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named Celia Hildreth. She was a high school senior, as was my brother—and Felix had invited her to the senior prom. This would have been in the springtime of 1943, almost exactly a year before I became a murderer—a double murderer, actually. World War Two was going on.
    Felix was the president of his class—because of that deep voice of his. God spoke through him—about where the senior prom should be held, and whether people should have their nicknames under their pictures in the yearbook, and on and on. And he was in the midst of an erotic catastrophe, to which he had made me privy, although I was only eleven years old. Irreconcilable differences had arisen between him and his sweetheart for thepast semester and a half, Sally Freeman, and Sally had turned to Steve Adams, the captain of the basketball team, for consolation.
    This left the president of the class without a date for the prom, and at a time when every girl of any social importance had been spoken for.
    Felix executed a sociological master stroke. He invited a girl who was at the bottom of the social order, whose parents were illiterate and unemployed, who had two brothers in prison, who got very poor grades and engaged in no extracurricular activities, but who, nonetheless, was one of the prettiest young women anybody had ever seen.
    Her family was white, but they were so poor that they lived in the black part of town. Also: the few young men who had tried to trifle with her, despite her social class, had spread the word that, no matter what she looked like, she was as cold as ice.
    This was Celia Hildreth.
    So she could have had scant expectation of being invited to the senior prom. But miracles do happen. A new Cinderella is born every minute. One of the richest, cutest boys in town, and the president of the senior class, no less, invited her to the senior prom.
    •   •   •
    So, a few weeks in advance of the prom, Felix talked a lot about how beautiful Celia Hildreth was, and what an impression he was going to make when he appeared with amovie star on his arm. Everybody else there was supposed to feel like a fool for having ignored Celia for so long.
    And Father heard all this, and nothing would do but that Felix bring Celia by the studio, on the way to the prom, so that Father, an artist after all, could see for himself if Celia was as beautiful as Felix said. Felix and I had by then given up bringing home friends for any reason whatsoever. But in this instance Father had a means for compelling Felix to introduce him to Celia. If Felix wouldn’t do that, then Felix couldn’t use the car that night. He and Celia would have to ride a bus to the senior prom.
    •   •   •
    Haitian banana soup: Stew two pounds of goat or chicken with a half cup of chopped onions, a teaspoon of salt, half a teaspoon of black pepper, and a pinch of crushed red pepper. Use two quarts of water. Stew for an hour.
    Add three peeled yams and three peeled bananas, cut into chunks. Simmer until the meat is tender. Take out the meat.
    What is left is eight servings of Haitian banana soup.
    Bon appétit!
    •   •   •
    So Father, without enough to do, as usual, was as excited by the approach of prom night as the most bubble-headed senior. He would say over and over:
    “Who is Celia? What is she?
That all her swains commend her?”
    Or he would protest in the middle of a silence at supper, “She can’t be that beautiful! No girl could be that beautiful.”
    It was to no avail for Felix to tell him that Celia was no world’s champion of feminine pulchritude. Felix said many times, “She’s just the prettiest girl in the senior class, Dad,” but Father imagined a grander adversary. He, the highest judge of beauty in the city, and Celia, one of the most beautiful women ever to live, supposedly, were about to meet eye-to-eye.
    Oh, he was leading scrap drives in those days, and he was an air-raid warden, too. And he had helped the War Department to draw