Drinking stories
Men Walking on Water By Emily Schultz Knopf Canada 560 pp; $ 25
Emily Schultz never asked her grandfather, Herman, about his rum-running days in Detroit. This was an experience that the man, who left school at 14 to support his mother and siblings, had hoped to conceal from relatives.
As a boy, Schultz’s father, who later came to Canada to dodge the draft, learned the secret after discovering a pearl- handled revolver in Herman’s drawer. The enterprise spanned generations: Schultz’s great- uncle, Alfred, and great- grandfather, a small- time gangster, were involved in the trade as well.
Alfred, in fact, drowned on a run across the Detroit River when his car fell through the ice. It was this bit of family history, notes Schultz, that gave rise to her fourth novel, Men Walking On Water, a terrifically devised and thoroughly entertaining caper that additionally riffs on her love of old music and films. Watching a blooper reel from the early 30s, in particular, “was so hilarious and eye-opening,” she says, reached at home in Brooklyn, “because you just don’t think of people from that era swearing. And I think it actually really broke the novel open for me. ‘ Oh, of course they said this! Of course they did all the things that we do today.’”
Starting on a winter night in 1927, when rum- runner Alfred Moss appears to have sunk in the Detroit River with a carload of Scotch and cash, Men Walking on Water tracks the fallout of this loss on a diverse cast that includes a deviant Lutheran reverend, an American- born daughter of a Chinese gangster, and an earnest teenage rum-runner. But the novel rewrites history with Alfred faking his death and assuming new identities to seduce and swindle his way around Prohibition- era America.
“If crime is an everyday activity — if taking a drink of wine, or a gin and tonic is a crime, which it was at that time — then suddenly it’s like all the rules are broken,” Schultz says. “You’ve already broken one rule, why not break them all?”
After Herman died, Schultz’s father, Tom, told more family stories. Initially, Schultz wrote some 100 pages inspired by these tales but stepped away, ambivalent about tackling a wide- angle historical novel and broaching material similar to Boardwalk Empire, which had recently premiered to fanfare.
Focusing instead on writing her 2012 novel, The Blondes, a dystopian reflection on feminism currently in development for a miniseries, Schultz was ultimately led back to her previous manuscript by The Blonde’s narrative momentum. She was further driven to complete it because of her father’s passing: he had instilled in her his own enthusiasm for old standards and had assisted with research for early drafts of Men Walking on Water. The novel is dedicated to him.
In 2013, a couple of years after moving from Ontario to New York, Schultz resumed writing and imagined a greater role for Elsie Moss, Alfred’s widow, who turns to rum-running herself in a bid for financial security. The characters on these pages are hustlers, and deception emerges as a dominant theme because of how common it was then to break the law. Cross- ing the line is literally and figuratively emphasized by border crossings and the building of the Ambassador Bridge, which occurred from 1927 until 1929, a time when civilians and officials alike were disillusioned with Prohibition.
“It is interesting to think about a time,” Schultz says, “when something that people do derive a lot of joy from was criminalized. Of course we want to criminalize all kinds of things, or at least some people do.”
Schultz acknowledges that while this was in many ways a period of liberation, she wanted to avoid a purely nostalgic lens and show its social problems. “A lot of the turmoil that was starting to build through the 20s is something that we’ve also seen building here in the U. S., just in terms of the tightening of borders and some of the racism and the antiSemitism,” she says. “It’s heartbreaking to see these things come up again and again and return. We want to learn from the past. And hopefully that’s something that historical novels do as well, is to open up that history again.”