IT’S BEEN a while since we visited Chester.

You remember Chester — the small industrial city on the rat-gray Delaware River, the city in Pennsylvania where my husband grew up back in the day when America had small industrial cities.

I haven’t been able to go there lately — I don’t mean physically, but mentally. I feel almost ashamed to go there.

For all their faults, and Chesterites had many faults, they were not all that afraid of death. I don’t think they would have identified with a war against an invisible enemy. I don’t think they would have identified with a war against the common cold.

You might even say they courted death. They tempted it with cigarettes and beer and bad food and toothless grins.

Take the neighbor next door, Mrs. Weiry (pronounced “Weery”) — to mention one minor example.

She played on the train tracks when she was a girl. She lost her legs doing it. Both of them, below the knees. She had two wooden legs for the rest of her life. All for a day of fun on the train tracks.

Now imagine Weery being afraid to breathe on a normal day in the supermarket.

Imagine my husband, who once put his finger in an electric socket, being afraid of a government-subsidized flu. Well, you get the idea of why I haven’t been able to go there. I don’t think they would have identified with this world and quite honestly I feel almost ashamed to think of them.

Anyway, since I have lived on and off in Chester (mentally speaking) for the last 34 years because my husband often talks of it, I can’t avoid them forever. When he brought up something the other night that I had never heard before, well, I was taken back.

It was 1966.

I was eight years old and in another universe, but my husband was a senior in high school at St. James Catholic High School for boys, a school where working-class ruffians wore jackets and ties and learned Latin.

Mr. Jordan (his name has been changed to protect his identity) was an English teacher at St. James who had written a school play.

The play was called “Joe’s Hour” and it was about a man named Joe Baker.

Now Joe was a good person who kept getting a raw deal in life. Sadly, my husband does not remember many details about the plot. But he does remember the chorus. My husband got a part in the chorus. It was one of those Greek choruses that stands on the stage interjecting profound comments during the action.

The chorus included five or six boys. They had one memorable line which was repeated over and over again during the play.

That line was:

“Baker’s a fool! Injustice festers in man’s most noble deeds.”

They said it again:

“Baker’s a fool! Injustice festers in man’s most noble deeds.”

And again:

“Baker’s a fool! Injustice festers in man’s most noble deeds.”

This is an interesting detail.

It shed light for me — yes, this one line was telling — on hidden undercurrents in Chester at the time. It was as if Jean Paul Sartre or Albert Camus had stopped by and walked the halls of St. James. The chorus’s line was just the kind of bleak statement a French existentialist would use to thrill his audiences. In Chester, of all places.

Life was so concrete in Chester. It was not what I would call a fertile field for French philosophers.

For example, one night, Weery drank too much beer.

My husband’s family had given her a quart of beer in exchange for a tub of FDA peanut butter. After consuming half of it, she called my husband’s mother, who picked up the phone and heard Weery laughing on the other end.

Doubled over with laughter, she said, “Get over here. My damn legs just fell off.”

Jonesy, who lived as a boarder in the house, along with my husband, his four siblings, parents and another boarder, bought the suit for his own funeral three days before he died and walked around in it. People laughed at how concrete life was.

People actually made things in factories — toilet paper and ships and beams of steel. They didn’t have much time for pointlessness — or maybe that’s just a romantic fantasy of mine. They were definitely not clever enough or educated enough or cultured enough to believe life was an empty wasteland or to entertain dreams of revolution. Marxism and emptiness — they might have been fine for the working-class in Europe, with their baguettes and berets and absurdly tiny coffee cups, but not in Chester.

After a few rehearsals, my husband decided he had had enough.

He never appeared in the actual performance of “Joe’s Hour” (there was only one performance.) He had better things to do.

It wasn’t until he went away to college — the only person in his family who went to college — and came back to tell his parents, who were by then living in a city that had imploded, that they were ridiculous and uneducated that he truly learned about existentialism.

Injustice does indeed fester in man’s most noble deeds.

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