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custodian, said Chaym Smith, and taking classes in the day. Back then he was an insatiable reader, the sort of autodidact who (like Harlem Renaissance writer Wallace Thurman) could absorb whole paragraphs at a single glance; his recall was so good he barely had to study for his exams. Sometimes when he came home three young boys—Powell, Jay, and Lester—would be playing on the steps or directly in front of the building in the street. They were good kids, he thought. Wild, but that wasbecause each of them had a different father. In effect, no father. And with no Daddy, they saw everything—and anything—as permissible. He knew what that was, not knowing your father, but feeling that the indifferent sonuvabitch who brought you into the world was out there somewhere, faceless and unreachable, silent and remote, someone you needed and hated all at the same time until the moment came that you damned him, renounced Him, and moved on. Nearly every day Smith saw those boys, and he liked them—he bought the trio candy and
Tales of the Unexpected
comic books at the corner store, shot a few hoops with them on Saturday when he was tired of studying, and after getting permission from their mother, Juanita Lomax, who was young and pretty and seemed to like him whenever she bumped into Smith in the hallway, he drove them in his battered secondhand Corvair to see Sidney Poitier’s portrayal of a black soldier in Korea in
All the Young Men
. It reminded him of his time in Korea, and he hoped Juanita’s boys would pick up something positive from Poitier’s performance, though he couldn’t be sure they had, given the way Powell and Jay hooted and threw popcorn at the screen when Alan Ladd’s bigoted character came on. Still, they told him they’d had a great evening when Smith brought them back to their mother’s basement apartment.
    As it turned out, Juanita was not there when he brought her boys home. Thing is, this was nothing new. Often she left them alone to fend for and feed themselves, usually potatoes, which they peeled with a pocketknife, threw into a handleless skillet in the closet-sized kitchen, then proceeded to burn until the four dark, below-ground rooms, which always smelled damp, clouded with smoke. Smith always worried they’d set the place on fire. That night, however, he’d filled their stomachs at White Castle, so he was sure they’d do no cooking and go straight to bed.
    His own tiny but tidy room was three flights up, one of the front bedrooms in a flat rented by Vera Thomas—a kind, brown-skinned woman about thirty—and her mother, an elderly woman who often said she wished he, Smith, had been her son, what with the way he studied and worked so hard after he got out of the service, and him with a disability too. Smith said he turned his key in the door and walked through the darkened living room—it was by then nearly midnight—then entered his bedroom, clicking on the light. Under his covers, wearing only a smile, was Juanita. Vera, she said, let her into his room when she explained he was out with her boys. She had something to give him to express her thanks for his being so kind to her kids. He asked her what that was. She said, Come here and see. Although he could not remember undressing, or the details of what he said—or might have promised her—Smith spent that night under the covers with Juanita Lomax.
    The next week he was in court.
    How he got there even he couldn’t rightly say. The police had picked him up on his job. Later he learned that Juanita had sworn on a stack of Bibles that he’d forced himself on her. Fortunately for Smith, this was not a case the judge wanted to hear. Juanita argued—as she had twice earlier in the same court—that he was obliged to make her an honorable woman. No, the judge said, he would have to do nothing of the kind. He lectured Juanita not to take up the court’s time this