A Book of American Martyrs

by Joyce Carol Oates

  Kinch spoke of his medical problems in a similar tone: casual, conversational, bemused. He liked to tell anecdotes of his hospital misadventures, nightmare tests and “procedures,” things that might have gone disastrously wrong but somehow did not. He did not want pity for his condition but he did want attention—an audience. When he had genuinely good news, a new medication that was working well, a new test that turned out negative, the slowing of the “progression” of his MS, Kinch had more difficulty speaking of it. What he most feared was hope, Naomi thought.

  Yet there was hope in Kinch’s life, of a kind. A new intravenous medication was now available for the treatment of the kind of MS he had, and it was possible that in fact Kinch didn’t have HIV after all but a rare blood disorder—his condition might have been misdiagnosed.

  Speaking of such matters Kinch maintained a light, bantering tone. Naomi understood—he did not want her to express hope of any kind. Better to fall in with Kinch’s pose of cynicism: “‘The treatment was a great success, the patient died.’”

  And: “Life is what spills over from a New Yorker cartoon caption.”

  She resisted Kinch. A middle-aged man who remained perennially young, unnaturally “boyish”—“childish.” To be in the presence of Karl Kinch was to seem to be conspiring, making mischief—though you did not quite know what kind of mischief you were making. She did not really want to like Kinch. She suspected that, if Gus were alive, Gus would not approve of Kinch—there was a kind of zestful morbidity in the man, much at odds with Gus Voorhees’s forthright and unironic nature.

  Yet, Naomi found herself confiding in Kinch. One afternoon when she was visiting him alone in his austere dwelling at Fifteenth Street just east of Fifth Avenue. She’d recently returned from Muskegee Falls and had fallen into a fugue of inertia. Or maybe it was a fugue of self-doubt and despair which she strove to hide from her grandmother. She’d decided—finally—to stop work on the archive; yet, she had no other project of her own. Her work for the documentary filmmaker was part-time, erratic; she enjoyed it, and had learned a great deal, but the career of a documentary filmmaker was episodic, and if you could not choose your own subjects it could be sheer drudgery, unrewarding.

  Yael Ravel had warned her: There is no romance of film. Except in the eye of the beholder.

  Kinch had observed his young niece’s quietness. He’d observed, with his sharp, singular eye, the sadness in her manner, that had not only to do with her grandmother’s medical condition (of which he knew but obliquely) but with something more personal to her, more private. He’d asked her what was wrong, and she had told him—she’d journeyed to Muskegee Falls, she’d taken pictures, made videos.

  “But it’s all exterior. No one from the Dunphy family was even there. And he’s been dead for six years.”

  Kinch said, “Your father has been dead for even longer.”

  Naomi winced, she had no idea what this meant. But she’d deserved it being said for she had made herself vulnerable to her father’s (rivalrous) half-brother.

  Unexpectedly then Kinch began to speak of “Luther Dunphy.” She had not known that he’d had the slightest interest in Dunphy, even that he’d known the assassin’s name; still less that he’d researched the case. She could not have guessed that Kinch in his pretense of indifference to domestic relations had had much interest in Gus Voorhees. But now he lighted a cigarette and exhaled luxuriously like a man in a movie, assured of being the center of attention. It was transfixing to Naomi, that anyone should approach the obsession of her young life, which she had shared with few others.

  “Dunphy. Luther Amos. As I see it the man consecrated himself as a ‘Soldier of God’—or a ‘Soldier of Christ’—if there’s any distinction. The essential thing is, Dunphy was a martyr. He didn’t expect to survive what he’d done. He precipitated his own execution. He was a suicide.”

  Kinch paused. He was leaning forward in his wheelchair, smiling a ghastly wet excited smile, exhaling smoke, clearly enjoying himself. He would never have expounded on this subject if Madelena had been present, Naomi thought.

  Naomi asked, “Was Jesus’s crucifixion a kind of suicide?”

  “Not if Jesus was resurrected. That’s the happy ending.”

  “But—we don’t believe that Jesus was resurrected. Do we?”

  “We don’t, but others do. Very likely, Jesus thought he would be resurrected, at least before the crucifixion.”

  Kinch continued: “Remember, on the cross Jesus calls out in a loud voice—‘My God, my God, why has thou forsaken me?’—‘Eli, Eli, lema sabachthani?’—the saddest words in the New Testament. (But the words are an echo of the Old Testament Psalms. Jesus was a Biblical scholar!) The rest of the story, the death, the burial in the tomb, the resurrection and the rising to heaven—is obviously of another, later era. This is the fairy-tale ending—the prescribed ending. It’s the verses leading to the crucifixion that depict a stark sort of reality. The betrayal of Judas—the denial of Peter—the anointing of Jesus’s feet by Mary, as if he were already a corpse—the matter-of-fact words of Jesus presaging his death: ‘Yet a little while is the light with you. Walk while you have the light, lest darkness come upon you: for he that walks in darkness knows not whither he goes.’”

  Kinch ceased speaking as if struck dumb by words he’d only comprehended as he uttered them. Naomi was sitting straight-backed on the sofa facing him in the wheelchair, cast into a state of mind not unlike the confusion of a dream, the waking-from-a-dream, when what you have lost is yet with you, though you can’t say its name.

  It had enveloped Gus—this darkness. Stealthily it continued to advance. No human effort could forestall it.

  In his stricken state Kinch sucked at his ridiculous parchment-cigarette, that Naomi hated. She’d have liked to hate him.

  Kinch recovered something of his jaunty composure and continued:

  “What is ‘suicide’? What do we mean by ‘martyrdom’? In the Gospels Jesus clearly accepts his own death—that is, the death that precedes resurrection. ‘The poor you shall always have with you, but me you shall not.’ This is a poignant remark, matter-of-fact, not self-pitying. Jesus accepts his death but he is ‘deluded’ you might say—he believes that his Father in Heaven can save him at any moment. But he knows that he must die, to wash away the sins of humankind. It’s a tragic story if you don’t believe—if you can’t believe—that Jesus was actually a demigod, and Jesus was resurrected and ascended to the throne of the Father in Heaven. Jesus is not a ‘suicide’ because Jesus believes that he is the savior of humankind—he can be killed, but he can’t be destroyed. The man who murdered your father, and another person, is the truer suicide. He never tried to save himself, it’s said. He never lost faith and he died in the service of faith—a delusion. Yet he wasn’t entirely deluded—he knew that God would forsake him, and he would die dead. You have to admire someone like that, eh?”

  Particularly, the eh? was outrageous. Naomi shrank from Kinch as if he’d uttered something obscene. She could not reply.

  Kinch persisted: “Very few people would die for any ideal. Even a delusion. Such courage is rare.”

  “It wasn’t ‘courage.’ It was—cruelty, stupidity . . .”

  “He wasn’t insane. No one tried seriously to suggest that Luther Dunphy was insane. But what of your father Gus Voorhees? He was not insane, of course.”

  Mutely Naomi stared at Karl Kinch. What was the man saying?

  “But Gus Voorhees was a kind of ‘suicide’ too—de facto. In his defiance of his enemies, in the risks he took, your father was courageous, but also—as he must have known—‘suicidal.’ He weighed the likelihood of his own death against the value of his services to women who needed him and decided it was worth it, whatever happened. The perfect martyr is a suicide.”

  In distress Naomi stood. She would run out and leave Kinch in his motorized wheelchair, with a forlorn, faint smell of cologne about his wasted body, and a scattering of ashes on his bony knees.


  “I hate you. I don’t have to listen to this.”

  “But I don’t hate you. I adore you. And your father Gus Voorhees—I admire him immensely. The more I’ve learned about him, the more I admire him; and Luther Dunphy too, in his sad deluded way . . .

  “But I would worry, Gus Voorhees wouldn’t admire me.”

  Kinch began to cough. The parchment cigarette in his hand trembled, and ashes fell. Naomi wanted to snatch the cigarette from him and throw it at his face.

  “Excuse me, Naomi—”

  Kinch’s cough worsened. Within seconds it became a wracking spasm of a cough. Naomi hoped that Sonia would come running to give aid to her invalid-employer but Sonia was feigning deafness perhaps, hiding in a remote room watching TV.

  Naomi came to Kinch, hunched now in his wheelchair, white-faced, shaken, the size and heft of a prepubescent boy. With a paper napkin she wiped at his damp face. The hateful cigarette she detached from his fingers and briskly stubbed out in a tray.

  Soon then, Kinch recovered. Irritably he said, “Just something I swallowed wrong. It’s nothing, much.”

  THE CONSOLATION OF GRIEF:

  FEBRUARY 2012

  Another time, she flew to the Midwest.

  The last time. She promised herself.

  AT KENNEDY her flight was delayed so that the plane’s wide wings could be “de-iced”—fascinating if harrowing to watch from her window seat at the rear of the plane. At the airport outside Cleveland, runways were bordered by six-foot banks of plowed-up snow and passengers already exhausted from a turbulent flight and a bumpy landing were made to sit on the plane for forty minutes awaiting an “arrival gate”—telling herself It is your choice that you are here. It is no one else’s but your own.

  That evening, at the Cleveland Sports Arena, on a card with a much-promoted middleweight boxing match between two top-ranked (male) contenders, was the title fight for the Midwest Boxing League Women’s Welterweight championship—(title-holder) Siri Aya “Icewoman” vs. D.D. Dunphy “Hammer of Jesus.”

  This time Naomi had a better seat: third row, center. A complimentary ticket courtesy of Dayton Fights, Inc.

  Since the Cincinnati visit she’d kept in contact with Marika who was under the impression (to a degree, this was not unfounded) that Naomi Matheson was preparing a documentary film on women boxers in which D.D. Dunphy would be prominent.

  Each woman believing herself shrewd in “keeping in contact” with the other.

  Marika had no doubt that D.D. Dunphy would win the MBL title in February, in Cleveland. The “really big” title fight would be with a boxer named Ilse Kinder who was the WBA champion and a box-office draw—“They can’t ignore us then. They will have to make a TV deal.”

  Adding, “This will be a major fight, probably in the summer. Atlantic City at least. Vegas is a long shot but a possibility.”

  And, “You might end up making your film all about D.D. Dunphy, Naomi. ‘The First Great Woman Boxer’—‘The First Great American Woman Boxer’—some title like that.”

  Difficult not to be caught up in such enthusiasm, such optimism for what’s-to-come, even in one who had grown cautious, if not apprehensive, of peering blithely into the future—as if one could peer into any future and not rather into a kind of distorting reflective surface mirroring one’s own anxious face.

  Naomi heard herself say carefully: “That would be a possibility. Yes.”

  Vehement and righteous Marika continued: “Jesus! The situation is, sportswriters are all men. You’d think that would be changed by now but essentially it isn’t. Sports photographers are all men. TV sports producers. They don’t give a shit for women boxers, and they don’t give a shit for our boxer because she isn’t ‘photogenic.’ Know what they say? ESPN has said? ‘Dunphy looks too much like an athlete—viewers won’t like that.’ Like, Mike Tyson doesn’t look like an ‘athlete’? What’s Dunphy supposed to look like, a ballet dancer? Ice-skater? Our boxer looks like who she is.”

  THIS TIME, Naomi knew to come to the fights late. To avoid the grueling earlier fights, between inexperienced or lesser boxers, that aroused such scorn among the spectators scattered through the arena.

  In the clamorous arena Naomi sat alone. Already her nerves were on edge amid such noise.

  This time she didn’t feel so self-conscious. It had not been her aloneness after all in Cincinnati that had made her conspicuous but the color of her skin and here in the more attractive Cleveland Sports Arena, at least within the first dozen or so rows, the majority of spectators were white.

  White-skinned, and a number of them women. Women in groups, in rows. Rowdy and funny. From comments Naomi had been overhearing these fight fans had come some distance to see “Icewoman” fight.

  Siri Aya had defended her title two years before in Cleveland, in this venue, and was a three-to-one favorite tonight.

  No one seemed to know much about D.D. Dunphy, or to care.

  Naomi did not want to see Dunphy win this fight, and become a “champion.” Yet, she did not want to see Dunphy lose badly, or be injured. Online she’d watched several fights in which the elegantly poised, seemingly invincible “Icewoman” Aya had outboxed, outmaneuvered, outlasted her opponents. Aya’s ring record was eighteen wins, two losses. Dunphy’s record was nine wins, no losses, one draw.

  Aya was twenty-nine years old and had been boxing for eleven years. She’d famously said in an interview that she would “never retire”—she’d have to be “carried out of the ring feet first.” In her hometown of Milwaukee, Wisconsin, she’d been trained in martial arts and kickboxing and had been an amateur champion in these sports as a young teenager. Her older brother had been a WBA heavyweight contender until he’d been convicted of domestic assault and incarcerated. Her only losses had come at the start of her career. She’d defended her MBL title several times. When she entered the Cleveland arena in a silky ivory-white robe, with an ebullient greeting to the crowd, cheers went up, and sustained applause. When D.D. Dunphy had entered a few minutes before there’d been sporadic applause that had quickly faded.

  In the ring, the two women boxers could not have been more unlike. Aya’s ivory-white robe was embossed with icicle-lightning bolts and her boxing trunks and Spandex top were of the same showy fabric; her chic buzz-cut hair was bleached platinum-blond; on her slender muscled arms was a tattoo-lacework of ivory and gold. Aya was sleek, long-legged as an antelope, her arms seemed to glitter like scimitars. Her skin was a pale cocoa-color but her features were “Caucasian.” Everything about Dunphy was cruder—matt-black ring attire, spiky streaked hair, lurid tattoos on her biceps. Her skin was sallow. Her body was thick, muscled, graceless. On the back of her T-shirt was colorful advertising for a Dayton sports store, Naomi was embarrassed to see.

  Siri Aya wore ivory-white shoes with gold tassels. D.D. Dunphy wore ungainly black shoes on feet large as hooves.

  “Ladies and gentlemen, ten rounds of women’s welterweight boxing for the Midwest Boxing League title . . .”

  In the first several seconds of the first round it seemed evident: Aya was the quicker, Dunphy the more forceful. Very likely, Dunphy was outmatched by her taller, leaner, more mature and more devious opponent who stymied her with a rapid jab, a succession of blows, a way of moving to the side as if in retreat yet not in retreat but aggressively, unexpectedly pushing forward—so that the stocky-bodied, stronger boxer was led to throw punches wildly, that missed their mark, or, striking her opponent, were but glancing blows.

  Aya wasn’t letting Dunphy get inside. So long as she could not get inside the shorter-armed boxer was helpless.

  Naomi saw too, Dunphy wasn’t consistently keeping up her left glove. She was distracted, off-stride. A kind of panic must have set in as soon as Dunphy realized that her ring style would not be effective against an opponent who could so easily slip her hard-thrown punches, and was so much lighter on her feet.

  When the bell rang, Naomi realized that her back teeth ached; she’d be
en clenching her jaws tight.

  Truly she did not want D.D. Dunphy to win this fight, she did not want the name Dunphy to triumph. Yet she could not help it, she dreaded seeing Dunphy hurt. She had scarcely been able to breathe during the three-minute round.

  If Dunphy could lose the fight without being hurt, knocked out.

  She tried to see the fight as an event. A spectacle. Why did it matter to her who won?—neither boxer meant anything to her. Her own life was not affected in any way.

  So far as Marika knew, Naomi Matheson was a documentary filmmaker with the intention of interviewing women boxers. It could not matter to her which boxer won this fight for her subject was women boxers and this would include those who lost as rightfully as those who won.

  The second round was more intense and more hard-fought than the first. Aya was pressing Dunphy, forcing her to step back, misstep. Strange that the antelope was fierce in aggression, quick and deft and pitiless; the steer plodding, stoic, blindly pressing forward, determined not to betray weakness. In the corner between rounds Dunphy’s trainer Ernie Beecher must have been giving her urgent instructions which she could not follow.

  By mid-fight Dunphy was panting, red-faced, cuts opening above both eyes from her opponent’s blows. Yet she prevailed, shoulders hunched, trying to protect her face and head with her raised gloves. She could not get inside, she could only punch frantically at her opponent’s arms and gloves.

  “Who is winning?”—Naomi asked fight fans behind her after the fifth round.

  “You kidding? ‘Icewoman.’”

  She felt a low mean thrill of satisfaction, hearing this. Of course, it had to be true. She was feeling Dunphy’s humiliation in her own gut.

  And that ridiculous and demeaning advertising on the back of Dunphy’s T-shirt—Give up! Give up! You don’t have a chance.

  Yet, a few seconds into the sixth round Dunphy managed to strike her elusive opponent on the side of the head with one of her blindly-thrown blows. At once the dazzling Aya staggered, thrown back on her heels.