At that cocktail party, I don’t doubt there were some former Exeter wrestlers who’d gone to Yale, but they weren’t the only ones who turned their heads when they heard the word Yalies. Suddenly my mother was beside us. She took hold of the heavyweight’s wrist with one hand; she had taken hold of my wrist with her other hand, the way a wrestler would take control of your hands. The heavyweight had flinched, recoiling from her touch. My mom wasn’t used to anyone resisting her hands-on approach to conversation; when she was eager to talk to you, she stood close to you and held your wrists. The tall, lean guy tried to free his wrist from her grip, but my mom wouldn’t let him go. Her winter life, all the ski-poling, had given her a good grip—her hands were small but strong, like the snowshoer’s. “Were you two talking about Zim—didn’t I hear that dear boy’s name? I know I heard the word Yalies,” my mom said in her breathless way. I saw she was standing on her toes. Little Ray was making an effort to bring her smiling, uplifted face closer to the small heavyweight’s scowling visage. It was the long-armed guy’s turn to be struck speechless.

“He didn’t really know Zim, not at Yale, not even at Exeter—they weren’t in the war together,” I tried to tell my mother.

“That awful war—poor Zim!” my mom cried. “You should have let me shoot him, sweetie—Zim would be alive if you’d let me shoot him, you know,” she told me. “Molly says she could have shot him out the kitchen window, when Zim was doing lunges in the driveway, but I wouldn’t have taken a chance with a deer slug in the twenty-gauge at that range—I would have shot him when he was asleep, just under the patella,” my mom was saying, when the appalled way the unnamed heavyweight was looking at her finally registered. “Just his knee—I wouldn’t have killed him, I could have saved him!” my mother cried. She let go of my wrist, taking hold of the heavyweight’s other wrist with her free hand. “Zim would be alive today—he would have been here, with us, if I’d shot him!” my mom insisted. “You can have a good life with a bad knee—you can still get laid with a limp, you know, and have children, and make friends,” she told the seemingly paralyzed heavyweight, as she’d told Molly and me. I knew she was about to burst into tears—what usually happened when she talked or just thought about Zim. Then Molly was there, with her big hands on my mother’s shoulders.