A Book of American Martyrs

by Joyce Carol Oates

  I could not bear a protracted time during which I would mourn my son for there was no thought of Gus that was not an infinity into which I could fall, and fall.

  I am not by nature a mourner. That is not my personality. What it was that happened to me, I have never understood. But it was in this room and not the other rooms of the apartment that it happened.

  Though I was very tired at this time I was also tireless.

  You may find yourself in this state someday. I think it is a woman’s state of being. Your mother would know.

  And then, it was September 2001—the morning of September eleventh.

  This window faces south—downtown. Of all the windows in the apartment it is this window, ironically, in this small room, that gives the most direct view of what would be called Ground Zero. I happened to be in this room on the morning of September eleventh. I don’t think that I had slept here the night before but sometime in the early morning, at dawn, when I was awake and couldn’t get back to sleep, I came into this room, which has such an extraordinary view of the avenues and streets and their lights and the taxis—on West Houston, the taxis cruise at all hours. To watch the sky change its colors—the clouds change—that is very comforting. And then, later, as I was about to leave to go to the University, there was—suddenly—a few miles away—in the area of the World Trade Center—a patch of something fiery-red.

  Was it a fire? An explosion? Out of nowhere it had seemed to come. I had just glanced out the window and now, I could not look away.

  One of the tall towers of the World Trade Center tower was on fire, billowing smoke—it was instantly recognizable though miles away.

  Almost sometimes, years later I can see the fire there, in that emptiness—the terrible smoke, like boiling black air. And then, as I was watching, the second plane struck . . .

  I would not look away for a long time.

  At the time there was only astonishment. This is what I recall—there were no words for what had happened, or was happening, only just astonishment. It was like trying to wake from a dream—I could not comprehend what I was seeing—for it had no end, it was continuous, it would not end for hours, for days.

  And the churning air that came up from the explosions, that looked like a cyclone or whirlwind of something like gravel, and smelled so terrible—for a long time. The spell was over all of us . . .

  So it happened that your father’s death was somehow part of this. Gus had died approximately one year ten months before the terrorist attack and in all that time I had been grieving for him—in silence mostly. But on that morning there came the catastrophe out of the sky killing thousands of men and women and within a few hours, or a day—a day and a night—my son’s terrible death seemed to fall into place like a waterfall emptying into water . . . My sorrow for Gus came to an end lost in the sorrow of others.

  When so many die, a single death is one of these deaths. It is not singular.

  Is that a good thing? Or is that terrible, unspeakable?

  What “terrorism” means—the end of grief.

  The wound is just too great. One limb you might mourn, but all of your limbs torn from you—it is just too much.

  That’s the emptiness there, at Ground Zero, Naomi—that you can’t see.

  Unfortunately, I can see it.

  EACH DAY, the promise that Madelena would reveal something crucial to Naomi about her father.

  Each day, the anxious anticipation. Then disappointment, or relief.

  She knew: she must not ask. Madelena had warned her months ago in that email. She must not offend Madelena Kein by seeming impatient.

  I will speak to you—you will not question me.

  There are some things I wish to tell you . . .

  She’d been shocked by her grandmother’s remark, that her sorrow for Gus had come to an end.

  That was not possible, was it?—an end.

  TWO MONTHS BEFORE in November of the previous year she’d received via parcel post a badly battered, much-duct-taped box addressed to Naomi Voorhees. The box was from a former colleague of her father’s with whom he’d worked at a women’s clinic in Grand Rapids in the 1990s.

  Inside was a hand-scrawled note: Naomi?—remember me? Whit Smith.

  Retiring this month & clearing out my office & files & surprised I had so much of Gus’s things here. I did not want to just toss it out, not even sure what there is here & if valuable to you or not.

  Tried to contact Jenna a few times but no luck. “No forwarding address”—hope your mom is OK.

  Heard about L.D. execution. Still can’t think about losing Gus without feeling just sick to heart & not feeling so optimistic about the political future frankly in this recession & the right wing campaigning against everything we’ve put in place like Sherman marching to the sea.

  Hope you & your brother (Darin?) & sister are OK also. Say hi to your mom for me, will you. Can’t believe it has been seven years since I’ve seen you all.

  Naomi had unpacked the box with trembling fingers. A smell of mold lifted to her nostrils. Inside were letters both professional and personal, addressed to Gus Voorhees; documents of all kinds—medical, legal, financial, IRS; printouts, clippings, pocket-sized appointment books, desk calendars, wall calendars . . . An eight-by-twelve frayed manila envelope containing greeting cards—Dear Dr. Voorhees, Thank you for saving my life.

  Dear Doctor Voorhees, Thank you. Thank you. God bless you.

  Dear Doctor Voorhees, Thank you from the bottom of my heart for all you did for me in my hour of need both before & after. I will never forget you Doctor. I will pray for you all the days of my life. You gave my life back to me. God bless you & keep you.

  Inside one of the cards, with a multifoliate rose cover, was a snapshot of an attractive woman with shoulder-length curly hair, smiling earnestly into the camera. Dear Dr. Voorhees THANK YOU!

  Your friend Irene.

  Were these women who’d had abortions at the Grand Rapids clinic? Naomi supposed so, until she discovered a card embossed with gilt letters THANK YOU! and inside a snapshot of a smiling young woman with an infant in her arms. Thank you Dr. Voorhees for our beautiful blessed little girl we are naming Augusta. Dwight & I will hope to drop by & see you SOON.

  Here and there in the box were other snapshots of babies. Some had names and dates on the reverse, others were unmarked, anonymous.

  And then there were cards, hand-scrawled private messages—

  Gus—Tonight is no good, sorry. E. decided not to drive to the conference after all, he’s taking a plane in the morning. OK? Call?

  Love etcetera

  Kat

  And—Gus darling, I have to drive Carrie to basketball practice & can swing by the office at about 4:00 P.M.—hoping you will be there. Will enter at rear—make sure door unlocked OK? Also hoping J. is all right. That was SCARY.

  Your Kitty-Kat

  Naomi’s heart beat hard in childish fury, resentment. Your Kitty-Kat. She hoped that Jenna had never known.

  (And what did it mean—Hoping J. is all right. Obviously “J” was Jenna. Had Jenna been ill, had Jenna found out that her husband was having an affair with a mutual friend, had Jenna been upset, angry, humiliated? Resigned?)

  Abruptly then the messages from Kat ceased. There were other suggestive and enigmatic notes from Val, Roslyn, Stuart (judging by the context this had to be a female: Gus, we have to talk. I wasn’t altogether truthful on the phone, I think each of us owes the other an explanation). These Naomi read in disbelief and disdain, hurriedly, crumpled in her hand, but did not set aside . . .

  Had Jenna known? Had Jenna been hurt?

  It was not clear that these were full-fledged affairs. (Naomi told herself.) Just as likely flirtations that had come to nothing.

  Yet: those years when Jenna was pointedly quiet, or distracted, or (intermittently) depressed; even at mealtimes when Gus was home with his family, exuding the warm genial always-entertaining personality that so captivated his children.

>   They’d sensed their mother’s unhappiness—she and Darren. But like the shrewdly selfish children they were, they had not wanted to inquire.

  And if they’d inquired Jenna would have said she had a “migraine,” or—“Too much damned work to do, for which I’m paid less than the minimum wage.”

  Laughing then, to show them that she wasn’t complaining really.

  Wasn’t depressed or furious really.

  You could not help but love Daddy best—of course.

  You could not help but forgive Daddy for being himself—of course.

  Naomi was sure (sure!) that she couldn’t recall a single exchange between her parents in which Jenna had even obliquely accused Gus of being unfaithful to her—unless it was Jenna’s silence that was the accusation.

  It was rare that their parents quarreled. If a voice was raised it was Gus’s voice, penetrating the bedroom walls. Often Daddy was exasperated, not angry. Daddy was never mean.

  Nor had they heard Jenna crying. Naomi was sure.

  She would call Darren! He might know who “Kitty-Kat” was, in Grand Rapids.

  Possibly, the mother of a friend or classmate. (Who was “Carrie”?)

  Naomi was sitting on the floor unpacking the box, that had been haphazardly packed. Telling herself that she was grateful to have received it. Telling herself that she was not beginning to panic.

  Gamely she was sorting out material, dividing it into piles. Whit Smith had included much that was impersonal, and of no interest—as if he’d dumped drawers into the box without glancing at them.

  She didn’t remember Whit Smith, of course—her father’s colleague in Grand Rapids. She’d been too young.

  A succession of Daddy’s colleagues, co-workers, young assistants. At mealtimes, sometimes staying overnight on a pull-out sofa. Gus thought nothing of arriving home at 6:00 P.M. with a guest, or two guests, in tow—Jenna! Hope it isn’t too late for dinner . . . I’ll open some wine.

  And Jenna would say Of course! Come right in.

  One of these visitors had surely been Whit Smith. Another might have been “Kat.”

  Naomi’s head was beginning to ache. She’d become overwhelmed by the material that had initially excited her. Trying to draw conclusions about her father’s (personal, professional) life from random items that overlapped, to a degree, with similarly random material she’d acquired from other sources . . . Looking through the pocket-sized appointments books she felt a sensation of vertigo. These well-worn and frayed little books had lived inside her father’s clothing. Near his heart.

  There had to be a number of individuals who knew or could shrewdly guess what these entries meant, as they would know who “Kat” and the other women were. But if initials were identified, to what purpose?

  The more she knew of the dailiness, the minutiae, of her father’s life, the more that life was eluding her. From a distance she could see the contours of an intriguing landscape while up close she could see virtually nothing.

  By this time numerous others had written about Gus Voorhees in a range of publications—The Nation, Mother Jones, Atlantic. Most had written with impressive knowledge of the Planned Parenthood/pro-choice community in the United States in the latter decades of the twentieth century, in which Gus Voorhees had been a prominent figure: he’d been “fearless”—he’d been “controversial.” These were observers who’d known Gus personally and professionally, who’d been friends of his, or friendly acquaintances; individuals who weren’t afraid to be critical of him even when admiring of him.

  Also by this time several other abortion providers had been murdered by right-to-life activists and many others injured or threatened. Abortion clinics had been vandalized, firebombed. All these had been covered in the media. The most concerted anti-abortion efforts were now political, waged in state legislatures and in state elections, and not confrontational.

  Risky to open one of her father’s little notebooks and to see his familiar slanted handwriting. Even if she had no idea what the words meant. 9/6/91 Ob mtg C.H.T. office 4:30 PM. 6/23/93 10:30 AM Rackham 313-447-1766. (This was a Detroit-area number, she might call. But so many years had passed!) There were pages of lists, dates, initials and abbreviations in which even K was lost—an indecipherable code she could never crack.

  Naomi had to turn away, feeling suddenly ill.

  None of this will bring me back, honey. Maybe you should let this go.

  TRYING TO EXPLAIN. Trying to choose her words with care but there was something wrong with her speech, her very tongue.

  It is not a memorial for Daddy alone—for “Gus Voorhees.” It is a commemoration of the world that surrounded him and that died with him.

  She felt it so keenly!—all that she could not utter in words.

  She wanted to explain to the woman who was her father’s mother. Who had given birth to a child and then seemingly abandoned him, as a boy of eight or nine. Naomi wanted to ask how such an act had been possible.

  And so, for the ten days of her stay with her grandmother in the high-rise apartment at 110 Bleecker Street she had to be alert to the most casual of remarks made by Madelena. She could not ask explicitly. Nor would Madelena reply explicitly.

  In their seats at Lincoln Center, at the Balanchine ballet. On an escalator at the Museum of Modern Art, ascending into an exhibit of Picasso drawings and paintings. At the Polish film festival at the NYU Film Institute. At Carnegie Hall, at a Kronos Quartet concert. At the International Center of Photography on Sixth Avenue, at the Whitney Museum, at the Guggenheim and at the Neue Galerie, at a performance of Offenbach’s Tales of Hoffmann at the Metropolitan Opera. In a taxi, or on the subway—(it was a revelation to Naomi, her beautifully dressed and not-young grandmother took the subway frequently, and seemed oblivious to its noisy distractions). At a lecture titled “The Rise of Consciousness and the Development of the Emotions” sponsored by the Psychology Department at NYU and at a lecture titled “The Birth of Ethics” sponsored by the NYU Institute for Independent Study, where Madelena Kein introduced the speaker.

  Offhandedly Madelena might say, “You know, Naomi—we were very close. Your father and me. Not geographically close. But we spoke often on the phone.”

  Naomi was surprised to hear this. Almost, she would wonder if it was true.

  “Gus understood that by leaving him and his father I didn’t cease to love him—only that I couldn’t continue to be his mother because I was not that person. I was another person.”

  There was a kind of spell upon them. If this were a ballet an entranced music would signal it. So long as Naomi did not interrupt with an inane remark or a question Madelena would speak as if she were thinking aloud, choosing her words precisely; but only in the interstices of an “outing”—an “activity”—in which she and Naomi were in a public place in which the occasion for such remarks was limited.

  “Gus didn’t judge me as others in the family did. He’d always respected the autonomy of individuals. That was why he’d believed that women must never be under the control of men—or even other women. A woman’s body is no one’s property but her own. Gus seemed naturally to understand.” Madelena paused, touching her fingertips to her eyes. “You understand, Naomi, I hope?”

  “Yes.”

  “Though I hope you will never need to have—or have not needed to have—an abortion . . .”

  Naomi felt her face grow warm. Was her grandmother asking her in this awkwardly oblique way if she’d had an abortion?

  Stiffly she said she hoped not, too.

  Fortunately the opportunity for further conversation abruptly ended as a bell chimed, signaling the end of an intermission.

  So distracted was Naomi, she’d forgotten for a moment where she was.

  SHE IS REMARKABLE! She will never admit that she did anything wrong—even for a moment.

  Abandoning her son and his father, leaving to establish a “career” for herself—she is not apologetic, she feels no guilt.

  But is this so?—Made
lena Kein feels no guilt?

  I adore her. I want to be her.

  I hate her. She is a monster!

  At the window flooded with late-morning sunlight. With a ruler Naomi had drawn lines on a sheet of white paper.

  Wanting to take notes by hand. As in an old-fashioned diary or logbook.

  As Gus had done in the notebooks she’d discovered. But not in code as Gus had done.

  TEN DAYS, that passed both rapidly and with dreamlike slowness.

  Amid the busyness of the city that seemed at times almost frantic Naomi yet managed to keep some time for herself, in the solitude of the white-walled room floating in air.

  She took notes on lined paper. She stared out the window. She paged through books from her grandmother’s crammed shelves searching for—what, she wasn’t sure.

  She tried to see the “emptiness” of which Madelena had spoken with such feeling, miles away at Ground Zero; but since she had not ever seen the twin towers there originally, she could not fathom their absence.

  “Naomi, dear?”—there might come a light rap at the door.

  Madelena was slipping away for a few hours, or for most of the day. But they would be going out in the evening—of course.

  So many people! Names and faces soon began to blur.

  Madelena’s colleagues in philosophy, linguistics, theater; musicians and composers; painters and sculptors, journalists, writers and poets . . . There was a tall courtly white-haired and -bearded Hungarian-born semioticist named Laslov whose heavily accented English was difficult to decipher, who seemed very fond of Madelena, as Madelena was of him; during Naomi’s visit she would meet Laslov several times, at restaurant dinners in the West Village arranged by Madelena. (Naomi wondered: were Laslov and Madelena lovers, or had they been lovers? She was struck by a playful ease between them that she hadn’t observed between her grandmother and other men, and a particular gentleness in the way Laslov pronounced “Lena.”) There was the New Yorker writer Janet Malcolm whom Madelena much admired as “fearless” and “intransigent” in her non-fiction essays, and who seemed to admire Madelena as a “kindred spirit”; there was the controversial gay writer Edmund White, who hosted a dinner party for Madelena and her visiting granddaughter in his elegant Chelsea apartment, and quite charmed Naomi with his wit, warmth, and erudition. An Israeli filmmaker named Yael Ravel, a visiting fellow at the Institute known for her documentaries about communities of Israeli and Palestinian women, made a strong impression upon Naomi by saying, to the audience, following a showing of one of her films: “What is most required for the documentary filmmaker is patience. When you encounter your true subject, you will know it.”