“As for the plots of my parents’ Nazi-era novels, like their Cold War novels…” Elliot Barlow quietly persisted. Then he paused. Everyone’s attention was drawn to the childlike behavior of the unfulfilled emeritus. He was not only eating voraciously; he was attempting to feed himself with a serving spoon, which was too big for his mouth. “The plots are all the same,” Elliot now resumed. “The killer is never caught. It helps that he’s killing bad people—no one’s trying very hard to catch him. Cynical characters, bleak nonendings,” the snowshoer concluded; his voice petered out. His heart wasn’t in it, and what was the point?

Martin and Johan were poised to interrupt him—Johan, in two languages. The hand-holding under the table had not convinced Abigail and Martha that Elliot Barlow was heterosexually inclined. My grandmother was an old-fashioned literary snob; Nana had never finished a single one of Simenon’s novels—she said she’d tried. She didn’t care for Eric Ambler, either. She claimed she’d never heard of Patricia Highsmith, but Nana had liked the Hitchcock film (Strangers on a Train) adapted from Highsmith’s first novel. It wouldn’t have mattered to my grandmother to hear that Patricia Highsmith, who was born in Texas, was better published and more widely read in German than in English, or that Elliot Barlow’s parents had made their living from murder novels.

“Mord, mehr Morde, noch mehr Morde!” Uncle Johan interjected, which he immediately translated into English, thus giving me an insightful glimpse of his repetitious classroom technique. “Murder, more murders, still more murders! The Germans take murder more seriously than we do—I mean, as literature,” Uncle Johan explained.

“I want to be completely honest with you,” the snowshoer blurted out, speaking directly to my mother and looking only at her.

“Yes, I feel the same way about you!” my mom didn’t hesitate to tell him, in her breathless fashion. My aunts had stopped breathing; they were praying for a confession of pederasty from the little English teacher. Even my uncles stopped talking. By the way Elliot Barlow suddenly sat bolt upright at the table, I could tell my mother must have grabbed his knee or his thigh. I’d missed seeing when they finished the first and second beers they’d been sharing—now I saw they had halfway finished their third.