If she were in the mood for it, my mother would burst into tears and weep, “I hate you, ah, God, I hate you!” The real battle would then begin. They would threaten to kill each other or to kill themselves; they would wish damnation to each other’s immortal souls; and each would blame the other for behaving badly in front of me. “Lieber Gott!” my father would groan, pressing the knuckles of his big red hands into his eyes. “What will become of my baby girl?”

My mother, clasping her hands together as if in prayer, would return, “She is safe with me! I will kill you if you hurt one single hair of her precious head!”

The outburst would be followed by a lamentation on my father’s part as my mother sank into a brooding silence. He would draw me close to him and run his fingers through my hair and tell me he was sorry that he had neglected me. Sometimes he apologized because he had not reared me as a Catholic and he would go out to the shop, bringing back a catechism. But we made no progress. Our minds wandered from the questions, mine to Boston or to the last movie I had seen, and his to his boyhood. He would talk for a long time, but to himself. “Sonie, my patron is Bonaventure, but how I have forgotten him like all the other saints! It is the irony that he should be my saint because he hated idleness. Brother Sebastian, one of the friars who taught us, brought my brother up short and myself a few years later. For we did not like to be shoemakers like our father and our grandfather and our great grandfather. Friedrich would have nothing to do with the trade. He would go to Paris, to the Sorbonne, to study literature, he said, and philosophy. And I, I would go to Berlin to study the law. But Brother Sebastian knew it wasn’t in us. He made us not ashamed of shoe-making. He would quote Saint Bonaventure: ‘You, Friedrich, and you, Hermann, are amongst those to whom the Lord has given the grace to labor.’ I would pray to my saint night and morning, to cure my sloth! It was a monstrous state. Monstruosum quemdam statum inter contemplativam et activam. See! It comes back.”

In his excitement, he would take both my hands in his and cry, “My Latin is not gone, Sonie! I will teach you. Have we a book? A grammar? Well, then, tomorrow we must buy one.”

But by the next day he would have forgotten. The catechism went back to the shop where for the next month it would lie untouched. Saint Bonaventure, Brother Sebastian, and indeed God, would be shelved like the little book. My father’s face would resume its mask. While I, glad that I had escaped his instructions, happily pursued Miss de la Mar’s career.