As for Charles Dickens and his imagining a pitiless firmament—the vast and distant dome of the uncaring heavens, of no help to mankind—well, Little Ray wasn’t a reader. Elliot’s love of literature didn’t interest her, nor did she give a hoot that my grandmother was impressed by Elliot’s parents. “The Barlows are a fine old Bostonian family,” Nana had said. What further impressed Mildred Brewster was that Elliot’s parents had been college sweethearts—they’d met when he was at Harvard and she at Radcliffe.

“Oh, I get it—the Barlows were sweethearts at those colleges,” Nora would later comment. In Nora’s view, those status-conscious Brewster girls—my mother excepted—were prone to have orgasms over the Harvard-Radcliffe connection. “They get hard-ons for higher education,” Nora said. Nora was entitled to her bitterness toward an elite education. Nora never forgot: she’d been a faculty brat at Exeter when Exeter was a boys-only school.

My mom wasn’t inclined to higher-education hard-ons; she didn’t have an orgasm over the Barlows’ Harvard-Radcliffe connection, nor did she give a hoot that Elliot came from a highfalutin bunch of Bostonians. What mattered to my mother was that the snowshoer was a virtual Austrian.

“You’re practically an Österreicher!” my mom told Elliot, breathlessly—showing off her German accent. Her breathlessness was possibly the result of Little Ray’s imagining herself skiing at high altitude, which she would have been in Lech, or St. Anton, or St. Christoph—especially in St. Christoph. Maybe my mother was feeling the effects of high altitude at the very idea that the snowshoer had been born in St. Anton, where Hannes Schneider had been a ski guide before the First World War.

Schneider had served as a ski instructor for the Austrian army. After the war, he returned to the Tyrol, starting a ski school in St. Anton, where he perfected his method of instruction—the Arlberg technique.

John and Sarah Barlow had been parents with a plan, even as college sweethearts. The European history and the German they’d studied at Harvard and Radcliffe were as purposeful as Sarah’s choosing to get pregnant in St. Anton and have her baby at altitude. Just as she thought all the ski-poling would make her little snowshoer stronger, Sarah Barlow believed she could acclimate her child to altitude if she went through gestation above four thousand feet.

“I love your mother for wanting you to be born acclimated to altitude,” my mom earnestly declared to the snowshoer, when he told her this story. She suddenly seized one of his small hands in both of hers, holding it to her left breast. Or so it appeared to me, and to Elliot Barlow. “Feel my heart—how it’s beating!” Little Ray cried. “It’s as if I’m at altitude.”