A Book of American Martyrs

by Joyce Carol Oates

  Why had they adopted the little Chinese-girl orphan?—a question that everyone who knew Gus and Jenna Voorhees had wanted to ask.

  She could not have said. Not clearly.

  For it was wrong to say—We felt it is our duty.

  Crude and misleading to say—It is the duty of some of us, who can afford to take into our homes a child who, otherwise . . .

  More accurate to say—Because we wanted to love—another child.

  More accurate—Because we could. Because it was time for another. Because another baby of our own was not practical. Because we had love to spare.

  She did not want to think that Gus’s wish for another child, an adopted child, preferably Chinese, had something in it deeply irrational, unexamined.

  She did not want to think that her acquiescence to her husband’s wish had something in it deeply craven, insecure. Or that her fear of displeasing Gus Voorhees in virtually any way, small, large, petty, profound was a fear that was justified.

  “I think it was to renew our marriage. Like renewing our ‘vows.’”

  These measured words she had several times said, about their adoption of Melissa.

  Was this true? Renewing our vows sounded naively upbeat, optimistic. For you would certainly not want to say Out of fear that our marriage was floundering, we reached out blindly for another baby. Are we so different from other couples?

  The older children were becoming mysterious to her. It was clear, they didn’t need her nearly so much as Melissa needed her. At twelve Naomi was secretive and elusive; at fifteen, Darren was unpredictable in his moods. To hug Darren was to risk being shoved away with a look of acute embarrassment—Hey Jesus, Mom.

  At times her very body ached, in memory of them; in memory of the terrible intimacy of pregnancy, childbirth, nursing that had so defined her in the early years of marriage. Now, her son and her daughter regarded her warily. Since Gus had departed, they seemed to blame her.

  Though only Melissa would inquire for only Melissa loved Jenna enough to trust her.

  Why can’t we live with Daddy?

  Don’t you love Daddy? Are you mad at Daddy?

  Doesn’t Daddy like to live with us anymore?

  WHEN THE CALL CAME at 9:18 A.M. of November 2, 1999, she did not answer it.

  Thinking, it would not be Gus because Gus would never call at such a time. Through each weekday morning he was likely to be in surgery. And often in the early hours of the morning he performed those difficult surgical abortions that involved late-term impaired fetuses and mothers whose lives were endangered, which other surgeons would not perform.

  His work wasn’t invariably abortion-on-demand. Much of his work was therapeutic abortion. Dilation and evacuation in the second trimester of a malformed fetus, a fetus whose heartbeat has ceased. In the third trimester, the malformed fetus injected with digoxin to precipitate a miscarriage. A considerable fraction of his practice was obstetrics—he did not destroy fetuses but saved them. He treated ectopic pregnancies. He treated pregnant women with cervical, uterine, ovarian cancer. He performed caesarians. He delivered babies whose mothers had been seriously injured in accidents, or were seriously ill. He repaired (surgically) the ravages of childbirth in mothers for whom childbirth had been devastating and would have proved fatal. But his enemies did not allow such distinctions and in their defamation of Gus Voorhees, it was as Baby Killer he was known.

  Mustard-yellow flyers—A Baby Killer lives in your neighborhood.

  (How awful, Melissa had brought one of these home! She’d found it on the sidewalk in front of their house in Saginaw.)

  The bomb threat at the Center in St. Croix. Graffiti on the shuttered windows, small white wooden crosses scattered on the walk in front of the building, picket signs, kneeling protesters, rosaries. . . The maddening chant she heard sometimes in her sleep, in that twilit region between sleep and waking.

  Free-choice is a lie,

  Nobody’s baby chooses to die.

  It was true: but you did not want to think so.

  The fetus wished to live. Stubbornly, sometimes astonishingly—the fetus struggled to live. But the power of its life—or its death—had to reside with the mother. No other alternative was possible.

  She tried not to think of these matters. Especially, the picket signs brandishing images of unspeakable horror—dead, mutilated, dismembered human infants any one of which (if circumstances had been altered) might have been her own beloved children. And yes, the realization that her husband was a surgeon who performed abortions, routinely. There was a kind of poison that seeped into her soul, if she allowed herself to think of such charges and of those whom Gus and his associates casually called the enemy.

  It made her anxious, it made her resentful, that her husband so immersed himself in his work, and in the internal politics of his work, he seemed scarcely to know how the world regarded him, or to care.

  Was it arrogance, or simple self-abnegation. Gus did not know what he might have known, if he’d cared more.

  Look, Jenna! My work, my life stands for itself. That will have to be my defense.

  She was climbing the stairs to the second floor. Steep and narrow and creaking beneath her weight. Feeling her heart suffused with happiness at the prospect of being, for a few hours at least, alone.

  She’d laughed, breathless. Feeling so strangely free.

  SHE WOULD NOT HAVE expected that she’d come to feel a kind of stoic comfort in the house on the Salt Hill Road, that had not been their first choice here in Huron County. At least, she did not hate it any longer.

  In the numerous places they’d lived, since deciding to live together, and deciding to marry, the responsibility had been (tacitly) hers, to establish a household. No one had told her this—certainly, Gus had not told her—but she’d understood, and had been equal to the task, and had taken pride in it. When she and Gus Voorhees had met she’d been completing her final year of law school at the University of Michigan, while Gus was a second-year resident at the medical school hospital; already Gus was involved in public health and community medicine, and Jenna had been a volunteer for Legal Aid. She would pass her Michigan bar exam on the first try but she hadn’t been ambitious for a private career in the law. Working to reform the economic situation of women in the state, providing legal counsel to organizations promoting women’s reproductive rights, these were her missions, but they were part of her life, and not her life. A career is not a life—her mother had warned her.

  In sixteen years of marriage she’d never ceased working except when she’d had very young children, and when they’d flown to Shanghai to adopt Melissa, which had involved nearly three weeks. But her work was executed in the interstices of her husband’s more complicated schedule. The life of the household centered upon him, and upon the children; to herself, Jenna had become a sort of blur, a figure in motion.

  So long as she loved Gus Voorhees, none of this mattered. Rarely had she thought of career, life. So long as he’d seemed to love her.

  But often, Gus was away. If indeed he was living with his family he was frequently away on weekends.

  In May 1997 they’d moved from Saginaw, Michigan, to Huron Township, when Gus Voorhees had taken over the administration of the floundering Huron County Women’s Center. Not long after the St. Croix center had stabilized, Gus had been approached by the Ohio Board of Medicine to take over a floundering women’s center in a rural township in Ohio, where anti-abortion agitators had vandalized the Center, forced out the director, and hounded out many of the staff. It was to be an emergency appointment, and a highly publicized appointment, made in the face of local opposition, given media attention in Ohio and in such national publications as USAToday. Jenna had been astonished when Gus hadn’t declined overtures from the Board at once. How could he be serious?—moving again?

  He explained to her: if the Broome County Women’s Center closed women in the area would have to drive at least one hundred miles just for contraceptive prescriptions, sti
ll farther for abortions.

  That anti-abortion opponents in Ohio were taking a particular stand against Gus Voorhees had seemed, perversely, to provoke and stimulate him.

  She’d told him no! He was needed right here in Michigan.

  He’d told her he was needed more in Broome County, Ohio.

  This was true, she supposed. But why did it matter? How many counties in the United States might have been described as needing Gus Voorhees, or someone very like him.

  Wasn’t it dangerous in Broome County, Ohio?—Jenna had demanded; and Gus had said, as she might have known he would say, that it was dangerous everywhere, and he wasn’t going to factor in his personal comfort.

  “‘Personal comfort’!—I hate you.”

  She’d wanted to scream at him. She’d wanted to push him from her. She’d wanted to harden her heart against him, that he had not the power to hurt her further.

  Despite her pleas Gus had said yes to the Ohio offer which was to include security provisions—protection for the Center, and the staff, by armed law enforcement. Gus would also have the power of hiring a completely new medical and support staff for the Center. Several young doctors, female and male. There was money for a radiology lab. For the first three years at least, there was the promise of more money from the state of Ohio than he’d had at his disposal in Huron County.

  She wasn’t sure if Gus really wanted her to relocate to Ohio with him. If he really wanted to bring the children into a potentially dangerous environment. Yet, Gus asked. Gus asked repeatedly. Jenna responded adamantly no.

  Another move! Another house! New schools for the children! It would be a nightmare.

  I think you really don’t mean this. You’re begging us to come because you know we will not. Should you be married at all, Gus? Should you have had children?

  That’s ridiculous! That’s a terrible accusation, Jenna.

  Is it? Ask the children.

  You ask the children—when they’re grown up and can judge.

  Any criticism of Gus as a father stung him, infuriated him—Jenna could see the rage in his eyes.

  He would pit the children against her, she thought. If it came to a separation, divorce.

  Even if the mother were awarded primary custody, it would be the father whom they revered, whom they knew so less intimately than they knew the mother.

  You’re making me hate you. And I’m afraid of you.

  Ridiculous! This subject is closed.

  ON TIPTOES Melissa stood to whisper to her mother—“Don’t make us move, Mommy! I will want to die.”

  This disturbing plea, Jenna pretended not to hear. Not entirely.

  “Of course we’re not moving again, Melissa. Anyway—not so soon.”

  Bizarre to hear the word die on the lips of a seven-year-old. Even if Melissa was a precocious child.

  Knowledge of dying, death seemed to be trickling down to ever-younger children. Jenna and Gus had been stunned to hear that the sixteen-year-old son of friends in Ann Arbor had committed suicide by hanging himself in his room, on the night of the first day of school in September—no note, no (evident) warning, a total surprise to high school friends as to the family. They’d known the boy since he’d been an infant and could only say to each other numbly—But Mikey had always seemed so normal . . .

  Jenna communicated best with her youngest child by hugs and kisses, she thought. Words were supplemental.

  After an interlude of (evident) misery and resentment Darren had begun at last to make friends at St. Croix High School. (Jenna had had glimpses of these “friends”—she wasn’t sure what she thought of the sulky-faced boys who barely mumbled H’lo Mz V’rhees when Darren had no alternative but to introduce them. Involuntarily came the cruel adolescent term—losers.) Darren had grown lanky-limbed and evasive, with ironic eyes, prone to moods; quick to lash out to hurt (his mother, his sister Naomi) at the slightest provocation. If his grades at the St. Croix school were high, he shrugged in adolescent embarrassment; if his grades were less than high, he was stricken with adolescent shame. He’d been dismayed and angered by his father’s decision to work in Ohio but he’d seemed to blame Jenna as well, which she understood: for Darren was one to blame.

  There’d been talk of Darren going to visit Gus. But no weekend had been quite ideal for a visit, so far.

  Perversely, as if to confound Jenna, Darren had said that he’d be willing for the family to move to Ohio, anytime. Saying with a smirk, “How much worse can cruddy-rural Ohio be than cruddy-rural Michigan?”—and Jenna said, “Ohio is a death-penalty state. Michigan has never executed in its history.”

  Darren stared at her, startled by this rejoinder.

  What did that mean? Why had she told him?

  But he’d understood. Ohio was a more conservative state than Michigan. As a young child Darren had learned to narrow his eyes at the sight or sound of the word “conservative.”

  Anti-black. Anti-women’s rights. Anti-equality. Anti-liberal. Anti-abortion.

  The enemy.

  “Ohio has yet to repeal the death penalty. Their legislature is not persuadable by rational argument. By contrast, Wisconsin executed just one person in its history, long ago; and capital punishment was banished in Minnesota in 1911. And Michigan has the most remarkable history of any state: not one execution.”

  How passionately Jenna spoke! These little speeches she would make to her children from time to time, often startling them. You were made to realize (if you were a child of Jenna Matheson) that she cared deeply for things about which you knew very little, and that this suggested a Jenna Matheson who wasn’t only just Mom.

  Meanly Darren said, “But Daddy is leaving anyway. So, who cares?” and Jenna said, stung, “Obviously, I care. And you should, also.”

  IF YOU LOVED ME . . .

  Of course I love you, darling. It isn’t that simple.

  But—is love simple?

  Don’t speak in riddles, Jenna. You know we have our work to do.

  She wondered: was his departure a prelude to formal separation, divorce? Gus would not be the one to make such a suggestion but, if Jenna broached it, he might agree, with alacrity. She’d known men who had goaded their anxious wives/lovers into such rash suggestions . . . Emotional outbursts that can’t be retracted.

  Since Gus had departed Jenna found herself in the habit of glancing out windows in the farmhouse, toward the road. Any movement she saw on the Salt Hill Road, or thought she saw, any glimpse of a random passing vehicle, stirred a childlike sort of anticipation: would the vehicle turn into the driveway? Was it Gus, coming home unexpectedly?

  Darling, I’ve changed my mind.

  It was a crazy idea. It was sheer hubris. You were right . . .

  But she wasn’t right, she supposed. It was small-minded of her, it was craven and cowardly, to expect of her husband that he think of her and the children before thinking of his work that effected so many desperate women and girls.

  And some of them adored him—of course. He had “saved” their lives—he had “made their lives possible.”

  Not just women who’d desperately needed to terminate pregnancies but nurses, nurse-practitioners, fellow doctors with whom Gus Voorhees had worked. He’d insisted—(Jenna was ashamed to think that they had ever had such a conversation)—that he loved her; he would always love her; if there were other women whom he found attractive fleetingly, if there were other women who seemed to find him attractive—“That’s only natural, Jenna. But let me say again—I love you.”

  She did believe this. She wanted to believe it. But how badly she missed him!

  Driving into town was painful now that her husband was no longer at the Huron County Women’s Center and there was no (evident) reason for Jenna and the children continuing to live here. When she encountered acquaintances in the grocery store, or staffers from the Center, she was struck by their seeming to assume that “Dr. Voorhees” would be returning to St. Croix, and that the move to Ohio wasn’t permanent.
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br />   Vaguely Jenna said, she hoped so. Gus tended to go where he was most needed . . .

  “We miss Dr. Voorhees! He always makes us laugh.”

  “Does he! Yes.”

  She went away feeling both slightly deceptive and yet cheered. Of course—Gus would return to St. Croix, in a year or two. Surely, he would return to Michigan.

  Or by then, he’d have convinced Jenna and the children to join him in Ohio, after all.

  Jenna thought of the poet Percy Shelley who’d boasted strangely of himself—I always go on until I am stopped. And I never am stopped.

  Except of course, Shelley was stopped, at a young age.

  And Gus Voorhees would be stopped—one day.

  BUT NOW, ALONE. And elated to be alone. She told herself.

  For the first time since Gus had moved to Ohio in the stifling heat of August she was feeling good to be alone.

  Don’t say that I am abandoning you and the children, Jenna! I am not, you know I am not.

  Come with me? In a few months . . .

  But she would not. She was determined, she would not.

  For she felt bitterly how he loved his work, essentially. Not his wife, and not his children.

  His ideal of Gus Voorhees whom others so admired and revered.

  Oh, she was grateful that he was gone! His hands touching her hair, stroking her cheeks, her neck, her arms—his murmurous voice—his mouth grazing hers. She was sick with love for him, she could not bear the thought of him. Waking in the night in the sunken crater of a mattress feeling his weight against her, feeling his breath—she wanted to die, she could not bear such loneliness. What a poor substitute the children were, needy for her! But she was needy for the husband, the man. In a delirium craving what only her husband could give her, and no one else.

  Yet telling herself a very different story: how grateful to be alone. If not to be alone for always, for this morning at least. Precious uninterrupted hours of work at the plain pine table in the small upstairs room she called her study with its slanted ceiling, meager view of dun-colored fields, a rattly old space heater turned high.