The Last Chairlift

18. WHAT THE STONE SPARROWS SAW

Certain families have an aura of arrival. I don’t mean an annoying punctuality—the opposite of the haplessness of always being late. Our Brewster family’s aura of arrival was borne of anxiety, bordering on dread. We sensed that something bad was about to happen. We had forebodings of doom—we could intuit when the doom was due to arrive—but we never knew who or what was doomed.

The snowshoer and I had talked about the terms of his adopting me. I could become Adam Barlow or remain Adam Brewster. “If you want to be a writer, Adam, I don’t recommend becoming a Barlow,” Elliot said; he really held his parents’ genre against them.

My mom was thirty-four on her wedding day. “I’ve been Rachel Brewster too long to become Rachel anybody else,” she’d told me and the snowshoer.

Naturally, Nora reported to us concerning the name business. “In my mother’s and Aunt Martha’s eyes, your being a Barlow will never legitimize you, Adam,” Nora told me, “and Ray’s becoming a Barlow won’t redeem her from having disgraced herself as an unwed mother.” I could hear in Nora’s reiterations, of course, exactly how Aunt Abigail and Aunt Martha must have expressed themselves on this subject; their righteousness was tireless.

All this is fair to say, but the real reason my mom and I were right to remain Brewsters is that you can’t change a family characteristic as easily as you can change your name. Curse or blessing, we Brewsters were stuck with our forebodings of doom. An aura of arrival was our thing.

In my mother’s bedroom, the afternoon of her wedding, Molly’s big bra had distracted me from my sense of foreboding. That nothing went wrong with the marriage ceremony was further misleading. Not even the sound of Wagner’s “Bridal Chorus” on a zither forewarned me. Did I imagine Lohengrin had a happy ending?

I didn’t screw up the rings, although both were small. Moreover, Dottie had found a way to bribe and pacify the diaper man with the old croquet ball. If the big baby stood (and remained standing) between Dottie and my grandmother, Dottie let him hold the sacred orb. If the infant emeritus dropped to all fours and started to crawl, Dottie took away his croquet ball. For a while, it worked.

Who cared that Henrik was limping? Henrik had no duties that required him to walk or stand; he had his lacrosse stick to use as a cane or a crutch when he hobbled around. The girl jocks were glad that he wouldn’t be asking them to dance.

In their bridesmaids’ dresses, the bare-shouldered girl jocks looked lithesome and strong. They were the fittest bridesmaids I’ve ever seen, especially for an older bride, and Molly was a strapping physical specimen among maids of honor. The night groomer didn’t just loom large. The décolletage of the bridesmaids’ dresses was cut exceedingly low, but Molly was showing the most cleavage.

Of course, my mom’s dress was the whitest and the prettiest; she may not have had humdingers, but that tightly corseted dress made the most of them. The neckline was an unusually low one for my mother. For such a small person, Little Ray was showing what amounted to a lot of cleavage for her. Even in the shade of the tent, the brightness of my mom’s white dress was dazzling. I suddenly saw what the zither man had seen in her: my mother was as beautiful as Alida Valli in The Third Man. In another world, if not in New Hampshire, Ray Brewster could have been a baroness.

Yet how could I have overlooked the aura of arrival that emanated from my aunts? Aunt Abigail and Aunt Martha had not neglected their foremost family characteristic—their sense of foreboding was as keen as ever. If those two didn’t see doom coming, they went looking for it. Nora told me later that her mother and Aunt Martha had been on the rampage in the Front Street house shortly before the ceremony started. Those two were opening every closet door and peering inside, hoping to catch the snowshoer with his pants down—“caught in the act of sodomizing someone, or being sodomized by someone,” as Nora put it.

When Little Ray, beautiful and radiant in white, was escorted down the aisle—looking like a baroness between my broad-shouldered, admiring uncles—Aunt Abigail and Aunt Martha glared at her from their front-row seats. Those two did more than suffer our family’s forebodings of doom. In my mom’s case, Aunt Abigail and Aunt Martha prayed for an unforgiving doom to befall her. There’s no measuring the harshness of the moral comeuppance or just deserts my aunts imagined my mother had coming to her. For Aunt Abigail and Aunt Martha, their aura of arrival was entwined with what they wished for.

I saw how those two were looking at their younger sister—on Little Ray’s wedding day, my aunts were wishing her dead. But nothing untoward happened; the ceremony was never interrupted. My own aura of arrival may have been asleep, but even I was half expecting a long-imagined interruption: a stranger—unrecognizable to everyone, except my mother—leaping to his feet and pointing to me. “He’s my son!” the angry man would declare. Then, pointing to the bride, his voice breaking, the stranger would say, “Remember me, Ray? Aspen, the Hotel Jerome, March ’41?”

But no such stranger came forth to stop the marriage ceremony—not even the one my aunts must have been imagining, the one they so ardently wished for. A pretty boy—a screaming young fairy, as my aunts would have labeled him—standing on his chair and showing us his member of the Dick family, as Nora no doubt would have embellished it. This, of course, would have been the snowshoer’s last lover—a jilted soul. Wouldn’t a pretty boy like that have been a surefire wedding stopper? But no such screaming fairy showed up and stood on a chair—alas, leaving my aunts with an undying disappointment and inner sorrow. No detectable disappointment or symptom of sorrow was evident in my jolly uncles, who laughed throughout the ceremony and burst into cheers during the vows.

The croquet ball almost kept the diaper man standing and calm. The sacred orb seemed to soothe him. When the Congo minister asked his “Do you, Rachel…” and his “Do you, Elliot…” there was no hesitation from Little Ray or the snowshoer, and their answers were crystal-clear. Yet I saw something change in the innocent and roaming attention of the principal emeritus. When my mom said, “I do,” the diaper man’s expression darkened. Something cognizant and distrustful crept into the standing child’s face.

Since he’d stopped speaking, and the retired grammarian began his slow drift toward infancy, Principal Brewster’s sole means of expressing himself was to chew his mustache. But Dottie had shaved it off when he was sleeping—no doubt, what Dottie woulda done in Maine. His beard had stopped growing anyway, and the hairs of his mustache were falling out—or the infant emeritus was pulling them out, and eating them. Dottie’s justification for shaving him, as she so frankly expressed to my grandmother, was neither profound nor illogical, but—to Nana’s thinking—it was vulgar. “The poor fella is becomin’ a baby, Mrs. Brewster. I don’t see babies havin’ much use for any kind of pussy-tickler.” Once Granddaddy Lew’s mustache had been labeled with such a vulgarism, my grandmother did not regret his losing it.

However, when the kiss-the-bride business began, I saw how the infant emeritus reacted. A moment of adult recognition or recollection deepened the diaper man’s frown. My mom had leaned over the snowshoer. She bent him backward when she kissed him, holding him tightly. There were oohs and aahs from the wedding guests, though I thought the kiss my mother gave Elliot Barlow was a tame version of the snowshoer kiss—a PG-13 kiss, we might call it nowadays. But there was something about the way Ray Brewster had delivered her “I do” and the kiss. I saw that the backward-traveling diaper man was flat-out racing through time. The infant emeritus appeared to be fast approaching his time as a father, albeit from light-years away. He seemed suddenly surprised to be holding the old croquet ball, which he dropped at his feet and kicked away from him—I thought the ball rolled under the front row of chairs. The diaper man touched his upper lip, as if feeling for his missing mustache, and I distinctly saw his lips move. Once more, the principal emeritus was mouthing unspoken words, which I could neither hear nor read.

This time, the zither-meister was too far away to read the diaper man’s lips. Besides, the zither man was busy. From the far end of the tent, at the rear of the assembled chairs, nearest the elevated platform for the dancing, the old Austrian was hell-bent on strumming his strings. He was heralding the sacrament of marriage, now sealed by the less-than-snowshoer kiss—the edelweiss man had no time for lip-reading. The wedding guests stood and applauded.

Well, not everyone. When Aunt Abigail grudgingly rose from her front-row seat, her feet flew out from under her. Reaching for someone to grab hold of, she dragged Aunt Martha to the ground with her. “The croquet ball,” the Congo minister whispered in my ear, while the zither recessional played on. Arm in arm, the snowshoer and Little Ray were proceeding up the aisle between the assembled chairs. I saw the moment when the puerile principal emeritus lost sight of the married couple. At that instant, Granddaddy Lew seemed stricken with a frightened father’s crazed anguish. I couldn’t read the unspoken words the diaper man mouthed, but I saw in his lunatic expression everything my infantile grandfather feared: his youngest daughter had just married one of her misbegotten children, and Principal Brewster had been powerless to prevent it!

That was when the diaper man reverted to his inner dog. While Uncle Martin howled with laughter and Uncle Johan actually barked, Granddaddy Lew dropped to all fours and began biting. On his hands and knees, the possessed infant scurried up the aisle, snapping at ankles and Achilles tendons. Dottie pursued him, holding fast to her Seeing Eye dog equipment. “Poor Lew,” my grandmother said wearily, squeezing my hand. “The bats in his belfry have taken over, Adam—it’s a good thing we’ve dispensed with the receiving line.”

We could see the wedding guests dropping and hear their cries—it was hard to tell who’d been bitten by the angry infant and who had merely stumbled and fallen into one of the flower beds. My grandmother’s garden was an obstacle course in transition; the caterers were unfolding the tables for the reception dinner, and they were rearranging the chairs around the tables. Platters of the sliced ham were carried to the tables, together with bowls of the German potato salad. There were still too many people standing under the tent for Nana and me to see what was happening out on the croquet court, but the smell of cooking was in the air. I would have bet that the barbecue chef began grilling before the ceremony started. Wagner’s “Bridal Chorus” had mercifully ended—the zither-meister was taking a break. I could see that Nora and Em were talking to the old Austrian—well, Nora was doing all the talking, and Em was nodding her head off.

“I think that went pretty well, all things considered,” the Congo minister was saying, albeit tentatively, to my aunts.

“That kiss was completely inappropriate—it lingered much too long!” Aunt Abigail retorted. She’d turned her ankle on the croquet ball; she was limping, and leaning on Aunt Martha for support.

“That dress was much too low—not to mention, too white!” Martha chimed in.

“Girls, girls,” my grandmother muttered, more to herself than to my condemning aunts. My uncles were woofing like dogs and pretending to bite each other.

Speaking of too low, I spotted the maid of honor and her most revealing décolletage—even from afar. Molly and her cleavage stood out. She was standing at the periphery of the milling crowd. The caterers were still setting the dinner tables, where only a few of the wedding guests had taken their seats. Fewer people were falling and crying out—mere blunderers, felled by the flower beds. I was confident that Dottie had harnessed and leashed the dog man. She likely had the biter under control.

Yes, I was drawn to the night groomer. Molly commanded the attention of every alert male under the wedding tent. Maybe that was why she’d stepped away from the ongoing fray? The trail groomer was the tallest woman standing, and she was showing the most cleavage. As I cautiously approached her, I was wondering if I would ever recover from encountering her bra. But when I got closer to her, I saw she’d been crying. Unmindful of her tears, Molly was as vividly transported by her thoughts as the diaper man was muddled by his.

Yet when Molly noticed me standing next to her, she immediately snapped back to the reality of the moment and the matter at hand. “You’re right on time, Adam the Kid—you have just what I need,” the night groomer said, taking the handkerchief that matched my tie from the breast pocket of my suit jacket. “Why do you think I put it there?” Molly asked me, wiping the tears from her face with my handkerchief, which she matter-of-factly returned to my breast pocket.

“You put it there?” I asked her. It was difficult to speak, at eye level to her cleavage.

“When your mom and I were laying out your wedding clothes, I asked her for a handkerchief to put in your pocket—I knew I would be bawling my eyes out, and I was going to need one,” the trail groomer told me. “They are not just the cutest-looking couple I know, Kid,” Molly said. “Of the couples I can think of, I’ll bet your mom and the snowshoer last the longest—I’m betting they go the distance.”

I was so suddenly moved to tears by Molly’s remarks that the snowcat operator hugged me. The bridge of my nose was flattened against her breasts, and I remembered my mother’s tearful shouting (“I can’t breathe!”) from my attic bedroom. My aunts’ awful aspersions must have affected me more than I realized. To have someone as stalwart as the night groomer speak with such authority about the veraciousness of my mom’s marriage to the little snowshoer—well, it truly mattered to me. I needed to hear it.

“My aunts say my mom is Elliot’s beard—Nora told me they think he’s a little light in the loafers,” I said to Molly. She was using my handkerchief again—this time, to wipe the tears from my face.

“You should listen to Nora, Kid—you can trust her,” Molly said. “But your aunts wouldn’t understand a beard if they grew one. You can count on your mom and Elliot to be there for you, Adam—you can trust me, too,” the trail groomer told me. I did. I actually began to relax a little.

Only the occasional fool, not watching his or her feet, was falling into the flower beds and thrashing around in the flowers. Henrik, already disabled, had his eyes on the girl jocks when he tripped on his lacrosse stick and flailed away in the blue hydrangea bushes. “Blame that one on the décolletage of the bridesmaids’ dresses,” was all the night groomer said. I saw she had her eyes on Nora and Em, who were still seeking to influence the zither man in an apparently musical direction. Em was dancing for the zither-meister while Nora appeared to be singing to him. For his part, the edelweiss man would strum a few strings—perhaps to demonstrate that he knew the tune of the song Nora was singing to him. “It looks like Nora and the screamer want something they can dance to,” Molly was saying. “Those two came dressed to do some dancing.”

More of the wedding guests had found seats for themselves at the tables. I could plainly see what Nora and Em were wearing. Short skirts, the pleated kind—skirts that flared when you spun around, skirts that showed a lot of your legs and your panties. Both Nora and Em were wearing slinky blouses. There wasn’t much support in the bras they were wearing. “I think that’s as close as you can get to the no-bra look and still have a bra on,” the trail groomer told me in her matter-of-fact fashion. Molly’s nonjudgmental tone contrasted sharply with the way my aunts spoke of women who flopped around without bras or aspired to the no-bra look. “What kind of music does Nora like to dance to?” the night groomer asked me.

“Nora has never danced with me,” I quickly said. “I think she likes Elvis, but Nora says Elvis should have been a woman.”

The snowcat operator nodded. “There’s something about Elvis—his gender is all over the place,” was the way Molly put it. “Elvis or no Elvis, Kid—when the dancing starts, you find me. I’ll dance with you.”

“I’ve never danced with anyone except my mother—I’m not much of a dancer,” I told the trail groomer.

“It’ll be easy, Kid—I lead, you follow,” Molly said.

“Okay,” I told her.

“I guess we should look for our seats—I don’t know if there’s somewhere we’re supposed to be sitting,” the night groomer said.

We had a clear view of the croquet court, where the barbecue chef was brandishing his spatula. He was conducting a virtual orchestra of salmon steaks and chicken breasts and burgers, while waiters and waitresses and sous-chefs assisted him or tried to stay out of his way. We could also see the determined diaper man, down on all fours and fiercely digging for something on the croquet court. Dottie had him harnessed and was letting him dig. Nana had told me that Dottie was going to feed the infant emeritus in the kitchen. Maybe the biter was beyond doing more damage to the festivities.

Molly and I sat at the table with the girl jocks, and with Nora and Em. It was okay with me that I was the only guy at the table. There were speeches, of course, but I don’t remember them. The zither man took his time, getting up his nerve to tackle Elvis. The Austrian began with the oldies in his repertoire, familiar to us from the night before. My mom and Elliot started the dancing to “The Third Man Theme,” which is what Molly and I first danced to. The trail groomer threw me around and crushed me against her. She led and I followed her through the zither-meister’s liveliest and most lugubrious numbers. Fast and slow, from “The Café Mozart Waltz” to “Farewell to Vienna,” I danced with all the girl jocks, and with Em, but Molly was my main dancing partner. Molly had noticed how Em lifted my chin and pointed to her eyes, indicating where I should look when we were dancing—not at her breasts, Em meant. “Em can read your eyes, Kid—she knows what you’re looking at,” Molly told me.

The reception dinner was over—the wedding cake had been cut and served—before the edelweiss man worked up the courage to give us the zither version of “Heartbreak Hotel” and “I Forgot to Remember to Forget”—as Nora put it, “Elvis to grind to, and Elvis to hug to.”

“For an old guy in leather shorts, and a hat with a feather, two by Elvis is pretty good,” Nora said. At our table, everyone was laughing, and everyone kept getting up to dance. The girl jocks knew the lyrics to “Heartbreak Hotel,” which they sang along with the zither.

The only words I knew were “so lonely” and “could die,” and I never forgot the “Lonely Street” location of the hotel. When Molly and I were dancing to “I Forgot to Remember to Forget,” she sang the beginning of the song to me. But even when Molly was dancing with me, I was aware of her keeping an eye on my mom and the snowshoer. The night groomer also kept an eye on the night. Molly knew there was a storm coming—she knew my mother and Elliot had a drive ahead of them.

“No beer,” I’d heard Molly tell the newlyweds. “You’ve got a honeymoon coming up, and you still have to drive there.”

The honeymoon hotel was somewhere on the coast of Maine. “It’s on a cliff, I think,” Nelly had said.

“In case the honeymoon doesn’t work out, there’s always the cliff—I’m just kidding, kiddo,” Nora said to me. Nora knew me.

After nightfall, the air was still but the rain didn’t come. The air just felt like the rain was coming. Now that the zither man was in his Elvis mode, we wouldn’t have heard the distant rumbles of thunder. Under the tent, how could we have seen the blinks of approaching lightning?

Elliot’s parents had reserved two rooms at the Exeter Inn for the wedding weekend. They’d wanted their son to be near them, and it was easier for Elliot. The inn was closer to the Front Street house than the snowshoer’s faculty apartment. Elliot had already left the reception dinner; he’d gone to the inn to change his clothes, and to pack up his things for the honeymoon.

Meanwhile, Molly was impatient to “start the fight”—she meant the struggle to get my mom out of “that killer dress.”

“Will it be as hard to get off as it was to put on?” I asked the night groomer.

“Maybe harder, Kid—the way I laced up that dress, your mother might have to starve herself to get it off.”

A few of the older folks were leaving. The younger crowd had a higher tolerance for Elvis on a zither, and for the way Nora and Em were grinding together. By this point in the evening, everyone had seen a lot of Nora’s and Em’s panties—those two had been dancing so hard, they were sweating nonstop. The writing team (both Barlows) had gone with Elliot to the inn, and at first I thought my mom was dancing with the wrestling coach.

“They’re not dancing, Kid—Ray’s showing him her single-leg lunges,” the trail groomer more accurately observed. It was clear the coach couldn’t hold his lunges as long as my mother could hold hers.

“Come on, don’t quit,” we could hear my mom urging him.

“We’re lucky, Kid—there’s no wall for Ray to show him her wall sits,” Molly said. “If she tries to show him her squats, that dress will cut off the blood supply to her heart and lungs.”

That was when the night groomer went out on the dance platform and persuaded my mother to call it a night.

“Look—Molly’s cutting in on the single-leg lunges,” Nelly said. She’d had a lot of beer, I knew. She’d been a little unsteady when we were dancing, and that had been a while ago.

“Molly wants to get my mom out of that dress—Molly is thinking about the honeymoon,” I told Nelly. Most of the other girl jocks were at the table. They just looked at me, not saying anything. “Molly is worried about the weather,” I went on. “She’s thinking about the drive to the honeymoon hotel,” I further explained to them; they just looked at one another, still not saying anything. I didn’t know what might have made them suddenly so uncomfortable. The trail groomer, we could all see, had already ushered my mother into the Front Street house—not that many of the remaining guests had noticed. Nora and Em were providing a more watchable distraction.

“Well, it’s a good thing it’s not my honeymoon—not with my yeast infection,” Nelly said. She was attempting to lighten the mood of the moment, I thought, but I felt it would have been rude to laugh, and the other girl jocks still seemed uncomfortable. I thought they were just tired of hearing about Nelly’s yeast infection. “You know what the next best thing to a honeymoon is, Adam?” Nelly was asking me.

“No, what?” I asked her.

“Dancing with you, Kid,” Nelly said, taking my hand—she led me, more than a little unsteadily, to the dance platform. That was why I happened to be in close proximity to the zither-meister when the first flash of lightning lit up the night sky. The bright-white light illuminated every detail of the unattended barbecue out on the croquet court. The boom of thunder was much louder and closer than anyone expected. We hadn’t heard the far-off rumbles, because of Elvis on the zither. Under the tent, we definitely didn’t see the faraway flashes of lightning. Now, even over the constantly repeated Elvis songs, we could hear the rain drumming on the wedding tent. Nelly and I could hear it pinging on the iron barbecue, once more in total darkness, out on the croquet court, where my grandmother had predicted someone would come to harm or be killed.

I had doubted this. I didn’t think anything was wrong—nothing seemed amiss. Even drunk, and stepping on my feet, Nelly was fun to dance with—I’d lost all fear of her yeast infection. That was when the lightning flashed again, so bright that everyone under the tent seemed exposed, their motion arrested—the way flash photography can both blind and freeze its subjects with unnatural clarity. There were Nora and Em: their mouths weren’t mashed together, but their tongues were touching, and their hands were groping each other under their slinky blouses. There were Uncle Martin and Uncle Johan: for some reason, they were no longer singing (for the hundredth time), “Bier, Bier—das Bier ist hier!” That was because Uncle Johan was choking. Uncle Martin had thrown him full-length and facedown on the dinner table, where Martin pounded away on his brother’s back. With the snowshoer still at the Exeter Inn, we were in need of a choking expert. “Go get Dottie—she’s putting the principal to bed. Dottie will know what to do,” my grandmother said, to either Nora or me.

“I’m faster,” I told Nora, who was still entangled with Em.

To no one’s surprise, Dottie did know what to do. When we returned to the tent, Uncle Martin had been joined by Henrik, who was whacking his father on the back with his lacrosse stick. “Give me that thing you’re always playin’ with,” Dottie told Henrik, who handed his lacrosse stick to her. She slid the stick sideways, under Uncle Johan, kneeling on my prone uncle’s lower back. Dottie wrenched the lacrosse stick upward, just below Uncle Johan’s diaphragm, holding the stick in both her hands. What my uncle disgorged defies description: a slab of Westphalian ham, the size of an adult’s shoe, doesn’t cover it—no small amount of wedding cake was involved, and lots of beer. It crossed my mind to wonder what Dottie woulda done in Maine, in lieu of using a lacrosse stick—a clam rake, maybe—but Dottie wasn’t one for idle conversation. “I gotta be gettin’ back to the baby man, Mrs. Brewster—he wasn’t sleepin’ like he shoulda been when I left him,” was the way Dottie put it to Nana.

“Bier, Bier—das Bier ist hier!” Uncle Johan started singing, weakly. Uncle Martin was once more laughing when the lightning struck yet again, even brighter and closer than before, and the thunder came crashing down upon us. The amplification system for the music momentarily cut out, and the edelweiss man stopped zithering. How was it possible that we still heard some music? There was suddenly, however remote, a rhythm section. From the darkness of the croquet court came the reverberating rattle of a snare drum, a metallic drumming.

“Oh, shit,” Dottie said softly—just seconds before the lightning struck once more, showing all of us the drummer. The standing diaper man was naked, except for his lightning-white diaper. The infant emeritus had not dug those rusty wickets out of the croquet court only to abandon them in the downpour. The wire wickets, which he’d been beating against the gleaming-wet cast iron of the barbecue, must have made music only the diaper man could understand. When the lightning struck him, the principal emeritus was mouthing the same words I’d seen him repeating to himself when the bride kissed the little English teacher.

There was a crack, or at least a loud click, coincident to the lightning strike and only a second before the boom of thunder. I saw that the zither man had seen my grandfather’s last words, although no one had heard them. “What was he saying?” I asked the old Austrian.

“Sweetie,” Nora suddenly said, again using my mom’s word for me. Nora and Em had moved between Nelly and me—I’d only just come back to the dance platform. “You don’t need to read lips, kiddo—you know what Granddaddy was saying.”

“It looked like ‘Not Little Ray!’—that’s what I saw,” the zither-meister said.

“That’s what you saw, all right,” Nora told him. The croquet court was in darkness again. Dottie and my grandmother, followed by my uncles (who were not laughing) and the limping Henrik, were the first to venture into the darkness.

“Lew, Lew—you poor thing,” Nana was saying. Aunt Abigail and Aunt Martha—histrionically, of course—were wailing.

“Son of the Bride,” the edelweiss man said gently. “You should go find your mother—you have to tell her.”

“No, don’t you go—I’ll tell her, kiddo,” Nora said, both too quickly and too loudly. But I was already off and running.

“I’m faster,” I told Nora, for the second time that night.

“Let me do it, Kid!” Nelly called after me.

“No, no—Kid!” I heard two or three of the girl jocks shouting. But I had the snowshoer to thank for my being a better runner than I used to be. I had a head start, and no one could catch me or stop me. I ran through the Front Street house, which was virtually empty and silent—only the rain was beating down. The rain made it hard to hear anything on the second floor, and the rain was even louder as I ran up the attic stairs, taking two steps at a time. I skipped the step with the creak in it, near the top of the stairs.

Yes, I thought it was curious—not to hear a word of dialogue between my mom and Molly. Was the wedding dress not as difficult to get off as it had been to put on? To my surprise, I saw the white dress lying on the attic floor—flung far from the bedroom, where my view of the bed was blocked by the half-open bathroom door. Yet I could see my mother and the night groomer reflected in the skylight above my bed. They were naked and locked in an upside-down embrace, their faces buried between each other’s legs, their hands holding fast to each other’s buttocks. At fourteen, this was an unfamiliar embrace to me. I wasn’t sure what I saw, but I knew I wasn’t supposed to see it.

When the lightning flashed, the skylight above my bed glared a blinding white. The reflection of my mom in the snowcat operator’s grasp vanished as suddenly as I had seen it. When I went back down the attic stairs, I was still half-blinded by the skylight’s glare—that was why I stepped on the step that creaked.

“Adam?” I heard my mother say, a little breathlessly. “Is that you, sweetie?”

I saw Nora and Em standing at the bottom of the attic stairs—Em had her fist in her mouth and was biting the big knuckle of her index finger. It was pretty clear that both of them knew what I had seen—they’d known what I was going to see before I saw it.

“I tried to stop you, kiddo,” Nora said quietly to me, when I got to the bottom of the stairs, but I couldn’t speak.

“Nora? Is that you, Nora?” we heard my mom asking.

“Granddaddy Lew is dead, Ray—he got hit by lightning,” Nora called upstairs to her.

“Where is Adam?” my mother asked. Nora had gone halfway up the attic stairs, where she’d stopped, looking back at me. Em had her arms wrapped around me. I could see the length of the second-floor hall, where the girl jocks were waiting for me. I was angry and near tears. I knew that all of them had known about my mom and Molly.

“Adam got here first, Ray—he saw you and Molly,” Nora told my mother.

“Sweetie! Adam?” my mom kept calling, but I still could not speak. There was nowhere to run—the girl jocks had me surrounded. It was no wonder I’d made them uncomfortable when I went on and on to them about how Molly wanted to get my mom out of that dress, and how Molly was thinking about the honeymoon. The girl jocks were still uncomfortable, and Em had locked her hands around my waist. There was no getting away from Em, either.

Nora came back down the attic stairs. She found us all in the second-floor hall. I suppose we looked like we didn’t know what to do with ourselves—I certainly didn’t. “We should let them get dressed, for Christ’s sake,” Nora said. “We’re not doing anyone any good here,” she told us.

Naturally, back under the wedding tent, the mood was tense in a different way. The diaper man lay covered with a sheet on the same dinner table where Uncle Johan had been saved from choking. I hoped there’d been time to clean up the disgorgement before the body was brought to the table. The snowshoer and his parents were back at the party. Elliot was more casually attired—in his honeymoon clothes, I was thinking. “Does your mom know—have you seen her?” the little English teacher asked me. I was wondering if I would ever speak again, but Nora spoke for me.

“Ray knows—Adam saw her,” Nora told the snowshoer. I was glad the girl jocks didn’t say anything to Elliot about what a bugger it was to get my mother into that wedding dress, or to take it off her.

“We understand that you would like to be a writer, Adam—either a novelist or a screenwriter, or both,” John Barlow suddenly said to me.

“Yes, we’re so sorry we didn’t get a chance to talk to you about writing,” Susan Barlow told me.

In addition to my having no confidence that I could speak, it was awkward to know what to say to Mr. and Mrs. Barlow. They were standing across the table from me, with the body of the diaper man under the unmoving sheet between us.

“Perhaps now isn’t the time,” the snowshoer said to his parents.

“But now is so noir—it’s the perfect time, dear,” Mrs. Barlow said to her little son.

“The Western will be replaced by the gangster film, because noir is the most original thing in American writing,” Mr. Barlow told me.

“I think Melville and Hawthorne are the most original things in American writing,” the little English teacher said to his parents. “I suppose they were somewhat noir.”

“Oh, you and your Melville and Hawthorne, dear,” Susan Barlow said to her son. “We write novels and screenplays, Adam,” Mrs. Barlow reminded me. I knew that Elliot didn’t like his parents’ movies any better than he did their books. “While our sensibilities are certainly European, our feeling for noir is very American,” Mrs. Barlow said.

“America will always be a frontier country, Adam,” John Barlow told me, “and noir is the tone that best captures the frontier—any frontier.” Mr. Barlow had leaned forward on the table, as if the covered body between us was proof of what was noir about America—as if the diaper man himself, from his infancy to his electrocution, had been a noir frontiersman.

“Sweetie!” I heard my mom calling. Understandably, Mr. and Mrs. Barlow believed my mother was hailing her darling husband. The writing team seemed surprised when my mom flung her arms around me instead of the snowshoer. “Oh, Adam, don’t worry, sweetie—everything’s going to be fine,” she whispered in my ear. “You just can’t sleep alone in this house, not until we know what kind of ghost Granddaddy is going to be,” she told me. “But don’t worry, sweetie—I told Molly to sleep with you.”

Under the circumstances, it was difficult to find the prospect of sleeping with the night groomer reassuring. “Molly says she doesn’t see ghosts—she doesn’t believe in them,” my mother went on whispering. “Maybe we’re the only ones who see them, sweetie. I don’t know if I believe in them, but I sure see them,” my mom told me.

This wasn’t exactly reassuring to me, either. It made me wonder what else ran in the family. I could see Nora giving me her most reassuring look—not that Nora was much inclined to be reassuring—and Em was nodding her head to me, as if Em could hear (and completely agreed with) everything my mother was whispering.

That was when my mom suddenly exclaimed, “I don’t see him! Where’s Daddy?”

“He’s under the sheet, Rachel—it should be you lying there!” Aunt Abigail declared. She was still limping, and leaning more heavily on Aunt Martha for support.

“Yes, Ray, you did it to him—you killed him!” Aunt Martha chimed in.

“He was killed by lightning—the heavens did it to him, you raving assholes,” the trail groomer told my aunts.

“Is he charred black—is he all burned up?” my mother cried, pointing to the sheet. I confess I wanted to see how he looked. The diaper man had spent half his life changing who he was. Who wouldn’t have wanted to see how the infant emeritus ended up? But no one would answer my mom—no one lifted the sheet. I learned later that the wrestling coach had carried Granddaddy from the croquet court, but the coach didn’t speak up, or he’d since gone home.

The snowshoer had locked his hands around my mom’s waist, hugging her from behind, where she couldn’t see him, but she knew his small hands and clasped them tightly, closing her eyes and leaning against him. “Yes, take me away, dear Elliot,” she told him. “Let’s go look at that cliff together—just keep hold of me.”

“I’ve got you, Ray,” the snowshoer told her. There would be no confetti thrown at them. When they left, I can’t remember which of them was driving. Em hugged me from behind, the way Elliot had comforted my mother. Maybe Em liked holding me that way, if only because she knew I couldn’t kiss her or look at her breasts with my back turned to her.

I remember what Nora told me: “You have to trust them, Adam—I mean all of them, kiddo.”

“All of them?” I asked her. It wasn’t a lot to say, but at least I’d spoken.

“You have to trust Ray and the snowshoer—you should trust Molly, too,” Nora told me. There was Em’s head, thumping me between the shoulder blades, but I was having a hard time with the concept of trusting anyone.

Not even Dottie had anything to say. If Dottie knew how the diaper man looked after the lightning struck him, I suspect she also knew how they woulda described his final appearance in Maine, but she spared us those details. My grandmother was talking only to herself—her lips mouthing what looked like a short, declarative sentence. Fortunately, or unfortunately, the edelweiss man was standing beside me. I didn’t have to ask him for a translation. “Son of the Bride,” the zither-meister said, “what your grandmother keeps telling herself is: ‘The drama’s done.’ Of course, that could be the truth or just wishful thinking.”

It was neither, I knew—it was only the first sentence of the Epilogue to Moby-Dick. (Queequeg’s “coffin life-buoy” has not yet risen from the sea; Ishmael has not yet found his safe passage through the “unharming sharks”; the “devious-cruising Rachel,” Ishmael’s rescue ship, has not yet “only found another orphan.”) All I knew was that I wanted to grow up and leave home, forever. If I could have accomplished this overnight, I sincerely would have.

Mr. and Mrs. Barlow were talking about the gangster film as the epitome of noir. They were expounding to anyone who would listen. They’d just seen a new gangster movie—“a rough cut,” in New York. The snowshoer told me that his parents often saw films before they were finished, long before their theatrical release. Elliot implied that the writing team enjoyed talking about a movie they’d seen, but no one else could have.

“It’s called The Wrong Car—it’s not a great gangster movie,” John Barlow was saying.

“But the guy who plays the driver of the getaway car is really noir—he’s someone special,” Susan Barlow weighed in. “I know we’re going to be seeing more of him.”

“His name is Paul Goode—with an e on the end, that kind of Goode,” Mr. Barlow was telling a small audience.

“And the getaway driver is really handsome—small but handsome. I think he looks a lot like our Elliot,” Mrs. Barlow was saying.

“Well, he’s not that small, darling,” Mr. Barlow said.

“He’s that handsome,” Susan Barlow insisted. When a mother says another man is as handsome as her son, you remember it. That’s why I would remember the actor’s name. Indeed, we would be seeing more of him, as the snowshoer’s mom had said, though I wasn’t really listening to the Barlows’ off-the-cuff conversation.

“Think of a very young George Raft,” John Barlow was suggesting.

“If George Raft were really handsome,” Susan Barlow added. Ironically, my mom and I didn’t think George Raft could ever be handsome; we didn’t much care for gangster films, either. But I would remember the singling out of the getaway driver.

That was when the snowcat operator spoke to me. “Is it Adam the Kid?” she asked me. I know, I’d been able to speak to Nora, but I couldn’t quite manage to speak to the night groomer. I was barely capable of nodding to her. “I’ll be seeing you later, Kid—ghost or no ghost,” Molly told me.

“Okay,” I managed to say to her.

“When shit like this happens,” I heard Nora saying to the zither man, “some people call it a night—they just pack it in.” I saw Em crazily shaking her head, not wanting to be mistaken for one of those craven people. I could see where this was going.

“I’m guessing you and your friend just want to keep dancing,” the zither-meister said to Nora and Em.

“Shit or no shit, we keep dancing,” Nora told the Austrian. My aunts and uncles had called it a night. Foreseeing no prospects of dancing, Henrik had packed it in with them—he’d hobbled off. No one could recall when the girly-girl blondes and the rest of the North Conway Norwegians had departed for the inn—perhaps before the fatal lightning strike, and what was for me a life-changing aftershock.

When I said my good-nights to Nana and Dottie, who were sitting at the far end of the table from the infant under the sheet, Dottie told me they were “waitin’ up for the authorities—them usual lamebrains in charge of anythin’,” as she put it. The girl jocks made a to-do over my going to bed, hugs and kisses galore. The night groomer definitely knew when I was calling it a night. Molly blew me a kiss as I was leaving the wedding tent.

There weren’t many partyers under the tent when the edelweiss man resumed zithering. Nora and Em were out on the dance platform, where a few of the girl jocks were dancing with one another. Small groups of people were gathered at the near-empty tables, just talking or drinking. With the tables cleared, I could more clearly see the floating candles. These misbegotten candles had been the idea of our local fire marshal: candles afloat in bowls of water. If someone knocks over a candle, you have a bowl of water handy to douse the flame. But of course the candles kept getting submerged in the water bowls. Then the wicks were wet, and it was hard to relight them. (Dottie doubtless would have included our local fire marshal among the lamebrained authorities.)

A wedding guest, bored and brainless—Henrik, maybe—had placed one of the floating candles in the birdbath. Thus I went to bed with a larger-than-life image of the stone sparrows perched on the rim: the floating candlelight had cast giant shadows of the birds’ heads and beaks on the roof of the tent above the birdbath. More disturbing than the huge size of the birds was that they appeared to be moving—twitching slightly, or preparing to peck. The candle afloat in the birdbath was never still—it kept moving, just a little. It was an unsettling image to take to bed—enormous, predatory sparrows—but I was relieved to have something else (anything else) to think about.

I needed to stop thinking about what I’d seen, and what it meant. Was it immaterial that my mom either was or wasn’t Elliot Barlow’s beard, now that the snowshoer evidently was a beard for my mother? Just what kind of honeymoon could my mom have with the little snowshoer, now that I’d seen the honeymoon she’d been having with the very big trail groomer? If good-looking and small were the features my mother found most attractive in men, what was I to make of Molly, who was beautiful but big?

These were the troubling thoughts that consumed me as I climbed the attic stairs to my bedroom. I wasn’t afraid of a nighttime visit from my grandfather’s ghost—with or without the night groomer to protect me. I even welcomed a haunting from the diaper man’s restless spirit. If the ghost of the infant emeritus came creeping up the attic stairs, at least I would have someone else to think about. I didn’t know what to think about my mom and Molly and the little snowshoer—I kept trying to imagine them in the rest of my life.

Now on a hanger—on a hook, on the inside of my bathroom door—my mother’s blameless wedding dress regarded me with unlaced simplicity. The bed was neatly made for me. No naked bodies, locked together in an upside-down embrace, were reflected in the skylight. No rain, no thunder, no lightning—the storm had passed. I left a light on in the bathroom, with the door ajar—a night-light for the night groomer—and got into bed in my boxers. The skylight, partially open, was tilted toward my bed. I heard a moth, flapping against the screen, no doubt drawn to the light from my bathroom. I could also hear the zither—a zither makes ghostly music when you hear it from far away, especially “The Harry Lime Theme.”

The tread I heard on the attic stairs was too heavy a footfall for Granddaddy’s ghost—at the time of his death, the diaper man didn’t weigh as much as Little Ray. But then I reconsidered: Why should you hear a ghost’s footsteps at all? When that telltale step sharply creaked near the top of the stairs, I heard the trail groomer say, “Don’t worry, Kid—it’s just me.” Under the circumstances, this wasn’t entirely reassuring. At the time, I may have been more afraid of Molly than I was of anybody’s ghost. Molly was wearing some workout shorts and a tank top without a bra, what my mom might have slept in on a warm summer night, and the night groomer got under the sheet with me as matter-of-factly as my mother would have—notwithstanding that the final resting place for my grandfather, whose ghost we awaited, had been under a sheet.

“I don’t think Granddaddy’s ghost will be charred black, or even a little bit burnt,” I said to Molly. “Do you think ghosts look like they looked at the moment they died?” I asked her.

“I don’t think about ghosts—I don’t see ghosts, no matter what they look like or how they died,” Molly said. “I think some people see them, and some don’t,” she added.

“My mom sees them, and she’s always asking me if I’ve seen them, but I’ve only started to see them,” I explained to Molly.

“I just know I’m not going to Aspen, or nowhere near that hotel your mother never stops talking about. There are plenty of other ski towns and hotels to go to,” the night groomer told me.

“The Hotel Jerome,” I said—as reverentially as possible, given the history.

“You couldn’t get me to go there for breakfast,” Molly said.

It’s too simple to say that people who don’t believe in ghosts don’t see them. Nana said she’d seen enough of Granddaddy when he was alive, not least when he wasn’t speaking and in a diaper. Nana said she didn’t need to see his ghost.

Only God knows how Aunt Abigail and Aunt Martha really felt about ghosts; only time would tell if my aunts were susceptible to seeing them. I would venture a guess that Aunt Abigail and Aunt Martha basically disapproved of ghosts; I always believed they would express their moral indignation upon seeing one. Only God knows what form that moral indignation would take. Only God would be there, upon their apparent ghost sighting.

If Uncle Martin or Uncle Johan ever saw a ghost, I’m sure their response would be completely inappropriate. My uncles, and other people who can’t distinguish between comedy and tragedy, probably shouldn’t see ghosts.

Surely Henrik lacked the imagination to see or believe in ghosts. He would one day be elected to the U.S. House of Representatives from a southern state—the same state where he went to college, to play lacrosse. At the time of my mom’s wedding, Henrik had not yet revealed his political inclinations, but given Henrik’s habit of expressing his desire for Em with his lacrosse stick, we should have known his politics wouldn’t be altruistic. A future Republican, Henrik was too self-interested to adapt to ghosts.

It suffices to say that my thoughts about ghosts were wandering while I waited for Granddaddy’s ghost to appear. It’s true that the ghost of the bogus principal emeritus wasn’t the first ghost I saw, but the diaper man was the first ghost I had known when he was (more or less) alive.

Then I saw Lewis Brewster’s ghost. He was nicely dressed, in a jacket and a tie—a much younger man than I’d ever known, and he seemed to take a frank and kindly interest in me, which he’d never taken. “My dear boys,” the youthful-looking English teacher said to Molly and me. Ghosts didn’t see very well, or this one didn’t. “Punctuation doesn’t have to be this difficult,” young Mr. Brewster assured us. I’d only seen photos of him at this age.

“What is it, Adam?” Molly asked. She’d put her arm around me. I must have made some sudden, startled move beside her when I saw the ghost. The young English teacher was standing under the skylight, as if he’d descended from the heavens.

“It’s him—he’s not burnt,” I told Molly. “It’s him, before I was born.”

“I’ve got you, Kid,” the night groomer said, putting both her strong arms around me.

“Remember one thing, boys, about the much-maligned semicolon,” my youthful grandfather was saying to us. “The clause following a semicolon should ideally be a complete sentence; the part about a complete sentence is what distinguishes the semicolon from the dash,” the youthful Mr. Brewster further explained to us. “What follows a dash can but needn’t be a complete sentence—just an aside, perhaps a random interjection. Do you see, my dear boys?” Granddaddy’s ghost asked. When I nodded, I could tell that the trail groomer had gone to sleep—with one heavy leg thrown over me. The young English teacher went on and on, until I fell asleep, too. It was “I Forgot to Remember to Forget” that the zither man was playing when Molly and I woke up hugging each other.

“Is the damn ghost gone?” the night groomer asked me. He was. The punctuation lecture was over. When I tried to tell Molly what the ghost had taught me, all she said was: “I’m still not going to Aspen—not even if the conversation is about punctuation. Besides, we’ve got more important things to talk about, Kid.”

She sang the beginning of the Elvis song to me again—just a few lines from “I Forgot to Remember to Forget.”

I just started talking—I told Molly everything. How my mom had shown me the way she’d kissed the snowshoer—how I’d shown Em, who showed Nora, what kind of kiss it was. I even told the night groomer what I’d seen reflected in the skylight above my bed, and how little I understood what I saw. Molly kept holding me, but she just listened. By the time I finished everything I had to say, the zither-meister had stopped playing. Molly and I saw a predawn glow in the skylight. I’d told the trail groomer my most troubling thoughts—all the stuff about who was whose beard, and my mother’s apparent fondness for small, good-looking men and big, beautiful women. I mean truly everything.

“Here’s what I know, Kid—I love your mom for how she just does certain things without any forethought, because if you truly love someone, you have to love everything about them. Even the things that hurt,” Molly said. “As for a beard, it’s a hateful word the way your hateful aunts use it—in their eyes, a beard is all about the deceit. But two beards are better than one, Kid,” the night groomer assured me. “Your mother and the snowshoer aren’t deceiving each other. They love each other, in their own way. It doesn’t have to be the same way your mom and I love each other,” was the way Molly put it. “There’s more than one way to love people, Kid.” All through the night, we’d held on to each other, and I thought of the honeymoon my mom and the snowshoer were having in Maine—how they were looking at that cliff together, how my mom had told Elliot to keep hold of her.

When there’s an event that changes your life forever, you know how the afteryears go by—how some people change, and some don’t. As I lay in the night groomer’s arms, I was hoping that this precarious triangle—that these three beloved people—would never change. Not Molly, not my mom, not the snowshoer. Please stay on the cliff, I was praying—to all three of them, for all four of us. Please keep hold of me, and of one another, I prayed.