The Last Chairlift

13. THE SNOWSHOER KISS

We meet people who change our lives—in my case, only a few. The little snowshoer was the first person I met who changed my life. The snowshoeing was an acceptable substitute for my learning to ski. My mom accepted snowshoeing, but she had her opinions: snowshoers should stay out of the way of skiers; snowshoers weren’t always welcome on ski mountains. From the start, my mother and the snowshoer could talk to each other on this subject—for hours.

It was stupefying to listen to them, but they were animated about where and when—on which ski mountains, at what hours—snowshoeing was allowed. Some ski areas let you snowshoe only when the lifts weren’t running, when no skiers were on the mountain.

As for the adversarial relationship trail groomers sometimes have with snowshoers, Molly wasn’t the only snowcat driver who almost ran over one. Mr. Barlow and my mom were in agreement: no snowshoeing when the snowcats are on the mountain. “Especially not when the night groomers are working,” the snowshoer said. In the ski towns he’d grown up in, he had learned to be politic. He’d talked to the trail groomers, the ski patrollers, and the lift operators; he’d occasionally bought lift tickets. “Some ski places make you take the lift up and down. You snowshoe above the tree line, where you’re more visible,” the little English teacher said.

While my mother believed that beginner or intermediate ski trails were the safest for snowshoers, because the skiers didn’t ski as fast on those trails as they did on the expert runs, she also said that the snowshoers would still get in the way of skiers—even if the snowshoers stayed to the side of the piste. “Make the snowshoers stay off-piste, on ungroomed trails—where the climbers and hikers and some telemarkers go,” my mom said.

In one of Elliot Barlow’s conversations with my mother, concerning what was allowed or not allowed at ski resorts, I learned that Nora had been barred from skiing at Cranmore Mountain. Nora hadn’t told me; I assumed she’d stopped coming to Cranmore because she’d had it with the girly-girl blondes, and Nora was old enough to make her own decisions.

“Nora hurt too many people,” my mom told Mr. Barlow and me. “The ski patrol barred her indefinitely.”

“I’ve never heard of a mountain barring anyone indefinitely!” Elliot Barlow cried. “Not even in Austria.”

To my mother, the most enchanting of the ski towns Elliot had grown up in were Austrian: Lech, in the Vorarlberg, and St. Anton and St. Christoph in the Tyrolean Alps. Little Ray revered the Arlberg. She spoke of these three mountain villages and ski destinations in hushed tones, by their full and sacred-sounding names: Lech am Arlberg, St. Anton am Arlberg, St. Christoph am Arlberg. When the little English teacher complimented her pronunciation, my mom admitted that Uncle Johan had helped her with the German.

It is strange to be a teenager before you ever see your mother flirt with someone. Additionally, it was awkward that my mom’s first meeting with the snowshoer took place in my grandmother’s house. It was unheard of for my mother to have made the long drive from Stowe at the height of ski season, in early February. She came home immediately. Nana did her best, but she failed to keep my busybody aunts away.

“Ray should be forewarned of the fairy factor,” Aunt Abigail had insisted to my grandmother.

“Mr. Barlow is too small to be believed,” Aunt Martha chimed in.

“Girls, girls—let Little Ray and Mr. Barlow have some privacy, please,” Nana said to the sexually vigilant harpies.

Ah, well—privacy with those Brewster girls was a one-way street. There were the things they wanted you to know; there were the things they kept from you. Besides, my mom and Elliot Barlow weren’t afforded much privacy by me—not on the occasion of their first meeting, what my mother would later call her “one and only blind date.” Add to the mix the random intrusions of Grandaddy Lew. Even deluded, the mustache-chewing emeritus possibly sensed it was highly irregular to see Little Ray at home in the ski season.

As for the enraptured conversation my mom was having with the little snowshoer, Grandaddy Lew seemed both baffled and outraged by it. The emeritus might have imagined that Elliot Barlow was another illegitimate child Little Ray had given birth to, despite Elliot’s repeated efforts to put the delusional mustache-biter at ease.

At each sighting of the indignant-looking emeritus—either peering into or slinking through the living room—Mr. Barlow would bounce to his feet and cry out: “Good afternoon, Principal Brewster!” Thereupon, the affronted old fool would scurry away.

While my grandmother was endeavoring to keep my aunts contained in the kitchen, there were periodic breakouts. Aunt Abigail offering stale crackers and a putrid-smelling cheese; Aunt Martha precariously carrying a decanter of sherry (with very small glasses, the size of eyecups) on a silver tray. I believe it was the same cheese we’d had at Thanksgiving. Only the emeritus ever had the sherry.

“All I drink is beer, and just a little,” my mother said to Elliot, as if my aunts had already left the living room or had never intruded.

“I’m just a beer drinker, too,” Elliot told her. “Sometimes I can’t finish the first one.”

“Oh, we’re perfect for each other—we could share one beer!” my mom said, batting her eyelashes.

My aunts knew Little Ray was flirting. “Keep your feet on the floor and your hands to yourselves, you two!” Aunt Abigail said to them.

“Keep your knees together, Rachel—remember Adam!” Aunt Martha chimed in. Even I had noticed that my mother was attractively dressed. It was unlike her to pay such close attention to her clothes. Perhaps the tight sweater had been borrowed for the occasion; it might have belonged to one of the girl jocks Little Ray was living with. It was also a surprise not to see my mom in jeans or sweatpants in the winter months. The skirt and the tights were most becoming—like the sweater, borrowed but fetching. That February afternoon in 1955, when my mom and the little snowshoer were first talking about where he’d lived in Austria, I had no doubt Little Ray was flirting with Elliot Barlow. Now I’m not so sure. Hadn’t my mother always idolized Austria, not least the Arlberg? Maybe my mom was flirting with the whimsical notion of being there herself. What if the flirtation was all about her imagining herself in Lech and St. Anton and St. Christoph, thus contradicting her previously expressed dislike of foreignness?

As for Charles Dickens and his imagining a pitiless firmament—the vast and distant dome of the uncaring heavens, of no help to mankind—well, Little Ray wasn’t a reader. Elliot’s love of literature didn’t interest her, nor did she give a hoot that my grandmother was impressed by Elliot’s parents. “The Barlows are a fine old Bostonian family,” Nana had said. What further impressed Mildred Brewster was that Elliot’s parents had been college sweethearts—they’d met when he was at Harvard and she at Radcliffe.

“Oh, I get it—the Barlows were sweethearts at those colleges,” Nora would later comment. In Nora’s view, those status-conscious Brewster girls—my mother excepted—were prone to have orgasms over the Harvard-Radcliffe connection. “They get hard-ons for higher education,” Nora said. Nora was entitled to her bitterness toward an elite education. Nora never forgot: she’d been a faculty brat at Exeter when Exeter was a boys-only school.

My mom wasn’t inclined to higher-education hard-ons; she didn’t have an orgasm over the Barlows’ Harvard-Radcliffe connection, nor did she give a hoot that Elliot came from a highfalutin bunch of Bostonians. What mattered to my mother was that the snowshoer was a virtual Austrian.

“You’re practically an Österreicher!” my mom told Elliot, breathlessly—showing off her German accent. Her breathlessness was possibly the result of Little Ray’s imagining herself skiing at high altitude, which she would have been in Lech, or St. Anton, or St. Christoph—especially in St. Christoph. Maybe my mother was feeling the effects of high altitude at the very idea that the snowshoer had been born in St. Anton, where Hannes Schneider had been a ski guide before the First World War.

Schneider had served as a ski instructor for the Austrian army. After the war, he returned to the Tyrol, starting a ski school in St. Anton, where he perfected his method of instruction—the Arlberg technique.

John and Sarah Barlow had been parents with a plan, even as college sweethearts. The European history and the German they’d studied at Harvard and Radcliffe were as purposeful as Sarah’s choosing to get pregnant in St. Anton and have her baby at altitude. Just as she thought all the ski-poling would make her little snowshoer stronger, Sarah Barlow believed she could acclimate her child to altitude if she went through gestation above four thousand feet.

“I love your mother for wanting you to be born acclimated to altitude,” my mom earnestly declared to the snowshoer, when he told her this story. She suddenly seized one of his small hands in both of hers, holding it to her left breast. Or so it appeared to me, and to Elliot Barlow. “Feel my heart—how it’s beating!” Little Ray cried. “It’s as if I’m at altitude.”

“I can certainly feel something,” the little English teacher said. In retrospect, I would guess that Elliot had never felt a woman’s heart beating above her breast.

I was most impressed that Elliot’s parents had planned to be writers—that is, the writing part of their plan was more impressive to me than their intention to live in Austrian ski towns because they loved to ski.

“Well, that’s who my parents are—they plan everything,” the snowshoer said, with barely noticeable exasperation. Even the novels the Barlows wrote were meticulously planned. Between the wars—“in the interwar period,” as Elliot Barlow spoke of it—his parents were busily plotting the crime and espionage novels they would write together. They’d received “some graduate-level diplomatic schooling,” Elliot said—“whatever Foreign Service training was standard at the time,” was the way the little English teacher put it. It was the year Little Ray was born, 1922, when the U.S. Department of State sent the young Mr. and Mrs. Barlow to Germany—first to Berlin, albeit briefly, then to Weimar.

Elliot said his parents had been appointed to Vienna in 1924, only three years after U.S. diplomatic relations with Austria were resumed. Sarah and John Barlow were attached to the office of the chargé d’affaires. The U.S. Embassy had been downgraded to a legation; the ambassador was then an envoy. Not that this lower rank mattered at all to his parents, the little snowshoer maintained. The Barlows acted as liaison officers between the U.S. chargé d’affaires and the Kriminalpolizei, the criminal-investigation department of the Austrian police in Vienna. The Barlows’ training and experience in the Foreign Service—and, of course, their German—would be useful to them as writers of international intrigue.

They were already expert skiers. By the ski season of 1927–28, when the Barlows arrived in St. Anton am Arlberg, Hannes Schneider had appeared in seven films—he was already famous—and John and Susan Barlow would become devotees of his ski school. The Barlows were determinedly writing their first husband-and-wife novel. Little Elliot, who would be born in St. Anton in 1929, was also a work in progress.

Ten years later, in 1939, Hannes Schneider would move his ski school to Cranmore Mountain in North Conway, New Hampshire. Prior to his leaving Austria, soon after the Anschluss, he’d run afoul of the Nazis and had spent time in jail. The Barlows left St. Anton in March 1938, immediately following the annexation of Austria by Nazi Germany, but their devotion to Hannes Schneider and the Arlberg was absolute. For the war years, Elliot and his parents lived in North Conway. When the little snowshoer started school in New Hampshire at nine, his German was better than his English. In St. Anton, he’d always been in a German-speaking school.

“We might have met in North Conway, when I was skiing at Cranmore!” my mother exclaimed to Elliot.

“But I was snowshoeing,” the snowshoer reminded her, “and you wouldn’t have noticed me. You were older,” Elliot softly said.

“I would certainly have noticed you!” my mom declared.

I knew what the snowshoer meant: when he was nine, Little Ray was sixteen. When the war ended, Elliot was only sixteen; he’d gone back to Austria with his parents. Why would a pretty young woman in her twenties pay any attention to a kid? Needless to say, Elliot Barlow must have been an extremely small kid.

“I would have noticed anyone as handsome as you,” my mother told the snowshoer, “no matter what age you were.”

“No matter how small I was?” Elliot asked her.

Once again my mother clasped the snowshoer’s hand, holding it to her heart—to her breast. “Say small again,” she told him.

“Small,” he said—so softly that I almost couldn’t hear him.

“Feel it?” my mom asked him. I saw the snowshoer shudder. He must have felt her heart race. “Small really gets to me, Elliot—like altitude,” Little Ray whispered.

If I hadn’t been in the living room with them, would they have had sex then and there? I doubt it. That was when Uncle Martin and Uncle Johan barged in, lugging bottles of wine and a case of beer; their eternal kidding around marked the end of what passed for privacy between my mother and the little English teacher.

“Bier, Bier—das Bier ist hier!” Johan sang in German. “Beer, beer—the beer is here!” he repeated in English. Uncle Johan loved to speak German with Elliot. Johan thought the snowshoer’s Austrian accent was hysterically funny. Uncle Johan thought all Austrian accents were comedies.

To Johan’s credit, he was a reader, albeit not a very discerning one. His love of all things German had led him to read the John and Sarah Barlow crime and espionage novels. “Die besten Kriminalromane! Das Ehepaar des modernen Spionageromans! The best crime novels! The married couple of the modern espionage novel!” Uncle Johan proclaimed.

I could tell that the little English teacher had been embarrassed by this hyperbole before, in German and in English, although the Barlows’ first two novels weren’t translated and published in German until after the Second World War. After they were translated, the Barlows’ historical and political thrillers had bigger sales and a more literary reputation in the German language than they enjoyed in English.

Uncle Martin and Uncle Johan couldn’t agree exactly where and when they’d read the Barlows’ first novel, which they’d read in English. My uncles were Tenth Mountain Division men. Like Hannes Schneider, they’d helped train the U.S. Army mountain troops, in which Schneider’s son Herbert had served.

“Supper is finished!” my grandmother confusingly announced. Nana made it sound as if supper had already been eaten, and we’d all missed it.

Martin and Johan were now in disagreement concerning their whereabouts when they’d both read the Barlows’ second contribution to Kriminalliteratur—Uncle Johan’s show-off German for the Barlows’ spy-noir genre.

The Vinter brothers had been with the First Battalion of the Eighty-seventh Mountain Infantry Regiment at Fort Lewis, Washington, in November 1941, but they’d moved with the First and Second Battalions of the Eighty-seventh to Camp Hale, Colorado, in December 1942. No one was interested in where or when they’d read the Barlows’ first two thrillers. I had a hard time imagining how Uncle Martin and Uncle Johan had trained the troops, because my uncles couldn’t agree which regiment was where when—or how old they were when the Eighty-seventh was here, or the Eighty-fifth was there.

“In February ’44, when the Eighty-seventh returned to Camp Hale…” Uncle Martin began, and then stopped, having lost his train of thought.

“The Eighty-fifth Mountain Infantry Regiment was activated at Camp Hale in July ’43…” Uncle Johan interrupted—whereupon he paused, the way ahead unclear.

“We were already too old!” Uncle Martin meaninglessly cried out. “I was thirty-eight, Johan thirty-six.” He stopped.

“The Eighty-fifth and the Eighty-seventh embarked together, from Hampton Roads in January ’45—bound for Naples,” Uncle Johan said, rather wistfully.

“I was forty, Johan thirty-eight,” Uncle Martin said, his voice trailing away.

What my grandmother meant was that supper was ready to eat. Only the cooking of it was finished. As usual, it was an overcooked casserole of unidentifiable ingredients; it was mortally finished, a casserole cooked into submission. Also finished was what remained of my aunts’ patience with my uncles’ lack of clarity concerning their wartime memories. Aunt Abigail suspected too much beer-drinking was the cause—“Too much fun!” Aunt Martha chimed in.

“Too much gallivanting around!” Aunt Abigail cried, when we were seated at the dining-room table.

“It’s a wonder you had time to read!” Aunt Martha chimed in.

Warfare was a young man’s game, in my aunts’ opinion. My uncles were thirty-six and thirty-four when they started training the mountain troops. Nora and Henrik were six and four, respectively. When the Eighty-fifth and the Eighty-seventh embarked for Italy—from Virginia, in January 1945—Uncle Martin and Uncle Johan went home to their wives and children.

“You were no spring chickens!” Aunt Abigail declared. “And you had families—you shouldn’t have been gallivanting around!”

“You were having too much fun,” Aunt Martha chimed in.

“Girls, girls,” my grandmother said. My mom gave my hand a quick squeeze under the table. I could tell the word fun had affected her, if not as powerfully as altitude.

Elliot Barlow was a brave little man. He tried to describe the plot of The Kiss in Düsseldorf, the first of his parents’ Nazi-era novels. It was a valiant effort: not to make his parents sound like hacks; not to call their novels potboilers; not to be outmaneuvered by my uncles’ interruptions. The intrepid snowshoer began, unwisely, with the eponymous kiss. Two SA men are seen kissing each other during Hitler’s speech in Düsseldorf in 1932.

“A two-and-a-half-hour speech—what a kiss!” Uncle Martin declared.

“The SA stands for Sturmabteilung—the Nazi storm troopers,” Uncle Johan, ever the German teacher, explained.

“Ernst Röhm and Rudolf Hess were in the SA,” Uncle Martin offered. “Röhm and Hess were Freikorps guys originally, before they were Nazis—Martin Bormann was a Freikorps guy, too.”

“Right-wing nationalists, they were the bunch behind the stab-in-the-back legend,” Uncle Johan interjected. “Die Dolchstosslegende!” he cried, causing the startled emeritus to lose control of his knife and fork. Like everyone else, Grandaddy Lew hadn’t really been eating. He’d been picking through his casserole, searching in vain for something recognizable.

My mother was seated between Elliot Barlow and me. Under the table, I could see she’d taken his small hand and was holding it in her lap. They’d scarcely touched the beer they were sharing—their first one.

Whether the hand-holding had distracted the snowshoer, or his grasp of The Kiss in Düsseldorf had slipped away, Elliot suddenly said: “One of the SA men seen kissing during Hitler’s speech in Düsseldorf is murdered. His killer is alleged to be the SA man who kissed him. Soon other Nazi storm troopers are found murdered, but they never find the kissing killer—that’s the plot.”

“Ernst Röhm was co-founder and a leader of the Sturmabteilung,” Uncle Johan jumped in. “Röhm’s homosexuality was well known.”

“Hitler had Röhm killed because Röhm was a homosexual,” Uncle Martin emphatically stated.

“Röhm had fought on the Western Front—he was awarded an Iron Cross,” Uncle Johan explained.

“Röhm was wounded—he lost a piece of his nasal bone!” Uncle Martin wanted everyone to know.

“No nasal bones—not when we’re eating!” Aunt Abigail ordered.

“Or even when we’re not eating!” Aunt Martha chimed in. My aunts’ interest in the conversation had peaked when the kissing men were mentioned, and when the words homosexuality and homosexual were used. Each occasion caused Aunt Abigail and Aunt Martha to stare intently at the little English teacher.

“As for the plots of my parents’ Nazi-era novels, like their Cold War novels…” Elliot Barlow quietly persisted. Then he paused. Everyone’s attention was drawn to the childlike behavior of the unfulfilled emeritus. He was not only eating voraciously; he was attempting to feed himself with a serving spoon, which was too big for his mouth. “The plots are all the same,” Elliot now resumed. “The killer is never caught. It helps that he’s killing bad people—no one’s trying very hard to catch him. Cynical characters, bleak nonendings,” the snowshoer concluded; his voice petered out. His heart wasn’t in it, and what was the point?

Martin and Johan were poised to interrupt him—Johan, in two languages. The hand-holding under the table had not convinced Abigail and Martha that Elliot Barlow was heterosexually inclined. My grandmother was an old-fashioned literary snob; Nana had never finished a single one of Simenon’s novels—she said she’d tried. She didn’t care for Eric Ambler, either. She claimed she’d never heard of Patricia Highsmith, but Nana had liked the Hitchcock film (Strangers on a Train) adapted from Highsmith’s first novel. It wouldn’t have mattered to my grandmother to hear that Patricia Highsmith, who was born in Texas, was better published and more widely read in German than in English, or that Elliot Barlow’s parents had made their living from murder novels.

“Mord, mehr Morde, noch mehr Morde!” Uncle Johan interjected, which he immediately translated into English, thus giving me an insightful glimpse of his repetitious classroom technique. “Murder, more murders, still more murders! The Germans take murder more seriously than we do—I mean, as literature,” Uncle Johan explained.

“I want to be completely honest with you,” the snowshoer blurted out, speaking directly to my mother and looking only at her.

“Yes, I feel the same way about you!” my mom didn’t hesitate to tell him, in her breathless fashion. My aunts had stopped breathing; they were praying for a confession of pederasty from the little English teacher. Even my uncles stopped talking. By the way Elliot Barlow suddenly sat bolt upright at the table, I could tell my mother must have grabbed his knee or his thigh. I’d missed seeing when they finished the first and second beers they’d been sharing—now I saw they had halfway finished their third.

“I love my parents—their writing, not so much,” Elliot earnestly said. “Their writing never exceeds the limitation of its genre, no matter what the Germans call Literatur; their writing is formulaic noir, but I love my parents nonetheless. I love them anyway.” Mr. Barlow’s eyes were locked on my mom’s throughout his heartfelt proclamation. While this was arguably not the declaration of love Little Ray had hoped to hear, she managed to mask her disappointment with an unfollowable tangent—a tactic familiar to me but baffling to Elliot, who had no previous experience with my mom’s method of changing the subject (again and again) until she ended up with the conversation she’d wanted to have in the first place.

Little Ray took the snowshoer’s face in her hands, pulling him closer. “Look at me,” she commanded him. “I would rather have altitude sickness than read anything. Oxygen deficiency is more interesting than writing—at least you feel something!” my mother cried. “Headache, nausea, swelling of the brain, even high-altitude flatulence—at least you can feel them!”

“All you can do is avoid alcohol and drink a lot of water,” Elliot told her with the utmost seriousness. “I find that eating dried apricots sometimes helps,” he added.

“Dried apricots make me fart more!” my mom cried.

“I meant that the apricots help with other symptoms of altitude sickness,” the little English teacher mumbled.

“I’ve heard that children born at altitude are abnormally small,” Aunt Abigail interjected.

“Maybe they just don’t develop,” Aunt Martha chimed in.

“My mother heard this, too,” Elliot calmly replied. “But she was also told that this was an old wives’ tale. And my birth weight was almost normal, though I was undersize.” My mom had not let go of his face. Out of customary politeness, Elliot had tried to look at my aunts when he spoke to them, but my mother wouldn’t let him turn his face away from her.

“Listen to me,” Little Ray said to the snowshoer. “You’re the handsomest man I’ve ever sat this close to. And you know what small does to me,” she said in her huskiest voice. Her lips almost touched Elliot’s ear. In his wildest dreams, he might have imagined she was going to kiss him. That was when my mom loudly said: “No man can be small enough for me, Elliot—or so I thought, before I met you.”

Even to me—at thirteen, a sexually inexperienced boy—it was shocking to hear the smallness of the snowshoer expressed in these terms, in the small enough for me way. I hoped no one would ask her to explain. I wished for an irrefutable ending.

That was Little Ray’s intention: to make this point, to end exactly here. Like her other tangents, this had been no tangent at all. Didn’t she begin by holding the snowshoer’s face in her hands? She knew all along she was going to kiss him.

It was a kiss I should have seen coming, but I didn’t—no one saw it coming, except my mother. The lawlessness of the kiss made it unwatchable. Everyone but Elliot looked away. It was a kiss you wished someone had given you. The lawlessness of the kiss made you want it. I wanted someone to kiss me like that.