“Ja, you should ski with her,” Werner said, taking his cue from Möglich yet again. Thus it was decided: I would learn to ski, once more. You are never over your childhood, not until you are under the train—unter dem Zug.

40. THE NIGHT OF THE SANTAS

There’d been another marine in the making in the Exeter wrestling room when I was wrestling there. Sam was our starter at 121 pounds, the year before I graduated. Everyone liked him. Sam was practically a marine before he came to Exeter; he’d been born on the Marine Corps base in Quantico. He went from Exeter to the U.S. Naval Academy and he did two tours of duty in Vietnam. We had our differences over the war, but we’d been good friends at Exeter and we remained good friends. A decorated hero, Sam was awarded the Silver Star, for valor in combat, and a Purple Heart—the one you get if you’re wounded. He had a Bronze Star Medal, too; I forget what that one is for.

Sam and I weren’t workout partners when we were teammates in the Exeter wrestling room; we were the wrong size to wrestle each other. Sam was a little guy. Elliot Barlow had been Sam’s principal workout partner at Exeter. The Marine Corps would promote Sam to brigadier general in 1989, and to major general and lieutenant general in 1992. Sam would be promoted to general in 1995, the same year he became commandant of the Marine Corps. In my opinion, and in Mr. Barlow’s, Sam was always very determined—both a positive guy and a fair-minded one. Sam was a far cry from the backup heavyweight without a name, the one we called our marine.

The natural 190-pounder was a prick of misery in comparison to “the general,” as the snowshoer and I called Sam. “The good marine,” we also called Sam, to distinguish him from the undersize heavyweight who was “the bad marine”—our other name for our marine, whose actual name was one that no one could remember in the monosyllabic utterances of life in boarding schools.

“Too many syllables to keep in mind. A New York mercantile family—originally, an English name,” the little English teacher told me. She’d found a photo of the saturnine boy who was too big to make weight at 177 pounds, but too small to be a starting heavyweight. Elliot Barlow had her own collection of Exeter yearbooks, from every year she’d been a teacher and a coach at the academy. She found the unsmiling Emory Trowbridge in the back row, in the photo of the JV wrestling team. Gloom appeared to be Emory’s constant companion. Was a perpetual pessimism characteristic of the Trowbridge family, perhaps inherent in all Trowbridges, or was Emory’s gloominess entirely his own?