I confessed it was me who’d started the fire while I was in the Jackson Park Hospital. (The Butterfields were being treated in the same hospital but I shared my room with strangers.) I told the first people I saw the next morning, which means that in the ambulance, the emergency room, and all through the night, while I drifted in and out of consciousness, I concealed that central fact. But when “I woke the next morning to find my parents sitting in folding chairs—Rose with her legs crossed and her fingers drumming on her patent leather purse, and Arthur with his large head bowed and needlepoint drops of perspiration in the bands of scalp that divided his thinning hair—I cleared my throat and said, “I started the fire.”

They both sat up and looked at each other, and then Rose leaned forward, pursing her small full lips and shaking her head. “Shut up,” she whispered, and she glanced with conspiratorial panic at my two sleeping roommates. But I wasn’t about to leave myself open to the horrors of detection and from that moment began a process of confession, defense, and punishment that was to dominate my life for years.

My father is what people call a “left-wing lawyer.” By 1967, both he and Rose had been separated from the Communist Party for fifteen years, but he was still a left-wing lawyer—meaning that he would never defend a rich man against a poor man and he didn’t charge his clients fancy fees. Arthur aged faster than he should have from the long hours he put in at work. He often stayed in his office until midnight and once—this was a story Rose liked to tell about him—the lightbulb in his desk lamp popped and went black and Arthur continued to sit there in his feeble, whinnying swivel chair writing down on his long yellow legal pad an inspired line of inquiry he wanted to pursue in an accident case.