Mr. LoPresto

Mr. LoPresto, a history teacher at Dominick Birdsey’s school, presents himself as an authority on American history while repeating a version of the past that casts Indigenous people as vanished and inferior. His confrontation with Ralph Drinkwater makes that contradiction personal: Ralph identifies himself as Wequonnoc, but Mr. LoPresto sends him from the classroom and then jokes about the very disappearance Ralph has challenged. The episode prompts Dominick to confront his own earlier betrayal of Ralph’s family.

Identity and Teaching

Mr. LoPresto is a middle-aged teacher whom Dominick remembers as sarcastic and particularly likely to aim his remarks at students he considered weak. He paced while lecturing, referred to the class as historians, and repeatedly hitched up his trousers. Dominick disliked his manner and resented sharing Sunday Mass with him and his white-haired mother, who sat in the second pew and went to Communion early.

His lessons combined historical claims with theatrical delivery. Discussing Samuel, the Great Sachem of the Wequonnoc Nation, Mr. LoPresto emphasized the eating of an enemy’s flesh, relishing the class’s squeamishness. He told students not to judge Indigenous people by what he presented as Western civilization’s higher standards, comparing the groups as fundamentally unlike one another. The framing reduced a history of Indigenous people to a contrast in civilization and savagery.

Confrontation with Ralph Drinkwater

When Ralph joined Dominick’s American history class, Mr. LoPresto made a joke from his surname and assigned him a desk at the back beside Dominick. For several weeks Ralph sat quietly, sometimes dozing. The conflict began during a lecture on Manifest Destiny, when Ralph laughed at Mr. LoPresto’s account of America’s supposed duty to spread democracy.

Mr. LoPresto answered Ralph’s objection by listing his history degrees and demanding to know what credentials Ralph could offer. Ralph replied that he was not an expert but was a full-blooded Wequonnoc Indian, contradicting the teacher’s implication that Indigenous people had disappeared. Mr. LoPresto denied having used that word, although Dominick’s notes showed that he had. He wrote Ralph a disciplinary referral and ordered him to the office.

After Ralph left, Mr. LoPresto turned his empty seat into a punchline, suggesting to the class that the Indians had disappeared after all. Several students laughed. The classroom exchange thus repeated the erasure Ralph had objected to, while making his removal part of the joke.

Dominick’s Recognition of Earlier Injustice

Dominick does not join the laughter. Instead, Mr. LoPresto’s display of contempt brings back Dominick’s childhood part in the treatment of Ralph and his twin sister, Penny Ann Drinkwater. Dominick remembers falsely blaming Penny Ann for stealing Oreos, knowing that adults would believe him, and later helping whitewash her memory at a tree-planting. He recognizes that the public story told about Penny Ann had concealed his own wrongdoing.

The connection does not make Mr. LoPresto responsible for Dominick’s past actions; rather, the classroom episode gives Dominick a present scene through which to recognize the pattern of rewriting and denial. The teacher’s dismissal of Ralph echoes the way Dominick had accepted a version of events that harmed Ralph’s family. Dominick’s anger and shame mark a change in his understanding: he sees the historical lesson not as neutral authority, but as a story that can erase people—and as a model of the erasure he once helped perform.

Narrative Significance

Mr. LoPresto functions as a minor but consequential figure in the novel’s treatment of historical memory and Wequonnoc marginalization. The cemetery beside Three Rivers State Hospital preserves generations of Wequonnoc dead, including war veterans and Lonnie Peck, Ralph’s cousin, while Mr. LoPresto’s classroom account treats Indigenous disappearance as settled fact. Ralph’s presence exposes the distance between that account and a living community.

The episode also links public history to private responsibility. Mr. LoPresto’s credentials do not answer Ralph’s challenge; they instead sharpen the contrast between institutional authority and the lived knowledge he brings into the room. For Dominick, witnessing the exchange unsettles the comforting version of his childhood past and makes his earlier silence and complicity newly legible.