The Last Chairlift

42. A NORMAL LIFE

On the second night, Em went back and forth between my bed and Mr. Barlow’s. Em would lie back on the pillow and not move, but she couldn’t sleep, and she was too restless to stay in bed. I knew better than to try to hug her; I didn’t even touch her hand. I kept my back turned to her and pretended I was sleeping. Once, when I actually was asleep, I felt her arm around me and her breath on my shoulder, or I just dreamed this—for old times’ sake, or because I couldn’t forget how Em had hugged me, the way she would bump me with her head when she locked her hands around me from behind.

Em was getting dressed when I woke up. I looked away; I didn’t see what she was wearing. When I went into the kitchen, Elliot Barlow asked me if Em was going to church. It was Sunday morning, but we both knew Em never went to church. “Em is dressed like she’s going to church, or to a funeral,” the snowshoer said.

Nora had been blunt about her death; she wanted no “remembrance bullshit,” as she put it. “When I die, let there be nothing—I want you to do fuck-all about my dying,” Nora had told us. Considering the unlikelihood of Em going to church, Mr. Barlow and I remembered a more recent conversation. Nora had been railing against John Cardinal O’Connor and the Roman Catholic Archdiocese’s opposition to safe-sex education in the city’s public schools. We’d heard Nora on this subject too many times; Mr. Barlow and I were barely listening. We knew O’Connor had campaigned against LGBT nondiscrimination laws, and how he’d described homosexual behavior as sinful—even Em’s gay but homo-hating dad knew that. And of course Cardinal O’Connor was opposed to condom distribution. Who hadn’t heard about that?

Then Nora said something we hadn’t heard before. Her fractured relationship with ACT UP notwithstanding, Nora knew about the planned Stop the Church protest at St. Patrick’s Cathedral. Nora had friends who were ACT UP members, and knew of the disagreements among them. The Stop the Church protest was aimed at Cardinal O’Connor, not at the worshipers attending Mass. The protesters had planned to gather outside St. Patrick’s during a Mass, but a bunch of activists wanted to demonstrate inside the cathedral. Nora had said it was a “piss-poor idea” to protest inside the church. “Some dork will do something stupid—it won’t take much to offend the worshipers,” Nora had railed, with Em nodding her head off.

There’d been a compromise within ACT UP. (Nora didn’t usually have a high regard for compromises.) One talking point had been not to disrupt the Mass. The people intent on protesting inside the cathedral agreed to dress conservatively, to blend in with the congregation. The plan was to stage a die-in during the homily, the least-sacred part of the service. How the die-in might turn out didn’t sound promising to Nora. How does a die-in not disrupt a Mass?

Nora said “some fink” would tip off St. Patrick’s. She swore there would be plainclothes cops inside the cathedral for the 10:15 A.M. Mass. “The cops know how to dress for church—the cops can blend in with the congregation, too!” Nora had railed. She said “some fink political leaders” would attend the Mass to show their support for Cardinal O’Connor. “I’ll bet the fink mayor will be there!” Nora had cried. She meant Mayor Koch. His name rhymed with crotch, but Nora called him Mayor Cock—or, sometimes, Ed the Cock. Naturally, the Gallows Lounge had not allowed Nora and Em to make fun of Mayor Ed Koch onstage—not in the way Nora intended. Em had been relieved; she didn’t think it was fair to make fun of the mayor’s head. “Ed’s head looks like a penis—he’s a cockhead!” Nora had argued with Em.

“In the LGBT community, there are better reasons to be disappointed in Mayor Koch,” the snowshoer had said, with Em nodding her head off. This time, Em was on the side of the fink management at the Gallows. Em had thought it would be an inappropriate use of her penis pantomime; it would be cruel to mock Mayor Cock because his head looked like a penis. “You can’t blame Ed for his head,” Mr. Barlow had said, but Nora was a no-holds-barred girl.

That was why Elliot and I remembered there was a Stop the Church protest planned on the Sunday after the Gallows Lounge shooting—because Nora had been opposed to the protesters entering the cathedral and interrupting the Mass, and Nora wasn’t known for being the voice of caution and respect. “There’s no stopping the Catholic Church. You shouldn’t try to stop them; all you can do is try to control the damage they do,” Nora had said. She’d said this calmly; she had stopped railing. It seemed Em also remembered what was happening at St. Patrick’s. Em not only knew that Nora had planned to go; Em had made Nora promise not to enter the cathedral.

Exactly how had Em dressed to go to church? I asked Elliot Barlow. Elliot was still wearing her flannel pajamas; she’d made herself a cup of tea and was making some coffee for Em and me. I was no more dressed to go to church than the snowshoer—socks, sweatpants, a T-shirt—and I was wondering why it was taking Em an eternity to do her makeup. She’d indicated to Elliot that she would be in the bathroom, tracing her eyebrow with an index finger, and touching her lips, to pantomime putting on her makeup. “Em was wearing black tights, that black skirt your mother gave her, a black turtleneck—for God’s sake, if Em had a black veil, I’m sure she would have worn it!” the snowshoer was saying.

“Em couldn’t have put on her makeup in a veil,” I pointed out to Mr. Barlow.

“Shit—I’ll bet she’s given us the slip!” the snowshoer suddenly cried, spilling her tea. Sure enough: Em had slipped away. We rushed around, putting on our running clothes. “There’s no dress code for a Mass—it’s not like a wedding or a funeral!” I could hear the little English teacher yelling.

That Sunday morning, December 10, 1989—two days after the Gallows Lounge shooting—it was below freezing, in the twenties, in New York City. Elliot Barlow and I had checked the coat closet; we knew Em was wearing her black ski parka with the hood. With or without makeup, she would be looking a little severe. We hoped she wouldn’t go inside the church; we were sure there would be trouble at the Mass. What would Em do if the police stopped her, if a cop asked her any questions? We knew Em wouldn’t speak, not even to the police.

The snowshoer and I ran south on Park Avenue to East Fifty-second Street, where we ran west to Fifth Avenue. We assumed the protesters would be everywhere we looked on Fifth; we expected they would be all along East Fiftieth, at least as far as Rockefeller Center, perhaps lying down and blocking traffic on East Fifty-first Street, from Madison Avenue to Sixth. There had been demonstrators lying down on Fifth Avenue, Mr. Barlow and I were told, but we’d missed it. You had to be really out of it to be late to the Stop the Church protest.

Inside St. Patrick’s, the Mass had long since started—maybe an hour and a half before we got there, one of the protesters said. The organist had played loudly at times, a demonstrator told us; there’d been shouting from inside the church. The cops had arrested more than a hundred protesters, one of the hangers-on had said. We heard that half the demonstrators who’d been taken away had been seized inside St. Patrick’s. The snowshoer and I were alarmed to hear that the cops had carried protesters out of the cathedral on stretchers.

“Were the protesters injured?” Elliot asked one of the demonstrators, who was just hanging around.

“I don’t think so,” the guy told us. “If you don’t go of your own accord, the cops tie you to a stretcher and you go that way.”

I don’t understand how anything works, I was thinking. Once more, Em had been right: I might as well marry a skier who works in publishing; I might as well be living in Vermont and skiing with my mother. I was of no use to anyone in New York. I couldn’t even get to a demonstration on time. The remaining protesters were barely protesting; there were so many cops around, you couldn’t get close to the cathedral. By the time the snowshoer and I arrived, it seemed there were almost as many bystanders as demonstrators; maybe the bystanders had come to gawk at the protesters. Mr. Barlow and I were just bystanders. From what we’d been told, the more demonstrative of the demonstrators were already under arrest. At 9 A.M., someone said, there’d been about four hundred police officers lining Fifth Avenue. We’d not been there to watch the loaded paddy wagons drive away. I saw only one police van—it was parked near one of the police barricades, in front of the church.

“The twin spires of St. Patrick’s, a Gothic Revival cathedral, look all the more medieval today—under the circumstances,” the snowshoer enigmatically said.

“Under what circumstances?” I asked the little English teacher.

“In the Middle Ages, there was widespread religious persecution of non-Christians by the Catholic Church—that’s why St. Patrick’s is looking more medieval today,” Mr. Barlow proclaimed in her schoolteacher’s voice; the rise and fall of her voice had a classroom intonation, as if she hadn’t been speaking only to me. The little English teacher knew how to attract and hold an audience. In the overall disarray of the deteriorating demonstration, sundry protesters were drawn to the snowshoer’s voice; Elliot was now accusing Cardinal O’Connor, the archbishop of New York, of religious persecution. We had no hope of finding Em among the disparate elements in the protest, which was petering out. We feared that she might be one of the demonstrators who’d been arrested. It would be just like Em to be among the persecuted.

We’d tried to talk to the cops, behind their barricades—to ask them how we could find Em. “We have a friend who doesn’t speak,” the snowshoer had said to the policemen. “What will happen to her, if she was arrested? Is there a precinct where we might find her? Is there a number we can call?” Elliot had kept asking the cops. They told us to stay back, on our side of the barricades. Our worrying about Em was hypothetical to the cops. They were fixated on the actual—on what was happening then and there. The cops cared about what they could see; their focus was on the waning demonstration in front of them.

I was praying Elliot Barlow wouldn’t recite the part of the First Amendment that the Roman Catholic Church ignores, but she went ahead anyway: “ ‘Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.’ ” Those cops who’d told us to stay back were watching the little English teacher now. They couldn’t hear what the pretty Mr. Barlow had been saying, but they saw she’d found a few followers; they could see she’d attracted a motley group within the lingering mob.

Some lost-looking souls were carrying condom signs; they hovered around Mr. Barlow. I didn’t see Nora’s favorite condom poster, the one of Cardinal O’Connor’s smiling face alongside a condom twice the size of his head. KNOW YOUR SCUMBAGS, the poster said. In smaller letters, under the condom: THIS ONE PREVENTS AIDS. Nora had loved that poster, but the condom protesters who were hanging around Elliot Barlow carried tamer signs. CONDOMS NOT PRAYERS, one protest sign said. TAKE ONE AND SAVE YOUR LIFE, said another condom sign; rows of condoms were attached to this sign. God knows how long those condoms had been outside in the cold.

The snowshoer was blaming Pope Pius XII for what sounded to me like a 1951 papal encyclical, an “Address to Midwives on the Nature of Their Profession.” The poor midwives, I was thinking, when I saw the cops cross the barricades; the cops who’d been watching Elliot were coming our way. I knew the snowshoer was hurrying; she saw the cops closing in. “But just you wait and see what Cardinal O’Connor and his craven supporters say about us! We’ll be condemned for infringing on their freedom to worship!” Mr. Barlow cried. I could see she’d lost half her listeners even before the police broke through and dispersed the few followers still surrounding the snowshoer. A woman with a reproductive-freedom sign was the last one who went away. When the cops closed in, the little English teacher took hold of my hands; she was delighted. “Finally—I was thinking the cops would never come!” Mr. Barlow whispered to me. This was when I understood she was trying to get arrested; it struck me as a rather roundabout way to find out if Em had been arrested, and where the police were holding her. Elliot Barlow would be right, of course—concerning what Cardinal O’Connor and his craven supporters would say about the Stop the Church protesters.

As for the die-in: some protesters had thrown themselves on the floor of the central aisle of the cathedral to symbolize the victims of AIDS; some had chained themselves to the pews. A guy had blown a whistle and shouted, “You’re killing us!”

That same year, the American Catholic Bishops had explicitly condemned the use of condoms to stop the spread of the AIDS virus. Cardinal O’Connor had advocated abstinence instead of condoms—“good morality is good medicine” was one way he put it. During the disrupted service in St. Patrick’s, Cardinal O’Connor had told his parishioners: “Never respond to hatred with hatred.” Nora would have pointed out that the cardinal hated homosexual acts, a woman’s access to abortion, safe-sex education, and condoms. Over the protesters’ shouts in St. Patrick’s, the cardinal had led his parishioners in prayer; he had handed out a written homily, to replace his regular sermon.

Mayor Koch was sitting in a front-row pew at the interrupted Mass. The fink mayor would criticize the demonstrators. “If you don’t like the church, go out and find one you like—or start your own,” Ed the Cock would say. His time as a mayor was running out; Ed Koch would become a movie critic. What Nora would have said is anybody’s guess.

The New York mayor-elect, David Dinkins, and the New York governor, Mario Cuomo, said they “deplored” the Stop the Church protest. Finks for the cardinal, Nora would have called them.

In the media, much would be made of the demonstrators’ disruption of the Mass—their disrespect of a religious service. To desecrate the Eucharist was wrong; host desecration was a sacrilege. Some guy had crushed a Communion wafer in his hand; he’d dropped or thrown it on the floor of the cathedral. “Certainly sacrilegious,” Mr. Barlow would say, “but if the rites of the Roman Catholic Church are sacred, isn’t the First Amendment sacrosanct?”

When the cops closed in on us, the little English teacher wasn’t talking politics—not to the police. There were demonstrators dressed as clowns, and guys wearing homemade miters—mock versions of the high hats (those tall headdresses) worn by Catholic bishops. A very handsome Jesus was walking around; he had a crown of thorns and the right beard, but we could see the cops were tired of the carnival atmosphere. The two cops who came up to us now were the ones we’d tried to talk to before. This time, they had handcuffs, or they’d always had them, only now they were carrying the cuffs where we could see them.

“Hello, again—we’re the ones who have a friend who doesn’t speak,” the snowshoer said, holding out her wrists to be cuffed.

“We know,” the older, clean-shaven cop replied, not cuffing her; he was pleasant, even smiling a little.

“We just want you to come with us—we need to know more about your friend who doesn’t speak,” the younger policeman told us. He had a mustache that overran his upper lip; I couldn’t tell if he was smiling or not.

“You don’t have to handcuff us—we’ll go peacefully, wherever you take us. We hope you’ll arrest us and take us where you’re holding our friend—she just doesn’t speak; she’s not trying to make trouble,” Mr. Barlow was babbling.

“We won’t handcuff you—we aren’t arresting you,” the older, clean-shaven cop said tiredly.

“We just want you to come with us—we need to know more about your friend who doesn’t speak,” the younger policeman with the mustache repeated. The two cops held their hands close to us—both to indicate where they wanted us to go, and to guide us through the crowd, to the police side of the barricades—but they barely touched us, or they touched us only incidentally. There were no strong-arm tactics.

We would later learn there were 4,500 protesters at the Stop the Church protest. The police arrested only 111 demonstrators, from inside and outside the cathedral. Those arrested faced minor charges; they were released without trial, that same night, and sentenced to community service. A small number of protesters were later tried for refusing their community service; no one would serve any jail time.

In the case of Elliot Barlow and myself, our two cops treated us well. We went with them along Fifth Avenue to Fiftieth Street, where the demonstration had started. We were making our way west on Fiftieth—we were almost to the Avenue of the Americas—when the snowshoer asked our police escorts if they were taking us to Radio City Music Hall. She wasn’t kidding, but our good-natured cops both laughed; they thought the pretty Mr. Barlow had been joking. “I just imagined you might be holding the other prisoners in the music hall,” the little English teacher told them seriously.

“You’re not prisoners, you’re not under arrest—we’re just trying to get to the bottom of your friend’s business with the cardinal,” the older, clean-shaven cop said.

“Let’s start with her name, including how you spell MacPherson—then we’ll get to her business with the box,” the younger one with the mustache told us. We’d not mentioned Em’s name to the policemen, I was certain. Elliot spelled out both Emily and MacPherson for the cops. I was watching the older policeman, who was nodding his head. He was looking at something written on a small scrap of paper. He already knew how to spell Em’s name; the cops were just making sure we were talking about the same person.

“What box?” I asked them. The snowshoer and I had just moved Em and her stuff out of Hell’s Kitchen. Em had a number of cardboard boxes, of the kind that paper comes in; they were boxes of writing paper, or for her manuscript pages, we’d assumed.

The snowshoer had stopped spelling; she was now babbling about the Gallows Lounge shooting. She wanted the cops to understand who Emily MacPherson was—Em was the silent partner of the performer who’d been shot and killed onstage. Nora had planned to go to the Stop the Church protest, the snowshoer was saying.

“We know,” the older policeman interrupted her. “But Emily MacPherson shouldn’t have brought a box to St. Patrick’s—not during a demonstration.”

“You can’t try to give a box to Cardinal O’Connor when there’s a protest going on, and she wouldn’t say what was in the box!” the younger cop cried.

“She doesn’t speak!” the snowshoer exclaimed.

“We know,” the clean-shaven cop told us, shaking his head.

“That box—the copies of her crazy father’s letters to Cardinal O’Connor,” I said to the snowshoer.

“I know,” the snowshoer softly said. Em was not an old hand at protests or demonstrations; this much was clear.

The policemen apologized for frisking us against the squad car parked at the intersection of West Fiftieth Street and Sixth Avenue—not that Mr. Barlow and I knew what the protocol was, or if there was any protocol. We knew barely enough to know that the policeman driving the patrol car was probably not an important pooh-bah on the police force; he was just the cop who drove the patrol car, taking us to the police station. The younger, mustached cop came with us; he sat up front in the passenger seat. The older cop called to us from the sidewalk, before the patrol car pulled away.

“One thing about your friend—she won’t have to do any community service, because she doesn’t speak!” he called.

The younger policeman with the mustache was shaking his head as the patrol car pulled away. “Your friend can’t bring anything in a box for Cardinal O’Connor—not to St. Patrick’s, not even when there isn’t a demonstration!” he told us.

“Got it,” the snowshoer said. We wouldn’t remember which precinct we were driven to; we were trying too hard to remember what had happened with Em’s homo-hating dad, who was dying of AIDS in Canada. He was in hospice care in Toronto; he’d asked Em to come see him. Nora hadn’t let Em go to Toronto alone—they’d gone together. Em had not written me about her visit with her dying dad, not a word. All Elliot and I knew about Em’s trip to Toronto, we knew from Nora.

The hospice was “quite a wonderful place, under the circumstances,” Nora had said; she meant “with all the dying going on,” as she told Mr. Barlow and me. She’d been impressed by how thoroughly the nurses explained the pain control for Em’s father. “The morphine shit escaped me,” Nora said.

“Sublingual morphine versus morphine elixir versus fentanyl patch?” Elliot had asked her.

“I don’t know,” Nora said; she’d paid closer attention to the awfulness of Em’s dad.

The dying father had called Em and Nora “a couple of lesbos”; yet he’d begged Em to “personally deliver” his unanswered letters to Cardinal O’Connor. All that mattered to Em’s dad was his hope of being baptized by the cardinal and receiving Communion from him. To Nora, all this was undermined by the parting shot the dying dad took at his daughter. “You’re just another licker, like your mother!” Em’s father told her.

Yet the homophobe was leaving what he had to Em—his money, and a house in midtown Toronto. Nora and Em had met with a Realtor and a lawyer in Toronto. The house was on Shaftesbury Avenue, in the Summerhill neighborhood—just north of the Canadian Pacific railway tracks. Em showed Nora the exterior of the house, but she declined the Realtor’s invitation to take them inside. Em remembered liking the sound of the train at night, but she didn’t like most of her memories. Following her parents’ separation and divorce, her father had divided the house into two apartments; he’d lived in one half of the house and had rented out the other. Of course Em could have taken the money and sold the house; she would have paid some taxes, but she could have walked away. No one believed Em would ever move to Canada, as she repeatedly threatened to do. Yet Em had refused to sell the house in Toronto. She’d been born in Canada to a Canadian father; she was both a Canadian and an American citizen. Em wanted to have a place to go if she ever left the United States.

When they’d been in Toronto, Em had also shown Nora the Bishop Strachan School, where Em had gone when she’d been little, although Em remembered it only dimly. On that late afternoon Em and Nora had watched the day students heading home from school. The older girls were walking away from the school by themselves, perhaps going to the subway, but the little girls were met by a parent or a nanny. The little girls in their school uniforms were the ones who fascinated Em; she was always trying to imagine herself as one of them, but Nora (of course) had preferred looking at the older girls—the ones who looked the hottest in their short skirts. Em had burst into tears, Nora told the little English teacher and me. “All because Em saw how I was looking at a couple of hot girls!” Nora said, laughing. I’d seen how Nora looked at a hot girl. I knew how sensitive Em was to the way I’d looked at her.

Not only would Em not have to do any community service, but she wouldn’t even be counted among the 111 demonstrators who’d been arrested. The charges against her were dropped. The plainclothes cops in the cathedral made sure that Em got nowhere near Cardinal O’Connor with the box she was carrying. And, upon further investigation, there’d been nothing threatening to the cardinal in the box. At the precinct or the police station, wherever we were, an older policewoman had been put in charge of overseeing Em—as the kindly policewoman explained to Mr. Barlow and me. We went with her to collect Em’s personal effects before we were led to where they were holding Em. We saw the box of letters to Cardinal O’Connor among Em’s more recognizable things. “Bless her heart—we know she wasn’t one of the protesters who got out of hand at the church, and we understand she’s been through a bad time lately,” the policewoman wanted us to know; the police knew about the Gallows Lounge shooting, and who Emily MacPherson was. Em had answered the questions the police had asked her, in writing. “She doesn’t have to tell us any more, but she won’t stop writing,” the policewoman said. This made perfect sense to the snowshoer and me: Em was a writer; writing was one thing she had confidence in. We were relieved to learn Em hadn’t been trying to pantomime her life story in a police station.

Mr. Barlow and I saw the handwritten note Em had Scotch-taped to the box she’d brought to St. Patrick’s to give to the cardinal. We were familiar with Em’s exquisite longhand. “Your Eminence, please read my father’s letters to you; he is dying. Thank you, Emily MacPherson,” Em had written.

We went along a hall to the room where they were keeping Em. There were some chairs around a table, where Em sat writing, the pages piled near her and across the table from her, where a young policeman sat reading them. “Bless her heart,” the older policewoman murmured to us again, when she let us into the room. In our labyrinthine journey through the station, the kindly policewoman advised us what to do with the dying dad’s letters to the cardinal. “Personally, I would just get rid of them, but if you want to take the trouble, you should call and speak to someone at the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of New York, or you should just go there and speak to someone—even if it’s only a secretary,” the policewoman had said. “Ask someone at the archdiocese what you should do with these letters, but if you bring the letters to the archdiocese, don’t bring them in a box! Just tie some string around the stack of pages and carry them that way,” the older policewoman kindly suggested.

“Got it!” the snowshoer had exclaimed enthusiastically; she’d not meant to startle our overseeing policewoman.

Em was excited to see us; she looked less than happy to see the box, but Em pantomimed her eagerness for Elliot and me to read what she’d written. “She’s been on a roll,” the young policeman, Em’s appointed reader, said to his elder colleague. “You two are in it—I’d recognize you anywhere,” he told the snowshoer and me. As he was leaving the room, he patted the pretty Mr. Barlow on her shoulder. “Good job, ma’am,” the young cop said to the snowshoer, the only hero of the Gallows Lounge shooting.

Em was as pantomimic as her former self when we brought her back to the little Barlows’ apartment. In spite of the undelivered copies of her father’s confessions to Cardinal O’Connor, Em had been energized by her arrest at the Stop the Church protest, and the subsequent dropping of the charges against her; she’d been writing up a storm, and she couldn’t wait for the little English teacher and me to read her handwritten pages. Nora had called me Longhand Man, but Em was a longtime longhand woman. While the snowshoer and I were impressed by Em’s narrative, we were no less impressed by the literary prowess of her police readers. Em had chosen to write about herself in the third person. I’m sure the line of questioning by the police did not begin with the Gallows Lounge shooting, but that’s where Em began her story.

“Emily MacPherson, a mute pantomimist and fiction writer, saw her partner shot and killed onstage at the Gallows Lounge; two days later, the nonspeaking pantomimist tried to deliver copies of her father’s unanswered letters to Cardinal O’Connor in St. Patrick’s Cathedral. The mute knew her dead partner had planned to go to the Stop the Church protest,” Em narrated, as if she were writing stand-up shtick for Nora’s deadpan delivery of Two Dykes, One Who Talks.

The snowshoer and I saw ourselves described as “the mute’s two best friends.” Not surprisingly, Mr. Barlow came off better than I did—as anyone would expect of the only hero. My efforts to entice the Gallows Lounge shooter to kill me instead of Em were described as “brave but stupid.” Fair enough, I thought. And both Elliot and I liked what Em had written about her homophobic father: “The pantomimist pitied the police officers who had tried to read her dad’s awful letters.” No wonder the police found Em endearing.

We were surprised to read that Em’s mom was also dying. The hateful mother had “some kind of cancer”; she’d written Em, expressly forbidding Em to come see her. “I have my women friends, and I don’t want them to meet you—when I die, one of my friends will notify you,” Em’s mom wrote her.

“Can’t wait!” Nora had written her back. Nora knew how to imitate Em’s signature.

Not long afterward, one of the mother’s women friends wrote Em. “Your mom is dead. There’s nothing for you,” the woman friend wrote. Naturally, Nora wrote her back—doing a good job with Em’s signature. Em’s handwriting was so perfectly legible, it was fairly easy to imitate; it almost didn’t look like handwriting.

“Yahoo! And fuck you to death, too,” Nora had written.

As always, the little English teacher was fixated on Em’s writing. “I really like the third person—you impart your point of view, but the voice is mostly omniscient,” Mr. Barlow said to Em, who nodded her head a little. I saw how Em’s writing could be what would save her. I was aware of my dependence on writing, in this way.

“I don’t see you writing something like an Op-Ed piece for The New York Times—about either surviving the Gallows Lounge shooting or being arrested at the Stop the Church protest,” the snowshoer was saying to Em, who pantomimed vomiting to indicate her agreement.

I was remembering how the snowshoer had saved me; she meant so much more to me than my mother had first imagined. My mom married Mr. Barlow to help me get through Exeter, but Elliot Barlow had been better than the stepfather Little Ray had imagined. I believed that Mr. Barlow was the best actual father I could have had.

“I don’t see you writing a memoir, Em, although a book about Two Dykes, One Who Talks—I don’t mean only about the Gallows Lounge shooting—would certainly appeal to a publisher,” the little English teacher was telling Em, who was elaborating on her vomit pantomime. Em wasn’t a true memoirist; nonfiction wasn’t for her. “You can be true to what’s true about you and Nora, you can be truthful when you write about what really happened, but keep yourself in the third person, and you can take some other liberties—you can make up a Santa or two, or a bunch of Santas,” the snowshoer was saying. “You can also make up what should have or could have happened, you can be truthful about the things you make up in a different way—you just have to keep it real when you make things up!” the English teacher was telling Em, who was nodding flat out again. I could see the pep talk working. I’d heard the writing pep talk before; Mr. Barlow had made me feel like a writer before I was one. I was remembering how the snowshoer had rescued me when I needed rescuing. I knew Elliot Barlow was good at rescue jobs. Now Em was the snowshoer’s rescue job. “You want to be a full-time fiction writer, don’t you? You understand this is a third-person omniscient novel—don’t you?” the little English teacher was asking Em, who was nodding her head off now, like the Em I knew and loved.

They’ll be fine without me—if I stay in New York, I’ll just be in their way, I was thinking. Everything had taken a fatalistic turn. It didn’t matter that Mr. Barlow wasn’t a real New Yorker; for the time being, Elliot Barlow had a rescue job that would keep her in New York. I was just one of the rescue jobs that had made the snowshoer stay at Exeter; the little English teacher probably stayed longer than she wanted to, I was thinking.

There was no one for me like Em, I knew, but I understood this was crazy. What Molly had told me on my mother’s wedding night wasn’t true for everyone. “There’s more than one way to love people, Kid,” the trail groomer had told me. This was true for Molly and my mom and the snowshoer, I believed, but this wouldn’t work for Em and me. Em loved women—maybe only one woman, I was thinking. It was pie in the sky for me to imagine Em would ever love me. I remembered the reenactment of the snowshoer kiss—how watching the way Em kissed Nora had numbed my tongue, how I’d wanted Em to kiss me like that. Had I forgotten that I showed Em the snowshoer kiss, and Em didn’t kiss me back?

I would be forty-eight in a matter of days. I knew enough about skiing to know I would never be an expert skier. If I gave skiing with my mom a chance, I knew my mother could help me get a little better, but I was an intentionally intermediate skier. When you’re an intermediate on purpose, you’ll never get a whole lot better. “Bad habits die hard, kiddo,” Nora once told me. Naturally, Nora didn’t mean my skiing; Nora didn’t give a rat’s ass about skiing. But bad habits are bad habits. “Most guys would fuck anyone—wouldn’t they, kiddo?” Nora had asked me. At the time she asked me, I definitely would have. You don’t unlearn your bad habits overnight—that was Nora’s meaning.

Yet here I was, not only moving to Vermont and going skiing with my mom; I was even imagining I might be happy, marrying a young and pretty publisher. I didn’t doubt that Em was right about my mother’s expectations for my meeting Grace. And what was I to make of Em’s conviction that Grace would have her own agenda? How did Em know Grace was dying to get pregnant? It was with trepidation that I intruded on Em’s euphoria; her writing was her only road ahead. I knew Molly and my mom would intrude on all of us tomorrow; there would be no candid conversation about my road ahead, not around my mother. I was feeling overwhelmed by how much I would miss Em and the snowshoer. If I told them how I really felt, I was afraid I would choke up—that was why I tried to sound lighthearted about it. You can say stupid things, or things you don’t mean, when you’re trying not to sound too serious.

“I know you guys are going to miss me,” I suddenly said, apropos of nothing. Em looked uncertain, but she nodded—warily. “I know you two will look after each other,” I just rambled on. “Don’t worry about me—maybe marriage and fatherhood will work out, as unlikely as that seems,” I said. I had no idea what I would say next. I was unprepared for how the thought of fatherhood affected me, but I was my mother’s son, wasn’t I? Look what Little Ray had done—to have her one and only, with no strings attached. Why wouldn’t I want to be a father before it was too late? “I would like to be a father,” I said, surprising them. The thought had surprised me, too.

“I think you would be a good father, Adam,” the snowshoer said sincerely. Em was nodding her head like she meant it, not in her pro forma way.

“Why wouldn’t I want to be a father? Maybe this is my chance to have a normal life,” I just blurted out. I immediately saw how I’d hurt them. I didn’t mean that Elliot and Em were abnormal, or not normal in any way, but I saw their faces and how they turned away. “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean…” I started to say, but Mr. Barlow was quicker.

“We know what you didn’t mean, Adam,” the little English teacher told me. Em barely nodded, with her face still turned away.

The next day, Molly and my mom would be there—packing up Nora’s stuff and all the guns. My mother and I would spend that night together, in the empty Hell’s Kitchen apartment. My mom said she wanted to be with her one and only, and the sleeping arrangements were up in the air with Nora out of the picture. The bad smell from the restaurant below us would need to be explained. Naturally, my mother wasn’t happy about blaming an octopus. Because the first bad restaurant had been Greek, Nora held an octopus accountable for the bad smell. “The poor thing—it’s not the octopus’s fault!” my mom proclaimed.

In my effort to change the subject from the bad smell, or the innocence of the octopus, I tried to have a serious conversation with my mother about my wanting to be a father before it was too late. I was being serious when I told my mom that, however belatedly, she must have inspired me, because I found myself wanting a one and only of my own.

“If you want to have a normal life, as I hear you do, you’ll have your one and only with someone else—not exactly a one and only of your own, sweetie,” my mom reminded me. “I know you didn’t mean to hurt our feelings, sweetie, but every creature wants to have a normal life—even an octopus!” my mother added. I knew the snowshoer would have assured my mom that I never meant to hurt their feelings; yet my careless remark had hurt my mother’s feelings, too.

I was reminded of my inappropriateness, more than a decade before, when I’d asked Molly and my mom to tell me more exactly how the snowshoer was affected by the orchiectomy; I’d inquired, furthermore, if they knew whether or not the little English teacher was considering a vaginoplasty. Instead of telling me that the surgical stuff was none of my business, or that I should at least have the courtesy to ask Elliot herself, Molly just shook her head. My mother sighed.

“Mr. Barlow is a better woman than some women I know who have vaginas, Kid,” Molly told me.

“Mr. Barlow has more balls than some guys I know who have balls—if you know what I mean, sweetie,” my mom said.

“He knows what you mean, Ray,” the trail groomer told her.

Our one night together in the apartment above the restaurant, my mother decided for herself what the bad smell was. “It’s a dead Greek, sweetie—a dead man smells worse than any octopus,” my mom said. I guess blaming the Greeks was okay, but not their octopus. When it had been a bad Greek restaurant, maybe the cooks got into a fight in the kitchen; perhaps an errant sous-chef had been chopped to pieces with a cleaver. The dismembered sous-chef was somehow interred in one of the heating ducts, my mother decided. I was glad it would be my last night in that rat’s-ass apartment in Hell’s Kitchen.

In the morning, I hesitated to tell my mom about something I’d been putting off. “One should meet one’s obligations before leaving town,” I remembered the snowshoer saying, before she left Exeter. I’d dedicated one of my novels to someone I felt beholden to—Lieutenant Matthew Zimmermann. It had been my intention to autograph a couple of copies of this novel for Zim’s parents and his adored Elmira. I thought it would be too impersonal to have my publisher send the books in the mail, so I planned to carry the inscribed and signed copies to the Zimmermanns’ Park Avenue apartment building; if Colonel Zimmermann wasn’t at home, I would leave the books with the doorman.

I remembered the outgoing colonel among Zim’s homeless friends. He was a man who enjoyed the fraternity of others; I believed the colonel would like to see me again. But my teammate Sam—the general, and a real marine—told me Zim’s dad had died. I could envision their white headstones at Arlington National Cemetery, though I didn’t ever want to see Zim’s actual headstone. General Joseph Zimmermann had been the first to die—“the big-deal, World War One Zim,” the snowshoer called him. Zim and his dad were the next to arrive in Arlington. Under the circumstances, I thought it would be difficult or awkward for me to see Elmira again—maybe for both of us. I was embarrassed that I didn’t remember Mrs. Zimmermann, Zim’s mother, at all; I wouldn’t have recognized her. Yet I imagined that my giving the books to the doorman was less impersonal than mailing them.

My mom said it would mean more to Elmira and Mrs. Zimmermann if I delivered my books to the doorman in person. “I’ll go with you, sweetie—just in case anything happens,” my mother reassured me. Her coming with me wasn’t reassuring. What I worried might happen was a chance encounter with Elmira or Mrs. Zimmermann in the lobby—a possibility I mentioned to my mom, as casually as I could. “I’m not going to say I should have shot Zim, sweetie—although I should have shot him,” my mother told me. Not exactly reassuring. We set forth from the snowshoer’s; we’d already brought our bed linens from Hell’s Kitchen to the Upper East Side. I should have known that the weather wouldn’t deter my mother from walking with me. It was right around freezing, and the forecast was calling for a mix of snow and freezing rain—wimpy weather for an old Vermont skier, my mom would have told me. She was sixty-seven, but she insisted on carrying the two books in her ski backpack.

We went a roundabout way to Park Avenue. I wanted to show my mother St. James’ Episcopal Church, the site of Zim’s memorial service. It was on Madison, between East Seventy-first and East Seventy-second—a few blocks south and a block west of the Zimmermanns’ apartment building—but my mom didn’t want to go inside the church. “I don’t want to see it, sweetie,” was all she said. “That stupid, futile war!” she suddenly cried out, only a block later—we were still on Madison. Two young men wearing stylish topcoats turned to look at her; I tried to see my mother in their eyes. Her hiking boots exaggerated her mannish way of walking; even when Little Ray was barefoot, she still walked like a jock. In her stretchy ski pants, her tightly fitted parka, with her ski hat pulled low, barely above her eyebrows—well, on a Madison Avenue sidewalk, let’s say my mom was more unisex than most. I saw our reflection in the plateglass window of a storefront for menswear; we looked more alike, and more like men, than the mannequins in the window. We looked more like two guys than those two fashion plates we’d passed on the sidewalk. “People here don’t even know how to dress for the weather,” my mother was saying. “I don’t mean you, sweetie—you’re not from here, and you don’t belong here,” she reminded me.

When we were walking on Park Avenue, my mom stared at the uniforms of the doormen we walked past. “You can’t tell diddly-squat about men in uniform, sweetie—you don’t know what their politics are, you don’t know what they’re thinking!” my mother told me. I didn’t dare ask her how she knew what men who weren’t in uniform were thinking. I scarcely trusted her to know the doormen were not military men, though they weren’t wearing military uniforms. “Are we almost there, sweetie?” my mom asked me. We were close enough that I could point to the Zimmermanns’ apartment building; we could discern their doorman’s uniform. No doubt my mom had waited for the best time to tell me what she’d been thinking. “You were the wrong age to hear Em’s orgasms, but you should try to stop thinking about it—it’s just not realistic for you to think about Em in that way, sweetie,” my mother told me.

There were no secrets between my mom and the snowshoer. I could imagine how Molly and my mother would have worried about my infatuation with Em. It was tempting to think how Em might have pantomimed her thoughts about it. Maybe Molly would revise what she’d told me on my mom’s wedding night. There’s only one way to love Em, Kid—just forget about it, I could imagine Molly telling me. I knew it wasn’t realistic for me to think about Em in that way, but my mom had known we would run out of time to talk about it.

“How may I help you?” the Zimmermanns’ doorman was asking us, because we’d stopped in front of their apartment building. He was an older man—not quite my mother’s age, but close to it. I explained that I had two gifts—one for Mrs. Zimmermann, one for Elmira. I said I’d been in school with Matthew; I told him we were wrestling teammates. My mom had taken her ski backpack off; she showed the two books to the gentlemanly doorman. “I’m going to miss the colonel, but it’s just so sad—what happened to young Matthew,” the doorman said.

“I loved young Matthew—that darling boy!” my mother cried, hugging the doorman. He ushered us into the lobby of the building, where I doubted the residents ever hugged him. The name tag on the breast pocket of his uniform jacket identified him as MILOS. The epaulets on the shoulders of his jacket were a little silly; they made him look like the leader of a lost marching band, but he was an otherwise dignified-looking doorman with what I thought was an Eastern European accent. He was wearing one of those Russian winter hats with earflaps—nothing of a marching band about it. I was trying to remember a Milos or two I’d met in Vienna. One was Czech; Milos was a Slavic name, the diminutive of Miloslav, I think he told me. Maybe the other Milos in Vienna was Serbian, but I can’t remember. I was distracted by my mother; she was showing off for Milos, doing her single-leg lunges in the lobby. Little Ray didn’t look sixty-seven; Milos probably thought she was younger than he was.

“Do you ski, Milos?” my mom asked him. She let him know she knew how to say MEE-losh. Given all the time she’d spent in Austria since she met the snowshoer, Little Ray had met a Milos or two.

“No, I do not ski,” Milos told her regretfully.

“Well, I could teach you,” my mother said flirtatiously. I’d not anticipated that my mom and a Park Avenue doorman would charm each other. They read my dedication to Zim; they agreed my author photo could be better. I knew it was only a matter of time before they would be talking again about Lieutenant Matthew—they’d both loved him.

“I could have shot him—I should have!” my mother cried out, seizing Milos by his wrists in her strong hands.

“She means Matthew’s knee—she would have shot him in the knee,” I told Milos. Nobody knew diddly-squat about what Milos was thinking, or what his politics were.

“If I’d shot him in the knee, no Vietnam—that darling boy would still be with us!” my mom cried, bursting into tears.

“You would have gone to jail,” I reminded her.

“I should have, sweetie—that darling boy was worth going to jail for,” my mother told me. I could feel the weight of the passage of time. Enough time had passed for me to agree with her.

“Yes, you should have,” I said to her softly; she’d made me cry, or just remembering Zim had done it.

“Yes, you should have shot him—I would have visited you in jail, just to thank you!” Milos told her; he was sobbing. This would be my last day as a New Yorker.

I could see what I was letting myself in for. I would be renting the spec house in Manchester, I would be buying the uphill land with a view of Bromley Mountain—not to mention I would be meeting Grace. I was considering that I would be crazy to put myself in my mother’s hands. Going skiing with her would be just the beginning.

Out on Park Avenue, my mom wouldn’t let up with her single-leg lunges. It was what happened when she didn’t get enough exercise, but she was also excited; she’d just kissed the doorman, as we were leaving the lobby. It was not a snowshoer kiss, but my mother gave Milos a pretty good one. I could see that Milos liked it.

“First time I kissed a guy in a uniform—first and last time, sweetie!” my mom kept singing, over and over. Whatever happened, I would always love her, I knew.

Thus, with my secondhand knowledge of sexual politics, I moved to Vermont—to what Em feared was an arranged marriage to a much younger woman, who would soon be pregnant. And what would such a life be like? I was wondering. It would be like learning to ski for the first time, I was imagining; it would be a fresh start. It would be my chance to have a normal life, I thought.