During the war things eased a bit. Men were scarce, and he got summer jobs that did not aggravate his hernia; he was made a timekeeper for a railroad work crew. The tracks were humming and needed to be kept up. In the history books our time in the war seems short: less than four years from Pearl Harbor to V-J Day. Yet it seemed to go on forever, while I inched up through the grades of elementary school. It became impossible to imagine a world without the war, without the big headlines and the ration tokens and coupons and the tin-can drives and Bing Crosby and Dorothy Lamour selling War Bonds at rallies. I reached seventh grade, a junior-high grade, housed in the grand yellow brick building where my father taught.

I was too young for chemistry, but there was no missing his high head and long stride in the halls. Sharing the waxed, locker-lined halls with him all day, being on his work premises, as it were, did not eradicate my anxiety that he would be brought low. The perils surrounding him became realer to me. We students filled the halls with a ruthless, trampling sound. My father was not a good disciplinarian; he was not Pennsylvania-German enough, and took too little pleasure in silence and order. Entire classes, rumor reached me from the upper grades, were wasted in monologues in which he tried to impart the lessons that life had taught him—you don’t get something for nothing, there are no free rides. These truths were well illustrated in the workings of chemistry, so perhaps he wasn’t as far off the point as the students thought. They played a game, of “getting him going,” and thus sparing themselves classwork for the day. He would suddenly throw a blackboard eraser up toward the ceiling and with a boyish deftness catch it, saying, “What goes up must come down.” He told the momentarily silenced students, “You’re on top of Fools’ Hill now, but you’ll come down the other side, I promise you.” He did not conceal from them his interest in the fruitful possibilities of disorder; so many great chemical discoveries, after all, were accidents. He loved chemistry. “Water is the universal solvent,” I often heard him pronounce, as if it were a truly consoling formula, like “This, too, will pass away.” Who is to say his message did not cut through the classroom confusion—the notes being passed, the muttered asides of the class clown, the physical tussles at the rear of the room?