A Book of American Martyrs

by Joyce Carol Oates

  Once, when Naomi answered the phone, it was our Matheson grandmother in Evanston, Illinois, demanding to speak with Jenna; told that Jenna wasn’t home, grandmother Matheson complained tearfully to Naomi that her daughter never returned calls from her or from her father, had not replied to their repeated invitations to visit and to stay with them, had not even cashed checks they’d sent to her . . .

  “Why won’t your mother speak with us? Is she so busy, doesn’t she want our help, what have we done?”

  Astonished and embarrassed Naomi promised her distraught grandmother that she would tell her mother to call that very night.

  (“Oh God, is my mother bothering you? Don’t answer the phone, don’t even bother checking the ID. Just don’t answer. I will go through the messages after they accumulate. I promise.”)

  Though Darren and Naomi had come to hate Ann Arbor they did not want to move to Birmingham. Above all they did not want to enroll in Birmingham schools—new schools! Almost every year of their lives, new schools. Our mother had destroyed our family by refusing to move to Ohio with our father but we’d moved anyway, eventually—to the McMahans in Ann Arbor.

  “You and Dad care a lot for women’s rights, children on welfare, abortions—what about your own children’s rights? Don’t we have any?”

  We’d put this question to Mom more than once. Darren’s brainchild he wielded against her from time to time like a switchblade knife.

  We’d never dared to ask Dad, not quite.

  Mom had no reply to this rude question other than nervous laughter. It was her strategy (we supposed) to pretend that her dear clever children Darren and Naomi meant to be funny.

  Later, after Dad was killed, and Darren had been reading about the killing online, as he’d been forbidden, Darren said with a smirk: “All those years, we were ‘collateral damage.’ We never knew.”

  “ALL WE WANT for you children is to have normal-seeming lives. We will do what we can. We love you!”—our Voorhees grandfather welcomed us to the big old white Colonial house with a two-floor foyer and a glittering chandelier provoking the mad thought to skitter through Darren’s sick brain—Ideal for swinging like a monkey.

  Grandma Adele hugged, kissed us. Melissa may have hugged in return, stiffly.

  Yes, our grandfather did say normal-seeming. Grandpa Clem (as he hoped we would call him) did not say normal—he was not naive.

  Grandma Adele was such a silly idea! Just because our grandfather had married this powdery-faced “chic” older woman with bright lipstick, hopeful eyes, and red-rinsed hair, and just because she was (we had to admit) very, very sweet, very nice, very patient, very kind, very considerate of us, her step-grandchildren, why would anyone expect us to be nice to her?

  Well, of course—Melissa was nice to both our grandparents.

  Perhaps because she was adopted, and not of our Voorhees bloodline, Melissa did not hate with quite the fervor we hated; or rather, Melissa did not seem to know hate at all.

  Within a few days of moving into the elder Voorhees’s house Melissa snuggled with Grandma Adele watching 101 Dalmatians on the large-screen TV in the sumptuous walnut-wood-lined den while Darren and Naomi skulked in their respective rooms upstairs with doors shut.

  (Eventually, Naomi went to knock softly on Darren’s door. Just could not stay away from her brother though his response—Yeh? What the fuck do you want?—was not encouraging.)

  Shocking to us, that Grandpa Clem who’d always been such a forceful person, ready to contradict our father, genial, generous, very fit for a man of his age, seemed to have been visibly stricken by our father’s death. Grandpa was shorter than we recalled—shorter than Darren. His eyelids were tremulous and there was a tremor in his left hand which he tried to disguise by grasping it with the other hand; when he saw that we’d noticed he told us that the tremor was harmless—not to be confused with the tremor of Parkinson’s disease.

  He’d cut back on his medical practice and no longer performed surgery. Yet he would not consider retiring as his wife wished; he could not bear a future, he said, in a retirement village in Florida.

  He had followed the trial at a distance. But he had followed the trial fanatically. Our grandmother Adele chided him, when she thought we were out of earshot: “There’s nothing you can do about it, Clem! Your son is gone. But your grandchildren are here, you can love them.”

  We were stricken with guilt hearing this. We had to laugh, hearing this. We thought—Nobody would love us, if they knew us.

  It is Darren and Naomi of whom I speak. Our sweet little adopted Chinese-girl sister everyone adored was not one of us.

  For mostly Darren and Naomi were hidden away upstairs in their rooms immersed in lurid fantasies of revenge as other adolescents are immersed in lurid fantasies of one another.

  Darren cultivated a crude, zestful, funny sort of skill for drawing comics in imitation of R. Crumb and Zap Comix. Naomi interspersed fantasies of setting fires to houses with a renewed interest in math/algebra in which despite the distractions of her miserable life she could excel.

  Elaborate plots poisoning the Dunphys’ dog. (We knew the Dunphys had to have a dog, the pictures we’d seen of the Dunphy family were of dog people.) Darren knew (thought he knew) how to acquire a gun in the city of Detroit (he’d take the Woodward Avenue bus south into the dangerous, depopulated, nearly-all-black city with three hundred dollars in cash hidden on his person) and with this gun someday soon he would shoot through the windows of the Luther Dunphy residence somewhere in Ohio, we had no idea where.

  Naomi said, practically: We could just set some fires here. Some stupid Christian churches.

  Darren said: That is such an asshole idea, I’ll pretend I never heard it. We are saving our revenge for the enemy.

  Naomi: OK. but where is the enemy?

  Darren: Shithole, Ohio. We’ll find ’em.

  “JUST FOR YOU”

  This is painful to recall. This is not easy.

  We knew that our mother was not-well and that we should not have been judging her harshly. But (maybe) we had no one else close enough to us, to wound.

  Oh your mother is such a remarkable woman! She has been so strong this past year, so brave . . .

  Bullshit we knew but dared not say. To reveal any emotion was an invitation to being hugged and wept over.

  In the aftermath of her husband’s death Jenna Matheson had become a (modestly) paid consultant for women’s centers in Michigan and the Midwest, as her husband had been. In addition, Jenna provided legal counsel, assisted in litigation, settlements of lawsuits. With several others in the Pro-Choice movement she addressed the Michigan state legislature with a plea for an increase in the budget for women’s health care. She was named by the governor to the Michigan State Task Force on Women’s Rights which met each month in Lansing. She was one of several lawyers representing a coalition of abortion providers suing right-to-life websites like Army of God which continued to post WANTED: BABY KILLER AMONG US lists despite the assassinations of several abortion doctors. (The lawsuit met with defeat when a federal judge ruled that such online postings, though “repellent,” were protected by the First Amendment as free speech.) Pro-choice colleagues solicited contributions to establish the Augustus Voorhees Foundation which was to fund the first Augustus Voorhees Visiting Professorship in Women’s Public Health at the University of Michigan; Jenna was actively involved in soliciting more funds to expand the foundation, to establish professorships at other universities. She gave talks and papers and keynote addresses, she participated in conferences, she served on panels fiercely discussing the heavy boot of the status quo on the napes of our necks.

  Like toadstools blossoming by night in dank spongy earth there had emerged a complicated sub-career in the netherworld of her life that involved the acceptance of (posthumous) awards and honors for Dr. Gus Voorhees: rarely renumerative though (of course) the widow’s travel and accommodations were paid for. Everywhere she went she was embraced and she was cherish
ed. A highlight of the past several months—(she knew that Gus would be thrilled)—was Jenna’s acceptance for him of the posthumous honor Humanist of the Year from the American Humanists’ Association; this required a speech Jenna deftly culled together from numerous speeches of Gus’s. In her spare time she worked tirelessly on articles and book reviews for such journals as Women’s Law Forum, Berkeley Journal of Gender Law and Justice, Women’s Review of Books, Nation, New Republic, Harper’s, Mother Jones.

  It wasn’t clear where she was living. Or rather, where she was staying. In the Ann Arbor area, or not far away. She seemed to have no fixed address, not even a post office box. She was itinerant, a perpetual “guest”—she lived out of a suitcase, a backpack, the rear of the station wagon. Sometimes she visited us in Birmingham where her Voorhees in-laws kept a beautifully furnished guest room in perpetual readiness for her—“Jenna, please know that you are always, always welcome with us.” It was strange for us to be living in a house in which our mother was an occasional guest but we understood that our mother never wanted to stay more than a few days with us out of a fear (we surmised) of being trapped with us and unable to leave.

  Also, our mother feared Gus’s father and stepmother commiserating with her. She’d grown to fear the tears of others as a contagion that might devastate her as salt water carelessly sprinkled will devastate expensive leather.

  Usually in these months following the “mistrial” she was traveling. Or, she was between engagements, not exclusively in Michigan but elsewhere in the Midwest or in the Northeast, on the West Coast, even in Texas (Austin), and so it wasn’t practical to fly all the way back home to Michigan—“I’m fine here. They’re putting me up at the college as a guest.” Or, “There’s a cottage on the property, they’ve been wonderful saying I can say as long as I want and what an ideal place this will be for me to finish that piece for Harper’s.” Or, “It’s for just a quarter. Ten weeks! All I need to do is live in the all-women residential college with a view of the Pacific Ocean, have meals with undergraduates and give a few tutorials, judge an essay contest on ‘New Frontiers for Feminism,’ give a public lecture . . . I don’t get paid exactly but there is an ‘honorarium.’”

  There was not yet a home for us. But (our mother wanted us to know) she had not given up trying to find one.

  In the meantime she’d stored some things in her in-laws’ house. They had pressed her, and she had given in. Her books, Gus’s books, hundreds of books, were shelved in various rooms of the house including the basement, more or less haphazardly; when Jenna found a permanent place for us to live together we would arrange the books in a proper order, as our father had promised he would oversee, someday. In the guest room reserved for her, our mother had filled most of the walk-in cedar closet with our father’s clothes—the frayed old camel-hair sport coat, the tweed coat with the worn leather elbow patches, the Shetland sweater now sadly riddled with moth holes, neckties Dad had never worn except under duress. The “new, fancy” charcoal gray wool three-button suit with the vest we’d teased him about for he’d looked like a banker and not—our father. Waterstained running shoes, dress shoes, sandals. Even socks, paired. Neatly organized in the closet along with her own less substantial clothing on hangers. We could enter this closet at any time if we were feeling lonely.

  “PLEASE SHUT THE DOOR! This is for just us.”

  Grandpa Clem and Grandma Adele were downstairs. Perhaps they had visitors: there were voices. Our mother was staying in her room in the house on Gascoyne Drive, Birmingham, just overnight for she’d arrived from Chicago that afternoon and would be leaving again for a conference in Seattle in the morning. She was a very busy woman! She was breathless! She’d done something strange and radical with her hair, which was graying and had thinned badly since November 1999, cutting it short, brushing it back severely from her thin face so she looked (Naomi thought) like a scalped bird, with large blinking blind-seeming eyes.

  Most radically she’d lost weight. Breasts, hips. She’d ceased to be female. In ceasing to be female very shrewdly she’d ceased to be maternal.

  Seeing Mom after several weeks we’d stared at her as if trying to identify her. Then Melissa cried, “Mom-my!” and ran to her to be swept into her arms and hugged even as frowning Naomi held back and especially frowning Darren hung back out of distrust.

  Who are you, fuck you. Your fault Dad is dead you left him all alone and kept us with you. We don’t love you.

  That night, she tapped the bed beside her in the guest room reserved for her, that we might sit beside her. We saw on her thin wrist a man’s wristwatch with a black strap, that fitted her loosely: Dad’s watch.

  “Just for us. Just for you. We won’t tell your grandparents. Our secret.”

  She had a small recorder. She was not adept with mechanical things but she managed to play it for us.

  Oh we had not heard since the first time. We’d forgotten.

  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.

  “NO MORE”

  Early she’d wakened. Very quietly—stealthily—she was leaving us for Seattle.

  A car had come for her, sleek-dark hired car like a torpedo in the twilit air before dawn waiting, motor running, headlights in the driveway below. And Naomi panicked and ran after her barefoot on the stairs for she was leaving without saying good-bye as she had arrived without (it seemed to us) saying hello. “Mom, wait! When will we see you again . . .”

  But already she was at the door, with her suitcase. Already, about to step outside.

  “Mom! Mom!”

  Her thinning shale-colored hair had been brushed back severely from her face. Her thin taut body that had reverted to the neuter body of a young girl and was no longer a mother’s body was hidden inside a shapeless dark coat that fell nearly to her ankles. Her face—that had once been a beautiful face, or nearly—was now worn, wan, alabaster-pale—bloodless. (Darren had said Jesus! She looks exsanguinated liking the sound of words extravagant and reckless and angry in Zap Comix style.) Her eyebrows seemed to have disappeared. Her eyelashes were brittle and broken. The eyes were naked, raw.

  “Aren’t you going to say good-bye to anyone? Not even Melissa?”

  Excitedly Naomi spoke. Not accusingly but with a sound of child-fear, that entered the marrow of the (fleeing) mother’s bones like radium.

  She was shaking her head now. She was fully awake.

  “Mom? Wait . . .”

  In the doorway Jenna hesitated. She had not seemed to hear Naomi’s question yet she turned to Naomi her wide damp blind-seeming eyes. And she was smiling, a faint, terrible smile.

  Shocking to Naomi, the face was a mirror-face. Almost, her own face reflected at her. But a tired face, an extinguished face, a baffled face. And in the eyes, for an instant, something like the dull blank of non-recognition.

  “Naomi! I didn’t want to wake you, to say good-bye. Or—the others . . .”

  Vaguely she spoke. Apologetically.

  Then Jenna said, as if she’d only just now thought of it, as if this chance m
eeting with her elder daughter at the very moment of her departure had provoked the disclosure that would have otherwise remained unarticulated, “D’you know, it’s funny, after we listened to Gus’s voice last night, I was thinking—not for the first time actually, but this time more clearly— how I’d always taken for granted that we are meant to help one another here on earth—(forgive me: ‘here on earth’ is such a cliché! Gus would laugh at me)—to be good, to be generous, to be kind and loving and forgiving to one another. Whenever I meet another person, instinctively I smile at him—or her; I am obliged to be generous, to be kind, to be thoughtful, to think of the other, to think conscientiously of the other, and not of myself. Of course. Your father was like this, too—in his own way, a more aggressive way. Where I am fearful, Gus was fearless. He believed passionately in this response to life . . . But in the past year it has become clear to me that really, none of this matters.”

  Naomi wasn’t sure she’d heard correctly. None of this matters?

  None of—what?

  She was the bad girl, the skeptic. Naomi, and her brother Darren. Both skeptics. Sharp-tongued kids, bratty kids, kids who roll their eyes during Pledge of Allegiance. Smart-ass kids with high I.Q.s and low tolerance for others. Kids with wizened little crab apples for hearts.

  Abortionist’s kids. Well, they all got what they deserved didn’t they.

  Naomi stood blinking at her mother wondering—was she supposed to laugh? Was this remark a joke? (Though Jenna did not appear to be joking.) (Had Jenna said anything remotely funny, amusing, ironically funny, even witty since November 1999?) Was her mother actually expecting Naomi to agree with these astonishing words?

  With the air of someone who had worked out for herself a mathematical theorem that is commonly known yet no less remarkable for being commonly known Jenna continued:

  “It doesn’t matter if we are kind to each other, or not. If Gus was superhumanly dedicated to his work, his ‘mission’—if he sometimes worked twelve hours a day—drove thousands of miles for fifteen years of his life to advance a cause of—of—whatever had seemed important to us all . . . The only fact now is, Gus is dead; Gus is not here; Gus is silent; Gus has ceased to exist and Gus is not coming back. The world will prevail without him—in a few decades no one will even remember that he’d lived. Or that he’d died as a ‘martyr.’ That is the only important fact about Gus Voorhees now.”