Teaching at Cushing he received board, room, and a thousand dollars a year. My mother taught high school in New Hampshire for wages of a similar munificence. In 1927 married women did not teach school and you didn’t get married on a thousand dollars a year. Lucy and Don (I am a junior) wanted desperately to marry, to live together, to have children. In 1927 my father went back on his earlier decision and gave up teaching to work for his father; he married my mother and I was born a year later.

As far as I can tell, or remember, my father always loathed his work at the dairy. No hobby or passionate pastime suggested itself as a substitute. There was my mother, there was me, there was golf … Because the dairy needed someone to do figures, he did figures—and he had no mathematics and disliked arithmetic. The dairy hired someone to teach him bookkeeping; my mother, who was good at numbers, helped him—and he became facile. But even though he added long columns of figures in his head faster than anyone in the office using a Burroughs, he detested what he did. I remember him sitting at the desk night after night—shaking, pale, smoking Chesterfields, coughing—as he added numbers on 8½ × 11 white pads with blue lines, like the pad I write these words on.

He hated what he did and I love what I do. Opposites are never accidental. He shook his fist over my cradle, I was always told, saying, “He’ll do what he wants to do”—and he stuck to it years later even when it turned out to be poetry that I wanted to do. He hated working for his father and with his younger brother—who liked business and seemed not to take it so seriously. I remember my father coming home, noon or night, weeping over “the office”—a slight, an insult, a cruel joke, the discovery of a an error.

If he had to fire someone who had stolen money from the dairy, or if he had to administer a reprimand, he came home weeping. He seemed soft to me; then softer; then softer still. With the five-day week he played eighteen holes of golf every Saturday morning, depending on the weather. He liked vacations, weekends, and eating out. Then his health fell away from him like leaves in August from a sick tree. He was pale, his hair thinned early, he woke coughing every night and quieted his cough with a Chesterfield. His hands and head shook when he was in his forties. Continually he planned to quit the dairy. He cherished a notion of the campus as a place where people were kind to each other—something I never noticed at the University of Michigan—and once he almost arranged to teach business at Bates; but the salary was minuscule. How would he pay for my college tuition?

When he was forty-two and I was seventeen, I was clerking one Christmas at a New Haven bookstore when my mother called to say that an ambulance had taken him to the hospital after he hemorrhaged and lost a third of his blood. An ulcer had gone undetected. He recovered and took two months leave from the dairy, going to Florida with my mother and walking on the sands. He stopped smoking; he no longer woke up coughing every night; I remember him just before he went back to work, lean and tan and young-looking. But he went back to the Brock-Hall Dairy, back to insult and injury and packs of Chesterfields. When he was fifty-one exploratory surgery revealed inoperable lung cancer and he died, sixteen days after his fifty-second birthday, on a hospital bed in the guestroom on Ardmore Street.