He haunted me more than the other ghosts in black and white, the ones I knew were dead. No, I wasn’t overlooking a certain similarity between the shyness of the snow shoveler’s smile and the shy, childlike smile of the dark-skinned hotel maid—forever posing with her mop and pail in a hallway between rooms. When I’d asked my mother about the maid, Little Ray had merely said, “Oh, I didn’t know she died—I think she was Italian.”

The maid looked Mexican to me, but that was just a guess. She had the same dark hair and eyes as the short boy with the tall shovel, but the kid wasn’t dark-skinned—he didn’t look Mexican. The shy innocence of their smiles was the strongest bond between them, and they definitely didn’t look like the 1880s or 1890s. I was pretty sure they came from the 1940s, where I’d come from.

Some secrets stay secrets for a long time. If my mom didn’t know the hotel maid had died—not until I mentioned the maid among my ghosts—didn’t that mean my mother had seen the shy maid when she was alive? Yet Little Ray said next to nothing about her. “I think she was Italian.” That didn’t sound definitive. My mom didn’t seem to care about the childlike hotel maid, dead or alive.

Why are people so interested in their ancestry? There’s nothing you can do about what your ancestors did. When I would obsess to the snowshoer about who my father was—not only out loud, in spontaneous outbursts, but also in unfinished fragments of my juvenile writing—the good teacher would counsel me as best he could. “My dear Adam,” he would say, “you can have no effect on what led up to your existence, can you? You can’t change the past, my dear boy. What you can try to affect is the present and the future—not only your own but, to some degree, the present and future of those you love.”

Mr. Barlow was right about the to some degree part. It began when I knew the little English teacher was drawn to wear my mother’s clothes—henceforth I felt compelled to protect him, to keep him safe. Wasn’t this within the realm of my trying to affect, to some degree, the present and future of someone I loved? I believed I was following Elliot’s advice—at least I tried.