“Oh! Nasty flies.”
Melissa shuddered. The kitchen counters and the sink were stippled with the bodies of tiny black flies. More flies lay on windowsills, and on the tile floor.
Also on the windowsills were house plants. Our mother’s abandoned houseplants which no one remembered until now.
Potted geraniums that had sickened and died and strewn their shriveled petals on the sill and on the floor. Yet, several red flowers remained on one of the plants, on skeletal branches.
Melissa hurried to the sink, to run water into a glass to water the geraniums; but when she turned the faucet the pipes groaned, and only a trickle of discolored water came out.
Silly Melissa! The older children laughed, to see their beautiful little sister so eager to water the geraniums as she’d often done in their former life in this house.
“Never mind, Melissa. The plants are dead. Watering won’t help now.”
Yet our mother touched a forefinger to the calcified dirt in one of the pots. We were remembering now, what we’d forgotten, how in each of our rented houses our mother had set out a row of houseplants in clay pots, mostly geraniums. She had not been a serious keeper of plants but she’d liked the cheeriness of vivid-red geraniums in the wintertime.
“Look! My address book.”
Jenna was surprised to find a small spiral notebook on an end of the counter.
Mixed with a hastily assembled pile of old copies of the New Yorker, Nation, New York Review of Books, and newspapers Naomi discovered a swath of math homework papers—problems she’d solved weeks ago, before her father’s death, but that looked unfamiliar to her now.
Her brain fumbled at the problems. She’d forgotten something crucial. -18(124)—she’d lost the key . . .
A rancid-stale smell pervaded the kitchen. Darren opened the refrigerator to reveal a sight of such ordinariness—a half-gallon container of milk, a quart container of orange juice, part of a loaf of bread, discolored celery stalks, a discolored head of lettuce, discolored grapes—it was shocking to us, baffling.
“Oh, terrible! Everything has spoiled and smells.”
Our mother pushed the refrigerator door shut.
Next, we noticed a winking red light on a small table. The telephone.
We would listen to the voice mail messages. Our mother activated the machine. There was a sequence of calls dating back to early November. In most cases as soon as a caller said Hello our mother deleted the message—“I’ve heard this.” Or, when a caller identified himself, quickly she deleted the message—“I don’t have to hear this.”
Then suddenly we were listening to our father.
Suddenly, our father’s voice lifting exactly as we recalled, yet had forgotten we recalled.
H’lo there? Anybody home?
(Pause)
Jenna? Darling? Will you pick up, please?
(Pause)
Is anyone there?
(Pause)
Well—I’ll try again. If I can, tonight.
I’m sorry that—well, you know.
I think I’ve been distracted by—what’s going on here.
(Pause)
If I sound exhausted—I am!
(Pause)
I have a new idea, Jenna—about next year. Or, rather, next summer. When the children are finished with school. I looked up the date—June eighteenth.
(Pause)
OK. Sorry to miss you.
Love you.
(Pause)
Love all of you.
(Pause)
Good-bye . . .
(Pause)
H’lo? Did I hear someone? Is someone—there?
(Pause)
OK, guys. Love you. I’ll call back soon.
G’bye.
Then, silence.
The shock of it, our father’s voice! We could not quite comprehend what we’d heard.
“Should I play it again?”—Darren asked eagerly.
“No! No, wait.”
Our mother had to sit down on one of the kitchen chairs. Her face had gone white, her mouth was trembling.
Another message clicked on the voice mail, a stranger’s voice, which Darren deleted.
“Turn it off for now, Darren. Please.”
Darren switched off the machine. The little red light vanished.
In the freezing kitchen of the rented farmhouse on Salt Hill Road which we had not ever imagined we would reenter we were waiting, we had no idea what we would do next.
“NEW IDEA”
How many times we would ask ourselves what had Gus meant by a new idea—what did this new idea have to do with the end of the school year in June?
Darren said it was obvious: Dad was planning to leave Ohio and move back to Michigan to live with us.
Naomi said, less certainly: Dad was (possibly) going to quit working in women’s centers and clinics, and become another kind of doctor (that people didn’t hate!).
Melissa said: Oh, Did Daddy have a surprise for us?
Overhearing, Jenna would say bitterly: Better for your father not to have called us at all than to have called and left that message, to fester in our hearts.
LAUGHTER
They tried to tell me you were—dead! Of course I didn’t believe it, we know how people exaggerate.
Often, she had this dream. She and Gus laughing together. Except it was the sound of a harsh wind rustling and not true laughter. Except when she could see clearly, it wasn’t Gus.
THE PEOPLE OF THE STATE OF OHIO V. LUTHER AMOS DUNPHY
DECEMBER 2000
Greedy and self-punishing her eyes fastened upon him. It was her strategy to sit in the Broome County Courthouse where she could observe the defendant Luther Dunphy more or less continuously yet not conspicuously for she knew (of course she knew) how others observed her.
A widow exists in the eyes of beholders. In her own eyes she is likely to be invisible.
And so she knew how they were measuring her. Is that her?—the doctor’s wife?
Or, less friendly—The abortionist’s wife?
Those individuals in the crowded courtroom who were on Gus Voorhees’s side and those who were on the side of the enemy.
Most days the defendant wore a sand-colored corduroy jacket that fitted his broad shoulders tightly though sometimes he wore a dark-hued jacket of a synthetic-seeming material like acrylic fiber. His trousers were dark and lacked a discernible crease. His shirt was white and appeared wrinkled. (Worn with a necktie most days but if without a tie, the shirt remained unbuttoned at the throat as if the collar was too tight for the man’s muscular neck.) Dunphy’s faded hair had been buzz cut like a military haircut and was sharply receding from his forehead. His negligently shaved jowls sagged. In profile she saw him. A heavy face, the face of an aged and baffled boy. Cheeks flushed and lined, dull-red blemish or birthmark in the creased skin and indentations beneath his eyes that were rigidly fixed on the judge, the witnesses, the gesticulating and quarrelsome attorneys as if he dared not glance to the side—dared not glance toward her.
If Jenna hadn’t known that on his most recent birthday Luther Dunphy was forty years old she’d have guessed that he was ten years older. His muscled-softening body was a slow landslide. His hands were a workingman’s hands, now useless. Mornings at the defense table he was able to sit reasonably straight but by mid-afternoon his shoulders began to slump, his head began to sink toward his chest. It was not possible to imagine what Dunphy was thinking as he heard, or gave the appearance of hearing, a succession of prosecution witnesses describing the shootings on the morning of November 2, 1999, and identifying him as the “lone shooter”—whether the man was righteous, defiant, indifferent, resigned. Though more than once, in the afternoon, his eyes nearly closed and a warning remark of the judge provoked Dunphy’s attorney to nudge him awake.
“Not in my courtroom, sir. Witness will continue.”
Jenna was keenly disappointed, Dunphy would not testify in his own defense. At least, that was what th
e Broome County prosecutor had told her.
He’d told her that no competent defense attorney would have allowed this (guilty) defendant to be cross-examined. In fact, very few witnesses would be called to testify on Luther Dunphy’s behalf while the prosecution would present more than thirty witnesses of whom most were eyewitnesses to the homicides and would describe what they’d seen with dramatic intensity.
The prosecutor had charged Luther Dunphy with two counts of first degree homicide and he was (he’d informed Jenna) determined not to settle for less: not a lesser degree of homicide, and not manslaughter.
Manslaughter!—Jenna was incensed. How could such a lesser charge even be considered.
“It won’t be manslaughter, Mrs. Voorhees. Don’t worry. The jury will vote unanimously for first degree homicide, I am certain. And if they do, they will deliberate again to decide whether to send Dunphy to prison for life without parole or to the death chamber.”
Death chamber. The archaic words evoked a shiver. As if death were waiting in a chamber, and the condemned man is made to enter the chamber. Jenna felt a flush of excitement and dread—He should die, for what he did to Gus and to that other innocent man. He does not deserve to live.
(URGENTLY SHE WAS ASKING HIM, what did he want. Did he want the man who’d killed him to die. And Gus allowed her to know, not in words precisely, for the dream was blurred as a windshield in pelting rain, that he did not want Luther Dunphy to die of course—he did not believe in the death penalty, he did not want anyone to die at the hands of the State. And she felt a rush of fury for him, for her dear lost husband, that he should be so forgiving even now, when his enemies did not care for his forgiveness and did not regret his death.)
“YES. I WANT HIM TO DIE.”
Or was it: “I want him sentenced to death. I want everyone to know, he has been sentenced to death. That my husband’s death is a profound loss and the murderer must pay with his own life.” Whether she wanted the man actually to die was another issue.
Of course, Jenna wouldn’t have spoken this way to Gus. Such vindictive words in his wife’s mouth would have shocked and dismayed him.
They had always disapproved of capital punishment. This was barbaric, unworthy of a civilized society. They did not know a single person among their wide circle of friends and professional associates who might have supported capital punishment; as (they liked to say, with a smile) they didn’t know a single person who voted Republican.
In fact of course they did. But they did not acknowledge this possibility.
Did she want Luther Dunphy to die.
Or did she want Luther Dunphy to repent.
It was true, she felt for her husband’s murderer a sick sort of fascination. She could not have said if she was incensed or if she was relieved that the self-ordained “soldier of God” seemed oblivious of her presence in the courtroom, less than twenty feet from her, as he appeared to be oblivious of others in the courtroom who yearned to make eye contact with him, to smile their support of him, to call out to him quickly before one of the bailiffs intervened.
We are praying for you, Luther.
God won’t forget you, Luther! Jesus won’t forget.
Such individuals were escorted out of the courtroom. Their faces shone with righteousness. They were members of the Christian prayer vigil assembled in front of the dignified old granite courthouse who knelt on the sidewalk and on the stone steps each day of the trial taking care to leave just enough space for others to pass by. These were peaceful demonstrators, for the most part—their picket signs didn’t depict aborted infants but only words—RIGHT TO LIFE. NOBODY’S BABY CHOOSES TO DIE. FREE LUTHER DUNPHY.
When she saw these signs, Jenna looked quickly away. She felt that her heart would burst—her head would burst! It was unbearable, that Luther Dunphy should be so defended.
Yet, she understood. Of course.
What had Gus said—Never engage with the enemy.
In Muskegee Falls, entering and departing the Broome County Courthouse, Jenna was never allowed to be alone. Even going to a women’s restroom, she was not allowed to be alone; another woman would accompany her. Always there was someone with her from the prosecutor’s office, or from law enforcement, and there were friends, old friends from Ann Arbor and newer friends from Ohio, associated with the women’s center where Gus Voorhees had worked when he’d been shot down.
Often, the women took Jenna’s hand. Slipping fingers through her fingers, squeezing and gripping. One or two were widows, she’d been told. A widow will tell you, if you are a widow. For there is a sisterhood of sorts.
Don’t look at them. Just look at me, we can talk together. Don’t let them upset you, Jenna. Try to smile at me. Yes! Like that.
It was bizarre to her, that the anti-abortion protesters should hate her. Didn’t they consider that she’d been punished enough, having lost her husband?
Even now, a year after Gus’s death, Jenna continued to receive sporadic hate mail from the enemy, which was forwarded to her in Ann Arbor. She rarely saw such messages, for others intervened and hid them from her, or destroyed them. She dreaded her children being approached, receiving ugly threats—You will be next following the Baby Killer Doctor. You & yours, you will not be spared. (She had sent the children away to live with their grandparents in Birmingham, Michigan, for an indeterminate period of time; in Ann Arbor, the “Voorhees” children were too visible.)
But it wasn’t opponents of abortion solely, or mentally unstable persons raging at Gus Voorhees as if he were still alive, from whom Jenna had to be protected; it was also “media people”—journalists, TV camera crews. Most of these (she believed) were sympathetic with the prosecution’s case. Especially the women were staunch supporters of abortion, pro-choice. Still, Jenna declined all requests for interviews.
“Not now. Not yet! Sometime. Please understand.”
She’d begun refusing such requests even from publications with which she and Gus had been associated immediately after Gus’s death. She had understood the political value of addressing a shocked public after the assassination of a prominent abortion-provider—(and the assassination of an abortion center escort)—but she had been too exhausted, and too stricken with grief. She had hidden even (at times) from her oldest and most loyal friends; even from her parents, and her children. And later, when she’d been a little stronger, she had not wanted to squander her strength in such a way; she did not want to talk about her husband as if he were a political “issue.”
About the trial that had been so frequently, so maddeningly delayed, she felt fierce, self-protective. The trial was all-consuming and obsessive and therefore she had nothing to say about it to an interviewer; she did not even like to speak of it with friends and pro-choice associates, and when she called her children, each night, she said little of the trial, and wanted only to know how (in obsessive detail, that made the eldest children impatient) they were.
To Jenna the trial of Luther Dunphy was an endurance like swimming underwater, holding her breath for as long as she could, and then a little longer. She dared not draw breath too quickly for she would drown.
Her friends were determined to protect her. Since Gus’s death they had surrounded her, shielded her. The trial of Luther Dunphy had loomed before them for more than a year.
“We will have justice, Jenna! Soon it will be over.”
Soon? Over? Jenna wondered what this could possibly mean. Gus’s absence from her life, and from the world, would never be over, no matter the outcome of the trial.
On the stone steps of the courthouse she took care to avoid the prayer vigil protesters. In the corner of her eye she saw how they regarded her, the widow of the man whose death they cheered. Did they hate her, as one of the enemy? Could they feel something more complicated for her—pity, if not sympathy? To them, she was the wife of a “baby killer”—that was her identity. She wanted to turn to them, to confront them—You are dangerous fanatics—religious lunatics! Your wrathful God does
not exist, you are brainwashed and absurd.
But she knew it was not so simple. She knew how Gus would feel: though the protesters were mistaken, they were well-intentioned. Their religious leaders mobilized them for political reasons to undermine the “welfare state”—the “godless atheism” of a more equitably distributed economy. Like right-wing politicians who pretended to be populist to draw voters they were financed by wealthy companies and corporations who cared only for electing governments that favored business. Among gay marriage, contraception, women’s reproductive rights, abortion was the singular emotional issue, the rallying cry—No baby chooses to die.
How manipulated these people were! How naive, politically. Yet, their emotions were sincere. Their rage was certainly sincere.
In their presence Jenna wore dark glasses on even overcast days and she wore dark, woolen clothing not because she was a widow but because the occasion of the trial was a somber one and bright colors had come to offend and hurt her eyes.
Mrs. Voorhees—?
No. She was polite, she was courteous, but she did not glance around.
Inside the courtroom Jenna took her place each morning in the row behind the prosecutors’ table. The Broome County Courthouse was a very old building dating to the early 1900s but the interior had been renovated, “modernized.” There were windows with sharp clear panes and a hardwood floor, slightly warped, that had been sanded and polished; twenty-two rows of seats were new but hard against the buttocks of a slender person. Jenna felt a leap of eagerness, of hunger, seeing that Luther Dunphy was being escorted into the courtroom by Broome County sheriff’s deputies, his hands cuffed before him; as he was seated at the defense table with his two court-appointed attorneys, the handcuffs were removed. It was always startling to see how Dunphy loomed over the attorneys: he was well over six feet tall, he weighed over two hundred pounds. He was a strong man, if he wished to be. You could see how if he were enraged Luther Dunphy could be very dangerous.
A Book of American Martyrs Page 24