He enjoyed human contact even at its least satisfactory, it slowly came to me. “I just wanted to see what he would come up with,” he would explain after some futile tussle with, say, the policeman in charge of the municipal garage to which our non-starting car had been towed, parked as it had been in a loading zone by the railroad platform; the cop refused to grasp the distinction between my father’s good intentions and the car’s mechanical misbehavior. “I used to land in the damnedest little towns,” he would tell me, of his days selling china. “In upstate New York, West Virginia, wherever, you’d just get off the train with your sample case and go into any store where you saw china and try to talk them into carrying your line, which usually cost a bit more than the lines they had. You never knew what would happen. Some of them, in these dumps at the back of nowhere, would come up with the most surprising orders—tall orders. This was before the Depression hit, of course. I mean, it hit in ’29, but there was a grace period before it took hold. And then you were born. Young America. Your mother and I, it knocked us for a loop, we had never figured on ourselves as parents. I don’t know why not—it happens all the time. Making babies is the number-one priority for human nature. When I’m standing up there trying to pound the periodic table into their jiggling heads I think to myself, ‘These poor devils, they just want to be making babies!’ ”

My own developing baby-making yen took the form, first, of learning to smoke. You couldn’t get anywhere, in the high-school society of the late Forties, without smoking. I had bought a pack—Old Golds, I think, because of the doubloons—at the Alton railroad station, while my father was coaching the swimming team. Though the first drags did, in his phrase, knock me for a loop, I stuck with it; my vagabond life as his satellite left me with a lot of idle time in luncheonette booths. One winter morning when I was fifteen, I asked him if I could light up a cigarette in the car on the way to school. He himself had stopped, on his doctor’s advice. But he didn’t say no to me, and, more than thirty years after I, too, quit, I still remember those caustic, giddying drags mixed with the first grateful whiffs of warmth from the car heater, while the little crackling radio played its medley of farm reports and Hit Parade tunes. His tacit permission, coming from a schoolteacher, would have been viewed, we both knew, as something of a disgrace. But it was my way of becoming a human being, and part of being human is being on the verge of disgrace.