One day, Grace would tell me, the ultrasound picture, which she’d had framed, faded from sight; the image whitened, until there were no details. I could only imagine that the tiny penis on the fetus was the first detail to disappear. Notwithstanding what a tiny penis it was, its meaning had once been so clarifying for us. We were going to have a baby boy. At the time, one rift between Grace and me had been avoided—we hadn’t been able to agree on a girl’s name. From the Barrett side of her family, Grace was asking me about Deirdre, Elizabeth, or Beryl; from the Barnard side, Grace asked me about Mary, Kate, or Rebecca. For a girl’s name, I really wanted Nora or Rachel. There was no one alive who called my mother Rachel anymore; my mom was Ray to everyone.

Rachel was not a rescue ship in this instance. Grace had the highest esteem for Melville and Moby-Dick, but a girl who’d tormented Grace in school had been a Rachel—not a nice one—and I could sense Grace’s misgivings about Nora. I knew Nora could be a bully to younger, prettier women, but I didn’t know the particulars of Grace’s fleeting contact with Nora and Em. Grace had seen Two Dykes, One Who Talks onstage at the Gallows; she’d introduced herself to Nora and Em backstage, at my mom’s prompting. A ski-school student of Ray’s from Vermont, now a New Yorker—a Clara Swift look-alike, but a pretty girl in her own right; in my imagination, those two dykes might have given Grace more than a once-over; they might have looked her up and down, but I didn’t know what (if anything) actually happened.

Grace was a fiction editor who became a publisher; she admired Emily MacPherson’s writing. Backstage at the Gallows, Grace thought it was strange that Em wouldn’t speak to her; Grace assumed that Em’s not speaking was part of her pantomime act. My mother and Molly had to explain later: Em didn’t talk. At first, Grace only said that Em’s not speaking hurt her career as a fiction writer. Later, when Grace was pregnant, she said: “When our child is learning to talk, it will be confusing to be around a nonspeaking adult—Em’s not talking will seem unfriendly, or just weird, to a child.” I let it go, although I knew what Grace was thinking. Em’s not talking seemed unfriendly, or just weird, to Grace. I not only could sense Grace’s misgivings about Nora; Grace’s misgivings about Em were there from the start.