Many of my wrestling teammates had observed, with heartfelt longing, that my mom and Mr. Barlow couldn’t keep their hands off each other. Wrestlers are creatures of constant physical contact. Okay, I know—wrestlers aren’t necessarily known for hugging and kissing one another, or for holding hands.

As for public displays of their year-round training, not solely indicative of their physical affection, the snowshoer and Little Ray took turns giving each other piggyback rides every time they encountered a flight of stairs. We had piggyback races in the wrestling room, carrying a workout partner in our weight class or near it. It was integral to our training, to lift and carry a body weight comparable to our own. It seemed natural that my fellow wrestlers would notice the athletic or competitive nature of the physicality between my mother and Mr. Barlow. Leave it to wrestlers to notice that Little Ray and the snowshoer were like workout partners who happened to hug and kiss each other, and hold hands.

Elliot Barlow had been a regular in the Exeter wrestling room since he came to the academy. In my first wrestling season, the winter of 1956–57, Elliot’s skills were better than those of a third-year wrestler. He was as experienced as the four-year seniors in the room. In his late twenties, the snowshoer was exceptionally fit; pound for pound, he was also stronger than anyone in our wrestling room. He’d shown up for his first wrestling practice in the 1953–54 season. He knew there would be a few little kids in the room, “right around a hundred pounds.” In those days, the lightest weight class was 110 pounds. In three years, the little English teacher would be competitive with the best lightweights in the room. By the time I was wrestling at Exeter, Mr. Barlow was treated as an assistant coach.

But the reason Elliot tried wrestling in the first place, and the foremost reason he wanted me to try it, was the coach. Mr. Dearborn had been a Big Ten champion and a two-time All-American at Illinois. An NCAA runner-up, he was overqualified for the job of coaching wrestling at Exeter—his teams dominated New England interscholastic wrestling for years. The snowshoer wanted me to try wrestling because he knew Mr. Dearborn was a good coach. My mom had wanted me to have my own faculty person at the academy, someone “like a father”—someone who treated me like his own faculty brat. Elliot Barlow was a good stepfather to me, from the start. His instinct to match me with Coach Dearborn was the first instance of the snowshoer’s steering me through Exeter.

I’d missed seeing the coach carry the diaper man’s body from the croquet court, but I remembered his doing lunges with my mom at her wedding—when I’d mistaken their lunges for dancing.