The Last Chairlift

28. STILL GROWING

I was still a college student at UNH, and still going out with Sophie. I took a break from the bleeder, the writer, by agreeing to meet Matthew Zimmermann in Vermont—“a ski weekend,” Zim had called it, with my mother and Molly. I’d let Molly know I wasn’t crazy about the idea, but the trail groomer assured me that my mom would be on her best behavior. After the weekend in West Point, Molly said, my mother knew better than to encourage Zim.

It wouldn’t have worked if I’d brought Sophie to Vermont—not on the same weekend when Zimmer was coming. I couldn’t imagine the bleeder sleeping between Zim and me, on that futon in the TV room. I hated the explaining of the bleeding. I was having a hard enough time just imagining Matthew Zimmermann and me on that futon.

You would have thought we were getting together for a weekend in the Alps. There were postcards from New Haven, detailing the formidable logistics Zimmer faced to get himself to Vermont. Zim was a New Yorker; his ski stuff was in the city. He wrote: “I’ll have to take the train to Penn Station—it’ll be a zoo. I’ll pick up my parents’ car, for the drive to Vermont. My parents are skiing in Gstaad, where they go every year. I try not to go to Gstaad—not when they’re there. I try not to ski with them. Yet I wouldn’t put it past them to have taken my ski stuff with them—I hope not!” This was on one postcard; there were other postcards, all in Zim’s impeccable but small handwriting.

I hadn’t known his parents went skiing in the Swiss Alps. At Exeter, other students had told me about his parents’ penthouse apartment on Park Avenue, where Zim had grown up; I knew the Zimmermanns were a prosperous New York City family. Yet Zim never exhibited the snootiness I associated with the wellborn boys at Exeter. Zim wasn’t a snob; he didn’t condescend to anyone. But I was out of it—especially, if not only, at Exeter. I’d managed to miss what Zimmer later referred to as “the Jewish business”; he meant the anti-Semitic business, Mr. Barlow had to explain to me. Matthew Zimmermann wasn’t Jewish, but the anti-Semites at Exeter thought he was because of his name. I was so out of it, I didn’t think of Zim as Jewish or not Jewish. I didn’t know or care.

“It may be a coincidence, but the majority of the Jewish Zimmermans I know spell the name with one n,” Zim later told me. “My family’s name has the double n—Zimmermann is the old German word for carpenter.” What Zim didn’t tell me, the snowshoer pointed out, was that being mistaken for a Jew made Matthew Zimmermann a fierce advocate for the Jews. At Exeter, Elliot said, Zim often pretended to be Jewish—just to expose the anti-Semites in the room. Some of the Exeter faculty thought Zimmer was a troublemaker, but Mr. Barlow defended Zim for his political activism. Given Matthew Zimmermann’s history of exposing anti-Semitism, the snowshoer wondered if this was why Zim had expressed his misgivings to me about becoming a Bonesman at Yale. (Naturally, I imagined a weird and painful sexual practice I knew nothing about.)

“You’ve become a what?” I asked him.

“Skull and Bones—it’s a secret society,” Zim told me. “I shouldn’t have joined—it’s all wrong for me—but I’m the first Zimmermann in my family to be tapped.”

“To be what?” I asked him. He explained that tapped meant being invited to join the fraternity. “But what’s secret about this society, and what’s all wrong about it?” I asked him.

“I can’t tell you—it’s a secret,” Zimmer said. Zim was obdurately honest—the worst person to be burdened with keeping secrets. By telling me he was a Bonesman—this was in 1965—had Zim violated one of the rules of membership? He would say no more about “belonging to Bones,” as he’d ominously put it, but his being a Bonesman clearly weighed on his conscience.

Mr. Barlow, who had a Harvard prejudice against Yale, was sympathetic to Zim’s having a stricken conscience over his membership in this particular society. “Being a member of Bones is a big deal for Yalies,” Elliot told me. “It’s convenient that everything about the society is a secret, because the rest of us can’t evaluate if the club is an empty vessel—a virtual crock of shit—or if it really is a big deal.”

Skull and Bones was an honors society; students from distinguished and successful families seemed to be singled out for membership, but the students themselves must have demonstrated their own capabilities for success. “Zim was always an excellent student, and I don’t doubt that the Zimmermanns are an illustrious family,” the snowshoer said. Both Zim’s father and his grandfather had gone to Yale, Zimmer had told me, but Mr. Barlow knew that Zim’s father and grandfather had been big deals in the military, too. “The grandfather was an army general in World War One,” Elliot informed me. “I think Zim’s dad was an army colonel in World War Two.”

It still troubles me that I never learned what bothered Zim about his “belonging to Bones.” Were his fellow Bonesmen anti-Semites? What made them feel so entitled to their secrets? What made Matthew Zimmermann feel so burdened by the secrets he couldn’t share?

“I trust that boy’s moral barometer,” the snowshoer always said about Zim. In reference to the Skull and Bones clubhouse, called the “tomb,” the little English teacher said: “These tomb societies don’t usually bring out the best in young men.”

When Zimmer and I were at Exeter, the Republican senator from Connecticut was Prescott Bush—he’d been a Bonesman at Yale, where he was also a cheerleader, played varsity golf and baseball, and was president of the Yale Glee Club. In Skull and Bones lore, Prescott Bush and a few of his fellow Bonesmen dug up and removed the skull of Geronimo from the grave of the Native American warrior at Fort Sill, Oklahoma, in 1918.

The snowshoer and I knew that Geronimo’s skull, hidden in the Bonesmen’s clubhouse—a stolen trophy, squirreled away in the tomb—would not have quieted Matthew Zimmermann’s moral barometer. “I’m sure those Yalies stole someone’s skull,” the snowshoer always said, “but I’ll bet it wasn’t Geronimo’s. How would those Yalies know whose head they stole?”

In later years, it seemed small consolation that Zim never knew what became of Prescott Bush’s son and grandson. It might have caused mortal damage to Matthew Zimmermann’s moral barometer if he had known that a couple of Bonesmen, George H. W. Bush and George W. Bush, would both be presidents of the United States. Zim never knew that President George W. Bush won a second term by beating another Bonesman, Massachusetts senator John Kerry. I can’t help wondering if Zim would have agreed with me—I thought John Kerry was a good Bonesman. We’ll never know; what bothered Zimmer about being a Bonesman would remain a secret.

In the ski season of 1965, I was packing for the trip to Vermont, when I overheard the snowshoer accept a collect call from New York. “Yes, of course I can hear you, Zim—you’re shouting!” I heard Elliot Barlow say. “You’re in a zoo?” Mr. Barlow then asked. We were in the apartment in Amen Hall; my bedroom door was open.

“He must be in Penn Station—Zim thinks Penn Station is a zoo!” I called to Mr. Barlow from my bedroom.

“What’s her name?” I heard the snowshoer ask Zim. “Buddy,” Elliot then said. “She’s your girlfriend?” Mr. Barlow immediately asked. When I finished packing and came out of my bedroom, the snowshoer was still on the phone. “Oh, here’s Adam—do you want to talk to Adam?” Elliot asked Zim.

“Just tell him everything!” I heard Zim shouting, all the way from Penn Station.

“Zim has a girlfriend—he’s bringing her to Vermont?” I asked Mr. Barlow, when he hung up the phone.

“Not exactly—it sounds more complicated than that,” the snowshoer said.

“She’s not his girlfriend?” I asked.

“Zim said he was bringing a girl—he didn’t say she was his,” Elliot explained.

“He’s bringing a random girl to Vermont?” I asked.

“She’s someone Zim ran into at Penn Station—maybe they were in elementary school together, an old friend,” the snowshoer speculated.

“I heard you describing the size of the futon in the TV room,” I told the little English teacher.

“I thought Zim should understand that the three of you would be sleeping together, but Zim assured me that Buddy is really small,” Mr. Barlow said.

“How small?” I asked.

“According to Zim, Buddy is smaller than your mom but bigger than me,” the snowshoer said. We agreed I should call my mother and Molly to let them know there would be a third person—just a small one—visiting for the weekend.

Naturally, Molly answered the phone; I had to tell her everything first. “If she’s that small, she can wear Ray’s clothes—if she needs ski stuff,” the snowcat operator said.

“Who can wear my clothes?” I could hear my mom calling. I explained to Molly that Buddy wasn’t a skier. Zimmer had told the snowshoer that Buddy would be hanging out with me.

“Buddy isn’t Zim’s girlfriend—she’s just a girl,” I told the trail groomer.

“I’m not surprised Buddy isn’t a girlfriend—Zim has eyes only for your mother,” Molly reminded me.

“Buddy sounds like a boyfriend!” I could hear my mom shouting.

Molly was surprised that Zimmer had his own ski stuff. I told her his parents regularly went skiing in Gstaad.

“If Zim has been skiing in the Swiss Alps, he probably already knows how to ski—at least a little,” Molly said.

“I’m betting Zim is a beginning-to-intermediate skier—he’s no better than that as a wrestler!” my mother was screaming.

“I should probably let you talk to your mom, Kid, before she loses her voice,” the ski patroller told me.

“Who is Buddy? I wouldn’t name a boy Buddy—not even a dog!” my mom was yelling. “Nobody would name a girl Buddy!” she screamed.

“Don’t get started with the name business, Ray,” Molly said, before handing her the phone.

“Where did Zim find a girl named Buddy who’s as small as me?” my mom asked me.

“Buddy is smaller—it sounds like she’s between you and the snowshoer,” I said. I didn’t say that Zim had found her in Penn Station. What Mr. Barlow had speculated was good enough for me: New Yorkers were always running into old acquaintances at Penn Station. Elliot guessed that Zim must have known Buddy in elementary school, his pre-Exeter years. In the back of my mind, however, I was bothered by something I was either remembering or imagining. (Fiction writers, even young ones, often can’t or don’t distinguish between the two.) I either remembered or imagined something Matthew Zimmermann had said to me, in a musingly sad way, when we were at Exeter. Zimmer told me he’d never been in school with girls.

Upon meeting her, Molly was the first to notice that Buddy was too young to have gone to elementary school with Zim. When Zim was pre-Exeter, Buddy would have been prekindergarten—“if Buddy was even born,” Molly whispered in my ear.

“Isn’t Buddy underage, sweetie? Maybe that’s why she’s so small,” my mother whispered to me. I had to wait for Buddy to go to the bathroom before I could ask Zimmer if Buddy was underage.

“Of course she is!” Zim said miserably. “But Buddy doesn’t think she’s underage. And when I saw her in Penn Station, she was pretending to be a boy! She wasn’t fooling anybody,” Zimmer added crossly. When Buddy came out of the bathroom, Zim asked her: “Do you really believe you’ll be safer with some guy who picks you up imagining you’re a boy?” Buddy shrugged; she smiled as innocently as she knew how. It was disconcerting to see she was wearing Zim’s clothes. One of his button-down shirts hung below Buddy’s knees; she’d rolled up the cuffs of Zim’s jeans to mid-calf, and she must have cinched his belt in the last hole. Still, Buddy looked like what she was—a pretty girl, maybe thirteen or fourteen, tops.

“I’m still growing,” Buddy told all of us proudly.

“I took her home because her boy clothes were filthy, and she was getting the once-over from every creepy guy in Penn Station,” Zimmer told us. “I thought my mom’s clothes might fit her. My mom is small, but she’s gotten fat—Buddy won’t wear fat women’s clothes,” Zim explained. “Buddy likes the way she looks in my clothes better,” Zimmer said despairingly.

Buddy smiled. She clearly enjoyed Zim’s summation of his rescuing her from Penn Station; Buddy even danced a little for us, her way of showing Molly and my mom and me how good she thought she looked in Zim’s boy clothes.

“Maybe some of my clothes would fit you, Buddy,” my mother said to her. “Would you like to try on a few things?”

“Yes, please,” Buddy said shyly. She became self-conscious and shy when she looked at my mom and Molly, or when they looked at her. It made me think that—on her own in Penn Station, where she wasn’t fooling anybody as a boy—maybe Buddy had met some women like Molly and Little Ray. Or maybe I was just imagining, as usual.

What Molly and my mother and I were not imagining was that Matthew Zimmermann, miraculously, was still growing. How was it possible that Zim had inched a little taller than he’d been three years ago, at West Point? “I’m almost five-six,” Zimmer had said apologetically, when he arrived in Vermont. He was almost as tall as me. He’d been pumping iron, too; he’d given up wrestling, but not the weight training. Zim would never be a big guy, but he wasn’t the skinny little boy we’d known.

“I can still see the smallness in you,” my mom had told him, just to make him feel better. “You’ll always be small to me, Zim,” she’d tried to reassure him, “even if you’re still growing.”

When Buddy went off with my mother to try on a few things, Zimmer had a meltdown in front of Molly and me. He took us into the TV room and showed us Buddy’s dirty pink backpack. Zim pulled an ornate glass ashtray from the girl’s backpack.

“Buddy stole this from my parents’ apartment—she can’t stop stealing stuff,” Zim said. “She’ll try to steal your stuff, too,” he told Molly. “I caught her trying to pick my pocket in Penn Station. But I couldn’t just leave her there, could I?” he asked us.

“Is Buddy a runaway?” Molly asked him.

“She must be!” Zim cried. “But she won’t tell me where she’s running away from.”

“I suppose she has no wallet, and no ID—she’s too young to have a driver’s license,” Molly said.

“No wallet, no ID—just bills, balled up in a wad,” Zimmer said. “What’s a kid like Buddy do to get a hundred-dollar bill?” Zim asked Molly and me. “Buddy knows what a blow job is—she offered me one,” he said. “She’ll offer you one, too—just wait,” Zim told me.

“You can’t rescue everyone, Zim—some kids can’t be saved, you know,” Molly told him.

“No, Buddy!” we heard my mother say—loudly enough to hear her clearly, from behind the closed bedroom door. “Please stop it—just don’t, Buddy,” my mom told the girl. Zim hid his face in his hands. Molly gave him a hug, kissing the top of his head. From the way my mother spoke to Buddy, there was no mistaking that Little Ray had declined to accept what Buddy was offering her.

“I’m sorry—I shouldn’t have brought her here. But Buddy doesn’t know any better—I think it’s all she knows how to do,” Zimmer was saying, his voice muffled against Molly, who just held him in her arms. “I managed to get her out of Penn Station, but she wouldn’t let me take her to the police. And won’t the police bring her back to the people who taught her to do this?” Zim asked us. “I can’t just take her back to Penn Station and leave her there, can I?” he kept asking us.

This was the way the weekend would go. When one of us was alone with Buddy, she would offer herself in overtly sexual ways; from our various encounters with her, we agreed that blow jobs weren’t the extent of what Buddy had been taught to do.

I learned that no one had taught the child how to read. I was writing in one of my notebooks when she asked me to read to her. I read a small scene I was writing aloud to her; then I asked her if she would read aloud to me. The girl sat staring at the words in my notebook, shaking her head.

Molly discovered that Buddy was old enough to shave her legs and underarms, but she didn’t know how. “Would you like me to show you how to do it?” Molly asked the girl.

“Yes, please,” Buddy answered shyly. They went off to the bathroom together.

“Cut it out, Buddy,” my mom and Zim and I heard Molly say, from the bathroom. “You’re learning to shave yourself—that’s all we’re doing,” the trail groomer told her.

Buddy showed us her legs and armpits, when she came out of the bathroom. “I only cut myself once—just a little one,” she said. Buddy showed us the tiny cut, which she seemed proud of, too.

All night, on the futon in the TV room, Buddy tried to fool around with Zim or me. Zim woke me up saying, “Stop it, Buddy.” Or I woke up Zimmer, saying something along those lines to Buddy.

Molly and my mother were friends with a Vermont state trooper named Mike; my mom had taught his kids how to ski. Molly tried to talk to Mike about Buddy’s situation—at first, hypothetically. Mike knew Molly well enough to know she wasn’t just conjecturing about a runaway girl. “If the minor is from out of state, I would need more information, Molly,” he told her.

“I can vouch for the boy who brought her here, Mike—he has only good intentions,” Molly said. “What we need to hear is a promise from the police—we need to know this child won’t be returned to the swine who did this to her.”

I don’t doubt that Mike was a good guy, and an honest one; like Zim, the trooper had only good intentions. But you can’t blame Mike for being truthful when he told Molly that he couldn’t promise her what would happen to Buddy. “I would need more information, Molly,” Mike could only repeat to her.

I don’t believe Buddy overheard what Molly told Zim and my mom and me about her conversation with Mike, but Buddy must have known we were talking about her, and we kept asking the girl for more information—beginning with where she came from, and the circumstances that led to her running away. “No cops, please,” Buddy said softly—to every question we asked. There were no answers to where she’d learned that sexual propositioning was the only thing that worked with adults. Was the weekend disheartening for the runaway child, because her constant propositioning didn’t work with us?

Buddy slept like a dog; she would just plop down, on a couch, in a bed, on a rug, in someone’s lap, and fall asleep. At night, she was restless and prowled around. She would get into bed with my mother and Molly; she would come back to the futon and insert herself between Zim and me. We would find her alone in the living room, where she had drifted away on the couch, the radio at a barely audible volume. Buddy seemed to like the local country station.

“Do you like country music, Buddy?” my mom asked her.

“No cops, please,” the girl answered, like the radio in the living room, at the lowest possible volume. My mother and Molly thought Buddy should see a doctor; they meant their OB-GYN person. God knows what the girl had been exposed to. But maybe Buddy overheard the word doctor. “No doctors, please,” she started saying to us, in her low-volume, country-music voice.

We were paralyzed; we couldn’t, or we didn’t, act. If Buddy hadn’t taken her fate into her own hands—as (we presumed) the enterprising child had done before—I think we would have trusted Mike. I’m guessing we would have handed Buddy over to the Vermont State Police. But Buddy must have known we were deliberating about what to do with her. In an instinctual but aimless fashion, she went on stealing things, yet she made no attempt to hide any of it; we found more of my mother’s clothes (and Zim’s watch and Molly’s makeup) in Buddy’s pink backpack, or stuffed under the futon in the TV room.

“I’m giving you my clothes, Buddy,” my mom told the girl. “If you want more clothes, I’ll give them to you—you don’t have to steal them.”

“No cops, no doctors—please, Ray,” Buddy begged her. On Saturday and Sunday morning, the girl ate her breakfast cereal out of the ornate ashtray she’d stolen from the Zimmermanns’ Park Avenue apartment. Buddy ate so ravenously, she gave no indication that she recognized the ashtray, but on the second morning Zimmer pointed disparagingly at the girl’s makeshift cereal bowl.

“That thing will never be of any use,” Zim said. “It’s too big for cigarettes, and it’s the wrong shape for cereal. I think it was designed to serve caviar, but my mother smokes so much, she turns everything into an ashtray!”

“It could be Steuben Glass—you know, sweetie, Nana has some Steuben shit in the Front Street house,” my mom said indifferently.

“It looks expensive,” Molly said, watching Buddy eat out of it. We were all thinking that this was why the girl had stolen it.

“Who cares if it’s Steuben shit?” Buddy asked, with her mouth full. “It’s really heavy—you could kill someone with it,” the girl told us. We were all thinking that this would have been a better reason for Buddy to steal it.

That same Sunday morning was when my mother brought up the name business. “I’m guessing no one named you Buddy—that sounds like a name you made up for yourself,” my mom told the girl, who was scraping the sides of the Steuben Glass caviar server. It was shaped like an elongated turtle shell, a better bludgeon than a bowl.

“I never had a buddy, Ray,” the girl said.

“It’s the perfect name for you, Buddy—you made the right choice,” my mother didn’t hesitate to tell her, but none of us could see Buddy’s face. The determined girl was bent over the glass bowl, licking it.

Buddy demonstrated no comparable interest in snowshoeing; she knew how to run away, but running for no reason didn’t interest her. I went snowshoeing by myself on Sunday, when Molly and my mom took Zimmer skiing. As Little Ray foresaw, Zim was a beginning-to-intermediate skier; he’d had ski lessons, but my mother said she’d managed to make him ski a little better.

We’d all imagined that Buddy would run away while we were out. Molly was the one who said a girl like Buddy wouldn’t have a hard time getting rides as a hitchhiker. We were troubled by how womanly Buddy looked in my mom’s clothes. And Molly’s observation was unquestionably correct: Buddy was too young to have a driver’s license. Yet none of us had imagined that the girl might know how to drive.

She stole Zimmer’s parents’ car—naturally, she knew where Zim kept the keys. I’d wondered why Buddy asked me so many questions about the stick shift in the VW Beetle; Zim’s parents’ car had an automatic transmission.

Buddy only took the clothes my mother gave her. She swiped one tube of Molly’s magenta or fuchsia lipstick, too. As for Zim’s clothes, she took the things that she’d already worn. She stole nothing of mine, but she’d left an imprint of her lips on an otherwise clean page of my writing notebook. I recognized the magenta or fuchsia lipstick. I knew the ski patroller wouldn’t have kissed my writing notebook; besides, the lips were too small to be Molly’s. Everyone was relieved that Buddy had reclaimed the Steuben Glass billy club she’d stolen from the Zimmermanns’ Park Avenue apartment. We all agreed that the Steuben shit, as my mom called it, was worthless as an ashtray; it had been a bad cereal bowl, too. If Buddy needed to kill someone with it, that was a different story—that was okay with us.

We knew what wouldn’t have been okay with Mike, the state cop—namely, that we didn’t report her. But if we’d told the trooper that Buddy had stolen a car, and she was driving without a license, the Vermont State Police would have gone after her; probably, they would have picked her up before she got out of the state. The girl was a minor. We didn’t know if there would be criminal charges. We didn’t know the odds of her being sent home. We definitely didn’t have a good impression of the home Buddy had run away from.

“By the book, I’m guessing Zim is liable if Buddy hurts herself or someone else with the car—I mean, if you don’t report the car as stolen, Zim,” Molly said.

“I would prefer not to,” Zim said automatically. The way he said it sounded so familiar, as if he were always saying this—or that someone was always saying it.

“By the book, we should call the cops,” my mother said.

“I would prefer not to,” Zimmer repeated. If I closed my eyes, I could remember hearing Zim say this in my sleep—when I’d thought we were both asleep. It was something he’d said, more softly, to Buddy—when he’d been trying not to wake me up. I would prefer not to was a more formal version of telling Buddy to stop it, or to cut it out. But why had I imagined that Matthew Zimmermann was always saying this, or that someone was?

It was like something you might read in a novel, something eternal. I knew I hadn’t read it, but it sounded so resolute—someone must have written it. I decided I would ask Mr. Barlow about it; if anyone who was any good had written it, the little English teacher would know.

Meanwhile, we did what Zim wanted—nothing. We let Buddy go. I drove Zimmer back to New York City. After Zim did some haggling with the parking-garage attendant, I was permitted to leave the VW Beetle in the empty spot where the Zimmermanns normally parked their car. In his parents’ Park Avenue apartment, Zimmer needed to assure Elmira, the family housekeeper, that I was not another of his rescue projects.

“Tell me you didn’t get him where you got Buddy, Matthew,” was Elmira’s way of putting it. Zim promised her: I was from Exeter, not from Penn Station. Elmira seemed minimally relieved. She’d been Zim’s nanny in his childhood years; she’d seen her share of Zimmer’s Exeter friends, not always on their best behavior. “You don’t look like you’re homeless or a drug addict, Adam,” Elmira said to me, when we were introduced. “Matthew will give you a tour of his father’s bedroom and bathroom. Try not to pee on the Picasso,” Elmira added.

I’d only heard or read about those married couples who slept in separate bedrooms; given her peregrinations between Mr. Barlow and Molly, my mother’s sleeping arrangements were more original. In Zim’s opinion, his parents were happy together, but they slept apart. “He says she snores, she says he farts,” Zimmer confided to me. Zim refrained from having houseguests, or other overnight visitors, when his mom and dad were at home. He only invited his friends—or his rescue projects, like Buddy—when Colonel and Mrs. Zimmermann were skiing in Gstaad, or otherwise away.

Elmira was in charge of damage control. She’d ascertained that Buddy had swiped drugs from Colonel Zimmermann’s medicine cabinet; Zim assured her that his dad would have taken the prescriptions he needed to Gstaad. “I’m just telling you, Matthew,” Elmira said. She was a long-suffering housekeeper, I could tell—a martyr type, like Dottie. Also like Dottie, Elmira was the embodiment of common sense—an efficiency she generally found to be lacking in others.

There were no guest rooms in the Zimmermanns’ palatial apartment. Elmira had her own bedroom and bathroom, adjacent to the kitchen. Zim had his own room; his mother’s bedroom, he’d explained, was never to be used by guests. The modest and somewhat spartan bedroom where his father slept was the only one available for friends or desperadoes. Elmira had referred to Buddy as “the most recent, female desperado.” From Elmira’s surveillance, and her judgmental comments, I gathered that Zim was predisposed to bringing home lost wanderers—the strays and castoffs of humankind. “Buddy stole a pair of your dad’s cuff links, Matthew—your dad didn’t take them to Gstaad,” Elmira added, for good measure. The Zimmermanns’ faithful housekeeper came from the West Indies, via the Bronx. A rotund and motherly Black woman, she’d been a baby when her family emigrated from Anguilla to the United States; to my ear, Elmira’s accent had more of the Bronx than the West Indies in it.

Matthew Zimmermann heard the intonations of the housekeeper’s voice differently. To Zim, Elmira had perfectly parroted his mother’s Silk Stocking District speech; to his ear, Elmira sounded like the Upper East Side. “Elmira has been more than a second mom to me—she’s been my main mother,” Zimmer told me. It was not necessary for him to explain that he loved Elmira, or for him to tell me that the housekeeper loved him; I could see this for myself.

“I’ve had no babies of my own—this one is my only baby,” Elmira told me, giving Zim an impromptu hug. The three of us were crowded into the small bathroom adjoined to what would be my sleeping quarters for the night. The purpose of our being in the bathroom was to show me the Picasso I was not supposed to pee on.

“It’s not really a Picasso,” Zimmer said. I wouldn’t have known, one way or the other. In a gilded frame, the small painting rested on the floor beside the toilet; leaning against the bathroom wall, it was small enough to fit under the roll of toilet paper. I know nothing about art, but the painting seemed mostly naturalistic to me—except the nude had three breasts. A friend of Zim’s father had painted it; Zim’s mother hated the painting. “My dad has tried to hang it on every wall of the apartment,” Zimmer explained. “My mom always takes it down and puts it here.”

“Two breasts should be enough,” Elmira said.

“I promise not to pee on it,” I told them.

“I had my fingers crossed that Buddy would steal it—I’ve got my reasons for calling it a Picasso,” Elmira said. Zim just smiled, saying nothing. As for the car Buddy had stolen, neither my former teammate nor his former nanny seemed especially worried about it. And for good reason. As it happened, Buddy would park the car—illegally, and as close to Penn Station as she could leave it. The car was towed from West Thirty-fourth Street, near Seventh Avenue; Buddy had left the keys under the floor mat on the driver’s side, where she knew Zim often left them.

The postcard Zimmer sent me later, from New Haven, described the “god-awful place” he had to go to retrieve the towed vehicle, but he didn’t tell me what it cost. What I remember of my one night in his father’s austere barracks of a bedroom has lasted longer. On the night table was an alarm clock and a gooseneck lamp, good for reading. There was a corner bookshelf—a narrow one, with not many books. From their titles, and my perusal of the flap copies, they seemed to be books about military history. Three photographs stood, as if at attention, on top of the small chest of drawers. General Zimmermann, I presumed—an army general in World War I. Colonel Zimmermann, Zim’s father—an army colonel in World War II. And there was Zim, a toddler, not yet in uniform; the child was tightly holding what looked like one of the commanding officers’ caps. I was aware of the weight of the expectations Zimmer grew up with. Had he always been still growing? Was he always trying to grow? Had Zim’s dad always been worried that his only child wouldn’t get big enough? What do they matter now—these domestic details?

In the morning, I would drive Zim back to Yale. New Haven was an easy stopover on my way north to New Hampshire. As for the cuff links Buddy had stolen, all Zim ever said was: “My dad has more cuff links than shirts with French cuffs.” After my night in the military man’s sleeping quarters, in Colonel Zimmermann’s barracks, I was more interested in discussing military matters.

It was the winter of my senior year at the University of New Hampshire and Zimmer’s senior year at Yale. Zim knew I was 4-F. Zim knew I’d been saved by my trigger finger; he also knew I was going to the MFA program in creative writing at the University of Iowa, the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. I hadn’t bothered to ask where my friend and former teammate was headed. I should have known. Our correspondence about the war in Vietnam had been ongoing. Nora and Em were increasingly anti-war, as were my mom and Molly; in his own way, the snowshoer was always political. And Zimmer seemed to know from the beginning that the Vietnam War was not the kind of war we were good at.

On Christmas Eve, 1964, two American servicemen were killed in Saigon when Viet Cong terrorists bombed the U.S. billets. “Uh-oh,” Zim’s postcard from New Haven had begun. “Who the ‘terrorists’ are is a matter of opinion.” In February 1965, just before Zimmer brought Buddy to Vermont, I’d asked him about Operation Flaming Dart—what the U.S. Air Force referred to as a tactical air reprisal.

“Tell me what that means,” I’d written him.

“That means we’re bombing the shit out of targets in North Vietnam,” Zim wrote from New Haven.

In March of that year—not long after Buddy stole the Zimmermanns’ car, and I drove Zim back to New York, and then back to Yale—the U.S. Air Force began Operation Rolling Thunder: “to interdict the flow of supplies to the south,” I’d read in a newspaper.

“That means we’re bombing the shit out of targets in North Vietnam,” Zim wrote to me. That was the month when the first American combat troops landed in Vietnam. “Uh-oh”—this stood alone on one postcard from New Haven.

In April 1965, President Johnson authorized the use of U.S. ground troops—“for offensive operations in South Vietnam.”

“That means ‘search and destroy,’ which is basically about the destroy part,” Zim wrote.

In May, the U.S. Navy began Operation Market Time—“to detect and intercept surface traffic in South Vietnam coastal waters.”

“They’re just seizing and destroying enemy craft—what we’re dealing with is guerrilla warfare,” Zimmer wrote. He may have been still growing, but his handwriting was getting smaller. “Are we prepared to obliterate the whole country?” he wrote. “They can call it ‘search and destroy’ or ‘seize and destroy,’ but it amounts to just plain destroy—there’s no good way to end this.” I never understood the particulars of Zim’s training at Fort Benning, Georgia, but Second Lieutenant Matthew Zimmermann would serve in Vietnam—Company A, 502nd Infantry, 101st Airborne Division.

From Fort Benning, there were no more postcards. As his criticism of the war grew more specific, and more obdurate, Zim’s letters got longer. “Who doesn’t question the war’s ‘morality’—don’t you think I question that, too?” one of his letters from Fort Benning began. “But I feel one has to see something firsthand to be sure. I’m inclined to agree with Kennedy’s assessment of the Vietnam problem—this was in ’63. You may remember what JFK said: ‘We can help them, we can give them equipment, we can send our men out there as advisers, but they have to win it, the people of Vietnam.’ I think that point is, or was, valid, but it’s clear the people of Vietnam aren’t winning the war. We appear to be trying to win it for them,” Zimmer wrote. I didn’t know the details of Zim’s Advanced Individual Training, or what went on in Officer Candidate School, but he couldn’t have had more time to write than he’d had at Yale. And when he mentioned his “active duty,” he didn’t interrupt his ranting to tell me what or where it was.

Of course I quoted him to my mother and Molly, and whenever I got together with Nora and Em, they always wanted to know what Zim had to say about the war. Nora and Em hadn’t seen Zimmer since his days as a 110-pounder at Exeter; they didn’t believe me when I told them that Zim had grown, or that he was still growing.

“He can’t be still growing,” Nora said in her didactic way. Em agreed in her usual way—a violent, disembodied nodding of her head.

“There doesn’t appear to be a government in Saigon that works without us,” Zim wrote from Fort Benning. “Do the South Vietnamese people even like the military junta of Marshall Ky? Why would Hanoi and the Viet Cong negotiate for a peaceful settlement if they think they can win the war? There’s every reason for the United States to keep enough ground forces in South Vietnam to persuade Hanoi and the Viet Cong that they could never achieve a military victory, but what do we accomplish by bombing the north?” Zimmer asked.

“I love that little boy—he must be driving everyone crazy at Fort Benning,” Nora said, when I quoted Zim to her again. We were in the TV room at my mother’s, where we’d slept on the futon. Em was doing something strange in the reclining chair in the TV room. It was a vintage Barcalounger, and no one liked it, but Molly said the chair was too big and heavy to throw out. Molly and my mom were in the kitchen, but they could hear us talking about Zimmer.

“Zim isn’t the little boy he was—he’s still growing!” my mother called. “But I can still see the smallness in him!” my mom added.

“Zim can’t be still growing,” Nora insisted to me quietly. “I just love him,” she added. Em appeared to be humping the Barcalounger, or she was acting out how she would hump someone in a reclining chair. “Em says that Zim is the only boy she would ever fuck,” Nora explained. “No, you wouldn’t fuck him, Em. I don’t love him that way!” Nora added crossly. Em was acting out ambivalence in the Barcalounger. Nora ignored her, but it seemed to me that Em was saying she reserved the right to remain undecided about fucking Zim.

“Supposing that we mean what we say—that we want South Vietnam to be free to govern itself—then we should be protecting South Vietnam from attack,” Zimmer just went on, from wherever he was. “But it appears that we are attacking the whole country—from the air!” my former teammate, a born infantryman, wrote. “If we bomb the whole country to bits—allegedly, to protect it from communism—what kind of protection is that? I think that’s a serious problem,” Zim wrote, “but I would prefer to see the situation for myself.”

My mom, of course, was opposed to Zim’s seeing the war for himself. “If he were my one and only, I wouldn’t let him go to Vietnam,” my mother said.

“He’s not your kid, Ray,” Molly reminded her.

I stopped quoting Zim’s letters to Nora and Em; their love for him got out of hand. Nora had threatened to sleep with Zim if Em slept with him. It was August 1967 when I saw Zimmer again. I don’t remember the way he worded it—if he was on leave from Fort Benning, or from active duty somewhere else. What my mom would remember is that Zim said he would be in Vietnam before Christmas—this really upset her. Molly and I were more shocked to learn that Matthew Zimmermann was engaged.

“Is he bringing his fiancée to Vermont?” my mom asked. The way she said fiancée, Molly and I knew my mother would have been happier if Zim brought Buddy. I forget if he told me his fiancée’s name. She was a New Yorker, like him; she worked at one of the women’s magazines, Zimmer said. He drove to Vermont by himself. Maybe the fiancée didn’t like the sound of the sleeping arrangements on the futon in the TV room; perhaps Zim didn’t want to be reminded of our awkward threesome on the futon with Buddy.

“I would prefer not to,” I imagined Zim said to his fiancée. I had learned from Mr. Barlow where this came from, and I’d since read the original dialogue. Knowing my attachment to Moby-Dick, the little English teacher had urged me to read more Melville. At his urging, I’d read “Benito Cereno” and “Billy Budd, Sailor”—not, however, “Bartleby, the Scrivener.” The snowshoer didn’t think I would like it, no matter how much I loved Melville. Elliot Barlow was right; I didn’t care for the story, and I found Bartleby both irritating and enigmatic. There was no doubt, however, that Mr. Barlow was also right to identify Bartleby’s repeated utterance as the source of Zim’s uncharacteristic dialogue. Or was it characteristic? the snowshoer had asked. Zim was a little irritating, and he could be stubborn; a twenty-four-year-old who was still growing, Zimmer was certifiably enigmatic. Did I would prefer not to have imaginable use when Zim was speaking to his fellow Bonesmen? The snowshoer and I could imagine how Zim would say this when one or more of the Bonesmen had proposed a sexual impropriety, or had suggested something that was otherwise morally reprehensible to the former 110-pounder.

When Zim came to Vermont in the summer of 1967, he weighed what I did, about 150 pounds, and he was taller than I was. “I’m five-seven—I’m almost five-eight,” he said. “And I’m still growing,” Zimmer added, in an offhand manner—as if it were no big deal, or he’d become a little embarrassed about it. But how could he have grown three (almost four) inches since we were wrestling at West Point? It wasn’t possible—not even, I thought, if Colonel Zimmermann had been willing it to happen.

Now Molly sounded like Nora when she said, “You can’t be still growing, Zim.” But he was.

Even my mom seemed suddenly subdued around him. It was without much conviction that she told him, “I can still see the smallness in you.” I don’t think Zim believed her; Molly and I certainly didn’t.

“How about a hike—want to climb a mountain, just a small one?” Molly asked Zimmer. Molly and I had the feeling that my mother was just going to stare at him; it was a good idea to do something physical with him. In 1967, Molly was roughly forty-seven. Bromley isn’t a big mountain, but—from the end of mud season till the first good snowfall—Molly hiked up Bromley, and walked down, four or five times a week. I had to work hard to keep up with her on a hike. That day, Zimmer set the pace; Molly and I had to make an effort to keep up with him. “You’re in good shape, Zim,” Molly told him. “I can tell you’ve been doing a lot of marching around.”

“Second lieutenants are supposed to be platoon leaders—we’re supposed to set an example,” Zimmer said. My mom wasn’t a runner or a hiker; she didn’t even like to walk. The only way Little Ray would climb up Bromley was to skin up with her telemarks on. I was glad my mother hadn’t hiked up Bromley with us. She would have found it even harder to still see the smallness in Zim.

At dinner, Molly mentioned the anti-war protests in April of that year; there’d been huge protests in New York City, Washington, DC, and San Francisco. The protests didn’t concern Zimmer; he wasn’t opposed to the protests, but they weren’t a solution. “The problem is, the North Vietnamese and the Viet Cong are fighting the war on their own terms—their large units never engage our large units,” Zim said. “Look what happened with Operation Buffalo, in one day—this was just last month,” the future platoon leader told us. There were two companies of marines involved in an ambush from three directions. Zimmer talked so fast, I later had to look this up—Alpha and Bravo Companies, First Battalion, Ninth Marines. They first encountered sniper fire from the People’s Army of Vietnam; the marines were then attacked with flamethrowers, artillery, mortar, and small-arms fire. There were so many details of a military kind, I lost track of whatever point Zim was making. He’d even memorized the number of casualties the two companies of marines had suffered, and the Vietnamese casualties. “We had eighty-four killed, a hundred and ninety wounded, nine missing in action—while the People’s Army of Vietnam had fifty-five killed, not counting another eighty-eight believed to be dead but unaccounted for,” Zimmer recited to us. My mother just stared at him, drinking her third beer; Molly mostly stared at my mom. I’d not seen Zim drink beer before, but I noticed he had a couple. When Zimmer got up from the table to go to the bathroom, my mother also got up from the table; she threw up in the kitchen sink.

“I’ll do the dishes, Ray,” Molly said to her. “Why don’t you go to bed?” My mom slipped away to their bedroom—like a ghost, I would later think. “I don’t believe it’s the beer,” Molly told me.

In Zim’s case, he fell asleep so quickly and slept so soundly, I believe it was the beer—he wasn’t normally a drinker. We’d helped Molly do the dishes. Zimmer was coherent in his questioning of our civilian and military leaders. He doubted those multidivisional operations that involved all branches of the military. “They’re calling ’67 the ‘era of big battles’; they’re targeting the ‘Iron Triangle,’ but I’m not buying the body counts,” Zim told Molly and me. He pointed out the casualties (to both sides) attached to Operation Junction City and Operation Cedar Falls. “Who cares that the casualties are ten to one in our favor? The Viet Cong and the North Vietnamese aren’t keeping score—they’re in this for the long haul; they’re fighting the way they can win,” Zimmer said. I would look up the numbers later; about 3,500 North Vietnamese and Viet Cong were killed, compared to a loss of 350 American lives. And Zim was right—we weren’t winning the war.

When we got settled and were stretched out on the futon, I could tell that Zim was drifting away. “We didn’t get to talk about your fiancée—you haven’t told me anything,” I said to him.

“I would prefer not to,” Zimmer said. It was the coldness that was uncharacteristic.

“Okay, Bartleby,” I said. We hadn’t talked about Melville, either; there were so many things we never talked about.

I thought Zim had passed out—he was so still, so deathly quiet. “Please don’t call me Bartleby—not you, Adam, of all people. Please don’t,” he begged me, his voice breaking.

“I’m sorry, Zim, I won’t ever do it again—I never will,” I assured him, but he was sound asleep; I felt the back of his hand fall against my shoulder, like a dead thing. I couldn’t see him in the dark, but I vividly recalled the way my former teammate used to fall asleep on our wrestling team bus. We often sat beside each other; Zim preferred the window seat. But wrestling is a winter sport. The winters in New England are very cold; it was cold on the bus, next to the window. And Matthew Zimmermann always fell asleep with his face pressed against the window glass, which was as freezing cold as it was outdoors.

I asked him about it once. How could he sleep that way? “I love to sleep when my face is cold,” Zim said.

I slept badly that August night in Vermont. I heard Molly’s voice a couple of times; she sounded like she was arguing with my mother, but my mom said nothing I could hear. Later I heard a clunking sound; it came from the kitchen. Maybe my mom had thrown up again, and Molly was getting her something to drink from the fridge. I got up and went into the kitchen, where I saw my mother. She usually slept in a T-shirt or a tank top and a pair of athletic shorts—maybe sweatpants, in the winter—but she was wearing just a bra and panties. After she’d thrown up, she must have passed out in her underwear.

I could tell I’d startled her, because my mom froze for a second over what she was doing at the kitchen table. I could see I’d caught her loading the twenty-gauge. She quickly closed the lever-action, single-shot shotgun, but I saw the shell she’d slipped into the barrel—the gun was loaded. “I heard a varmint,” my mother said softly. I knew she was hoping Molly hadn’t heard her.

“Ray?” Molly called from the bedroom. My mom just looked at me, cradling the shotgun.

“What are you doing, Ray?” Molly asked, coming into the kitchen.

“Heard a varmint,” my mother said; she was whispering.

“I shoot the varmints—give me the gun, Ray,” the ski patroller said. My mom hesitated. “Zim isn’t your kid—you can’t shoot other people’s children, Ray,” Molly told her.

“If Zim’s mother loved him, she would shoot him. And what’s the matter with Elmira?” my mom asked me. “You said Elmira was Zim’s main mother. Why doesn’t Elmira shoot him, if she loves him?”

“You can’t shoot other people’s kids, Ray,” the snowcat operator repeated. Molly took the twenty-gauge away from her and unloaded it. “You’d make a mess of a varmint if you shot one with a deer slug,” Molly told my mother.

“One shot, just under the patella—you can have a good life with a bad knee, you can still get laid with a limp, and have children, and make friends,” my mom told us. Little Ray didn’t slip away to their bedroom this time; she was clearly pissed off, and left us in a huff.

I certainly agreed with Molly—as a rule, you shouldn’t shoot other people’s children. It wasn’t lost on me that my mother and Molly seemed to think it was okay to shoot your own children, under certain circumstances, but this didn’t seem to be a good time to take up the matter with either of them. Besides, Molly handed me the unloaded shotgun; she wanted me to hide it for her. “Your mom knows me too well, Kid—she knows where I would hide it,” the trail groomer told me. “Just remember to tell me where it is after Zim has gone,” she added.

The twenty-gauge was unloaded; it was safe to hide it under the futon in the TV room. The way Zimmer was sleeping, I’m not sure he would have woken up if my mother had shot him. Breakfasts in Manchester were not as early in August as they were in the ski season, when we woke up in the darkness. The coffee grinder was always my alarm clock in Vermont. On his back, with his right hand on his heart—as if he were pledging allegiance to the flag—Zim slept as peacefully through the grinding of the coffee beans as he had with his cheek against the frigid window of our wrestling-team bus. A streak of sunlight slanted across his forehead, giving him a godlike or angelic appearance. I was watching him when his eyes opened. Zim woke up to the smell of coffee brewing; at the time, I believed this was a better way to wake up than having a deer slug just under the patella.

My mother didn’t speak at breakfast. When she allowed herself to look at Zimmer, her eyes would well with tears; then she immediately looked away. Zim seemed to understand and accept how my mom felt; when she let him, he held her hand. At breakfast, for the most part, Zimmer refrained from talking about the war, but he said one thing that upset my mother—it didn’t matter that Zim was trying to reassure her, in his ill-advised and slightly irritating way.

“By the end of this year, I’ll bet about fifteen thousand Americans will have died in Vietnam,” Zimmer began, “but hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese will be killed.” Those statistics would turn out to be fairly accurate, but statistics wouldn’t win the Vietnam War or reassure my mother. This time, my mom didn’t throw up in the kitchen sink; she just went to her bedroom and closed the door.

I hoped Zim wouldn’t discover the twenty-gauge under the futon in the TV room while he packed up his things. Back in the kitchen, where Molly and I hugged him and said our goodbyes, I had a hard time speaking to him. “Take care of yourself, Zim,” I barely managed to say.

“I’m supposed to be a second lieutenant—I’m the one who’s supposed to take care of my platoon,” Zimmer said, with some difficulty.

I could see it surprised him when Molly kissed him on the lips and crushed him in her arms. “Try to take care of yourself, too,” the trail groomer told him.

“I’m not saying ‘goodbye’ to you, Zim—I’m going to hug you and kiss you like crazy when you come back!” my mother called to him, from her bedroom. The door was still closed.

“Okay!” Zimmer called to her. I could see he was a little shaken; he didn’t know what else to say.

“No, it’s not okay—it’ll never be okay!” my mom was wailing. “You’re just a boy, you’re a little boy! You’re still growing, Zim!” my mother screamed; then we could hear her sobbing.

To watch Matthew Zimmermann put his few things in the car was a lesson in inessential deliberation. It took him forever to drive away; Zim must have done a dozen single-leg lunges in the driveway before he finally got in the driver’s seat. Molly and I were crying as we watched him out the kitchen window.

“You’ll never guess where I hid the shotgun,” I started to say to Molly, but she stopped me. The ski patroller grabbed my throat, in her big hands—choking me.

“Don’t tell me where the twenty-gauge is, Kid,” Molly told me. “If you tell me now, I might have enough time to load it and shoot him.”