The bane of John’s boyhood wasn’t poverty so much as chronic worry about money, and it is easy to see how cash came to seem like God’s bounty, the blessed stuff that relieved all of life’s cares. After the family spent anxious weeks or months running up credit bills and waiting for Father’s return, Bill would abruptly materialize, a jolly Santa Claus, swimming in lucre. He would compensate for his long absence by extravagant shows of generosity with his children. For John, money became associated with these brief but pleasurable interludes when the mercurial father was at home and the
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