“The ‘Vengeance is Mine’ bit,” Em repeated, in the deadpan way Nora would have said it at the Gallows.
“Deuteronomy, definitely—32:35. It’s more of the ‘says the Lord’ bit—the good old ‘heap coals of fire on his head’ bit,” the young priest explained to us, making us almost feel sorry for Cardinal Law, given everything that was in store for him. “Proverbs 25:22, if I’m not mistaken,” the young priest modestly added. I liked him. He was doing his best to make Em feel better—with the “coals of fire on his head” part, and all the rest of it.
When I got up from our table to pay the bill, Em was telling the young priest we were writers. I could see him writing down our names and the titles of our books. The priest was writing on the GOOD RIDDANCE sign. When I found out the priest had paid for everything, I went back to our table. Our heaven-sent priest had departed. Em told me he’d left the way he came—a young man in a hurry. “It’s a heap of the ‘says the Lord’ bit, if you ask me,” was all Em would say about it. At least she was still speaking.
Outside, on the Yonge Street sidewalk, the young priest had disappeared—if he really was a priest, if we actually saw him. Em was annoyed that he’d taken her sign, whoever he was. I saw our reflection in a storefront window. I was wearing a pair of my Roots sweatpants, what I usually wrote in—we were just an old couple, still able to walk. Em saw us reflected in the window. “It’s a good thing we’re fiction writers, kiddo, or they might make us retire,” Em said.
Our reflections in the storefront window were transparent—we could see through each other. We knew we wouldn’t retire; writers can’t stop writing. But one of us would die first. I hoped it would be me—my head on my desk, in the middle of a sentence Em would finish for me. She knew me well enough. I didn’t want to find Em with her head on her desk. I couldn’t imagine finishing Em’s last sentence. There are no mountains to climb in Toronto—no last chairlifts for Em and me, only last sentences.
What do we want most when we’re children, and crave more when we’re old? Consistency is what counts the most. We want the people we love to be consistent, to stay the same—don’t we? I can’t really tell Em what I feel about my mom, because Em has no reason to love her awful mother—nor should she. We’re alone in the way we love our mothers, or in the way we don’t.
When I see Little Ray on the subway, when she and the snowshoer are just fooling around, I miss her when she was even younger than that—before she met Molly or the snowshoer, when I was a child and I was already learning to miss her. Now that my mom is gone, I miss what was constant about her—or the most constant thing about her. When I was a child, my missing her was the most constant thing in my life. You are never over your childhood, not until you are under the train—unter dem Zug.
The older I get, this is what I remember best about my mother. I’d told her I didn’t like the dark. Kids generally don’t like the dark, do they? I said I didn’t like the dark, or words to that effect.
“Hug the dark, sweetie, and the dark will hug you back,” my mom said. “But the dark has other dates to make, sweetie—if you don’t hold her tight, she won’t wait around all night.”
“The dark is a she?” I asked her, but my mom was gone. Little Ray didn’t wait around. She just vanished, like a ghost.
I try not to think about the vanishing.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Tom Best
Kristin Cochrane
Dean Cooke
Emily Copeland
Giustino De Blasio
Amy Edelman
Kay Eldredge
Gail Godwin
Ron Hansen
Khalida Hassan
Brendan Irving
Colin Irving
Eva Everett Irving
Janet Irving
Jonathan Karp
Bayard Kennett
Gen. Charles Krulak
Jon O’Brien
Anne Tate Pearce
Dick Peller
Anna von Planta
Theo Salter
Dr. Martin Schwartz
Anna Scott, Aspen Historical Society
William Scoular
Jackie Seow
Nick Spengler
Cleve Thurber
Grant Turner
Martha Turner
Dr. Abraham Verghese
Kate Wells
Edmund White
Kip Williams
Bill Wolvin
And all the good times at the Hotel Jerome.
And special thanks to Geri Lipschultz—my student in the fiction workshop at Iowa in 1974, and my longtime friend. In 1982, I read Geri’s first novel in manuscript. I wrote her about it; I recommended some agents. There was a character named Em, a mime in a New York club. Geri’s mime named Em must have gotten into my head, because—forty years later—I created a very different character, but my nonspeaking pantomimist Em owes a debt to Geri Lipschultz, whose mime named Em came first and never went away. Thank you, Geri.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
JOHN IRVING was born in Exeter, New Hampshire, in 1942. His first novel, Setting Free the Bears, was published in 1968, when he was twenty-six. He competed as a wrestler for twenty years and coached wrestling until he was forty-seven. In 1992, he was inducted into the National Wrestling Hall of Fame in Stillwater, Oklahoma.
Irving has been nominated for a National Book Award three times, winning in 1980 for The World According to Garp. In 2000, he won the Oscar for Best Adapted Screenplay for The Cider House Rules. In 2013, he won a Lambda Literary Award for In One Person. Internationally renowned, his books have been translated into more than thirty-five languages. A Prayer for Owen Meany is his bestselling novel, in every language.
A dual citizen of the United States and Canada, John Irving lives in Toronto. The Last Chairlift is his fifteenth novel.
www.SimonandSchuster.co.uk/Authors/John-Irving
@ScribnerUKALSO BY JOHN IRVING
Setting Free the Bears
The Water-Method Man
The 158-Pound Marriage
The World According to Garp
The Hotel New Hampshire
The Cider House Rules
A Prayer for Owen Meany
A Son of the Circus
The Imaginary Girlfriend
Trying to Save Piggy Sneed
A Widow for One Year
My Movie Business
The Cider House Rules: A Screenplay
The Fourth Hand
A Sound Like Someone Trying Not to Make a Sound
Until I Find You
Last Night in Twisted River
In One Person
Avenue of Mysteries
First published in the United States by Simon & Schuster, Inc., 2022
First published in Great Britain by Scribner, an imprint of Simon & Schuster UK Ltd, 2022
Copyright © Garp Enterprises, Ltd, 2022
In essay form, a small portion of the text herein referencing Moby-Dick was previously published in the summer 2013 issue of Brick.
Excerpts from My Father’s Dragon by Ruth Stiles Gannett are reprinted from the work originally published by Random House, New York, in 1948. Additional permissions granted by Swift Press.
SCRIBNER and design are registered trademarks of The Gale Group, Inc., used under licence by Simon & Schuster Inc.
The right of John Irving to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988.
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Hardback ISBN: 978-1-4711-7908-2
eBook ISBN: 978-1-4711-7910-5
Audio ISBN: 978-1-4711-9207-4
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either a product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual people living or dead, events or locales is entirely coincidental.
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