Another passage the little English teacher had marked prompted Mildred Brewster to keep reciting. “And there’s this, Adam,” Nana said with gloomy solemnity. “May you be spared such a moment of recognition as this—namely, the conviction that most of your happiness lies behind you, and the lion’s share of your loneliness looms ahead. This is poor Pip’s view of the marshes at night: ‘I looked at the stars, and considered how awful it would be for a man to turn his face up to them as he froze to death, and see no help or pity in all the glittering multitude.’ May you be spared such awful loneliness, Adam,” my grandmother most solemnly said.

“I’m going to call my mom now, Nana—while you fix supper,” I said. Under the circumstances, I tried to sound as hopeful as possible, knowing that the supper business conducted in my grandmother’s kitchen rarely turned out well. Still reeling, as I was, from the demands of real love, which included giving up my heart and soul to the smiter, I was no less devastated by the prospect of freezing to death while receiving no assistance or kindness from the indifferent stars. “What’s a smiter, Nana?” I asked her.

Handing the little teacher’s copy of Great Expectations to me, my grandmother was making her stoic way to the kitchen, where I knew her expectations were modest. “A smiter is one who strikes a heavy blow, Adam—either with the hand or with an implement,” Nana said. It didn’t sound good, either way, but I was now alone and could call my mother.

During the ski season, calling my mom in Stowe was not in the devastating category of Pip’s seeing “no help or pity in all the glittering multitude”; nevertheless, I faced some uncertainties when I made these calls. In the first place, my mother knew how much I missed her; I had to be careful, especially at the beginning and end of the call, not to make it apparent that my missing her was the reason for my calling her. If she could hear how much I missed her in my voice, she would cry—then we would both feel guilty.

Of lesser importance, yet also of an uncertain nature, was that I had only a vague idea of where she lived in Stowe—not to mention, with whom. She’d told me she had a “bunch of roommates”; usually, when I called, either my mom or Molly answered the phone. “Just picture a kind of dormitory for girl jocks, Adam—that’s where I spend the ski season,” my mother said. I’m sure she had no idea of the unease and arousal she had conjured up for me, her thirteen-year-old son, lying awake with conflicting images of girl jocks—her fellow ski instructors or ski patrollers, and there was at least one female trail groomer in the aforementioned bunch of roommates.