It filtered even into my childhood dreams, the fear. The fear that my father would somehow fall from his precarious ledge of respectability, a ledge where we all stood with him. “We all”—his dependents, my mother, her parents, myself. The house we lived in was too big for us: my grandfather had bought it in 1922, when he felt prosperous enough to retire. Within the decade, the stock-market crash took all his savings. He sat in one corner of the big house, the little “sunroom” that looked toward the front yard, the hedge, and the street with its murmuring traffic. My grandmother, bent over and crippled by arthritis, hobbled about in the kitchen and out into the back yard, where she grew peas and kept chickens. My mother had her nook upstairs, at a little desk with wicker sides, where she did not like to be interrupted, and my father was generally out somewhere in the town. He was a tall, long-legged man who needed to keep moving. The year I was born, he had lost his job, as salesman in the mid-Atlantic territory for a line of quality English china. Only after three years—anxious years for him, but for me just the few buried smells and visions retained by my infant memory—did he succeed in getting another job, as a high-school teacher. It was as a schoolteacher that I always knew him. Wearing a suit, his shirt pocket holding a pack of cigarettes and a mechanical pencil and a fountain pen, he loomed to me as a person of eminence in the town; it was this sense of his height that led, perhaps, to my fear that he would somehow topple.

One of my dreams, borrowing some Depression imagery from the cartoons in the newspaper, had him clad in a barrel and, gray-faced, being harried down the Town Hall steps by the barking apparitions of local officialdom. The crowd began to throw things, and my attempt at explaining, at pleading for him, got caught in my throat. In this present day of strip malls and towns that are mere boundaries on a developer’s map, it is hard to imagine the core of authority that existed then in small towns, at least in the view of a child—the power of righteousness and enforcement that radiated from the humorless miens of the central men. They were not necessarily officials; our town was too small to have many of those. And the police chief was a perky, comically small man who inspired fear in no one, not even in first-graders as he halted traffic to let them cross the street to the elementary school. But certain local merchants, a clergyman or two, the undertaker whose green-awninged mansion dominated the main intersection, across from a tavern and a drugstore, not to mention the druggist and the supervising principal of the school where my father taught, projected a potential for condemnation and banishment.