The circuit-type training suited my mom’s eternal restlessness. She allowed herself no rest between these exercises. “You don’t want the lactic acid to clear—you want to increase your lactic acid threshold,” she was always saying to Uncle Martin and Uncle Johan, who often tried to do the exercises with her. They couldn’t match her pace.
Yet Little Ray hated to run, and she wouldn’t ride a bike. All winter, when the academy athletic fields were covered with snow, my uncles would stride over the playing fields on their cross-country skis, but my mother was strictly a downhill skier. She would, occasionally, put on her telemark skis and skin up a mountain, but that was because she liked skiing down.
When it wasn’t ski season, my uncles were cyclists. Not Little Ray. “I don’t want to be killed by a car,” my mom said. “I’m too small—bad drivers won’t see me, till they run over me.”
I liked running around the academy playing fields, and my uncles had shown me the cross-country running course through the woods. Most of all, I liked running on the wooden track in the Thompson Cage. I liked the sound of my feet on the boards. For the most part, you’re alone when you run—even when there are other runners around.
By the time I was old enough to walk anywhere I wanted—when I was also old enough to imagine myself as a student at the academy—I liked watching the older boys playing their sports, and wondering which sports I would play. Most sports didn’t appeal to me; team sports were particularly unappealing. So many of the boys on teams appeared to be struggling; the attention paid to balls or pucks seemed stupid, beyond moronically obsessive.
Henrik was a ball-and-puck person; his sports were soccer, hockey, and lacrosse. Henrik started at Exeter in the fall of 1952; he graduated in the spring of 1956, about three months before I would start. Given my negative relationship with Henrik, I had long ago decided against soccer, hockey, and lacrosse.
Because I was small, wrestling tempted me; it was a weight-class sport (I would wrestle other small boys) and I liked the one-on-one aspect of it. But the wrestlers often competed in a box-shaped gym attached to the cage; the wooden track overhung the wrestling area, and spectators sat on the boards with their legs dangling above the mat. It disturbed me that the wrestlers grappled at the bottom of a gladiatorial pit, with their pitiless fans staring down at them. And I didn’t like how the wrestlers ran their laps after wrestling practice—the way their flat-soled wrestling shoes pounded on the wooden track. They jogged half a lap, then sprinted the other half; this meant that I was always passing them, and they were always passing me. Therefore, I somewhat tentatively decided that I wouldn’t wrestle. My only sport would be running, I believed. I would run cross-country in the fall, and run the mile in track-and-field—in the cage in the winter, and outdoors in the spring.
I met the snowshoer one winter day, after I’d been running on the wooden track in the cage. I could see him coming toward me. He was crossing the snow-covered baseball diamond, from the infield to the outfield. In the distance, the narrow stone bridge over the Exeter River was obscured by wind-blown snow. I mistook him for a cross-country skier—a very small one, too small to be one of my uncles. The snowshoer had ski poles. His stride was shorter than a cross-country skier’s, or he had the wrong wax on his skis. He didn’t appear to be getting any glide from his stride. Of course I couldn’t see his snowshoes, which I thought were his skis.
In the wind-blown snow, I couldn’t be sure he was a guy; he looked smaller than me, even smaller than Little Ray. He was as small as the smallest Exeter student I had ever seen; he was as small as a child, but he didn’t move like a child. I saw something decidedly male and adult in the strength of his stride. The way he loped along reminded me of a runner I’d encountered a few times in the warm weather—both outdoors, on the academy athletic fields, and on the wooden track in the cage. He was out of my league as a runner—too fast for me to keep up with, though his legs were comically short. On the sloped boards in the cage, he had lapped me a couple of times in less than a mile. There was a very mature element in how friendly he was; the Exeter students rarely acknowledged me. This made me think he was a very young faculty member, although—in addition to his childlike size—he was absurdly youthful-looking for anyone on the faculty. It was hard to imagine he could command the students’ attention.
I was thirteen that February day in 1955. I wouldn’t become an academy student until September 1956. I hadn’t started to shave; in my estimation, neither had the snowshoer. I couldn’t see they were snowshoes until he removed them—old wooden bear paws with leather bindings and rawhide laces. He stood beside his snowshoes in the parking lot of the Thompson Cage, where he brushed the snow off them. They were the long kind of bear paws, shaped like teardrops—nearly a yard long, more than half as tall as the diminutive snowshoer himself. “I thought you were a skier,” I told him.
“I’m just a runner,” he said, smiling warmly, “either on snowshoes or off them. You’re a runner, too, aren’t you?”
“I’m just a kid—I’m a kind of faculty brat,” I told him. I’d never thought of myself as any kind of faculty brat—not a legitimate one, anyway. I didn’t think my being the grandchild of a faculty emeritus counted for faculty-brat status—especially not the grandkid of a deluded grammarian.
“A kind of faculty brat?” the exceedingly small snowshoer asked. “What kind of faculty brat are you?” He was too good-natured to be a student; he was definitely a faculty member, but a very unusual one.
I just blurted it all out; I didn’t even know his name, but I told him everything. I had never felt as safe with anyone—not even with Nora, occasionally not with my mother. “I’m the illegitimate son of Rachel Brewster—the unmarried daughter of faculty emeritus Lewis Brewster, my insane grandfather,” I began, thus capturing the little snowshoer’s attention. “Lewis Brewster is a madman emeritus; he has deluded himself into believing he used to be principal of the academy, but he was just an English teacher,” I further explained, barely pausing to breathe. “Granddaddy Lew stopped speaking when he learned my mother was pregnant—with me,” I added, just to be perfectly clear. “According to my cousin, who remembers when the lunatic emeritus used to talk, all he ever said was stuff about punctuation marks.”
“What sort of stuff?” the surprised snowshoer asked. I had the feeling that the part about the punctuation marks was the only aspect of my Brewster family history heretofore unknown to him.
“I don’t know,” I admitted. “I never heard what he said, because he stopped speaking before I was born,” I reminded the snowshoer.
“Oh, yes—you already explained the chronology perfectly,” the tiny man told me. “I’m afraid I’m ‘just an English teacher,’ as you say. I was being overly curious about the punctuation marks.” Here the snowshoer lowered his voice, as if he didn’t want to be overheard; at a glance, I could see we were alone in the parking lot. “In the area of student writing,” the extremely small English teacher said, “some of my colleagues in the department overdo the importance of punctuation.”
“You teach writing?” I asked him.
“I do—that is, to the degree that writing can be taught,” the little snowshoer said. He was disarmingly handsome.
“My grandmother read Moby-Dick aloud to me—when I was ten, eleven, and twelve,” I told him. “When I’m a little older, I would like to try reading it again—to myself.”