I felt neglected that Pop had never gotten around to completing that part of my education, and I resented it. It was typical somehow of the way he thought about me, as opposed to Manny. He was a busy man, I know that, he didn’t have the time, but somehow he found time for Manny, and it never occurred to him to find it for me.

I always liked to hear Manny talk about what happened the summer night nearly a decade before, his first time with that girl in the whorehouse in Harlem, and I’d get a hard-on myself just thinking about it, never mind listening to him telling me about it, how he and Pop sat around in this parlor talking with the girls who came in to talk with the customers. They weren’t naked but they were the next best thing. They wore these skimpy clothes you could pretty much see through, or imagined you could, which was just as good.

It was a warm night and a breeze came in the window and lifted the curtains as it lifted the girls’ dresses, so you could see almost everything, and Pop told Manny to pick out one that he liked, and he did, and the girl took him off to another room, with a big bed and freshly ironed sheets and a lamp with a rose shade on the table beside it and she took off her dress, her covering, whatever it was, and began undressing Manny, took off his shirt, socks, and pants, and ran her hand over his chest and touched the bulge in his BVD’s, and then slipped her hand inside and held him, then stripped his underwear off as well. “And then what did you do?” I remember saying. “The semaphore was saying ‘Clear track ahead,’” I remember his answering. “The semaphore just shot right up and told me what to do after that.”

“What was her name?” I wanted to know.

“I don’t know. Why would that matter?”

“I don’t know. I guess I’d want to know who she was.”

“I think maybe she said it was Clytemnestra, her name. She said she came from the south and people had names like that.”

That must have been it then.

“Was she black?” I wanted to know. Really black? Was her hair kinky and what did it feel like when you touched it? Not just her head, down there, what did it feel like, but I didn’t ask any of those things. I asked, “What was Pop doing while you were with this girl?”

“How would I know,” Manny said. “When I came back to the parlor he wasn’t around. Later on he and the woman who ran the place came downstairs and had a glass of wine together. I had one too.”

“Had he been with her?”

“How would I know? But what would you have done?”

I wasn’t sure.

I used to tell myself that Pop was different from other fathers. He didn’t just have a job. He was someone other people depended on for their lives, their happiness, their future.

We had moved uptown, to the Bronx, around the time I was born and settled into a big sprawling house on a broad tree-lined street with elm trees that met overhead, keeping shade all summer. Our house was a fairly new one; it had a steep slate roof and lots of towers and turrets; inside there was dark wood gleaming everywhere, staircases, banisters, and paneling, with room for us all to live and Pop to maintain his practice.

The Bronx was a grand and beautiful place in those days, with fields spreading out behind the houses, and in many ways it was far more attractive than Manhattan. It was where the city’s immigrant population settled once they had made enough money to move into the middle or upper class and wanted to escape the newcomers like themselves who flooded into the city to replace them.

The Grand Concourse was just what its name suggested—the Fifth Avenue of the city, the Champs Elysee, the Unter den Linden, a rich and stylish community. It was a handsome spacious thoroughfare, with a highway depressed in the middle. There were lines of trees planted down the center with boulevards on either side and big granite-faced townhouses rising behind them. There was a shopping district nearby, with stores at least as posh as Macy’s or Saks or any of the Fifth Avenue shops, and Pop lived off its rich and stylish customers. He was also the doctor most members of the immigrant Russian community preferred, never mind their politics. They were newcomers to the Bronx like himself and, increasingly, refugees from the revolution in Russia.

Madame Onegin was one of those—I never knew her first name or why everyone always referred to her as Madame. She was a fulsome blonde who spoke English with a fractured accent, an attractive woman in a frowzy way, with fuzzy yellow curls and heavily made-up eyes, and I suppose you couldn’t blame Pop for wanting to help her out. The Onegins were white Russians tzarists, and somehow or other she and her husband had escaped with their fortunes intact. People like that always did, Pop used to say.

It was ironic that a man whose heart bled over the tribulations of the poor spent most of his life serving the lives and wives of the frivolous rich. Raise the subject with Pop as I did a couple of times, and he would explain that it was these poor fools that made everything else possible: generated the money that enabled him to support the cause that would one day liberate all the downtrodden, those who huddled in the tenements on Rivington Street or the shanty towns of Pittsburgh, Homestead, or Canarsie, to say nothing of the hovels of Rome, London, Vienna, Berlin, and Athens, and for all I know Cairo and Bombay and Shanghai.

Pop had never lived off the exploitation of anybody else. What he had he acquired by the sweat of his own brow—and arms and shoulders.