I’d admired the third-person, deadpan omniscience of Em’s narration when I read Come Hang Yourself and gave Em my notes. I knew we were each other’s editors, for the foreseeable future—given that the little English teacher was gone. Before long, Em would find her reading voice in Moby-Dick—she was channeling Ishmael, the antithesis of a deadpan narrator. In those long car rides, listening to Em as Ishmael—giving voice to her most ferocious first-person—I thought Cardinal O’Connor was lucky. If the son of a bitch had baptized Bonkers Nathanson after Em’s long voyage on the Pequod—I mean, all the way to the doomed ship’s encounter with the white whale—Em as Ishmael might have held the ass-kissing cardinal accountable. Yet Em seemed to have let her grievances against Cardinal O’Connor go. A benign gesture—like Ishmael imagining that Queequeg seems to be saying to himself, “We cannibals must help these Christians.” We’ll see, I was thinking.

Ishmael’s first-person voice, as expansive as the sea itself, would affect more than the way Em read aloud. The pitch and timbre of Em’s speaking voice began to change. Even as a beginner, she’d spoken with intensity—as if she’d been channeling Nora. Since she’d met Ishmael, Em was channeling a sailor; her voice was lower and less strident, but she was no less intense. In fact, she sounded more forceful—more masculine than Nora.

“First-person male,” Grace called Em’s newfound reading and speaking voice. It seemed wrong to Grace that Em, who was so feminine in her appearance, should sound like a sailor, but I felt differently about the change in Em. She’d not just found her voice in reading Moby-Dick aloud; aboard the Pequod, Em had found and embraced a bigger world.

In the strong, low voice in which she read aloud to me—“ ‘It was the whiteness of the whale that above all things appalled me’ ”—Em also said, “Stop the car, I have to pee.” (No wonder—with all the reading aloud, Em was drinking a lot of water.) And when Em read Moby-Dick to me, I thought of Emmanuelle—the high school student who’d been charged with exposing herself, mooning and flashing her titties on the Swasey Parkway.

The “Police Report” had cited “an outrage to public decency,” but I was just embarrassed. At thirty-eight, I’d not known Emmanuelle was a high school kid. She’d been reading Moby-Dick to my grandmother. Emmanuelle was the one who found Nana—dead in bed, with that big book. I still wondered if Emmanuelle had noticed Nana’s thumb between the pages—if Emmanuelle knew where in Moby-Dick my grandmother was reading when she died.