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though never pristine owing to the lights of the metropolis that nibbled the rim of the heavens. You had to turn your back to the city to get a chaste view of the stars—my father’s thought on those occasions when he felt crowded by Chicago’s muscle. He believed Chicago was a separate and hostile nation. Chicago was where you went for a loan when times were hard, and Chicago in turn looked east, where the muscle was bought and paid for. My father grew up believing that Illinois was a colony of some greater, more prodigious society to which he did not have access. This feared society was controlled by secretive personalities in New York, Philadelphia, Boston, and London. They owned the banks, the railways, the steelworks, and the oil. They owned the electricity you needed to turn on a radio; and they owned the radio. These were the people who had nominated Eisenhower at the criminal convention in Chicago, summer of ’fifty-two, stealing delegates from poor Bob Taft, Mr. Republican, who had earned the nomination fair and square but refused to wheel and deal. No honor among them, the moneymen from the East, malefactors of great wealth. Who said that? Theodore Roosevelt, the good Roosevelt, the rough-riding Republican Roosevelt said it; and his appalling cousin, the bad Roosevelt, the socialist Roosevelt, expanded the definition to include any hard-working businessman trying to make ends meet in a tough economy. Some poor bastard owns a gas station or a shoe store, he’s a malefactor of great wealth. Meanwhile, the millionaires got away with murder.
    Well, I had said, now you’ve got Eisenhower.
    We’ll see about Eisenhower, my father said. Good man, I guess, but I don’t trust generals. He’s an improvement over Truman. And a damn sight better than Adlai.
    I would have voted for Adlai, I raid.
    Of course you would, my father said, barking a laugh. When was the last time you filed an income tax return?
    That was the world I sought to escape, for a double bed in the living room of an apartment off the Midway on the South Side of Chicago, and if I could find a dark-eyed, long-legged girl to share it with me, I would not care if she was a Republican, a Teen for Taft, even. I shivered in the chill, looking at the constellations and Chicago’s sulfurous glow on the southern horizon, wishing to God I was five years older and out of Quarterday, out of college and out of the Midwest, freely sailing the oceans under the Southern Cross. I stood and walked to the edge of the fairway and flipped my cigarette in the direction of the green on Six—and out of the evening mist came a herd of deer, a buck and three does and their fawns, gliding lightly up the rise of the fairway, the does leading the way, moving their heads like turtles. They made no sound as they glided along, high-haunched, the fawns pausing to graze a little. The buck turned his heavy head to look directly at me and then back again; and in a heartbeat they were gone, vaulting into the mist where they vanished for good. I stared at the place where they had been, shaking a cigarette from the pack and trying to light it. But my fingers would not work properly. I waited a minute or more for the herd to reappear but they were gone.
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    We lived in a political house that se`son, nightly communicants at the evening news. The mess in Springfield, the mess in Washington, subversion in Hollywood, corruption in Chicago, stalemate in Korea, unrest generally. My mother was a ghost at the table, patiently knitting while the news was read by a sad-eyed middle-aged man with a baritone voice and a reassuring manner. Once, when he devoted a sentence to a strike at my father’s plant, my father looked up, startled; but the sentence came and went in an instant.
    Did you hear that?
    No, Teddy. What was it?
    He mentioned the strike.
    Your strike?
    My strike, my father said.
    What did he say?
    That there was trouble at Carillo & Ravan.
    I’ll