“Maybe he was more fun when he talked,” I suggested.
“I remember when he talked,” Nora said. “The old crock of shit never shut up!”
It was my opportunity to ask—as I had asked Nana, to no avail—“What made him stop talking?”
“Your mom didn’t tell him she was pregnant—not that I blame her!” Nora exclaimed. “She was nineteen, she wasn’t saying who your father was, she had no plans to get married—your mother didn’t want to marry anyone.”
“But my mom told Nana, right?” I asked Nora, who nodded.
“And Nana told the principal emeritus. Knowing Nana,” Nora said, “it would have been a long story—if not the whole story.”
“The Moby-Dick version,” I said; Nora nodded again. “And that’s when Principal Brewster stopped talking?” I guessed.
“Not quite,” Nora answered. “The principal emeritus started to sob; he couldn’t stop sobbing. At last, when he managed to get control of himself, he cried out, ‘Not Little Ray!’ After that, he was done talking—he stopped speaking,” Nora told me.
“Why does our family have so many secrets, Nora?” I asked.
“Why do you wring your hands? So what if they’re small? When you’re old enough, Adam, you’ll have secrets,” my older and wiser cousin said.
There was another up north reason Nora and I were soul mates: our mutual resistance to learning to ski, though we resisted a variety of ski instructors (my mom included) in diametrically different ways. We went to opposite extremes of not learning.
Nora and I would stop short of that fairly common crime among first cousins; we would never have sex with each other. We weren’t that brave, but we were partners in crime. Our more timid rebellion—our determination not to love skiing, in a ski-loving family—was what Nora and I did instead of having sex with each other.
I was fourteen, soon to be fifteen, when Nora said the following to me. Keep in mind that Nora was already in her twenties. “If you’re not old enough to get this, Adam, you soon will be,” Nora began. “The issues we have, about being Brewsters, are all about sex.”
When I was falling asleep at night, trying not to think about sex, I would envision myself in the “Let me buy you a drink” scene in Shane—that moment when the handsome but small Alan Ladd slugs the bigger Ben Johnson, knocking him through the saloon’s swinging doors.
When I was still awake, and my thoughts were all about sex, I would think instead of the “lowdown Yankee liar” scene—the shoot-out, when Jack Palance gets gunned down and is buried by the falling barrels.
“Shane, look out!” I could hear Brandon De Wilde calling. In the darkness of my bedroom, I could hear the ensuing gunfire, followed by silence, then the music rising. My thoughts, of course, were still all about sex—as if the sex were what Brandon De Wilde should have been warning Shane about.
8. HAVE YOU SEEN THEM?
A small geography lesson might help. Stowe is in northern Vermont, closer to Montreal than to Exeter. North Conway is in northern New Hampshire, closer to Maine than to Vermont. And Exeter is in southeastern New Hampshire—Exeter is nearer to the seacoast, even nearer to Boston than it is to Vermont. In New England, the roads running north or south are slightly better than the ones going east or west, but in the 1950s and the 1960s, the roads in New Hampshire and Vermont weren’t very good at all. “And if it’s snowing,” my grandmother used to say, “you can’t get anywhere from somewhere else.”
In the ski season, this was why my mom never came home to see me. Stowe to Exeter and back was a long drive, and it would be snowing somewhere along the way. But my mother did drive from Stowe to North Conway and back—in those days, not an easy drive but a more manageable trip. The way this worked was my mom would trade places with one of the ski instructors at Cranmore Mountain. The Cranmore ski instructor got a change of scenery (and a chance to ski some new runs) at Mount Mansfield, while my mother gave ski lessons at Cranmore. This way, in the two busiest weeks of the ski season, neither ski area was missing a ski instructor. And this meant my mom had two weeks every winter to teach me to ski.
In elementary school, in junior high school, and in prep school at Exeter, I managed to remain a beginner as a skier. In those holiday weeks, there were mostly little children in my mother’s ski lessons for beginners—even after I’d started shaving and had already learned to drive.
The effort this took—the strain on my mom, and on me, of my unwillingness to improve as a skier—required a lot of patience. To stay pleasant, to be positive—we were never unhappy with each other—that was the key. And at night, we were demonstrably affectionate. I truly loved these two weeks every winter of not learning to ski—of staging falls, of letting my perfectly adequate stem christie revert to a sloppy snowplow turn. I think my mother loved these two weeks every winter, too; she not once lost her temper or showed the slightest sign of frustration. “Oh, Adam—your weight on the downhill ski would work better, sweetie. But I know it’s hard to remember.”
No, it wasn’t; it was hard, so purposely, to appear I had forgotten. I skied so slowly, perpendicular to the hill, sometimes my skis would just stop—even on a steep slope. Other skiers yelled at me for blocking the trail. When my mom led a line of beginners through their turns, I went last. The eight-year-olds would already be in the lift line when I got to the bottom. In those years when all the parents were afraid of polio, the other mothers asked my mother if I’d been a victim—or they inquired if I had some other handicap.
“Oh, no,” my mom answered cheerfully. “My dear Adam just finds skiing potentially dangerous. Adam has always been tentative.”
There was nothing tentative about Nora, who fiercely upheld her beginner status as a skier by being reckless.
“Skiing in control is the goal, Nora,” my mother told her futilely—in control would never be Nora’s goal. She threw herself down the mountain; she hurtled ahead. Nora never was perpendicular to any slope, however steep; she pointed her skis downhill and schussed.
“I’m not into turns, Ray,” Nora told my mom.
“My dear Nora,” my mother said sweetly, “I’m more concerned that you’re not into stops.”
Nora was more of an athlete than I was, and she was braver; she schussed till she crashed. While my mom was carving her perfect turns, instructing us beginners to turn where she turned—to follow her, if we could—Nora would blow by my mother in a blur.
“In control, Nora!” my mom would call after her. “Oh, that dear girl,” my mother would say, turning to one of the eight-year-olds. “That dear Nora was born to do things her way—I just hope she doesn’t hurt herself, or someone else. On skis, it’s better to be in control.”
But hurting herself, or someone else, was of no concern to Nora. She was up to the task. She’d been a big kid—she was a big girl, who would become a big woman. Her professed hatred of skiing had begun with the clothes. Ski pants would never be Nora’s friend.
“You’ll be happy you have hips aplenty in your childbearing years,” Nora’s mother had told her. Aunt Abigail had hips aplenty, and boobs galore. But Nora had other plans for her hips—childbearing was not in Nora’s plans.
On skis, my mom had observed, Nora was good at keeping her balance or recovering it, and her weight helped her go fast; at high speed, and not losing her balance, Nora could be out of control and get a long way down the mountain before she crashed. Yes, Nora skied too fast; she was too out of control to turn or stop safely. But doing things safely would never be her style.