No one spoke, no one laughed—not even my uncles, who behaved like children when the topic of conversation was off-limits to them. Uncle Martin picked an olive out of his casserole and dropped it in Uncle Johan’s beer. Uncle Johan found a green pea in his casserole and he put it in Uncle Martin’s beer.

The sexual-minority subject had been near-constant background music in the years I was growing up. I was always hearing it, but I wasn’t really listening. I didn’t hear the politics in sexual politics—not at first. Then, one day, I did.

Whenever that dinner-party moment of belated enlightenment happened, and I don’t remember exactly when it was, I was not in Exeter on the Thursday night of October 5, 1961, when the fire started. Naturally, my grandmother couldn’t have invited my mom and Molly and Mr. Barlow to dinner without inviting my aunts and uncles, too. It was Aunt Abigail who inquired if Nana had burned the casserole. The snowshoer later told me that the casserole was no better or worse than usual; the dinner guests had been eating it, or pushing it around on their plates.

“Mine isn’t burnt,” Uncle Martin said.

“I ate mine—I didn’t notice it was burnt,” Uncle Johan said.

“Not that you would notice, Johan,” Aunt Martha told him.

“Maybe the dessert is burning,” Aunt Abigail said to Nana.

“That blueberry thing—the bottom is always burnt,” Aunt Martha chimed in.

“There’s nothin’ burnin’ here!” Dottie called from the kitchen.

“I do smell smoke,” the little English teacher said.

“I smell smoke, too,” Molly said.

My mother got up from the table and opened the door that faced downtown, in the direction of the academy. “There’s more smoke outside—there’s a fire somewhere,” my mom said.

“The academy can’t be burning—it could never burn!” Aunt Abigail cried indignantly, presuming an institution of such superior learning was divinely protected from anything as ordinary as a fire.

“The smoke isn’t coming from the academy,” my mother reported. “It’s coming from the seminary.”

The door to the outside was still open when the fire alarm blew from the Exeter Fire Station. It was about nine o’clock at night, Mr. Barlow later told me.

Dottie had cleared the dinner plates and the casserole; she was serving the blueberry thing. Now she clomped upstairs to the attic, guessing she could see the flames from the window there.

“It’s the seminary for girls that’s burnin’!” the diners could hear Dottie calling from upstairs.

“It’s your old school, Rachel! Don’t you want to see the fire?” Aunt Abigail cried, but my mom had closed the outside door; she’d sat back down at the table.

“The burnt part is better with vanilla ice cream on it,” my mother reminded Mr. Barlow, indicating the blueberry thing.