“What on earth are you doing with Mr. Barlow, Adam? He didn’t approach you, did he?” Aunt Abigail asked me. She and Aunt Martha and my grandmother were still glued to the dining-room windows, watching the small snowshoer navigate the treacherous driveway in reverse. I was thirteen—I was unfamiliar with the implications of the approach word. Because I’d spoken to the snowshoer before he spoke to me, I was thinking that I’d approached him.
“If Mr. Barlow was too small for Korea, I say he’s too small to drive!” Aunt Martha chimed in. She was still looking out the window, as was my grandmother.
“Fiddlesticks, Martha—you can’t blame someone for being too careful,” Nana said.
“Mr. Barlow is a little light in his loafers, if you ask me,” Aunt Abigail said; this expression, not unlike Abigail’s usage of the word approach, sailed entirely over my head. Though I detected my aunt’s derisive tone, I nonetheless imagined she’d noticed (as I had) how nimble on his feet the little snowshoer was. I needed Nora to interpret her mother’s homophobic slur for me, which Nora soon would.
“My mom and Aunt Martha think Elliot Barlow is a fairy, Adam—they mean light-footed, like a fag, a queer, a fruit,” Nora told me. Their sexual bigotry was consistent with my aunts’ convictions that the older, unmarried men on the Exeter faculty were what they deemed nonpracticing homosexuals. As for the younger bachelors on the academy faculty, Aunt Abigail and Aunt Martha didn’t give a young, attractive man much time to get married. As Nora put it: “If there’s a cute guy on the faculty, and he’s not hitched up by the end of his first year of teaching—well, he’s a homo in the eyes of those witches. That’s how those bitches think,” Nora informed me. “But you tell me, Adam: How’s a guy, even a cute one, going to find a girl he wants to hook up with in Exeter? It’s an all-boys’ school with an all-male faculty, and there’s no one to meet downtown! Trust me, I know,” Nora told me. “I couldn’t find a girl to hook up with, not even for a quickie—not here!”
“What did little Mr. Barlow want with you, Adam?” Aunt Abigail asked me, while she and Aunt Martha were still watching him creep out of the driveway.
“We know what Mr. Barlow wants, Abigail!” Aunt Martha chimed in. “More to the point, Adam—what did you two talk about?”
“Snowshoeing,” I answered.
“Snowshoeing!” Aunt Abigail roared.
Later, when I told Nora about her mother’s and Aunt Martha’s interrogation tactics, Nora said: “I can imagine how my mother would have said snowshoeing—as if you told her that you and Elliot had been talking about fisting!”
“What’s fisting?” I asked Nora, who sighed.
“There will come a day, Adam, when you’ll be as grown up as I am—or as grown up as you’re ever going to get,” Nora said. “Let’s leave the fisting for another day—okay, kiddo?”
“Okay,” I replied. I liked it when Nora called me kiddo, an endearment my mom only sometimes used to express her affection for me—only when she felt sorry for me, or when she was saddened by something she wouldn’t explain. Nora’s pity for me was always apparent, but it became more noticeable near the end of her college years. Maybe what happened to her at Mount Holyoke—where her aversion to men became more politicized—gave her more sympathy for me, her clueless and much younger cousin.
“Mr. Barlow gave me a book,” I told my inquisitive aunts, holding up the worn paperback—his teacher’s copy.
“A book!” Aunt Abigail cried, snatching it out of my hands. “Great Expectations—aha!” she exclaimed.
“Are there any pictures?” Aunt Martha asked. Charles Dickens had, at last, drawn them away from the dining-room windows—my grandmother included. Nora later said her mom and Aunt Martha were probably imagining that Great Expectations was an illustrated book about penile erections.
“Give the book to me, girls—it’s just a novel,” Nana told them. “Dickens didn’t write pornography.”
“There are underlined passages,” Aunt Abigail said peevishly.
“There’s handwriting in it—the midget fairy has scribbled in it,” Aunt Martha chimed in.
“It’s Mr. Barlow’s book—his teacher’s copy,” I repeated. “I told him you read Moby-Dick aloud to me, Nana. I said I would like to try reading it again—to myself,” I told my grandmother.
She held up Great Expectations almost as reverentially as I’d seen her raise Moby-Dick—in a heavenward direction. “Reading this novel would be easier, Adam,” Nana said. “And there’s a young man finding his way in the story,” she added.
“That’s what Mr. Barlow told me!” I piped up.
“A young man finding his way!” Aunt Abigail cried with alarm.
“What sort of way, I wonder!” Aunt Martha chimed in.
“Girls, girls—just stop,” my grandmother told them. “This is a literary novel.”
“Mr. Barlow is a snowshoer,” I insisted. “Snowshoeing is my answer to skiing. I like to run. On snowshoes, I can run on top of the snow,” I told them. “And Mr. Barlow teaches writing. I’ve decided I want to be a writer,” I said.
“A writer!” Aunt Abigail screamed.
“God have mercy—save us!” Aunt Martha chimed in.
As Nora would one day tell me: “You might as well have said you were going to be a fist-fucker, Adam. Or that you couldn’t wait to get fist-fucked,” she added. (Yes, this was after the day had come—when I had grown up sufficiently for Nora to illuminate fisting for me.)
But, at the time, I was at a loss to understand the consternation Mr. Barlow had caused my aunts. I wished I could talk to my uncles about the snowshoer. I somehow knew they would hold “the runner on top of the snow” (as they called him) in high esteem. Later, when I was able to speak with them, Uncle Martin and Uncle Johan paid Elliot Barlow the utmost collegial respect. The little English teacher was popular with his students. As for those students who hadn’t taken a class with him, and the ones who were inclined to tease him, Mr. Barlow’s good humor would win them over. My laughing uncles were won over by the snowshoer’s good humor, too.
At Harvard, Elliot Barlow had declared English as his concentration, Uncle Martin would tell me. The small snowshoer got a bachelor’s degree in 1951. Because the U.S. Armed Forces, in their infinite wisdom, said the runner on top of the snow wasn’t big enough, or so Uncle Johan told me, Mr. Barlow got his master’s at Harvard in 1953. In the fall of that year, the snowshoer started teaching at Exeter. According to my uncles, the only faculty who still raised their eyebrows at the snowshoer’s smallness were the old fuddy-duddies.
My aunts kept raising their eyebrows. With their lynch-mob mentality, my aunts had been sounding the homo alarm before the end of Mr. Barlow’s first year as a teacher. By the halfway mark of the small snowshoer’s second year, he met me. By then, Aunt Abigail and Aunt Martha were in full fruit-alert mode.
As Nora would one day explain to me: “My mother and Aunt Martha were on a faculty-wives’ witch hunt; nothing got their rocks off like witch-hunting for fairies.” In Nora’s opinion, my mom’s marrying the little snowshoer saved him. Nora would later modify her opinion: “Ray saved the snowshoer’s job, anyway.”