“It’s where you went to school, Rachel! Don’t you care at all about it?” Aunt Martha asked her.

“We’ll just be in the way at the fire,” my mom answered. “I don’t think about that old place, one way or another.”

The final class had graduated from the Robinson Female Seminary in 1955. The lower floors of the towering old building had been boarded up to prevent further vandalism; this meant the vandals were targeting the windows of the upper floors. The floors themselves, only God knows why, were oiled annually—the wood was “super combustible,” Elliot would tell me. The flames shot a hundred feet in the air. My uncles wanted to watch the fire from the attic window, but my aunts insisted on seeing the flames firsthand. There would be two thousand onlookers; the inferno raged for hours. It was almost two o’clock in the morning before it was under control.

“You’re not even going to see it, Rachel?” Aunt Abigail asked my mother again.

“Nope,” my mom said.

“Rachel cares more about her sleeping arrangements than her old school!” Aunt Martha chimed in.

“Rachel never cared about school—not about any school!” Aunt Abigail cried.

“Girls, girls,” Nana murmured.

The Hampton and Stratham fire departments were called in, but there was no saving the seminary, where my mother never took to the subject of domestic science—cooking and so forth, what the seminary’s founder, William Robinson, had once called “the practical duties of life.” Not Little Ray’s duties. Molly and the snowshoer did the cooking and the household chores.

I can imagine the undue stomping in the hall, prior to my aunts and uncles making their dramatic exit to see the fire. “Be sure you close the door after yourselves, not to let more smoke in!” my mother called to them. But, as Elliot described to me, notwithstanding Uncle Martin and Uncle Johan’s efforts to close the door, either Aunt Abigail or Aunt Martha reopened it and left it open.

“Rachel would rather eat the blueberry thing and pursue her sleeping arrangements than pay proper respect to her old school!” Aunt Abigail was shouting from the driveway.

“Rachel doesn’t care a fig for education!” Aunt Martha shouted.

When Molly got up to close the door, she gave my aunts a piece of her mind. “You two are as stupid as skiing on bare ground!” the ski patroller called to them.

The way my mother was rubbing the neck of her beer bottle against the neck of Elliot’s might have been misunderstood by anyone unfamiliar with their relationship—or so Molly told me later, when I called from Pittsburgh. The toast my mom proposed at Nana’s dining-room table was repeated by all. “Here’s to the Robinson Female Seminary,” Little Ray said, her beer bottle suggestively rubbing the snowshoer’s beer bottle. “Burn in peace!”

“Burn in peace!” even my grandmother repeated.