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.