Those Brewster girls, my mother included, were fond of dramatizing their exclamatory remarks, though my grandmother—Mildred Brewster, whose maiden name was Bates—always maintained that drama was more characteristic of a Bates than a Brewster.

I believed her. Evidence of the dramatic developed slowly in my grandfather, Lewis Brewster. I was told he’d been the principal of Phillips Exeter Academy, albeit briefly and with no accomplishments of significance. Throughout my acquaintance with Principal Brewster, as he preferred to be called (even by his grandchildren), he was retired. As a perpetual principal emeritus, gloomy and stern—bordering on catatonic—the former headmaster seemed destined to live forever. Little seemed to affect him. It would take the heavens to kill him.

My grandfather didn’t speak; he rarely did anything. I used to think Lewis Brewster had been born a retired head of school. To whatever was said or done, Granddaddy Lew, as he hated to be called, would respond (when he reacted at all) with no more than a nod or a shake of his head. To engage with children, his own included, seemed beneath him. When he was vexed, he chewed his mustache.

Of course, I was not yet born when my mother told her parents she was pregnant. Before I knew the story, I used to wonder what Principal Brewster had to say about that. I was born one week before Christmas—Dec. 18, 1941. As my unwed mother would never tire of telling me, I was ten days late.

3. A FIRST-NAME BASIS

My mother was the kind of moviegoer who could not resist likening the physical appearance of people she knew to movie stars. When the Austrian skier Toni Sailer won three gold medals at the 1956 Olympics, my mom said, “Toni looks a little like Farley Granger in Strangers on a Train”—a Hitchcock movie we’d watched together. My mom was a Hitchcock fan, but was she on a first-name basis with Toni Sailer?

“Toni almost fell into an open mine shaft in Aspen!” she said in her wide-eyed, exclamatory way. My mother then went on and on about all the ski lifts they were constructing and new trails they were cutting on Aspen Mountain. She said the old mine dumps and the abandoned buildings were being bulldozed, but there were still open pits here and there.

It’s also not clear if my mother knew Stein Eriksen, the Norwegian skier; to this day, I don’t know if they so much as met. The FIS Alpine World Ski Championships were in Aspen in 1950. “Stein was in first place after the first run,” was not quite all my mom had to say about Stein. I’m referring to more than her oft-repeated knowledge of his famous reverse-shoulder technique.