The Last Chairlift

11. SMALLNESS AS A BURDEN

Downtown Exeter wasn’t much to speak of. At the intersection of Water and Front Streets, there was a bandstand; there were occasional appearances of a band. Below the falls, where the Exeter River ran into the Squamscott, the water was brackish and filthy. Because the Squamscott was a tidal river, the academy crew couldn’t row at low tide. Because the Squamscott was polluted, the mudflats stank. A rower would one day tell me: “You can usually spot a beetleskin in the mud at low tide.” We called condoms beetleskins. The Ioka wasn’t much of a movie theater, but it’s the only downtown building I remember.

Because I was the grandson of a principal emeritus of Phillips Exeter (or so I thought), the academy—even before I attended it—was my part of town. Front Street bisected the Phillips Exeter campus. I grew up in my grandparents’ red-brick house on Front Street, within hearing distance of the bells that heralded the changing of classes. Principal Brewster’s house was Georgian—the front door framed by two white columns, white window trim, black shutters. From the cupola window in my attic bedroom, I could look along Front Street and almost see the academy clock tower, where the bells tolled.

When I told her I could see the Roman numerals on the clockface of the tower, Nana said this was an early sign that I had the imagination to become a fiction writer. She knew it was impossible to see any part of the main academy building from our attic.

Nora put it more plainly: my imagining I could see the academy clock tower from my attic bedroom didn’t indicate to her that I had a fiction writer’s imagination—only that I was a slow learner.

To the Exeter faculty—most of all, to the faculty wives—I was “the Brewster boy,” not necessarily because I was the grandson of a mysteriously mute principal emeritus. It was more remarkable that I had my mother’s maiden name, and that pretty Rachel Brewster was noticeably unmarried; she was also away for months at a time.

Exeter was a small town, though not as small as the claustrophobic community of a single-sex boarding school. It wasn’t unnoticed that Principal Brewster had stopped speaking—at which time, I presumed, he’d been relieved of his headmasterly duties. This was around the time my mom got pregnant, but before she began to show. I don’t remember who told me that he’d not been principal for long. I don’t remember when Nora told me that he’d never been principal at all. It was only Lewis Brewster’s fantasy, all because he believed he should have been Exeter’s headmaster.

“Those damn Brewster girls indulged him,” Nora told me. “In truth, Granddaddy Lew is just another faculty emeritus. He was only an English teacher—a strict grammarian, big on rules. When he used to talk, he went on and on about punctuation marks. Saltonstall has been the principal at Exeter since before I was born. Salty will probably be principal forever.”

As would always be true of Nora, she was mostly right. William Gurdon Saltonstall was the principal of Phillips Exeter from 1932 until 1963, when he left to direct the Peace Corps in Nigeria. Salty appeared to be beloved.

Here was another Brewster family secret I hadn’t known. Nora apologized for not telling me sooner. “I thought I’d already told you, Adam; I must have assumed that everyone knew the ‘principal emeritus’ was deluded, long before he stopped talking.” But how would I have known that Granddaddy Lew was delusional? He’d never spoken to me. It unnerved me to think there were faculty members (and their families) who knew more about me and the Brewster family than I did. Other than what Nora told me, I’d been kept in the dark. And after Nora went off to Northfield, and later, to Mount Holyoke, I was alone a lot.

The Front Street house, where I lived with my grandmother and the grammarian emeritus—Principal Punctuation Mark, as I thought of our silent family lunatic—was in easy walking distance of the academy athletic fields and the school gym. Best of all was the Thompson Cage. A 1929 brick edifice with skylights, the cage contained two indoor tracks. On the dirt floor of the cage was a running track; above it, a sloped wooden track circumscribed the dirt track below. I liked to run, but I loved the old cage.

Did I like running because my mother loathed it? Probably, in the beginning. When I began to run, I’m sure this was part of the same perverse psychology that persuaded me to dislike skiing. But the more I ran, the more I liked the aloneness of it. My mom didn’t run, but she understood solitary compulsions.

My mother was almost as obsessed with her off-season training for skiing as she was with skiing; she took those exercises very seriously. She did lunges and squats and wall sits, everywhere and all the time. Her lunges never failed to startle the bogus principal emeritus. They were single-leg lunges, which she held for forty-five seconds or a minute (each leg). The squats were deep ones—her butt hit her heels—and the wall sits, which she held for over a minute, were done at ninety-degree angles with her back against a wall and her knees perfectly aligned to her middle toes. “If you can’t see your big toes, you’re doing it wrong,” she would explain to me repeatedly.

The circuit-type training suited my mom’s eternal restlessness. She allowed herself no rest between these exercises. “You don’t want the lactic acid to clear—you want to increase your lactic acid threshold,” she was always saying to Uncle Martin and Uncle Johan, who often tried to do the exercises with her. They couldn’t match her pace.

Yet Little Ray hated to run, and she wouldn’t ride a bike. All winter, when the academy athletic fields were covered with snow, my uncles would stride over the playing fields on their cross-country skis, but my mother was strictly a downhill skier. She would, occasionally, put on her telemark skis and skin up a mountain, but that was because she liked skiing down.

When it wasn’t ski season, my uncles were cyclists. Not Little Ray. “I don’t want to be killed by a car,” my mom said. “I’m too small—bad drivers won’t see me, till they run over me.”

I liked running around the academy playing fields, and my uncles had shown me the cross-country running course through the woods. Most of all, I liked running on the wooden track in the Thompson Cage. I liked the sound of my feet on the boards. For the most part, you’re alone when you run—even when there are other runners around.

By the time I was old enough to walk anywhere I wanted—when I was also old enough to imagine myself as a student at the academy—I liked watching the older boys playing their sports, and wondering which sports I would play. Most sports didn’t appeal to me; team sports were particularly unappealing. So many of the boys on teams appeared to be struggling; the attention paid to balls or pucks seemed stupid, beyond moronically obsessive.

Henrik was a ball-and-puck person; his sports were soccer, hockey, and lacrosse. Henrik started at Exeter in the fall of 1952; he graduated in the spring of 1956, about three months before I would start. Given my negative relationship with Henrik, I had long ago decided against soccer, hockey, and lacrosse.

Because I was small, wrestling tempted me; it was a weight-class sport (I would wrestle other small boys) and I liked the one-on-one aspect of it. But the wrestlers often competed in a box-shaped gym attached to the cage; the wooden track overhung the wrestling area, and spectators sat on the boards with their legs dangling above the mat. It disturbed me that the wrestlers grappled at the bottom of a gladiatorial pit, with their pitiless fans staring down at them. And I didn’t like how the wrestlers ran their laps after wrestling practice—the way their flat-soled wrestling shoes pounded on the wooden track. They jogged half a lap, then sprinted the other half; this meant that I was always passing them, and they were always passing me. Therefore, I somewhat tentatively decided that I wouldn’t wrestle. My only sport would be running, I believed. I would run cross-country in the fall, and run the mile in track-and-field—in the cage in the winter, and outdoors in the spring.

I met the snowshoer one winter day, after I’d been running on the wooden track in the cage. I could see him coming toward me. He was crossing the snow-covered baseball diamond, from the infield to the outfield. In the distance, the narrow stone bridge over the Exeter River was obscured by wind-blown snow. I mistook him for a cross-country skier—a very small one, too small to be one of my uncles. The snowshoer had ski poles. His stride was shorter than a cross-country skier’s, or he had the wrong wax on his skis. He didn’t appear to be getting any glide from his stride. Of course I couldn’t see his snowshoes, which I thought were his skis.

In the wind-blown snow, I couldn’t be sure he was a guy; he looked smaller than me, even smaller than Little Ray. He was as small as the smallest Exeter student I had ever seen; he was as small as a child, but he didn’t move like a child. I saw something decidedly male and adult in the strength of his stride. The way he loped along reminded me of a runner I’d encountered a few times in the warm weather—both outdoors, on the academy athletic fields, and on the wooden track in the cage. He was out of my league as a runner—too fast for me to keep up with, though his legs were comically short. On the sloped boards in the cage, he had lapped me a couple of times in less than a mile. There was a very mature element in how friendly he was; the Exeter students rarely acknowledged me. This made me think he was a very young faculty member, although—in addition to his childlike size—he was absurdly youthful-looking for anyone on the faculty. It was hard to imagine he could command the students’ attention.

I was thirteen that February day in 1955. I wouldn’t become an academy student until September 1956. I hadn’t started to shave; in my estimation, neither had the snowshoer. I couldn’t see they were snowshoes until he removed them—old wooden bear paws with leather bindings and rawhide laces. He stood beside his snowshoes in the parking lot of the Thompson Cage, where he brushed the snow off them. They were the long kind of bear paws, shaped like teardrops—nearly a yard long, more than half as tall as the diminutive snowshoer himself. “I thought you were a skier,” I told him.

“I’m just a runner,” he said, smiling warmly, “either on snowshoes or off them. You’re a runner, too, aren’t you?”

“I’m just a kid—I’m a kind of faculty brat,” I told him. I’d never thought of myself as any kind of faculty brat—not a legitimate one, anyway. I didn’t think my being the grandchild of a faculty emeritus counted for faculty-brat status—especially not the grandkid of a deluded grammarian.

“A kind of faculty brat?” the exceedingly small snowshoer asked. “What kind of faculty brat are you?” He was too good-natured to be a student; he was definitely a faculty member, but a very unusual one.

I just blurted it all out; I didn’t even know his name, but I told him everything. I had never felt as safe with anyone—not even with Nora, occasionally not with my mother. “I’m the illegitimate son of Rachel Brewster—the unmarried daughter of faculty emeritus Lewis Brewster, my insane grandfather,” I began, thus capturing the little snowshoer’s attention. “Lewis Brewster is a madman emeritus; he has deluded himself into believing he used to be principal of the academy, but he was just an English teacher,” I further explained, barely pausing to breathe. “Granddaddy Lew stopped speaking when he learned my mother was pregnant—with me,” I added, just to be perfectly clear. “According to my cousin, who remembers when the lunatic emeritus used to talk, all he ever said was stuff about punctuation marks.”

“What sort of stuff?” the surprised snowshoer asked. I had the feeling that the part about the punctuation marks was the only aspect of my Brewster family history heretofore unknown to him.

“I don’t know,” I admitted. “I never heard what he said, because he stopped speaking before I was born,” I reminded the snowshoer.

“Oh, yes—you already explained the chronology perfectly,” the tiny man told me. “I’m afraid I’m ‘just an English teacher,’ as you say. I was being overly curious about the punctuation marks.” Here the snowshoer lowered his voice, as if he didn’t want to be overheard; at a glance, I could see we were alone in the parking lot. “In the area of student writing,” the extremely small English teacher said, “some of my colleagues in the department overdo the importance of punctuation.”

“You teach writing?” I asked him.

“I do—that is, to the degree that writing can be taught,” the little snowshoer said. He was disarmingly handsome.

“My grandmother read Moby-Dick aloud to me—when I was ten, eleven, and twelve,” I told him. “When I’m a little older, I would like to try reading it again—to myself.”

“That’s most commendable,” the snowshoer told me. “Perhaps I could suggest another adventure story, also involving a young man—a story that’s a little easier to read to yourself?”

“Yes, please,” I said, but he could see I’d not once taken my eyes off his snowshoes. All the while I’d been babbling, my mind was racing: the bear paws before me were my escape from skiing; the snowshoer had been running on them, and I liked to run.

Uncle Martin and Uncle Johan had tried to get me on cross-country skis. My mom had tried to get me on telemarks. “Skis are skis,” I’d told them. Here before me was an appealing alternative: downhill, uphill, on the flat—on snowshoes, you just ran or walked. With the ski poles, you could go anywhere. On a ski mountain, couldn’t you keep out of the skiers’ way? Couldn’t you go up or down the mountain, off to one side or along the edge of the ski trail?

I’d been talking nonstop to a stranger about my family’s darkest secrets, which everyone in the academy community—even the youngest, smallest member of the faculty—knew. Now I couldn’t speak. The tiny English teacher must have thought I was overcome at the prospect of reading a young man’s adventure story that was easier to read than Moby-Dick, but what knocked the wind out of me were the little man’s bear paws. I foresaw a way not to ski.

“I confess I knew you were the Brewster boy, but I didn’t know about the punctuation marks,” the snowshoer said. He added: “Growing up here, as I know you have, I’m sure you must know how people talk.” I nodded; I still couldn’t speak. The adults I’d grown up with weren’t as forthcoming. Here was an honest adult, notwithstanding a small one; I wanted him to teach me how to snowshoe and how to write, but I didn’t know what to say. When the words came, I couldn’t control what I said.

“My mother is small, like you. She’s not as small as you, and she’s very pretty, but she is rather small,” I blurted out. Consciously, I’d been thinking about his snowshoes, but what came out was all about smallness—his size, my mom’s size, their comparative smallness.

“I’ve seen your mother,” the snowshoer quickly said. “No one seems small to me, but your mom is definitely pretty—she’s very pretty. I hear she’s an outstanding skier.”

“I hate skiing,” I told him. “Every ski season, it’s what my mom does instead of being my mother. She keeps trying to teach me to ski, but I refuse to learn.”

“I grew up in ski towns,” the little snowshoer said. “My parents are skiers. My father taught me to ski, but I was too small. On the chairlift, he never let go of me. The rope tow was too heavy for me; I couldn’t hold on. And there was an equipment problem: a shortage of skis that were short enough, of boots that were small enough, of bindings that adjusted enough. My dad had to shorten my ski poles, thus my poles were custom-made. I didn’t hate skiing, but it was the first thing that made me aware of my smallness as a burden. My mom got me some snowshoes; they were small enough, and you could make the bindings work with a variety of boots. I already had the downsized ski poles. My mom thought all the poling would make me stronger—then I could hold on to the rope tow, she said. But I loved the snowshoeing, and I didn’t have to be around all those bigger skiers. I’m very fond of ski towns,” the little snowshoer told me, “but I’ve stopped skiing. I just run, and I snowshoe.”

“How tall are you?” I asked him. “My mom is five feet two. Lana Turner is only one inch taller.”

“They would tower over me!” the snowshoer declared. His handsomeness was the most grown-up thing about him. “I’m four feet nine—only fifty-seven inches. Too small for Korea; they wouldn’t take me. They didn’t make uniforms that were small enough, they told me—another equipment problem,” the snowshoer added, as if skiing and the military had disappointed him equally. The subject of his smallness as a burden bothered him. “Would you like to try snowshoeing?” he suddenly asked me. There was only one car in the parking lot of the Thompson Cage, a VW Beetle. At the time, did they make anything smaller? As small as a VW Beetle looked to me, I still wondered how the little snowshoer could reach the pedals.

“Yes, please,” I answered him. I absolutely believed I was born to try snowshoeing; I also couldn’t wait to introduce the snowshoer to my mother. I knew I’d met a man I wanted my mom to meet. I wanted to hear her opinion of how handsome he was—“good-looking and small,” I could imagine her saying. Before I met the little snowshoer, I believed that destiny only happened in fiction. Yet here was my destiny, and maybe my mother’s.

The snowshoer was still talking to me, but I could scarcely hear him; his head and upper body had momentarily disappeared. He was just stowing his snowshoes in the backseat of his VW Beetle. He was telling me he had “other pairs of bear paws”; I heard him say something about the “different shapes,” quickly followed by an incomprehensible bit about the boots I would need. “If I have to take you shopping…” the snowshoer began, but I didn’t catch the rest.

When he emerged from the Beetle, and I could hear him again, he was talking about Charles Dickens. Great Expectations was the novel he thought I should read. All of a sudden, it occurred to me, I had my own expectations. How great or small, I didn’t know. Expectations for myself were new to me.

“Can I give you a lift?” the snowshoer asked me.

“Yes, please,” I answered him.

From the Thompson Cage, I could walk home in about eight minutes; I was imagining I could run home faster than the snowshoer could drive me. It had been a few years since one or more of those Brewster girls had warned me: “Don’t accept rides from strangers.”

At thirteen, I was about five feet five; fully grown, I would end up just short of five feet seven. In the parking lot of the Thompson Cage, the top of the snowshoer’s head barely reached my chin. I accepted the little stranger’s offer of a lift home—not only because I wanted to hear more about the aforementioned Great Expectations, which the diminutive snowshoer believed I should read, but because I wanted to see how he managed to drive.

I was already acquainted with the interior of a VW Beetle; it was my mother’s choice for a car, perhaps owing to her smallness, but I had never seen the driver’s seat in such a dramatically forward position. The snowshoer’s knees were almost touching the bottom rim of the steering wheel, and he didn’t actually sit on the seat. He gripped the wheel so tightly that his fanny never touched the seat. As the stick shift for the Beetle was on the floor, between the two front seats, the snowshoer reached behind him to change gears. I immediately thought that my mom would admire the position the snowshoer maintained while driving. It resembled the ninety-degree angle she held for her wall sits. And although my first trip with the snowshoer was a very short drive, the tensile position he tenaciously held was made more impressive by the small English teacher’s recitation of a passage from the opening chapter of Great Expectations. My confusion came from my not understanding he was quoting Charles Dickens. I thought the snowshoer was telling me about his own unhappy childhood, not the graveyard circumstances of a fictional character.

“ ‘As I never saw my father or my mother,’ ” my tiny driver began, reciting from memory, “ ‘and never saw any likeness of either of them (for their days were long before the days of photographs), my first fancies regarding what they were like were unreasonably derived from their tombstones.’ ” This surely meant his parents had died without his knowing or remembering them—before the time of photography! Or so the snowshoer seemed to be telling me.

“I thought your father taught you to ski, and your mom got you some snowshoes,” I interjected. Now, naturally, we were both confused. The snowshoer’s eyes never left the street ahead of us, though he could scarcely see over the steering wheel, which he fiercely gripped in his small but strong-looking hands. I was convinced his mother had been correct in thinking that the ski-poling would make her small son stronger. Yet what was I to make of the snowshoer’s telling me that he’d known his parents only by their tombstones?

We had pulled into the driveway of my grandparents’ Front Street house, where the smallest English teacher in Exeter history stopped the car. He leaned back in his seat as he regarded me. “That was a quotation, Adam,” he told me calmly. “That was the second sentence of the second paragraph of Great Expectations. I thought the circumstances of the young, first-person narrator—namely, never knowing his parents—might resonate with you and what little I know of your somewhat similar circumstances.”

“I see,” I said. The sentence he recited had resonated, all right. I sat in the Beetle while the part about deriving your only knowledge of your parents from their tombstones went on resonating.

There was another car in the driveway—Aunt Abigail’s station wagon. Therefore, I was not surprised to see the querulous faces of both my aunts in a dining-room window; those two biddies went everywhere together. Soon my grandmother’s benign face appeared in an adjacent window. I could imagine what they were thinking. Who is bringing our Adam home? Who is that weird little man? However, Exeter being Exeter, my gossipy aunts would have known all about the handsome but miniature snowshoer. Aunt Abigail and Aunt Martha had made it their business to know everything about everyone.

I could see that the obstacle presented by Aunt Abigail’s station wagon was bothering the little snowshoer. There was nowhere to turn around in the driveway; he would have to back up into Front Street.

“Backing up could have become a sticking point in my driving test,” the snowshoer was saying, “but I somehow managed.” He adjusted his rearview mirror, twice; he kept glancing in his side-view mirror, as if he might have missed something.

Exeter being Exeter, the snowshoer not only knew I was “the Brewster boy”; he knew my first name, too—he’d called me “Adam.” I was about to ask him his name, but he was rummaging through the Beetle’s glove compartment, where he found and handed to me a tattered-looking paperback of Great Expectations.

“Forgive the underlinings, all the marked passages—it’s my teacher’s copy,” the snowshoer said.

“All the better, I’m sure,” I told him. It struck me as an unlikely coincidence: the very novel he thought I should read just happened to be waiting for me in the glove compartment of his car. Then the snowshoer explained how he never drove anywhere in the Beetle without what he called “an emergency novel.”

“If I drive off the road and am lying upside down in a ditch, unable to move my legs or get out of the car, I want to have something good to read—an emergency novel,” Exeter’s smallest English teacher explained.

I thanked him, and got out of the car. I hope I was sufficiently sensitive to the little snowshoer’s fear of backing up; I made a point of not watching him back out of the driveway. Besides, I couldn’t wait to start reading Charles Dickens. At thirteen, I lacked the experience or the suffering to regret anything I’d done. No one close to me had died—not yet. No encounters or interactions with ghosts—not yet. As for Great Expectations, I couldn’t imagine how a story that begins in a graveyard—about a lonely boy who is accosted by an escaped convict “among the graves”—would become my emergency novel.