At Harvard, Elliot Barlow had declared English as his concentration, Uncle Martin would tell me. The small snowshoer got a bachelor’s degree in 1951. Because the U.S. Armed Forces, in their infinite wisdom, said the runner on top of the snow wasn’t big enough, or so Uncle Johan told me, Mr. Barlow got his master’s at Harvard in 1953. In the fall of that year, the snowshoer started teaching at Exeter. According to my uncles, the only faculty who still raised their eyebrows at the snowshoer’s smallness were the old fuddy-duddies.

My aunts kept raising their eyebrows. With their lynch-mob mentality, my aunts had been sounding the homo alarm before the end of Mr. Barlow’s first year as a teacher. By the halfway mark of the small snowshoer’s second year, he met me. By then, Aunt Abigail and Aunt Martha were in full fruit-alert mode.

As Nora would one day explain to me: “My mother and Aunt Martha were on a faculty-wives’ witch hunt; nothing got their rocks off like witch-hunting for fairies.” In Nora’s opinion, my mom’s marrying the little snowshoer saved him. Nora would later modify her opinion: “Ray saved the snowshoer’s job, anyway.”

All I knew, for certain—on the night of the day I met him—was that I had to call my mother. I was waiting for my aunts to leave—to go home to their laughing Norwegians—and for my grandmother to begin her business in the kitchen. “The supper business,” Nana disparagingly called her efforts to make dinner for the nonspeaking emeritus and me. My grandmother wasn’t a good cook; she didn’t enjoy cooking.

What finally persuaded my aunts to leave the Front Street house, to go home to their good-humored husbands, was that my grandmother began reciting from the marked passages she’d been reading to herself in Mr. Barlow’s annotated copy of Great Expectations.

“Listen to this, Adam—Miss Havisham on the subject of love. Let this be a lesson to you,” Nana said, before she began to read aloud. Aunt Abigail and Aunt Martha exchanged dire looks; they were roused to sudden-exit mode. “As follows: ‘I’ll tell you what real love is. It is blind devotion, unquestioning self-humiliation, utter submission, trust and belief against yourself and against the whole world, giving up your whole heart and soul to the smiter—as I did!’ That’s Miss Havisham in a nutshell!” my grandmother proclaimed. “The little English teacher knows how to read!”

Upon hearing Miss Havisham’s proclamation, I was not greatly encouraged by the prospect of real love. Through a dining-room window, I observed Aunt Abigail and Aunt Martha’s hasty retreat. The very idea of love as utter submission was repellent to them. And Nana wasn’t finished. In her years with the deluded, now-silent emeritus, my grandmother was used to an audience of one. At least I was a responsive audience.