A Book of American Martyrs

by Joyce Carol Oates

  “Watch out.”

  “I didn’t do it on purpose.”

  Almost in tandem we ran from the house. For always there was the half-pleasurable touch of child-panic—

  Wait!—wait for me.

  A BRIGHT WARM DAY in mid-June in Huron County, Michigan: school had been out just one week.

  An incandescent light shimmered from the sky that was bleached of color, reflecting the rough water of Lake Huron five miles to the north, and not visible from the Salt Hill Road.

  In a blur of pale lilac—linen slacks, matching jacket—our mother slid into the driver’s seat of the Chevy station wagon. Her glossy dark hair was plaited into a single thick braid that fell between her shoulder blades. Her eyes, that tended to water in bright air, were shielded behind sunglasses, and her mouth, described by our father (embarrassingly) as eminently kissable, was a dark plum color.

  Beside our mother was our little sister Melissa pert and darkly pretty. So small, and so unobtrusive, you might almost miss that she was there.

  But always, Melissa was.

  We did not like to consider—(Darren and Naomi did not like to consider)—how frequently Melissa sat in front with our mother or, less frequently, our father. Overnight it had happened, seemingly irrevocably, that as soon as Melissa was old enough not to be strapped into the demeaning child-seat in the rear, she sat in the passenger’s seat beside the driver.

  We did not complain, we took not the slightest notice.

  But having so often to be together in the backseat of a vehicle, the two of us older siblings, thrown into each other’s company and forced to stare steely-eyed out the side windows pointedly ignoring each other—that wasn’t so great.

  Now, we were (almost) late. Hurriedly Mom backed the Chevy station wagon down the rutted and puddled driveway at an angle, cursing beneath her breath—“Damn!”

  Our (rented) house three miles west of the small town of St. Croix, Michigan, was a clapboard house dingy-white as a gull’s soiled feathers. It was a forgettable house, a house you could not “see” if you were not standing before it; not a house to nourish memories though it was, or would become, a house to nourish regret like the toadstools that emerged out of wet soil around its base.

  Seven miles in the opposite direction from St. Croix (population 11,400) was the smaller town of Bad Axe (population 3,040). Our mother had said, when we’d moved to rural Huron County from Saginaw, at least we’re not living in a place called Bad Axe. No one would believe me!

  The clapboard farmhouse had been built atop an uneven knoll, an upstairs lump of land like a thumb. In the stone foundation was a faint numeral—1939.

  The unpaved driveway veered and careened downhill to Salt Hill Road where the aluminum mailbox stood atilt and scarified from numerous collisions.

  There had been another house in St. Croix which our parents had rented, or had intended to rent, several months before. This was a ranch-style house on a residential street (only just three blocks from St. Croix Elementary, which Melissa would attend) into which we’d been partly moved when something had gone wrong, a misunderstanding about the terms of the lease, or a disagreement between the landlord and my father, or a “dispute”—and the boxes we’d unpacked had had to be hastily and humbly repacked, and the rental trailer reloaded, so that within a single harried day we moved another time, to the very farmhouse on Salt Hill Road which my parents had seen, and had rejected, my mother with particular vigor, weeks before.

  It was a vague promise of our father’s that we would find another, more suitable house in St. Croix soon.

  To spare us the rural school buses, which had not been very pleasant for any of us, in the first week or so of school, our mother usually drove us to and from school.

  (Our parents had asked us not to speak of the school buses. Not to complain. Bullying, harassment, sexual threats—“rough behavior”—we would be spared the rural-America school bus experience but were not to think that we were in any way superior to the boys who were the sons of our Huron County neighbors.)

  (For our parents were adamant, idealistic, [usually] unyielding liberals. They did not believe in anything other than public schooling and hoped to convince each other that their children’s sojourn in the Huron County public school system would not sabotage our educations or our opportunity to attend first-rank universities.)

  In the station wagon Darren was restless, fretting.

  “Mom, did you call Dad? Does he know we’re coming to meet him first?”—Darren couldn’t resist asking.

  “Darren, no. I have to drop the car off at the garage to get it inspected. You know that.”

  “But—”

  “We’ll get to the Center before your father leaves. Please don’t catastrophize!”

  That was our father’s most earnest admonition to his family—Please don’t catastrophize. This was an entirely made-up word, we would one day discover. And it did not—ever—apply to our father himself.

  Dad operated within so tightly wound and so intricately structured a schedule, nearly always running late, fleeing phone calls, searching for mislaid car keys, wallet, sometimes even his shoes, he could not bear the anxieties of others in addition to his own.

  It was sharp-eyed Darren who’d discovered just that morning that the inspection sticker on the Chevy station wagon was outdated by five months. With grim-gleeful reproach he’d run to tell our mother that she was in danger of getting a ticket, possibly getting arrested, driving without a valid 1997 sticker issued by the Michigan Department of Motor Vehicles—“You or Dad better take the car to get inspected, fast!”

  Dad had his own, newer car, that is his pre-owned 1993 Volvo, and Mom had inherited the 1991 Chevy station wagon for her full-time use. Thus responsibility for the station wagon had fallen between the two adults like a ball indifferently dropped, rolling heedlessly about at their feet, unacknowledged.

  The original plan for the day had been to meet Dad for lunch at one o’clock at a lakeshore restaurant called The Cove, which was our parents’ new favorite restaurant, overlooking Lake Huron five miles north of our house; Dad would be driving to The Cove from the center of St. Croix, a distance of two miles. That morning, however, without consulting him, Mom had conceived of a “brilliant—and pragmatic” new idea: we would drive to St. Croix and drop the station wagon off at a garage, and we would walk the short distance to the women’s center where Gus Voorhees was physician-in-chief, and surprise him—“You kids never see your father at work. You deserve that.” Then, Mom reasoned, our father would drive us all to The Cove, and by the time we returned from lunch, in the early afternoon, the station wagon would be ready to be picked up at the garage.

  Of course, prissy Darren objected to this plan on two grounds: it was a change of plans, which seemed to nettle him on principle; and, what if our father left for The Cove before we got to the women’s center, how would we get to the restaurant?

  “Don’t be ridiculous, Darren. We’ll get to the Center by twelve-thirty. Your father won’t leave for the restaurant until at least quarter to one. Gus Voorhees has never been early for anything, and he isn’t likely to start today.”

  “I think you’d better call Dad anyway.”

  “Your father doesn’t like nuisance calls at work. We’ll just surprise him.”

  “It isn’t a nuisance call. It’s us!”

  “Your father doesn’t like unnecessary calls. He’s a busy man.”

  “But—what if he leaves early for the Cove?”

  Brainless as a parrot my brother was repeating himself. And so grim was he presenting these superficial objections, our mother laughed at him. How could that possibly happen! Why was he being so silly! There was something edgy and provocative in our mother’s laughter like the scratching of fingernails on a blackboard.

  “But—but—what if the station wagon isn’t ready to be picked up when we’re back from lunch? How’ll we get home?”—this was Darren’s fumbling coup de grâce.

  “�
��How will we get home?’—Darren, we live three miles away. There will always be a way to get home.”

  In the rearview mirror our mother’s eyes flashed at us in warning yet still she was smiling. Her mood was cheery, ebullient.

  How beautiful she seemed, to us! Before the ravaging.

  Mom said that if the station wagon wasn’t ready when we returned from lunch, we could wait in the public library—“I want to go there anyway, to pick up a book. It may not be Ann Arbor but the library isn’t bad.”

  So frequently our mother would preface a wistful remark with It may not be Ann Arbor but . . .

  We’d lived in Ann Arbor long ago. To me, a lifetime ago.

  Darren scornfully refuted most of my memories of Ann Arbor as mistaken, fraudulent. Especially I was eager to recall a place and a time where (we all knew, she hardly disguised her feelings) my mother had been happier. I had been born—(that is, I’d been told so)—at the University of Michigan Medical School Hospital where at the time Gus Voorhees was a physician on the staff; soon afterward, he shifted his interests to another kind of medical care, public health, community-oriented, female-centered, and we moved away. Of Ann Arbor I could remember little clearly except a vast, hilly park of hiking trails to which I’d been taken as a small child in a backpack on my father’s back—the excitement of those hikes, a pleasurable jolting like being rocked in a cradle, seeing the park spread out astonishingly before my eyes even as, so strangely, I was being carried backward . . .

  Mom had hiked with us of course in this beautiful place they called the arboretum. And Darren too—I had to assume. Only vaguely did I remember him.

  On the drive into St. Croix through open fields, past farmhouses and small clapboard houses dingy-white and cruddy (Darren’s most frequently used word) as our own, Darren shifted his shoulders and lanky-long legs in the seat beside me, and continued to fret, in an undertone meant for our mother to hear. At last she said, peering at him in the rearview mirror:

  “Look, Darren—it’s my birthday, practically. I should get to do what I want to do on my damned birthday.”

  “Your birthday isn’t until next week!”

  Our mother’s blatant misstatements of fact seemed to particularly aggrieve Darren. At thirteen he’d become increasingly literal-minded, fussy and judgmental—not about himself but about the rest of us. Especially, our parents’ attempts at humor offended him, as if, in his ears, such humor was meant to obscure a harsher and more profound reality hovering like mist beyond the ragged foliage surrounding our house.

  Our mother was saying, pleading: “Look. I’m sure that’s why your father wanted to have an ‘excursion’ today. He’ll be gone next week—to Washington, D.C. And he was away last weekend. Please just try to relax, Darren. You seem so—angry . . .”

  Darren muttered what sounded like angry! Jesus and squirmed in his seat, kicking the back of the driver’s seat.

  In our family there had come to be the tradition of the family excursion. These were sudden adventures planned by our father—usually impromptu, when a window of opportunity opened in his crowded schedule—involving a few hours snatched from oblivion as he liked to say. The family excursion had the air of the unexpected and the surprise; it could not ever involve any other persons, only the Voorhees family (two adults, three children); invariably it involved driving somewhere, as far as possible given restraints of time and common sense—once, to Houghton Lake; another time, to Saginaw Bay at Katechay Point. Rare that Gus Voorhees could take a few days off in succession—(more precisely, rare that Gus Voorhees would want to take a few days off in succession)—but when he could, and we didn’t have school, he drove “my brood” to Mackinac Island in northern Michigan where we stayed in a ramshackle cabin that belonged to relatives.

  These were our happiest times. You would surmise.

  It wasn’t often that our mother was so ebullient and funny, as she was on this day; not often that she smiled so much, and with such dazzle.

  Except possibly, too much dazzle.

  Our mother had made an effort to dress for this excursion. Not her usual flannel shirts, T-shirts, torn jeans, grimy Nike running shoes or, more often, at least indoors, no shoes at all; but rather the stylish lilac-colored linen suit purchased at a consignment shop in the Detroit suburb of Birmingham—(for Mom purchased most of her clothes at consignment shops, on principle: she was morally outraged by the prices of most clothes). She’d brushed and braided her almost waist-length hair, she’d “made up” her face. She has prepared herself to be beautiful for Gus Voorhees though she is (she knows: she accepts) not a beautiful woman but rather an ardent and intense woman who can (sometimes) convince a man (that man) that she is beautiful or, if she is not beautiful, that beauty does not matter: ardor and intensity matter.

  Often there were times—days, weeks—when our mother did not smile much. When a smile from her felt like a rubber band being stretched tight—tighter. On the worst days of the interminable Michigan winter now behind us. (You did not ever want to think: yes, and before us, too.) On those evenings when our father didn’t come home for an evening meal because he was elsewhere, at another meal; or he was away altogether, in another part of the state, or in another state; he was “dining with” wealthy contributors (in Birmingham, Bloomfield Hills, Grosse Pointe) to women’s organizations, who happened to be (older, lonely) wealthy women for whom time spent in the company of Gus Voorhees was a thrill.

  He’d become something of a male-feminist hero in Michigan, in some quarters, having made an impassioned presentation before the Michigan state legislature in 1981 that convinced enough of the (predominantly conservative) legislators to vote into law the establishment of a special commission on women’s reproductive medical rights, on which Gus Voorhees had served. The legislature also approved a budget increase for women’s community medical services, a controversial subject in Michigan as elsewhere in the United States: should public funds be used to provide abortions? And which kinds of abortion?—therapeutic, following rape or incest, elective? Should public funds be used to provide contraception? Social welfare issues that had seemed to have been decided definitively years before were revealed as not decided at all, rather they were continually under attack, and increasingly vulnerable since the Presidential election of Ronald Reagan in 1980. No issues aroused more passion in both political parties, and with each elected legislature, and each new campaign to maintain, increase, or decrease the budget, Gus Voorhees was involved as a public-health physician-spokesman.

  Our father had long been “under attack” from his enemies—(we would learn after his death). We’d been allowed to see some of the friendlier responses in the media—articles in newspapers in Ann Arbor and Detroit, cover stories in the University of Michigan Alumni Bulletin, Michigan Public Health and Michigan Life, a profile on Gus Voorhees—“Crusader for Women’s Rights”—in the New York Times Magazine.

  By the age of forty he’d virtually surrendered a private life. So our mother would say wistfully yet with an air (we thought) of pride.

  Famous? Infamous.

  Can’t separate the two.

  Winter afternoons shading into dusk when we would find our mother lying on the sagging brass bed upstairs in her and Dad’s bedroom, a cheerless room with fraying wallpaper like wet tissue, with a damp towel over her face—(for she suffered every two or three weeks from what she called idiopathetic migraine); or, on better days, we would find our mother upstairs in the low-ceilinged room she called her office, at a table facing a dormer window, working on her IBM personal computer squarely before her, frowning and intense and often excited. As Jenna Matheson (who was qualified to practice law in Michigan) she sent and received countless emails; she made and received countless calls; she could immerse herself as deeply in her work as our father did in his, or nearly. She was a legal consultant for women’s rights organizations in Ann Arbor, Grand Rapids, and Saginaw, as well as Michigan Planned Parenthood, with which she was most associated; she was a
n editor for Women and the Law: An American Review, which was published by a coalition of women’s legal associations, at the University of Chicago Law School. She was always writing book reviews, essays—for years she’d been revising her one-hundred-page Master’s thesis (English, University of Wisconsin) titled The Battered Woman: Portraits of the Female Self in Literature, in the hope of getting it published.

  Sometimes as we approached our mother’s office we would hear her on the phone; we would hear her speak sharply and incisively; we might hear her laugh in a way we did not often hear her laugh, in our presence. We might hear her muttering to herself, sighing. And again, laughing. If we knocked on the (usually ajar) door our mother would turn to us with a quick vague squinting-guilty smile—“Oh Christ! Is it that late? Time to eat?”

  AT DANTE’S AUTO REPAIR Mom gave the station wagon keys to the mechanic: “It isn’t a new vehicle, obviously. It may need some fixing-up. There’s been a rattle in the engine, or somewhere beneath the hood, for a while. The left rear tire seems a little flat. Please change the oil, or—whatever you usually do. Thank you!” In a little procession we walked to the Huron County Women’s Center three blocks away on South Main Street. Now the sky had cleared, to a degree: the pale incandescent light seemed to fall directly from above, sunshine filtered through gaseous clouds. The sidewalks of St. Croix were not much populated as in a painting by Edward Hopper and so we did not imagine—We are being observed. Family of Dr. Gus Voorhees baby killer.

  We’d heard much from our parents about the women’s center in St. Croix, for which our father had first been a consulting physician and, more recently, head of the staff, but we had not visited it until now—that is, Darren, Naomi, and Melissa had not visited the Center; we were not sure if our mother had, since her remarks about the Center were cryptic and ambiguous.

  That place! That place that has swallowed your father’s life.

  It will be a relief when we can leave here. This is “interim”—not “permanent.”