He was the faculty clown, to my discomfort. His remarks in assembly always got the students laughing, and, in the spring, in the annual faculty-assembly program, he participated in a, to me, horrifying performance of the Pyramus and Thisbe episode of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Gotten up as a gawky, dirndl-clad, lipsticked Thisbe, in a reddish-blond wig with pigtails, my father climbed a short stepladder to reach the chink in the Wall. The Wall was played by the thickset football coach, Tank Geiger, wearing a football helmet and a sheet painted to resemble masonry.

I had noticed in the privacy of our home how my father’s legs, especially where his stockings rubbed, were virtually hairless compared with those of other men. Now the sight of his hairless legs, bare for all to see, as he mounted the ladder—the students around me howling at every mincing step he took upward—made me think his moment to topple had come.

Mr. Geiger held up at arm’s height a circle-forming thumb and forefinger to represent the chink in the wall; on the opposite side of the wall, little Mr. Haas climbed his ladder a step higher than my father, to put his face on the same level. “O, kiss me,” he recited, “through the hole of this vile wall.” Mr. Geiger mugged in mock affront, and the auditorium rocked. My father, in his high Thisbe voice, answered, “I kiss the wall’s hole, not your lips at all,” and his and Mr. Haas’s faces slowly met through the third teacher’s fingers. The screams of disbelieving hilarity around me made my ears burn. I shut my eyes. This had to be ruinous, I thought. This was worse than any of my dreams.

But the next day my father loped through the halls with his head high, his hair parted in the middle as usual, in his usual shiny suit, and school life continued. “Burning,” went another of his chemical slogans, “destroys nothing. It just shuffles the molecules.”