My uncles weren’t fjord-jumpers, but they were Norwegians, which once led me to believe they must have seen or read an Ibsen play. They’d named their children Henrik and Nora. As it turned out, Nora would inform me, Henrik had not been named for the playwright, and Nora herself was in no way the Nora in A Doll’s House. “Though let me tell you,” Nora told me, darkly, “if I had three children, I would abandon them. If I had one kid, I’d be out the door.”

Nora had her fjord-jumping moments; she was the pessimistic Norwegian on the Vinter side of my family. Nora was the eldest of us cousins, the one and only child of Uncle Martin and Aunt Abigail. In the war Nora bravely waged with her judgmental mother, she won my heart. I thought Nora knew everything, and she was usually forthright to me about what she knew. Those Brewster girls—Nora’s mom and mine, and Aunt Martha—were clever at keeping things from us children, and from their own parents. “Maybe even from one another,” Nora had hinted to me.

“Why would they keep things from one another?” I asked Nora. She was six years older than I was. As a child and a teenager, I didn’t just love her; I idolized her.

“Your mother is the most mysterious—she’s the smartest one. My mom and Martha are dolts,” Nora said.

I was ten or eleven. Nora would have been sixteen or seventeen; she was already driving. It must have been summer vacation, because we were lying on the beach at Little Boar’s Head. It was subversive of everything that had heretofore been implied to me about my mom’s intelligence, to hear she was the smartest one.

Champion of Little Ray that my grandmother was, even she disparaged my mother’s lack of a proper education. While Abigail and Martha had been sent away to Northfield, my mom had refused to leave home.

“Well, truth be told, Adam,” Aunt Abigail said, expanding on this theme to me, “Little Ray wasn’t much of a student.”

“If she’d applied to Northfield, they wouldn’t have taken her,” Aunt Martha had chimed in.