The Last Chairlift

46. “FOUND YOU!”

On the New Year’s Eve when I met Grace, I assumed my mother took Em’s grocery list with her when Molly drove her and Grace home. It made sense to me that Little Ray wouldn’t want me to think about meeting my father, or to imagine I might like Paul Goode if I got to know him—“in real life,” as Em had written. And since Em and I weren’t writing to each other, a whole year would pass without our being alone together; there was nothing personal between us, not even another grocery list. When I went with Grace to New York, and we saw the snowshoer and Em for dinner, Em’s pantomimes were restrained. Did Em sense that Grace disapproved of her not speaking? When Mr. Barlow brought Em to Manchester, they stayed with Grace and me in the spec house, but my mother and Molly were always around; Em’s pantomimes were toned down then, too.

Whenever we had overnight guests in the spec house, Grace closed our bedroom door. I could still hear the pad of Em’s bare feet in the upstairs hall—when she was visiting Elliot, or on her way back to her own bedroom. I’d given Em a brighter flashlight, and she’d learned where the obstacles were; there were no more collisions with the excess furniture. But sometimes—when Em woke up alone, and she felt frightened—she ran to a bed with a body in it. Then the pad of her bare feet resounded in the upstairs hall.

“Do you miss her getting into bed with you?” Grace asked me one night, when Em sounded like she was sprinting in the hall.

“No,” I lied, but I was wondering how Grace knew what Em was up to. “There was never any fooling around,” I added.

“I know,” Grace told me; she gave me a hug and went back to sleep. I was awake, just wondering. Maybe Mr. Barlow had forewarned Grace of Em’s nighttime wanders. Knowing my mom’s fixation with Em’s bedroom visits, Molly wouldn’t have mentioned them.

That week between Christmas and New Year’s, in the last days of 1990, Em and the snowshoer stayed with us in the spec house. It was near the end of Grace’s sixth month. I was surprised to see the physical affection between Em and Grace, the hugs and the hand-holding—Em was excited to feel the fetus move. I’d seen Em’s childbirth pantomimes; they were not positive experiences. Yet Em was attentive to Grace’s pregnancy. Em did the dishes and the kitchen cleanup; she was her old self in pantomiming how she wanted Grace to lie down and call her when the fetus was acting up, so that Em could feel the kicks.

I kept an eye on the grocery list on the fridge door, hoping Em would leave me a message. But Molly and my mother were with us every night; maybe my grocery list was too public for what Em had to say. It was only a week or two before this that I told Grace I would be going to Aspen and the Hotel Jerome in early February—a month before she was due. “I just want to see where I came from—I don’t need to know more about what happened,” I said.

“Okay—I’ll tell Matthew to wait to be born until you come back,” Grace said with a laugh; we were both laughing.

The going got tougher when I told my mom and Molly my reasons for taking a trip to see the Jerome when my wife would be eight months pregnant. “I just want to see where I came from,” I said again, but this time I paused; I knew I couldn’t tell them what I’d told Grace. “I just want to get the ghosts over with, without involving Grace,” I told my mother and the night groomer. The without involving Grace part was true, but I wanted the ghosts to come back. The last thing I wanted was to get the ghosts over with.

“This is a funny time to go to the Jerome, sweetie—you should have gone there already; you should have long been back,” my mother said.

“Just be careful, Kid—not only when you’re skiing. I mean, in general,” the old ski patroller said.

“When you come back, don’t even think about going there again—you don’t want to end up at the Jerome, sweetie,” my mom told me. This was a new one for the night groomer and me; Molly and I just looked at Little Ray, but she ignored us.

The little English teacher and I were still writing to each other, and there were any number of times I could have told Elliot and Em about my upcoming trip to Aspen and the Jerome, but I didn’t. I couldn’t beat around the bush with Mr. Barlow; she knew me too well. The snowshoer would know there was more to my restlessness with married life than my missing the ghosts. And wouldn’t Em have wondered about my going anywhere without my new wife? I suppose these were the reasons I didn’t tell Em my plans to go, but someone told her.

It was the night before New Year’s Eve. Mr. Barlow and Em would be driving back to New York in the morning. Em and I were doing the dishes after dinner. Grace was lying down on the couch in the living room; we could hear her telling stories about the elder Barretts, her parents. “My father has to put his pajamas on before the ball drops—you’re lucky you’re leaving,” Grace was saying to the snowshoer. I knew another reason Grace was relieved that Elliot and Em were leaving. Grace was afraid her father might ask Em about the Gallows Lounge shooting. Grace knew that Em didn’t like to be asked about it. I didn’t like imagining how Em might pantomime it. I only knew what Elliot Barlow told me, about how Em’s third-person novel was going. I wished Em would send me some pages; that was all I was thinking. From the kitchen, Em and I could hear Molly and my mother laughing.

“Oh, Arthur isn’t so bad, Grace—you don’t know what it’s like to have a father in diapers!” we heard my mom say.

Em and I had loaded the dishwasher and had moved on to the pots and pans; I was washing, Em was drying, when I felt her hand slip in and out of a front pocket in my jeans. The folded piece of paper she put in my pocket made a crinkling sound when I touched my jeans with the knuckles of my wet hand. I was reaching for a dish towel to dry my hands when Em crossed her index fingers, giving me the X sign. I had to wait to read what she’d written till Em and Mr. Barlow went to their bedrooms, and Grace was in the bathroom. “I hear you’re going to Aspen and the Jerome,” Em wrote me. “I hope you don’t have a lot of explaining to do when you come back. You have a very nice wife, you know. Grace is also a very good editor, but don’t let her be your editor,” Em had written.

There would be no way to be alone with Em, or to have a private conversation with the snowshoer, before they went back to New York the next morning. I thought about writing Em, but I wrote to Elliot Barlow. I assumed my mother must have said something about my going to Aspen and the Jerome, and the little English teacher had mentioned it to Em. “What does Em know about Grace as an editor—why is Em even thinking about Grace, editorially?” I asked Elliot.

“You and Em should be writing to each other—I’ll guess that Em is waiting for you to write her first,” Mr. Barlow wrote me back. This was four or five weeks before I went to Aspen; Grace was starting her seventh month. The snowshoer said Em and Grace had been writing each other for a year. On the New Year’s Eve when I met Grace, it was Grace who took Em’s grocery list with her when Molly drove my mom and her home. The snowshoer assured me that Grace had not imposed herself on Em, as an editor; Grace was offering to be an early reader of Em’s novel, not presuming she would be Em’s publisher. What Grace did presume, Mr. Barlow wrote, was that this would be a more commercial and accessible work of fiction for Emily MacPherson. Despite the third-person omniscient voice—as deadpan and detached as Em could make it—the novel was based on Em and Nora’s life together, onstage and off, and on the Gallows Lounge shooting. Grace had advised Em against Two Dykes, One Who Talks as a title. I’d known Grace for only one year, but I knew how freely she gave advice. Was this why Em told me not to let Grace be my editor? I asked Elliot.

Mr. Barlow repeated what Em had told me—Grace was a very good editor. Elliot and Em were worried that my having Grace as an editor could be a strain on our marriage. “It might be too much Grace,” was all the snowshoer said about it. I was surprised to learn Em had decided Grace would be her publisher—not surprised to hear Em would stick with the snowshoer as her editor and her copy editor. I’d known Grace for only one year, but I knew there was such a thing as too much Grace—as the snowshoer put it. “You should write Em—you should talk to Grace,” the little English teacher told me. In the month before I left for Aspen, I could have written Em. I didn’t; I was waiting for her to write me first.

When I asked Grace why she didn’t tell me she and Em were writing each other, Grace began by saying Em and I were childish—we were each just stubborn about not being the one who wrote first. I had to hear all about the fate of the Gallows Lounge. “The Gallows is going under—by the time Emily MacPherson finishes this novel, the Gallows will be gone,” Grace assured me. I didn’t understand why this mattered to Grace; she’d not been a regular Gallows-goer. But after the shooting, the regulars were the ones who stopped going. Grace said the Gallows had become a tourist attraction—naturally, because of the shooting. When some of the regulars started to go back, they stopped going again; it was uncool to be in a comedy club overrun by tourists. Didn’t Nora always say the walkouts at the Gallows were from out of town?

The out-of-towners didn’t matter to Grace. From a publisher’s perspective, it was good the Gallows was going under. Grace knew Em’s novel was less likely to raise legal questions if the comedy club was no longer in business, and the management of the Gallows had moved on. Wouldn’t it be great, Grace asked me, if Emily MacPherson’s novel could make the point that the Gallows Lounge shooting had killed the comedy club itself? I said I doubted that the death of the Gallows Lounge was a point Em cared about. I knew Em well enough to say that Nora’s death would be the one that mattered, though Two Dykes, One Who Talks had been killed—not only as a title.

I half expected Grace to lecture me, to the effect that the demise of the Gallows was a watershed in cultural history—hence more important than the killing of one comedienne, or the last performance of a fringe comedy act. From Grace’s perspective, I’d imagined, Em’s title Two Dykes, One Who Talks was marketing suicide. The chain bookstores would not display such an inflammatory title; all the booksellers would find the title willfully provocative. Even relegated to the LGBT section of a bookstore, it was an offensive title—although it was written by a lesbian and was about two known lesbian performers. Knowing Nora, surely she knew she was being offensive in choosing that name for a comedy act, even if it was for fringe comedy.

Yet, whatever Grace thought, she said none of these things. Grace was merely dismissive. “You and Em are childish—you’re just stubborn, you two. She misses you, you know—I know you miss her, too. But you won’t even write each other!” was all Grace said. I would soon be on my way to Aspen without writing Em or hearing from her, and not once revisiting this conversation with Grace—nothing further about Em, not even about her writing, and nothing more about our missing each other (or one word about how Grace knew we did). After I came back from Aspen, the topic of conversation would change.

The news of Clara Swift’s death got back east from Colorado before I did; as a minor celebrity in Manchester, I would be a topic of conversation in town. A bestselling author isn’t famous in the same way a movie star is, but I was the guy on the chairlift with Clara Swift when she jumped. In the news, I would be identified as “the writer Adam Brewster.”

It was not unlike when Nora was killed at the Gallows, where I was the guy doing jumping jacks in the audience, trying to draw the shooter’s attention away from Em. It was the same thing, my being mentioned as a minor celebrity—only occasionally had I been called “Nora Winter’s cousin Adam Brewster, the writer.”

When Clara Swift jumped to her death from the Loge Peak chairlift, no one in the media mentioned I’d been ineffectual both times—no better than a bystander. No one asked why I hadn’t just grabbed Clara Swift, holding her in the chair. My culpability wasn’t an issue. It stayed the way it was at Aspen Highlands. The bodyguard made an effort to take the blame; both Billy and Toby tried to blame themselves—but Paul Goode wouldn’t hear of it.

“It’s my fault,” my father said. “Everyone knows why Clara was distraught. It’s all my fault that Clara was not herself,” Paul Goode resolutely said.

Whatever you thought of Paul Goode’s acting, he knew how to run lines; he got off book in a hurry. Yet what Em wrote on my grocery list was true: Paul Goode came across as more believable and sympathetic in his interviews than he ever did in his writing or his acting. From what little I saw of him in Aspen, I thought he might be a good guy—“in real life,” as Em had written. I thought I might like him—if I actually had a chance to get to know him. Fat chance of that happening now, I was thinking.

The little English teacher wrote me; she reminded me how disheartened Dickens had been by the circumstances of his early childhood. “I thought life sloppier than I had expected to find it,” Dickens wrote. I wasn’t sure what sloppiness the snowshoer had in mind, or if she meant that my being on the same chairlift with Clara Swift was an example of life as sloppier than expected. The snowshoer was passionate about Dickens; she knew I loved and admired Dickens, too, but what Elliot Barlow meant was mysterious to me, one of her Whale Ship ideas.

Em wrote me. “What sounds like real life is the coincidence of your being on the same chairlift with her—shit like that happens in real life,” Em wrote. “There should be a better reason for your ending up with her in that chair. You could just send me some pages of whatever it is you’re writing,” Em added.

“What happened in Aspen is a movie—I will always see it as a movie,” I wrote Em back. It was true, but I was stalling; it was one way to say I had nothing in writing.

Grace recognized Em’s handwriting on the postcard that came next. “Just send me some pages, if there’s anything you want to show me,” Em had written.

“I’m glad you two are writing each other again,” Grace said, handing me the postcard. If we’d been living in New York, Grace would have kept working till the day she delivered, but the driving bothered her; in her eighth month, she was uncomfortable in the car. She stopped working in the middle of February. Matthew would be born the first week of March. Six weeks was standard for maternity leave in the 1990s. Grace would add her vacation allotment for the year to her time off for maternity; Grace said this was also standard. What would not feel standard or normal to me was how everything changed when I had a child.

I was a first-time father at forty-nine, old for a new dad. I had never been afraid in this way before. As new parents learn, loving a child means living with the fear of losing a child. When Matthew was born, my fear for him was passed on to my fictional characters, but you don’t purge the dread of losing a child by writing about it. Writing as catharsis doesn’t work; it’s bad therapy and bad writing. Nothing purges the fear of losing a child; it’s why nightmares are recurrent. You don’t choose your nightmares; they choose you.

Everyone, even the elder Barretts, had teased Grace for having such an elaborately planned agenda; as Arthur Barrett had put it, “All these plans, just to have a child.” But when Matthew was born, I was the one who had an agenda—to keep him safe, to guide his path, to be the best father an old dad could be. More: to be Matthew’s rescuer, as the snowshoer had rescued me.

I didn’t question Grace for her overmanaging; I tried to let it go. I was writing a new novel and an adapted screenplay of a previous novel, and also what I first called Loge Peak, my Aspen screenplay—not to purge my guilt or my shame, and not to redeem myself, but to visualize my most irredeemable behavior.

I kept my Loge Peak screenplay to myself; it got worse and worse. “Just send me some pages, if there’s anything you want to show me,” Em had written. She meant the movie of what happened in Aspen. I thought about it, but I didn’t send those pages. I couldn’t show Loge Peak to Em; I couldn’t even show it to the snowshoer.

As a writer, I was impatient with Matthew’s early childhood; I was waiting for him to find the words. For the first three months, he fussed, he cried, he burped, he cooed; he was startled by loud sounds. When you spoke to him, he paid close attention to your mouth and your eyes. Matthew recognized his mom’s voice, her breast, a bottle. It was June, our last week in the spec house, when Mr. Barlow and Em came to stay with us, and to meet Matthew. Em made faces at him, the exaggerated facial expressions of a pantomimist. The first face Em made was one of wide-eyed, open-mouthed astonishment; then she lolled out her tongue and panted like a dog. Matthew imitated her—this made them both happy. When Em and the snowshoer went back to New York, Grace and I tried making faces at Matthew, but he made no response to us. We weren’t doing it right. “Em isn’t just babylike—Em is a baby,” Grace said. I couldn’t tell if there was an edge to this, if she was editing.

At six months, the babbling began; Matthew could say “Mama” and “Dada,” but he had no idea what the words meant. Matthew made sounds to amuse himself; he liked to yell. When Elliot and Em came to see us again, their first time in our new house in East Dorset, Mr. Barlow brought Matthew two musical toys; there was a rattle and a ball with a bell inside. Matthew loved these toys.

“Boys are into cause and effect,” the little English teacher told us. For better or worse, I would think—after Aspen.

Em held a makeup mirror parallel to her face. Matthew was excited to see himself in the mirror; he smiled, he blew raspberries (or made farting sounds), he reached to touch himself. “Matthew,” Em said, pointing to the mirror. “Em,” she said, pointing to herself.

Matthew learned the Em word, but not Matthew; he would learn his own name later. When Em and Mr. Barlow went back to New York, Grace and I experimented with the mirror; we did something wrong. “Em!” Matthew said, when he saw himself in the mirror.

“Em is infantile—the mirror just confuses Matthew,” Grace said. There was definitely an editorial edge to this. Em actually spoke, I thought.

Between a year and eighteen months, Matthew knew his name and the names of familiar people and objects; he knew the word no, too, both what it meant when you said it to him and how to say it himself. He was interested in the TV; he liked listening to songs, and to simple stories that rhymed. He could name the pictures in his favorite books.

At eighteen months, when Em and the snowshoer visited us, Matthew was drinking from a cup. He would now notice if you did something that was meant to be funny, if you were purposely clowning around. Em made Matthew laugh by putting a pot holder on her head; when she put a salad bowl on her head, Matthew laughed and yelled, “No, no, no!”

Between two and three, the words were coming—now in sentences. “What Daddy doing?” Matthew would ask Grace, or one of the nannies, when I was writing. “More milk,” he would tell us. “Read book,” he said, holding out the book he wanted me to read. “Share toys,” he said, sometimes for no reason—just because he was in a preschool play group, and he heard it there.

Grace was spending four nights a week in New York—three workdays in the office—before Matthew was five months old. She was reading and editing all the time, in Vermont and in New York. Grace had signed up our nannies when she was pregnant. My mother and Molly often stayed with Matthew and me when Grace was in New York—even in the ski season. My mom got up with Matthew at night; Molly did the cooking, so that I could have a longer writing day.

I became more interested in the books I read to Matthew after he was three. You can only read Little Fur Family or Green Eggs and Ham or Brown Bear, Brown Bear, What Do You See? so many times before you go crazy, but we both loved The Ghost-Eye Tree, and Matthew never got tired of The Caboose Who Got Loose. When Matthew was between three and four, we were loving Winnie-the-Pooh, one of the early chapter books I read to him.

Matthew liked Elliot Barlow’s reading voice the best—we all did. Em would curl up on the couch beside Matthew when any of us read to him; it was as if Em were another child, listening to the story. Matthew seemed to accept that Em didn’t read to him, and she rarely spoke; if Matthew asked her one of his two- or three-word questions, Em would answer him quietly, in as few words as possible. I’d noticed how Matthew was drawn to Em, in the hesitant way children are curious about other children. In due course, he liked sitting in Em’s lap; he hugged her and she hugged him back. When you read to him on the couch, he looked around for Em—expecting her to curl up next to him. “Matthew isn’t sure what Em is—she’s like a strange pet,” Grace said, certainly with an edge. I would never let her be my editor.

When I asked Grace how Em’s novel was going, Grace was bitchy about it. “You know that Emily MacPherson writes very well; her novel will be very good,” Grace told me abruptly. “But Em is so stubborn—you know how she is. There’s no telling if she listens to me, or if she only listens to Mr. Barlow.” I didn’t like how Grace emphasized the Mr. Only those of us who knew and loved the snowshoer when she was a man were welcome to call her a mister, and we never said the word like we were rubbing it in.

When Matthew was four, he used contractions—can’t and won’t and don’t and didn’t. He asked a lot of how and why questions. “Do I have to?” he asked. “I don’t want to,” he stated. He knew the names for pennies, nickels, and dimes—but not what to call a quarter. He could recite the days of the week. Matthew knew that Friday was the day his mom came home from New York.

One weekend, Grace brought Elliot Barlow and Em back up with her. They would drive back to the city with her on Monday, too. Em brought a book she’d picked out for Matthew—Madeline, by Ludwig Bemelmans. “I told Em, in the car, I think it’s a little young for Matthew—she should have given it to him a year ago,” Grace said to me.

Matthew loved looking at the pictures in Madeline. Perhaps he loved the book because Em had given it to him. Matthew thought Em was special. “I remember Madeline—I loved that book,” Molly told me when we were making dinner. I remembered my grandmother reading Madeline to me; I loved it, too. Molly was in her twenties when she’d read it the first time—to a niece, who had hated it. “She was my most insensitive niece—she deserved to have an agonizing experience with appendicitis,” the night groomer said.

Elliot Barlow remembered what a big deal her parents had made of Ludwig Bemelmans because he was Austrian. Mr. Barlow was eleven or twelve when she’d been introduced to Madeline. “I think I was too old for it,” the snowshoer said; she and my mom were setting the table in the dining room while Molly and I did the cooking.

“You were definitely too old for it—Matthew is already too old for Madeline!” Grace chimed in, all the way from the living room. In our East Dorset house, the kitchen and the dining room were one big room, and there was only a chimney with a two-sided fireplace between them. All the way from the kitchen, Molly and I could see the living-room couch, where Matthew sat by himself, looking at the pictures in Madeline.

“You should read it to him after dinner,” I told the trail groomer. We were the cooks; someone else would take charge of the cleanup. As it turned out, my mom and Mr. Barlow did the dishes—after they finally stopped horsing around with their piggyback rides. Their constant piggybacking irked Grace; whenever Matthew saw them doing it, he wanted a piggyback ride. My mother was seventy-three—too old to be doing single-leg lunges with a four-year-old on her back, in Grace’s opinion. Although Molly was a couple of years older than my mom, the night groomer was a workhorse; even Grace had to admit that Molly could carry Matthew on her back to the top of Bromley.

After dinner, Grace and Em had cleared the dining-room table, while the old ski patroller was giving Matthew a piggyback ride—all over the house, upstairs and downstairs. “Reading after dinner, not roughhousing!” Grace kept calling to them.

I knew what Nora would have said, if she’d been with us: Grace sounds just like my mother and Aunt Martha. I was watching Molly; she was trying to get Matthew to settle down on the couch in the living room. Matthew was more in the mood to roughhouse than to listen to a story about robotic-looking little girls in Paris. The ski patroller sat on the couch, waiting for Matthew to climb into her lap; Molly was leafing through the pages of Madeline.

“All of my pants are too tight,” my mother was saying to the snowshoer in the kitchen. They were washing and drying the pots and pans, while my mom was showing Mr. Barlow her bare belly. She’d been complaining about her ski pants back in March, at the end of the ski season. She couldn’t button the top button on a single pair of her ski pants. “If I don’t work on my abs in the off-season, I’ll have to get a bunch of new ski pants next year,” I’d heard her say to Molly. Now it was May 1995; for the first time, she was wearing pants with elastic waistbands. “Like an old woman!” I’d heard her exclaim to the snowshoer. “I like my sweatpants with drawstrings better.” They were both staring at her exposed abdomen. “Am I getting a pot?” she was asking Elliot. “Tell me the truth!”

“You don’t have a pot, Ray—you look the same to me,” the little English teacher told her. Molly and I had been telling her and telling her. Little Ray didn’t have a pot.

“The name of the little girl in this story is Madeline,” I heard the ski patroller say, in the living room. “Can you say her name?”

“Madeline,” Matthew said, the same way Molly said it. I saw that Em had curled up next to them on the couch.

Grace was in the dining room, obsessively removing the melted wax from the candlesticks on the table. That was when Grace intervened in the reading. “Em should read Madeline to Matthew—she gave him the book,” Grace said; she sounded insistent about it. The pushy bitch! I was thinking. At that moment, I hated her for putting Em on the spot.

I must have looked like I was going to say something, because I felt Mr. Barlow’s strong grip on the back of my neck; her hand was wet from washing the pots and pans. She caught me in a collar tie, pulling my head down to her level, where she could whisper in my ear. “Let it go, Adam. Don’t worry about Em—she’s been practicing,” the snowshoer whispered. I thought Matthew looked a little unsure about the prospect of Em as a reader, but the night groomer never hesitated. At Grace’s directive, Em had sat bolt upright on the couch. Molly just picked up Matthew, passing him from her lap to Em’s.

The lap-to-lap exchange was fun for Matthew, but when Molly handed Madeline to Em, Matthew looked worried. The dear boy is more sensitive than his mother, I was thinking, when Grace asserted herself again. “Em is going to read to you, Matthew,” Grace said, in her most matter-of-fact manner.

“You don’t have to,” Matthew said to Em.

“But I want to read to you,” Em assured him, as if speaking had suddenly become second nature to her. Em sounded as self-assured but offhand about her reading as she’d sounded when she talked me out of studying abroad for a year—when she convinced me I was melancholic enough, without adding to my melancholy by going abroad. “In Europe, you’ll meet some girl who’s as sad as you, or sadder. Then you’ll be twice as sad together, until the sadness drives you apart,” Em had said, as if she’d been talking her whole life.

From the kitchen, the banging of the pots and pans had ceased—the washing and drying done. On the hearthstone bordering the fireplace, my mom sat on a cushion, pulling the little English teacher into her lap; those two couldn’t stop fooling around, but they managed to compose themselves and sit quietly, in readiness for the reading. I was too angry at Grace to look at her, but I stole a glance in her direction; it was sufficient to see she was staring at me, before I looked away. I was watching Matthew and Em when Em began to read. As a pantomimist, she could control the exertion she put into her pantomimes. I didn’t know that, as a reader, Em knew how to modulate her voice—ramping up the cadence when there were rhymes to hit at the ends of lines.

As far as Matthew was concerned, the creepy house in Paris, which appeared to be run by nuns, might have been a Catholic boarding school for little girls who ate like automatons—they even brushed their teeth by rote and slept like dutiful soldiers in barracks.

Em’s audience in the living room was riveted—Matthew, most of all. I’d not seen Em in such command since she’d been onstage at the Gallows, in a nonspeaking role.

In the ghostly nuns’ command, the highly disciplined little girls, as a unit, bestowed their blessings or showered their disapproval on the do-gooders or criminals they saw in their city surroundings. Or—like the nuns, Matthew could only imagine—the little girls moped in unison, too. Em was animated and vocally transcendent in capturing the endearing but frightening militancy among the identically trained little girls.

Grace sighed, loudly enough to make Matthew look at her. Grace had stopped staring at me. She was looking at her hands, picking at her fingers—at the candle wax. The reading was not what she’d expected. Grace was hoping Em would fail. I saw that Grace had wanted Em to embarrass herself. Grace was fucking around with her fingers when she left the living room. The sound of running water, in the kitchen sink, made Em pause before she continued reading. She’d just read the part about Madeline’s size—she was littler than the other little girls.

“I’m the littlest one!” Matthew cried, as if he’d just realized he was the smallest in our extended family.

“Don’t interrupt, Matthew!” his mother called from the kitchen. Matthew looked remorseful; he’d meant no disrespect to Em, but had merely meant he identified with Madeline.

Once more, Mr. Barlow prevented me from saying something. I was sitting on the hearthstone beside my mom, but not on a cushion. In Little Ray’s lap, Elliot was elevated; she had to reach out and down to grab my wrist. The snowshoer spoke to Matthew, not to me, but her strong hand had stopped me from speaking. “It’s true—you’re the littlest one here, Matthew—but when I was your age, I was smaller than you,” the little English teacher told him.

“When I was a kid, I was smaller than you, too,” Little Ray said to Matthew. The way my mother was sitting—with her T-shirt tucked into her sweatpants, in profile to me—I was surprised to see that she did have a very small potbelly.

“Let me tell you, Matthew—I’m sure you’ll be bigger than me, when you grow up,” I told my son. Em was nodding her head off—like the old, nonspeaking Em—which made Matthew laugh.

“You see what you started, Matthew—this is what happens when you interrupt someone!” Grace shouted, over the sound of the water she was running in the kitchen.

Fuck! I almost said, but Mr. Barlow had control of my wrist; she was just born quicker, Coach Dearborn would have said. I felt the snowshoer slip the wristlock on me with her other hand. “Not now, sweetie,” my mom whispered. I saw Molly lean over Matthew; she was whispering to him on the couch, too quietly for anyone but Matthew and Em to hear.

Em would write and tell me what the old ski patroller had said. “You didn’t do anything wrong, Kid,” Molly whispered to Matthew. What my mother and Mr. Barlow and I could hear from the hearthstone was what Matthew whispered to Em, and what she whispered back.

“Read, please.”

“Okay.”

Em didn’t wait to start reading—then we all heard Grace turn off the water in the kitchen. Undaunted, Em cited Madeline’s bravery—her lack of fear of rodents, her adoration for winter, her disdain for the tiger in the zoo, her knack for upsetting the nun on night duty. The second syllable of that nun’s name rhymed with well. “Miss Vell,” Matthew called her, shortening her name.

Grace stood over me, where I sat on the hearthstone. “I don’t feel well—I’m going to bed,” she told me.

“I’m sorry you don’t feel well, Grace, but don’t interrupt,” my mother said.

“Good night, Matthew,” Grace said; she gave my mom a look before going upstairs. Little Ray had grown up with disapproving looks; she was impervious to being looked down on. My mother went on hugging the snowshoer in her lap; she knew perfectly well that Grace disapproved of all the lap-sitting and the hugging in my extended family. Em was in the habit of holding and hugging Elliot in her lap. “God knows what Matthew might make of Mr. Barlow—sitting in Em’s lap and your mother’s, while your mom also sits in Molly’s lap!” Grace had said to me. Matthew gave no indication that he was disturbed by lap-sitting or hugging. How could someone as smart as Grace also be so unquestioning of conformity? I was thinking; I was done letting it go.

“Read, please,” Matthew repeated to Em, who’d stopped again. Em ad-libbed what Miss Vell said when she turned on her light in the dark of night. The nun had had a premonition of Madeline’s appendicitis.

Matthew was laughing at the bad French accent Em gave to Miss Vell. “Now what’s rrr-rong?” Em had ad-libbed, rolling her rrr’s.

“Something is wrong with you and Grace, sweetie,” my mom whispered to me.

“I know,” I whispered back.

Mr. Barlow had released me from the wristlock. The snowshoer still held my wrist with one hand, but she’d relaxed her grip. It was the way you might take hold of a child you were walking across a street, I was thinking—remembering how Grace had objected to what she’d called my “hand-holding with Elliot Barlow.” God knows what Matthew might have made of Mr. Barlow’s and my hand-fighting. My resentment of Grace was rising.

Em’s reading rolled along. Madeline kept crying. A doctor came; he knew the problem was her appendix.

As the ambulance drove Madeline and her appendix through nighttime Paris, my mind drifted ahead—to my coming separation and divorce from Grace, to our joint custody of Matthew. When the nun Matthew called Miss Vell and the little girls were visiting Madeline in the hospital, I was already imagining myself living with Em—somehow, somewhere. The snowshoer gently squeezed my wrist, reminding me to pay attention to the reading. My mom had untucked her T-shirt to dry the tears on my cheeks. I saw her bare belly again; even sitting down, she had such a small potbelly. It was crazy for my mother to be worried about her belly, I was thinking, while Em was reading the appendectomy part.

Em read to Matthew that the little girls were most surprised to see the scar on Madeline’s tummy. (It comes as no surprise that the little girls will wake up Miss Vell one night, crying to have their own appendectomies.)

“You can’t see the scar,” Matthew pointed out to Em. In the book, there’s a picture of Madeline showing her scar to the other little girls, but no picture of the scar itself.

“Molly, show Matthew your scar—Molly had an appendectomy,” my mother said.

“Em had her appendix out, too—Em has a scar,” the little English teacher told us. I’d seen Molly’s scar; the old ski patroller had shown me, years ago, when we were talking about surgeries. But of course I got up from the hearthstone to take a look at Em’s scar. I didn’t know she’d had an appendectomy.

“No, sweetie—you shouldn’t see Em’s scar,” my mom whispered, but it was too late. Mr. Barlow had let go of my wrist, and Em was already showing Matthew her scar. That’s how I saw it. On the right side of Em’s abdomen was a small, faded scar—an incision of three or four inches. It wasn’t the scar my mother thought I shouldn’t see, but where it was—between Em’s navel and her panties, closer to the panties. In 1995, Em was sixty, but the pantomiming had kept her fit. She had a flat stomach, even sitting down. I’d not seen a lot of Em’s abdomen before; I was staring.

“If you’d looked at my scar that way, I would have slugged you, Kid,” the trail groomer later told me. Em’s bare belly became an enduring distraction. I lost track of the rest of Madeline. What would stay with me about Ludwig Bemelmans’s story was the orderly determination of those little girls who liked straight lines. This resonated with so many different meanings; one meaning that would stay with me was unintended in Madeline. It was in straight lines, away from each other, that Grace and I would separate and divorce—the way those little girls had marched around and brushed their teeth and gone to bed.

When Em finished reading Madeline, I wasn’t surprised that Matthew wanted her to put him to bed. I watched the two of them, holding hands as they went upstairs together. I was imagining the rest of my life, with the two of them in it—just the two of them.

“You shouldn’t stare, sweetie—stop staring,” my mom whispered, although only Molly and the snowshoer could have heard her. “It’s a good thing you have five bedrooms—tonight you might want to be in a bed by yourself, sweetie,” my mother told me; she’d stopped whispering. It didn’t matter anymore that she was the one who’d wanted me to meet Grace; I knew my mom would be my and (most of all) Matthew’s ally when the dissolution of my marriage started. Obviously, the dissolution had already begun.

Mr. Barlow told me that Em had been practicing more than Madeline. Most nights, when the snowshoer went to bed, she fell asleep listening to Em read aloud to herself. Elliot Barlow had heard Em reading her own novel, the one she was writing.

“What about Moby-Dick?” I asked Mr. Barlow. We’d both been there when Em tipped over the coffee table—her way of pantomiming that she was waiting for an upheaval of some kind, a certain moment when she intended to read Moby-Dick, now that she knew the novel wasn’t about a penis.

“I’ve not heard her reading Moby-Dick. This is not that moment, Adam—this is not the upheaval Em is waiting for,” the snowshoer said.

It was enough of an upheaval for me. Em was a long time putting Matthew to bed. “Matthew wanted to show me how he brushed his teeth, then he had to show me everything in his room, and he wanted to see my scar again,” Em told us, when she finally came downstairs. I couldn’t look at her, or she would have known I wanted to see her scar again, too. I thanked her for reading to Matthew, not looking at her. I knew what Em was going to say, because I knew how Grace would have pressured her. “I didn’t want Matthew to think I was weird. All my life, I haven’t cared that everyone thought I was weird. But I don’t want Matthew to think so,” Em said; she was looking right at me.

“I used to think you were pretty weird, but now I think you’re just a little strange,” my mother said to Em, hugging her. “We’re all a little strange—you especially, sweetie. Straight people are the strangest!” my mom declared, deciding she should hug me, too.

When I went upstairs, the four adults I loved most remained in the living room. They are all wound up; they’ll talk till dawn, I was thinking. I kissed everyone good night—Elliot and Em, Molly and my mother. I wasn’t surprised that Grace was awake; she was seething. “Your family is so weird—I won’t let them, or you, make Matthew weird,” she started.

“We won’t make Matthew weird,” I said to her.

“First Em seduces you, then my son—you don’t even know it’s obvious that you’re in love with her,” Grace told me.

“I am in love with her, but nothing can come of it,” I said.

“It’s a good thing we have so many bedrooms, and you’re used to sleeping in another one,” Grace told me. “Em can come visit you, in her fashion.”

“Do you want me to stay or go?” I asked.

“I heard Em, putting him to bed—I guess that’s what you want it to be like,” Grace told me.

“Matthew wanted Em to put him to bed,” I told her.

“What is the scar she has? Matthew asked to see her scar—I know Em showed him,” Grace said.

“Em had her appendix out, like Molly—like Madeline,” I said.

“Fuck Madeline!” Grace screamed.

I went into Matthew’s bedroom, to make sure he was asleep, before I went looking for the empty guest bedroom—the one Em or the snowshoer hadn’t put their stuff in. I left the bedroom door open. I wanted Em to be able to find me when she came wandering. It was a moonlit night; I knew Em could see me in the moonlight. I was trying to stay awake until she came, but I was asleep when Em found me—in the predawn light, no thanks to the moon. I knew it was Em with my eyes closed, from the way she hugged me.

“Now what’s rrr-rong?” Em whispered, rolling her rrr’s. “I know you’re in trouble, Longhand Man. Whatever you do, I hope you know your biggest priority is the littlest one.”

“I know,” I whispered. At first, Grace and I had tried to make it work; we’d tried to stay together for Matthew’s sake. Lately, I told Em, Grace and I had been strategizing about the best way to break up—meaning the best way for Matthew. “But there’s no way to do it without hurting Matthew,” I whispered to Em.

“When you’re a child,” Em whispered back, “you don’t understand how the adults who love you and protect you can hurt you.”

I didn’t want to go down the childhood road with Em—not with her hugging me in the guest bedroom in the predawn light. I tried to change the subject, but there was nothing as important to me, or to Em, as protecting Matthew from the fallout of my deteriorating marriage. “What happened in Aspen is a movie,” I’d written Em, but I hadn’t shown her the movie; I’d not sent her my no-end-in-sight Loge Peak screenplay. I could tell Em knew I came back from Aspen with a lot of explaining to do, and I hadn’t done any explaining. I didn’t want to go down that road with Em, either.

I should have known Em knew what was on my mind, as long ago as when I danced with her at my mom’s wedding, or when I gave her the snowshoer kiss—the best kiss I could manage at fourteen, the kiss Em ramped up when she gave it to Nora.

“When I was a kid,” Em went on whispering, keeping our conversation on the childhood theme—or so I imagined—“I had a feeling, not as strong as a conviction, that I didn’t want a penis or a baby’s head in my vagina.” (That was when I realized we weren’t going down the childhood road.) “This didn’t mean I couldn’t love a child—I just didn’t want to give birth to one,” Em whispered. “And there were always other things I could imagine doing with a penis—just not in my vagina.” (For Em, a formerly nonspeaking person, I understood this was a lot to say—it was unforgettable as pantomime.) “When I met Nora, she already had her convictions—stronger than my feelings. Nora knew she wanted nothing to do with penises or having children—not only in her vagina. I just went along with what Nora wanted,” Em whispered.

I was reminded of the time the Gallows nixed the Two Dykes’ skit about things to do with a penis. Em’s pantomime was pretty clear about the rubbing; she would put a penis between her boobs or between her thighs, but nowhere else. This got a good laugh at the Gallows, but Nora’s punch line was why the comedy club pulled the plug.

“Not me,” Nora said onstage, in her deadpan way. “The only thing I would do with a penis is cut it off.”

Em wrote the Two Dykes’ dialogue, including Nora’s monologues; knowing how frequently Nora went off-script, ad-libbing her lines, I wondered if what Em had written about a penis for the stage was true, or just for laughs. Did Em feel the same way she’d felt about penises when she was a kid? The morning light was stronger now; I could see Em clearly. “I’m just like Matthew,” I whispered to her. “I want to see your scar again, too.”

“Your interest in my scar, Adam, is not the same as Matthew’s,” Em whispered back. She took my hand and put it under her T-shirt, placing my palm against her bare abdomen. “That’s my scar—you’re a writer; you can imagine it,” Em told me. She held my hand against her bare belly; if I closed my eyes, I saw her scar.

Em went back to her bedroom, or to visit the snowshoer, before we could fall asleep together. We knew Matthew would come looking for me when he woke up and didn’t find me in bed with his mom. Matthew was used to finding me in one of the guest bedrooms in the morning. He thought I was playing a game with him—hiding in another bedroom. “Found you!” Matthew would say with such delight, you’d think it was the first time he’d discovered me, every time. It was the best time of my days and nights, when Matthew climbed into bed with me. I could imagine he was my one and only—no strings attached. I am my mother’s son, as Nora and Molly always said. For Matthew and me, there were strings attached. The morning after the Madeline reading, when Matthew found his sleeping father, I was still seeing Em’s scar.

The morning after the Madeline reading, Matthew couldn’t be separated from those little girls in Paris; he carried the nuns and their charges with him everywhere he went. Em was Matthew’s new favorite reader, but she was aware that Grace hated listening to her read. Grace’s body became tense; her physical movement resembled the wariness of someone anticipating a muscle spasm with every step. Over the weekend, although we must have listened to Em’s rendition of Madeline half a dozen times, Em kept suggesting other readers to Matthew.

“It makes Molly sad not to read to you—Molly loves Madeline, you know,” Em would say to Matthew.

Even my mom was called upon to read. Little Ray wasn’t much of a reader; I couldn’t remember her reading to me. Yet my mother was the first reader who paused before saying the end of certain lines. She let Matthew speak the words that rhymed. Matthew had memorized the rhymes—the vines that rhymed with lines, the scar that rhymed with far. And my mom made sure to pause, to let Matthew say Miss Vell’s “Now what’s rrr-rong?”—the way Em always said it, not the nighttime nun’s actual words.

For the rest of the weekend, all the Madeline readers paused before reading the part about Madeline’s being littler than the other little girls—inviting Matthew to whisper in their ears.

This pause, and the whispering that Grace could still hear, made her so tense that she trembled in an unspoken rage. “I’m the littlest one!” Matthew would whisper in his readers’ ears; then the reading would proceed. Even at four, Matthew knew better than to ask his mom to read Madeline; Em didn’t suggest Grace as a reader.

I declined to be a Madeline reader when Em suggested to Matthew that I should have a chance to read to him. I could see Grace stiffen. I said that Matthew and I would soon be alone—when the weekend was over and Matthew’s mom and our guests went back to New York. I told Matthew I was looking forward to reading Madeline many times during the coming week. That must have been when Grace decided to take the book with her when she went back to the city.

On Monday, when one of the nannies brought him home from preschool, Matthew couldn’t find Madeline; we looked everywhere for it. When Matthew was searching upstairs, I looked for the book in the trash, but I couldn’t find it. I called the Northshire Bookstore to see if they had a copy; they had a good children’s section, but the book was on backorder. I was told that they would have it in a couple of days.

The prospect of a couple of days was no consolation to Matthew. “Maybe Mommy took it,” Matthew said, when I was putting him to bed. I tried to assure him that his mother wouldn’t have taken the book—it was just lost, somehow, and a new copy was coming. Yet it had been apparent, even to a four-year-old, that his mother had it in for Madeline.

I raised that point with Grace when I called her Monday night in New York—after I knew Matthew was sound asleep.

“Maybe Em took it—she might have realized that Madeline is too young for Matthew,” Grace told me.

I tried to say what Em had said to me. “Forget Madeline—Matthew is the littlest one, and our biggest priority,” I said to Grace.

“I know that,” Grace said, hanging up.

I sat on the floor of Matthew’s bedroom and watched him sleeping, for about an hour. I went to bed in Grace’s and my bedroom, now that I was alone again. This didn’t diminish Matthew’s greeting when he woke me up in the morning. “Found you!” the littlest one cried, climbing into bed with me. Matthew sounded so happy, as if our being apart was the only thing wrong with the universe—or rrr-rong, as Em had ad-libbed when she found her voice.