The maimed and suffering American pariah who had come to loom larger for me than any man I’d ever known, including my father, whose passionate struggles had become my own, whose future I fretted over when I should have been listening to the teacher in class, had begun to buddy up with the same good-for-nothings who’d helped turn him into a petty thief at sixteen. What he appeared to have lost in combat, along with his leg, was every decent habit inculcated in him when he was living as my parents’ ward. Nor did he display any interest in the fight against fascism, which, two years earlier, no
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