A Book of American Martyrs

by Joyce Carol Oates

  We could not discuss the case during the trial, in the jury room. We could not say a word outside the courthouse or inside the courthouse until the trial was ended! We were brought to the courthouse by a shuttle bus to a special door at the rear of the building that was guarded by Broome County sheriff’s men, and we exited by that door, and boarded the shuttle bus to avoid the picketers and protesters at the front of the courthouse who would shout and scream at us, if they saw us. For half of them wanted Luther Dunphy freed. And the other half wanted Luther Dunphy found guilty. And they hated one another, and had to be kept apart from one another. And there were TV camera crews there also, tying up traffic in the streets.

  Inside the courtroom we just had to listen to all that talk, talk, talk of the lawyers. Every damn thing the prosecutor would say if he would say it once, he would say it a dozen times. There was too much about shotgun shells or casings—whatever they call it. Identifying Luther Dunphy. So many witnesses speaking for the abortion doctor and the other one—the driver of the van—hearing what a good man Dr. Voorhees was, how “selfless” and “dedicated” to helping women and girls—and the other one who’d gotten in the way of the gunfire (so it seemed to me)—what a “good husband and father”—you just stopped hearing it after a while. I did listen to the priest from Nebraska. He spoke from the heart and knew of what he spoke, the defense of the defenseless. And the pastor of Luther Dunphy’s church—there was a true man of God, you could see. The prosecutor was sarcastic hoping to make them say incriminating things against Luther Dunphy but they would not.

  Once the trial was over, it was different in the jury room. Almost everybody wanted to talk. Like the tower of Babel it was, everybody talking at once. So the foreman instructed us to speak one by one around the table and say what we believed, was Luther Dunphy guilty as charged, or not guilty. And it was shocking to me, it was sickening to me, that ten jurors out of twelve believed that this innocent man was guilty when he had acted to protect living babies. One juror had not made up her mind yet—(this was Edith)—and the other was me.

  What about the law to protect a living baby? Babies? Nobody wished to talk about that law.

  So it was, after four and a half days we could not agree. The talk turned bitter and bullying but we would never give in, for Edith and I were certain in our hearts that Luther Dunphy was not guilty of any crime of God. It was like Pontius Pilate saying to the Jews, this man is not a criminal, and the Jews saying Yes, yes! He is a criminal, he is to be crucified because we want him crucified.

  After a point if I tried to speak, they would cut me off. Edith did not speak at all for she knew how they would leap onto her. And so, I did nothing more than say again, and again, as many times as they would ask me, why I did not believe that Luther Dunphy was guilty of any actual crime, and why I would not vote that he was guilty for it was a “higher law”—as Luther Dunphy’s lawyer argued—“the law of God”—and our country is based upon this principle of rebellion and upon the higher law and by this, Luther Dunphy is a hero and not a criminal.

  So it happened, we could not agree. Each ballot it was ten against two—Edith and I would never change our minds. And so the trial was declared a “mistrial” by the judge. I could see, the judge seemed to know who I was, and who Edith was, and he hated our guts as the other jurors did. When I tell this I sound calm and easy but at that time, I was not. Each night sick to my stomach and not able to sleep but we would not give in, for Jesus had spoken. The spirit of the Lord had spoken.

  When the jury was called back into the courtroom, and the judge declared the mistrial, at the table where he was sitting Luther Dunphy stared toward us for a moment without seeming to hear. And when the judge repeated his words there were outcries in the courtroom, of disbelief, and happiness, but also of anger, and the judge rapped his gavel hard, and bailiffs and guards came forward to block people from pushing into the aisles and by this time Luther Dunphy was on his knees on the hardwood floor, giving thanks to the Lord and his face streaked with tears.

  Later when we were leaving the courthouse I hoped that I would see Luther Dunphy one last time, it seemed to me that Luther Dunphy might come to shake my hand, and Edith’s hand, for we had saved his life, for several of the jurors had expressed a wish that Luther Dunphy should be sentenced to death and not just to life in prison, but this did not happen of course.

  If there was to be a second trial, I would pray that God would look after Luther Dunphy another time in his hour of need.

  These five weeks were a strained time in my life but always I would look back upon the trial of Luther Dunphy that was a mistrial as the time in my life when my life had purpose.

  Before that, and after, I am not always so sure. But I am sure of that time.

  “MISTRIAL”: WIDOW OF THE DECEASED

  Trial ends, jurors dismissed.

  Cheers, cries of triumph in the courtroom, that ripple outside within seconds onto the stone steps, into the street.

  Not not guilty. But mistrial.

  Still, this is perceived as a (temporary) victory for the defendant—the defense.

  She is so stunned, mistrial doesn’t immediately register.

  For some seconds paralyzed where she sits, staring and blinking at the judge who has now turned away, rising, with an expression of prissy disapproval, displeasure as if the jurors reporting “hopeless deadlock” have personally offended his honor.

  Much of this she won’t remember afterward. Rapid vertiginous ride in a roller coaster that rushes you breathless and dazed to your point of origin. Is this it?—this? That Luther Dunphy did not turn toward her (as she’d fantacized through more than three weeks he might) and lock eyes with hers but appeared to be as stunned by the non-verdict as well.

  “MISTRIAL”: CHILDREN OF THE DECEASED

  We knew, we’d known, no one had to tell us. I mean Darren and Naomi. Twins joined at hate.

  Someone called our grandfather with the news. Not our mother.

  Someone who was with her attending the trial in Ohio.

  Shithole, OHIO (credit: Darren).

  Can’t even remember when Mom finally called us. Or a woman friend called us, and put Mom on the phone, and all Mom could do was say I’m sorry, I’m sorry crying and choking so it made us want to puke, so disgusted.

  So sorry, they did not convict him. The judge dismissed the jury after four days. “Mistrial.” Oh God.

  Hung up the fucking phone so hard, fucking plastic receiver ricocheted and fell onto the floor. Kicked and stomped fucking plastic receiver until it was just fucking pieces.

  “Naomi! Stop! What are you doing, Naomi! Stop.”

  Ran out of the room. Out of the house. What do you fucking care, you are not our real grandmother fuck you.

  SHE’D SENT US AWAY. Out of Ann Arbor where too many knew Voorhees.

  Possibly, there’d been danger. Threats against the children of Gus Voorhees. We were never (exactly) told. Even Darren, who demanded (of the McMahans) to be told what was going on, anything and everything that involved our mother and us, did not really know.

  You know what people (adults) tell you. Essentially, you know what people (adults) want you to know.

  Too much in the media about Gus Voorhees, abortion provider, shot down, anti-abortion assassin. Too much about trial ending in a stunning upset: mistrial.

  There would be another trial. Dunphy would remain in custody. (It was said.)

  Another trial was imminent, and more media. More TV, more Tom McCarthy spewing hate, more front-page headlines, photos. More baby killer, Army of God, martyr.

  More distraction for our mother. More dread. Ever closer to the breaking-point. (We did not want to acknowledge.)

  Asshole at Ann Arbor High says to Darren if I was you, Voorhees, know what?—I’d change my last name.

  Fuck you, you are not me.

  Hey! Just sayin.

  Just sayin fuck you, asshole.

  (What followed from this Darren didn’t say. Darre
n’s hate stories ended in one-liners by Darren deftly uttered like TV stand-up comedy.)

  (At sixteen Darren stood five feet eleven with slumped shoulders like a raptor hunched on a fence. He smiled rarely but when he did smile it was a razor-flash of pure adolescent drop-dead cynicism. His long arms were ropey-muscled and his habit of clenching and unclenching his fists did not encourage other boys to “mess” with him even when they were insulted.)

  At her school where Naomi was in eighth grade the most valuable information she’d learned was to avoid restrooms between classes. These were danger zones even when no words were directed at her. Girls’ eyes shifting to her face in the mirror above the sinks, sharp like ice picks. Possibly (probably) they’d been talking about her before she entered, or maybe just the sight of the “new girl” drew their rapt and pitiless attention.

  That’s her. Voorhees.

  Oh God the one whose father—

  Abortion-doctor—

  —got himself killed?

  Tried not to use a restroom if she could help it. No more than she could help it. Having to go (often badly) to the bathroom, waiting—miserably—for an opportunity not fraught with peril.

  She’s pathetic. Jesus!

  Feel sorry for her . . .

  Oh sure it’s real sad but what’d anybody expect, killing babies for a living, someday somebody’s going to kill you.

  Wasn’t sure if she actually heard these words. Maybe she dreamt them. Maybe she muttered them to herself.

  It came to be frequent, so frequent she knew they were laughing at her, and her teachers were pitying her, how she would avoid the girls’ restroom and wait until she could not bear it any longer, pressure in her bladder, terror of losing control of her bladder, in class, in class where everyone would see, and smell, and would never ever forget, until at least white-faced and desperate Naomi would raise her trembling hand, and the (usually sympathetic) teacher would excuse her, and she would hurry to the nearest girls’ restroom in acute distress trying not to imagine (oh she could not allow herself to imagine!) how the teacher might be joking about her to the class—Naomi is right on time today! We were all waiting.

  None of this our mother knew. Of course.

  Yet we were not happy when our mother sent us to live with our father’s father and his wife in Birmingham, Michigan. Just far enough from Ann Arbor (she reasoned) that the name Voorhees wouldn’t be so potent.

  For, in Birmingham, there was already a much-respected Dr. Voorhees—our grandfather. Clement Voorhees, MD, Birmingham Gastrointestinal Associates, Birmingham Medical Arts Bldg., 114 Cranbrook Way, Birmingham, Michigan.

  The Voorhees grandparents wanted us badly. It was their promise, Birmingham was wholly unlike Ann Arbor where everything was left-wing, political.

  Crime was virtually nonexistent in Birmingham. Suburban policemen were polite, courteous—to (white-skinned) residents.

  Never could it have happened, our Voorhees grandfather said, that his son would have been shot down in broad daylight in Birmingham, Michigan!

  (There was no counterpart in Birmingham to the women’s care clinics with which Gus Voorhees had been associated, that provided abortions for women without money to pay for them; but there was a private clinic in West Bloomfield, and a suite in the Birmingham Medical Arts Building, staffed by reputable OB/GYN doctors, where such surgical interventions were provided.)

  At one time (we were told) it had been expected that Gus Voorhees would join his father’s lucrative practice in Birmingham. Father and son would be resident surgeons at the (top-ranked) William Beaumont Hospital in Royal Oak. But son disappointed father by becoming radicalized at U-M in the sour aftermath of the Vietnam War, one of a small but vocal number of pre-med students with an activist interest in public health, women’s rights, abortion.

  Gus’s mother Madelena, who’d divorced the elder Dr. Voorhees in 1967, to depart for a new-invented life in New York City, had told her doctor-son that he was throwing away—“almost literally”—millions of dollars in income by declining gastrointestinal medicine in favor of OB/GY public-welfare medicine; and our father had reputedly said, “Well, that’s too bad. But I’m not in it for the money. Obviously!”

  Amazing photos of Gus Voorhees in his early and mid-twenties. Long-wild-haired, red headband, fierce wiry beard. A defiant young man picketing with other young men and women his age, both whites and blacks, marching in streets and avenues flanked by masked and uniformed police officers in riot gear.

  Oh! Oh God. Gus.

  Yes, that was Gus.

  We had seen these photos in family albums, many times. We’d been fascinated, and we’d laughed at Daddy’s Afro hair, bristling beard, bell-bottom jeans.

  Overall, we did not like Daddy’s beards. Even Melissa complained of scratchy kisses.

  At the memorial service for Gus Voorhees in the Unitarian Church in Ann Arbor these pictures projected onto a screen evoked shrieks of wounded laughter and tears from the gathering.

  In the front row the children of the deceased hid their eyes. Hid their tears. Did not want to see. Did not want to hear. These pictures of their young father filled them with dismay, despair. How they’d have liked to have known him.

  The more love for the father, the more his death was awful.

  Really we knew little of our father’s complicated relationship with his father. We did not often visit the elder Voorheeses, who rarely, perhaps never, visited us in our rented places in Michigan very different from their residence in Birmingham. Nor did we see much of our mother’s parents, who lived in Evanston, Illinois. There had been some estrangement between the sets of grandparents, perhaps. Disapproval, even opposition, over the “radical” lifestyle Gus Voorhees cultivated, and was responsible for having drawn Jenna with him, and “endangering the children.”

  Grandfather Voorhees’s wife Adele was our step-grandmother determined to be nice to the step-grandchildren as if we were orphans which, since our mother was alive, we were not.

  Grandma Adele, she wished to be called. She had no grandchildren “of her own.”

  Soon, Grandma Adele would complain tearfully of Darren and Naomi to our mother: we were “withdrawn”—we were “hostile”—we were “irritable”—we did not “observe ordinary good manners.”

  Note to Mom: There is a difference between living with and (merely) staying with. Jenna believed that we were living with our grandparents in the big white brick Colonial at 19 Gascoyne Drive, Birmingham, Michigan, because that was her fantasy. But even Melissa knew that we were (merely) staying with them.

  For how long?—it was natural for us to ask.

  But if we asked Mom, her answer was evasive—“I don’t know. We will see what happens.”

  We were waiting for Mom to establish a new home for us. Though we did not quite phrase it that way, we had not the vocabulary.

  We might have reasonably wondered: where was home, now that Daddy was gone?

  The places we’d lived with Daddy, the houses that had been homes, though rented and temporary, were all gone.

  We’d had to vacate the farmhouse on Salt Hill Road in Huron County—of course. There was nothing in that part of Michigan for Jenna. No possibilities for a life within a few miles of the St. Croix Women’s Center that had once been so crucial in our father’s life.

  Ludicrous to have ever thought of that house as home.

  We had taken with us only what we could fit into the station wagon that day, crushed into the rear of the vehicle: a chaotic selection of our belongings and clothing, grabbed and carried to the vehicle, flung inside. (These included several of Daddy’s sport coats, sweaters, shirts and neckties which our mother could not bear to leave behind though she left behind many of her own things—“I never want to see these again.”)

  Before the farmhouse in Huron County we’d lived in a (rented) house in Saginaw, and before Saginaw, in a (rented) house in Grand Rapids. Before that, in a long-ago time when Darren had been a little boy, and Naomi newl
y born, and Melissa not-yet-born on the far side of the earth, we’d lived in Ann Arbor which was the only city our parents considered home—yet to us, Ann Arbor was never home.

  Our parents had many friends here. Like the McMahans, many of these friends offered to open their houses to us, for “as long as you want.”

  Of course, Jenna could not accept such hospitality forever. Soon she would make decisions, rent a place to establish a home.

  “When things settle down. When things are less crazy. When I see where I will be working. When the trial is over . . .”

  Mom spoke to us with a smile but it was a strained and unconvincing smile. It seemed likely (to us) that our mother would be working in Ann Arbor but she postponed making decisions; we looked at several places to rent, so that we could move out of the McMahans’ house, but no place was quite suitable. Where once Jenna Matheson had been capable of quick assured judgments now she seemed baffled by choices, the more choices the more baffled, and could put off for days the simplest of decisions—whether to say yes to another invitation to accept another award or honor in Gus Voorhees’s name, or whether to say, in a breathy whisper “No! No more.”