ON THANKSGIVING DAY of 1977, my father took a Greyhound bus from Minneapolis back to Chicago after spending a week in the Twin Cities settling his own father’s affairs. My mother and I had gone along for the funeral, although I was too young to remember, then taken the car back home. At five o’clock that morning he locked up the house where he’d grown up and took a cab downtown to the bus station, where he made breakfast of a Mars bar and a bottle of Coca-Cola.

The station was packed to capacity even in the predawn—holiday travelers who’d booked at the last minute after the more civilized departures had already filled up. My dad had booked the early trip on purpose, hoping to avoid a crowd. Half the terminal was asleep on their bags or each other’s shoulders; most of the rest nibbled on snacks or sat with glazed eyes and magazines open on their laps. A few parents contended noisily with irate kids, and of course there was one bright-eyed, cheery family sharing juice boxes and playing patty-cake. Every bus terminal in America had at least one. A few chairs were occupied by people he assumed were homeless; it was Thanksgiving and the staff couldn’t bring themselves to boot them out in the cold. But when the bus boarded, my dad was surprised to see one of them get up and climb on board.

Dad claimed an aisle seat near the rear. As the bus filled up, the man he’d pegged for a vagrant came and took the seat across the aisle. He was in a green army jacket and my dad realized that was the thing: he’d seen a lot of homeless vets.

by Jerome Charyn

IT HAPPENED LIKE THIS.

Tom would deliver aria after aria at criminal court, while the most seasoned cops stuttered under his cross-examination. Even witnesses who had been coached by the Manhattan DA couldn’t stand up to the pounding. The DA scoffed at Tom, mimicked him, called him “Tonsils,” and that moniker remained. Tom hadn’t served overseas, but landed in the provost marshal general’s office in ’43 and visited prisoner-of-war camps in the South and Southwest. He’d been the boy wonder at Nichols & Bass, fresh out of Columbia. He’d grown up in a hovel on Eleventh Avenue, studied at Horace Mann on a full scholarship, and entered law school at nineteen. He never learned who his benefactor was. Some obscure Fenian society, he’d been told, a society that was just as real as any illusion. He could quote Aristotle and Captain Marvel in the same breath. He was impossible to resist.