Ray liked adventure movies. King Solomon’s Mines may have been the first film of that kind we saw together. (Was I eight? I can’t remember.) My mother liked love and war—I mean, together. I might have been nine when we watched The African Queen. I’m guessing I would have been ten or eleven when we saw From Here to Eternity, which Aunt Abigail and Aunt Martha proclaimed was “completely inappropriate.”

Going back to Westerns: my mom liked but was upset by Bad Day at Black Rock. “I like Spencer Tracy better when he’s got both arms,” was all she said.

We hated The Robe and The Ten Commandments. (We agreed that biblical epics were too predictable.) We loved Marilyn Monroe. We held hands during Bus Stop and Some Like It Hot. We both defended Marilyn’s singing in River of No Return. “Breathless is just who she is!” my mother declared. Marilyn’s death would hit us harder than James Dean’s.

I’m not a fan of science-fiction films, but my mom and I liked watching them together—both the good ones, like The War of the Worlds, and the terrible ones for teenagers necking in drive-ins, like Attack of the Crab Monsters, The Blob, and The Wasp Woman. When my mother and I went to drive-in movies in the summers, we would cuddle together like the teenagers on dates. “How completely inappropriate!” my dependably disapproving aunts said, yet again.

Aunt Abigail and Aunt Martha had a hissy fit over The Graduate—all because the Dustin Hoffman character is a “college kid” who has an affair with the middle-aged Mrs. Robinson (the Anne Bancroft character) and with Mrs. Robinson’s daughter. I would have been twenty-five or twenty-six at the time of The Graduate—Nora was already in her thirties. It was 1967, but Abigail and Martha were in a tizzy at the very idea of a movie about an older woman who has sex with a younger man.

“A mere boy!” Aunt Abigail had lamented.

“It should be a crime!” Aunt Martha had chimed in.

“He’s a college grad—he’s not a college kid,” Nora pointed out.

“I don’t see what’s wrong with it, even if the boy is a high school kid—not if he likes it!” my mother exclaimed.

Yet my mom, who adored Billy Wilder, the Austrian-born director, thought Audrey Hepburn was too young to have anything to do with the aging Gary Cooper in Love in the Afternoon—this was in 1957. My mother loved Audrey Hepburn. So did I. When my friends at Exeter said my mom reminded them of Audrey Hepburn, I was embarrassed. I knew their thoughts about Audrey were likely to be comparable to my own. Audrey wasn’t the motherly type to me.