At the war’s end, we moved from the house that was too big to a farmhouse, ten miles away, that was too small. It was my mother’s idea of economizing. The antique small-town certainties I had grown up among were abruptly left behind. No more wood icebox, no more tin toaster, no more Vernon Grant nursery rhymes framed above my bed, no more simply running down through the yard to the high school. My father and I were thrown together in a state of daily exile, getting into the car—we had to acquire a car—before the frost had left the windshield and returning, many nights, after dusk, our headlights the only ones on the pitted dirt road home. He still took the ticket money at the basketball games, and, as another extracurricular duty, coached the swimming team, which, since the school had no pool, practiced at the YMCA in Alton’s dingy and menacing downtown. The ten-year-old car we acquired kept giving us adventures: flat tires, broken axles, fearful struggles to put on tire chains at the base of a hill in the midst of a snowstorm. We sometimes didn’t make it home, and walked and hitchhiked to shelter—the homes of other teachers, or what my father cheerfully called “fleabag” hotels. We became, during those years of joint commuting, a kind of team—partners in peril, fellow-sufferers on the edge of disaster. It was dreadful and yet authentic to be stuck in a stalled car with only four dollars between us, in the age before ATMs. It was—at least afterwards, in the hotel, where my father had successfully begged the clerk to call Danny Haas to vouch for us—bliss, a rub against basic verities, an instance of survival.

I stood in sardonic, exasperated silence during his conversations with hotel clerks, garage mechanics, diner waitresses, strangers on the street, none of whom were accustomed to encountering such a high level of trust. It was no mistake that he had wound up in education; he believed that everyone had something to teach him. His suppliant air humiliated me, but I was fourteen, fifteen; I was at his mercy, and he was at the mercy of the world. I saw him rebuffed and misunderstood. Flecks of foam would appear at the corners of his mouth as he strove to communicate; in my helpless witnessing I was half blinded by impatience and what now seems a fog of love, a pity bulging toward him like some embarrassing warpage of my own face.