During World War II, when the ski troops of the Tenth Mountain Division came to Aspen on cross-country maneuvers, the skiing soldiers slept on the floors of the Jerome. I learned, long after the fact, that many of Stowe’s male skiers joined the Tenth Mountain Division. Weren’t these men my mother would have seen on the slopes of Mount Mansfield? Maybe some of them were among that bunch of Vermonters she’d hitched a ride with, on her way to Aspen from Denver in 1941. She didn’t say.

Toni Matt was a Tenth Mountain Division man. A lieutenant in World War II, he was posted to the Aleutian Islands. Toni Matt wasn’t married in 1941, when he won two championships in Aspen. Matt was only a few years older than my mom—at the time, he would have been twenty-one or twenty-two.

I’ve seen photographs of Toni Matt; he looks a little like me. Actually, I think I look a lot more like Toni Matt than I do Alan Ladd, but my mother could not be persuaded of this.

“In the first place, Toni Matt has dark hair,” I pointed out to my mom, “and his face is rounder than Alan Ladd’s—more like mine. Furthermore, Toni Matt’s nose isn’t as sharp as Alan Ladd’s, and his eyebrows aren’t as thick—they’re more like mine.”

“Toni Matt was never handsome, not like Alan Ladd—not to me,” my mother added, with a dismissive shrug. “Not like you’re handsome, sweetie,” she told me.

Once, when I argued with my mom about Toni Matt, she just took my hand and squeezed it. Then she said—with each word, her eyes never left mine—“If you were Toni Matt’s son, you would love to ski. Toni schussed the headwall of Tuckerman Ravine,” she reminded me. She even knew Toni’s time for the four-mile race, from the top to the bottom of the ravine. “Six minutes, twenty-nine and two-tenths of a second,” my mom whispered to me; her eyes were locked on mine. “If Toni Matt were your father, no one could have kept you off skis. Leave your little hands alone, sweetie.”

But my mom must have been on a first-name basis with someone that weekend of March 8 and 9. She never varied from saying I was born ten days late—on December 18 of that year. You do the math. That weekend when Marilyn Shaw won the Women’s National Slalom Championship in Aspen, someone got my mother pregnant. Poor Jerome didn’t knock her up. That March weekend in 1941, Jerome B. Wheeler was already a ghost.

6. LITTLE RAY

What I remember of my winters, when I was a child and in my early teens, is that my grandmother was my mother. Nana, my name for Mildred Brewster, was my winter mom. And she was my mother’s most devoted apologist—for a while, it seemed to me, her only apologist.