A Book of American Martyrs

by Joyce Carol Oates

  Naomi lay her suitcase on a cedar chest at the foot of the bed. She would stay here? In this perfect place? She felt a twinge of excitement and yet uneasiness, apprehension.

  A tinge of homesickness like a faint blue shadow falling over her face.

  How absurd! Homesickness for—what? Where? She had not had a permanent home for years. She had never felt comfortable in her grandparents’ house in Birmingham, Michigan, a girl’s room in rosy wallpaper, a girl’s bed with a pink satin coverlet, white lattice windows. Her memory of the last house in which she’d lived with her family, before her father had departed, was the rented, fly-infested house on Salt Hill Road in Huron County, Michigan. She had hated that house as much as her poor trapped mother had hated it.

  I can live here, with my grandmother—can I?

  Is that what she is offering me? A life with her?

  IN THE AFTERSHOCK of the murderer’s death she had not been “freed” after all—not as she’d expected.

  She’d been ill for some time. A mud-malaise of the spirit.

  She’d returned to the archive—now grandly and bravely retitled Life/Death/Life of Augustus Voorhees, MD.

  Or maybe less formally—Life/Death/Life of Gus Voorhees.

  Life/Death/Life of My Father Gus Voorhees.

  Life/Death/Life of My Dad Gus Voorhees.

  She’d considered (not seriously: desperately) marrying a young biology post-doc at the U-M medical school from Ceylon whose mother was an American epidemiologist and whose father was a Ceylonese pharmaceutical executive—their feeling for each other had been intense, but short-lived.

  She’d considered dropping out of college. Or, deferring college.

  She’d considered transferring to Bennington. (Was this even possible? Bennington College was a private college, reputedly very expensive. The University of Michigan was a state university, with tuition and costs kept reasonably low for residents of the state.)

  She’d considered—well, it was not serious enough, it was not minutely imagined enough, to merit the word “consider”—killing herself, from time to time.

  (Except: her father would have been devastated if he knew. Worse than devastated, disapproving. What’s my little worrywart done to herself? Sweetie, no! And so, suicide was out of the question.)

  She’d returned again to the archive . . . She’d amassed so much material, she could not give up; yet, so much material amassed, she could not bring herself to assess it, even to catalogue it. At the same time she knew that more was needed for a fuller portrait of Gus Voorhees. Much more.

  Out of nowhere, then: the invitation to visit Madelena Kein.

  Please understand: I will not be “interviewed.” I will speak to you—you will not question me.

  There are some things I wish to tell you (that were not secrets from Gus, he knew of them). These are spare, sparse truths—but crucial.

  Your visit with me will be more than just this subject, I hope!

  It had been seven years—more than seven years—since Naomi had seen Madelena, at her father’s funeral. At the time she’d had only a confused glimpse of the woman, stylish black clothes, silver hair obscured by a black hat with a curving brim, skin very white, stern and dry-eyed amid the gathering of mourners of whom many were vocal and emotional.

  Naomi recalled the surprise, disapproval—that, soon after the funeral, Madelena had left Ann Arbor. She’d made no arrangements to stay overnight. She’d declined invitations to stay with Jenna or with Gus’s friends. She’d been coolly courteous with her ex-husband Clement—of course she’d declined his and Adele’s invitation to stay with them for a few days in Birmingham, an hour’s drive from Ann Arbor.

  She’d spent some time with Jenna. Not in public but in private.

  What had they talked about? Naomi wondered.

  Jenna would have been very reticent. Confronted with stronger personalities like Madelena, more willful and dominant individuals like her husband, Jenna often lapsed into silence.

  Naomi couldn’t recall Madelena speaking with her, Darren, or Melissa at the funeral or at the reception afterward. Probably she’d avoided the children of the deceased stunned and stricken like young zombies.

  For what is there to say to children whose father has been murdered? Even if they are your grandchildren? Other adults had tried, clumsily. But not Madelena Kein.

  But Naomi’s grandmother had not ceased to be aware of Naomi altogether.

  At Kennedy Airport Naomi had been greeted at the baggage claim by a uniformed limousine driver bearing a white cardboard sign—NAOMI VOORHEES. Madelena had insisted upon hiring a car for her, as she’d insisted upon paying for Naomi’s airline tickets.

  Naomi was touched. She was made to feel privileged, cherished. She had never seen her name so conspicuously displayed.

  In Ann Arbor she was highly conscious of her name. It seemed to her a beautiful name, and a significant name—Voorhees, at least. But there was relief to assume that, in New York City, the name would mean nothing.

  It was winter break at the university. She’d told no one where she was going. She had not told her Voorhees grandparents in Birmingham knowing that they would disapprove, or feel hurt, subtly insulted—thinking that after they’d been so generous with Naomi, as with their other grandchildren, had done so much for her, her allegiance should be to them, and not with the selfish “career” woman who’d scorned the role of grandparent.

  Her Matheson grandparents, in Evanston, Illinois, were not much in her life any longer. She wondered how often they saw Jenna, or rather how often Jenna chose to see them.

  Of course she had not told Jenna. Since the disastrous telephone call of the previous March the two had not spoken.

  And she had not told Darren. She was trying to telephone her brother less frequently. Her emails to him were very belatedly answered, if answered at all. She had to accept—He is moving away from me. I remind him of what he wants to forget, and who can blame him.

  In a state of intense anticipation she’d stared from the rear, tinted windows of the car hired to bring her into the city. She had not been to New York City more than a few times, with her parents—not for a long time. The drive was slow and halting and her view was truncated by lanes of traffic, heavy-duty construction equipment making a deafening racket, elevated railroads, girders. Billboards, fleeting patches of sky. Highway ramps, bridge ramps. More elevated railroads, girders. More traffic, slow and halting. Her head began to ache with the strain of anticipation. She had packed only a few things but she had not forgotten her camcorder. She was wearing her heaviest winter jacket and layers of clothes beneath. It was January, that cheerless month. In Michigan, snow had accumulated in dunes like slag.

  In New York there was much less snow. From the rear of the hired car she saw patches of dirty white like soiled Styrofoam.

  She tormented herself with a fantasy of arriving at the address on Bleecker Street her grandmother had provided her and finding—nothing.

  A barren lot, an abandoned building in a derelict urban setting. And slow-falling snow to obscure her tracks.

  It was a malevolent fairy tale. She did not want to think of her life as a malevolent fairy tale.

  And then, the car was moving swiftly onto a ramp—across the Williamsburg Bridge—was this the East River below? High-rise buildings loomed above the choppy water. The sky was mottled with cloud, a deep bruised sky of myriad layers as in a painting of El Greco that had been one of her father’s favorites—A View of Toledo.

  Her heart lifted, she began to feel hope.

  The driver continued to Houston Street. Her grandmother’s apartment building was located near the intersection of West Houston and West Broadway, near Washington Square Park.

  At LaGuardia Place were three high-rise buildings, with vertical panels of glass. There were nothing like these in Ann Arbor.

  She gave her grandmother’s name, and her own name, to a doorman. Again the fleeting thought came to her—It is a mistake. I am not e
xpected.

  Ascending then to the thirty-first floor in an elevator.

  And there, waiting by the elevator, her beautiful silver-haired straight-backed grandmother Madelena Kein—the woman who’d made it clear years ago that she had no interest in being someone’s gram-muddy.

  “Naomi! Welcome.”

  There was an embrace—slightly stiff, awkward, but eager—for which Naomi wasn’t prepared. The older woman’s arms were thin but strong.

  Madelena was just slightly shorter than Naomi. Her striking silver hair was plaited around her head like a crown. She was dressed in rippling black pleats, trousers with flaring cuffs. The skin of her perfect-petal face was unlined and smooth as the skin of a woman decades younger.

  Her eyes were veiled by large tinted glasses with chic black frames. In these glasses Naomi’s pale girl’s face hovered uncertainly.

  “Let me take that, dear.”

  Before Naomi could protest Madelena took her suitcase from her fingers and bore it to the opened door at the end of the corridor. As if, so much younger than Madelena, Naomi were not capable of carrying the suitcase herself. How embarrassing!

  “And how was your flight?—and how are you?”

  “Fine. I am—fine.”

  “And is that how you are really?”—Madelena was smiling at Naomi with a kind of warm, teasing affection as if they were old acquaintances, or accomplices.

  Was this her father’s mother, who had to be in her mid-seventies at least? It did not seem possible. Naomi was feeling dazzled by the vigorous straight-backed woman who’d snatched the suitcase from her fingers with the impetuousness of one whose will is rarely challenged.

  She remembered her father ruefully joking that in time his youthful and energetic mother would be mistaken for his sister—“A slightly older, bossy sister.”

  Madelena was saying that she hated plane travel. Hated putting herself in the trust of strangers. “Traveling is so passive. It’s a toss of the dice whether we survive the simplest flight. I’ve been checking your flight out of the Detroit airport, it was unsettling to be told that the plane was delayed while the wings were being de-iced.”

  Naomi was surprised and touched that Madelena had cared so much. She could think to say, haltingly, “Yes. It was very cold and icy there . . .” She was smiling foolishly.

  Inside the apartment Madelena insisted that Naomi drink a glass of water—“You’re dehydrated from traveling. It can’t be avoided. If you aren’t careful you will get a very bad headache. And tomorrow is your first full day in New York City—you must not be indisposed.”

  “Thank you.” Naomi drank from the crystal-cut glass she was handed, dutifully. It was so, her head had been aching since before the plane had landed.

  Madelena led her into a large, light-filled living room—floor-to-ceiling windows overlooking a remarkable vista of rooftops, spires, streets, small patches of snowy parkland. “That’s the Hudson River—that blue haze at the horizon. And over there, just visible from this window, the arch at Washington Square Park.” Naomi stared but did not see—wasn’t sure what she was seeing.

  “It’s so beautiful . . .”

  “From a height, yes. ‘Distance enhances.’”

  On the walls of the living room were large canvases that looked waterstained. Pale-pastel abstract paintings in (seeming) mimicry of the sky. Elegant contemporary furnishings, a rough-textured eggshell-colored rug on a polished hardwood floor. On a table, an antique stringed instrument. Sculpted figures, white marble heads. The living room opened into a dining room in which there was a long mahogany table, large enough to seat ten or twelve people; at the farther end were just two place mats set across from each other, with neatly folded colorful cloth napkins.

  Naomi was naively touched. Thinking that her grandmother had set the table in readiness for her.

  She recalled that, long ago when she’d been a young child, her parents had often had friends for dinner, friends and their children, informally, crowded around a table half the size of this table and with nothing of its formal elegance. These dinners had been boisterous, fun. It was true as people said—Gus Voorhees made you laugh. You would not have guessed how intense and often anxious the man was, for he delighted in making others laugh. The adults had drunk wine, beer—they’d quarreled about politics—they’d traded stories about their jobs, their bosses—they’d told jokes. Gus had not been reticent. But he had not dominated—usually.

  Eventually at these protracted dinners the children had drifted away to watch TV or, if they were younger, to be put to bed by their mothers. She could not recall if she’d been one of these young children, or if she’d always been older, and spared the humiliation of being put to bed.

  She wiped at her eyes. She had not thought of these dinners in some time. In Detroit, in Grand Rapids—of course, in Ann Arbor—but there had been few boisterous dinners in the rented house on Salt Hill Road, in rural Huron County, where (she saw now) things had begun to deteriorate in the life of their family.

  On Madelena’s dining room table was an elaborately designed wrought iron candelabra bearing a half-dozen slender candles, each of a different height, and color; each candleholder was lavishly encrusted with wax, like something sculpted. Naomi remembered that her parents had had a similar candelabra, slightly smaller, very striking, but impractical; it was usually kept on a sideboard, unused. She wondered now if it had been a gift, an impractical gift, from Madelena Kein.

  “It’s from Mexico. The candelabra. Does it look familiar?”—Madelena regarded her with bemused eyes.

  Naomi wondered where her parents’ candelabra was now. What had Jenna done with the household furnishings? Put them in storage, sold or gave them away . . .

  “And how has your mother been, Naomi?”

  “I think—my mother has been well . . .”

  “Jenna isn’t in Ann Arbor any longer, I’ve heard?”

  “Yes. I mean—no. She’s in Bennington, Vermont.”

  How halting, Naomi’s speech. And why did she think it was necessary to add “Vermont”—as if Madelena would not know where Bennington was.

  “She’s grieving, Naomi. It doesn’t end.”

  Was Madelena defending Jenna? But why would Madelena suppose that Jenna needed to be defended, to her daughter?

  “Are you in touch with her—with Mom?”

  “In a way. No and yes. Not obviously.”

  Naomi would consider this elusive remark, at length.

  Madelena told Naomi that she’d planned several outings for them during Naomi’s visit—to the Metropolitan Opera, to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, to the Neue Galerie, to Lincoln Center for the New York City Ballet —but she would be away from the apartment for much of the day most days, at the university; she would be away some evenings as well—“You’ll be on your own. As much as you wish. Or, if things work out, you can accompany me.”

  If things work out. What did that mean?

  “Life is not inevitably more complicated in New York City than in the Midwest but for those who thrive on complications, this is our city.”

  Madelena led Naomi along a narrow corridor into a sparely furnished white-walled room flooded with waning afternoon light.

  On a sleek white plastic desk in this room Madelena had laid several pages of the New York Times listing museum exhibits, concerts, plays, films, lectures and poetry readings for the upcoming week. Beside some of the listings, a red check.

  “Feel free to add anything of your own that you’d like to see, and if we have time, we will. This is a ‘holiday’ for me, too.”

  The closet door was ajar as if to suggest that Naomi should open it farther, and hang her things inside. At the foot of the bed was a small cedar chest.

  “There’s a bathroom just across the hall, for you.”

  “Thank you . . .”

  Naomi didn’t know how to address her grandmother. “Madelena” did not sound right, but “grandmother” was out of the question.

  As i
f reading her mind Madelena said, “Please just call me ‘Lena.’ I realize it’s awkward, but you will get used to it.”

  “‘Lena.’”

  “With more emphasis, dear! ‘Le-na.’ ”

  “‘Le-na.’”

  Madelena laughed happily, and touched Naomi’s arm. For a moment Naomi thought her grandmother might embrace her again, swiftly and tightly, but that did not happen.

  Next, Naomi was asked by Madelena if she had any questions—she could not think of a single question!—except questions she dared not ask of the straight-backed silver-haired woman whose eyes were obscured by tinted glasses. Why am I here, why did you invite me, do you care for me, is it expected that I will care for you?

  When she was alone she lay her suitcase on the cedar chest and began to unpack, slowly. Her gaze was drawn to the floor-to-ceiling window of the outer wall, that opened out into pure shimmering light. She was feeling weak with excitement, and had to sit on the edge of the bed.

  The coverlet was made of a stiff white puckered fabric, with rough-textured pillows in bright colors and designs that might have been Native American, Mexican. She smiled happily. She was a child who has crawled through a looking-glass and come into an amazing world—like Alice, her old, lost heroine.

  WHEN YOUR FATHER DIED I came here to live. I could not breathe in the low place I’d been living, a brownstone in Washington Square Mews.

  For a long time then I slept mostly in this room—though it’s meant to be obviously a child’s room. I fell asleep to the view outside this window, at night. I woke to this view in the morning. It was months before I got around to unpacking. I hardly went into the other rooms . . . During the day I was a professor at the University.

  I have always been hypnotized by my work and essentially my life is this “hypnosis.” It has not been a personal life, much.

  At the Institute it was suggested that I take a semester’s sabbatical but I refused. I took on new responsibilities—a new graduate seminar in the philosophy of linguistics, a new course with a colleague in art history titled “The Art of Estrangement.” A university committee on minority hiring, a selection committee for post-docs at the Institute for Independent Study.