As ever, the work-lover detaches himself from people, not wishing to “regain some positive relation.” I find myself in this respect Emersonian: Although I want to live among my children, my grandchildren, my mother, and Jane, otherwise I want to say: KEEP OUT. Is this coldness? I would rather write a letter to a friend than talk with her. Some of my friends resemble me in this regard, aging workers desperate to work; I recognize their desire with pleasure or at least with relief. On occasion we meet—these particular friends—to hug each other, to talk with excitement, and to part quickly. Loving to work has become our nature: Meister Eckhart says that the stone does its work day and night. “If it lay on the ground a thousand years, it would press down-wards as much or as little as it did on the first day.” Maybe Emerson and the rest of us emulate the coldness of stone so that for a thousand years we “will work the harder.”

My father, on the other hand, was a gregarious man—and it pains me to think of my father’s work. He was always a victim—because he was the eldest son of a hard-working self-made man and an immigrant’s hard-working daughter: Nothing he ever did was good enough. When he went to Hillhouse High School in New Haven, his parents followed the advice of friends: He took no college courses but studied mechanical drawing which he hated. Then his parents joined the middle class. When he was graduated, the smallest male in his class, they packed him off to Cushing Academy in Ashburnham, Massachusetts, for a postgraduate year that would prepare him for college. He took Greek to qualify for college when everybody else took Latin, sprinted on the track team, grew four inches, and sniffed the possibilities of happiness. His parents managed to confer some misery upon him even at Cushing; in their naivety they believed the catalog when it unconscionably claimed that students required no pocket money. Other young men and women bought five-cent sodas but my father did not have five cents.

I repeat stories I grew up on, stories that created me.

Cushing’s headmaster suggested Bates College in Lewiston, Maine. When my father arrived he took a job in a diner where he worked four years for meals and pocket money. Going home to Connecticut from Maine for his vacations, he took the State of Maine that arrived in New Haven at dawn, whereupon he began working for the Hall Dairy all day every day (never doing anything right) until he took the train back to Lewiston, where my mother remembers him returning from Christmas or Easter vacation exhausted and ready for rest. Decades later, going over the family books, Augusta noticed that my father’s four years at Bates cost less than his younger brother’s first semester at Yale.

When my father was graduated from Bates in the Class of 1925 (along with Erwin Canham, who became editor of the Christian Science Monitor and a perennial on “Face the Nation”; along with the novelist Gladys Hasty Carroll; along with Euterpe Boukis Dukakis; along with my mother) he decided not to enter the family business. Small wonder. On the other hand, what a blow for his parents, who could not fathom his rejection; what had they struggled for, all these decades, if not to build a business for sons to carry on? Instead, my father wanted to teach; for two years at Cushing Academy he taught History (his Bates major) and English while he coached track. Bette Davis was his pupil. Meantime his father—because an eldest son decided not to join the firm—combined with Charlie Brock to form Brock-Hall. In later years, whenever the partnership caused strain, my father took the blame; if he had only come right out of college to join the Hall Dairy …