I lock my door upon myself—a poet had said.
I turn my key and there’s—happiness.
SHE HEARD THE PHONE ring downstairs. God damn.
She felt now a stab of guilt. Not freedom but something like a vise tightening around her chest.
She had no phone extension in this room. She did not want a phone extension in this room. Her work, so long executed in the interstices of her husband’s and her children’s schedules, called to her, like something that is dying of thirst. No, no!—don’t stop so soon.
She’d just begun to work. The room was drafty and damp, she’d had to plug in a space heater. She’d warmed her hands by gripping a coffee mug tight. It was not fair, she did not want to be interrupted.
She was typing on an electronic typewriter—an old, durable office model with almost silent keys. Laboriously she was assembling material to mail to a women’s organization in Detroit for which she’d become a sort of pro bono legal consultant. Though she hoped to be paid for her work, eventually.
If you give away your services you can’t expect to be paid for your services. Isn’t that logical, Jenna?—so Jenna’s mother-in-law Madelena had asked, not unreasonably.
It would not be said of the mother-in-law Madelena Kein that she was a professional woman who gave away her services cheaply, or indeed at all.
(Madelena Kein headed the Institute for Independent Study at New York University, where she had a joint appointment in philosophy and linguistics. She’d been, for a few years, when Gus was very young, Madelena Kein-Voorhees, but she’d been Madelena Kein—Professor Madelena Kein—for a long time. Gus could not recall when his parents were divorced, precisely—his mother had moved away, to live and teach in New York City, sometime before the formal divorce from Gus’s physician-father in Birmingham, Michigan. She had willingly surrendered all claims to joint custody of her son by moving away in defiance of a court order and yet, so far as Jenna could determine, Gus did not seem to resent his ambitious mother for having left him; if he’d been hurt by her behavior, he did not dwell upon this hurt but seemed instead proud of her—at a distance. Madelena had not come to Gus’s wedding and she’d only rarely visited his family for, as she’d liked to say, as if it were a witty bon mot, she had but a “minimal interest in being someone’s gram-muddy.”)
Gus had told Jenna not to be intimidated by his mother—“It’s bad enough that I am intimidated by her. She won’t bother you.”
In fact Jenna was quite taken with the glamorous, mysterious, and absent mother who had not the slightest inclination to interfere with her son’s private life. In another lifetime, they might have been friends.
In the early years of marriage Jenna had been so grateful to be Gus Voorhees’s wife that she had not—ever—complained of being lonely, or left behind, or (subtly, not crudely) exploited by him. Gus Voorhees was the first man she had ever loved—emotionally, sexually. Intellectually.
It had seemed to her from the start that Gus did not (probably) love her quite so deeply as she loved him. Not because Gus’s attentions were scattered, rather more that Gus had not the capacity to love so deeply as she loved. Such yearning, such need, Jenna understood to be weakness and not strength.
That Gus was not weak as she was weak, she reasoned she could not blame him.
Unless—she misunderstood her husband? That a man did not need love so much as another might not mean that he did not love as much as another.
As a young wife Jenna had taken a stoic sort of pride in not-complaining of the exigencies of her married life: so much that fell totally upon her shoulders as the wife of a very busy physician-surgeon with a commitment to women’s public health issues. She had not-complained while maintaining households (one child, two children, at last three) in diverse regions of Michigan to which Gus’s work had brought him. She’d helped Gus in his career that was like a locomotive rushing ever faster along a curving track—not just typing (of course—that was the minimum) but composing, assembling, researching and preparing talks and papers on women’s reproductive health issues and legal rights for Dr. Voorhees who was frequently invited to give keynote speeches, to appear at fund-raisers, to consult, to collaborate. Gus Voorhees too was expected to work pro bono, often. It was rare that he worked fewer than one hundred hours a week.
She’d have liked to speak to Madelena Kein. Just to ask a single question.
Did you leave your family because you loved them too much? Because you understood that love and pride are a baited hook you swallow unwittingly and discover one day that it is tangled in your guts?
ALONE IN THE HOUSE, that morning. Hearing the phone ring downstairs. Glancing at her watch—9:18 A.M.
Damn phone!—she would not be distracted.
Hearing the voice mail recording, and a muffled message. For she was too far away to hear distinctly, and so immersed in her work, which was already delayed by a day, she tried not to be distracted as another woman might have been for whom aloneness was a state of unease.
And the phone ringing again, soon after.
Thinking again in exasperation, or in mounting alarm: it would not ever be Gus calling at this prime time of morning nor would it be a call from the children’s schools, she was sure.
She was sure!
Hearing the phone again. Nervously pushing back her chair.
Oh hell. All right. I will see what it is.
Rapidly descending the (steep, narrow, creaking) stairway, brushing her hair out of her face, daring to think This had better be worth it.
UNKNOWING. NOT-YET-KNOWING.
For the remainder of her life my mother will recall herself in those minutes suffused in wet-glistening light from a window.
She will try to reconstruct the scene. Envisioning the woman who imagines herself Gus Voorhees’s wife, annoyed with her husband, uncertain of her husband, rehearsing words with her (absent) husband while not knowing that she isn’t his wife any longer but his widow, descending the stairs to the first floor of the house.
A woman who is (not yet) a widow at 9:18 A.M. of November 2, 1999, in the old clapboard house on the Salt Hill Road.
Where we’d thought we were not so happy. Where we’d complained, whined. Flies in the walls! Only imagine.
In the kitchen my mother pauses, listening. The voice mail mechanism in the telephone has been activated. A woman whose voice she doesn’t recognize is addressing her urgently.
Mrs. Voorhees? If you are home please call us immediately. There has been an emergency. Our number is—
It is the number of the Broome County Women’s Center in Muskegee Falls, Ohio, which my mother recognizes at once.
And so quickly she picks up the receiver while the woman is speaking.
“Hello? Hello?”
“Mrs. Voorhees? Is that—you?”
“Yes of course. What is it?”
“Mrs. Voorhees—are you sitting down? Please?”
A nurse. Has to be. Someone with medical training.
Sharply my mother says yes. She is sitting down. (Though in fact, in her confusion, in mounting panic my mother is not sitting down; she is leaning onto a chair, awkwardly, one knee on the chair and her trembling body off balance.)
The voice is a distraught voice. Breathless and uncomfortably close. My mother grips the receiver tight unable to stop the hemorrhaging words.
“I’m afraid that—that—your husband has been injured—badly injured . . . Mrs. Voorhees? Are you still there?”
Through a roaring in her ears she hears herself murmur impatiently yes.
“—emergency situation, an attack—single assailant—shotgun—”
And then, somehow I was on the floor.
I was standing with the phone in my hand and I was listening and understanding every word but then came the word shotgun which I heard like a gun going off close beside my head—SHOTGUN. And I was on the floor, my head struck the counter by the sink as I fell. I was on the cold linoleum floor of a room I would not have been ab
le to identify as a kitchen still less the kitchen of the rented house on Salt Hill Road in Huron County, Michigan; and the phone receiver was beside me swinging on its cord. I remember that I could hear a voice coming out of the receiver—a little voice. And then I was lifting myself dazed feeling the strain in my shoulders you feel when you are doing push-ups. And my head was throbbing and I was thinking—Did I faint? Is that what happened?—the first time in my life, such a thing had happened to me.
It was amazing. It was an astonishment. Relief swept over me like warm water—It isn’t so bad. Like a candle blown out. I will never be afraid of dying again.
THE ARCHIVIST INTERVIEWED
Are you Naomi Anne Voorhees, daughter of Jenna and Gus Voorhees, born in 1987 in Ann Arbor, Michigan?
Are you undertaking this “archival research” with the blessing of your mother, or is it undertaken out of pure selfishness, and desperation, to know your slain father?
If you are Naomi, and no one else, how can you claim to appropriate your mother’s voice? Her most private, fleeting thoughts?
Are you aware that your mother Jenna Matheson has refused to speak to interviewers about such private matters in the more than six years since your father’s death?
Will you acknowledge that your mother has steadfastly refused to speak to you on this subject?—that she does not care to “heave her heart into her mouth” as you have done?
Will you acknowledge that you have violated your mother’s privacy, as you have violated the privacy of your sister Melissa and your brother Darren, and others? Have you no shame?
How as a university dropout can you imagine you have the intellectual ability required to be a thorough and disinterested archivist of your father Gus Voorhees’s complicated life?
How can you claim to know what you have not personally experienced? How do you dare?
Indeed, how can you claim at the age of nineteen to recall in such detail what you’d (allegedly) experienced as a child in a time of upheaval and distress when by the account of others you’d suffered a kind of “traumatic amnesia” following your father’s death?
Do you really know even “Naomi Anne Voorhees”—or is she a desperate construct, like the others?
LAW OF EXPONENTS
Naomi.”
In seventh-grade math, first period. She is hunched over her desk fiercely concentrating on a pre-algebra math problem the teacher has written on the blackboard. Clack, clack!—the sound of chalk striking like a sharp-beaked bird against a window.
She likes math! Especially since beginning seventh grade now that math doesn’t mean mere arithmetic.
But she has to grip tight. Grip the pencil tight. In a panic of falling.
For she can’t seem to comprehend certain of the laws of exponents.
Has tried, but cannot.
If the exponent is 1, then you get just the number (example 91 = 9) but if the exponent is 0, then you get 1 (example 90 = 1).
Why, she has asked, don’t you get 0?
For 9 times 0 is 0—isn’t it? Or, 9 multiplied 0 times is 0—obviously!
Yet, the teacher (who is not a mathematician but a seventh-grade math teacher) just smiles and says that’s the law of exponents.
Students are expected to memorize. Don’t try to understand.
But Naomi wants to understand.
It is maddening to her that the “law” is, if the exponent is 0 you always, invariably, get 1.
How can it be, if you multiply a number by 0, you will not get 0? Why are exponents different from multiplying when that is what exponents mean—multiplying.
Also, it is crucial to Naomi Voorhees to solve problems fast.
In-class math problems are a race. A frantic game. Whoever raises his/her hand and gives the correct answer first is the winner.
“Naomi—?”
She glances up. She squints. What is it—what does Mrs. Bregman want?
So absorbed has Naomi been in the blackboard problem—
112 - 3=
—so eager to be the first to solve it, she is not aware that Mrs. Bregman has gone to open the classroom door; that the school principal Mr. Cameron is speaking earnestly with Mrs. Bregman in the corridor as everyone in class—(except Naomi Voorhees)—observes them curiously; and now, Mrs. Bregman turns back to the class and is saying in a soft voice, yet a recognizably agitated voice, “Naomi? Can you come here, please?”
What you never want to hear: your name.
In such circumstances: your name.
Mrs. Bregman is a pug-faced woman who smiles too much but Mrs. Bregman is not smiling now.
Naomi fumbles to put down her pencil. She is reluctant to surrender the game to a rival!
In the margin of her paper she has been multiplying numbers but in her haste has (probably) made a mistake. Yet, she can’t risk taking time to check, for another student will rush to supply the answer before she does. (Naomi has two rivals in Mrs. Bregman’s math class: John Beaver and Alice Czechi. John is as smart as Naomi usually, but he isn’t quite so fast—John raises his hand just a heartbeat after Naomi. Alice isn’t as smart as either Naomi or John but has the advantage of being able to be more patiently methodical than either; when Alice raises her hand, she is rarely mistaken.)
Damn! Naomi’s pencil rolls across the desk and clatters onto the floor.
If she stoops to reach for it she will have to touch with her fingertips (at least) the scummy pool beneath her desk where a greenish-smelly excrement has accumulated, the sickness of her inability to comprehend a basic law of exponents, that maddens her, and makes her grind her teeth—why is it, 9 to the 0 power is neither 9 nor 0 but 1?
“Naomi—dear?”
Naomi is trapped in her desk—first seat, farthest row against the windows, exposed to all eyes. Her face is smarting. She can taste something like black sludge at the back of her mouth. Singled out so inanely, so stupidly, so unforgivably—dear. Mrs. Bregman has never called anyone in the class dear before! Poor Naomi Voorhees! Naked as if her clothes have been torn from her and her scrawny body exposed. A plain girl, a self-conscious girl, a girl with brown hair and slate-colored eyes; a girl with a pained smile and a girl with a sarcastic mouth; one of the tall girls in seventh grade with a tendency to slouch her shoulders to appear less-tall . . .
“Please bring your books and backpack with you, Naomi.”
Even worse than hearing your name: being told to bring your things with you for you will not be returning.
IN THIS EARLY PHASE of The Death of Gus Voorhees the wife of Gus Voorhees is not yet a widow for she is behaving in a way to demonstrate to her husband how capable she is, how reliable, how he can depend upon her, how deeply she loves him. See? I can do this. They have not stopped me.
Not yet a widow but Gus Voorhees’s brave and remarkable wife, Jenna.
Despite her shock she manages to telephone our schools: St. Croix Elementary, St. Croix Middle, St. Croix High. She is able to identify herself and to explain that there has been a family emergency. She identifies the children and does not confuse one school with another. She informs whomever she is speaking with that someone will be coming to take the Voorhees children out of school within the hour and that they should be prepared to leave at once.
Gus Voorhees’s widow has been contacted by Michigan State police who have been contacted by Ohio State police. It is urgent, they are saying, that Jenna and the children be taken to a safe house as soon as possible.
But first, Jenna calls Ellen Farlane who was Gus’s administrative assistant at the Huron County Women’s Center, their closest friend in St. Croix. Ellen! This is Jenna, Gus’s wife. Something terrible has happened to Gus in Ohio, we need your help.
She calls our father’s parents—of course. She speaks with our grandfather (in Birmingham, Michigan) but she is able to leave only a voice message for our grandmother (living in New York City, long divorced from our grandfather). Something terrible has happened to Gus, I won’t be here to speak with you, I will b
e going to him.
She may call other, crucial numbers. She will not remember clearly. At some point she calls her parents in Evanston, Illinois, but leaves a cryptic phone message.
Call when you can. But I won’t be here. Emergency in Ohio. I will be going there soon.
Children are all right. Safe. Gus in hospital.
She calls, or tries to call, our father’s oldest Ann Arbor friends. Our father’s attorney-friend in Ann Arbor, Lenny McMahan, who is Darren’s godfather. And other friends of Gus Voorhees scattered through Michigan. His beloved mentor, now retired from the University of Michigan medical school—Something has happened to Gus. I don’t have details. I wanted to prepare you.
Jenna knows that if she hangs up the phone it will ring again immediately and this will frighten her.
At this time Ellen Farlane has gone to pick up the Voorhees children at their schools which are within a few blocks of one another. She is accompanied by a young nurse from the Center. Ellen Farlane is grim-faced and wet-eyed in a dark green nylon jacket hastily thrown over a white uniform.
Naomi is dazed and suspicious. Why has she been summoned out of math class? Why doesn’t Mr. Cameron tell her what the family emergency is?—(doesn’t he know?). She will not be seated in the principal’s outer office but is pacing about like a trapped animal as the principal’s assistant tries to smile at her, to comfort her.
“Has something happened to my father? What is it?”—Naomi demands bravely. But all she is told is that her mother has called, it is a family emergency and someone is coming to pick her up.
Not her mother, then. Not Jenna.
It isn’t her mother to whom the emergency has happened, obviously. And yet, it isn’t her mother who is coming to pick her up.
There is a kind of vacuum, an emptiness. Naomi is confounded by such a blank. It is like trying to comprehend how the exponent 0 must result in the number 1—she can’t do it.
Her tongue has gone numb, cold. Pulses beat wildly in her head. Sometimes when she is agitated she fears that she will become insane, such pulses beating and in what she knows to be her brain, for what beats wildly is in danger of bursting, and what bursts into a brain will cause insanity—she believes. But her fear of going insane is normally bracketed by the calm and orderliness of the exterior world, that would judge her harshly, and lock her away from view; but now it seems to her, judging by the behavior of the adults at her school, their inability to speak clearly and even to look her in the face, there has been some catastrophe in the exterior world, that has nothing to do with her.
A Book of American Martyrs Page 20