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the big lake, and compete for parts in weekly dramatic productions. Mother adored the camp’s owner, Caroline Lavenson—a friend of the family—who reciprocated the feelings.
    Despite promises made on all sides, Francis and Elizabeth kept up their correspondence:

    There was a letter waiting for me here, and an eight page one yesterday. His resolve not to write evidently proved impossible to keep. I’ve answered both letters. Of course, I miss him, but there is much compensation here. I’m finding pleasure in this work.

    As the year wore on, the pair broke promises right and left. Exactly what transpired between them has been lost to burned letters and unspoken confidences, as well as whatever actions could not—or would not—be spoken about. My mother confided some things to Missy—who, it turns out, was not only undergoing psychoanalysis but having an affair of her own—and they supported each other in these secrets.
    Then there was silence: nothing in my file of letters for the next year, not between Missy and my mother, nor between Francis and my mother. I suspect that my grandmother dispensed with those letters that bore dangerous secrets; or Mother did. It was a “thrilling, but painful” year is all my mother would say in her memoir.
    On his side, Froelicher was clearly fighting his own moral and practical battles. He made what must have been a hard decision. He told Elizabeth that he would look for a better, higher-paying job and, when he had money put aside, he would leave his wife and marry her.
    But as the country entered
its
Depression, Mother entered into her own increasingly intense periods of pressure and desperation. She knew that Missy would “stand by her no matter what she did,” but she was equally sure “that she might just as well kill her father as to do this thing.”
    “This thing,” of course, was to run off with Francis. And other factors weighed in. There was a large sum of money waiting for her in her grandmother’s trust fund; if she married Francis, she knew she would be disinherited.

ENTER EDWIN JAY LUKAS . After graduating, Dad had begun the practice of criminal and civil law. In a few years he would join the firm of Sapinsley and Santangelo. Later, when Santangelo became a judge, it was Sapinsley and Lukas.
    Alvin Sapinsley handled the civil cases that brought in money. Dad took care of the less remunerative civil cases and—increasingly—the criminal ones. In later years, he spoke only of the latter. And more and more he took on cases that brought in little money—cases of indigents and the underclasses.
    Somewhere in the bottom of the pile of letters through which I have been rummaging I came across
this
snippet, from a woman whose name was unfamiliar to me. It was written to Missy in 1932:

    A short time ago, I read of a lawyer, Edwin Lukas, offering his services free of fee as a defense counsel for a Negro couple whose case interested him (as it did me) and who, through utter ignorance had gotten themselves into a lot of trouble. What a splendid act of true charity and proof that ethics have not yet gone entirely out of the world.

    One of my father’s friends was an actress named Anna Kostant (later, after she married a real estate magnate, she was Anna Bing). Anna knew my mother through Le Gallienne and thought she would be a good match with my father.
    Dad and Mother met and immediately saw something within each other that struck a strong chord. They were both energetic, both endowed with good looks, but there was more. For my mother, my father was a way of keeping her from being tempted by Froelicher—at least for now. For Dad, there was something endlessly enticing about this sparkling actress from an upper-class family. Mother had a clear sense of Dad and approved of his goals and activities.

    He was a self-made man who, while not yet successful, had been working since he was fourteen, helping to support his family since his father’s death, alone supporting