“Don’t be so cynical,” Elliot Barlow wrote me back. She believed my mother, who sacralized the Hotel Jerome—in the same way my mom had the hotel’s founder, Jerome B. Wheeler. To listen to Ray, you wouldn’t know the sainted Mr. Wheeler had lost the hotel to back taxes in 1909. You might get the idea that the ghost of Jerome B. Wheeler ran the Hotel Jerome.

I know my mother believed the Hotel Jerome was sacred, to the degree that she thought the staff and management were incapable of any wrongdoing, but even my mom knew the staff and management couldn’t control (or be blamed for) the behavior of the hotel guests.

“What about the Aspen locals—how did the townsfolk behave?” I wrote back to Mr. Barlow. If you were one of the people who loved her, and she loved you, the snowshoer liked being called Mr. Barlow, but not everyone was welcome to call her Mr. Barlow—not now. As a woman, notwithstanding her transitioning, she saw no reason to change her name; Elliot worked fine as a female name. She and I had recently been back in Exeter—sadly, for the occasion of Coach Dearborn’s memorial service. I wanted to go, and I knew the snowshoer wanted to be there, but I didn’t want her to go back to the academy alone. I wasn’t worried about how my wrestling teammates would treat her when they encountered Elliot Barlow as a woman; I wasn’t worried about those wrestlers from before or after my time at the academy, who would have known Coach Dearborn’s littlest wrestler and assistant coach. I’m not sure who I was worried about, exactly—I was worried inexactly. I didn’t know who could be abusive to Mr. Barlow as a woman: the faculty members who might not have known her when she was a man, those wrestlers who hadn’t been at Exeter when Elliot was a regular in that wrestling room? Both Mr. Barlow and I had been asked to speak at Coach Dearborn’s memorial service. I struggled not to imagine Coach Dearborn’s ghost, still smoking in the coaches’ locker room. I preferred to remember him doing single-leg lunges with my mom at her wedding. I also struggled not to think of him carrying Granddaddy’s body from the croquet court. “I’ll speak just ahead of you, so I can introduce you,” I said to the snowshoer. Naturally, I wanted to make it easier for Elliot—to let me say something about her transitioning from male to female, before all those good old boys got a look at her. Coeducation was still pretty new at Exeter; the snowshoer had resigned fairly recently.

“If you don’t mind, Adam, I’ll introduce myself—I’ll speak just ahead of you, so I can tell all these wrestlers to read your novels,” the little English teacher told me.