“Well, that’s who my parents are—they plan everything,” the snowshoer said, with barely noticeable exasperation. Even the novels the Barlows wrote were meticulously planned. Between the wars—“in the interwar period,” as Elliot Barlow spoke of it—his parents were busily plotting the crime and espionage novels they would write together. They’d received “some graduate-level diplomatic schooling,” Elliot said—“whatever Foreign Service training was standard at the time,” was the way the little English teacher put it. It was the year Little Ray was born, 1922, when the U.S. Department of State sent the young Mr. and Mrs. Barlow to Germany—first to Berlin, albeit briefly, then to Weimar.
Elliot said his parents had been appointed to Vienna in 1924, only three years after U.S. diplomatic relations with Austria were resumed. Sarah and John Barlow were attached to the office of the chargé d’affaires. The U.S. Embassy had been downgraded to a legation; the ambassador was then an envoy. Not that this lower rank mattered at all to his parents, the little snowshoer maintained. The Barlows acted as liaison officers between the U.S. chargé d’affaires and the Kriminalpolizei, the criminal-investigation department of the Austrian police in Vienna. The Barlows’ training and experience in the Foreign Service—and, of course, their German—would be useful to them as writers of international intrigue.
They were already expert skiers. By the ski season of 1927–28, when the Barlows arrived in St. Anton am Arlberg, Hannes Schneider had appeared in seven films—he was already famous—and John and Susan Barlow would become devotees of his ski school. The Barlows were determinedly writing their first husband-and-wife novel. Little Elliot, who would be born in St. Anton in 1929, was also a work in progress.
Ten years later, in 1939, Hannes Schneider would move his ski school to Cranmore Mountain in North Conway, New Hampshire. Prior to his leaving Austria, soon after the Anschluss, he’d run afoul of the Nazis and had spent time in jail. The Barlows left St. Anton in March 1938, immediately following the annexation of Austria by Nazi Germany, but their devotion to Hannes Schneider and the Arlberg was absolute. For the war years, Elliot and his parents lived in North Conway. When the little snowshoer started school in New Hampshire at nine, his German was better than his English. In St. Anton, he’d always been in a German-speaking school.
“We might have met in North Conway, when I was skiing at Cranmore!” my mother exclaimed to Elliot.
“But I was snowshoeing,” the snowshoer reminded her, “and you wouldn’t have noticed me. You were older,” Elliot softly said.
“I would certainly have noticed you!” my mom declared.
I knew what the snowshoer meant: when he was nine, Little Ray was sixteen. When the war ended, Elliot was only sixteen; he’d gone back to Austria with his parents. Why would a pretty young woman in her twenties pay any attention to a kid? Needless to say, Elliot Barlow must have been an extremely small kid.
“I would have noticed anyone as handsome as you,” my mother told the snowshoer, “no matter what age you were.”
“No matter how small I was?” Elliot asked her.
Once again my mother clasped the snowshoer’s hand, holding it to her heart—to her breast. “Say small again,” she told him.
“Small,” he said—so softly that I almost couldn’t hear him.
“Feel it?” my mom asked him. I saw the snowshoer shudder. He must have felt her heart race. “Small really gets to me, Elliot—like altitude,” Little Ray whispered.
If I hadn’t been in the living room with them, would they have had sex then and there? I doubt it. That was when Uncle Martin and Uncle Johan barged in, lugging bottles of wine and a case of beer; their eternal kidding around marked the end of what passed for privacy between my mother and the little English teacher.
“Bier, Bier—das Bier ist hier!” Johan sang in German. “Beer, beer—the beer is here!” he repeated in English. Uncle Johan loved to speak German with Elliot. Johan thought the snowshoer’s Austrian accent was hysterically funny. Uncle Johan thought all Austrian accents were comedies.
To Johan’s credit, he was a reader, albeit not a very discerning one. His love of all things German had led him to read the John and Sarah Barlow crime and espionage novels. “Die besten Kriminalromane! Das Ehepaar des modernen Spionageromans! The best crime novels! The married couple of the modern espionage novel!” Uncle Johan proclaimed.
I could tell that the little English teacher had been embarrassed by this hyperbole before, in German and in English, although the Barlows’ first two novels weren’t translated and published in German until after the Second World War. After they were translated, the Barlows’ historical and political thrillers had bigger sales and a more literary reputation in the German language than they enjoyed in English.
Uncle Martin and Uncle Johan couldn’t agree exactly where and when they’d read the Barlows’ first novel, which they’d read in English. My uncles were Tenth Mountain Division men. Like Hannes Schneider, they’d helped train the U.S. Army mountain troops, in which Schneider’s son Herbert had served.
“Supper is finished!” my grandmother confusingly announced. Nana made it sound as if supper had already been eaten, and we’d all missed it.
Martin and Johan were now in disagreement concerning their whereabouts when they’d both read the Barlows’ second contribution to Kriminalliteratur—Uncle Johan’s show-off German for the Barlows’ spy-noir genre.
The Vinter brothers had been with the First Battalion of the Eighty-seventh Mountain Infantry Regiment at Fort Lewis, Washington, in November 1941, but they’d moved with the First and Second Battalions of the Eighty-seventh to Camp Hale, Colorado, in December 1942. No one was interested in where or when they’d read the Barlows’ first two thrillers. I had a hard time imagining how Uncle Martin and Uncle Johan had trained the troops, because my uncles couldn’t agree which regiment was where when—or how old they were when the Eighty-seventh was here, or the Eighty-fifth was there.
“In February ’44, when the Eighty-seventh returned to Camp Hale…” Uncle Martin began, and then stopped, having lost his train of thought.
“The Eighty-fifth Mountain Infantry Regiment was activated at Camp Hale in July ’43…” Uncle Johan interrupted—whereupon he paused, the way ahead unclear.
“We were already too old!” Uncle Martin meaninglessly cried out. “I was thirty-eight, Johan thirty-six.” He stopped.
“The Eighty-fifth and the Eighty-seventh embarked together, from Hampton Roads in January ’45—bound for Naples,” Uncle Johan said, rather wistfully.
“I was forty, Johan thirty-eight,” Uncle Martin said, his voice trailing away.
What my grandmother meant was that supper was ready to eat. Only the cooking of it was finished. As usual, it was an overcooked casserole of unidentifiable ingredients; it was mortally finished, a casserole cooked into submission. Also finished was what remained of my aunts’ patience with my uncles’ lack of clarity concerning their wartime memories. Aunt Abigail suspected too much beer-drinking was the cause—“Too much fun!” Aunt Martha chimed in.
“Too much gallivanting around!” Aunt Abigail cried, when we were seated at the dining-room table.
“It’s a wonder you had time to read!” Aunt Martha chimed in.
Warfare was a young man’s game, in my aunts’ opinion. My uncles were thirty-six and thirty-four when they started training the mountain troops. Nora and Henrik were six and four, respectively. When the Eighty-fifth and the Eighty-seventh embarked for Italy—from Virginia, in January 1945—Uncle Martin and Uncle Johan went home to their wives and children.