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 mentally-ill mother who disappeared when Kegs was six years old, shows up in Mariska’s neighborhood as the Welfare worker. Kegs wants to escape the memory of her mother rather than find out what happened to her. She accomplished this as a child by mastering foreign languages. Now, graduating from college, she plans to enter President Kennedy’s Foreign Service and move from country to country as 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, woman wanting their rights, Afro-Americans fleeing Jim Crow’s South, hill people leaving the depleted coal fields of Appalachia for jobs in the city, and Gypsy roamers settling down. New waves of the uprooted are settling 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, who only wants to go to school—shadow Kegs as she becomes a part of their neighborhood. Among the other characters Kegs meets is Peaches Palloma, the iron-fisted Afro-American owner of the Polish tavern where John F. Kennedy makes a campaign stop. Peaches introduces Kegs to the brutal underside of Welfare, the medical underground, and Polish food.  From those she comes to know in the neighborhood, Kegs learns the promise and price of flight from one’s homeland. From the young psychiatrist, Dr. Dan Shannon, Kegs learns the cost of fleeing from oneself and how the human mind protects and sometimes fails its owner.