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inspired Jane to recite it around the house:
    Kaiser Bill went up the hill
    To take a peek at France
    Kaiser Bill came down the hill
    With bullets in his pants.
    Don’t sing that , said her mother; “pants,” of course, were underpants, and Jane was not to mention them. But of course Jane kept at it: …with bullets in his… , whereupon Bess slung Jane over her knee and spanked her. “But I was going to say trousers ,” Jane wailed.
    Jane would picture her mother’s mind as a veritableminefield of small-town narrow-mindedness. She remembered being ordered not to play with a Chinese girl in the neighborhood. She was advised that peoplefrom Sicily were slum dwellers—for the sole, if unassailable, reason that they were Sicilian. Politically, her mother was much more conservative than her father. When young, she’d been a strong Temperance advocate (as was enough of the country to get us Prohibition). Red wine was “Dago red,” one strike against it, of course, being that it was Italian; when Dr. Butzner occasionally got a bottle of wine from a Sicilian coal miner he’d treated, Mrs. Butzner was known to turn it into vinegar if she got her hands on it, or else just pour it down the drain.
    So, as many an adolescent before and since, Jane wrangled with her mother. Maybe worse, she felt “I had to shut up about things that I really would have liked to talk to her about.” The detailed, pages-long, idea- and fact-filled missives Jane wrote to her mother much later—on farming practices in the Canary Islands, acupuncture, or the “micro-balance-of-nature” represented by ladybugs eating aphids—testified to her own need to say , to speak, to explain, and also to her mother’s receptivity. But again, that came later. As a teenager, especially on more intimate subjects, she didn’t feel she had her mother’s ear.
    This seems to have been about as troubled as Jane ever felt at home. Not that any hurts she did experience were trifling to her; how could they be? But set against the whole fabled, fraught landscape of children and parents, little in her life on Monroe Avenue hints at subterranean terrors or cries out for probing scrutiny.
    Jane and her family inhabited the fat, happy middle of American economic and social life. They mostly had enough money, but not too much. Jane grew up in a nice house, on a pretty street of nice houses, in an upper-middle-class neighborhood; the house even had an early dishwasher. But she wasn’t entirely cut off from the less lucky. She’d remember a down-at-the-heels area near their house, “the Patch,” that had no sidewalks; “you just knew when you went into the Patch that this was a miserable place.” She knew about the men who worked the mines; some of them were her father’s patients. She heard from her mother about her nursing days and her poorer patients.
    Her childhood was sprinkled with a full share of the familiar and the comfortably unremarkable. She went to church—Green Ridge Presbyterian, a few blocks away. (Jane was “never at war with the church,” one of her children would say, “just bored.”)She traded cards with her friends—of political figures, it seems, not baseball players. She played pirates, the loser walking the plank atop an old stump. She playedcowboys and Indians. She sometimes roller-skated to school. She had a hiding place, in a cleft in a nearby cliffside, where she couldsecrete treasures. Like her sister, she joined the Girl Scouts, went to camp, enjoyed crafts. She’d remember the summer weeks when theChautauqua came to Scranton, with its great children’s programs. She loved listening to her parents and grandmothers talk about their childhoods—like her grandmother, on wash days, making soap from fat and wood ash, or her mother, when she was eight, flipping the switch on the town’s first electric lights. She played pranks on her siblings, one time tricking brother John into giving uphis favorite shirt. Come Christmas, thetree in