To have this power, you had to have been born in the town, or at least in the locality, and my father had not been. His accent, his assumptions were slightly different. This was Pennsylvania, and he was from New Jersey. My mother came from the area, and she may have married my father in hopes of escaping it. But the land of six decades ago had more gravity than it does now; it exerted a grip. Fate, or defeat, returned my parents to live in my grandfather’s big house, a house where only I, growing up day by day, felt perfectly at home.

I was proud of my schoolteacher father. If his suit was out of press, and his necktie knotted awry, I was too new to the world to notice. He combed his hair back and, in the style of his generation, parted it near the middle. In our kitchen, he would bolt his orange juice (squeezed on one of those ribbed glass sombreros and then poured off through a strainer) and grab a bite of toast (the toaster a simple tin box, a kind of little hut with slit and slanted sides, that rested over a gas burner and browned one side of the bread, in stripes, at a time), and then he would dash, so hurriedly that his necktie flew back over his shoulder, down through our yard, past the grapevines hung with buzzing Japanese-beetle traps, to the yellow brick building, with its tall smokestack and wide playing fields, where he taught. Though the town had some hosiery and hat factories tucked around in its blocks of row houses, the high school was the most impressive building on my horizon. To me it was the center of the universe. I enjoyed the gleams of recognition that fell to me from my father’s high visibility. His teaching colleagues greeted me on the street with a smile; other adults seemed to know me and included me in a sort of ironical forbearance. He was not a drinker—his anxious stomach was too tender for that—but he had the waywardly sociable habits of a drinker. He needed people, believed in their wisdom and largesse, as none of the rest of us who lived in the house did: four recluses and an extrovert. Imitating my mother, I early developed a capacity to entertain myself, with paper and the images it could be made to bear. When school—the elementary school, at the other end of town, along the main street—took me into its classes, I felt, in relation to my classmates, timid.