My father never faced his chortling, democratic oppressors; they were contemptible, unworthy of his steel. He refused to pursue the gratification he might gain and the reward he would harvest in a public confrontation. I could not have resisted such a dustup, if only to relieve my frustrations by snapping off a few of their teeth, hitting the bastards with the nearest chair, pissing on their flag, burning down their sheep-dip library—all those books about animal husbandry and the cross-fertilization of squash—but that was not my father’s way. When things got too sticky, as sooner or later they did, he’d saddle up and shove off. Thus he had come south from Virginia, and before that, in inverse chronology, from Pennsylvania, Connecticut, Massachusetts.

It was hardly a solution. Frustration that is unrequited in one corner finds, like a confused and famished rat in a maze, sustenance in another. Dr. Breslau among his colleagues (neither he nor they considered the other peers) maintained his rigid politesse. His most virulent public expletive remained a quiet “son of a biscuit” without even the mild explosive of an exclamation point at the end. For major irritant and inconvenience, ranging from a cut finger to a dented fender, he would say “sugar.” Still, they got to him, vultures pecking away at his entrails. In private, in the secret shell of our small house, it wouldn’t even take a cut finger to elicit sheer red-eyed choler, the veins beating at his temples like the wings of a blind bat, the wales of his cheeks pulsating. In our house all was rampage—the price of a can of soup jumping a nickel, a trace of starch on a shirt collar, a broken shoelace and he’d be off, apoplexed, calling my mother a fat cunt, striding across the length of a room to push me out of his way, invariably followed by regrets, remorse, pronouncements of self-hatred. Then he would put an arm over my shoulder and ask with grave deference what I wanted to be when I grew up. I would mumble, shifting my weight from one leg to another, kicking imaginary shit like Jimmy Stewart in a stable, “I don’t know.”

Once, I’ll never forget, this oblique, irrelevant armistice led to an even nastier war. I was perhaps ten at the time; he asked me that persistent question I had until then successfully evaded. But now, “I want to be a teacher,” I said sturdily, eager for his approval. His eyes went red again, his face twisted as if his stomach had suddenly gone sour, and something obscure, monstrous, and terribly uncomfortable flashed between us. I didn’t realize until years later that the conflict was oedipal, that I was giving him notice of competition, but I knew enough to be frightened. “You miserable little coward,” he screamed at me, and pushed me away as if I were unclean.