A Book of American Martyrs

by Joyce Carol Oates

  Dunphy rose to her feet unsteadily. She was breathing audibly, panting. Her savage bloodshot eyes were wet with tears, not of sorrow but of rage. Naomi steeled herself—She could kill me with her fists. She could pound me to death. I would not be able to lift a finger to defend myself.

  “Of course—the interview is almost over anyway. Thank you so much for—”

  “Yah. G’bye.”

  Agitated, Dunphy strode away. Without a backward glance pushing through a set of double doors that led into the hotel.

  Naomi switched off the camera. She was shaken. Excited. Still it seemed unreal to her, that she had contrived to “interview” Luther Dunphy’s daughter. Her first impulse was to call Darren, to gloat and jeer.

  You will never guess . . .

  Oh but I am so—ashamed . . .

  Her hands were so shaky, she nearly dropped her camera onto the floor inserting it in its snug black leather bag.

  Outside in the parking lot the dyed-blond Marika, chief of public relations for Dayton Fights, Inc., was smoking a cigarette and speaking on a cell phone.

  “Oh. The interview’s over? How’d it go? D.D. Dunphy’s not a great talker, is she? We can send you pictures if you need more. Like, ‘The Hammer of Jesus at the heavy bag—in the boxing ring. There’s maybe going to be a local Dayton sponsor for her, a sports store—we could have some pictures there. Ernie says, she takes after Joe Louis. Meaning—I guess—they don’t talk much but they hit hard.”

  Marika gave Naomi her card, and did not seem to notice that Naomi had no card to give her.

  “Send me the video—Natalie, is it? Please. Next time D.D. fights, could be a title match. She could be the next women’s welterweight champion of the world. You won’t want to miss that.”

  “FAMILY”

  It was true. A prediction.

  You won’t want to miss that.

  SHE’D GONE AWAY, back to New York City. She wasn’t going to recall anything about Cincinnati. She wasn’t going to recall D.D. Dunphy for in so doing she would be forced to recall how cruelly, how crudely, even viciously she’d behaved in contriving to interview the naive young woman boxer. How unethical Naomi Voorhees’s behavior.

  Fortunately, no one knew. She had not called Darren to gloat over her audacity—hardly.

  Neither Gus nor Jenna could know. That was the great relief, that they be spared such knowledge. Your daughter is disfigured, warped in some way. Your daughter lacks humanity, charity, decency. Mercy.

  She had not told her grandmother much about the trip, and she had not told Kinch.

  (Always, there was the temptation to share a secret with Kinch. The more deliciously shameful the secret, the more the temptation to share with her father’s half-brother who inhabited his dwelling place like a spider emaciated from lack of food and thus ravenous, grateful for any morsel you could give him. But Naomi resisted.)

  Yet she wasn’t readily forgetting D.D. Dunphy. How recklessly close she’d come to taking the girl’s hand, to comfort her. And what would have followed from that?—would Dunphy have shoved her violently away, with a curse? Don’t touch me! You are a heathen, you are not to touch me.

  It was perhaps the most extraordinary memory of her life: how close she’d come to taking the hand of Luther Dunphy’s daughter.

  In the white-walled room thirty floors above the clamorous city streets of the West Village she’d learned to sleep with part-opened eyes, unable or unwilling to sleep fully, trustingly. For fear that something terrible would happen if she relaxed. Keep your left up. Get inside. Inside! Opening her eyes when a bell rang sharply ending a round. And there were the veiled bloodshot swollen and accusing eyes confronting her and a voice that seemed to be in the room with her, close in her ear: “My fights are for the glory of Jesus so the heathen will know His name.”

  Naomi understood that she’d been issued a challenge. What were her fights for? She had not a clue.

  “NAOMI, DEAR. We have to talk.”

  Reluctantly she came to sit near her grandmother. Icy fingers seeking hers, that were not so very warm, either.

  “Oh why—now? Some other time.”

  “Ah but now is precisely the ‘some other time’ of last time, chérie.”

  Madelena laughed. It gave her pleasure to be witty, droll. To be witty and droll you require at least one other person to listen, to be amused or to shudder.

  Fortunately at that moment a phone rang, to interrupt.

  Like a coltish child the granddaughter ran to snatch up the mobile phone to bring to her grandmother seated by one of the floor-to-ceiling windows overlooking the abyss.

  “Lena, for you.”

  THESE FRAGILE TIMES. Thin-ice fragile. Phone calls from Sloan Kettering. Radiology lab, oncology. She’d learned to recognize the caller IDs that most exuded dread. By her estimate there was not one that guaranteed safety.

  At the start of the first series of chemotherapy treatments Madelena had made a dramatic decision: rather than wait for her hair to come out in handfuls she’d had it totally buzz-cut from her scalp so that she could be fitted with a wig of a near-identical hue, but tougher and more resilient than her own hair had been.

  Naomi had accompanied her grandmother to the glamorous wig emporium in a high-rise building in midtown. She and a saleswoman had helped Madelena Kein try on wigs, trying not to see how Madelena’s eyes shone with tears—of embarrassment, repugnance, self-pity or disdain you could not have said.

  “No one needs to know. Even if they suspect, they don’t know. And if they don’t know, they can’t commiserate with me.”

  Surgery, chemo, hair loss, wig. Madelena’s pride had been astonishing to Naomi for it had seemed to her the most obvious sort of desperation on her (rational, reasonable) grandmother’s part, meant to deflect a terror of mortality.

  Over eight months Naomi had become familiar with the attractive, light-filled, just perceptibly malodorous waiting rooms at Sloan Kettering, in midtown Manhattan. She’d brought work with her, schoolwork, a laptop, waiting for the several hours of chemotherapy to run its course in an interior room to which she had no access. (For chemotherapy meant chemicals, chemicals meant hazardous medical materials. Clinical protocol surrounding chemotherapy and radiation was high-security and only specially trained nurses came anywhere near such patients.)

  Waiting by one of the tall windows in the waiting room for her grandmother to be pushed out in a wheelchair by one of the infusion nurses. “Naomi? Here is your grandmother”—glancing up, and feeling her heart clutch.

  Seeing poor Madelena so white-faced, so tired. Not wearing the beautiful silver human-hair wig at this time, and her poor head bare, fragile-seeming as eggshell. Yet in one of her dressy-casual sweater-and-trouser sets. And wearing earrings.

  Bravely Madelena managed to smile: “Hi there! Sorry to make you wait so long.”

  Madelena was only pushed in the wheelchair out to the waiting room, where she stood shakily, and took Naomi’s arm, and walked with her to the elevator. The wheelchair was part of the protocol. Perhaps it had to do with insurance. But it was invariably a shock to Naomi, to see her grandmother in a wheelchair.

  Always, or nearly always, Madelena had been stoic, uncomplaining. Pride would not allow her to complain. Chemo days were fraught with stress, the drama of not knowing if (in the hired car descending to the Village, in the elevator at 110 Bleecker, in the clammy sheets of her bed that night) Madelena might have a sudden reaction to the poison that had been pumping through her heart—a temperature spike, or a temperature drop; sudden nausea and vomiting, or diarrhea; a piercing headache, a ghoulish bloodshot eye.

  (Why was it only one bloodshot eye, and not two? And unpredictably the right eye, or the left? No one seemed to know.)

  At least there was no fussing over dinner that evening, Madelena liked to say. Naomi would prepare her a small bowl of chicken broth, a small bowl of white rice, a small bowl of applesauce.

  On these evenings Madelena would go to bed earl
y. Or rather, she would shut the door to her bedroom, and Naomi might hear her speaking on the phone—(to her friend Laslov?—they spoke each day at least once, so far as Naomi knew); a murmur of words, even laughter, not quite audible.

  In those months neither Madelena nor Naomi had seriously considered that Madelena might die. If Naomi had examined her naive assumptions she might have thought—My father died. My mother is dead to me. It is not possible that my grandmother will die, too.

  In this way Naomi had come to love Madelena. By unmeasured degree she’d come to love her grandmother. Between them had grown a bond like a soft, clotted, delicate cobweb that has appeared in the night, unobserved. Such a bond might be easily broken but—why would you break anything so beautiful?

  On the street, in the subway, Naomi exuded an air of female strength; she’d made herself into a New Yorker, sub-species young-woman-professional. With those with whom she interacted she was brisk, competent, uncomplaining; she was never (seemingly) distracted.

  Her single most vulnerable time wasn’t in public but returning to the apartment building at 110 Bleecker, entering her grandmother’s apartment when no one else was there. Especially when Madelena was scheduled to be in the hospital overnight. During the second course of treatment there were six sieges of several days each of intensive twenty-four-hour chemotherapy not in the quasi-social infusion room at Sloan Kettering but in a private hospital bed on another floor.

  Switching on a light in the apartment in which the large plate-glass windows floated in the night sky and in the nighttime city below winking with lights. As shadows leapt back in a mimicry of human movement she could not stop from saying, in a hopeful voice “Hello?”—but of course, there was no one.

  She was not unhappy really. She could not quite recall what happy was, but she was not unhappy.

  Reasoning: the chemo treatments seemed to be helping her grandmother. Despite the hair-loss, the weight-loss. Initially there had been treatments every two weeks over eight months. There had been a brief three-month period of remission. But now, a new period of relapse. And more extreme therapy. For oncologists at Sloan Kettering were inspired by the rarest of cancers, metastases (for instance) from the kidney to the colon, or from the colon to the kidney. There was less interest in “ordinary” cancers—colon, kidney, breast, bone, blood. There was revealed an intense and jealous scholarly narrowness to cancer that Naomi had not ever guessed. She had to think that her father could not have guessed, for his medical specialization was of a very different sort. How intrigued Gus would have been by the oncologists who were treating his mother! He would have liked to discuss her condition with them, and the treatment they were prescribing. Not for the first time Naomi felt all that her father was missing, being dead.

  At any rate, the terrible twenty-four-hour five-day chemotherapy did appear to be working. In the last lab report from the oncologist, Madelena Kein’s bloodwork indicated that the patient was holding her own.

  “‘Holding my own.’ This is a touching metaphor. It seems to mean that something, some force, is trying to wrest something, some possession of mine, from me—from out of my arms, for instance. But I am not allowing it to be wrested away—I am not passive in the face of my destiny but I am holding my own. Thank you for this good news.”

  Once, these words would have been ironic, out of Madelena’s mouth. But now, Naomi knew they were sincere. And she thought how conscientious her grandmother was being, in resisting irony at such a time.

  For good news, even if it may be temporary and precarious, is good news. Though a fact may be reversed with the next PET scan, or the next bloodwork, it is not less a fact because it is temporary and precarious.

  “If the dead could return to life, they would rejoice in ‘life’—whatever it was. They would not be picky and quarrelsome. They would not be ironic. And so we who are alive had better rejoice in their place.”

  “Yes, Lena.”

  “Good! You’ve learned to call me ‘Lena.’ What next?”—Madelena laughed, delighted.

  “I will learn to call Kinch ‘Kinch.’”

  In fact, Naomi could not call Kinch anything except, if she could not avoid it, “you.”

  When she’d returned to New York City from the first of her Midwestern trips, to Muskegee Falls, it was to discover that Madelena had become cheerfully “resigned.” Prematurely “resigned.” There was a new airiness, lightness in her grandmother’s bones. It wasn’t the ravages of chemotherapy—rather a ravage of the soul. A rarefying of the soul. To her surprise Naomi discovered, and would have liked to toss out into the incinerator chute in the corridor, a copy of The Tibetan Book of the Dead on Madelena’s nightside table.

  She’d leafed through the book dreading what she might read. She knew how derisive Gus had been of “wisdom” literature—the sacred texts of the great religions, apologias for oppression, ignorance, superstition, pacifism in the face of political tyranny. Not to mention enslavement and mistreatment of women. No “wisdom” is worth such ignorance, Gus had said. And it was laced with anti-science as with anthrax.

  Naomi supposed that The Tibetan Book of the Dead was not to be taken literally but rather symbolically. The subtitle was Liberation Through Hearing During the Intermediate State.

  For you did not die instantaneously, it was claimed. By degrees you died, as your consciousness waned. Many days and many nights were required for complete extinction. Possibly this was once true, or true in some way, before modern medical technology. Now, consciousness in the dying individual waned, and was extinguished, while the body continued to live a zombie-life in its reduced state. This was living—but only physically.

  Naomi put the book down, and did not confront her grandmother with it. For she knew that, if she did, Madelena would make a joke of it in some way painful to Naomi.

  She missed Madelena’s former contentiousness. Madelena’s contrarian spirit. Since the onset of the cancer Madelena scarcely seemed to care if someone disagreed with her—she rarely troubled to disagree with others. She had lost her strong opinions as you might lose bulky household objects and never miss them. She did not refute colleagues, she did not take sides in disputes. When Kinch said something preposterous, or provocative, Madelena simply smiled.

  Clasped her hands tightly together, as if in restraint. Smiled.

  When Naomi told Madelena that she thought she might have at last found her “subject”—(“A film documentary about women boxers”)—Madelena had said, “Good!”—and had not raised the obvious objections Naomi had expected.

  “Will you apply for a grant? From the Institute? Or—are you looking for private investors? If so, maybe I can help.”

  Quickly Naomi told her grandmother that she wasn’t looking for money—yet. It was mortifying to her that Madelena would offer to support her documentary filmmaking, along with allowing her to live in her apartment for no rent.

  Madelena said, “But I want to help you, in any way I can. Why would I not want to help you, Naomi? You’re my granddaughter: I love you.”

  SHE’D SEEN THIS CLEARLY: Madelena had intended to maneuver her into a relationship of some intimacy with the half-uncle Kinch. She’d known almost at once. Oh, she had known.

  Yet, it had happened nonetheless. Not that she’d been powerless to stop it but that she had not stopped it, as if powerless.

  As she’d come to love Madelena over a period of time so she’d come to love Karl Kinch. (To a degree.)

  My family. Mine!

  She didn’t know whether to smile over this, or to cry. Often she had a fleeting vision of something—ashes, bone—swirling sucked away into a stream.

  Until Madelena’s illness Naomi had never visited Kinch without her—of course. It had seemed very strange, awkward—visiting the half-uncle without her grandmother present.

  When she came alone to see Kinch he was bright, cheerful, garrulous and inquisitive as usual. He’d made an effort to groom himself: fresh-laundered white shirt, shaving cologne. With play
ful rudeness he sent the dour Sonia away to “molder” in a back room and not bother them. Yet: he didn’t ask in detail about Madelena.

  He didn’t tease Naomi nearly so much as he had at the start of their acquaintance. She’d become for him a familiar presence, a “relative”—almost, a relative he’d known for a long time, about whom there was no need to ask probing questions.

  Kinch liked to surprise Naomi by giving her presents at unpredictable times. A pristine first edition of Selected Poems of Marianne Moore. A paperback copy of Julian Jaynes’s The Origins of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind with Kinch’s own annotations in the margins. A copy of Kinch’s own, early book of poems Tristes published when he’d been Naomi’s age, and out of print (as Kinch said) for three decades, with a lavishly obscure inscription—To my dear niece Naomi with hope for the happiness of her life to come. Yrs with Love, “Uncle Karl.”

  She took away the books, and tried to read them. Grateful that Kinch never asked her about them.

  In return for these gifts Kinch sometimes asked Naomi to read to him. Anything, everything—passages from that morning’s New York Times or from a new book on epistemology from Cambridge, captions beneath New Yorker cartoons in a font too small and thin for his single good eye.

  Sighing with happiness Kinch said: “Very nice, to have a ‘niece.’ For one who’d never had the slightest interest in children of his own a ‘niece’ is the perfect solution.”

  “Solution to what?”

  “To the problem of aloneness. Sometimes overlapping with ‘loneliness.’”

  Naomi had cultivated a mildly skeptical response to Kinch’s remarks—a bright-schoolgirl manner appropriate to a young niece.

  There was nowhere else that Naomi Voorhees spoke in such a way, that was both younger than she felt, yet older, “sophisticated” like a young girl in a romantic film by Jean Renoir.

  (Madelena had taken her to a Renoir festival at the local Film Forum. Naomi had fallen under the spell of the visually beautiful cinematic Renoir world slow-moving and insular as a dream.)