When Matthew was alone, he played with Oscar—as if the naked gold man were an immovable kind of action figure. Oscar wasn’t a posable soldier or superhero—Oscar had no jointed limbs—but what mattered most to Matthew was that Oscar had no uncertainty about his name. “Your name is Oscar,” Em and I heard Matthew tell the statuette. There was no mention of Manolo.
As for Em’s protest plans at St. Patrick’s, I not only said I would go with her—I volunteered to carry the more inflammatory of the protest signs. If I was the one holding FUCK THE DEMOCRATS, maybe the cops or the Secret Service would arrest me first. Maybe a woman in a SILENCE=DEATH T-shirt—even if she’d brought a GOOD RIDDANCE sign to Cardinal O’Connor’s funeral—would be perceived as less of a threat to our fragile democracy. And while Em was putting on her shorts and her running shoes, I reread to her the snowshoer’s repetitious notebook entries on the subject of the First Amendment—knowing Em was as sick of hearing about the First Amendment as I was.
I recited the clause Mr. Barlow had loved best: “ ‘Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion’ ”—that was the clause the Catholic Church ignored. The First Amendment’s protection of “the free exercise” of religion was not in jeopardy, the snowshoer always said. Our freedom of religion was assured. What was at risk, in America, was our freedom from religion, I was saying—when Em kicked off her running shoes, which I had just watched her put on.
“I know,” Em said. I wanted to spare her the pointlessness of her protesting at St. Patrick’s, and she knew it. I followed her into the bedroom, where she took off and kicked away her shorts. Before she got in bed, she took off Nora’s T-shirt. She didn’t have to tell me to put it back in the drawer. “I’ve had enough of the damn déjà vu, kiddo,” Em was saying.
“I know,” I said, sitting beside her on the bed. “I’m still stuck on you, you know,” I told Em.
“And I’m still of the opinion that I would rather be with a penis—with your penis, anyway,” Em replied. “It’s a good thing you don’t have an Oscar, if you know what I mean,” she added.
“I know what you mean,” I said, holding her hand.
When Em fell asleep, I went into the kitchen and decided what to do with the protest signs. I would regret getting rid of FUCK THE DEMOCRATS. Our fellow Democrats would do something to disappoint us again. I had sufficient common sense to keep the GOOD RIDDANCE sign, although I put it on a high shelf—above one of the kitchen cabinets, where Em would need a stepladder to reach it. Maybe that’ll make her think twice about it, I was thinking. But I didn’t doubt that someone would surely die—someone who had it coming. I didn’t doubt that Em would find another deserving candidate for the GOOD RIDDANCE sign.
Along with my not having an Oscar for a penis, it was another good thing that Em was depressed for a few days following the funeral. She wouldn’t watch TV; she didn’t read the newspapers. By the time Em heard the news about Cardinal Bernard Law, she was over her inclination to protest. Cardinal Law was the archbishop of Boston; he delivered the homily at O’Connor’s funeral. To be fair, many of the mourners in St. Patrick’s didn’t know how bad Cardinal Bernard Law would turn out to be. Law got a standing ovation for praising O’Connor’s “constant reminder that the church must always be unambiguously pro-life.” The TV cameras in the cathedral had focused on the Clintons and the Gores, who at first remained seated. They eventually stood, reluctantly—or so it was reported. In more than one account I read, the Clintons had refrained from applause, but I was worried Em would have a shit fit because our fellow Democrats had not stayed sitting down. Yet there were no cries to bring back the FUCK THE DEMOCRATS sign—not then.
It would be a couple of years before the scandal of child molestation by Catholic priests implicated the archbishop of Boston. For years, Cardinal Bernard Law had transferred abusive priests to other parishes; he never told the parishioners or informed the police. He’d protected the priests, not their victims. Cardinal Law was vilified in Boston. At the end of 2002, the discredited archbishop flew to Rome, where the pope accepted his resignation. In 2003, Cardinal Law was taken to task by the Massachusetts attorney general. Over sixty years, a thousand children had been abused by more than two hundred priests in the Boston archdiocese. Cardinal Law had known about it; the former archbishop of Boston had suppressed any publicity about it.
The Vatican did more for Cardinal Law than kick him upstairs. In 2004, Cardinal Bernard Law would be appointed as high priest of the Basilica of St. Mary Major—one of Rome’s most prestigious churches. Law would serve on the Vatican committee in charge of advising the pope on the assignments of bishops, notwithstanding that the former archbishop of Boston had been disgraced for covering up the child abuse of priests. His disgrace didn’t matter to the Vatican, where Cardinal Law was rewarded for his staunch defense of church orthodoxy.
What would Nora have said? “Holy crap,” was all Em said about it. Holy crap, I thought.
By 2004, Em and I were spending more time in Toronto—we were learning to be more like Canadians. Or we were learning to let go of the things we couldn’t change; we just did our best with those things we could do something about. At least this was what Em said we were doing. It did seem to me that we were trying to be more like Canadians, because we both liked Canada—and we liked being in Toronto—but it also seemed to me that Em and I were demonstrating we were the little English teacher’s students. Mr. Barlow had been more than our copy editor. As writers, Em and I were the snowshoer’s disciples. More and more, the writing was the only thing that mattered—besides Matthew.
When you get older, you find out how good (or not) your teachers were. Elliot Barlow had taught Em and me to care about the writing, not only about our writing. Melville had listened to Schiller: “Keep true to the dreams of thy youth” was good advice for a writer. As fiction writers, Em and I had our own gods to listen to, but the snowshoer gave us a manageable rule: what applies to fiction is relevant to other writing. You have to be truthful to time and place; you can’t leave out anything important. Lies of omission count as lies, right?
In June 2004, Em and I knew Ronald Reagan had died—it was a while before we got around to reading his obituary in The New York Times. Em and I were in no hurry to read about him. Reagan had been secluded from the public since 1994, when it was learned he had Alzheimer’s. His death didn’t mean much to Em and me; we’d never liked him. By the time Reagan died, he was long dead and gone to us. We’d hated him enough when he was president. We didn’t run to get the stepladder when we heard he died. The GOOD RIDDANCE sign stayed put, but there was no forgiving Reagan’s willful silence about the AIDS epidemic. “Government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem,” he’d said. How easily he abdicated his responsibility.
Reagan’s aw-shucks, nice-guy demeanor had belied his moral absenteeism. A lot of Americans didn’t care about the gay men who died of AIDS. Like Ronald Reagan, those Americans who didn’t care about those gay men already seemed dead to Em and me.
Reagan’s obituary in The New York Times made Em miss the Gallows Lounge; she said his death deserved a political comedy club. The obit was laden with Reagan’s backstory; Em and I took turns reading it aloud to each other. Em began, but she got bogged down in Reagan’s radio career. It made Em cry to imagine we might have had a president who cared about the AIDS victims, if Reagan had stayed in the broadcasting business. It was my turn to read, Em said. She’d gagged on a phrase in one of the opening paragraphs—a line about Reagan’s promising America “a return to greatness.” Nora said Americans were obsessed with their own greatness. Many American politicians ended their speeches by telling us how great we were—the ideologues always assured us we could be great again.