The Last Chairlift

24. MELANCHOLIC ENOUGH

That boy, the one who wasn’t shaving, the boy who couldn’t take his eyes off Little Ray—my mother told Molly he looked thirteen or fourteen. “The kid told Ray he was almost fifteen,” Molly told me. Beginning with his age, Molly and I sensed there were likely some strings attached.

“He was no big deal!” my mom had insisted to Molly, but—whoever the kid was—he was a big deal to me.

Molly and I knew boys who couldn’t keep their eyes off my mother—my wrestling teammates, Matthew Zimmermann among them. How my mom had described the kid in Aspen to Molly was consistent with what she’d said about him to me. “He was small,” my mother had emphasized. “He would have been a pretty girl,” she’d told Molly and me.

“She never told you about this kid before?” I asked Molly.

“Ray said she gave some of her clothes to a boy who was a little smaller than she was—she didn’t say she slept with him,” Molly told me. “Not at first.”

“What clothes did she give him?” I asked the snowcat operator.

“Ray gave the kid a ski sweater—it was too small for her, but it was a little big on him,” Molly said. “There was a ski hat, too—Ray said she never liked it, but she liked it on him.”

“A ski hat with a pom-pom?” I asked Molly.

“Ray didn’t say there was a pom-pom,” Molly said.

“I’m not sure about it,” I told her, truthfully.

“There are always strings attached, Kid,” Molly said.

Had I seen my father as a ghost? Was he the short boy with the tall snow shovel? Had he been wearing my mom’s ski sweater? Was that her hat, with the girlish pom-pom? And why did I think this ghost looked like it was still alive?

Yes, I put off telling my wife, Grace, about the ghosts. I know, I know—people who are guilty of lies of omission are usually guilty of more than one. But I did tell Grace about the snowshoer kiss. I told her the entire history of that kiss. I wasn’t trying to put her off. I’d been hearing about Grace for years—foremost from my mother, long before Molly jumped on the Grace bandwagon.

I heard that Grace did this, and that Grace did that, when Grace was still in high school. Thanks to my mom, Grace was reading my novels when she was seventeen—when I was thirty-one. It’s a good thing I resisted my mother, who wanted me to meet Grace then. How could that have turned out well?

“Maybe later would be better, Ray,” was all Molly said at the time, or words to that effect. Later the trail groomer joined forces with Little Ray. I didn’t give in to my mother’s nagging at me to meet Grace until Molly wanted me to meet her, too. When Molly and my mom joined forces, I gave in.

“I’m just saying you should meet Grace, sweetie,” my mother usually began. This time, Molly was making pancakes in the Manchester kitchen; no doubt it was the ski season in Vermont, because it was dark outside when Molly was making breakfast, and my mom and Molly were wearing their long johns and their ski socks. “Grace is thirty-three, she’s beautiful, she works in publishing—she’s been reading your books since she was in high school, sweetie,” my mother carried on.

“Grace is thirty-two, Ray,” Molly corrected her.

“She’s almost thirty-three, Molly,” my mom said.

It was 1988, I think. Those two old ski jocks, who were spilling their coffee while they were trying to put on a second underlayer of clothes, were working at Bromley Mountain. Molly was a couple of years older than my mother, who was sixty-six.

“You wanted me to meet Grace when she was still in high school,” I reminded my mom.

“It’s just as well that didn’t happen, Kid—I think now is a good time to meet her,” Molly said.

“Grace was a darling little girl—I gave her ski lessons, you know,” my mother reminded me.

“You gave me ski lessons, too, and look how I turned out—the serial bad-girlfriend guy,” I said.

“I wouldn’t go there if I were you, Kid,” Molly told me. Too late.

“If Grace was a bleeder, sweetie, we would have heard about it,” my mom assured me. “Manchester is a small town—a woman with continuous uterine bleeding would be a big deal here.”

“Come on, Ray—no bleeding,” Molly said.

“I know Sophie was a writer, sweetie—I’m not saying all she did was bleed!” my mother said. “But did Sophie ever publish anything?”

“I saw some short stories, in magazines, but there wasn’t a collection—there was no book,” I told my mom and Molly. “I don’t think Sophie wrote a novel, not that I saw.”

“Not a surefire page-turner, sweetie—a novel about fibroids!” my mother exclaimed.

“Cut it out, Ray,” Molly told her.

“I’m pretty sure Grace doesn’t have fibroids, sweetie,” my mom reassured me. “Not that fibroids are the worst thing—except to the life of a washing machine, they’re not life-threatening or anything.”

“Just stop, Ray,” Molly said.

“I’m stopping, I’m stopping!” my mother promised.

Her memory was remarkable, I was thinking. She’d first and last seen Sophie twenty-five years before—another early morning in the ski season, when Molly was making pancakes.

The washing machine was in the kitchen of the Manchester house, and Sophie had been loading it with our bloody bedsheets. My mom and Molly were in their early forties; I was twenty-two. I’d met Sophie in a creative writing class in college, but Sophie was a little older—twenty-four or twenty-five. The uterine bleeding had caused her to miss two or three years of school.

“Fibroids are benign muscle-tissue tumors in the uterine wall,” Sophie was explaining to my mother and Molly. They hadn’t asked her about the bleeding; Sophie was always explaining it, unasked. “Fibroids generally don’t turn malignant or become dangerous, except for the sometimes severe bleeding they can cause—the bleeding can vary, from very little to hemorrhagic,” Sophie further explained.

I had my arms full of bloody pillowcases and towels; Sophie pointed to the washer, and I stuffed them in. I was wearing a T-shirt and boxers; Sophie pointed to my white T-shirt, which I took off and put in the washer. I liked having a writer girlfriend. We talked about writing, and our wanting to be writers, all the time, truly more than we talked about her constant bleeding—but we were always doing laundry. Sophie hated the sight of blood.

That early morning in the Manchester kitchen, Sophie started the load of laundry; she sipped her coffee without ever pausing in her lecture to Molly and Little Ray, who were speechless. Of course I’d heard Sophie’s fibroid prognostications before; I was always speechless. There’s nothing you can or should say when a woman is telling you about her nonstop uterine bleeding.

“To understand how fibroids cause bleeding, you have to know what usually allows for uterine bleeding not to occur,” Sophie was saying. This was the part of the ordeal when Sophie pressed her palms together, as if in prayer. I was checking out my boxer shorts, but there were no signs of blood—not that I could see—while Little Ray also held her hands tightly together. My mom was being a good sport, going along with Sophie’s dramatization of uterine bleeding, but Molly was busy with the pancakes at the stove—Molly’s hands were otherwise engaged. Molly wasn’t praying.

“Imagine your uterus like your hands squeezed together,” Sophie was saying. “The inside surfaces of your uterus are two walls, tightly opposed—the endometrial surfaces of your uterus would easily bleed, if the opposing walls weren’t pressed together.” Sophie wrung her hands. “The walls hold the blood in,” she said, praying harder.

The way my mother was wringing her hands, it looked like a new off-season exercise. “Fibroids are irregular muscle masses; they abut the inner surfaces of the uterus, like marbles. Imagine marbles between your hands,” Sophie said to Little Ray. “The walls of your uterus are pushed apart.”

“Fucking marbles!” my mom cried.

“The blood sloughs off anytime, causing irregular or constant bleeding,” Sophie continued calmly. She knew the story, but you can see why it wouldn’t have worked as a novel. “Sometimes the bleeding doesn’t amount to more than spotting. Sometimes the blood really flows,” Sophie went on. Definitely not a novel, I hoped.

We were together a year; we read all of Thomas Mann together. Sophie thought Mann might have managed a novel about uterine bleeding. Fibroid sufferers meet at a women’s clinic; they tell one another the stories of their ruined relationships. I suggested that Mann might have tried this as a novella, or a long short story.

“Maybe there are men who can only be with women who are fibroid sufferers,” Sophie had speculated. Definitely not longer than a novella, I was hoping.

“During my actual period, the flow is much heavier than normal—there’s severe cramping and pain,” Sophie was telling Molly and my mother. “No one wants to have sex with me—not after the novelty wears off,” Sophie said, looking at me. Molly and my mom looked at me, too. I was self-conscious and cold, standing around in my boxers. “I wouldn’t want to have sex with me, either,” Sophie said—more softly, to me. “I wouldn’t stay with me as long as you have, Adam,” she said. When she got to this part, it broke me up—every time—but we’d agreed not to cry in front of each other. Instead, we tried to imagine how Thomas Mann would have written it. Not an uplifting novella.

Sophie stretched the waistband of my boxers, appearing to take a disinterested look; she always let the waistband go with an audible snap. To Molly and Ray, this gesture might have seemed affectionate or cruel—perhaps both—but I knew Sophie. She was always looking for blood. “Aren’t you cold, sweetie?” my mother asked me. “You should put some clothes on.”

I tried to look like I was leaving the kitchen, but I took my time doing it. Sophie knew how to finish a story, and I knew exactly where she was in the fibroid saga—she was almost done with it. “Surgery is an option,” Sophie was saying to my mom and Molly. I was edging toward the TV room with the giant futon—where Sophie and I had slept, where we’d had sex, where there’d been bleeding—but I knew I had to linger in the kitchen a little longer. “I could have a fibroidectomy—or, one day, a complete hysterectomy,” Sophie said, almost casually. She paused; she knew I was waiting to leave. “Don’t worry, Adam,” she said softly, letting me go. “I won’t try the surgery till you’ve moved on. I won’t make you go through the surgery part.”

I love Thomas Mann. He was the perfect writer to discover in a year of bleeding. But twenty-five years later, I was alone with my mother and Molly in their Vermont kitchen. I was older than they’d been when Sophie and I broke up. I didn’t want to hear my mom say, “Poor Sophie”—not again, not when those two old ski jocks were in their sixties, and I was in my forties.

I’d missed having a writer for a girlfriend, if not the bleeding. I’d been seeing another writer; there was something about it that made being a writer a little less lonely. I’d never gone out with a woman who worked in publishing, and Grace had been reading my novels since she was in high school. If you were a writer closing in on fifty—if your relationships had been a rocky road—wouldn’t you have been interested in meeting Grace? Even if you were worried about the age difference. Even if Grace was your mother’s idea.

“Okay,” I said, looking at Molly, who was flipping pancakes. “Okay, okay,” I told my mother, who was doing her wall sits in her long johns against the refrigerator, trying not to spill her coffee.

“Okay to what, sweetie?” my mom asked.

“Okay, I’ll meet Grace. If that’s what you want, I’ll meet her,” I said. I should have known this would make my mother suspicious.

“You’re not seeing anyone, are you? You can’t go out with Grace if you’re seeing someone, sweetie,” my mom told me.

“Ray, let Adam meet Grace—let them decide if they want to go out,” Molly said.

“Are you seeing someone, sweetie?” my mother asked me.

“You know who I’m seeing. In my uncommitted way, I’ve been seeing her for a few years,” I said.

“Oh, her—oh, God—that other writer, the one who’s depressed all the time!” my mom exclaimed. “It’s been more than a few years, sweetie. You’re not living with her, are you?”

“I told you. We have an agreement. We don’t live together, we don’t have children,” I said.

“She’s probably too old to have children, sweetie. She’s your age, isn’t she? Are you sure she’s not trying to have children?” my mother asked. She was spilling her coffee now, and there’s no telling what her wall sits were doing to the stuff on the inside of the refrigerator door.

“Give it a rest, Ray,” Molly said. “Wilson doesn’t want children.”

My mom had chugged the last of her coffee; she’d moved on from the wall sits to her single-leg lunges. “Wilson!” she cried. “What a name for a woman—no wonder she’s depressed! It’s a male given name. If Wilson was her last name—well, okay.”

“Ray, you know Wilson’s story—her parents named her after the president. Wilson won a Nobel Peace Prize,” Molly said.

“The World War One guy—I know, Molly,” my mother grunted, lunging. “But you don’t name a girl Wilson! What was the president’s first name? Sue?” She’d moved on from lunges; she was doing squats.

“Woodrow Wilson, the twenty-eighth president of the United States,” Molly answered tiredly.

“Smarty-pants,” my mom told her. “Woodrow would have been a better name for a girl.” Her squats were so deep, she was bumping the floor with her little ass. “I’m not introducing you to Grace, sweetie, if you’re still seeing Wilson. You can’t hide things or keep secrets from Grace—you have to tell her everything,” my mother said.

“Ray, lay off the squats,” Molly said sharply. Little Ray stopped; Molly didn’t often speak sharply to her. “We didn’t tell Adam we were more than friends, did we?” Molly asked her, more softly. “We didn’t tell him everything, Ray.”

“We were going to tell you, sweetie,” my mom immediately said. “Smarty-pants,” my mother told Molly, again.

There was no lasting acrimony, but what was lost in our conversation was my mom’s advice. When I fell in love with Grace, I should have told her everything. I shouldn’t have hidden things or kept secrets from her. I should have listened to my mother.

What I remember is trying to keep the peace between my mom and Molly. I quickly said, “Okay, okay—I’ll stop seeing Wilson. I’ve been thinking I should stop seeing her, anyway. We’re not seeing that much of each other, as it is.”

“You’re always thinking you should stop seeing someone, sweetie,” my mother pointed out.

“Let it go, Ray—let the Kid and Grace meet each other. Let them figure it out,” Molly said.

I sensed a sea change coming. Lucky me, I thought.

I’d been lucky before. I competed as a wrestler for a relatively short time, and not very successfully, but wrestling did a lot for me. My small hands, my little fingers—the accumulated injuries—would keep me out of Vietnam. I was reclassified 4-F—“registrant unfit for military service.” An untouchable draft deferment, before my student deferment expired. The wrestlers who knew me knew only that my hand and finger damage had saved me from the draft and Vietnam.

What my wrestler friends didn’t know—what I didn’t know, either, not for a while—was that my mother had her own hopes and plans for keeping me out of the draft. “Ray was angling to keep you out of the draft before we were in the Vietnam War, Kid,” Molly told me.

Only then did I understand what my mom had meant when I mistakenly thought she must have overheard Molly and me talking about penis surgery. “It’s a better surgery for a boy to have,” was all Little Ray had said—meaning Caroline’s meniscectomy. My mother’s highest hopes for my wrestling were that I would have an old-fashioned, take-everything-out meniscectomy—a surefire 4-F draft deferment. In Little Ray’s view, this surgery was wasted on a girl—girls couldn’t be drafted.

When I told Nora, Em just nodded; I could see it was old news to them. “Did Molly tell you why they got a gun?” Nora asked me. I’d seen the gun, a twenty-gauge shotgun. Molly told me it was a good gun for varmints—she’d mentioned rabid raccoons, when I’d asked her what was around in terms of varmints. I saw it was a single-shot shotgun, and that they had a limited assortment of shells—buckshot and deer slugs. “The buckshot was for the varmints. The deer slugs were for your knee, kiddo,” Nora told me. “If the wrestling injuries were insufficient, one shot would have worked—a twenty-gauge deer slug in the knee does as much damage as a meniscectomy.” Em had covered her ears, as if to block out the sound of the shot; then she knelt at my feet, hugging my knees. I knew Nora wasn’t kidding.

I knew Henrik had a 4-F deferment, too. (A lacrosse injury, when he was still in college, and the subsequent meniscectomy.) It was a shock to consider that my mother would have shot me to keep me out of Vietnam. When I asked Molly if what Nora had told me was true, Molly said, “You’re her one and only, Kid, but she probably would have made me pull the trigger.”

When I asked Nora if she would have shot Henrik in the knee if Henrik hadn’t had the meniscectomy, Em went into a pantomime performance that resembled delivering her own child and killing it. “What Em is trying to say, kiddo, is that we might not have shot Henrik in his knee,” Nora told me.

They’d met in a theater course in college. They had an onstage routine they’d been developing for a long time. Em wrote all their material, but she never spoke onstage—she only acted things out, in pantomime. Nora, with her deadpan delivery, interpreted what Em had mimed for the audience. They began with college audiences. Nora and Em were relatively late bloomers in finding their New York audience. Cabaret theater and burlesque shows weren’t their best audience, but before the Gallows Lounge (a comedy club) launched them, Nora and Em had to start onstage somewhere. To me, their shtick onstage was pretty much the same as the way they were together—they’d always been dark. But over time, in the writing, Em made their dark shtick more entertaining. Over time, Em would speak to me, but very little—at first, only if Nora was with us. Once I asked Nora what would have happened if my mother and Molly had been unable to shoot me—if the wrestling injuries to my hands and fingers hadn’t deferred me from the draft. Would Nora have shot me?

“No,” Em said. She was shaking her head and biting her lower lip, but she was done talking.

“You have to explain what you mean, Em,” Nora told her.

Em made me lie down on the floor on my back; then she directed Nora to lie on top of me, chest to chest but perpendicular to me. The way you’d pin someone, the wrestler in me was thinking, when Em pounced on my legs and bit me, hard, in one knee. I had to roll up the leg of my pants in order to examine her teeth marks—she didn’t break the skin. Nora explained what Em meant. “The way we imagined we would do it, kiddo, is that I would hold you down and Em would shoot your knee.” Once again, I knew Nora wasn’t kidding.

My wrestling injuries at Exeter had been small ones. Some broken fingers, and a torn extensor tendon in the index finger of my right hand—my writing hand. I would keep tearing that same extensor tendon. My mom kept score; she wanted to know exactly how many times that tendon had been torn. “The index finger of your right hand is your trigger finger, sweetie,” my mother reminded me. This went over my head. At the time, I thought my mom was worried about my writing.

At Exeter, I had two surgeries to repair the damage to flexor tendons in my palms—a surgery on each hand—but those surgeries were just the start of my trouble with flexor tendons. I had the smallest hands of anyone in my weight class. There’s a lot of hand-fighting in wrestling; I lost most of the hand fights. When I broke a finger in a backward direction—if it was bent back against the back of my hand—the real damage was to the flexor tendon attached to that finger in the palm of the hand. The scar tissue builds up; one day, you can’t make a fist or fully extend the affected fingers. My middle and pinky fingers, of both hands, were the ones most often broken in a backward direction; over time, those flexor tendons had the most surgeries.

My mother seemed unconcerned with what happened to my other fingers; she wasn’t keeping score of all my flexor-tendon or extensor-tendon surgeries. Her obsession seemed to begin and end with what happened to the index finger of my right hand—my writing hand, as I thought of it. As I pointed out to my mom, the middle finger of my writing hand actually exerted more pressure on the pen, and my middle finger had really taken a beating—from wrestling, I’d pointed out to her, not from giving people the finger. “Your middle finger isn’t your trigger finger, sweetie,” was all she said. Even that went over my head. Nora said everything did, but all I thought about was being a writer. It hadn’t occurred to me that I might become a soldier.

Wrestling at Exeter, I had the usual mouth injuries, requiring some stitches in my lips and tongue. In those days, mouth guards were uncomfortable, and I didn’t wear one. My mom didn’t keep score of the stitches in my lips and tongue. It never occurred to me that soldiers didn’t need perfect lips and tongues, or that lip and tongue defects wouldn’t qualify me for a 4-F deferment.

The snowshoer and Molly kept closer track of my cauliflower ears than my mother did. “Cauliflower ears look like dog turds, sweetie—I don’t want my one and only to have dog turds for ears,” my mom said. As a ski patroller, Molly had drained a few cauliflower ears—Molly knew how to do it. In the days before most recreational skiers wore helmets, there were occasional cauliflower ears from skiing. (Ears scraped on icy snow; ears abraded by contact with trees; unimaginable chairlift mishaps.)

“Ski hats do fuck-all to protect your ears, or your head,” Molly told me. “I like to pack an ear with snow before I drain it,” Molly said. “A cold ear doesn’t feel the needle.”

The snowshoer knew how to drain a cauliflower ear, too. Mr. Barlow was better at it than the one guy who knew how it was done in the Exeter training room. There was one nurse in the academy infirmary who knew how to do it without hurting you, the little English teacher told me, but she wasn’t at the infirmary a lot. When the snowshoer drained my cauliflower ears, he used ice cubes in a white athletic sock instead of snow. The ear only hurt when the gauze, soaked in wet plaster, hardened—then the ear throbbed. The plaster cast on your ear was a funny-looking thing. Many wrestlers didn’t bother to have their cauliflower ears drained, but I did. Most wrestlers liked the looks of their cauliflower ears, but Little Ray didn’t. Not that my mom counted the number of times my ears were drained. “No one ever got a draft deferment for cauliflower ears, sweetie,” she would eventually tell me, but this was after I got the 4-F deferment. “Soldiers can still kill, or be killed, with dog turds for ears,” was the way my mom explained it.

When I was at Exeter, Elliot Barlow and wrestling were what I loved about the academy. I had my heart set on winning the New England Interscholastic Wrestling Championship. Two years in a row, I lost to the same guy in the championship tournament. I finished fourth in New England at 133 pounds in 1961. I appreciated what Coach Dearborn told me: “Better than halfway decent, Adam.”

I had my heart set on wrestling in the Big Ten, too. Coach Dearborn had done it, and I wanted to try. I had no illusions that I would ever be good enough to start on a Big Ten team, but I’d met the wrestling coach at Wisconsin when I’d visited Madison. In those days, the wrestling room was in Camp Randall Stadium. So what if I would always be a backup in my weight class? I could see myself being happy in Madison, but Wisconsin didn’t take me.

I went to Pittsburgh instead. Pitt had a tough wrestling room. There was no shame in being a backup there. I had more hand and finger injuries, but it wasn’t because of the flexor- or extensor-tendon surgeries that I left Pittsburgh after only one year. Nor was it because of the competition, although a fourth-place finish in New England didn’t amount to much in Pennsylvania. The best guy in my weight class in the Pitt wrestling room was a fellow freshman. He would be an NCAA finalist the following year. It would have been better than halfway decent to have been his backup at 130 pounds.

I said I left Pitt because I was lonely. My only friends were my teammates—I met no one else. The classes were enormous and impersonal. I was used to Exeter’s small classes and roundtable discussions. I complained that Pittsburgh was a big city. Almost anywhere—after Exeter, New Hampshire—would have struck me as a big city. The real reason I left Pittsburgh was that I was worried about Mr. Barlow. I was afraid that his dressing as a woman would get him in trouble.

I would never have predicted, upon my leaving Exeter, that I would miss home, but I did. I missed the snowshoer—I missed my mom and Molly, and Dottie and my grandmother. I must have been homesick, because I even missed the ghost of the fetus emeritus.

What was I writing? I wrote to Elliot Barlow more than anything else. I kept asking him if he was okay—meaning, Was he still a man? I was trying to write fiction, but I didn’t finish anything. I wrote long fragments of larger things—everything was a work in progress. I’d had early indications that the short story wouldn’t be the form for me. Even at Exeter, I had begun long stories—ones I never finished.

When the snowshoer wrote to me in Pittsburgh, he argued that my loneliness was of a different kind than homesickness. It went over my head when Mr. Barlow quoted Rilke to me. “Works of art are of an infinite loneliness,” Rilke had written. I failed to see how this applied to me. Was the snowshoer saying that my trying to be a writer was why I was lonely? I was more worried about how he dressed.

Imagining the stories you want to write, and waiting to write them, is part of the writing process—like thinking about the characters you want to create, but not creating them. Yet when I did this, when I was just a kid at Exeter—when I thought about writing all the time, but I never finished anything I was writing—this amounted to little more than daydreaming. My trying to be a writer didn’t help my performance as a student. When I read a novel I liked, I immediately read it again. If you’re a student in a demanding school, you don’t have time to read novels twice.

No wonder I didn’t get into Wisconsin. I needed five years to graduate from a four-year school. I took Math III three times. I struggled with Spanish for two years, even with Uncle Martin’s patient help. I struggled with German for three years—despite Uncle Johan’s robust encouragement, and Elliot Barlow’s drilling me on strong and irregular verbs.

The snowshoer did his best to console me, concerning my additional year of high school. “Why be in a hurry to finish school, or a novel?” was the way he put it. The little English teacher introduced me to Graham Greene’s writing—he was the first modern writer I liked. Before Greene, my heroes were all novelists from the nineteenth century. Living in the nineteenth century can expand your loneliness; as a writer, it’s lonely living there.

It was still the wrestling season in Pittsburgh, and I was recovering from flexor-tendon surgery—the tendon attached to my right index finger, in the palm of my writing hand—when the snowshoer wrote me and told me to come home. He’d kept the same faculty apartment in Amen Hall. I’d imagined that my mom was sleeping in my bedroom, alone, whenever she was back in town. With his letter, Mr. Barlow had included the requisite forms for me to apply as a transfer student to the University of New Hampshire for the fall semester of 1962.

I could live with him in Exeter—“in your old room,” the snowshoer wrote. I could commute to UNH, he proposed. Durham was an easy drive from Exeter. I could take his VW Beetle, or buy a used car. There were two fiction writers in the English Department at UNH, and there was a creative writing course—in those days, not common at the undergraduate level. The snowshoer didn’t have to sell me on the Franklin Theatre in Durham. The art-house cinema was still in town. And if I wanted to wrestle, Coach Dearborn would welcome me back in the Exeter wrestling room. The coach had told the snowshoer it would be good to have another assistant coach in the room. I’d learned a lot about wrestling in one year at Pitt.

In Pittsburgh, I’d also had two more surgeries for a torn extensor tendon in the index finger of my right hand. My mother seemed especially interested in the third of these surgeries. “If it’s a surgery involving your trigger finger, sweetie, please have the surgeon send the details of the procedure to me,” she’d already instructed me. I assumed this was all about Molly making sense of the surgical results. This third surgery was of particular interest to Molly because the tendon not only had been torn, but had been detached. And then there was the flexor-tendon surgery in the palm, just below that right index finger. “That counts as a trigger-finger surgery—that makes four,” my mom said.

I couldn’t be bothered with this. I just turned over my surgical records to my mother and Molly. My hand and finger wrestling injuries were so numerous, but they were minor; they were a nuisance, but they lacked gravitas. Whereas my concern for the snowshoer, my fear about his dressing as a woman—this preoccupied my thoughts, this was serious. And Mr. Barlow had a plan to bring me home from Pittsburgh.

Ever my champion, Elliot Barlow was still helping me with my homework. He was trying to make my coming home to New Hampshire not feel like a defeat. “Your mom and Molly will be happy to have you closer to them,” the snowshoer wrote. The clincher was that Elliot managed to make me feel I could be a writer before I was one. The little English teacher gave me confidence in my future as a writer, when all I’d written were unending works in progress.

I was barely a beginner as a writer. I was too immature as an artist to understand how Rilke could connect “works of art” to “an infinite loneliness.” I didn’t get it, not yet. But Elliot Barlow knew I’d read Graham Greene, if not Rilke, and the snowshoer knew which passage from The End of the Affair would resonate with me—a passage that gives confidence to all writers with unending works in progress, a passage that resonates with me still.

“So much of a novelist’s writing,” Greene wrote, “takes place in the unconscious: in those depths the last word is written before the first word appears on paper. We remember the details of our story, we do not invent them.”

“Buoyed up by that coffin,” Ishmael tells us in the Epilogue to Moby-Dick—when Queequeg’s “coffin life-buoy” rises from the sea to save him. Thus did the snowshoer offer me the academic equivalent of Queequeg’s coffin—a way to go home and work at being a writer. In those days, the University of New Hampshire didn’t have a wrestling team, but I didn’t need to compete to keep wrestling. If you’re in a wrestling room, you can always find a workout partner.

I’d not liked living in a dormitory in Pittsburgh. The faculty apartment I shared with my mom and the snowshoer in Amen Hall was more private. When I went back home to Exeter and commuted to college, I became more of a writer. I also saw more movies with Elliot. It helped that I didn’t make many friends in Durham. As a commuter, how could I? I hadn’t yet met Sophie, the bleeder—the writer, I should say. But I latched on to the two fiction writers in the UNH English Department. I took every course they taught, following them around like their faithful dog. One of them told me to apply for a junior year abroad. It occurred to me that he may have wanted me to go away. “Americans need more melancholy,” he said. I didn’t realize, at first, that he meant as writers. He seemed to be saying there was something beneficial about melancholy—universally, for everyone. “Melancholy is good for the soul,” he told me.

Naturally, I told Mr. Barlow about this. He agreed there was more melancholy in Europe. “I can see how melancholy would be good for a writer’s soul,” the snowshoer said, somewhat cautiously.

When I asked Nora what she thought about my studying in Europe for a year, she said, “I told you there’s a foreignness inside you. That’s just who you are. What you’ll find in Europe is more of the melancholy that’s inside you.” I interpreted this to mean that Nora thought Europe would make me unhappier than I was.

Em spoke to me at greater length about Europe than she’d ever spoken to me before, and it was more than she would say to me again for years. Nora was with us, and Em didn’t look at me when she spoke—she was looking at Nora, who seemed surprised. “In Europe, you’ll meet some girl who’s as sad as you, or sadder,” Em said. “Then you’ll be twice as sad together, until the sadness drives you apart,” Em said. This sounded like a novel I would never finish—one I would keep beginning and stopping, again and again. I don’t think Em needed to go to Europe to become more melancholic—Em was melancholic enough—but she and Nora went to Europe a lot.

Of course the little Barlows would have an opinion: I should go to Austria. When it came to what I should do to deepen my darkness as a writer, the Barlows were a writing team—they didn’t hold back. But in this case, a rare one, Elliot reluctantly agreed with his parents. If I went to Vienna, the snowshoer said, I would certainly find sufficient melancholy there.

That was when I decided against a junior year abroad in Europe—I didn’t want to meet a girl who was as sad as me, or sadder. I was afraid of being twice as sad together (with anyone) until the sadness drove us apart. Like Em, I was melancholic enough.

When I came home to New Hampshire from Pittsburgh, I was only twenty. I’d not yet had a girlfriend who was a keeper, though Maud turned out to be a keeper as a friend. Fantasizing was what I did for girlfriends. (Commuting to college would have its drawbacks.) I was living at home with my mom and the snowshoer, which meant I was living alone with Elliot Barlow for long periods of time. And hadn’t I come home to watch over him, to keep an eye on what the little English teacher was wearing? Wasn’t that situation melancholic enough?

I don’t know if melancholy is good for the soul. Once you’ve seen ghosts, you’ve seen sufficient melancholy. If ghosts aren’t melancholic, what are they?

What did my ghosts, if they were ghosts, want? I don’t mean the infantile diaper man, as obvious in death as he’d been in life. I mean the static figures in those black-and-white photographs, their expressions frozen in time, their standpat characters not once revealed by action or dialogue—leaving me to fill in the blanks, to imagine the rest of their lives. What were those ghosts trying to teach me? What did they want me to learn from them? But didn’t I come from a family of secrets? I would wait them out—my mother and the ghosts.

Now I was older than that boy or young man posing in front of the snowbank. That fourteen-year-old was still leaning on his snow shovel—either a long shovel or a short boy. “He was just some kid, sweetie—he wasn’t shaving,” my mom had said. “He was small,” Little Ray had whispered when she kissed me. “He would have been a pretty girl,” she told me. She must have seen something of the small snow shoveler in the little snowshoer, I thought.

In black and white, his handsomeness, his shyness, his smallness alongside his tall snow shovel never varied—in black and white, he didn’t change—but now I could see the feminine prettiness my mother had seen in him, an attractiveness she’d no doubt noticed in the snowshoer. Yet I still sensed in the short boy with the tall snow shovel a different kind of ghost—the kind who can hurt you—and I still thought there was something about him that didn’t look dead. He may have been the boy who couldn’t take his eyes off Little Ray, but whether or not he was the no-strings-attached kid my mom slept with in Aspen, he had the look of someone who was still alive.

He haunted me more than the other ghosts in black and white, the ones I knew were dead. No, I wasn’t overlooking a certain similarity between the shyness of the snow shoveler’s smile and the shy, childlike smile of the dark-skinned hotel maid—forever posing with her mop and pail in a hallway between rooms. When I’d asked my mother about the maid, Little Ray had merely said, “Oh, I didn’t know she died—I think she was Italian.”

The maid looked Mexican to me, but that was just a guess. She had the same dark hair and eyes as the short boy with the tall shovel, but the kid wasn’t dark-skinned—he didn’t look Mexican. The shy innocence of their smiles was the strongest bond between them, and they definitely didn’t look like the 1880s or 1890s. I was pretty sure they came from the 1940s, where I’d come from.

Some secrets stay secrets for a long time. If my mom didn’t know the hotel maid had died—not until I mentioned the maid among my ghosts—didn’t that mean my mother had seen the shy maid when she was alive? Yet Little Ray said next to nothing about her. “I think she was Italian.” That didn’t sound definitive. My mom didn’t seem to care about the childlike hotel maid, dead or alive.

Why are people so interested in their ancestry? There’s nothing you can do about what your ancestors did. When I would obsess to the snowshoer about who my father was—not only out loud, in spontaneous outbursts, but also in unfinished fragments of my juvenile writing—the good teacher would counsel me as best he could. “My dear Adam,” he would say, “you can have no effect on what led up to your existence, can you? You can’t change the past, my dear boy. What you can try to affect is the present and the future—not only your own but, to some degree, the present and future of those you love.”

Mr. Barlow was right about the to some degree part. It began when I knew the little English teacher was drawn to wear my mother’s clothes—henceforth I felt compelled to protect him, to keep him safe. Wasn’t this within the realm of my trying to affect, to some degree, the present and future of someone I loved? I believed I was following Elliot’s advice—at least I tried.

Today, I would echo my mom’s heartfelt endorsement of the snowshoer’s femininity. But, at the time, wouldn’t that have put him in more danger of being found out? I not once neglected to tell him how nice he looked in Little Ray’s clothes. I always praised how pretty he was in this or that outfit. But I stopped short of telling him that he was a woman. I didn’t say he “just wasn’t born one,” as my mother had told me—only she’d used the she word for him.

I didn’t go that far. Even when it was just the snowshoer and my mom and me, or when only Molly was with us, I thought it put Mr. Barlow at risk to use feminine pronouns for him. I would not refer to him, in the third person, as she or her. I even told my mother that she should stop using female pronouns for the snowshoer.

“What if you slip up?” I asked my mom. “What if you call him her, or you say he’s a she, around someone else? Someone who doesn’t know—someone who’s not one of us,” I said to her. “What if you call him her, or you say he’s a she, around Abigail or Martha?”

“I didn’t know you were such a nervous Nellie, sweetie,” my mother said.

Poor Mr. Barlow. He was always mediating between my mom and me—he didn’t like it when we quarreled. “Take it easy on Adam, Ray,” the snowshoer said. “Fiction writers are worriers—they have heightened imaginations. They imagine worst-case scenarios.”

I knew the trail groomer agreed with me. Molly knew my mother wasn’t careful concerning what she said to whom—she just said it, whatever it was. I knew the night groomer had heard my mom use feminine pronouns for the snowshoer around the wrong people. “Listen to your one and only, Ray,” the snowcat operator said. “The Kid’s right—you could be more careful.”

“You’re not a fiction writer, Molly—you’re just a nervous Nellie, too,” my mother said.

“Pronouns are a habit, Ray,” the little English teacher said, always mediating. “You don’t need to have the writer gene to worry that you might repeat yourself—we all repeat ourselves.”

This caused an uncomfortable silence. For an English teacher—a man of words—the mere mention of my having the writer gene was not the most carefully worded thing Elliot Barlow ever said. If I had the writer gene, if there was a writer gene, I certainly didn’t get it from my mom—she didn’t even read fiction. As Molly had said, I was the only fiction writer Little Ray ever read.

I’m guessing my mom and Molly and I couldn’t help thinking about where my writer gene came from. I can’t speak for my mother’s thoughts, or the trail groomer’s; they said nothing. As for me, I found it hard to discern the degree of imagination in the short snow shoveler with the long snow shovel. He looked younger than fourteen, and (frozen in black and white) even his smile was shyly enigmatic—as unreadable as his handsomeness was only slightly effeminate. The writer gene was not evident in the snowbank the young shoveler had created, although it was an artful snowbank—it was more than a haphazard pile of snow. It was not solely the effect of his ski hat with the pom-pom, but there definitely was—in his confident bearing, in his preoccupied demeanor—the air of an artist about the snow shoveler.