“Is Emmanuelle okay?” I asked the nurse.

  “Stop thinking about Emmanuelle, sweetie!” my mother called from the futon in the TV room, between sobs. On the phone, I heard the nurse sigh; her sigh should have prepared me for her misunderstanding my question.

  “As far as we know, Emmanuelle has been behaving herself,” the older nurse said stiffly. I listened to the disapproving nurse a little longer; there were “the usual arrangements” to be made. My mom was crying more softly; I could hear Molly’s voice, but not what the snowcat operator was saying. I spoke as quietly as I could into the phone.

  “Please tell Emmanuelle I’m sorry she was the one who found her,” I said. Had she found Nana’s thumb between the pages?

  “Forget Emmanuelle—she’s a stripper, sweetie!” my mother screamed from the TV room.

  “Emmanuelle was upset, so we sent her home—she’ll get over it,” the disapproving nurse abruptly told me.

  “Emmanuelle is just a kid, Ray,” I heard Molly say.

  “A kid who strips, Molly—a kid who shows off her tushy and her titties!” my mom said. I didn’t want to think about Emmanuelle’s tushy or her titties, but of course I could imagine them. I was thinking I had no more relatives in the town of Exeter—none living, counting Granddaddy’s ghost. I couldn’t imagine my grandmother as a ghost. If Nana had wanted to see more of the diaper man, she wouldn’t have hired Dottie. I thought being a ghost would have struck Mildred Brewster as undignified; the suddenness of all the appearing and the disappearing was beneath her, like bad manners.

  I’d hung up the phone—I was at loose ends in the kitchen. I wished I knew where in Moby-Dick my grandmother was when she died. It didn’t matter where Emmanuelle had stopped reading to her; Emmanuelle was way behind, just plodding ahead. But what had Nana been reading to herself, at the end? The rice was still steaming; the stove timer said the rice had two minutes to go. The stir-fry needed stirring. “Leave my wok alone, Kid,” Molly said. She’d come out of the TV room, with my mother clinging to her—the way I’d seen Em cling to Nora.

  “I was wondering when we were going to eat,” I said. In truth, it was Emmanuelle I was wondering about: the kind of complications I might encounter, trying to track her down—just to ask her if she knew which part of the Pequod’s voyage had been the final part for Mildred Brewster. Had there been a bookmark or a dog-eared page?

  “You know, sweetie, there’s another thing about that kid, Emmanuelle—I was doing some single-leg lunges with her, and some wall sits, and some squats,” my mom said.

  “Don’t, Ray,” Molly said. The flame under the wok made a popping sound—simultaneously with my mother saying squats.

  “Emmanuelle is a fairly athletic kid, sweetie—she’s got pretty good balance, she nailed the squats,” my mom said.

  Maybe the “Sunset” chapter—Nana loved that one, I was thinking. “(The cabin; by the stern windows; Ahab sitting alone, and gazing out.)” I didn’t want to imagine Emmanuelle nailing the squats, anything but her squatting. “I leave a white and turbid wake; pale waters, paler cheeks, where’er I sail,” Ahab is musing to himself.

  “You don’t know Emmanuelle is the green-dumper, Ray—I don’t think she’s got anything against those golfers,” Molly said.

  I didn’t want to imagine Emmanuelle taking a shit on the putting green; I really must have known I shouldn’t be imagining Emmanuelle at all. My mother was pointing out how the River Bend residents wobbled; they even wobbled when they walked—not that all of them could walk, my mom told us. “Imagine the River Benders squatting—they’d fall over!” Little Ray was saying. I didn’t want to imagine the River Benders I’d met squatting, my grandmother included.

  “I don’t think dumping is all that athletic a thing, Ray,” Molly told my mom, but I was trying to tune them out. Should I make contact with Emmanuelle, her athleticism notwithstanding? Could I spend the rest of my life not knowing where the voyage of the Pequod ended for my grandmother? Did I believe her reading Moby-Dick to me had made me a writer? My childhood attachment to Exeter had ended; not even my uncles were around to remind me of it.

  Uncle Martin and Uncle Johan were both in their seventies when their voyage on the Pequod ended. Nora said they were living like boys again. They’d moved up north, to be near the skiing; they’d traded their cars for a truck, like a couple of Carroll County old-timers. They’d bought a house near North Conway, and Uncle Martin and Uncle Johan went everywhere and did everything together. “With one truck,” as Nora put it, “they had to.” My uncles never got tired of each other’s company; they just loved fooling around together. Everywhere they drove, they would sing along with the song on the radio.

  I last saw Uncle Martin and Uncle Johan when they came to New York to see Nora and Em onstage at the Gallows. It was the first and only time my uncles saw Two Dykes, One Who Talks; it was understood (but unspoken) that they wouldn’t have enjoyed themselves as much if my aunts had been alive and with them. My uncles had laughed and laughed; they’d loved the show. They’d loved seeing the snowshoer, too; Uncle Martin and Uncle Johan kept telling the snowshoer how pretty she was as a woman.

  My uncles also loved Damaged Don, who’d written and was singing a new song. That night at the Gallows, we were told it was the premiere of “No Lucky Star,” but, predictably, it was the same old song, and Damaged Don sang it in the same, near-death drone.

  I met Fuzzy Ouilette

  in a bar.

  He’d lost his last job,

  his wife just left him,

  his dog had been killed

  by a car!

  Poor Fuzzy had

  no lucky star.

  No, Fuzzy had

  no lucky star.

  Don’t upset yourself

  thinkin’ of Hal.

  He got struck by lightning,

  his balls caught on fire,

  there was no one to say,

  “Sorry, pal!”

  You better not

  dwell on poor Hal.

  No, don’t ever

  dwell on poor Hal.

  I last saw Bill Brown

  in L.A.

  His bike blew a tire,

  his dick got run over,

  he could never go out

  and get laid!

  The poor guy would

  never get laid.

  No, poor Bill would

  never get laid.

  The dumb fucks had

  no lucky star.

  No, dumb fucks have

  no lucky star.

  That night at the Gallows, you would have thought that was the funniest song my uncles had ever heard. When we walked them back to their hotel, they sang “No Lucky Star” the whole way.

  When we were saying good night, Uncle Johan expressed concern for me—that I wasn’t with someone. That was when Uncle Martin told me, “You can find anyone you’re looking for in New York, Adam.” Even an old Austrian zither-meister, I was thinking.

  Of course I was remembering my mother’s wedding—how Uncle Johan had cried, “Wagner’s Lohengrin on a zither!”

  Uncle Martin and Uncle Johan were killed on the Kancamagus Highway when their truck went off the road. Kancamagus, which means “Fearless One” in Algonquian, was the last sagamore of one of the Pennacook tribes. “The Kanc,” as the locals call New Hampshire Route 112, winds through the White Mountain National Forest; in a series of turns, the road crosses the Kancamagus Pass. Uncle Johan, who was driving, drove straight off one of the turns. Nora always wished she didn’t know the last song her father and Uncle Johan had been singing along with, on the truck’s radio. I always thought that “No Lucky Star” would be a hard song to have in your head for the rest of your life.

  Damaged Don had complained; he’d had to clean up the lyrics before “No Lucky Star” could be heard on the airwaves. Poor Hal, who’d been struck by lightning, had his hair catch on fire—not his balls. Poor Bill had his head run over, not his dick. And, somewhat diminishing the scale of Bill’s bad luck, it was not the case that “he could never go out and get laid”; instead, it was only the last day he would get paid. As for the final stanza, the dumb fucks were changed to dumb guys. Censorship never made anything better, as Nora knew.

  “Less bad ain’t better,” Damaged Don said.

  But “No Lucky Star,” or what was left of it, went out on the airwaves. In northern New Hampshire, there was a country radio station—my uncles’ favorite—that played it all the time. Uncle Martin had told Nora that he and Johan always sang along when “No Lucky Star” was on the radio, but my uncles would insert the original lyrics, which they knew by heart.

  Before the turn, Uncle Johan had overtaken a car of fall foliage gawkers; the leaf peepers later reported that the brake lights of my uncles’ truck not once flickered on in the upcoming curve. My uncles knew the Kancamagus; Nora said they drove it all the time. But there were no skid marks on the road where Uncle Johan had missed the turn. A logging truck was coming toward them, through the pass; the logger later said that both men appeared to be singing, but their eyes were fixedly on the road. They were not speeding, the logger said, but their steadfast determination compelled the logger to keep watching their truck in his mirror.

  The logger said Uncle Johan seemed to speed up as he drove off the Kancamagus; as Nora and I preferred to imagine, those two Norwegians never stopped singing. The logger stopped his truck, put on his hazard lights, and made his way to the wreck. Nora and I would imagine a cluster of trees, an outcropping of rocks. The leaf peepers had stopped their car, too; one of them followed the logger through the trees or over the rocks. They could hear the truck’s radio—it was still playing.

  “The dumb guys had no lucky star,” Damaged Don was singing. “No, dumb guys have no lucky star.”

  “Those two weren’t dumb—they knew how to have a good time, and they knew when to call it quits,” was the way Nora saw it.

  It looked like an accident to the leaf peepers. Uncle Johan may not have been speeding, one of the foliage seekers reported, but he appeared to be driving too fast for the curve; maybe he misjudged the particular turn.

  The logging truck driver saw it more the way Nora saw it. “Those guys looked like they knew what they were doing,” the logger said.

  We’ll never know, but Uncle Martin and Uncle Johan weren’t cut out to be River Benders. Those two Norwegians were telemarking men; they liked to go telemarking through the trees. Their bend in the river was a turn in the road.

  33. JUST SMALL ENOUGH

  When I was teaching at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop in the seventies, my students thought Century Review was the zenith of literary journals. It was first called New Century Review, and one of my students published a short story in it; this one short story seems to have marked her zenith as a fiction writer. I don’t believe she ever published other fiction. That literary journal had a similarly short life span, lasting only a decade. I don’t mean to sound irreverent about New Century Review, or just plain Century Review; some very good writers were published in it, my former student among them.

  I was never published in that literary journal. I didn’t write poetry or essays or short stories; the fiction I submitted to Century Review was excerpted from novels in progress, which I’d edited to read like short stories. Or that was what I hoped. One of my rejections said, “This reads like an excerpt from something longer, or like something that should be longer.” This was indisputably true, but the rejection pissed me off.

  Though that literary journal is long gone, I remain most grateful it existed. It was where I first read Emily MacPherson’s fiction. I was aware that Em had scripted Nora’s monologues for Two Dykes, One Who Talks; I knew that Em composed many of her pantomimes in writing. It hurt my feelings that I hadn’t known Em wrote fiction. I hadn’t even known her full name—just that she’d been an Emily, who was shortened to an Em.

  I read almost to the end of Emily MacPherson’s first short story before I knew Em was the author. The histrionics of Em’s pantomime performances were absent from her third-person omniscient voice. A teenage girl is fitfully dreaming; she is sexually attracted to one of her girlfriends, but she doesn’t dare to make the first move, not knowing if her girlfriend is similarly attracted to her. She wakes from her erotic dream to discover her mother in her bedroom—her mom is sitting at the foot of her bed, sobbing.

  “I’m an awful mother, I’m a worse wife, and if you have my genes, you’re doomed!” the poor girl’s mother tells her.

  The next night is even better. This time, the teenage daughter is dreaming about her cloddish boyfriend. It’s okay when he touches her boobs, but she knows he wants her to touch him down there, and the poor girl wants no part of his penis. Upon my second reading, I saw this scene as an obvious precursor to Em’s penis pantomime—her depiction of an approaching penis as a one-eyed eel. Not upon my first reading, when the narrative detachment and restraint of Emily MacPherson’s fiction did not connect me to Em as an unbridled pantomimist—Em’s full-body slither, her mouth in the shape of the letter O, a sightless eye.

  The second night, the poor girl wakes from her penis dream to find her father stripped to his boxer shorts, on all fours in her bedroom, where he is whipping himself with his belt—loud smacks, his back and shoulders reddened in the faint light.

  “I’m a terrible father, an unconscionable husband, but your mother is worse!” the poor girl’s dad assures her, between lashes. “If we’ve made you like us, I’m so sorry!” her father wails, still whipping himself. The self-flagellation continues while the father confesses his homosexuality; he denounces his wife as a repeatedly unfaithful lesbian. The daughter silently listens and observes. The teenage girl is justly angry that her own coming out has been dimmed by the self-centered coming out of her parents. (Only then did I realize that Emily MacPherson was Em.)

  The clear-headed teenage girl also makes an astounding aesthetic judgment. Her oafish father should castigate himself either verbally or physically—not both, not at the same time.

  “Either act it out or put it in words, Daddy—not the two together,” the daughter tells her deplorable dad, who has barely managed to draw blood with his belt. If I hadn’t already figured it out, her artistic doctrine gave Emily MacPherson away; she’d put in writing a pantomimic aesthetic. Pantomime is the art of conveying a story by bodily movements only. Clearly this was what Em was doing—either pantomiming or writing, “not the two together.”

  “A Family Comes Out” was the title of the first Emily MacPherson story I read. I asked my Iowa students to read it in our fiction workshop; some students, veteran readers of Century Review, had already done so. They duly noted Em’s sardonic humor. The better writers cited the unusual focus of the story’s physical details: how the bodily movements of the characters capture their haplessness, their sexual tension, their conflicted feelings of desire and regret. I did not point out the pantomimic rendering of the characters’ inner lives: how their bodies betray their sexual turmoil. Only three of my fiction workshop students were New Yorkers, and only one of them had been to (or even heard of) the Gallows Lounge—a kid who’d been an undergrad at NYU, and he’d never seen Two Dykes, One Who Talks onstage at the Gallows. I didn’t tell my Iowa students that Emily MacPherson had a parallel creative life as a pantomimist, or that Em (as a fiction writer) had virtually pantomimed the way her characters moved.

  Emily MacPherson’s second short story in Century Review was written in a different narrative voice—there was a deadpan first-person narrator, the lesbian daughter, now a college girl, whose homosexual parents are divorcing. “A Couple of Latecomers Get Divorced” was the title, prompting a couple of my fiction workshop students to say they thought the two stories might be back-to-back chapters in a novel Emily MacPherson was writing; the different narrative voices notwithstanding, these were clearly the same characters from “A Family Comes Out.”

  It hurt my feelings more to imagine that Em might have been writing a novel. It was bad enough that I hadn’t known she wrote fiction—short fiction, I’d assumed, upon reading only one of the short stories. Maybe Em hadn’t shown me her short stories because she knew they weren’t my thing—or so I’d rationalized. I had shown Em my novels, in manuscript; she was a close reader and gave me good notes. (Naturally, Nora was among my first readers, but Nora wasn’t a writer and never gave me notes; she just told me her thoughts.) Yet, surely, if Em was writing a novel, she would have shown me some pages, wouldn’t she? If only a first chapter, I was thinking. Did “A Family Comes Out” or “A Couple of Latecomers Get Divorced” work as a first chapter? I wondered.

  In the second story, the lesbian daughter decides to stop talking. She’s not crazy; it’s a wise and rational choice. The last person she speaks to is the psychiatrist at her college. The shrink defends the student’s decision to the college community—the student’s written work is faultless; she should be permitted not to speak. Her not talking is therapy for her breakdown, caused by her parents’ clumsy coming out and their self-indulgent divorce.

  The students in my fiction workshop at Iowa praised the parents’ tell-all dialogue; the stuff they tell the daughter about their divorce totally justifies the daughter’s decision to stop speaking. “For the things I’ve done with other men, I should be castrated. Or maybe just a vasectomy,” the father tells his silent daughter.

  “For the things I’ve done with other women—women you know, in some cases, mothers of your friends—with one of your contemporaries, I’m ashamed to say, I regret most of all that you’ll do these degrading things yourself. I’ve done this to you—I’ve made you like me!” the mother cries. “But your father has done worse things,” the mom quickly adds. “Women like you and me are unredeemable, but homosexual men do much worse things,” the lesbian mother assures her lesbian daughter.