The scandal with the girl somehow died away. Perhaps the notes he carried were innocent. Perhaps he persuaded the principal and the school board that he, at least, was innocent. There had been a romance, because within a year or two the girl, graduated now, married Otto. The couple moved to the Southwest but occasionally would visit my parents. When my mother became a widow, living alone in a farmhouse ten miles from the town, the couple would visit her, as part of their annual Eastern pilgrimage. Though fifteen years younger, Mrs. Werner went plump early, and her hair turned white, so the age difference became less and less scandalous. They had bought a Winnebago and would pull up alongside the barn and Otto would limp across the yard to greet my mother merrily, that twinkle still in his eye. My mother would be merry in turn, having forgotten, it seemed, all the woe he once brought us. In trying to recall the heat in the old house, the terror he had caused, I have forgotten the most interesting thing about him: he had only one leg. The other was a beige prosthesis that gave him his jerky walk, a sharp hitch as if he were tossing something with his right hip. Remembering this makes him seem less dangerous: how could the world ever punish a one-legged man for shouting “Heil, Hitler!” or for falling in love with a teen-ager from another school system?

The country ran on dimes and quarters. A hamburger cost ten cents, and I paid ten cents to get into the movie house, until a war tax made it eleven. The last year of the war, a month before V-E Day and Hitler’s vanishing—poof!—from his underground bunker, I turned thirteen, and old Mrs. Naftziger in the little glass booth somehow knew it. An adult ticket cost twenty-seven cents, and that was too much for me to go twice a week.