Mildred Brewster wanted her daughters to go where she had gone. Abigail and Martha would be Northfield girls; they went to Mount Holyoke, too. That my mother insisted on staying home for high school limited her to whatever local education was available to girls. I’ve read that Exeter’s Robinson Female Seminary, which opened in 1867, once had high-minded intentions—an academic school for women, with standards similar to those upheld for the men who attended Phillips Exeter Academy. But most of the girls who went to the school did not go to college. In 1890, the Robinson Female Seminary had reevaluated its curriculum; in the name of domestic science, needlework and the culinary arts were added. My mom never commented on her years in high school. She showed no interest in sewing or cooking. I had the impression that she cared little for homemaking—it was hard to imagine that she’d ever studied it. Maybe the Robinson Female Seminary was where she’d learned to hate domestic science.

That my mother had flunked out of Bennington in record time conclusively proved to my aunts that Little Ray was intellectually subpar. That my mom went to Bennington in the first place was sufficient to relegate her to intellectual inferiority in Abigail’s and Martha’s eyes.

Bennington wasn’t one of the estimable Seven Sisters—the constellation of liberal arts colleges in the northeastern United States, all of them (historically) women’s colleges. It had further been suggested to me that my mother might have been “mentally lacking”—these were Aunt Abigail’s very words.

“Maybe Little Ray is a little damaged,” was Aunt Martha’s undermining way of putting it. Martha implied that my grandmother had been too old to get pregnant, or that this was what Nana had believed—meaning my mom had surprised her. Abigail and Martha further speculated that the sperm count of the principal emeritus was “lacking oomph,” or perhaps this was what Nana had believed. Nora needed to explain to me what a sperm count was—knowing Nora, she may have made up a good story about the oomph part.

“Trust me, Adam,” Nora said that summer (I did). “There are ways of being smart without going to the best schools and colleges. Your mother is the smartest of all the mothers.”

“You don’t mean she’s smarter than Nana, too—Nana’s also a mother,” I pointed out. At ten or eleven, I was no match for my more mature cousin; truth be told, I would never be a match for Nora.