Publisher's Synopsis
In 1963, shortly before his assassination, President Kennedy promises Mariska Bakunin, a poverty-stricken Chicago Ukrainian child, he will find her father lost in one of the massive mental hospitals of mid-twentieth century America. Kennedy also promises the nation he will close these institutions as they have imploded into horror. Kegs Addams, wealthy daughter of a federal judge and a mother who was mentally-ill and disappeared when Kegs was six years old, shows up in Mariska's neighborhood as the Welfare worker. Kegs escaped the memory of what her mother had done by mastering foreign languages. Now, graduating from college, she plans to enter President Kennedy's Foreign Service and become an American diplomat. When her father's illness delays her plans to enter the Foreign Service, Kegs reluctantly takes the Welfare job to help her overburdened best friend, Maggie Cahan. Mayor Richard J. Daley's 1963 Chicago is ablaze with Kennedy's New Frontier, Puerto Ricans arriving in the first airborne migration, African-Americans fleeing Jim Crow's South, hill people leaving the depleted coalfields of Appalachia for jobs in the city, and Gypsy roamers settling down. New waves of the uprooted settle in the city with earlier refugees from war-ravaged Europe. Mariska Bakunin and her pals: ten-year-old Jesús Montez, a Puerto Rican boy trying to assume a man's responsibilities; and Nelda Anthony, a mute, failure-to-thrive Gypsy child of unknown age, shadow Kegs as she becomes part of their neighborhood. From the young psychiatrist, Dr. Dan Shannon, Kegs learns the promise and price of flight from one's past and how the human mind protects and sometimes fails its owners.
