And the truth is, I can never seem to stick to a subject, as you’ve probably noticed, and I really do apologize for that, but everything always seems so connected to me! Anyway, before long I found myself recounting my struggles with resentful, bitter parents, frightened by their children’s success. Americanization was a Faustian bargain for such immigrants, I told Herr Weilbacher. Yes, their children could go to public schools with no bribes, no fees, and no questions asked, but American tuition was paid in estrangement. Daughters told mothers that they dressed funny, they cooked funny, they talked funny. Sons stayed out late and went to dance halls, and quarreled with their fathers over who would keep the money earned from after-school jobs.

Fed up, the parents would decide enough was enough. A father would appear at my classroom door. Hat in hand but defiant, he would declare, “My kid don’t wanna go to school no more.” Listening to those men, you’d have thought their sons and daughters wished for nothing more earnestly than to work for a pittance in a steel mill or a laundry.

“And the children stood there, dying inside,” I told Herr Weilbacher. “I could see it! The boys would hang their heads. The girls would weep. I could do nothing, and it just broke my heart—because honestly? What the father meant was, I’m losing my power. I am diminished every day as this child grows more knowledgeable—”

I realized suddenly that Herr Weilbacher, so charming and chatty before, had fallen utterly silent.

You simply cannot see it when you bore others, Agnes, Mumma whispered. He doesn’t care that you were a schoolteacher. My land! He’s only being polite to sit with you at all, and here you are with your crossed eyes, braying about immigrant children. You’d drive gentle Jesus to drink, Agnes. Honestly, you would.

I stared at my lap, hands clawed around my napkin. “I— My apologies, Herr Weilbacher,” I stammered, trying to drop my voice an octave and to soften its harsh midwestern timbre. “One does get carried away.”