The Last Chairlift

14. A JUDGMENT CALL

If we hadn’t turned away from the snowshoer kiss, we might not have noticed that the infantile emeritus was choking. At the periphery of my fixation on my mom’s interactions with the snowshoer, I had seen my grandmother wrestle the serving spoon away from Granddaddy Lew. For several months now, I’d been aware of the periodic appearances of the diaper-service truck in the driveway; the regressive emeritus was turning into a two-year-old. His table manners weren’t alone in going backward. The never-a-headmaster had reverted to stuffing his face and shitting in his diapers.

The historic kiss might have gone on forever, but my grandmother had pushed Granddaddy Lew’s forehead to the table; standing behind his chair, she’d begun to hit him between his shoulder blades. The blows to the back of the choking emeritus were resounding.

Showing no signs of oxygen deprivation or dizziness, the snowshoer quickly recovered from the kiss. “If that doesn’t work, Mrs. Brewster, I know another thing you can try,” Elliot Barlow said to my grandmother, as he stepped behind the slumping emeritus. With unexpected strength, the little English teacher clasped his hands above the belly button of the skinny emeritus, jerking him to a sitting position, ramrod straight in his chair. If the never-a-headmaster had been standing, Elliot wouldn’t have been tall enough to exert the diagonally upward pressure on the bottom of Principal Brewster’s diaphragm. These were abdominal thrusts, exerting pressure on whatever was lodged in the trachea of the toddler emeritus—with a little luck, perhaps expelling it.

“We’ll see,” the snowshoer said, between thrusts. “I saw a ski instructor in the St. Anton ski school do this, to dislodge some bratwurst—or that’s what it looked like, when it came out.”

For years, my mother would credit Hannes Schneider with this lifesaving technique—“a kind of Heimlich maneuver before Heimlich,” Little Ray liked to call it. Elliot Barlow never made this claim; it was just a trick some young ski instructor at St. Anton happened to know. Elliot would later express his doubts about the Heimlich maneuver. “Personally, I like to start with back slaps—then try the abdominal thrusts, then pound on the choker’s chest. I don’t count on the first thing working,” the little English teacher said.

What Elliot Barlow demonstrated that day was himself as a man of action; even though he didn’t initiate the unwatchable kiss, Mr. Barlow got the job done. He’d attracted my mom; with the probable exception of the near-to-death emeritus, no one at the dining-room table would ever forget how Little Ray had kissed the snowshoer. And Elliot Barlow saved the regressor emeritus from choking. Granddaddy Lew would live to die another day.

A great gob of food was expectorated onto the dining-room table. What the infant emeritus had choked on was no more identifiable than it had been before he’d tried to eat it.

“It looks like a potato, but it’s probably the pork,” Aunt Abigail said. It did not look like a potato; it resembled the first two phalanges of an adult index finger, but it had to be the pork.

In the throes of asphyxiation, the baby emeritus had filled his diaper; in shame, he lowered his head and pouted as Nana led him out of the dining room.

“When was one of you going to tell me about the diaper service?” my mother asked no one in particular, but she was looking straight at her sisters. “Does anyone in this family ever say what’s going on?”

“You should talk, Rachel—you of all people!” Aunt Abigail said.

“People in glass houses shouldn’t you-know-what, Ray,” Aunt Martha chimed in.

Uncharacteristically, my uncles had nothing to say. The kiss they’d seen and couldn’t watch was not a kiss anyone had bestowed on them—not even in their Tenth Mountain Division days, when they were alleged to be gallivanting around.

Best of all, my mom and the little English teacher were knocking back the beer and making plans to see each other again. It just so happened that the academy’s March break overlapped with mine. “I’ll be teaching in the ski school at Cranmore during Adam’s March break and yours,” my mother was saying to the snowshoer. “Maybe you and Adam can meet me in North Conway!” she said excitedly.

“If we have to, we can do something different with the sleeping arrangements,” Aunt Abigail informed them, sighing.

“We can put Mr. Barlow and Adam with Martin and Johan, in the boys’ bunk room,” Aunt Martha chimed in. “Then Abigail and I can sleep with you, Rachel.”

“Don’t be ridiculous,” Little Ray told them. “Elliot knows people in North Conway—Elliot and Adam and I don’t have to stay with you.”

“My parents know people who have an inn—the innkeepers are European, but the inn is very nice,” the snowshoer tried to reassure Aunt Abigail and Aunt Martha. On the subject of my mom’s sleeping arrangements, it was clear there was no reassuring my aunts. “When I was at Harvard, I took the ski train from North Station almost every winter weekend. For the snowshoeing,” Elliot added; he kept trying. “I did my homework on the train—the same train that stops in Exeter,” he said. “I knew some Exeter boys at Harvard; they were boys who’d been teased when they were in school here. One of them had been tormented,” the snowshoer added. “When the ski train stopped in Exeter, it made me consider that I might teach here one day,” Elliot continued. “I knew I could help the boys who were teased—especially the tormented ones,” he told us.

My mother stood up from the table, a little unsteadily. She hugged Elliot Barlow, pressing his face to her breasts.

“You wonderful man—I hope you were never tormented!” Little Ray cried, smothering him.

Considering how tenaciously my mom hugged the little English teacher, and the obstacle to his speech and breathing presented by her breasts, he managed to allay her fears. “No, no—I was never tormented, just teased,” Elliot told her.

Not wanting to see more wanton displays of affection from my mother, Aunt Abigail and Aunt Martha were busily clearing the table and breathing heavily; their tasks included the stabbing and brisk removal of the partial index finger with a fork.

“Noch ein Bier?” Uncle Johan ambiguously asked the snowshoer or my mom; Johan had already opened another bottle, which he offered to them. The four empties stood as silently judgmental as sentinels between their place mats. My aunts had already removed their beer glasses from the table.

“Yeah, why not?” my mother said, in her girl-jock way, releasing Elliot from her embrace. She was taking a long swig from the fresh bottle when my aunts marched into the dining room from the kitchen; they were carrying clean plates and the dessert, which was always a kind of fruit pie, strangely missing half the pie part. Nana didn’t overreach in the kitchen. My grandmother’s desserts were better than the rest of her meals, notwithstanding that there was no name for them. No name for it, I should say—there was only one.

It was a deep-dish fruit dessert with a thick bottom crust, and no crust on top. “You can’t call it a cobbler,” Aunt Abigail insisted, “because a cobbler has a thick top crust.”

“It’s more like a pie than a cake, but sometimes it’s vice versa. You never know how the bottom crust will turn out—it’s usually burnt,” Aunt Martha chimed in.

My grandmother admitted she never made the bottom crust the same way twice; her being a reader had not carried over to her chores in the kitchen, where she wrote nothing down and there were no cookbooks. The bottom crust was flour and sugar and butter, in unspecified amounts and proportions, and Nana threw in some vanilla or rum—or the sherry no one but the infant emeritus drank. Now, since Granddaddy Lew was reliving his infancy, my grandmother hid the sherry from him.

All Little Ray ever said about the unnameable dessert was that the burnt part tasted better with vanilla ice cream on it. She said this to the snowshoer, offering him a swig from the bottle they were sharing. Aunt Abigail, who’d been counting the bottles, chose this moment to say: “Five beers! That’s a lot for you, Ray.”

“We’ve been sharing the beer—I’ve had two and a half,” my mom told her.

“That’s still over your quota, Rachel,” Aunt Martha chimed in. “That might explain all the kissing.”

“It doesn’t matter where you stay in North Conway, Rachel—you should carefully consider the sleeping arrangements,” Aunt Abigail said.

“The sleeping arrangements and the kissing!” Aunt Martha chimed in.

“I can make my own sleeping arrangements,” my mother told them. My aunts gave me their most redoubtable look. I felt incriminated, as if I were positive proof of what came of Little Ray’s making her own sleeping arrangements.

By the time my grandmother returned to the dining room, no one was talking. We were silently eating the deep-dish blueberry thing, with vanilla ice cream on the burnt bottom crust. “Girls, girls,” my grandmother admonished her daughters. Nana didn’t need to hear them to know when they’d been fighting.

My grandmother looked tired and defeated. Real life was not as sensibly or purposely constructed as one of her favorite novels. Mildred Brewster loved all the foreshadowing in Melville and Dickens. She’d not foreseen she would be changing her damaged husband’s diapers, and putting him to bed, when there was intelligent company for supper and the unnameable but edible dessert was on the table. On top of that, her children were at war with one another.

“I’m so sorry to have missed a single minute of your company, Mr. Barlow,” my grandmother announced. “I was looking forward to talking about books with you.”

“I wish someone had read Moby-Dick aloud to me, Mrs. Brewster,” the snowshoer replied. “I might have paid closer attention and not found it such hard going. I envy Adam his experience.”

“No one envies Adam!” Aunt Abigail cried.

“Look how he wrings his little hands!” Aunt Martha chimed in, for good measure. It was evident to my aunts that neither the unexplained indiscretion of my birth nor the interminable exercise of my enduring Moby-Dick out loud had led to a single observable virtue in my character or accomplishments. Not yet.

“ ‘It is a most miserable thing to feel ashamed of home,’ ” my grandmother suddenly said, as if she’d been reading my mind. It was unclear if Nana was speaking to me or to all of us, but I felt certain her remark was meant for me to hear. She’d exposed what I was thinking.

It was absolutely clear that my aunts and uncles were leaving; their mode of departure was familiar to me. My aunts, who saw themselves as pillars of moral superiority, were leaving in a huff; my uncles, in their dickless fashion, were sheepishly following. This had happened before—not infrequently, when my aunts’ righteous indignation was aroused by their contemplation of my mother’s sleeping arrangements.

It is a most miserable thing to feel ashamed of home—well, yes, it is. But my mother didn’t make me feel ashamed. Not what I knew, and didn’t know, about her sleeping arrangements—not even the way she’d kissed the snowshoer. My mom never made me feel ashamed.

As for the regressor emeritus, I couldn’t blame him for losing his marbles; I didn’t hold him accountable for reverting to his diaper days. That can happen to any of us; that Granddaddy Lew was shitting in his diapers only made me feel sorry for him and my grandmother. I regret thinking of him as a diaper man.

What made me feel ashamed was my aunts’ intractable hatred of the snowshoer. I was ashamed of them—of their obdurate disapproval of my mother, of their steadfast disappointment in me. In Aunt Abigail’s and Aunt Martha’s eyes, I was the unwholesome offspring of my mom’s unsavory sleeping arrangements.

To a lesser degree, I was also ashamed of my uncles—not of their aesthetic insensitivity, and not of their overall boorishness. Uncle Martin and Uncle Johan were fun-loving goofs, they were good-hearted men; they genuinely tried to boost my spirits and my self-esteem, and they truly liked the snowshoer. What made me ashamed of them was their cowardice; when my aunts were on their moralistic warpath, Uncle Martin and Uncle Johan didn’t stand up to them.

“We can give you a ride, Mr. Barlow!” Aunt Abigail called from the front hall. Before this loud summons, those of us who’d remained at the dining-room table had heard only the grunting and stomping sounds of my aunts and uncles putting on their boots.

“It’s snowing, Mr. Barlow!” Aunt Martha chimed in—as if snow in New Hampshire, in February, were an aberration.

“He’s a snowshoer,” I heard Uncle Martin quietly say.

“I think he likes the snow, Martha,” Uncle Johan meekly added.

“Mr. Barlow didn’t bring his snowshoes, did he?” we could all hear Aunt Abigail ask my uncles.

“Last chance, Mr. Barlow!” Aunt Martha chimed in.

“No, thank you!” the little English teacher called. “I like walking in the snow.”

“He’s staying, Martha!” my mother shouted. “And Adam and I are sleeping together tonight—in his room, in the attic, in the same bed! Under the skylight, where we can see the snow fall. In the same bed, Abigail!” my mom yelled.

“Maybe Adam wrings his hands because he’s too old to sleep in the same bed with you, Rachel!” Abigail called.

After that, there was more boot-stomping in the front hall—followed by the sound of the front door opening and slamming shut—while my mother told Elliot Barlow (in embarrassing detail) that she and I still liked to sleep together in the same bed, and that she hoped we always would like it.

“Girls, girls,” my grandmother muttered, though only one of her girls could hear her.

“It’s late—I should be going,” the snowshoer reluctantly said.

“Make sure they’re out of the driveway before you go, or they’ll run over you,” my mom told him; she held his arm with both her hands. Little Ray wouldn’t let him leave—not when my aunts might see him go.

“ ‘It is a most miserable thing to feel ashamed of home,’ ” Nana said again, as if—under the circumstances—it bore repeating. “Not a bad way to begin a chapter, is it, Mr. Barlow?” my grandmother asked.

“Chapter Fourteen, I believe,” Elliot said. That was when I realized my grandmother had been quoting from Great Expectations.

“ ‘Heaven knows we need never be ashamed of our tears, for they are rain upon the blinding dust of earth, overlying our hard hearts,’ ” Nana now recited to us, as if she were praying.

“What a memory you have, Mrs. Brewster,” the snowshoer complimented her. “That’s near the end of the first stage of Pip’s expectations—Chapter Nineteen, I believe.”

“You’ve marked the passages I most liked when I first read them—you’ve made me want to read Dickens again,” my grandmother told him.

“Oh, I see—you’re talking about a book,” my mother said, with sudden dismay. “If you’re going to talk about books, I’ll do the dishes.”

I went with her to the kitchen, where we did the dishes together—where we could whisper about the snowshoer without our being heard in the dining room. When we wanted to listen to what Nana and Elliot Barlow had to say about the world of books, we could hear them from the kitchen. Not that we stopped whispering long enough to overhear very much of their book talk; we were too excited about the snowshoer.

“He’s the perfect thing—for both of us!” my mom whispered in my ear. “You’ll need someone to help you at the academy—your own faculty person, someone you can turn to. Like a father,” she added.

“A father?” I asked her.

“I said ‘like a father,’ Adam—you have to listen to me, sweetie. You aren’t a real faculty brat—you need someone on the faculty who treats you like his own faculty brat,” my mother whispered.

“I have Uncle Martin and Uncle Johan,” I reminded her.

“I said ‘your own faculty person’—you’re not listening, sweetie,” my mom said. “Oh, God!” she suddenly cried out, forgetting to whisper, then clamping her hand over her mouth. “I couldn’t keep my hands off that wonderful little man!” she whispered. “I had to stop myself from hugging him!”

“You sure kissed him,” I reminded her.

“We’ll talk about the kiss later, sweetie,” my mother said. “How much is too much, how little is not enough—kissing is a judgment call.”

“A judgment call?” I asked her.

“We’ll talk about kissing later, Adam,” she repeated, taking a swig from the bottle. But was it the fifth beer, the one she’d been sharing with the snowshoer, or was this a sixth bottle? It was just like my uncles to open a beer for Little Ray as they were leaving, when my hawk-eyed aunts wouldn’t be around to watch her drink it.

My grandmother and Elliot Barlow could be overheard agreeing about the unfaithfulness of the 1930 film of Moby-Dick. “There is scant mention of Ahab’s wife in the novel—‘a sweet, resigned girl,’ she’s called,” the snowshoer was saying.

“It is a sacrilege that Ahab kills Moby Dick and lives to go home and be happily married—it’s not a love story!” we heard Nana cry.

“I hate it that the wife’s name is Faith, and she’s a minister’s daughter,” we heard Elliot Barlow bemoan.

“I hate it that there’s no Ishmael—they eliminated the main character!” we heard my grandmother wail.

“I don’t think I could go out with a guy named Ishmael,” my mom whispered in my ear, giggling and spilling her beer—the sixth one, I was pretty sure, or the third for her.

“I love it when Ishmael says ‘a whale-ship was my Yale College and my Harvard.’ Or, even better, when Starbuck says: ‘To be enraged with a dumb thing, Captain Ahab, seems blasphemous,’ ” the little English teacher was saying.

“I love it when Starbuck tells Ahab, ‘God is against thee, old man’—I love Starbuck,” we heard Nana tell the snowshoer.

“I love it when Queequeg tries out his coffin, to see if it fits,” Elliot was telling my grandmother, “and how Queequeg carves the lid of his coffin, copying parts of his tattoos.”

“I love Queequeg, too,” Nana said.

“I definitely couldn’t go out with a guy named Queequeg,” my mother was whispering to me. She had her arms wrapped around me. She was giggling again, and nibbling on my earlobe, when my grandmother and the snowshoer came into the kitchen. Nana never drank—only water. Mr. Barlow had his arms full, carrying the five empty bottles. I took the bottles from him; I knew where the empties went. My mom coyly offered the snowshoer a swig from the beer she was drinking—the sixth one, definitely.

“Come here,” she said to him, opening her arms. “You’re not leaving without a hug.”

I was relieved that Little Ray restrained herself in hugging him; she didn’t crush him, or force his face against her breasts. This time, I tried to prepare myself not to watch the way my mother kissed him. I was as surprised as the snowshoer by what a chaste and circumspect kiss she gave him.

Elliot Barlow must have been disappointed, but the little English teacher didn’t show his disappointment. My mom was shorter than almost everyone else, but she was five inches taller than the snowshoer. When she bent down to kiss his upturned face, she gave him a quick peck on his forehead—a good-night kiss you might give a child.

“See you up north, snowshoer,” my mother told him. At first, I thought I understood what Little Ray was up to: she wanted the snowshoer to remember her first kiss; she wanted him to wonder when she might have more to give him.

In retrospect, I think my mom wanted me to remember the first kiss she gave the snowshoer; I think she wanted me to keep it in mind. When my mother and I had retired for the night in my attic bedroom—in the same bed, as Little Ray made a point of telling her sisters, twice—we cuddled together under the skylight, where we could watch the falling snow.

In the summer months, when my mom was home—especially when it was very hot—we slept together in her bedroom, on the second floor. Even though I had a ceiling fan, my attic bedroom got very hot. But we generally preferred to sleep in my bed, under the skylight—where we could see the moonlight and the stars. And when it snowed, we loved how the flakes blanketed the skylight. When the dome was completely covered, my attic room was in total darkness.

My bed was in an alcove; the alcove wall blocked any light from the Front Street end of the attic, where the cupola window was. The cupola was a small, rounded vault with an overhanging roof; it never admitted much light to the room, not even in the day. The only light over the bed came from the skylight, but not when it snowed.

Because my mother wasn’t usually at home in the ski season, we didn’t have that many nights together in my attic bedroom when it was snowing. In that New England seacoast climate, there were only occasional snowstorms in late October or early November, or in late April—not like up north. It was special for my mom and me—to cuddle together under the falling snow, until the darkness surrounded us. As a young child, alone and far away in that attic bedroom, I had doubts about the darkness.

On the night when my mother met Elliot Barlow, when we first went to bed and were lying under the skylight together, the snow hadn’t been falling for very long; some light still lingered in the night sky, and we could still see the snowflakes fall. The dome of the skylight was not yet completely covered.

“I love it when we can still see the snow falling, but the darkness is closing in,” my mom whispered. There was no need for her to whisper; there was no one who could have overheard us. “I just love it when the darkness comes,” she whispered. It was what she always said—not only under the skylight, or in the falling snow, but whenever we were waiting for the darkness.

“Why are we whispering?” I whispered to her, as usual.

“Because people in bed together should whisper in the dark, sweetie,” my mother always said, but not this time. She was snoring.

“You’re already asleep!” I said, loudly enough to wake her.

“It’s the beer,” she told me, giggling. “I’ll be getting up to pee all night,” she said. “I hope you’ll tell me if I’m farting.” She had thrown one of her legs over me, and her head was in the crook of my arm. I could feel her breathing. I waited until I knew she was almost asleep.

“You were saying—about the kiss,” I whispered. I waited. I knew she was awake. I could tell by her breathing.

“What about it?” my mom whispered.

“You said we’d talk about the kissing later,” I reminded her. The whispering seemed to suit our conversation. The snow kept falling, but we could barely see it.

I could feel my mother withdraw the leg she’d thrown over me; she rolled away from me, on her back. I could only dimly see her staring at the disappearing skylight. “It’s not dark enough to talk about kissing,” Little Ray whispered.

“You said ‘kissing is a judgment call’—where does the judgment come in?” I whispered back.

I had purposely closed my heart to my mom’s attempts to teach me to ski. I’d spurned her efforts to make me the kind of athlete she was. I’d shunned the jock in her by not being a jock, but being a jock was a big part of who my mother was. I’d overlooked the jock in her—hence I was always surprised and disarmed by any sudden, explosive display of her athleticism. Even when she’d had a few beers, when I should have been on guard, I was unprepared for the split-second coordination of her strength, her balance, her catlike quickness.

From her back, my mom threw her far leg over me, this time bringing the rest of her body with it. She was suddenly sitting in my lap, with her legs straddling my hips and her hands pressing my shoulders into the bed. I saw only the silhouette of her head and shoulders—now backlit by the diminishing light from the disappearing skylight, blanketed with snow.

“Can you still see me, sweetie?” she whispered.

“I can see you a little,” I told her.

“Tell me when you can’t see me—tell me when I’m gone,” my mother whispered.

“Okay,” I whispered back.

“Has anyone ever kissed you, Adam?” she asked me.

“Not like you kissed the snowshoer,” I told her.

“I should hope not,” she whispered. She’d stopped giggling. “The knowing how much, or how little—that’s where the judgment comes in, that’s where you have to know what you’re offering, or what you’re getting yourself into.”

“I can still see you,” I whispered. I didn’t want her to kiss me, but I also did. I wanted the kiss she’d given the snowshoer, but I didn’t want that kiss from her. Yet how could it have been that exact same kiss if it wasn’t hers?

“You’re not fooling around when you kiss someone like that,” my mom whispered, as she was disappearing in the darkness. “You better know what you mean—you better mean what you’re promising—when you kiss someone like that.”

“I can’t see you—you’re gone,” I whispered. I know—I might as well have told her to kiss me—I know, I know. And while I truly had lost sight of her in the darkness, I could still see her in my mind’s eye, as I will forever see her—the way she stretched her body full-length on top of mine, and the way she kissed me. I have no doubt it was the exact same kiss she gave the snowshoer.

“Like that—that’s how you do it,” she said, in her girl-jock way, as if the kiss had been routine business for her, as perfunctory as her showing me (again and again) a stem christie or a parallel turn.

She rolled off me. I could no longer see her beside me, but I could hear her breathing. Soon she was snoring, leaving me wide awake in the infinite darkness.