When I told her I could see the Roman numerals on the clockface of the tower, Nana said this was an early sign that I had the imagination to become a fiction writer. She knew it was impossible to see any part of the main academy building from our attic.

Nora put it more plainly: my imagining I could see the academy clock tower from my attic bedroom didn’t indicate to her that I had a fiction writer’s imagination—only that I was a slow learner.

To the Exeter faculty—most of all, to the faculty wives—I was “the Brewster boy,” not necessarily because I was the grandson of a mysteriously mute principal emeritus. It was more remarkable that I had my mother’s maiden name, and that pretty Rachel Brewster was noticeably unmarried; she was also away for months at a time.

Exeter was a small town, though not as small as the claustrophobic community of a single-sex boarding school. It wasn’t unnoticed that Principal Brewster had stopped speaking—at which time, I presumed, he’d been relieved of his headmasterly duties. This was around the time my mom got pregnant, but before she began to show. I don’t remember who told me that he’d not been principal for long. I don’t remember when Nora told me that he’d never been principal at all. It was only Lewis Brewster’s fantasy, all because he believed he should have been Exeter’s headmaster.

“Those damn Brewster girls indulged him,” Nora told me. “In truth, Granddaddy Lew is just another faculty emeritus. He was only an English teacher—a strict grammarian, big on rules. When he used to talk, he went on and on about punctuation marks. Saltonstall has been the principal at Exeter since before I was born. Salty will probably be principal forever.”

As would always be true of Nora, she was mostly right. William Gurdon Saltonstall was the principal of Phillips Exeter from 1932 until 1963, when he left to direct the Peace Corps in Nigeria. Salty appeared to be beloved.

Here was another Brewster family secret I hadn’t known. Nora apologized for not telling me sooner. “I thought I’d already told you, Adam; I must have assumed that everyone knew the ‘principal emeritus’ was deluded, long before he stopped talking.” But how would I have known that Granddaddy Lew was delusional? He’d never spoken to me. It unnerved me to think there were faculty members (and their families) who knew more about me and the Brewster family than I did. Other than what Nora told me, I’d been kept in the dark. And after Nora went off to Northfield, and later, to Mount Holyoke, I was alone a lot.