In my third year at Exeter, the wrestling season of 1958–59, I became the varsity wrestler in my weight class, the starter at 133 pounds. In schools, wrestling is a winter sport. I was competing in the ski season. But now that I was facing outside competition, my mother—at first, only occasionally—came to see my matches against wrestlers from other schools.

What made this possible was that she was no longer as far away as Stowe. My mom and Molly had moved to Bromley—it was a smaller mountain and ski area, but Bromley treated them well, and they liked living in southern Vermont. My mother and the trail groomer bought a small house in Manchester. They liked the town, and the drive to Exeter was a lot less formidable than that from Stowe. (This was why I was able to take Caroline and Maud from Exeter for an overnight with Molly and my mom, but it was still a long drive.)

Some of my away wrestling matches were at schools nearer to Manchester, Vermont, than Exeter was. My mom came to see a few of my matches at other schools, but she preferred the Exeter home matches. That way, she and I could have a sleepover together in the bed we shared in Amen Hall. Exeter had wrestling matches on Wednesdays and Saturdays. In the beginning, my mother came only to the Wednesday matches—weekends were the busiest days in ski areas. But soon she was coming to see my Saturday matches, too, even though this meant her leaving Exeter at four or five o’clock on Sunday morning, in order to be at Bromley before the ski lifts started running.

I was surprised when my mom became a wrestling fanatic, but this was no surprise to Molly. “Your mother is small but strong, Kid,” the trail groomer told me. “Wrestling is a weight-class sport—you get to beat up people your own size. What’s not to love about that?”

My mom’s fanaticism for wrestling didn’t surprise Nora and Em, either. “Why wouldn’t Ray love the idea of beating up someone, even at the risk of being beaten up?” Nora asked me. “Look how awful my mother and Aunt Martha were to her, Adam—and Ray hated school, right?” I nodded, if not as vigorously as Em, who saw and understood the connection to hating school more clearly than I did. “The bitchy girls who turn against you, because you’re not getting wet over boys,” was the way Nora put it. “What’s not to hate about that?”

Em was in her advanced pantomime mode. She had studied—later, she taught—in workshops for pantomimists in Italy. If I’d not seen her enactment of vomitous retching a few times before, I would have thought she really was vomiting. “All those years they made us ski, kiddo,” Nora suddenly said, while Em retched, “don’t you think I would have liked wrestling better?”