Grace tried hard not to insert herself as an unwanted editor of Em’s Come Hang Yourself, which would be published in the spring. Em tried hard to ignore what was written about The Hand of God. Nathanson himself was not the reason Em would drift away to Canada. In December 1996, Bonkers Nathanson was baptized by John Cardinal O’Connor at St. Patrick’s Cathedral in New York. No, Em did not show up at St. Patrick’s with a box for Cardinal O’Connor; she’d not been invited to the private Mass, where Nathanson also received confirmation and First Communion from the ass-kissing cardinal. When Nathanson was asked why he’d converted to Catholicism, he would say that no religion matched the special role for forgiveness provided by the Catholic Church.

“I’ll say,” was all Em said. It was not Nathanson who would eventually compel Em to do her seagull thing—nor would it be John Cardinal O’Connor himself. O’Connor’s pro-life advocacy was a given; the cardinal relegated women to the childbirth role, and O’Connor’s relegations of the gay community were similarly dogmatic and doctrinaire. Cardinal O’Connor and the Catholic Church did not believe in the separation of church and state. As Nora knew, all you could do was try to control the damage they did.

That said, had Nora been alive—if she’d survived the Gallows Lounge shooting, and the comedy club were still kicking—Nora would have relegated Cardinal O’Connor’s baptizing of Bonkers Nathanson to “The News in English” part of the Two Dykes stand-up act, the part Nora referred to as “shit in the offing.” It certainly was a shit show, but Em didn’t move to Canada because of the private Mass O’Connor provided for Nathanson in St. Patrick’s Cathedral. The shit in the offing part happened later.

Soon after Bonkers Nathanson’s baptism, Em took what she called a “reconnaissance trip” to Toronto—this was in January. I knew the story of Em showing Nora the exterior of the house on Shaftesbury Avenue; she’d not shown Nora the inside. In her reconnaissance trip to Toronto, Em made plans to gut the interior of the house. She arranged to have her hateful father’s furniture and his dingy curtains carted off. She found someone to strip and sand and polish the old floorboards, and someone to paint the walls white. Em was away from New York for only a week, but it felt to me like the start of something longer; she’d taken a step toward making the house more fit to live in. “The Realtor told me it’ll make the house more sellable,” was what Em said about the renovations.