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unbagged the cat, he wasn’t obviously angry at me. It was not going to be a big deal for him. He didn’t mind paying the fines, since he did acknowledge that the farmer (“a working man,” he said in one of his expansive friend-of-the-proletariat moments) had lost some money (though not nearly so much as he’d made from tourists paying to roam slack-jawed through our art).
    His anger would have been preferable. Being wrongly accused of anything by anyone is bad enough to a boy, and I certainly didn’t like feeling myself pushed out of my father’s magic circle. But worse was that our wonder-working was wondrously worked into something grubby. All his talk about wizards fell away. He was just a semicompetent conspirator rethinking whom in the gang he could trust, like kids on a playground reshuffling, again, who was in and who was out. My father’s confidence in me (which was the early entry ticket to adulthood) and adulthood itself (a place of wonder-working and pranksterism) now both appeared childish, petty. I wasn’t very good at articulating this anger, other than to tell Dana over and over that he was a jerk.
    “He knows it wasn’t you,” she reassured me, adjusting the troll dolls in the tabletop theater he had built her, the little black one smothering the little blond one with a tiny red pillow. “He believes you.”
    “I know,” I lied, the troll grinning mischievously in its violence, its orange hair standing erect in murderous ecstasy.
    My disappointment didn’t last. It wasn’t quite corrosive enough to free me permanently, and I look back now
“across time’s moat”
and I wish I could shake sense into that kid: “Enough,” I’d say. “That guy’s not what you want to be.” But younger selves refuse to follow older wisdom.
    For my twelfth birthday, when I was deep in an espionage fetish, he made me a high-quality Soviet passport, with my stern photo expertly installed behind Cyrillic seals and visa stamps from my travels to North Korea, Vietnam, Hungary, and Czechoslovakia. I knew thatthe work involved—the research, the hand stitching, the specialized glue and paints—reflected his sincere love for me. I also knew by then that love was only one element of such an extravagant gift: the rest was professional vanity and a quantity of probable felonious rehearsal.
    For my thirteenth, he gave me a baseball signed to me by my hero, Rod Carew, the Minnesota Twins’ star second baseman and, later, first baseman and a Jewish convert from Panama, easily the coolest Jew within ten thousand miles of my house. It’s not that this item was so difficult to obtain. It’s just that by the time I was thirteen, I had started to assume that
anything
that passed through his hands was fake. I threw the ball away.
    Later he gave Dana a sweet-sixteen present: a “consolation” driver’s license after she failed the exam twice. Since Dad was in prison when we turned sixteen, the license was made by Chuck Glassow, Dad’s college friend who, officially, owned a grocery store. We had known Chuck for years, and he used to come out for dinner with us occasionally when Dana and I spent weekends with Dad. He was a little like Dad, very well-read, but less flamboyant about it. He was taller even than my six-foot-one father. When I was twelve or so, with all my contradictory feelings about Dad and manhood simmering up to a boil, I still liked Chuck, though I was also ashamed that I thought my father lost in comparison. This diminishment of my father may have been unavoidable anyhow at that time; that’s part of being a twelve-year-old boy (as my own sons, now fifteen, continue to teach me).
    I liked how Chuck swore. It was, I see now, an affectation, like quoting Latin and Greek (which he also did); his cursing was Runyonesque, calculated, cooked up. “She should consider blowing that attitude all the way out of her ass and lighting it on fire,” he said of one of the grumpy, antique waitresses at the Embers