“Not to change the subject, but Bella knows something about Giuseppe,” Matthew told us.
“My girlfriend went out with him. She calls him Pino, which means ‘pine tree’—she says he has a little penis!” Bella said. She was gripping the steering wheel with both hands, but she wiggled the pinky finger of her right hand. “The littlest one she’s seen, since she saw her baby brother’s—he’s no pine tree!” Bella cried, her pinky still wiggling. Em and I were happy to hear Bella’s story, and her hee-hawing.
In December of that year, 2019, I would obey the notice to appear at the government office for Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada in Scarborough—this was for my swearing-in ceremony. As an old Yankee from New England, I wondered what my grandmother might have said—to hear me swear to be faithful and bear true allegiance to Queen Elizabeth II. The same day I was sworn in, I took the Oath of Citizenship with eighty-three new immigrants, from thirty-five countries. I’m guessing there were families who’d been granted Protected Persons status by the Immigration and Refugee Board of Canada. There must have been families who’d suffered hardships—they’d endured a more dangerous life than mine, before getting to Canada. A young girl spoke to me; she was only twelve or thirteen, wondering what my story was. “What about you, Mister?” she asked me. “What are you running away from?”
That July night in Barolo, our last night at the Albergo, Em and I were just lying in bed. We weren’t in need of Protected Persons status. We were just feeling old. We weren’t too old—we were just too old to be roadies. I almost said we were too old to be writers, still singing for our supper, but I didn’t.
“There are German students somewhere, kiddo—they’re still singing,” Em said. I hoped she would keep saying it. I almost said the nostalgia could finish us off, but I didn’t. From the bedroom next door, we’d heard Matthew and Bella—they’d been singing Thirty Seconds to Mars songs to each other.
Now even the hee-haws had stopped; everything suddenly seemed more serious. I thought Em was asleep when she rolled closer to me, holding my penis. “You know, kiddo—we’re both lesbians’ children,” Em said.
“I know,” I said. This I didn’t hesitate to say.
That was when Em told me what Molly had told her. “Don’t tell Adam until I’m dead, but Ray and I were just bluffing about shooting Zim—speaking from our hearts isn’t the same as doing it,” Molly said. As the old patroller put it, if she and Ray had been serious about shooting Zim or me, they would have done it with a .22, not a shotgun. At close range, that twenty-gauge would have blown off Zim’s leg—or mine. Not even Little Ray or Molly would have gone that far, except in their hearts.
It made me wonder if Nora and Em would have shot me—if Em really would have pulled the trigger, the way Nora had said. “I keep thinking about that. I hope I wouldn’t have,” Em told me, cuddling closer, not letting go.
53. THE VOICE ON THE SUBWAY; THE SILENCE IN THE ROCK GARDEN
Henrik hadn’t written Em when Nora died. I had written him after our cousin’s death, but he hadn’t responded. Henrik had always been wary of Molly; when the old patroller died in January 2006, Henrik’s inner writer was unleashed. He wrote me at the snowshoer’s East Sixty-fourth Street address, and he wrote Em twice, sending the same letter to Em’s Toronto address and in care of her New York publisher; that was why Grace saw it.
Henrik wrote that he was going to rent a U-Haul truck and come to Manchester to get his guns, or he was sending a couple of “college boys” to get them for him. Henrik offered no condolences for Molly. When we heard about the old patroller, Em and I were in Canada. We came back to the States and went through Molly’s Manchester house, with Matthew and Grace. Naturally, there were things of sentimental value. Each of us took things we wanted. We could have taken a gun or two, before Henrik or the college boys drove my uncles’ arsenal of weapons down to Dixie, but Em and I were done with guns, and Grace had never wanted one. Like most boys, Matthew wanted to have a gun, but he was fourteen; he was too young to have a say in the matter.
“We’re just keeping the guns for Henrik, sweetie—we’re not going to start a war or anything,” my mom had told me, but there were more guns hidden away in the Manchester house than I’d imagined. The old patroller had left the house to me. I knew my mother had arranged this. Except for Molly’s twenty-gauge, the guns had belonged to Uncle Johan and Uncle Martin. Henrik was champing at the bit to have them.
“That’s a shitload of lethal weapons, kiddo,” Em said, when she saw the guns gathered together. “Everyone in Vermont—not to mention, the deer—will be safer when these guns are down in Dixie.” Em and I never said the name of the southern state where Henrik had gone to college, just to play lacrosse—the same state Henrik served in the U.S. House of Representatives. Not saying the name of Henrik’s state was almost as good as forgetting it. We wished we’d never known Henrik in the first place.
Em reminded me that Henrik had married a second time, when he was in his forties; he’d had no children with his first wife, and only one with the second. Nora had hoped Henrik’s kid would be a girl. Henrik would have nothing to do with a daughter, Nora said—she meant a girl might have a fighting chance to be herself. If Henrik had a boy, Nora said, the poor kid would be like his father.
The boy was twentysomething when he and a lacrosse teammate took turns driving the U-Haul truck all the way to Vermont. Henrik had named him Johan, after his father, but the kid was a Johan in name only—he lacked the Norwegian’s good nature. I’d told Matthew the stories—how Henrik had bullied me, how Nora had bullied him back. Matthew was dying to meet Henrik, but Em and I doubted the old congressman would do the gunrunning himself. We wondered if young Johan might be one of the college boys. Henrik had written once more, only to me. “We call him Johnny,” Henrik wrote. “The Johan didn’t go over big, not down here.” That was the last I would hear from Henrik—not counting the consequences of his party’s policies.
Johnny called Grace’s number when the gunrunners got to Molly’s driveway. Grace’s parents had passed away; their house in Manchester was Grace’s now. Arthur Barrett had beaten the ball drop in Times Square; he’d permanently put his pajamas on before the ball could drop again. Grace and Matthew met the two lacrosse teammates in Molly’s driveway. When the old patroller died, I just knew I was done with Vermont and that driveway, where my mom’s mission of mercy was tragically averted.
Grace said the southern college boys were the worst male jocks imaginable. “They’re from a subculture of misogynist insouciance—women make them slouch,” Grace said.
“Lax bros,” Matthew called the gunrunners. Johnny sounded like he was a hundred percent Henrik.
“The chill attitude, the backward baseball caps—those boys would have beaten up Matthew if I hadn’t been there,” Grace went on.
“They would have raped you if I hadn’t been there!” Matthew told his mom.
“Don’t go there, Matthew—raging puberty is ahead of you. You’ll be there soon enough,” Grace said.
Em and I were staying away from the raging puberty business. We were in the East Sixty-fourth Street apartment, trying not to think about what had happened to the old patroller. We’d been moving to Toronto in a part-time fashion, mostly because we wanted to see as much of Molly in Vermont as possible. Em and I wanted to divide our time between Toronto and the snowshoer’s pied-à-terre for as long as Matthew was in school in New York.