He called me “young America,” as if I were more bumptious than I was. He pushed me about the town with a long stick he had made, whose fork gripped the back of my red wagon, so that all I had to do was sit in it and steer. No more births followed mine. My bedroom was a narrow back room, with a bookshelf and some framed illustrations, by Vernon Grant, of nursery rhymes. It overlooked the back yard and adjoined my parents’ bedroom. I could hear them talk at night; even when the words were indistinct, the hiss of unhappiness, of obscure hot pressures, came through the walls. “That son of a bitch,” my father would say, of some man whose name I had missed. “Out to get me,” I would hear. Who could this enemy be, I would wonder, while my mother’s higher, more rhythmic voice would try to seal over the wound, whatever it was, and I would be lulled into sleep, surrounded by my toys, my Big Little Books, my stacks of drawings crayoned on the rough dun-colored paper supplied at school, and the Vernon Grant figures presiding above the bookshelf—a band of cheerful, long-nosed angels who lived in giant shoes and tumbled downhill. Paper, I felt, would protect me. Sometimes in my parents’ room there were quarrels, stifled sobs from my melodious mother and percussive rumbling from my father; these troubles were like a thunderstorm that whipped and thumped the house for half an hour and then rolled off into the sky to the east, toward Philadelphia.

One center of trouble, I remember, was a man called Otto Werner, which Otto pronounced as if the “W” were a “V.” Among the Pennsylvania Germans, he was exceptionally German, with a toothbrush mustache, a malicious twinkle in his eye, and an erect, jerky way of carrying himself. He, too, was a schoolteacher, but not in our town’s system. He and my father, on weekends and in the summer, travelled to Philadelphia, an hour and a half away, to accumulate credits toward a master’s degree. Having a master’s would improve my father’s salary by a few sorely needed dollars.