, the damp and gritty cement on which he stood, the abundance of swimmers both in the pool and out oblivious to the dire narrative about to transpire. And then the water itself. Jacob had spent plenty of time in shallow ends, and had even, when younger, been held close by his mother and pulled down the slant of other pools, where she loosened her grip to evince the queer sensation of floating. But the protective warmth of being clutched by her transformed anxiety into what could even have been called delight.

He began to cry.

Are you fucking kidding me?

His father knelt before him.

Look at me. Look.

Jacob did.

Do you think there’s any possibility you’ll drown? That any harm will come to you so long as I’m in that pool to catch you?

Can’t we do this another time?

We can’t.

"Why?

Because we’re doing it today.

But why?

Because you’re ready.

I’m not.

You don’t decide that. I do.

Why?

Because I’m your father, and I just know about shit more than you.

Jacob looked at his toes. His father was right: under no circumstance—should the water erupt in flames, should the building collapse, the very concrete beneath them sink into the earth’s magma—would Isaac Rosenthal allow actual harm to come to his son.

Can’t I just sit at the edge and you hold me? Carry me in?

No.

Why?

If you ask me why one more time, I’m going to drown you myself.

But what does jumping into the water have to do with swimming?

I want you to prove to yourself you can do this.

But do what? I already know I can’t.

Overcome your fear of the water, because once you’ve done that, the swimming lesson part will come much easier. You get two for the price of one.

To Jacob’s right appeared another father and son. Grinning expansively, the balding man eased himself in. His tremendous girth, shared by his spawn, caused Jacob to suspect the water’s surface might rise in increments visible to the eye. The man took a few steps from the edge, then submerged his wide head, rising haughtily. Shaking what remained of his hair, he stepped forward, rowing his arms grandly in stride until he reached the lip of the pool where his son waited. Following Jacob’s gaze, Isaac too watched as the man reached with balletic care to pull his boy into the water.

See? Like they did. Can’t you hold me?

I can’t, Jacob.

But why? As soon as his mouth had launched the word, he knew what he’d done. No, he wasn’t going to be drowned, just as he’d never had his hands chopped off, his teeth knocked in or his skull smashed, though these and a host of other consequences had been promised for violating past injunctions.

You want to know why? His father’s wrathful face was now inches from his. Because those people are fat and stupid. But if you want to be raised by that idiot and eat whatever you want and be coddled like a fucking baby until you’re useless and obese, be my guest. Do you want me to ask him, because I’m sure he’d be stupid enough to take you into his home and piss away his time and money rearing you the way he’s rearing his little pig of a boy. So, tell me now and save us all the time, Jacob: Do you want out of this arrangement? Answer me.

No.

Then you’re going to stand up there at the edge of the pool, and you’re going to have the guts to jump into my arms.

All right. He could barely get the words out.

What’s that?

All right.

And stop crying. It’s a fucking embarrassment. You’re seven, not four.

He met his father for the first time at the age of three, when the man who would raise him returned from the Pacific. A marine, he was fit and sure of himself but moved awkwardly. There was a ruggedness to him that others said preceded his time in combat, and a quickness to anger he himself would describe to Jacob and Jacob’s mother and sister as manliness. His eyes were dark and deep-set, and his ears jutted low and perpendicular from his head like handles there for the lifting of him. His nose was enormous, his cheekbones assertive and high. In the home into which he returned he asserted authority immediately and profanely without hint of reluctance. He beat his son frequently but never, he would aver, capriciously. He didn’t speak of the war, ever, even to Jacob’s mother, other than to say that he’d wish on no one what he’d been through and seen.

We did what we did so you’ll never have to, he told them, and not with pride but rather as if in reference to an unspeakably costly bill that had needed to be paid the moment it was tallied.

He would say that the marine corps, far more than his parents, made him who he was, though from the beginning it had been a struggle. There was his small size, his lean frame, and of course the fact he was a Jew and, therefore, it was inferred by others, not to be trusted. The last of these concerned him least because he knew he’d refute such nonsense in an environment where actions meant something. Besides, there existed a more immediate concern, one that had special significance to the predicament in which Jacob found himself on this particular Sunday: unlike Jacob, no one had ever taught Isaac Rosenthal to swim. Making matters worse, he couldn’t very well confide this uniquely problematic ineptitude in the military’s amphibious branch to others who might reveal it at his expense. After all, when applying for the honor of attending boot camp, he’d checked the yes box when queried as to all relevant proficiencies.

When the day to demonstrate his abilities came, he was petrified, but he’d taken the measure of those around him and figured the skill they’d devoted months to learn as children he could acquire quickly as an adult, so long as he could study how it was done. Not having the money for lessons, for weeks before reporting he took care to observe how bodies moved in water, and what combination of movement seemed not only most effective but easiest to chance. He’d settled on the breaststroke.

Those present would remember it their entire lives: how the slight, big-eared, humorless Jew propelled himself into the water feet first and simply sank, before thrashing back into view and violently disgorging the water that had filled his lungs. A freckled recruit from Nebraska named Leland McFarland—who would become Isaac’s truest friend in the service, and whom he would see pummeled to death with the butt of an Arisaka rifle at Guadalcanal—swore afterward that it had seemed as if Isaac had eight appendages instead of four given the wrath inflicted on the water’s surface. Yet no one, not even Leland, entered the pool to save him. Instead, as if studying a drowning wasp, they gawked, paralyzed, as Isaac frantically learned enough of the physics to keep his head, now crimson with struggle, above water, where he began taking raspy, heaving breaths, terrifyingly comical in their volume and pitch.

Are we done with this charade, Private? shouted the drill instructor.

No, sir, Isaac managed in a strained warble that almost killed him, thinking, correctly, that if he could simply get horizontal, where all his observations of the preceding weeks could be aped, he might sort out the challenges besieging him. The question was, how did a human actually do this? It was enough just to stay afloat without sucking in liquid with each paroxysmal gasp. No wonder people drowned with such frequency, even accomplished swimmers. Now he too would succumb, and in a pool into which he’d moronically flung himself while others watched, each too intrigued by the very ridiculousness of it to intervene.

Finally, the likelihood of an embarrassing public death enabled him to maneuver into a position that traced the water’s surface. He flailed his hands while leaning forward and kicked back froglike with his legs. To those watching, the majority no doubt wishing him to fail, the ungainliness now exceeded comical to encroach on grotesque. And yet, though strikingly inefficient in terms of energy expended for distance traversed, Isaac Rosenthal was swimming, bobbing his head from the water every few strokes to suck air through an outrageously distended mouth. He managed the two required laps, exceeding the time limit tenfold, after which erupted unanimous applause.

Private Rosenthal, that was the single-most fucked-up display I hope this pool ever experiences. In fact, I want to drain it for having had that and you in it. But you’re going to get a pass for guts, so long as one of these other idiots actually teaches you to swim. I don’t expect it to be pretty, but I’m not going to have any marines getting shot because they see you flouncing around in the drink instead of getting to shore. Does everyone understand me? After a chorus of Yes, sir, Isaac was pulled from the pool.

This is going to happen, Jacob. You’re going to jump to me, I’m going to catch you, and by the time we get out of this pool, you’ll be a swimmer. I don’t know what your problem is.

He’s scared is his problem. How old is he? The voice came from their left, high-pitched for the large neck and body of the heavyset father still holding his son.

He’s seven, and he can swim.

None of my business, pal, but it doesn’t look like it.

It’s okay, sir, offered Jacob, eager to defuse a situation that would soon involve slanders his father’s oblivious interlocutor couldn’t fathom.

Shut your mouth, Jacob. Isaac now turned to face the man. I’m your pal?

It’s a figure of speech.

Are you going to tell me how to raise my son?

Not how to raise him, no.

Then what is it you want to say?

You wonder why he’s upset is all. Like I said, he’s scared.

You know what it’s like to be scared, you fat son of a bitch?

Pardon?

Isaac now addressed the man’s son. Have you ever seen your fat father—my good pal there—scared?

The boy gaped back, stunned.

He’s not answering, said Isaac. So maybe my kid’s scared, and yours is a goddamn moron.

Come on, Ira, said the man, his large body trembling as he retreated with his cargo of boy, headed, it would seem, for the farthest point from the Rosenthals the pool would allow.

Now, are you finished, or do you want to call more attention to yourself, because that’s why I had to bark at that fat idiot. You know it and I know it.

Yes.

"Yes what?

I’m finished.

Good, because the more time you spend standing up there, the less time you get for learning to swim.

Jacob looked down to gauge whether any room remained between his toes and the pool’s edge. Over two inches, he estimated, having just that year begun to use a ruler at school. The class was math, and he was good at it. In fact, he was good at everything in school. The teachers adored him because he was diligent, compliant, quiet, and kind. From what he could tell, his class was about a third Jewish, a third Polish, and a third a fairly even split between Italians and Irish. The fathers mostly labored, meaning Isaac’s donning of a shirt and tie every day was something of an anomaly. Jacob’s mother lobbied for her son’s transfer, to which Isaac responded, There are enough smart kids in that school, and he’ll learn stuff from the ones who aren’t smart that he’d never get in someplace where the kids are pampered. He’s going to be a lawyer, which means he has to be tough.

How do you know he’s going to be a lawyer?

He’s quiet, but he won’t always be. I was the same way. I can see it in his eyes. He’s going to see through people, and that’s going to terrify them.

You say he’s like you were, Jacob’s mother offered, and you didn’t become a lawyer.

Because I fought in a damn war. You think I was going to law school after I got back and had him to take care of, in addition to you and Rebecca? Two kids and a wife? He gets to have what I never did—like I never had to work on a killing floor like my poor dad. He’s going to law school. Even if he follows me in real estate, he’s gonna get a law degree. Listen to me, Jacob. They call this a democracy. And the economic system is capitalism. Fine and good. But both of those depend on the rule of law. You get that training, you’ll see shit for what it is, and you’ll know not only who’s out to get you but what’s possible within the rules. Anything. Anything is possible.

Can I make movies?

What?

Movies?

I don’t know why you’d want to. Unless you run a studio, from what I understand it’s a dog’s breakfast.

I like them.

Movies?

Yes.

Well, that doesn’t mean you should waste your life making them. But sure, make movies for all I care, so long as you do it better and smarter than everyone else.

Jacob inched forward until the toes of each foot curled over the tiled lip.

You comfortable now? Feet just right?

Yes.

Now jump.

If I hurt myself, I won’t be able to learn to swim.

It’s water. How are you going to hurt yourself?

By breathing it in.

Jacob, listen to me. All I want is for you to show some bravery. Not only will that make learning to swim easier but you’ll have the whole rest of your life—and believe me, you’ll remember this the whole rest of your life—to know that when you were scared to jump in the pool, you didn’t give in, but you overcame it.

Jacob jumped. How, having leapt into air over water, could he want to giggle uncontrollably and vomit at the same time? There was for starters the exhilaration of flight, his weight somehow refusing to pull him down. He wished others close to him—his mother and sister, his grandparents, a few of his teachers—could witness him soar. Yet his body sensed that the brain and will had put the entire apparatus in terrific danger. He was going to die. At the apex, fear won out, alleviated only by the certainty that his father would catch him. He saw instead Isaac Rosenthal’s deliberate retreat. Jacob crashed through the surface and sank, sucking water into his lungs, his eyes burning with chlorine, his chest and brain seeming to explode. His whole being erupted in spasms, jerking desperately as pain ripped through his chest into his arms, legs, fingers, and toes. Instead of struggling to the surface as his father had years before, Jacob remained below it, the sheer physical agony, along with the terror that accompanied it, simply too much to endure.

He blacked out.

He did not therefore see, as others did, Isaac Rosenthal wait calmly until his son was no longer moving before gathering him from the bottom of the pool. Nor did he perceive the expressions on the faces of the astounded witnesses to this manifestly intentional act. He didn’t hear his father snarl at them to keep away as he lifted his son poolside and pushed at his chest until Jacob burped water from between blue lips, coughing and retching with a violence that surprised even Isaac.

He’s fine. Keep away. He’s fine. Just some water in his lungs. I know what I’m doing.

I saw the whole thing! exclaimed a man who quickly emerged as the spokesman for those suddenly arrayed against this callous figure who would so endanger his son. He jumped, and you backed away, watching him drown!

I did nothing of the kind!

I saw it! I saw him! the man declared to an enlarging crowd.

Will you shut your hole and let me deal with my boy?

Someone call the police!

Isaac turned from his strident accuser, knowing that attention to Jacob was not only essential to reviving the boy but the most effective defense against further allegations.

Jacob? Jacob? Can you hear me, Jacob?

Jacob could somewhat, but all he wanted was to breathe, and his head was in more pain than he imagined possible. But was he dead? He coughed percussively, tears spilling from his eyes.

Jacob. You’re fine. You’re just fine. That’s it. Cough it out.

Is he all right? asked a young boy.

Yes, he’s all right! insisted Isaac.

Don’t speak to my son like that, said the man next to the child.

Then tell him to butt out of my business. I told everyone he’s all right.

He did it on purpose. I saw it all, repeated the initial appellant.

Let the man be. Do you need any help, sir? It was a third father, who seemed instinctively to feel the need to take Isaac’s side.

No, I’m fine.

Should we call an ambulance?

No. Thank you.

I’m a doctor, offered a kindly older man who stepped forward. Isaac had no choice but to move aside. Let’s have a look at you. The physician cradled Jacob’s head in one hand and with practiced fingers used the other to swivel the boy’s chin to face him. Can you see me, child? Do you see me? What’s your name?

His name’s Jacob.

Pardon me, sir, I need for your son to answer. The doctor turned back to Jacob. Can you tell me your name?

The face seemed to float there. Jacob had imagined God this way, as a disembodied head looming in the heavens, and for some reason not the superannuated bearded version consistent with paintings he’d seen but someone shaven, short-haired, square-jawed, and younger. The notion of God showing age always confused him. Why, after all, would God allow himself any deterioration? He’d be a man at his peak, decent, loving, understanding, just, and firm. Was this the divine being, confirming his name, eager to summon him to the beyond? If so, why then could he hear his father? Had his father died too? Was that why his father hadn’t caught him? Would he not be free from his father even in death? And why was his father interrupting God? Then again, why wouldn’t his father interrupt God? Soon he’d be chastising God, berating him for his deficiencies, insisting he account for all that had gone wrong with the world.

Son, can you tell me your name?

Jacob.

Jacob what?

Jacob Benjamin Rosenthal.

Is that his name?

Yes, Jacob heard his father answer. It’s his full name. I told you he was all right.

And where are you, Jacob? asked God.

Obviously, with the concrete under his head, the unmistakable wafts of chlorine, the bare legs and feet all around, the corrugated ceiling above, they were at the pool. So why ask?

Heaven?

God laughed gently.

No, Jacob, you’re not in heaven, though surely that’s where you’d belong if you’d died.

I’m not dead?

Your father here saved you.

He saved me?

He did.

I did, Jacob, said his father.

You’re very much alive, said God, who perhaps was not God. Though I imagine your head doesn’t feel so great.

It hurts.

You’ve got water in your sinuses. That’s the pressure. It’ll go away, but it’ll take a while. He turned to Jacob’s father. He’s going to be all right.

Thanks.

And he shouldn’t go back in the pool.

Of course he shouldn’t. You think I’m a goddamn idiot?

The doctor had encountered every manner of recalcitrance, but never of the severity now before him. Yes, the man wanted to be alone with his son, as would any father should his offspring brush with mortality. Yet there was simply too much about the man that gave him pause, especially in the context of what had happened. The doctor lingered therefore, as if even a moment’s further exposure might dispel misgivings. Jacob was used to this sort of caesura between his father and other adults, along with quizzical stares and balking, stuttering responses to whatever vindictiveness Isaac Rosenthal had chosen to voice.

Okay then, sir, the doctor finally murmured, turning to the group that had gathered. Let’s give them some room so little Jacob can get his senses back.

I’m telling you, he let his son nearly drown on purpose!

Drop it, Abe, said the doctor.

I saw what I saw!

I’m sure you did, but leave it. The physician ushered Abe away as others too receded toward the dressing rooms, showers, steam rooms, or back into the pool.

Jacob attempted to lift his head, which now throbbed violently to the beat of his pulse.

Easy now. That’s going to hurt, his father warned.

It already hurts, thought Jacob. He could see the poolside showers where swimmers were required to bathe before entering the pool, a rule many, including his father, didn’t observe. Give the chlorine something to work with, he would say. Jacob closed his eyes.

That’s it. Rest for a bit, but don’t fall asleep, he heard his father say. But darkness only amplified the throbbing. Jacob studied his father’s face for any hint of contrition or even concern.

Just keep breathing, Isaac instructed. Should the doctor have suggested this, Jacob could imagine his father retorting, What the hell else is he supposed to do? Maybe, thought Jacob, he actually does regret what happened, and simply doesn’t know what to say. But the more pressing question was, had his father actually backed away when Jacob jumped?

Look at me, Jacob. Look at me.

Jacob did.

Can you see me?

Yes.

"Now listen, because what I’m about to say I rarely say, but I want you to know I mean it. Are you listening?

Yes.

Because you might not get this again from me for a very long time: I love you.

Jacob had heard this from his father only once in his life, two years prior, and not in a manner that could be described as volunteered. Before moving to Maxwell Street, they’d lived in a fourth-floor walk-up in Woodlawn, and normally, particularly when descending, Jacob would clasp his mother’s hand negotiating the stairs, not yet having mastered the momentum that would gather on the downward journey. From the age of fifteen months, when he’d taken his first steps, the impulse was always reciprocated, giving him stability on both sides, with her on one and the railing on the other.

The entire family was going to visit Jacob’s mother’s parents, an excursion made once every couple of months and one that always irritated Isaac, who felt, not inaccurately, that his in-laws, who were of Austrian Jewish descent, looked down on his Eastern European lineage.

You’re five years old. Let go of your mother’s hand.

Isaac… His mother’s voice already advertised the reluctance of defeat.

I’m telling him to let go of your hand.

I always hold her hand, said Jacob.

And now you don’t anymore. It’s a new and glorious day. Jacob’s sister had already made it to the bottom, hungry for the plate of smoked sable that always waited at the home of her grandparents, the only two she and Jacob had.

Are you all coming? she shouted from below.

In a moment, sweetie, said Jacob’s mother before turning to her son. Your father’s right. You’re old enough now to take the stairs on your own. Hold the rail. That’s what it’s there for. Jacob looked imploringly to his father as a final ploy.

You think I’m going to change my mind? You’re not holding anyone’s hand. Those days are finished.

His descent began more easily than he’d imagined, and immediately he recognized advantages. For instance, the rail on its own, by virtue of being fixed, actually provided steadier guidance than his mother, who was often burdened with packages and would occasionally stumble.

Are you coming? It was his sister again.

Damn it, Rebecca, we’ll get there when we get there, shouted his father before turning back to Jacob. Now come on. You’ve got the hang of it. Let’s go.

Don’t hurry him, Isaac.

Ida, it’s walking down goddamn stairs.

Jacob loosened his hand slightly on the milled wood. The building they lived in postdated the great fire by only a decade, and was designed to house as many families in as little space possible. The stairs were narrow and steep, and like the landings and entryway below, they were seldom cleaned beyond the removal of trash once a week. The treads bore gentle valleys formed by a half century of footfalls, just as the banister had been tarnished by the palms of thousands, many long dead. As he rounded the corner, with three flights to go, Jacob increased his speed.

That’s it. You’re getting it, his mother encouraged. This new skill, thought Jacob as he rounded the next corner and strode with confidence across the short, narrow landing to the penultimate flight, might even afford the independence he was beginning to crave. He’d be trusted to make excursions on his own, perhaps to borrow a missing ingredient from a neighbor or even make an emergency purchase at the grocery down the block.

Loosening his grip yet more and increasing his pace, he even had the temerity to glance down between the balusters ticking by and catch a glimpse of his sister loitering below. Behind him he heard the footfalls of his parents, distinguishing the heaviness of his father’s, now passing on the left, from the lightness of his mother’s behind him.

Keep going, barked his father as he reached the top of the final flight. We need to be home before two. I have a week’s worth of floor plans to look over.

Jacob took the last step from the second flight and followed briskly, even proudly, as his father bounded the final landing. He glanced at his feet to find the first step while reaching for the railing to his right. But with his judgment not yet practiced, his hand gripped nothing at all, and as he stepped forward and down he lurched to his right and his legs gave out beneath him. He tumbled forward, catching his arm between two spindles before flipping headfirst down the entire flight. Ida Rosenthal was convinced her son had perished.

Oh shit! Jacob heard his father exclaim before nothing could be heard but his mother’s screams. The pain in Jacob’s forearm alone was enough to make him lose control, but her hysteria, particularly once she’d gotten a look at his unnaturally crooked appendage, was simply too much for a five-year-old. Jacob began to wail, adding volume and pitch to a commotion the likes of which was rarely heard in the stairwell, even in a building that had sheltered its measure of violence and tragedy.

Quiet, both of you! He’s going to be fine. Jacob, for Christ’s sake, you slipped and fell, but you’re all right.

Are you seeing his arm? shouted his mother. Are you even looking?

Jacob did so along with his father, and any hope for calm evaporated when he beheld what seemed like an added joint. His crying turned to screams, further inciting his mother. Doors up and down the building’s interior began to open, and to his father’s consternation, a small crowd gathered.

My son slipped, and he’s broken his arm. It’s under control.

Jacob, Jacob sweetie, listen to me. His mother had calmed herself, if only coercively. I’m sorry I screamed and scared you. I was startled is all, but you’re going to be all right. You broke your arm, but you’re going to be fine.

It hurts so much! he shouted.

I know it does, my angel. It’s broken but we’re going to get it fixed. I love you, sweetie, and I’m here. I love you. And your father loves you.

No, he doesn’t!

"Of course your father loves you, Jacob. He just wanted you not to hold my hand anymore. I know it doesn’t seem like it, but he did that because he loves you."

He hates me! As if to confirm this assessment, a spasm of pain shot through his arm, and sobs overtook him. Make it stop! Make it stop!

His father knelt over him. We’re going to take you to the hospital, Jacob, and they’ll make it stop, but we’ll get there faster if you let me carry you.

I don’t want you to carry me!

He thinks you don’t love him.

Because I wouldn’t let him hold your hand?

Because of everything! shouted Jacob.

What does that even mean? retorted his father, unable to resist the urge to contest an inaccuracy. Is ‘everything’ the fact that I’m raising you and feeding you and paying for your clothes? Keeping a roof over your head?

You just do that because you have to!

I’m not fucking listening to this, responded his father. And trust me, I don’t have to raise you. You’re my son, but what I do with that is my decision. Now, you’re going to let me carry you so we can get your goddamn arm fixed.

He reached for his son.

Nooooo! Nooooo! Nooooo! More witnesses crowded the stairwell.

Jacob, I want you to stop it, intoned his father, lowering his voice with a gravity meant more to warn than to importune. He reached again, taking a leg in one hand, and attempting to shimmy his arm under Jacob’s back.

Nooooooo! It was as if the boy were being sundered.

Isaac, Ida said quietly, tell Jacob you love him.

Are you kidding me?

Your son needs to know it.

He knows I love him.

He doesn’t know unless you tell him.

Isaac paused, his teeth clenched in what looked something akin to rage.

Jacob, he said, tell your mother that you know I love you.

You don’t! You can’t even say it! shouted Jacob.

Turning to her husband, his mother spoke with the confidence of someone who knew more about what was about to transpire than anyone but perhaps God. Isaac, she said, you’re going to tell our son that you love him now. Those are the next words that will come out of your mouth. Jacob’s father looked back at the woman he had met in 1938 at a high school social and married a year later against the strident objections of her parents, the woman with whom he’d had a daughter ten months later and who would give birth to their second child while he was away at war, and he began to cry. It was the only time Jacob would see his father do so, and it happened quietly: no sobbing, no sudden inhalations of breath, simply tears.

Go on, Isaac, said Jacob’s mother. You can do it.

Jacob, he said, turning to his son and making no effort to conceal the vulnerability that had suddenly overcome him, I love you. I love you. I always have and I always will. Jacob loosed his own new spasm of tears, from emotion, not pain, then reached up with his good arm to embrace his father, who lifted his son carefully for the walk to the hospital.

But over the months that followed, and especially once his cast had been removed, Jacob began first to suspect, and then firmly to believe, that his father had been lying. It was not just that Jacob was still prohibited to hold anyone’s hand when negotiating stairs, and that this rule was enforced even while the cast remained on. It was that while his mother afforded him measures of empathy—allowing him more time to dress and bathe, opening doors for him, and even cutting his food—there was absolutely none of this from his father. Remarks like He’s not an invalid, for Christ’s sake and He’s using the arm as an excuse, can’t you see that? proliferated, the burden of the cast now construed as though the entire incident on the stairs and all associated encumbrances had somehow been Jacob’s fault, or even willfully intended by the boy.

This inspired a new periphrasis in his father’s rhetorical arsenal, as he took to informing his son, who certainly had no need for the fact ever to be voiced, Get this inside your little skull: I’m not your mother. Such pronouncements would follow any simple request Jacob might have, such as for help getting the temperature of the bathwater right or fetching a plate or glass from a high shelf. Any emotion Jacob dared show following the refusal of such requests would arouse variants along the lines of Cut that shit out. It might work on your mother, but not on me.

It eventually occurred to Jacob that his father wanted the three words his mother had coerced in the stairwell, and the tears that accompanied them, back. Though nothing was ever spoken, nor was there any memorializing moment, Jacob had had no choice but to yield them and more. For in their reclaiming, not only did his father’s chilly aloofness again predominate, but it did so now with vindictive purpose. Interactions became quietly aggressive, laced with suspicion, his father’s tone seeming always to imply that Jacob was up to something, endeavoring to subvert the way his father meant to raise him. What made this especially painful was that through it all Jacob remained desperate for the love he’d possessed so briefly.

What, then, to make of nearly drowning in his care, and the lingering ambiguity as to whether this had been intended? What to make of, in the aftermath, for the second time in his life, his father insisting he loved his son?

I need to know you hear me, Jacob.

I hear you.

Just in case, I’m going to say it again. I love you. But before we go any further, I need to know also that you believe it. Do you believe I love you?

It became clear to Jacob that one of two explanations for what had happened was about to be revealed. Either the near drowning was an accident, for which stating paternal love was meant by way of exculpation and even apology. Or, and the tone of his father’s voice made this the more likely option, Isaac Rosenthal had actually meant for his son nearly to drown, and there was a deeper lesson involved, probably involving not allowing oneself to be duped, even by a parent.

Neither option inspired Jacob to give his father the affirmation he wanted. There even loomed tantalizing rewards associated with withholding it. First, at certain rare moments (such as the breaking of an arm or near drowning), the imputation of emotional dereliction could be weaponized to great effect. His father being forced to say I love you only proved this. The problem, however, was that it wasn’t a strategy he could deploy on his own; he had the torpedo but needed his mother’s help to fire it. Without her there, who knew how his father would respond should he push any further?

And yet a dread lurked that made her absence irrelevant. Like all other boys, Jacob had stood at shul and heard tell of Abraham and Isaac and their trek up Mount Moriah, where God intervened only with Abraham’s knife at its apex. But unlike the rabbi, who seemed fixated on the faith of the father (who would kill a child sharing Jacob’s own father’s name no less), Jacob thought only of the boy, and by way not of empathy or sorrow but of inculpation. What must the biblical Isaac have done in secret away from his parents to anger the Lord to the extent that He wanted him killed? Not even the intervention of the angel arrested this line of thinking. After all, had Isaac not been ushered gravely up the mountain? Had he not experienced the castigating terror of seeing his own father crouched over him, ready to plunge the knife? Why would God perpetrate this against an innocent? The Isaac who was the son of Abraham must therefore have deserved it.

What was Jacob’s father about to reveal had been his near-capital crime? And were he not to provide such evidence, what had Jacob done that had compelled God to engage his father as an agent in the manner of Abraham? He wished to learn none of this, and that became his urgent challenge. Were he to say, as he had on the stairwell, No, I don’t believe you love me, and then add and you never have, he would be contradicting his father, and Isaac Rosenthal needed always to be right. This was no pro forma rule sufficiently followed with words alone. Adherence couldn’t be faked. Should his father detect even a fleck of doubt in his capitulation, he would pursue a more believable delivery until it was provided or the actual sentiments behind the dissembling revealed. Since a perjured concession would result in painful interrogation anyway, Jacob told the truth.

No, I don’t believe you.

And why is that?

Because you never act like it, and you never say it.

Now, that’s not true. I’ve told you I love you. You know this, I know this, your sister knows this, your mother knows this, the entire building back in godforsaken Woodlawn knows it.

Once.

More than once.

Only when I broke my arm.

What about just now?

That doesn’t count.

You said I’ve only said it once. Did I not just say it?

You did.

So already that’s twice, and we haven’t even spent any effort summoning other instances, such as before you have the capacity to remember. So, I think we can agree that your claim I’ve only said it once is a little suspect, not to mention unreliable. In addition, I’ve made it clear to you I’m not one for saying that all the time. That’s your mother’s way, and believe me, you don’t want how you’re raised to be up to her. It would be nice for a couple of days, but by the time you became an adult it would be a fucking disaster for you, so be grateful you have to deal with mean old Dad not gooing all over you with ‘I love you’ every ten seconds. Now what was the other ridiculousness you said?

I don’t remember.

You’re lying to me now. Don’t be a chickenshit. Of course you remember.

That you don’t act like it.

"Ah, right. That I don’t act like it. Like who, that obese idiot over there who cradled his son like a fat baby instead of having him jump into the pool like I did with you? That’s love? Trust me, it’s not. That’s a perfect example of what I was just talking about: a father taking the easy way out, like he does at the lunch counter every day when instead of having the discipline to skip the third piece of pie, he stuffs it into his punum and then waddles off to work God knows where. But this to you is love."

I wasn’t even thinking about them.

So just what were you thinking about? How I keep you clothed and fed?

You have to do that.

This again. Let me tell you something. I could easily run off and leave all of you, which believe me, some men do. When I left for the Pacific, I didn’t even know your mother was pregnant, so you were not what I signed on for. We were going to have one child, that’s it. I choose to give a shit about you and your sister both instead of going to the track or the neighborhood bar every night or buying whores like a lot of the assholes in our old neighborhood, which by the way, I worked my ass off to get us out of, so let’s not forget that while we’re inventorying all the reasons I don’t love you. My own father was a goddamn sap at the slaughterhouse, but he taught me one thing: loyalty to his family. So other than being completely responsible to you and your sister and your mother, what else? What’s your other proof?

I don’t know.

You’re lying. I want you to be a man and tell me what your other proof is.

That you’re always so mean. And with this Jacob let himself cry once more. His father ignored the tears. Perhaps he recognized his son simply wasn’t going to be able to bear a growing number of infractions. Already wrong, a liar, and gutless, if being a crybaby were added, the boy might ask to be tossed back into the pool rather than endure further rebuke.

Let me tell you something, Jacob, his father said in a voice suddenly inflected with warmth. "I don’t like talking about the war. In fact, I never do, not even to your mother. I hate these jackasses who go on about it. My feeling is that the ones who do probably weren’t actually there, or at least in any real danger or around any of the real misery of it. But I’m going to tell you a story, which isn’t about the war proper, which you’re really not old enough to hear about. This was when I was training, and it’s not the swimming story