A Book of American Martyrs

by Joyce Carol Oates

  Desperately!—Mommy laughed. Is it ever anything less than desperate?

  Adding, And what of us—are we not desperate?

  So Daddy was saying, not to Mommy (who hadn’t come hiking with us but had stayed back at the picnic table with her typewriter) but to us, that there was no evil, but there was Heaven, if you kept in mind that Heaven wasn’t anything special or surprising; it might be just a hike along the shore, on a windy day, in late September; in itself not memorable, but the point is, if you can remember that we did this, we were here together, we stopped for lunch at Bay Point, even if it wasn’t a great lunch we were together, the five of us, no matter what happens afterward—this is Heaven. Got it, kids?

  OK, Daddy, we said. It embarrassed us when Daddy spoke to us as to another adult, too seriously.

  Y’know what, kids?—promise me you will scatter my ashes here after I die.

  After I die. It is possible, none of us heard this.

  A child does not hear die on a parent’s lips. No.

  Of course we’d have said yes. Anything Daddy wanted us to say, we’d say, and anything Daddy wanted us to believe, we’d believe. Even if we had not a clue what Daddy was talking about this time as other times.

  SPECIAL SURGERY

  Something to do with babies. What did that mean?

  We knew where babies came from. We thought we knew, for our parents had told us. Animal babies, and human babies. (But birds were different, and reptiles. Their babies came out of eggs.) (Why did some babies come out of their mother’s bellies and other babies came out of eggs, like chicken eggs you could eat? That was never made clear.) We were embarrassed and excited to consider the place where we had come from, which was supposed to be Mommy’s belly.

  (We did not believe this really. It was so funny! Like one of Daddy’s silly jokes that made you laugh so hard you wetted yourself. But we had to pretend we believed it. Out of Mommy’s belly, when it was time to be born.)

  (Anxiously Naomi said to Darren, Mommy’s belly isn’t big enough. We could never be that little, to fit inside. Naomi swallowed hard at the thought of it, such a terrible thought that made her eyelids flutter and a sick, choking sensation arise in her throat, for what if—somehow—it was made to be, Naomi would have to fit inside Mommy’s belly again though she was too big. This thought made her queasy and shivery for it could not even be articulated, it was so awful like the illustrations in her favorite storybook where poor Alice had unwisely nibbled at a mushroom and grew too big to fit in a normal-sized room but had to shove her arm up a chimney and another arm outside a window and her head crushed against the ceiling . . . Though she was terrified at the thought Darren just laughed at her and gave her a little shove that signaled a kind of forgiveness even as it signaled how silly she was, and how much younger and weaker than he.)

  (Of the children Naomi was the worrywart as Daddy called her. How’s my little worrywart? Naomi was not sure if a worrywart was an actual wart which was a kind of hard ugly pimple on the back of an older person’s hand, or on a face, terrible-ugly to look at so it wasn’t nice to be called a worrywart though it seemed clear that Daddy was just teasing and you were expected to laugh when Daddy teased.)

  We were not told exactly what our father did, that made living with him dangerous.

  We knew that our father was a doctor—Dr. Voorhees. But we were not sure what kind of doctor he was.

  Something to do with babies. We thought.

  WHEN IT WAS EXPLAINED to us that there are women and girls who require a special surgery, that only doctors trained like our father could provide. These are women and girls who have found that they are pregnant, and the pregnancy is unwanted.

  A pregnancy is unwanted for many reasons and one of them might be, it is a threat to the life of the mother.

  Another is, it has come at the wrong time in the mother’s life.

  And another, it is a result of something forced upon the mother, that the mother did not want and should not have to bear.

  It was related to us that there were doctors like our father who provided this surgery not only because it was badly needed but also because it was a surgery that some others opposed, on religious grounds, or “moral” grounds, a doctor like our father had to be very careful that he was not attacked by these individuals who opposed it.

  We did not know what this meant—attacked.

  Like in a movie? On TV? Attacked with knives, guns? Attacked with a bomb?

  Darren was the one to ask questions. Naomi sucked her fingers and smiled foolishly. (Melissa was too young to be told anything that would frighten her.)

  Of the Voorhees children Darren was the oldest. Naomi was three years younger than Darren and Melissa was two years younger than Naomi. It gave Darren immense satisfaction to know that he would always be older than his sisters. He would always be taller, bigger, smarter and stronger.

  That meant that Darren could protect his sisters if they required protection. Or, he could discipline his sisters if they required discipline in the absence of our parents.

  We were not exactly sure what preg-nan-cy meant. We were told but somehow, we did not quite comprehend. At least, Naomi did not comprehend. Preg-nan-cy was a scary word like cancer you would not say aloud so that an adult might overhear.

  Preg-nan-cy was a matter of free choice, we were told.

  A woman must have control over her body, that is a fundamental human right.

  Darren who was always having to argue to show how smart he was, how more astute than his young sisters, smarty-Darren said, A man, too?—and Daddy and Mommy said Yes of course. A man, too.

  “WOULD DADDY HURT ME?”

  Melissa was adopted. Melissa had been chosen. Unlike Darren and Naomi who had come into the family by chance.

  Yet one day Melissa said to Mommy in her whispery little mouse-voice, “If you and Daddy didn’t want me, would Daddy hurt me?”—and quickly Mommy said, “Oh but your Mommy and Daddy want you. All of you.”

  By all of you Mommy meant Darren and Naomi also.

  By all of you Mommy wanted Melissa to know that she was not any sort of outsider, but one of us: brother, sister, sister.

  (And was Naomi there, a witness to this exchange? She would surmise that she’d had to be in the kitchen with Mommy and Melissa, to hear these words. She could not have been elsewhere in the house. She would not have been eavesdropping. She was with Mommy and Melissa in the kitchen in the shingle-board house on Drummond Street in Grand Rapids where Melissa and Naomi went to the Montessori school but Darren went to the middle school and where Daddy was a physician/surgeon attached to the Grand Rapids University Medical Center and Mommy was a stay-at-home mom who was a legal consultant for the local Planned Parenthood office.)

  (The little girls loved to help Mommy in the kitchen. Preparing meals, cleaning up after meals. It was pleasant for Naomi because she was two years older than Melissa and more capable than Melissa, and Mommy would know this. Mommy encouraged Naomi to instruct Melissa, and this made Naomi feel good. Each girl had her own colored sponge to rinse dishes—Naomi’s was pink, and Melissa’s was green. These colors could not vary. Carefully the girls set the rinsed dishes neatly in the dishwasher for it made them happy when Mommy praised them—Thank you, girls! You did a perfect job.)

  But today in that soft little mouse-voice Melissa said, “Nobody wanted me. My real Mommy gave me away.”

  “But—but”—Mommy stammered not seeming to know what to say—“but she didn’t mean it, Melissa.”

  DIDN’T MEAN IT! These words of my mother’s were so weak and unconvincing, Naomi would pretend that she had not heard.

  “ADOPTED”

  Why’d they want her. Why aren’t we enough . . .”

  This question all children ask of their parents, when a new baby is brought into the household. The most reasonable of questions, but no answer will satisfy.

  Darren was outraged, resentful. Naomi was deeply wounded.

  Why aren’t we enough. Oh!


  Years later Naomi would recall observing their parents with the new baby, from a staircase. And Darren on the step below her, fretting.

  Friends were dropping by to see the new baby. This was in the (rented) house on Seventh Street, Ann Arbor. In the living room where the baby had been brought, shimmering halos of light. Squeals of delight, uplifted voices both female and male. Giddy happiness of adults that makes children uneasy.

  Of course, Darren and Naomi had been prepared by their parents for the new baby, the adoption. Still it was a shock. It was certainly a surprise!

  Already at six Darren was concerned with the (hidden? secret?) motives behind the actions of others, which he distrusted. He had not liked it when the other new baby had come into the household several years before, who’d turned out to be his sister Naomi he’d grown to tolerate.

  But the new baby was particularly unwelcome. For now there were two small girls in the household where before there’d been but one and there was a particular softness to girls that aroused, in adults, emotions of a kind Darren knew he could not arouse.

  At three Naomi was a very young child and yet concerned that somehow, in some way she could not anticipate, the new baby would involve her in a way that was beyond her.

  Twenty years later the question has still the power to wound her in her weakest moments.

  Why weren’t we enough . . .

  PRETTY DOLL-LIKE MELISSA with her thick dark eyelashes and small perfect features was a little Chinese girl-orphan whom Mommy and Daddy had adopted through “contacts” in Shanghai. Darren claimed to remember that they’d flown to Shanghai to bring Melissa back with them!—but Naomi was not so sure about this.

  Darren would claim that he’d been at the airport to see the plane “fly away”—and he’d been at the airport when the plane had “landed.” (None of this was true, evidently. But Darren had insisted it was so.)

  Naomi, who had no memory of when the new baby had been brought home, only when the new baby seemed to have been home for a while, was told that she’d been “very excited” about her new little sister and had wanted to hold her “all the time”—but none of these memories remained with her.

  Much that has been related to me I must accept on faith. The memories of others confused with my own which have vanished.

  Shut my eyes and see the shotgun blast striking my father’s face and all that was Daddy was destroyed in that instant including his children’s memories of him and so what point is there in trying to excavate them, if they are lost?—yet if Naomi examined her mother’s photograph albums that were brimming with loose snapshots and Polaroids she would discover many pictures from childhood, many of the mid- and late 1990s after Melissa had come into the Voorhees household. She would spread these photographs on a table for all to contemplate.

  Evidence: the (visual) record of a happy family.

  It would leave her teary-eyed and shaky to examine these pictures too closely. Little Melissa and Naomi cuddling with Mommy in a porch swing, little Melissa and Naomi lifted into Daddy’s muscled arms . . .

  Sometimes Daddy had a beard. Other times, Daddy did not have a beard. Daddy’s beard was not the color of his hair (which was a gingery-toast color), Daddy’s beard was wiry and white, and threaded with dark crinkly hairs. Daddy’s beard was scratchy-funny.

  In Grand Rapids there were not many Chinese people. It was rare to see any except at the Chinese restaurants which were Mommy’s and Daddy’s favorite restaurants in Grand Rapids. In Naomi’s school there were no Chinese children.

  At first you saw that Melissa was different-looking from other children but soon, you did not see that at all. You did not “see” anything unusual about Melissa except that her hair was very black and very silky and shiny and that her eyes were different-shaped than other people’s eyes and she was very pretty like a doll. And there was a stillness and watchfulness about her which you would not see in other children.

  Which was why sometimes at school or in some public place (like the Grand Rapids mall) it was surprising that others stared at her so openly, seeing her with her family; or that older children dared to say stupid mean things revealing their own ignorance.

  Little Chinee girl?

  Hey little Chink-Chink.

  Where’d you come from, Chink-Chink?

  Melissa did not seem to hear these taunts. Mommy walked us quickly away. We did not look back.

  Comm-un-NISTS!

  It was rare that Daddy was with us on excursions to the mall or to the grocery store. And so, if Daddy was with us, no one would make such crude remarks, that we could hear.

  It had been explained to Darren and Naomi what “adoption” meant. The subject had been brought up as if casually and set aside for another time and then brought up again, the second time in more detail. And the third time in greater detail. This was the way our parents approached such matters: methodically. So we were made to understand that we would have a new little sister in the family who was adopted. Carefully this was presented by both Mommy and Daddy who read us Chinese storybooks for children, showed us Chinese picture books and played videos on our TV of Chinese people, Chinese art, Chinese history.

  It was related to us: “Melissa” was just a little girl but she came from a great, ancient civilization that had cultivated the arts, and science, and agriculture, and had built waterways and roadways and the Great Wall when (as Daddy said) his ancestors were still swinging from trees.

  For a long while, in one of my dreamy states I would see human figures swinging from trees like monkeys. I would feel unease and worry and yet, I would find myself smiling.

  His being has suffused mine. I would try to escape but I do not want to escape. His being is everywhere. It is his eyes through which I look, at sights he never saw, yet he interprets them for me.

  Before the adoption, Mommy and Daddy were showing us pictures of Melissa. Already this felt to us like a betrayal, the way the pictures were brought out to us, the way we were summoned, to sit together on the sofa, in a way that felt unnatural, even posed; we understood that our parents must have had these pictures for a while, and must have discussed them together, in the privacy of their bedroom from which at certain times we were barred; yet they were behaving now as if the pictures were new, and expected us to react to them as they did.

  “Well—what do you think?”

  Instead, Darren said nothing. Naomi said nothing.

  “Your new little sister is beautiful—isn’t she?”

  Warily, Darren shrugged. Naomi frowned, sucking at her fingers.

  Despite even the evidence of the pictures the affronted brother and sister did not entirely believe that they would have a new, little sister from China or from anywhere else. Darren did not believe it really, and Naomi did not think about it at all.

  But then, one day a seven-month-old baby with feathery tufts of thin black hair was brought into the house in Grand Rapids, in Mommy’s arms, and with Daddy close beside, and from that time onward Melissa was their little sister.

  It was shocking, the baby was real. The children had not been able to comprehend even the idea of the baby, and now the baby was real.

  You could run away to hide. You could gape and blink into the bassinet. You could act very silly chattering and laughing like a monkey, or you could be very quiet, clenching your jaws so your back teeth ached. It made no difference really, Mommy and Daddy would scarcely notice.

  Darren glowered with resentment and jealousy, Naomi knew he’d have liked to strangle the new little sister. For a long time he could not utter the name “Melissa”—as Naomi did.

  Meanly they whispered together. Wished their parents would send Melissa back to China! Nobody needed her.

  Too young to consider that obviously there was something lacking in the family, our parents had felt the need for a third child when our father was in his late forties and our mother at about the age when bearing a child was beginning to be “problematic”—and at a time when our father’
s work was becoming increasingly dangerous.

  But Melissa was so little, it was hard for Darren and Naomi to hate her for long.

  Such a nice feeling when Melissa began to recognize them and to smile at them, within weeks of her arrival. Such a nice feeling when Melissa closed her tiny fist around your finger! And Melissa shook both her hands at Darren excitedly as if she had a particular message for him. The kitten-squeaks she made were not intelligible but Darren pretended he could understand.

  “How much can the baby understand of what we say?”—Naomi was anxious to know.

  “The baby understands feelingly.”

  (This was a Shakespearean line, Naomi would recall years later. At the time it was uttered by Daddy as if it were his own and very likely, from Gus Voorhees’s perspective, it was his own.)

  NOT UNTIL A FEW YEARS LATER, when Melissa was old enough to understand, or to understand partly, did Mommy and Daddy explain to her that she’d been adopted.

  They told Melissa she’d been chosen. Unlike most children who are born to their parents—like Darren and Naomi, for instance—who’d come into the world as surprises—(“but very special surprises”)—Melissa had been freely and deliberately chosen.

  In his serious-Daddy voice Daddy said:

  “An adopted child is a chosen child. An adopted child is a very much-wanted child. An adopted child has two sets of parents, and is in the world doubly. There are the biological parents—whom she may someday discover, if she wishes—at least, the biological mother. And there are the adoptive parents—who have chosen her out of multitudes.”

  The strange word was multitudes. We did not know what to make of it. There was something terrible in the thought—a vast sea of little babies, and Melissa among them, but hardly distinguishable from any of them. No wonder that she cast her eyes down, and waited for the ordeal to end.