Some of Skip’s childhood schoolmates had come from immigrant parents, Scandinavian, most of them. He’d visited their stuffy homes, felt his lungs clutched by alien odors, looked at unimaginable bric-a-brac and cloudy photographs of military men with feathers jutting up behind the brimless caps of their uniforms, and heard the parents fumble the grammar and drop small words, thick-spoken and sincere, everything about them an affront to their sons, who endured the fathers in silence and rushed past their mothers’ offerings: “Yes, Ma—okay, Ma—I gotta go, Ma.”
