When she was about to give up a woman answered the phone—a woman’s voice. But it was not Jenna Matheson’s voice.
“May I speak with Jenna?—this is her daughter.”
“Her daughter!”—the voice registered a quiet sort of shock.
But then, the voice went away without further inquiry. Which daughter? might have been expected.
She had no idea if she had called Jenna’s residence, or Jenna’s office. Or maybe they were one and the same. She realized that she knew virtually nothing of her mother’s life now. So far as she knew, Darren knew nothing.
Such resentment she’d felt for years, that their mother had abandoned them! Almost she’d wished that Jenna had died with Gus. In that way her children could have continued to love her as they loved their father.
Hang up. What do you care for her.
This is your new life now. She is your old life.
But then, her mother was on the phone. “Yes? Hello?”
Jenna sounded uncertain, hesitant. Naomi had been prepared to hate her mother but at the sound of her voice she felt a wave of emotion that left her weak.
“Hello. It’s m-me.”
“Is it—Naomi?”
“Yes. Naomi.”
There was a moment’s stunned silence. How long had it been since they’d spoken together? Months, a year?
Naomi tried to speak evenly, without stammering.
“Well. I guess you know why I’m calling, Mom—he’s dead.”
How awkward, the word Mom! It had come naturally, without Naomi’s volition.
So long, she had not uttered Mom.
Jenna was saying yes—“I know.”
Then again, there was an awkward silence.
Was Jenna going to say nothing more? Would Naomi have to speak for both of them?
Recalling the hateful words—I can’t be your “Mommy” any longer.
Naomi tried to speak. In the bright clear way in which she spoke in her classes, to make a strong impression upon her instructors. Saying, the execution had been postponed so many times, it had sometimes seemed that it might never happen. In some states condemned men remained on Death Row for years . . .
Jenna murmured yes. Naomi imagined a look of fastidious distaste in her mother’s face.
Naomi asked if anyone from Chillicothe had contacted Jenna about observing the execution?—and again Jenna murmured yes.
“And you said—no.”
“That’s right. I said no.”
There was a shudder in Jenna’s voice, and something else—mirthless laughter?
“Of course—I said no.”
Daringly Naomi said, “I shocked Darren, I think—I told him that I could have witnessed the execution, if I’d been invited. I think he thought I’m barbaric.”
“Well. You weren’t serious, maybe.”
“Maybe.”
There’d been a ripple of excitement between them. In Naomi, a ticklish sensation as if her mother had reached out to lightly touch her, as a mother might.
And now she thought—If she makes some damn priggish statement about opposing capital punishment, her and Gus both, I will hang up.
In fact, she was fearful of Jenna suddenly hanging up. She had so much to say to her mother!
She said she’d been speaking with Darren at the time of the execution forty-eight hours ago. Their father’s old friend Elliot Roberts—“D’you remember him, Mom? From Detroit? Used to write for the Detroit News?”—was covering the execution for the AP and he’d volunteered to call Darren from Chillicothe as soon as it was over.
“Because Elliot knew we would want to know. As soon as it was over. Before the news was released . . .”
How eager Naomi was sounding, like a child running to bring good news to a parent who scarcely cares to hear it. She wondered if it had always been like this between them—she’d rushed to bring to her coolly distant, beautiful and elusive mother some shred of information that might bolster her standing with her mother in the humblest of ways.
But why did it matter so much? Naomi wondered. Just the other evening it had seemed, to her and to Darren, crucial that they know as soon as possible if and when Luther Dunphy had died; now, it did not seem like precious knowledge at all but something sordid, sad.
Jenna said, as if she’d just thought of it, “Darren called me too. Darren left a message.”
“I thought he might! How did he sound?”
“How did he sound?” Jenna considered this.
“I mean—what did he say?”
“He just left a message about Dunphy. That was the way I’d learned that Dunphy had died. That the execution had actually taken place, after so many delays.”
“How did you—how did you feel, then?”
“How did I feel? Like—nothing.”
Jenna spoke with infinite sadness. She did not sound relieved. She did not sound celebratory. She did not sound angry nor did she sound disappointed.
“You didn’t speak with Darren, then?”
“No. I didn’t speak with Darren.”
You mean, you didn’t call him back.
“D’you know where Darren is living now? In a place called Newhalem, Washington?”
“I think so, yes. I mean, he told me.”
Naomi felt a small mean stab of satisfaction. Darren was no closer to Jenna than she was.
“We’ve been waiting—so long. And he has been alive so long—I mean, he had been—Luther Dunphy. And now . . .”
Naomi’s voice trailed off into an awkward silence. She wasn’t sure in which direction these words were leading her.
Haltingly she said, “I guess there’s a kind of—‘aftershock.’ Like, after an earthquake . . .”
Why was she saying such things? She was fearful that Jenna would hang up the phone. She was fearful that, if Jenna hung up, she would hate Jenna with such passion, it would make her ill.
“I’ve been feeling kind of—excited, I guess. As soon as—it happened.”
She listened closely. Had Jenna replied? A very gentle murmur—yes. Yes?
She wondered if someone else was in the room with Jenna. She could not bear it, that Jenna might be glancing at another person, a stranger, even as she, Naomi, the daughter, was speaking so passionately to Jenna.
“I’d been sick for years waiting for that son of a bitch to die—and he would not die. I’d been feeling so anxious and so exhausted but as soon as Darren told me the news I’ve been feeling so alive. It’s as if this fierce blinding light has flowed into me—it’s so powerful, it’s almost visible at my fingertips—a kind of phosphorescence, like undersea life.”
What was she saying? She stared at her fingertips and indeed it almost seemed to her, she saw there a shimmering life.
Now that she’d begun, she could not stop. Remembering that as she’d groped with her foot onto the icy step, and missed the step, and fell, and struck her head, this conviction had swept through her; or maybe the conviction had preceded the fall, and had caused it.
“Usually it’s hidden within us—this life. We are so frightened of it, and ashamed of it, and people like us who are ‘secular’—we don’t have the vocabulary to speak of it. But this morning I woke up filled with this happiness and this conviction that it is life that courses through us and binds us to one another. It was after the execution I realized this—I slipped and fell on an icy step, and hit my head—I wasn’t found until the morning—”
“Naomi, what? What are you saying?”
“I had to get outside—to get fresh air. I had a kind of attack of something like happiness—I was out in the street and running—I slipped, and fell, and hit my head—and was taken to an emergency room . . .” She wondered if she should tell Jenna that it was the University Hospital ER. Jenna would think at once of Gus as a young physician.
“Are you all right, Naomi? Were you unconscious?” For the first time Jenna was sounding concerned.
“It was a minor accident. I wasn’t really injured. Non
e of this is why I’m calling you. I am calling to tell you that I feel so certain now—so sure about myself. And about life. Our lives.”
“What do you mean, Naomi? I don’t understand.”
“It came to me—a conviction. But it’s almost impossible to explain. That Daddy is dead—and Luther Dunphy is dead—but you are my mother—I am your daughter—and we are alive. This is a great revelation to me after years of blindness and self-absorption. It’s a revelation like a boulder rolled away from the mouth of a cave.”
Naomi was speaking rapidly now. She could not have stopped if she had wished to stop.
“There has been this silence between us—it’s been so painful. When Daddy died we were wrong to accuse you—Darren and me—it was as if we’d thought you had driven Daddy away, to live in another place, and to leave us, and it was in that other place that Daddy was murdered, and it would not have happened as it had happened because of you. We were so angry, and bitter. We were—we felt—we hated you so . . . But now, Luther Dunphy’s death has changed everything.”
She could not believe she’d said what she’d said—we hated you so. The words had sprung from her like toads out of a gaping mouth. And now, they could not be recalled.
At the other end of the line there was silence.
“Mom? Are you still there? Hello?”
A near-inaudible murmur. Might’ve been yes.
Repentant, agitated Naomi heard herself say: “I’m sorry. You left us. Not once but many times—all the time—you left us. And then you left us for good, in Birmingham with Daddy’s parents. But I’m not calling to accuse you, Mom—Jenna. Really it’s the reverse—I am calling to not accuse you. I just wanted to say—I wanted to explain—it came to me like a vision—that we are alive . . . We are both alive even if Daddy is dead, and now Luther Dunphy is dead.” Naomi spoke excitedly, her teeth were chattering with sudden cold.
She was crying. It came upon her like a seizure, harsh helpless crying like grief.
“I missed you—in the ER. When they brought me in. They thought that I was dying, they said I was dehydrated, anemic . . . Why didn’t you come to see me there . . .”
Crying so hard, she could no longer speak.
Jenna begged her to stop crying—“You will make yourself sick, Naomi.”
But Naomi couldn’t stop crying. She could not understand why she was crying when she was not unhappy; when in fact, she was very happy.
The happiest she’d been in years.
Still, she was crying. Hoarse wracking sobs. And Jenna was saying she would have to hang up, if Naomi didn’t stop.
“Then hang up! Hang up the fucking phone! You know that’s what you want to do anyway! Hang up!”—Naomi screamed.
Slammed the receiver down, hard enough so that it clattered onto the floor where she gave it a little kick.
HATEFUGE
Hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate
until it is burnt away, until it has lost its meaning, until you are transformed, until you are not even you but another
“EMPTINESS”:
JANUARY 2007
There is an emptiness you can’t see—where the twin towers were. Unfortunately, I can see it.”
WHAT A VIEW! Naomi had not ever before stared from a window at such a height in a private residence, a floor-to-ceiling plate-glass window, looking miles into the distance, to the very end of the island.
Clouds in the sky horizontal, shredded and thinning. A crescent sun like a bloodied egg poised to sink into the horizon.
Standing so close to the window she felt a wave of vertigo. She could feel cold emanate from the glass. She was on the thirty-first floor of her grandmother’s apartment in the West Village, New York City. Her gaze swung downward to the street below—(what was its name? West Houston?)—then up again swiftly to flat rectangular rooftops seen from above, water towers, church spires, high-rise buildings columnar and dazzling in the late afternoon sun that stretched for miles, to lower Manhattan and beyond.
She was nineteen years old. That was an accomplishment—just still being.
It was a hiatus in her life. Still in the aftershock of her father’s murderer’s death. Still stunned by her fury that had the power of black bile to boil up into her mouth, leak out of the corners of the mask-mouth at unpredictable times.
And then, mid-winter of what would have been her third year at the university she’d been invited to stay with her grandmother Madelena Kein whom she scarcely knew, for a week or more, in Madelena’s apartment in the West Village, New York City.
Out of nowhere, the mysterious and elusive Madelena had contacted her—If you would like to speak of your father, dear Naomi. If you are still interested.
Of course Naomi was interested! She was consumed with curiosity but also with dread of what her father’s mother might tell her.
Within the Voorhees family Madelena Kein was a remote and glamorously forbidding figure. She had left her husband Clement when their only child was young and had lived for decades in New York City. She’d been a graduate student in philosophy, and then a professor of philosophy and linguistics; she had written many essays, reviews, and books, esoteric and demanding and difficult of access for a general reader. She had not remarried but was known to have had a succession of lovers. She was known to be sharp-tongued, sardonic. She did not soften her words. Her wit could be slashing. It was rare for her to return to the Midwest to visit, and rarer still for her to invite anyone among the relatives to visit her.
But Madelena Kein was capable of sudden—unexpected—acts of generosity. Over the years, somewhat randomly, she’d sent gifts to her grandchildren for Christmas, birthdays. She’d endowed a residency at the University of Michigan Medical School, named for Augustus Voorhees. In recent years she’d become more attentive to Naomi in particular as if, nearing the end of her own life, she’d taken a renewed interest in the lives of others.
Or it may have been, the loss of her only son had profoundly shaken her.
There were no photographs of Gus in the apartment, that Naomi had noticed. Of course, she had seen only a few rooms so far; she had not seen Madelena’s bedroom.
The room in which Naomi was to stay, one of several bedrooms in the apartment, was not a large room but appeared large and airy, with three white walls and one wall that was a plate-glass window looking out, it seemed at first glance, into blank bright air.
The view outside the window—stretching to the horizon, lifting to the sky, plunging below into the street—was mesmerizing to Naomi. She could stare, and stare. She could lose herself in staring. Her brain that often felt wounded, as if with tiny bits of glass, felt peaceful here, after only a few minutes of such solitude.
A consoling thought came to her—I am closer to him here. My father.
Something about the height. The sudden distance her vision was thrown, that was so usually blocked within a few yards. In most urban settings you can see only a short distance and soon you come to forget that your vision is unnaturally foreshortened.
But at this height there was nothing to impede vision. The sensation was, you could see past all earthly things.
That was foolish of course. That was “primitive thinking.” She’d been trained not to think in such a way. Her mother would be shocked. Her father would have laughed.
That is why my grandmother has invited me here. To be closer to my father.
On the eggshell-white walls of the small guest bedroom were works of art, framed drawings, woodcuts, paintings in Fauve colors. These were contemporary artists of whom Naomi had possibly heard—Moser, Daub, Kahn. There were bookcases crammed with books including outsized art books with slightly torn covers suggesting how closely they’d been read, studied. Naomi pulled one out—The Complete Little Nemo. A massive book of color plates of the classic surrealist
comic strip of the early twentieth century—Naomi seemed to recall, Madelena had sent an identical copy to Darren for one of his birthdays.
Was it after receiving Little Nemo that Darren had become so interested in drawing comics? Or had Madelena known of his interest, and had carefully selected the book?
Naomi remembered: for her thirteenth birthday, no card or explanation included, her grandmother had sent her a hardbound copy of Homer’s Odyssey; for Melissa, barely able to read at the time, an illustrated copy of Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass in an edition identical to the one Naomi had cherished as a child—Naomi hadn’t known, or had forgotten, that this favorite book of her childhood must have been a gift from Madelena Kein!
Naomi had grown up knowing very little about her father’s mother. Wryly Jenna had spoken of Madelena as her “phantom mother-in-law.” In the Voorhees household among countless books, magazines, journals and newspapers stacked on tables, chairs, sofas, floors and stairs there’d been books by Madelena Kein with such titles as An Inquiry into (Human) Consciousness (Oxford University Press), Do We Mean What We Say; or, Do We Say What We Mean? (Columbia University Press), Transformational Ethics: A History (University of Chicago Press). It wasn’t clear whether Gus had read these books though he had certainly hoped to read them. Darren and Naomi had tried, without much success. At the University of Michigan graduate library Naomi had made an effort to seek out articles and essays by Madelena Kein in publications not otherwise available—Philosophical Studies, Philosophical Review, Harvard Review of Philosophy, Journal of Psychology and Linguistics, Ethics, Meme; she’d had slightly more success reading reviews by Madelena in popular publications like the New York Review of Books and the Times Literary Supplement.
But what did she know of her grandmother, having read, or having tried to read, these works of Madelena Kein? The pieces were densely argued, opaque with obscure phrases, enigmatic, riddle-like, possibly brilliant, resistant of paraphrase. Was this what philosophy had become? Confounding questions and paradoxes, and no answers?
A Book of American Martyrs Page 46