The last time I saw those two Norwegians was when they came to New York to see Nora and Em onstage at the Gallows, the first and only time they saw Two Dykes, One Who Talks—when they also saw and heard the premier performance of Damaged Don’s “No Lucky Star,” the original lyrics, the uncensored version. Not then, at the Gallows in New York, or only shortly before then—that next-to-last time, when I saw Uncle Martin and Uncle Johan in Exeter—did I detect in my uncles their desire to call it quits, to drive off the road. Not even the people you love in your own family tell you everything, and there are always the things you miss.

“Those two men never misjudged a turn,” my mother said, when Uncle Johan drove off the Kancamagus.

“I thought that’s what you said about their skiing, Ray—I thought that’s what you meant,” Molly said.

“That’s what I’m saying about their driving, Molly—that’s what I mean,” my mom said.

As for Uncle Johan and her dad misjudging a turn on the Kanc, Nora saw it the way my mom saw it—“they knew when to call it quits,” Nora always said.

In 1977, the same year Uncle Johan accelerated as he drove off the Kancamagus, Clara Swift, who played the teacher in The Kindergarten Man, gave birth to Paul Goode’s child. To be sure, they’d been an item since they made that first film (of their many films) together—when Paul Goode was forty-six, and Clara Swift was twenty years younger. But the age difference between them wasn’t what got the goat of the Hollywood press and the scandalmongers in the media. What ticked off the tabloids was how pregnant Clara Swift was when they got married—she was already showing.

THE BRIDE WORE WHITE—A WHITE MATERNITY DRESS! was one headline. FLAUNTING IT! was another one. And, of course, there was HAVE YOU NO SHAME?

Nora was six when I was born. “I remember what your mom looked like when she was pregnant, kiddo—your dad definitely married a woman who reminded him of your mom,” Nora told me. Well, okay. In 1977, there was so much gossipy media about Paul Goode and his much younger, pregnant bride, even my uncles must have made the little mountaineer connection. Nora said her dad and Uncle Johan surely would have seen the resemblance to Little Ray in the pregnant Clara Swift.

Em and I kept it to ourselves. Clara Swift was no less attractive to us when she was hugely pregnant than she was when we first saw her in The Kindergarten Man. What also appealed to Em and me about Clara Swift was that she refused to be interviewed; she would not talk to journalists, period. “You would have to be a journalist not to like that about her,” Em wrote me.