“I just want the snowshoer to be safe,” I said. “I love him—I don’t want anyone or anything to hurt him,” I told her.

“Elliot wanted to be a little girl when he was a little boy,” my mother told me. “Elliot is a woman, sweetie—she just wasn’t born one.”

“He,” I corrected her. “Elliot is a man at an all-boys’ school,” I reminded her.

“She,” Little Ray corrected me. “Elliot is a woman to me, sweetie. She’s almost perfect for me, isn’t she?” my mom asked me.

“Almost perfect,” I could only repeat. I was once again seeing them on their wedding night—how they were when they were leaving for their honeymoon on the cliff, how my mom had told Elliot to keep hold of her. I was once more lying in the night groomer’s arms—not yet beginning to understand how some people change, and some don’t. Only now I realized I would forever be praying for this precarious and precious triangle to hold on. Please stay on the cliff, I would always be praying—to all three of them.

“Oh, don’t cry, sweetie—don’t be afraid,” my mom repeated. She held me in her arms, the way she had when I was a child.

“Are you saying, ‘Keep true to the dreams of thy youth’—is that what you’re telling me?” I asked her.

“Oh, my—that’s pretty! I like that,” my mother told me. “Is that something you read, sweetie? Who wrote that?”

“Maybe Melville,” I answered.

“Oh, him,” Little Ray said, disappointed. A lifetime of hearing about Moby-Dick had predisposed her to dislike Melville, though she’d never read him. I was quoting what the author had pasted to his writing desk—Nana had told me about it. At the time, I didn’t realize that Melville hadn’t written it—I just liked the sound of it.

When the snowshoer took my grandmother and me to see the 1956 film adaptation of Moby-Dick—the John Huston version, with Gregory Peck as Captain Ahab—we all hated it. At least Ahab dies—he doesn’t go home to his wife—but New Bedford isn’t New Bedford, the great white whale looks like a bathtub toy, and all the poetry is lost.

“They lost the hyphen, too,” Nora had observed. She’d seen the poster, not the movie. “That Dick is just one more white Dick in a sea of white Dicks,” she said. “I’m not seeing it.” Em just cringed at the thought of a sea of white Dicks.

After I’d seen the movie, when we were riding home in the snowshoer’s VW Beetle, Nana said: “That film was not true to the dreams of Mr. Melville’s youth.” She didn’t elaborate to Elliot and me on the admonition Melville had pasted to his writing desk. It turned out that Schiller had written it.