“I know he played football,” Uncle Martin said. “I know he didn’t take French or Spanish with me.”

“Tarzan was never in my German class—I know that,” Uncle Johan told me. “He definitely did track-and-field.”

“Did he ski?” I asked my uncles.

“Tarzan on skis!” Uncle Martin cried.

“Skiing in his loincloth!” Uncle Johan shouted. Life was a comedy; my uncles once more dissolved into laughter.

In 1988, thirty years after the Johnny Stompanato stabbing, when Cheryl Crane was forty-five, she published her autobiography, Detour: A Hollywood Story. In the book, Cheryl revealed that, between the ages of ten and thirteen, she was repeatedly raped by Lex Barker. When Cheryl told her mom, Lana kicked the ape man out.

In 1988, Lana Turner and Little Ray were sixty-seven and sixty-six, respectively. Lex Barker wasn’t alive to read about himself in Cheryl Crane’s autobiography. He had died of a heart attack in 1973, at the age of fifty-four. Tarzan was walking down a street in New York City, on his way to meet his fiancée, Karen Kondazian. She was an actress, twenty-three at the time—thirty-one years younger than Tarzan of the Apes. Not counting Jane, she would have been the ape man’s sixth wife.

How did my mother respond to the news that Lex Barker had serially raped Lana Turner’s young daughter, beginning when the girl was prepubescent? All my mom said, softly, was: “Poor Cheryl.”

Later, Little Ray spoke more pointedly—if not in much detail—to me. “I’ve told you, Adam—please don’t ask me again, sweetie. Not Tarzan.” This time, I felt badly that I hadn’t asked my mom about him—not for thirty years.

11. SMALLNESS AS A BURDEN

Downtown Exeter wasn’t much to speak of. At the intersection of Water and Front Streets, there was a bandstand; there were occasional appearances of a band. Below the falls, where the Exeter River ran into the Squamscott, the water was brackish and filthy. Because the Squamscott was a tidal river, the academy crew couldn’t row at low tide. Because the Squamscott was polluted, the mudflats stank. A rower would one day tell me: “You can usually spot a beetleskin in the mud at low tide.” We called condoms beetleskins. The Ioka wasn’t much of a movie theater, but it’s the only downtown building I remember.

Because I was the grandson of a principal emeritus of Phillips Exeter (or so I thought), the academy—even before I attended it—was my part of town. Front Street bisected the Phillips Exeter campus. I grew up in my grandparents’ red-brick house on Front Street, within hearing distance of the bells that heralded the changing of classes. Principal Brewster’s house was Georgian—the front door framed by two white columns, white window trim, black shutters. From the cupola window in my attic bedroom, I could look along Front Street and almost see the academy clock tower, where the bells tolled.