The first scandal that attached itself to Otto concerned his standing on the steps of the Furness Library at the University of Pennsylvania and shouting, “Heil, Hitler!” The United States was not yet in the war, and a pro-German Bund openly met in our local city of Alton, but still it was an eccentric and dangerous thing to do. Otto was, my father admitted, “a free spirit.” However, he owned a car, and we did not. We once did—a green Model A that figures in my earliest memories—but somewhere in the Thirties it disappeared. In a town so compact one could walk anywhere within fifteen minutes, and in a region webbed with trolley tracks and train tracks, the deprivation did not seem radical. Once the war came, those who owned cars couldn’t buy gas anyway.

A worse scandal than “Heil, Hitler!” had to do with a girl at the high school. My father carried a few notes from Otto to her, and it turned out they were love notes, and he was aiding and abetting the corruption of a minor. The girl’s parents got involved, and members of the school board were informed. Not only could my father get fired, as I understood it: he could go to jail for his part in this scandal. As I lay in my bed at night I could hear my parents talking in a ragged, popping murmur like the noise of something frying; I could feel the heat, and my father twisting in his agony, and the other adults in the house holding their breath. Had there been trysts, and had my father carried the notes that arranged them? It was like him; he was always doing people unnecessary favors. Once he walked out into a snowstorm to go and apologize to a boy in one of his classes with whom he had been impatient, or sarcastic. “I hate sarcasm,” he said. “Everybody in this part of the world uses it, but it hurts like hell to be on the receiving end. Poor kid, I thought he stunk the place up to get my goat, but upon sober reflection I believe it was just one more case of honest stupidity.” His subject was chemistry, with its many opportunities for spillage, breakage, smells, and small explosions.