The Last Chairlift

50. EM AS ISHMAEL

I heard about the snowstorm in the Northeast at the Aspen airport. My Chicago connection would be canceled. To Albany, or to Hartford—it doesn’t matter that I don’t remember. I wasn’t going to get back to Vermont from Chicago—that was clear. I decided to fly from Denver to New York. I knew Em was at the snowshoer’s pied-à-terre on East Sixty-fourth Street. It was her apartment now.

I called Molly from the Denver airport. I thought the old ski patroller would know everything about the snowstorm, but she didn’t care about it. “It’s just snow, Kid. By the way, we’re done hearing from Jasmine,” she told me.

A nurse at a home for assisted living in New York had called Molly. (The nurse was calling all the numbers Jasmine called most frequently.) Jasmine had passed away peacefully in her sleep, the nurse wanted Molly to know. “I told the nurse I was sorry about the peacefully part,” the old patroller said.

I called Grace from Denver, too. Given the good bookstore in Manchester, Grace had already bought a new copy of My Father’s Dragon. Grace said she would read Matthew the last two chapters while I was in New York, waiting out the snowstorm in New England. Em had delivered her novel—“based on her life with Nora,” as Grace put it. I thought her life with Nora was a vague way for Em’s publisher to describe the novel. This meant Em and Grace couldn’t agree on a title, I was thinking. “Em sent two copies, one for you,” was all Grace would say.

I asked Grace what Em was calling her novel. “You’re seeing Em tonight—she’ll tell you. Maybe you can talk her out of it—Em won’t listen to me,” Grace said. I could tell Grace was done talking about it. I knew she’d rejected Two Dykes, One Who Talks as a title. I’d already imagined Grace’s grievances against the Dykes word.

Em told me Grace had suggested The Gallows Lounge Shooting as a title, but Em was opposed to a title with the “Gallows Lounge” in it. Em didn’t want her novel to sound like nonfiction, but a title with “Two Dykes” in it was unacceptable to Grace. What I could sense—long-distance, in the Denver airport—didn’t bode well for peacefully resolving what to call the novel.

Of course I called Em from Denver, too. Paul Goode’s shooting was big news in New York, but other news was in the mail. Em called the letter, from someone at the archdiocese, “kind and compassionate—not at all perfunctory, beyond pro forma.” It was only the hierarchy of the Catholic Church she hated, Em told me. “I have nothing against all the rest of the Catholics,” she said; she sounded worn out. Em had been busy boxing up Mr. Barlow’s things; not that long ago, I knew, she’d been boxing up Nora’s. It was upsetting enough for Em to be putting away the snowshoer’s stuff, but Em was angry and crying because she came across a box of Nora’s writing. Knowing Elliot Barlow had been her rescuer, Em understood that Mr. Barlow was both saving the box for Em and protecting her from seeing it. “Nora’s box,” Em called it, pun intended.

To say it was a box of Nora’s writing doesn’t cover it. Em wrote what Nora said onstage at the Gallows. Em put in writing what she knew how to pantomime and had rehearsed, but Nora was known to ad-lib her lines onstage—a subject of much disagreement between the two of them. Nora was also known to rewrite, in her own words, what Em had scripted for her to say. Dear Mr. Barlow would have known that Nora’s box contained a ton of contention between Nora and Em. Bernard (“Bonkers”) Nathanson had been a sore subject at the Gallows, where the cowardly management wouldn’t permit Nora and Em to ridicule Nathanson for his being a turncoat to abortion rights and the pro-choice cause.

A former pro-choice activist, Dr. Nathanson was a licensed obstetrician and gynecologist in New York. One of the founders of the National Abortion Rights Action League (NARAL), Nathanson had worked with Betty Friedan for the legalization of abortion in the U.S. He was also the former director of New York City’s Center for Reproductive and Sexual Health, but Bonkers Nathanson became a right-to-lifer. In 1984, Nathanson was the narrator of The Silent Scream—an anti-abortion film that included an ultrasound video of a fetus sensing it was about to be aborted.

I remember the row between Nora and Em concerning what Nora had written for Em to pantomime about The Silent Scream. Em knew there was no way for her to pantomime a threatened fetus and be funny. Nora was incensed that Nathanson had called himself a “Jewish atheist.” In Nora’s opinion, Nathanson gave Jews and atheists a bad name—he was bad-mouthing both groups. But Em knew there was no way for her to pantomime a Jewish atheist and not look like she was anti-Semitic. Their differences of opinion didn’t matter; their Bonkers Nathanson skit never made it to the stage. The Gallows management wouldn’t allow Nora and Em to make Dr. Nathanson a target of their political comedy. Bonkers was Nora’s name for Nathanson, naturally.

“We shouldn’t mock a doctor who repents his killing unborn babies,” one of the cowards managing the Gallows had whined. But I was only beginning to understand why Nora’s box was a Pandora’s box for Em to have opened. There might be more in that box than Em’s writing, and Nora’s—that’s what I was worrying about.

I asked Em if it seemed contradictory of the snowshoer to save Nora’s box for her, but to keep her from seeing it. “No!” Em cried. “It makes perfect sense.” Grace couldn’t restrain herself from editing every reference to Bonkers Nathanson out of Em’s novel, Em now told me. I only knew that Grace and the snowshoer had been seeing Em’s novel in piecemeal fashion, as Em wrote it—whereas Em had wanted to finish her novel before showing it to me.

“It’s okay that Bonkers Nathanson changed his mind about abortion—that’s his choice,” Nora had always said. “What’s not okay is that Nathanson won’t let other people make that choice for themselves.”

As for the sea change in Nathanson’s abortion politics, what got to Em was the part about his becoming a Catholic. Nathanson’s newfound belief in God would have riled up Nora, Em said. But what would get to Nora, Em knew, was not just Nathanson’s finding God. “Bonkers Nathanson is a former abortionist groveling for forgiveness from the Catholic Church,” Em said.

I knew how this was relevant to the epigraph Em had chosen for her novel, long ago—the quote from Nora, the one with such a moderate or reasonable tone that it didn’t sound like Nora. “There’s no stopping the Catholic Church,” Nora had said. “You shouldn’t try to stop them; all you can do is try to control the damage they do.”

Grace, I knew, had objected to the epigraph from the beginning. And now Em was hopping mad because Grace was opposed to anything in Em’s novel that sounded like, or could be perceived as, anti-Catholic. Em’s whole novel could be perceived as anti-Catholic—this was Grace’s editorial opinion. “The snowshoer and you were my editors—now it’s just you, kiddo,” Em told me.

Speech was relatively new to the formerly nonspeaking Em. I’d noticed she would experiment with how she wanted to sound—the way a teenager would try out different attitudes and voices. In her experiments, Em often spoke like Nora—kiddo was what Nora had called me.

“You and Nora were a stand-up act in a comedy club—your foremost objective wasn’t to offend no one,” Mr. Barlow had written Em. “Don’t let Grace make offending no one be the objective of your novel. Remember why you wanted to write Two Dykes, One Who Talks in the first place—not as nonfiction, but as a novel,” the snowshoer wrote. “In a novel, your foremost objective isn’t to offend no one,” the little English teacher told Em.

In the Denver airport, I was forever on the phone. Em had finished reading Mr. Barlow’s advance galleys of Bernard Nathanson’s The Hand of God. I knew Grace had got hold of the advance galleys, too. My chief concern was that Em would try to read aloud the entirety of Chapter 15, the last chapter in The Hand of God—the Catholic chapter. It would be a bad way for me to miss my flight to New York—hearing all about Bonkers Nathanson’s conversion to Catholicism. He wrote that he’d been having “lengthy conversations with a priest… for the past five years, and it is my hope that I shall soon be received into the Roman Catholic Church.”

God help Cardinal O’Connor if the son of a bitch baptizes Bonkers Nathanson, or some other craven convert to Catholicism—God help His Eminence if the son of a bitch gives Communion to another former infidel and repentant sinner, like my hateful father! I was expecting Em to say, but she didn’t.

“If Cardinal O’Connor baptizes Bonkers Nathanson, I might throw up,” was all Em said. She reminded me about one night at the Gallows when we were backstage—Damaged Don was there—and Nora was having one of her First Amendment fits.

The Roman Catholic Church was riding roughshod over the Constitution, Nora was railing—that bit about “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.” Nora was reiterating what had been Mr. Barlow’s mantra—the snowshoer’s way of saying that freedom of religion wasn’t a one-way street. We were free to practice the religion of our choice, but we were also free from having someone else’s religion practiced on us. Nora and the snowshoer sounded like a broken record—the way they never stopped saying that freedom of religion also meant freedom from religion.

Damaged Don, who we didn’t know was listening—Don just kept strumming his guitar—spoke up. “Those Catholics—they’ll beat you up about their freedom of religion, but they don’t give two shits for yours,” the Damaged Man declared.

Well, we know what became of Don. The Damaged Man was gunned down in a parking lot in Montana, after Reagan’s reelection, when the gay boys Don had been singing about were still dying, and Don was still singing his plague song.

Don’t give Ronald Reagan

eight years.

He talks tough to commies,

he kills all the gay boys,

but that does fuck-all

for our fears.

Please don’t give the Gipper

eight years.

No, don’t give the Gipper

eight years.

If there was a Damaged Don box in the snowshoer’s pied-à-terre, I knew it wouldn’t have been easy going for Em. After Don was killed, and for as long as Ronald Reagan was our president, Nora had closed out every performance of Two Dykes, One Who Talks with a Damaged Don song. As Nora said, she couldn’t sing, but neither could Don. Em, crying, hugged Nora while she sang.

In the Denver airport, I decided that singing the Damaged Man would be better than hearing more of The Hand of God. I started with the chorus of Damaged Don’s plague song. Em, crying, sang with me on the phone.

It’s time to head back to

Great Falls.

I’m lackin’ the talent,

I can’t stand the sadness,

I don’t have big enough balls!

It’s time to head back to

Great Falls.

I’m just goin’ back to

Great Falls.

The Damaged Man was with us; he’d managed to make Em and me feel less alone. Later, we sang “No Lucky Star” to each other.

That was when Em told me she’d barely glanced at Elliot Barlow’s notebooks. She had filled two boxes with the notebooks; we would read them together, she told me. All she’d read was a short passage about the snowshoer’s last visit to St. Vincent’s—in the 1990s, after Ronald Reagan was no longer in office. The snowshoer had written about Reagan—just one sentence, after seeing her friends who were dying of AIDS.

“If or when there’s another plague, I hope America has a better plague president than Ronald Reagan,” the little English teacher wrote.

Em still had to get to the bottom of Nora’s box, she told me, but she promised she would be done with it by the time I got to New York. When I boarded my flight in Denver, I felt closer to Em than ever before, but I knew she would keep surprising me.

I began to realize that I’d overlooked Em’s earliest, unspoken seagull imitations—signifying her going back to Canada. Nora had observed I was slow to notice more of the world—she meant politically. “It took you long enough, kiddo,” my older cousin had told me—meaning for me to get out of Exeter, literally and figuratively. In Nora’s opinion, Exeter was not only a cloistered school and a small town; Exeter was a cloistered state of mind.

Zim had died in February 1968. Elliot and I had gone to his memorial service in March. But I was still out of it, politically, two years later, when Nora and Em went to hear Kurt Vonnegut speak at Bennington College’s commencement. I loved Vonnegut’s writing—he’d been my favorite teacher at the Writers’ Workshop in Iowa City. Kurt and I continued to have a correspondence; when I was in New York, we often had dinner together. But I don’t know where I was, literally and politically, for Kurt’s speech to the graduates at Bennington in 1970—I wasn’t there. It was Nora who told me Vonnegut was a socialist—Nora said she was one, too. Em just did her seagull thing, which didn’t only mean she was thinking about going back to Canada, but sometimes it did.

Of course I remembered when the craven management of the Gallows Lounge had complained about the Canadian, meaning Em. She’d been born in Canada, she had a Canadian father, but her early childhood was the only time Em had lived in Canada; then she’d moved to Massachusetts with her mother. Thereafter, Em visited her father in Toronto only once a year, over the Christmas holiday.

I hadn’t heard Em talk about “social democracy” in Canada—not until I came back from Aspen and the Hotel Jerome the second time. I don’t remember seeing Em do a socialist pantomime at the Gallows, where the cowardly management surely would have blamed the Canadian for anything remotely resembling anti-American politics—even though it was Nora who started calling herself a socialist, and only after Vonnegut’s speech at Bennington. Vogue magazine published the speech, and Nora made me read it. Nowadays, all I remember is the end of Kurt’s speech—the socialist part. But I’m embarrassed that I skimmed over the socialism when I read the speech the first time.

“I suggest that you work for a socialist form of government,” Vonnegut had told the students. (Their parents and grandparents must have shit their pants over that idea, Nora said.) “Free Enterprise is much too hard on the old and the sick and the shy and the poor and the stupid, and on people nobody likes,” Kurt had continued. The speech sounded like Kurt; reading it was just like listening to his voice. “So let’s divide up the wealth more fairly than we have divided it up so far,” he went on. He talked about people having enough to eat, and a decent place to live, and medical help. “It isn’t moonbeams to talk of modest plenty for all. They have it in Sweden. We can have it here,” Kurt said to the students.

Elliot Barlow had voted for Stevenson in 1956; Mr. Barlow liked what Vonnegut said about Eisenhower. “Dwight David Eisenhower once pointed out that Sweden, with its many Utopian programs, had a high rate of alcoholism and suicide and youthful unrest. Even so,” Vonnegut said, “I would like to see America try socialism. If we start drinking heavily and killing ourselves, and if our children start acting crazy, we can go back to good old Free Enterprise again.” I liked the speech because it was funny, but the socialist part slipped away.

Em had been paying attention to Canada, politically—more than I knew. Though the homophobe, her dying father, had left Em the house in midtown Toronto, Em had refused to sell it. Em had even refused to rent out half the house, as her father had. She was a dual citizen, of Canada and the U.S. I knew she wanted to have a place to go if she ever left the United States, but I didn’t know Em had been reading about democratic socialism or socialist democracy—not to mention social democracy in Canada. That part slipped away, too. From my American perspective, Canada was more socialist than the United States—that was all I knew.

In the Denver airport, we didn’t talk about socialism, but before we got off the phone, I asked Em about the title of her novel. I let her know that Grace wouldn’t tell me the title. “Grace hopes I can talk you out of it,” I told Em.

“You can’t—the title was the snowshoer’s idea. You won’t talk the two of us out of it—Elliot Barlow isn’t listening anymore,” Em told me. She was calling her novel Come Hang Yourself, Em said. I would never have tried to talk her out of it, not even if the only hero hadn’t had a hand in it.

If you ever went to the Gallows—even if you went there only once—you would remember the hangman’s noose above the bar, where a sign said, COME HANG YOURSELF.

I remembered the night when I ran into Prue, the Tongue Kisser and her husband at the Gallows. Prue was happy to show her husband where she’d once had an all-noir act. This was during the AIDS years. Prue must have been forty. Her husband was appalled by Two Dykes, One Who Talks—then Damaged Don did a dirge onstage, and the tongue kisser’s husband looked at the hangman’s noose above the bar in a welcoming way. In the AIDS years, the Damaged Man wasn’t funny at all, and the dickless management at the Gallows considered taking down the noose above the bar, or at least removing that sign. In my years of going to the Gallows, the tongue kisser’s husband was one of the few who looked noir enough to hang himself on the spur of the moment from the noose above the bar.

When I got to East Sixty-fourth Street, Em was raging around the apartment in her pajamas; she was in the kind of rage that made me think an old injury had come back to hurt her. “Was it something in Nora’s box?” I asked her. Nora had hurt Em’s feelings before, but this wound had nothing to do with Nora’s writing or Bonkers Nathanson. An old magazine had been hiding in Nora’s box.

It was a familiar-looking issue of Vogue—August 1, 1970. On a dog-eared page, I recognized Vonnegut’s Bennington speech. I’d since read it many times in Wampeters, Foma & Granfalloons—a collection of Kurt’s short works, mostly essays and reviews and speeches. I’m sure Elliot Barlow had all of Vonnegut’s books. I know I did; I thought Em did, too. I saw no harm in Nora’s saving that old issue of Vogue—I knew Nora had loved that speech.

“Nora was getting off on the photograph—she wasn’t saving the speech!” Em wailed. On the page facing Kurt’s speech was a black-and-white photograph of the eighteen-year-old Isabella Rossellini. At that age, with those eyes and that mouth, Isabella was Nora’s type. “I know what Nora was doing with this magazine!” Em cried.

After all these years, to be jealous of a girl in a magazine—even if she was a girl Nora might have been masturbating over—amazed me. I tried not to be jealous of how much Em had loved Nora, but it made my heart ache. The photo was a full page—a close-up of Isabella Rossellini’s face and throat, with her dark hair falling over her shoulders. Twenty-five years before, I might have masturbated over such a pretty face in a magazine, but it wouldn’t have helped Em to know my thoughts. All I could do was hug her while she raged. If there were more mystery boxes, we would open them together—we would pack up the snowshoer’s stuff together, too.

That night, when I was lying in bed with Em, it occurred to me that it had been about a month since my mother had climbed into bed with me. “Shh! Don’t say anything—just listen, sweetie,” my mom had whispered. She’d giggled like a little girl and said I was the love of her life. Those were her last words to me. Then my mother was gone; she had plans to keep, after midnight. It was a mile, straight up Twister, to the top of Bromley. Little Ray and the snowshoer had some serious climbing to do. I knew I would hear my mom whispering to me, and giggling like a little girl, for the rest of my life.

That was the same night Em had asked me if I was still stuck on her. I couldn’t speak, but we both knew I was. “Well, now is not the time,” Em had said, “but we’ll have to consider what we can do about that.”

My first night at the snowshoer’s since the apartment had become Em’s, I sensed it was still not the time for us to consider what we could do about my being stuck on her. We were lying in bed, holding hands. Em was telling me I couldn’t let Grace edit the way we separated and divorced, or allow her to edit where and when I was going to be with Matthew. I just listened. Em had more experience rejecting Grace’s edits than I did. Even knowing she wasn’t Em’s editor didn’t stop Grace from trying to edit Em.

I didn’t know that Em had been talking to Molly about what would be best for Matthew. Molly knew Grace was looking for a larger apartment in New York. Grace wasn’t planning to be a divorced woman living in Vermont. Her parents had a house in Manchester; one day, it would be Grace’s house. Grace and Matthew would come to Vermont—for weekends or school vacations, and to ski—but Matthew would be going to school in Manhattan, Molly pointed out. The old patroller was paying particular attention to the new skiers at Bromley; she kept an eye out for potential buyers of a second home.

“With all those bedrooms, it’ll have to be a whole family of skiers or a sports team,” Molly told Em.

“Matthew’s going to be a New Yorker, you know,” Em said to me in bed, squeezing my hand. “If we’re living here, it’ll be easy for him to stay with us—Matthew is used to us being together.”

“Okay,” I said. I was afraid of saying the wrong thing, or sounding too excited about the prospect of my living with Em.

It was no big deal to me how the Gallows pulled the plug on the Two Dykes’ skit about things to do with a penis. What I couldn’t forget was Em’s pantomime—how she would put an imaginary penis between her boobs or between her thighs, but nowhere else.

More recently, Em implied there were other things she could imagine doing with a penis—just not in her vagina. When Em was a kid, she had a feeling—“not as strong as a conviction,” was the way she’d put it—that she didn’t want a penis in her vagina. Was it wishful thinking, on my part, to imagine Em might not be adamant about what to do with a penis? She didn’t sound unwavering. “A penis is just a funny clitoris,” I’d heard Em say to Molly when they were washing dishes.

Em would be sixty-one in the coming year; I would be fifty-five. Because she was six years older, maybe Em could read my mind. “Molly and I have been talking about penises,” Em told me. It was not a conversation I could imagine lasting very long. “A clitoris is smaller than a penis, but a clitoris has almost eight thousand nerve endings—twice as many as a penis, kiddo,” Em said. I guess it was a longer conversation than I’d imagined. “A clitoris gets a hard-on, you know,” Em told me.

“Okay,” I said. I didn’t know what to say. It was Molly who told me a penis doesn’t have any muscles. Everyone knows a penis doesn’t have a brain. Em had stopped holding my hand.

“Well, now is not the time,” Em said again, “but I’m working on things to do with your funny clitoris.”

“Okay,” I said. There are these moments when you see the course of your life unfolding, and you feel powerless to alter it.

“And we’ll have to talk about your writing,” Em said.

“Okay,” I said. You see the road ahead, and you know you’ll follow it—your future feels as unalterable as your childhood, and you know how childhood works. You go along with it.

“You write about sex, you know—you describe having sex, in detail,” Em told me. “But whatever we decide to do with your penis, you won’t write about what we do—you won’t describe how we have sex, okay?” she asked.

“Okay,” I said. You are never over your childhood, not until you are under the train—unter dem Zug.

In the morning, I was still asleep when the phone rang. I woke up hearing Em talking—not knowing, at first, she was talking on the phone. “She shit in bed, you know—nothing peaceful about it,” Em was saying. “Her pussy was a subway station—it never slept,” Em said. “Do you have the wrong Jasmine?” Em asked the nurse at the home for assisted living, who was still apparently calling all of Jasmine’s contacts. “We called her Rush Hour Pussy—if she didn’t shit in bed when she died, you have another Jasmine. I’m sorry, but we don’t know her,” Em told the nurse. I was lying in bed with my whatchamacallit, looking forward to many mornings of waking up with Emily MacPherson.

Matthew’s fifth birthday—March 2, 1996—was my last night in the East Dorset house. I would miss the sauna and the guest bedrooms. When Grace and I had no more wall space for hanging Matthew’s pictures in the rest of the house, we hung them in the guest bedrooms. Wherever I would live, for the rest of my life, I would never have enough wall space for pictures of Matthew. For his fifth birthday, Molly spent the night in one of the guest bedrooms; Em and I spent the night in another one. Before that house was sold, Molly would spend a few more nights there, but Matthew’s fifth birthday was the last night in that house for Em and me.

Grace and I weren’t the only ones who got to spend time with Matthew alone, telling him how things would be when his mom and I separated and divorced. Matthew got to spend time alone with Em, and with Molly, too. Matthew was very particular about the details. He asked you to repeat yourself; he corrected you if you contradicted yourself. We went over the details again and again. Repetition isn’t comforting only to children.

I felt like a five-year-old when Molly went over the details with me. For as long as Matthew was in preschool in Manchester, he would be welcome to stay with Molly when his mom had to be in New York. Matthew had the most fun with Molly and with Em, and there was no knowing when the East Dorset house would be sold. If Matthew started kindergarten in Manchester that fall, there would always be room for Em and me and Matthew to stay with Molly. “For a few more years, Kid, Matthew won’t mind the communal sleeping arrangements,” the old patroller said.

I said I still didn’t mind the communal sleeping arrangements.

Molly knew I hadn’t seen my mother’s ghost in Aspen, at the Jerome. I didn’t expect my mom to make an appearance in the vicinity of East Sixty-fourth Street, but I admitted to Molly I was disheartened not to have seen Little Ray and the snowshoer in Vermont. “Where are they?” I asked her.

“Where they are isn’t a place, Kid,” the old patroller told me. “I see those two all the time, right here,” she said, touching her heart. I knew Molly wasn’t into ghosts; I didn’t doubt she saw those two in her heart. “The main thing, Kid, is that you’re going to be seeing only half as much of Matthew as you’re used to—if you’re lucky—and Matthew knows he’ll be seeing only half as much of you,” Molly said.

“I know,” I said. Em had warned me about this.

“Matthew can follow the seasons of the year, you know—he gets it, about the passage of time,” Em said.

“Matthew understands the sequence of time, Kid,” was the way the old patroller put it. Matthew understood what happened first, and what came next. He knew the order of events; he could follow stories, from their beginnings to their endings.

“When you’re alone with Matthew, don’t be sad—he knows when you’re sad, like I do,” Em told me. “Don’t let him know you’re sad because you’ll miss him, or that you’re thinking about how it’ll be for him to miss you,” Em said.

“I know,” I said. Naturally, the next time I was alone with Matthew, he asked me why I was sad. “I miss my mom and the snowshoer,” I said. We were lying on the futon in the TV room of the Manchester house, after dinner. I didn’t like to think about Molly’s intention to leave the Manchester house to me; she’d already told me. Matthew and I could hear Molly and Em talking in the kitchen, where they were washing the dishes.

“Grandma and the snowshoer look a lot younger than they were,” Matthew whispered.

“You’ve seen them?” I whispered back.

“Grandma and the snowshoer, in the sauna—naked!” Matthew whispered. “They’re still fooling around—they’re just much younger now,” he assured me. This was what Em meant about Matthew’s following the passage of time—his understanding the sequence of time, as Molly put it—even when time seemed to be working in reverse.

After Matthew fell asleep—in Molly’s big bed, where he loved to sleep, leaving the futon in the TV room for Em and me—I told the old patroller and Em what Matthew had told me. “He’s seen his grandma and the snowshoer—they’re still fooling around in the sauna, but Matthew said they look a lot younger now.” I didn’t say Matthew had seen the ghosts of those two. I knew Molly and Em weren’t ghost people. I knew ghosts could be younger than they were when they died, but what I’d learned about the rules for ghosts was that I knew nothing.

“When I see those two, they’re the age they were when they met—of course they’re still fooling around,” Molly said. “They’re the way they were when they both wore Ray’s clothes, Kid—when your mom and Mr. Barlow were the only ones who knew the snowshoer was meant to be a woman,” the old patroller said.

Em knew I was wondering why my mother hadn’t shown herself to me—why I hadn’t seen her. Nora had told Em how I missed my mom when I was a child—how I’d always wanted to see more of my mother than I did. When I was with my mom, I never doubted her love for me. Even now, I trusted I would see her—when the time was right, as she used to say. Em knew Nora exaggerated, at times. I’d learned what Nora also told Em—that my mother was the love of my life. As far as Nora knew, this was true.

When Em spoke to me, she was trying to make me feel better. “Your mom and the snowshoer know Matthew comes first—you’ll be the next to see those two, kiddo,” Em said, giving me a hug.

I tried to make Em feel better about the review of Bonkers Nathanson’s The Hand of God in the March 15 issue of Kirkus Reviews. It was such an overcautious review, so noncommittal in tone, it came to no conclusions. In the end, what were we to make of Nathanson himself? “He is clearly not at peace with his past, and he states that he is seeking admission to the Catholic Church”—that was putting it mildly, to make what Bonkers was seeking sound as innocent as applying to a school.

“What a limp-dick review!” Em was screaming, while I hugged her. In Em’s opinion, The Hand of God was a proselytizing call for a theocracy. “In a social democracy,” Em said, when she calmed down, “I wonder if you can count on the separation of church and state—I mean, if you can count on it actually working.”

I could count on the separation of church and state to get Em’s attention. I knew Kurt Vonnegut wanted to see America try socialism. But this was when I learned that Emily MacPherson, the author of Come Hang Yourself—the formerly nonspeaking member of Two Dykes, One Who Talks—was thinking about giving a little socialism a try. This was the beginning of my paying attention to Em’s interest in social democracy in Canada. From this moment, I was on the lookout for Em’s seagull imitations. Even the way Em watched the seagulls floating over Manhattan got my attention. I knew her seagull thing hadn’t always meant she was thinking about going back to Canada. A seagull’s seemingly directionless drifting had been Em’s way of pantomiming Ronald Reagan’s laissez-faire approach to AIDS; her seagull thing had been her way of portraying President Reagan as the Pontius Pilate of the AIDS epidemic, but Reagan wasn’t in the White House now. Even when Em was asleep, I watched her for signs she was drifting back to Canada—her arms spread like a seagull’s motionless wings, a faraway look in her eyes when she woke up.

It’s hard to write about how much I missed Matthew. Every time I said goodbye to him was hard—no matter how soon, or how long, it would be before I saw him again. By the fall, the East Dorset house had still not been sold. Matthew was going to kindergarten in Manchester, but Grace and I were in agreement that he would be starting first grade in Manhattan the following fall. We were in agreement about the things that mattered. The part about missing Matthew was the hard part—also for Grace—but Matthew was always excited to see me, and Molly and Em, too.

One night in Manchester, when Matthew and I were watching TV on the futon, I overheard Em and Molly talking in the kitchen; they must have been continuing their conversation about penises. I heard Em say it wasn’t complicated to take care of a thing with no muscles and no brain, just nerve endings. “It sounds like it’s easier than taking care of a dog,” the old patroller said. I can’t imagine what else they could have been talking about. Em and I were in agreement about the things that mattered, too.

Grace tried hard not to insert herself as an unwanted editor of Em’s Come Hang Yourself, which would be published in the spring. Em tried hard to ignore what was written about The Hand of God. Nathanson himself was not the reason Em would drift away to Canada. In December 1996, Bonkers Nathanson was baptized by John Cardinal O’Connor at St. Patrick’s Cathedral in New York. No, Em did not show up at St. Patrick’s with a box for Cardinal O’Connor; she’d not been invited to the private Mass, where Nathanson also received confirmation and First Communion from the ass-kissing cardinal. When Nathanson was asked why he’d converted to Catholicism, he would say that no religion matched the special role for forgiveness provided by the Catholic Church.

“I’ll say,” was all Em said. It was not Nathanson who would eventually compel Em to do her seagull thing—nor would it be John Cardinal O’Connor himself. O’Connor’s pro-life advocacy was a given; the cardinal relegated women to the childbirth role, and O’Connor’s relegations of the gay community were similarly dogmatic and doctrinaire. Cardinal O’Connor and the Catholic Church did not believe in the separation of church and state. As Nora knew, all you could do was try to control the damage they did.

That said, had Nora been alive—if she’d survived the Gallows Lounge shooting, and the comedy club were still kicking—Nora would have relegated Cardinal O’Connor’s baptizing of Bonkers Nathanson to “The News in English” part of the Two Dykes stand-up act, the part Nora referred to as “shit in the offing.” It certainly was a shit show, but Em didn’t move to Canada because of the private Mass O’Connor provided for Nathanson in St. Patrick’s Cathedral. The shit in the offing part happened later.

Soon after Bonkers Nathanson’s baptism, Em took what she called a “reconnaissance trip” to Toronto—this was in January. I knew the story of Em showing Nora the exterior of the house on Shaftesbury Avenue; she’d not shown Nora the inside. In her reconnaissance trip to Toronto, Em made plans to gut the interior of the house. She arranged to have her hateful father’s furniture and his dingy curtains carted off. She found someone to strip and sand and polish the old floorboards, and someone to paint the walls white. Em was away from New York for only a week, but it felt to me like the start of something longer; she’d taken a step toward making the house more fit to live in. “The Realtor told me it’ll make the house more sellable,” was what Em said about the renovations.

I didn’t doubt Em’s determination to try living with me, nor was I kidding myself; I knew Matthew was a big part of why Em wanted to try. “Don’t worry, I’m not leaving you guys—I’m just playing house,” Em told Matthew and me, about the renovations in Toronto. “I’m just thinking I might like to try a little socialism,” Em would say later, just to me.

That winter of 1997, there was a lot of driving to and from New York. With Matthew in preschool in Vermont, there was a lot of staying with Molly in the Manchester house, too. I was grateful to my mom for teaching me to ski, and grateful to the old patroller for making me keep skiing. Although I would never be better than an intermediate skier, Matthew and I would have fun skiing together for a few more years.

With all the driving back and forth between Vermont and New York, Em and I were often alone together in the car. I was usually the driver, because Em wanted to practice reading aloud. In the coming spring and summer, there would be public readings to promote Come Hang Yourself. “As a writer who is relatively new to speaking, you’ll have to find your reading voice,” Grace had forewarned Em. There was no mention of Madeline.

While Em and I had been taking turns reading the snowshoer’s notebooks aloud to each other, this was usually at night, when we were in bed. Mr. Barlow’s notebook entries were not linear in nature—they weren’t sequential. The little English teacher wasn’t keeping a diary; her notebook entries were her observations, not necessarily connected to one another. This was not ideal for reading aloud on long trips in a car—no narrative momentum.

I knew Em had been waiting for a certain moment when she would finally read Moby-Dick—an upheaval of some kind, as she’d put it, signified (in Em’s nonspeaking days) by her tipping over a coffee table. Between Em’s urgency to find her reading voice, and the renovations to her house in Toronto, Em had found the Moby-Dick moment she’d been waiting for. Lucky me, I was thinking—someone I loved would read Moby-Dick aloud to me again.

“You can see why the third-person omniscient voice is a safer voice for Em to be in,” the snowshoer had said.

I’d admired the third-person, deadpan omniscience of Em’s narration when I read Come Hang Yourself and gave Em my notes. I knew we were each other’s editors, for the foreseeable future—given that the little English teacher was gone. Before long, Em would find her reading voice in Moby-Dick—she was channeling Ishmael, the antithesis of a deadpan narrator. In those long car rides, listening to Em as Ishmael—giving voice to her most ferocious first-person—I thought Cardinal O’Connor was lucky. If the son of a bitch had baptized Bonkers Nathanson after Em’s long voyage on the Pequod—I mean, all the way to the doomed ship’s encounter with the white whale—Em as Ishmael might have held the ass-kissing cardinal accountable. Yet Em seemed to have let her grievances against Cardinal O’Connor go. A benign gesture—like Ishmael imagining that Queequeg seems to be saying to himself, “We cannibals must help these Christians.” We’ll see, I was thinking.

Ishmael’s first-person voice, as expansive as the sea itself, would affect more than the way Em read aloud. The pitch and timbre of Em’s speaking voice began to change. Even as a beginner, she’d spoken with intensity—as if she’d been channeling Nora. Since she’d met Ishmael, Em was channeling a sailor; her voice was lower and less strident, but she was no less intense. In fact, she sounded more forceful—more masculine than Nora.

“First-person male,” Grace called Em’s newfound reading and speaking voice. It seemed wrong to Grace that Em, who was so feminine in her appearance, should sound like a sailor, but I felt differently about the change in Em. She’d not just found her voice in reading Moby-Dick aloud; aboard the Pequod, Em had found and embraced a bigger world.

In the strong, low voice in which she read aloud to me—“ ‘It was the whiteness of the whale that above all things appalled me’ ”—Em also said, “Stop the car, I have to pee.” (No wonder—with all the reading aloud, Em was drinking a lot of water.) And when Em read Moby-Dick to me, I thought of Emmanuelle—the high school student who’d been charged with exposing herself, mooning and flashing her titties on the Swasey Parkway.

The “Police Report” had cited “an outrage to public decency,” but I was just embarrassed. At thirty-eight, I’d not known Emmanuelle was a high school kid. She’d been reading Moby-Dick to my grandmother. Emmanuelle was the one who found Nana—dead in bed, with that big book. I still wondered if Emmanuelle had noticed Nana’s thumb between the pages—if Emmanuelle knew where in Moby-Dick my grandmother was reading when she died.

In 1980, when Nana died, Emmanuelle might have been as young as sixteen—she couldn’t have been older than eighteen, I was thinking, when Em interrupted her reading in the car. “You’re thinking about Emmanuelle, aren’t you?” Em asked me.

“You could probably go to jail for sleeping with Emmanuelle—Moby-Dick is not an excuse, sweetie,” my mom had told me.

“I don’t think Emmanuelle is that young, Ray—I don’t think it’s illegal to sleep with her,” Molly had said.

I told Em I wasn’t thinking about Emmanuelle “in that way.” I just wanted to ask Emmanuelle which part of the Pequod’s voyage had been the last part for my grandmother; I wanted to know what Nana was rereading to herself when she died. I knew Em would have said it was okay, if I’d been thinking about Emmanuelle in that way.

We’d talked about this. “We’re too old to sleep with young women anymore, but it’s okay to think about them—in that way—and it’s okay to look at them,” Em had told me.

“Okay,” I’d said.

Once, when Em saw me looking at a young woman—in that way—she said, “I saw her first.” This had since become what we said when we caught each other just looking. In truth, we didn’t look at other women a lot.

It was a long winter, with a late spring, in 1997. There were uncounted hours of reading Moby-Dick in the car. Em had just finished Chapter 111, “The Pacific,” when she woke me one night—crying out in her sleep, as Captain Ahab cries out in his, “ ‘The White Whale spouts thick blood!’ ” When I woke her up, and she’d calmed down, there was another matter on her mind. “You know, kiddo—she would be in her thirties now,” Em said.

“Who would be?” I asked her.

“Emmanuelle—she’s thirty-three, maybe thirty-five,” Em told me.

“I know,” I said.

“I’m just thinking out loud, kiddo. If Emmanuelle finished reading Moby-Dick to herself, she’s a real reader. Emmanuelle will show up at one of your readings,” Em said. I repeated that I wasn’t thinking about Emmanuelle in that way, but Em said it didn’t matter what I thought about her. “If Emmanuelle kept reading Moby-Dick, she has staying power—she’ll show up one day,” Em said.

I was learning that Em as Ishmael made herself clear. But Em was still learning about six-year-olds. Matthew took what you said literally. Em had told us she was playing house in Toronto. Matthew pressed her for more details. To a six-year-old, playing house sounds like fun. But where was Toronto, and how did you play house? Matthew wanted to know. Em’s explanation of playing house to Matthew was a revelation to me. She sounded like Em as Ishmael, or maybe she was Em as a fiction writer—or both.

“Toronto is in Canada, a foreign country with a different kind of government. For some reason, the Queen of England is also the Queen of Canada,” Em began. Not a word about social democracy, so far.

“But where is it?” Matthew asked; he didn’t care about the kind of government, or the queen.

“If you drive to an airport and go in an airplane, it only takes as long to get to Toronto as it takes to drive to Vermont from New York. My mystery house isn’t far away,” Em said.

“Why is it a mystery house—what’s the mystery?” Matthew asked. Now maybe we would get somewhere, I thought.

It would take a while for Matthew to imagine the house Em had in mind. It would take me a while, too, whereas Em was the kind of fiction writer who was good at foreshadowing—she always knew where she was going; she saw the path ahead of herself. Em’s house in Toronto was no mystery to her.

“Imagine an empty house, no furniture. The rooms don’t know what they are—no one has told the rooms what they’re for,” Em said. “Imagine you’re a room, but you don’t know if you’re supposed to be a bedroom or a living room or a dining room,” Em went on, creating sympathy for the rooms.

“The poor rooms!” Matthew cried, a compassionate child.

“Well, the bathrooms know they’re bathrooms—what toilets are for is no mystery—and a kitchen knows what it’s for,” Em said. “But this house has two kitchens—one is upstairs—so the kitchens are kind of confused, too,” Em told us.

“Why is there a kitchen upstairs?” Matthew asked her.

“There used to be two families living in the house,” Em explained, “but the family living downstairs never saw the family who lived upstairs. The family living downstairs only heard the upstairs family—when someone was walking around, or when someone went up or down the back stairs,” Em told us.

This wasn’t the best story to tell a six-year-old, Grace said. Matthew had nightmares about an unseen family living above him. Matthew swore he could hear them, although there was no one walking around above the five upstairs bedrooms in the East Dorset house—and there was no upstairs in Molly’s Manchester house, where Matthew occasionally had the same nightmare.

One night, when Matthew and Em and I were at Molly’s, Matthew slept with me on the futon in the TV room. I knew he liked sleeping with Molly, in her bed, better. I thought Matthew might be worrying about the upstairs family, but it turned out he just wanted to tell me what was up with my mom and the snowshoer. “Those two don’t hang out at the house anymore—I only see them at Molly’s,” Matthew told me. “They must know the house is for sale, and that you’re not there anymore,” Matthew said.

“I see,” I said, wishing I could see them.

“They’re not getting any older—all those two do is goof around,” Matthew assured me.

Matthew must have talked to Molly and Em about seeing them, because both Em and the old patroller spoke to me. “Where they are isn’t a place, Kid,” Molly had already told me, touching her heart. Now Molly made it more clear; those two must be hanging out at her house because they could see all of us there. It was Matthew and Molly and Em and me that mattered to those two—not where we were, the old patroller said.

I just wished I could see my mom and the snowshoer, I admitted to Em. “You know those two—they’ll figure something out,” Em told me. “Those two know how to make a plan and stick to it.”

There was more evidence of stick-to-itiveness in the snowshoer’s notebooks, not that we needed more evidence; Em and I stopped reading for the night when we came across Elliot’s entry about the Rock Garden. “I can carry Ray out of the Rock Garden, if she can’t make it,” the snowshoer had written.

Near the top of Upper Twister was what Molly also called the Rock Garden, where the old patroller and I had noticed how the climbers’ tracks changed. My mother must have had some trouble on the second steep part of Twister. Molly and I had seen only the snowshoer’s tracks the rest of the way. Elliot Barlow had carried Little Ray piggyback to the top.

“Those two are always piggybacking each other everywhere,” Matthew had said of their younger ghosts.

“That’s just what those two do—they love each other,” was all I could say to Matthew about their piggybacking.

I had almost everything I wanted, I was thinking. I had Matthew’s love, and Em was seriously trying to live with me. I just wished I could see those two—I missed them, and their fooling around.