When the station had exhausted its election coverage, I saw the news about Otto on the TV. Toby Goode had his arm around the gray-haired Billy, who was sobbing—Billy’s head had fallen on Toby’s shoulder. Notwithstanding the simultaneous translation—the German anchorwoman was speaking—I could hear my half brother’s voice. “I saw Otto in the rearview mirror—how he’d slumped in the seat, the way Billy had to hold him upright, but I saw Otto’s eyes,” Toby tried to say. Then he stopped speaking; he couldn’t say the rest.
The German anchorwoman said everything else. Toby Goode and his backup dads had been at a party; they’d left early. Otto had the heart attack in the backseat—“der Herzanfall,” I heard the German anchorwoman say. The video wasn’t clear. It looked like the paramedics were moving Otto from Toby’s car to the ambulance—“zu spät,” the German anchorwoman said. That was clear—the ambulance was too late.
I went back to the window, where Em was watching the German students. Em could see I was crying; she knew I wasn’t crying for Romney. It was good news that Obama won, but that wasn’t the only news. We just went on watching the happy German students—they were still singing.
That November in Munich, I was almost seventy-one; Em was already seventy-seven. Maybe we went on watching those German students because the inexorable march of time had caught up to Otto; maybe Otto’s mortality made Em and me imagine our own. That November in Munich, when we heard Otto had died in L.A., Toby Goode was thirty-five. Matthew was twenty-one.
There was no time difference in Toronto, where Em and I watched the 2016 U.S. election results on TV. In immigration terms, I’d become a permanent resident of Canada in 2015. I would be eligible to apply for Canadian citizenship in 2018. Em was already a dual citizen of Canada and the United States and I would become one in December 2019. Em and I had voted in the 2016 U.S. presidential election, via absentee ballot, for Hillary Clinton. Matthew was with us in Toronto for that election night; he’d voted for Clinton in New York.
A former girlfriend of Matthew’s watched the election results with us. Matthew had met Carol on the subway when she was a Bishop Strachan student; Em and I agreed that Carol looked cute in her BSS uniform, in that short skirt with her knees showing. “Nice knees—I saw her knees first,” I remembered Em saying to me. I used to wonder, when Matthew and Carol were no longer dating each other, if Matthew missed seeing her in the BSS uniform. “You miss seeing Carol in the BSS uniform, kiddo—I know I do,” Em told me.
Carol was Matthew’s age, twenty-five, when we watched Hillary Clinton lose to Donald Trump; we’d not seen Carol in a BSS uniform for six or seven years. I was almost seventy-five and Em eighty-one. On that election night, I might have wished that Em was still not speaking, but Em was making up for lost time.
“Trump is a pussy-grabber,” Carol repeated, for the fourth or fifth time. In her BSS uniform, or not, Carol was angry about a self-described pussy-grabber going to the White House.
Em was angry at our fellow Democrats and about Trump’s pussy-grabbing. In 2012, Obama got more votes than Hillary. Who were those Democrats who didn’t show up for Mrs. Clinton? “All of them weren’t crybabies for Bernie,” Em was saying. I was a registered voter in Vermont; I’d always voted for Bernie. We’d all wanted Bernie, but Bernie hadn’t been nominated. The Democrats who wouldn’t vote for Hillary were like the ones who didn’t vote for Humphrey in 1968, Em was saying. “Those Democrats gave us Nixon, these Democrats gave us Trump!” Em was raving.
At two in the morning, in the Trump headquarters in New York, there were yahoos in coats and ties and MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN baseball caps. They were chanting for Hillary to be locked up. Em essentially said Trump didn’t win the election. “Our fucking fellow Democrats lost it—we gave it to him!” Em was screaming.
“It’s a good thing you two moved to Canada, so you can get away from shit like this,” Matthew said, giving Em a hug.
“We can’t get away from shit like this, Matthew—there’s no getting away from this shit,” she said, not letting him go.
“I know,” he told her.
“Pussy-grabbers!” Carol was calling the yahoos in baseball caps on TV, where the chanting to lock up Hillary just went on.
I remembered what the snowshoer had written in a notebook. Mr. Barlow was quoting Alexander Hamilton, who called the voting public a “great beast.” The great beast had spoken, I was thinking, while Em and Matthew went on hugging each other, and Carol kept watching the celebration at the pussy-grabber’s headquarters in New York. The way Matthew had to bend over Em when he hugged her made it appear he was whispering in her ear, but he spoke loudly enough for me to hear him, and Matthew was looking at me when he said what Em and I were only thinking to ourselves—we couldn’t have said it.
“I don’t really mean this, you know, but it’s a good thing Molly isn’t around—the pussy-grabbing would piss her off,” Matthew said, bursting into tears. All I could do was hug him and Em; I would have lost it if I’d tried to say anything. The three of us knew Molly had loved Bernie, but the old patroller wouldn’t have been a crybaby about it. Poor Carol. She knew what wrecks we were whenever one of us mentioned Molly. Carol had heard about my mother and the old patroller—“my two grandmas,” Matthew called my mom and Molly. Carol muted the volume on the Trump headquarters in New York, where the yahoos in coats and ties were still chanting for Hillary to be locked up. We could only imagine what Molly might have thought of Trump and his pussy-grabbing supporters.
In the summer of 2019, Em would be back in Barolo, where she’d last been at the Disastri Festival with Nora. We were both invited to the Collisioni Festival—the Collisions Festival was for writers and rock bands, but the damn déjà vu was in the air for Em. One night, for old times’ sake, it was expected we would attend a special showing of the Disastri documentary. “If old age doesn’t kill me, kiddo, the nostalgia could do it,” Em said. That July in Barolo, Em was almost eighty-four; I was seventy-seven. Some of Em’s pantomime fans were at the Disastri screening, where Em had to see and hear Nora as Anthony Quinn, talking about the dead-pudenda dance in Italian.
Matthew, who by then was twenty-eight, had flown with us to Milan; he had his own room where we were staying, at the Albergo dell’Agenzia in Pollenzo. He liked writers and rock music. The writers’ onstage interviews and the book signings were daytime events, the rock concerts at night—all in Barolo. The parties and dinners were in the surrounding area; everywhere we went, we were driven from and back to the Albergo. Our driver, Bella, was a beautiful young woman; she was a good driver. “I saw her first,” I whispered in Em’s ear, just to tease her—Em was usually quicker to say it than I was.
“Matthew saw her first, kiddo,” Em whispered back. We were in the backseat of Bella’s car. Matthew sat up front, in the passenger seat—riding shotgun next to the beautiful Bella.
“What are you two whispering about?” Matthew asked us. “It’s embarrassing—they still behave like newlyweds,” he said to Bella. The three of us loved to hear her laugh; for such a pretty girl, Bella had a hee-haw like a donkey.
“Matthew says he’s too old for Bella,” Em told me later. I couldn’t imagine Matthew as too old for anyone. Had Bella said she was too young for him? I was wondering.
At our book signing after the Disastri screening, a tall and gloomy guy, a pantomime fan, told Em he’d liked her better before she started speaking. “It’s a compliment, kiddo,” Em said, because she saw the way I was looking at the guy. The women wearing the hangman’s nooses—not to mention the Nora look-alikes—were older now. The hangman’s noose was not a welcoming look for an older woman. For the Disastri audience, Em was mostly signing Italian translations of Come Hang Yourself—in Italian, Vieni ad impiccarti—although some of the Nora look-alikes, and just normal-looking readers, were asking Em to sign Noi figli di lesbiche. The literal translation, We Offspring of Lesbians, made Em cringe. The beautiful Bella had translated the title in the car. I’d thought Em was going to barf in the backseat, but the way Matthew laughed made Bella start hee-hawing. Our pretty driver’s hee-haw had won us over.