My mom didn’t watch most of the TV shows that my grandmother saw in the Front Street house. It depressed me to see Nana slumped in her reading chair, not reading. The Milton Berle Show, The Red Skelton Show, The Jack Benny Show, The Ed Sullivan Show, and (especially) The Lawrence Welk Show really depressed me. Walt Disney’s Wonderful World of Color was a crapshoot. What had happened to the wonderful woman who’d read Moby-Dick aloud to me? My grandmother sat as if she’d been poleaxed in the chair she used to read in. The blank way she watched TV suggested that television was killing her. Fortunately, Nana’s stupor didn’t endure; she would eventually go back to Moby-Dick.

The occasional good stuff on TV perked up Nana’s and my mother’s attention. Little Ray turned on the volume for The Honeymooners and Alfred Hitchcock Presents. But, for the most part, our faculty apartment in Amen Hall was a sanctuary for silent television. In my Exeter years, I did my homework at our kitchen table, where Mr. Barlow would join me when he was grading papers. The ever-changing light from the soundless TV glowed or flashed over us—a distant war in a foreign country, sanitized, void of suffering.

Even in the ski season—in the long winter months when my mom was away—Elliot and I kept the quiet television on. We went to the extreme of reading TV Guide. We wanted to be sure our TV was on the channel Little Ray would have been watching. We missed her, but it was easier for me that I had company in missing her. The academy was hard—the schoolwork was overwhelming. I was busier, but more engaged in a good way, than I’d ever been before.

Outwardly, my mom and Elliot Barlow were the lovebirds on the Exeter campus. In those months they were separated, not counting the ski holidays, did they sincerely miss each other? Was that why they seemed so in love whenever they were together? “They’re not like a married couple,” one of my friends would tell me. “It’s like they’ve just met, and are head over heels in love.” I’m not sure I know what my mother and the snowshoer were really like. I just know that I loved the way they were together, and I loved our family of three. Four, counting Molly. It was the snowcat operator who said that Little Ray and the snowshoer never stopped looking like newlyweds.

“They give you hope,” another of my friends told me.

“What hope?” I asked him.

“Hope you’ll meet someone you can’t keep your hands off—hope she’s someone who can’t keep her hands off you. That hope,” my friend said.