“Tarzan went to Exeter, Adam,” Nora informed me. “You weren’t born, I would have been a toddler, and Henrik was still shitting in his diapers. Tarzan was three years older than your mom. When Ray was thirteen and fourteen, Tarzan was sixteen and seventeen,” Nora said. “You can imagine how my mother and Aunt Martha would have found it ‘completely inappropriate’—namely, that this big gorilla was hitting on Little Ray.”

“How did Tarzan get into Exeter?” I asked Nora.

“The actor, Adam—not the half-naked man swinging on vines, or fooling around with Jane and that chimpanzee. Lex Barker, the actor, went to Exeter—before he was Tarzan,” Nora explained. I must have looked lost. I was eight; the concept of Tarzan hitting on my mom surely went over my head. “I don’t mean they dated, Adam—you know, they never went out. I don’t know if they ever spoke to each other,” Nora said. “But something happened. Maybe Tarzan gave Ray a funny look—he gave her the once-over, in an unwelcome way—or he creeped her out with a certain kind of smile.”

Naturally, I was imagining that Tarzan gave my mother one of his ape calls, or he beat his bare chest. Nora always knew what I was thinking. “Adam: Tarzan wouldn’t have been wearing just the loincloth, not at Exeter,” Nora assured me. “I’m almost certain he had his shirt on when this happened, whatever it was—if anything actually happened. Something about the guy just freaked out your mom. Or the big ape did something that my dumb-fuck mother and Aunt Martha saw, and they were freaked out—probably because they could see that Tarzan had the hots for Ray.”

I could imagine that happening, of course. In the area of appropriateness or suitability, it didn’t take much to freak out Aunt Abigail and Aunt Martha. For example, Nora was away at school when Lex Barker’s third and fourth Tarzan movies—Tarzan’s Peril and Tarzan’s Savage Fury—came out. I was nine and ten when those two Tarzan films were playing at the Ioka. Aunt Abigail and Aunt Martha insisted on seeing them with me; they didn’t think it was suitable for me to see them alone. Henrik came along, too. In those years, Henrik was thirteen and fourteen. With his mother and Aunt Abigail sitting between us, Henrik couldn’t reach around them to punch me in the arm or snap my ear with his fingers, which he was fond of doing.

I remember very little of the two movies. I was distracted by Aunt Abigail and Aunt Martha; they were in their forties, at least a decade older than Lex Barker, and their moral outrage was palpable. Their clenched fists, their heavy breathing, the looks that flashed between them—especially when Tarzan was socializing with Cheetah, the chimp, or cozying up to Jane.