When he was not in his classroom, I discovered, he was in the boiler room. There was a faculty room, with a long table, where the teachers could sit and rest in an idle class period; but they couldn’t smoke there, and many of the male teachers took their time off in the boiler room, a great two-story chamber beneath the towering smokestack. A subterranean passage led into it from the school basement, past the woodworking shop, but as a mere student, a seventh-grader, I only entered, in search of my father, from the outside. You crossed a stretch of concrete enlivened by a few basketball backboards fastened flat onto the bricks, opened a resistant metal door, and stepped, with a hollow sound, onto the landing at the head of a flight of studded steel stairs. In front of you, across a dizzying gap, were the immense coal-burning furnaces that warmed the school. You could see the near furnace take a great sliding gulp of pea coal from its hopper, and the mica viewing-portals shudder with orange incandescence, and bundles of asbestos-wrapped steam pipes snake across the ceiling. Dwarfed by the downward perspective, a few male teachers sat and smoked around a card table, in company with the school janitors.

His coat off, and the full length of the parting in his hair visible, my father looked youthfully happy, sunk to the concrete bottom of this warm volume of space. The rising heat intensified my blush of shyness as I descended, breaching the male sanctuary with my message. Why I was intruding I have forgotten, but I remember receiving a genial welcome, as if I were already one of these men who had filled the glass ashtrays to overflowing and whose coffee cups had left a lace of brown circles on the card-table top. As a teacher’s child I was privileged to peek behind the formal stage-set of education’s daily theatre. It was a slight shock to see, on the stained table, a deck of worn pinochle cards, held together by a rubber band. Teachers were human. I was expected to become, eventually, one of them.