The Last Chairlift

15. SEEING THINGS

Think of your first good kiss. Was it life-changing, or was it no big deal? Do you remember how old you were? Did it matter, at the time, who gave it to you? Do you even remember who it was?

I’ll tell you this: when you’re thirteen and your mother gives you your first good kiss, you better hope someone matches it or eclipses it—soon. That’s your only hope.

I wanted my mom and the snowshoer to hit it off. I even admired the lawlessness of the way she kissed him. But when she kissed me that way, her lawlessness frightened me. Wasn’t the way she kissed me a bad judgment call?

At thirteen, I’d been in the habit of telling Nora everything. I couldn’t wait to tell Nora about the kiss my mother gave Elliot Barlow. “When you’re old enough, Adam, you’ll have secrets,” Nora had told me. I was old enough. I had a secret I kept from Nora. I didn’t want Nora to know how Little Ray had kissed me.

“The issues we have, about being Brewsters, are all about sex,” Nora had told me. Does the secrecy in families start with sex? In my case, it started with the snowshoer kiss. My mother’s kiss marked the beginning of my having something to hide.

Yes, I felt I was a traitor to my mom. Whenever I found myself thinking that the snowshoer kiss she gave me was unsuitable or inappropriate, I felt I’d joined forces with my evil aunts. When they called Little Ray a hippie or a free spirit, they were putting her down.

When you’re a child, you think childhood is taking too long—you can’t wait to grow up. One day, the growing up has happened; you missed it, and you’re trying to seize it after the fact. When you keep secrets from people you love, you don’t sleep as soundly as a child. That’s when you know the growing up has happened, though you still have more growing up ahead of you—I certainly did. That’s when my dreams started, when I stopped sleeping like a child.

Now I know they weren’t dreams, but I didn’t know what to call them then. Can you have premonitions of things that happened before you were born? Now I know that premonitions and dreams are the wrong words for what I saw in my fitful sleep; nevertheless, I first thought of them as dreams. They began soon after the kiss of questionable judgment. I still see them; I always will.

From the start, they looked like what they were: black-and-white photographs of actual people, places, and occurrences. But they weren’t of people I knew, or of places I’d been, or of things I’d seen. How could I have known they were real? I had no idea they were ghosts. There was nothing nightmarish about the first images.

In the passage of time, like recurring dreams, they became as familiar as old friends. Over the years, their predictability grew—like members of your family, they repeated themselves. These eight images were the first ghosts I saw, not knowing they were ghosts.

1. Five rough-looking men are standing or sitting in front of a crudely built shack, a log cabin with an open door. A stack of firewood is beside the cabin; a bucksaw is at rest in a sawhorse in front of the men. Each man is wearing a different kind of hat or cap. Some aspen trees, but more evergreens, are in the background.

2. A trail above timberline—it could be a mountain pass. A mule train is making its narrow way. You can’t see what’s in the wagons; the heavy-looking loads are covered with animal hides, maybe steerhides. God knows what’s being toted.

3. A group portrait—there must be two dozen men, in as many kinds of hats or caps. The men in the back row are standing; the ones in the front row kneel or sit on the ground. There are two children, both bareheaded, and a couple of dogs. On the hillside, which slopes uphill behind this group, is a workplace of shed-roofed buildings made of beams and mismatched stones. Maybe it’s a mine.

4. Two men, definitely miners, are working underground. One man holds a sledgehammer over his shoulder; the other man appears to be setting an explosive charge. Crowbars, of various sizes, are strewn at the men’s feet. Their boots—like their hats, with crumpled brims—are very dirty.

5. A formal portrait: a close-up of a well-dressed, bearded gentleman. I can’t make out what might be an old-fashioned stickpin, perhaps holding a necktie in place; his hair is slicked back and his beard has been purposely trimmed. He’s definitely not a miner. Maybe he’s the mine owner, or a banker—an entrepreneur of importance, I deduced from my first look at him.

6. I can’t see a name on the façade of the three-story brick building; I can’t tell if I’m looking at the front or the back of the building. A horse-drawn wagon, possibly a delivery wagon, stands beside the building, which I first pegged as late-Victorian architecture. Maybe mine camp architecture is more apt. It is a massive-looking brick rectangle, with both arched and rectangular windows—impressive, but not pretty.

7. A dark-skinned hotel maid, maybe Mexican, poses with her mop and pail in a hallway between rooms. She has a shy, childlike smile.

8. A boy, or a young man; the first time I saw him, he looked my age, thirteen or fourteen. He is leaning on his snow shovel—a long shovel, or a short boy. The top of the shovel’s handle comes to his ear. He is posing in front of a snowbank; he appears to have cleared the sidewalk and the entryway to a building, which has a tall door. Sometimes I think I see skis leaning against the building; the snowbank and an American flag are always there. The boy is handsome, but his smile is childlike. Except for the boy and the hotel maid, the black-and-whites have the look of the 1880s or 1890s. Like the photo of the maid, the black-and-white of the boy with his snow shovel could be from the 1940s. He’s wearing jeans and cowboy boots; his ski sweater and hat look like they might have belonged to someone else. The sweater is a little too wide for his shoulders; the pom-pom on the ski hat is girlish, or the pom-pom accentuates something girlish about him. The American flag and the tall door indicate the entrance to a hotel. A hotel guest, a woman, might have given her old hat and sweater to the boy.

When you stop sleeping soundly, you dream more. You’re also tired; you can’t always discern the difference between your dreams and what you imagine when you’re lying awake. When I started seeing the black-and-whites—in the seventeen months between my mom’s first meeting with the snowshoer and when she married him, when I still slept in the attic bedroom of my grandmother’s Front Street house—my sleep was further disturbed by the smell of human shit. It’s an unmistakable smell. You don’t dream it; you can’t imagine it. When I first woke up to that awful odor, I felt myself under the covers—just to be sure I hadn’t had an accident in my sleep. It wasn’t me. It was the nightwalker emeritus; he was also detectable by a creak on the attic stairs. The twelfth step, third from the top, invariably creaked. Had my nighttime visitor always come to watch me sleeping under the skylight? When I slept as soundly as a child, I probably didn’t hear him—or smell him. Before the prowling diaper man started shitting himself, I wouldn’t have smelled him.

One night—it wasn’t snowing, and the moonlight was bright—I woke to see the nocturnal diaper man standing in the silvery glow from the skylight. Gaunt as a ghost—naked, except for the loaded diaper—the disassembling emeritus had come to stare at the illegitimate child who’d taken his words away.

“I’m sorry, Granddaddy,” I said to him. As the real ghosts would one day teach me, it is difficult to look at someone who is disappearing. I closed my eyes; I didn’t open them again until I heard the familiar creak on the attic stairs. The diaper man’s smell took longer to drift away. Real ghosts, I would later learn, don’t always drift away.

In the seventeen months before their wedding, my mother and the snowshoer got to know each other, and I got to hang out with them. We would spend two March breaks and one Christmas vacation together—all up north, conspicuously not with all the North Conway Norwegians. I can’t keep straight the names of the trails on Cranmore Mountain where Elliot Barlow and I were allowed to snowshoe, but Elliot knew all the Austrians there, and he could talk to them in German.

There was an Arlberg run; there was a Skimeister and a Lower Skimeister, too. Of course there was a Kandahar and a Schneider. The names didn’t matter to me; I didn’t learn them. I never knew the name of the trail we were on. I just followed the snowshoer; up or down, I matched his stride. Elliot Barlow taught me to lengthen my stride—not only on snowshoes, but also when we ran together. Naturally, with my longer legs, I could soon overtake him—as a runner, and as a snowshoer. But, out of respect—later, out of love—I didn’t, or I wouldn’t, overtake him. You’ll remember I had a history of this: even with a good ski instructor, I’d maintained a beginner-to-intermediate appearance.

Elliot Barlow brought my mom and me together; the snowshoer made us a family. Elliot made it possible for my mother and me to separate ourselves from the tyranny of those Brewster girls. I began to see that Nora had been right about my grandmother. Didn’t her passivity—Nana’s ineffectual “Girls, girls”—enable my aunts’ bitchery? Their nonstop scrutiny of my mom’s sleeping arrangements was invasive. Aunt Abigail repeatedly asked me about our accommodations at the inn in North Conway.

“We don’t care if it’s European,” Aunt Martha chimed in.

“It’s cozy,” I told them. “One of the other guests is an Austrian.”

“We don’t care if it’s cozy, or about the Austrian,” Aunt Abigail said. “Just tell us about your rooms, Adam.”

“Just stick to who sleeps with whom, Adam, and in what kind of bed,” Aunt Martha chimed in.

I’d read Great Expectations twice. I was reading more Dickens; the snowshoer had given me his teacher’s copy of David Copperfield. I was beginning to imagine myself as a fiction writer.

“Mr. Barlow calls the inn a Gasthaus,” I began—this much was true.

“We don’t care what Mr. Barlow calls it, Adam!” Aunt Abigail protested.

“Where does Mr. Barlow sleep—in what kind of bed, with whom?” Aunt Martha chimed in.

“He has a single bed, a small one. Ray and I have a double bed, in a bigger room. We share a bathroom—it’s between the bedrooms,” I explained. This was true, too, but I was stalling.

“You’re too old to sleep with your mother, Adam,” Aunt Abigail said tiredly, for the hundredth time. “Think of your hands.”

“My mom visits Mr. Barlow—in his room, almost every night,” I said slowly, as if I were writing this sentence. A truthful sentence, nonetheless. After Ray and I had gone to bed—when we’d been whispering together, and had finally run out of things to say—my mother would slip out of bed and whisper a few more things.

“I’ll be back soon, sweetie—I’m going to visit the snowshoer,” she whispered. “I’ll leave a night-light on in the bathroom—okay?”

“Okay,” I whispered back.

I would have noticed if she wore a naughty-looking nightie, but she was always wearing her flannel pajama bottoms, or athletic shorts, and a T-shirt—nothing frisky. Sometimes I was awake when she came back to our bed, sometimes not. These are true details, notwithstanding that I knew the conniptions Little Ray’s nightly visits would cause my querulous aunts.

“She visits Mr. Barlow!” Aunt Abigail cried. “For how long?”

“It wouldn’t take long—he’s so small!” Aunt Martha chimed in.

“They’re not even engaged!” Aunt Abigail said scornfully. They soon would be, but their engagement wouldn’t matter to my aunts. The inappropriateness of my mom’s visits with Mr. Barlow would continue to rankle the two most condemning Brewster girls, long after the snowshoer and Little Ray were married.

“Those two have other bugs up their asses—more than the matrimony bug,” Nora always maintained, about her mother and Aunt Martha.

“I don’t suppose you can hear Mr. Barlow and your mom—can you, Adam?” Aunt Abigail asked me. Ah, well—that was the opportunity for fiction writing I’d been waiting for. I was experimenting as a storyteller. I was imagining I could make something up by leaving something out. Dickens would have done it better.

“I don’t hear them talking,” I started to say. The pause was deliberate. “Well, I can occasionally make out what she says—never what he says, if he ever talks. There’s just a lot of grunting and groaning, and laughing,” I told them. “The floor shakes, sometimes.” My aunts said nothing—that was a first. It was as if they were listening for the grunts or groans, and the lovers’ laughter, or they were waiting for the floor to shake.

I didn’t tell them that Little Ray and the snowshoer were in the habit of doing her ski exercises together. Their single-leg lunges made the floor shake, and she could hold her lunges longer than he could hold his. Little Ray could also hold her wall sits longer than the snowshoer could hold his. It was during the lunges and the wall sits that she would urge him to hang on a little longer. “Come on, don’t quit,” I could hear her say.

I also didn’t tell my aunts that my mother had found a way to make the squats harder. She made the snowshoer lace his fingers behind her neck, and lock his legs around her waist; then she squatted. She was a big believer in deep squats, but she outweighed the snowshoer by ten or fifteen pounds. When he squatted—with her fingers laced behind his neck, and her legs locked around his waist—he really strained to finish his squats. He couldn’t go as deep as she did. “Deeper!” I could hear her urging him. When I could hear them laughing, I knew he’d collapsed or lost his balance—with her still clinging to him—trying to finish too deep a squat.

I thought the way I imitated her overheard dialogue—the “Come on, don’t quit” and the “Deeper!”—had the desired effect on my easily scandalized aunts, but their speechlessness deceived me. My early efforts at fiction writing failed. As Nora would tell me later, her mother and Aunt Martha didn’t believe me.

“For Christ’s sake, Adam—everyone’s heard Ray doing her lunges, her wall sits, and her squats,” Nora told me. “Ray tries to get anyone to do them with her—even I’ve done them with her!”

I was ashamed. I thought I’d been creative. I had refrained from telling Aunt Abigail and Aunt Martha how I overheard Little Ray’s instructions to the snowshoer concerning the wall sits: “If you can’t see your big toes, you’re doing it wrong.”

“I’m surprised you didn’t try to make them believe the wall sits were sexual, too,” Nora told me. “My mother and Aunt Martha are convinced that Ray and the little snowshoer are faking it. My mother and Aunt Martha think Ray is looking for a situation that will get you out of the Front Street house, before Nana goes off the rails and the diaper man becomes a fetus emeritus. They say the snowshoer is looking for a way to keep his job. They think Ray is Mr. Barlow’s beard, Adam,” Nora said.

“His what?” I asked her.

“Jesus, Adam—I forget you’re only twelve or thirteen, or something,” Nora said.

“I’m thirteen,” I told her.

“A beard is a front, Adam. In Ray’s case, she’s pretending to be the girlfriend of a homosexual,” Nora told me.

“She’s not pretending—she really likes him, and he likes her!” I cried. “You didn’t see how she kissed him, Nora.”

“I haven’t met the guy, Adam,” Nora said. “Let’s leave who’s pretending, or not, for another day—okay, kiddo?”

“Okay,” I told her.

Naturally, I would find a way to ask my mom about those black-and-whites that were haunting me—whatever they were. One night I phoned my mother in Stowe—at her dormitory for girl jocks.

“This is Molly,” the night groomer said, and we went through our Adam the Kid routine before my mom came to the phone.

“Is this my Adam?” she said, as usual.

I didn’t tell her I’d been having dreams. I said I’d been seeing things—usually when I was somewhere between asleep and awake. I told her I’d been imagining black-and-white photographs of what looked like actual people, places, and occurrences.

“You’re being a little vague, sweetie,” my mother said.

“Before it was a ski town, Aspen used to be a mining town—right?” I asked her.

“Silver mining. Describe what you’ve seen, sweetie.”

I began with the guys in front of the shack, the stack of firewood, the bucksaw in the sawhorse; I didn’t get to the different kinds of hats and caps. “Sounds like a mining camp in the 1880s—the early days,” my mom said.

I got only as far as the mule train carrying heavy cargo above timberline—just the part about the narrow trail the mules and the wagons were on. “Sounds like Independence Pass—ore wagons, raw silver, going to Leadville over the Continental Divide,” Little Ray interrupted me.

I described the men, children, and dogs—their posing in front of the ramshackle buildings. I ended with, “Maybe it’s a mine.”

“Of course it is, Adam—it sounds like a daytime shift at the Smuggler Mine,” my mom told me.

I barely mentioned the two miners underground—the one with the sledgehammer, the other tinkering with what might have been an explosive device. “I’ve seen those two—they’re always setting the black-powder charges. Something must have gone wrong,” my mother said.

“You’ve seen them?” I asked her.

“I’ve seen their ghosts, sweetie—you’re seeing ghosts. This kind of ghost can’t hurt you,” my mom assured me.

“What about the well-dressed, bearded gentleman? He looks very refined; he looks brave but sad. Is he the kind of ghost who can hurt you?” I asked my mother.

“Poor Jerome,” my mom said softly. “Jerome B. Wheeler won’t hurt you.”

I knew then what the three-story brick building was, without asking. The massive-looking brick rectangle was the Hotel Jerome. I asked my mom about the horse-drawn wagon.

“Oh, that’s just a beer delivery,” she said. I doubted that the horse’s ghost was dangerous. And when I asked her about the shy, childlike hotel maid, Little Ray said, “Oh, I didn’t know she died—I think she was Italian.”

No—I didn’t ask her about the boy, or the young man. His handsomeness, his childlike smile, his smallness alongside his tall snow shovel—that kid from the 1940s, whoever he was. I sensed he might have been a different kind of ghost, the kind who can hurt you. There was something about him that didn’t look dead. I’m sure I saw skis leaning against the building.

“I have to go now, sweetie,” my mother was whispering. “The ghosts can wait—they’re good at waiting.”

“Okay,” I said. “When will I see you again?” I asked her.

“When the time is right,” my mom said.