I was eleven or so before I accepted Nora’s reasoning on this point. I hadn’t started at Exeter yet, and Nora would have been around seventeen. We had moved on from the matter of my mom’s independent way of thinking to the speculation that Nana was not surprised to find herself pregnant with my mother. Both Nora and I believed it was no accident that our grandmother got pregnant with Little Ray. As Nora told me: “The prospect of being left alone with the principal emeritus loomed large for Nana. I’m telling you, Adam, Nana knew perfectly well she could get pregnant—I’m sure she meant to. Who would want to be left alone with Principal Brewster?”

“Maybe he was more fun when he talked,” I suggested.

“I remember when he talked,” Nora said. “The old crock of shit never shut up!”

It was my opportunity to ask—as I had asked Nana, to no avail—“What made him stop talking?”

“Your mom didn’t tell him she was pregnant—not that I blame her!” Nora exclaimed. “She was nineteen, she wasn’t saying who your father was, she had no plans to get married—your mother didn’t want to marry anyone.”

“But my mom told Nana, right?” I asked Nora, who nodded.

“And Nana told the principal emeritus. Knowing Nana,” Nora said, “it would have been a long story—if not the whole story.”

“The Moby-Dick version,” I said; Nora nodded again. “And that’s when Principal Brewster stopped talking?” I guessed.

“Not quite,” Nora answered. “The principal emeritus started to sob; he couldn’t stop sobbing. At last, when he managed to get control of himself, he cried out, ‘Not Little Ray!’ After that, he was done talking—he stopped speaking,” Nora told me.

“Why does our family have so many secrets, Nora?” I asked.

“Why do you wring your hands? So what if they’re small? When you’re old enough, Adam, you’ll have secrets,” my older and wiser cousin said.

There was another up north reason Nora and I were soul mates: our mutual resistance to learning to ski, though we resisted a variety of ski instructors (my mom included) in diametrically different ways. We went to opposite extremes of not learning.

Nora and I would stop short of that fairly common crime among first cousins; we would never have sex with each other. We weren’t that brave, but we were partners in crime. Our more timid rebellion—our determination not to love skiing, in a ski-loving family—was what Nora and I did instead of having sex with each other.

I was fourteen, soon to be fifteen, when Nora said the following to me. Keep in mind that Nora was already in her twenties. “If you’re not old enough to get this, Adam, you soon will be,” Nora began. “The issues we have, about being Brewsters, are all about sex.”