You would have thought we were getting together for a weekend in the Alps. There were postcards from New Haven, detailing the formidable logistics Zimmer faced to get himself to Vermont. Zim was a New Yorker; his ski stuff was in the city. He wrote: “I’ll have to take the train to Penn Station—it’ll be a zoo. I’ll pick up my parents’ car, for the drive to Vermont. My parents are skiing in Gstaad, where they go every year. I try not to go to Gstaad—not when they’re there. I try not to ski with them. Yet I wouldn’t put it past them to have taken my ski stuff with them—I hope not!” This was on one postcard; there were other postcards, all in Zim’s impeccable but small handwriting.

I hadn’t known his parents went skiing in the Swiss Alps. At Exeter, other students had told me about his parents’ penthouse apartment on Park Avenue, where Zim had grown up; I knew the Zimmermanns were a prosperous New York City family. Yet Zim never exhibited the snootiness I associated with the wellborn boys at Exeter. Zim wasn’t a snob; he didn’t condescend to anyone. But I was out of it—especially, if not only, at Exeter. I’d managed to miss what Zimmer later referred to as “the Jewish business”; he meant the anti-Semitic business, Mr. Barlow had to explain to me. Matthew Zimmermann wasn’t Jewish, but the anti-Semites at Exeter thought he was because of his name. I was so out of it, I didn’t think of Zim as Jewish or not Jewish. I didn’t know or care.

“It may be a coincidence, but the majority of the Jewish Zimmermans I know spell the name with one n,” Zim later told me. “My family’s name has the double n—Zimmermann is the old German word for carpenter.” What Zim didn’t tell me, the snowshoer pointed out, was that being mistaken for a Jew made Matthew Zimmermann a fierce advocate for the Jews. At Exeter, Elliot said, Zim often pretended to be Jewish—just to expose the anti-Semites in the room. Some of the Exeter faculty thought Zimmer was a troublemaker, but Mr. Barlow defended Zim for his political activism. Given Matthew Zimmermann’s history of exposing anti-Semitism, the snowshoer wondered if this was why Zim had expressed his misgivings to me about becoming a Bonesman at Yale. (Naturally, I imagined a weird and painful sexual practice I knew nothing about.)

“You’ve become a what?” I asked him.

“Skull and Bones—it’s a secret society,” Zim told me. “I shouldn’t have joined—it’s all wrong for me—but I’m the first Zimmermann in my family to be tapped.”