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.