In one of Elliot Barlow’s conversations with my mother, concerning what was allowed or not allowed at ski resorts, I learned that Nora had been barred from skiing at Cranmore Mountain. Nora hadn’t told me; I assumed she’d stopped coming to Cranmore because she’d had it with the girly-girl blondes, and Nora was old enough to make her own decisions.
“Nora hurt too many people,” my mom told Mr. Barlow and me. “The ski patrol barred her indefinitely.”
“I’ve never heard of a mountain barring anyone indefinitely!” Elliot Barlow cried. “Not even in Austria.”
To my mother, the most enchanting of the ski towns Elliot had grown up in were Austrian: Lech, in the Vorarlberg, and St. Anton and St. Christoph in the Tyrolean Alps. Little Ray revered the Arlberg. She spoke of these three mountain villages and ski destinations in hushed tones, by their full and sacred-sounding names: Lech am Arlberg, St. Anton am Arlberg, St. Christoph am Arlberg. When the little English teacher complimented her pronunciation, my mom admitted that Uncle Johan had helped her with the German.
It is strange to be a teenager before you ever see your mother flirt with someone. Additionally, it was awkward that my mom’s first meeting with the snowshoer took place in my grandmother’s house. It was unheard of for my mother to have made the long drive from Stowe at the height of ski season, in early February. She came home immediately. Nana did her best, but she failed to keep my busybody aunts away.
“Ray should be forewarned of the fairy factor,” Aunt Abigail had insisted to my grandmother.
“Mr. Barlow is too small to be believed,” Aunt Martha chimed in.
“Girls, girls—let Little Ray and Mr. Barlow have some privacy, please,” Nana said to the sexually vigilant harpies.
Ah, well—privacy with those Brewster girls was a one-way street. There were the things they wanted you to know; there were the things they kept from you. Besides, my mom and Elliot Barlow weren’t afforded much privacy by me—not on the occasion of their first meeting, what my mother would later call her “one and only blind date.” Add to the mix the random intrusions of Grandaddy Lew. Even deluded, the mustache-chewing emeritus possibly sensed it was highly irregular to see Little Ray at home in the ski season.
As for the enraptured conversation my mom was having with the little snowshoer, Grandaddy Lew seemed both baffled and outraged by it. The emeritus might have imagined that Elliot Barlow was another illegitimate child Little Ray had given birth to, despite Elliot’s repeated efforts to put the delusional mustache-biter at ease.
At each sighting of the indignant-looking emeritus—either peering into or slinking through the living room—Mr. Barlow would bounce to his feet and cry out: “Good afternoon, Principal Brewster!” Thereupon, the affronted old fool would scurry away.
While my grandmother was endeavoring to keep my aunts contained in the kitchen, there were periodic breakouts. Aunt Abigail offering stale crackers and a putrid-smelling cheese; Aunt Martha precariously carrying a decanter of sherry (with very small glasses, the size of eyecups) on a silver tray. I believe it was the same cheese we’d had at Thanksgiving. Only the emeritus ever had the sherry.
“All I drink is beer, and just a little,” my mother said to Elliot, as if my aunts had already left the living room or had never intruded.
“I’m just a beer drinker, too,” Elliot told her. “Sometimes I can’t finish the first one.”
“Oh, we’re perfect for each other—we could share one beer!” my mom said, batting her eyelashes.
My aunts knew Little Ray was flirting. “Keep your feet on the floor and your hands to yourselves, you two!” Aunt Abigail said to them.
“Keep your knees together, Rachel—remember Adam!” Aunt Martha chimed in. Even I had noticed that my mother was attractively dressed. It was unlike her to pay such close attention to her clothes. Perhaps the tight sweater had been borrowed for the occasion; it might have belonged to one of the girl jocks Little Ray was living with. It was also a surprise not to see my mom in jeans or sweatpants in the winter months. The skirt and the tights were most becoming—like the sweater, borrowed but fetching. That February afternoon in 1955, when my mom and the little snowshoer were first talking about where he’d lived in Austria, I had no doubt Little Ray was flirting with Elliot Barlow. Now I’m not so sure. Hadn’t my mother always idolized Austria, not least the Arlberg? Maybe my mom was flirting with the whimsical notion of being there herself. What if the flirtation was all about her imagining herself in Lech and St. Anton and St. Christoph, thus contradicting her previously expressed dislike of foreignness?
As for Charles Dickens and his imagining a pitiless firmament—the vast and distant dome of the uncaring heavens, of no help to mankind—well, Little Ray wasn’t a reader. Elliot’s love of literature didn’t interest her, nor did she give a hoot that my grandmother was impressed by Elliot’s parents. “The Barlows are a fine old Bostonian family,” Nana had said. What further impressed Mildred Brewster was that Elliot’s parents had been college sweethearts—they’d met when he was at Harvard and she at Radcliffe.
“Oh, I get it—the Barlows were sweethearts at those colleges,” Nora would later comment. In Nora’s view, those status-conscious Brewster girls—my mother excepted—were prone to have orgasms over the Harvard-Radcliffe connection. “They get hard-ons for higher education,” Nora said. Nora was entitled to her bitterness toward an elite education. Nora never forgot: she’d been a faculty brat at Exeter when Exeter was a boys-only school.
My mom wasn’t inclined to higher-education hard-ons; she didn’t have an orgasm over the Barlows’ Harvard-Radcliffe connection, nor did she give a hoot that Elliot came from a highfalutin bunch of Bostonians. What mattered to my mother was that the snowshoer was a virtual Austrian.
“You’re practically an Österreicher!” my mom told Elliot, breathlessly—showing off her German accent. Her breathlessness was possibly the result of Little Ray’s imagining herself skiing at high altitude, which she would have been in Lech, or St. Anton, or St. Christoph—especially in St. Christoph. Maybe my mother was feeling the effects of high altitude at the very idea that the snowshoer had been born in St. Anton, where Hannes Schneider had been a ski guide before the First World War.
Schneider had served as a ski instructor for the Austrian army. After the war, he returned to the Tyrol, starting a ski school in St. Anton, where he perfected his method of instruction—the Arlberg technique.
John and Sarah Barlow had been parents with a plan, even as college sweethearts. The European history and the German they’d studied at Harvard and Radcliffe were as purposeful as Sarah’s choosing to get pregnant in St. Anton and have her baby at altitude. Just as she thought all the ski-poling would make her little snowshoer stronger, Sarah Barlow believed she could acclimate her child to altitude if she went through gestation above four thousand feet.
“I love your mother for wanting you to be born acclimated to altitude,” my mom earnestly declared to the snowshoer, when he told her this story. She suddenly seized one of his small hands in both of hers, holding it to her left breast. Or so it appeared to me, and to Elliot Barlow. “Feel my heart—how it’s beating!” Little Ray cried. “It’s as if I’m at altitude.”
“I can certainly feel something,” the little English teacher said. In retrospect, I would guess that Elliot had never felt a woman’s heart beating above her breast.
I was most impressed that Elliot’s parents had planned to be writers—that is, the writing part of their plan was more impressive to me than their intention to live in Austrian ski towns because they loved to ski.