At some point about 1920, it was revealed to Henry and Augusta that they had become members of the middle class. Gussie withdrew from bookkeeping when Brock-Hall hyphenated itself. She wore white gloves and played bridge, proper and stiff but humorous and quick to acknowledge her origins. Henry worked hard while he could, then as he grew old turned into H. F. the Chairman of the Board. It was my Uncle Arthur not my father who took to the modern world of business—employing “consultants,” studying “communications.” Henry built up the business, as it seemed to Henry, because he worked harder and longer than anyone else, not because of class or inheritance or education. Growing up with his own company, Henry worked with the people whose labor he hired; he prided himself that he could do the work they did. A paternal employer, he knew their families and helped them in their trouble and fired them in their drunken fecklessness and hired them back again. He intended to be fair and honorable; as the society changed around him, he turned into Management. Imagine the young boss, vigorous, with his thriving new business; he came up the hard (and only) way, delivering milk that he bottled himself, and, if an employee sicked out, working twenty hours that day. Then, imagine him with thirty years added to his mustache, his stomach, and his gait, turned into H. F. who wears suits and parks a big car; he has become a state senator in Connecticut, even a minor Republican boss: When he walks through the parking lot at the dairy, the only workers he knows have white hair; younger men belong to a union and vote for Roosevelt. Henry’s own sons, who went to college, sit at desks wearing white shirts and neckties, adding columns of figures.

Class in America may be a joke but it is not funny. When I was seventeen I decided I was a socialist; at prep school I subscribed to a weekly edition of The Worker and read it as publicly as I was able, a classic reactive pinko … and at home I was a boss’s son: I remember crossing the dairy’s parking lot walking with my father, who wore a brown suit and brown shoes and brown fedora, past young men my age in ratty clothes washing the mud from trucks. I lowered my gaze, unable to look them in the eyes.

Henry’s son’s wives—unlike Augusta or Clara, unlike Kate—did not work the way their mothers did. My mother becomes indignant when I say such a thing, because she worked hard and long. I exaggerate—in order to note the extraordinary difference between her life and her mother’s life. My mother acquired the vote but lost a domain to rule over, nor could she provide half the labor essential to her establishment’s economy. Brought up to work, and to value herself by work’s accomplishment, she cooked, sewed, washed, ironed, canned, and cleaned—in the suburbs, in a six-room house, for a husband and a single child. She worked out of habit’s necessity not out of necessity’s habit. She washed and ironed fourteen white shirts a week; she washed and ironed sheets, pillowcases, tablecloths, and underwear. In the summer she bought bulk vegetables and fruit, she canned and made jellies and jams on a gas stove. She worked all day on these tasks, then washed, changed her clothes, and cooked supper for my father and me. She cooked breakfast for the two males also, and often lunch. No school buses in those days; school was close enough so that I walked home for lunch; and my father returned from twelve to one as we sat at the table with our ironed linen napkins.