Mother Nature: The Journals of Eleanor O'Kell

by Michael Conniff

  August 23, 1993

  “I know you think I’m crazy,” Diana says. “But I love the Convent. I’m in love with God.” History repeats itself, I say.

  September 7, 1993

  “Vincent D’Angelo is being clever about it,” Betsy Bokamper says. “You’re not named in the suit. It’s against the Lying-In. He’s saying all the women carrying the gene for breast cancer had the procedure done in the hospital. He is looking for hundreds of millions of dollars.” Motherfucker, I say.

  September 11, 1993

  So it’s true? I say. “The DNA is better than a fingerprint,” Abigail Rickover says. “It’s like a blueprint for everything about you. And no two are alike.”

  October 29, 1993

  Sliv refuses to become a whistle-blower, God bless him. “What would your mother say if I went and did that?” he says. “What kind of a man would I be? No thanks, Miss O’K. It’s too late for me to go to another movie.” You might have to go to jail, I say. “The slammer?” Sliv says. “In Korea, that was my home away from home.”

  November 9, 1993

  “You’re not named in the suit,” Betsy Bokamper says. “So you have to do what’s best for you. Whatever happens, you have to take care of yourself.” I promise, I say.

  November 13, 1993

  My new doctor tells me I will die if I don’t go under the knife again before Christmas. I have no choice.

  December 3, 1993

  Sliv brings me home from the Lying-In. I feel so sore I can barely move, like they’ve cut out my heart.

  December 4, 1993

  Sliv settles me at home in one of our sick-people beds from the Lying-In. He cranks and cranks until I am sitting up with a view of the ice floes on the canal. I am so drugged up I don’t feel anything.

  December 7, 1993

  “Maybe there’s someone you can talk to about it,” Sliv says. Someone like you, I say. “I don’t know, Miss O’K,” Sliv says. “I know some things in life, but I don’t know nothing about this. I’m calling your sister the Sister.”

  December 9, 1993

  “I’m coming up there,” Diana says. Don’t, I say. “You need me,” my sister says. Sliv is all I need, I say. “Nonsense,” Diana says. “You’re no different than anyone else. You need family.”

  December 15, 1993

  Back in the hospital for a check. “I have wonderful news,” the doctor says. “We got every bit. Isn’t that wonderful!” I tell him yes. But I wonder.

  December 20, 1993

  Diana arrives to care for my soul. I could care less.

  December 25, 1993

  Diana cooks Christmas dinner for Sliv and me and G and her. There is snow on the ground along the canal and snow coming down. Everything tastes so good. I know it does. But I can barely eat.

  December 31, 1993

  I am dreaming about the Southwest, about tumbleweeds and tight skirts and true love.

  January 1, 1994

  “It’s a new year,” Diana says, “and I want to talk about your soul.” There’s nothing to talk about, I say. “Oh, but there is,” she says. “I’ve learned so much since I’ve become a Sister. I’ve learned to watch the birds, the way they fly. I’ve learned to study the way the snow falls. I’ve learned about the Holy Spirit in my life.” I used to know all about that, I say. “What happened?” she says. Hell if I know, I say.

  January 4, 1994

  “What about this friend of yours?” Betsy Bokamper says. “This Sister X.” Nancy? I say. Nancy is every bit as guilty as I am. So is Abigail Rickover. That’s my insurance policy. “We’re going to need lots of insurance,” Betsy Bokamper says.

  January 24, 1994

  They try to fit me for the fake breast or whatever they call it but I will have none of it. Instead I wear shirts big enough to be tents, half-again big enough for me to hide inside of.

  February 9, 1994

  I thought it would be better to be half a woman than none at all. Now I’m not so sure. They want to take the other breast and the ovaries, everything that makes me a woman.

  April 16, 1994

  The IRS miraculously appears and takes a floor at The Queen Mother. They want to see all my books, going back to the beginning. I’m beginning to believe all the conspiracy theories. I’m sure my Princess phones are bugged.

  May 2, 1994

  “Vincent D’Angelo is going after everyone in the civil suit,” Betsy Bokamper tells me at the Bake Shop. “Not just Sliv. He wants Nancy to testify against you. And Abigail Rickover. If they don’t, the government will go after them for fraud, perjury, you name it. It doesn’t look good.”

  May 7, 1994

  Chief Dan comes around. “You know what I need,” he says. How much? I say. “More than before,” he says. “Because they want me to talk.” I tell him to name his price.

  May 28, 1994

  “The Staties have decided to come in and to kick some real ass, Miss O’Kell,” Sliv says. “They’re turning the town upside down.” Aren’t there laws against that? I ask.

  July 5, 1994

  I was never the same after Nancy left. I see that now. I never looked at people the same way. Something inside of me died or just stopped living.

  July 11, 1994

  “Bad news,” Betsy Bokamper says. “Chief Dan? He’s had a wire on for the last three months. They say they’ve got you on tape offering him a bribe.” Lies, I say. Nothing but lies.

  August 6, 1994

  Vincent D’Angelo is trying to subpoena my diary. Over my dead body.

  August 9, 1994

  “They’re piecing it together,” Betsy Bokamper says. “Through Nancy, Chief Dan, Allyson Koksher. If they get Abigail Rickover to turn we’re cooked. If they get your diary, we’re dead.” I tell her that won’t happen in this life.

  August 20, 1994

  “Sorry ma’am,” Chief Dan says on his way out of town. “It’s business, after all, and the Feds just offered me a clean bill of health.” I tell him he’s a dead man to me. “Mutual, I’m sure,” he says.

  September 23, 1994

  “They already know what I know,” Abigail Rickover says. “That you were putting Cushing eggs into the mothers after you suctioned out their eggs. Without them knowing it. Nancy’s already told them what she knows. Now they know everything!” Nobody else has to know, I say. If you don’t tell them, it never happened.

  October 1, 1994

  “I had no choice,” Abigail Rickover says. “I’m sorry.”

  October 21, 1994

  “This trial is going to kill you,” Vincent D’Angelo says to me outside the courtroom in Boston. “That makes me the angel of death.”

  October 23, 1994

  And there she is, suddenly, right in front of me, in the hall outside the courtroom. Why did you do this to me? I ask. I would have given you anything. All you had to do was ask. “I was tired of begging for your blessing,” Nancy says. “I was tired of begging period.”

  November 7, 1994

  I need all the lights on all the time. I can’t sleep any other way. Some days I want to sleep forever.

  November 17, 1994

  Don’t worry, Sliv, I say. We will blow them all to kingdom come.

  December 1, 1994

  “We have to convince the jury that your diary is a pack of lies,” Betsy Bokamper says. I say there’s not an ounce of truth in it.

  December 5, 1994

  “I love it,” Vincent D’Angelo says to me on the courthouse steps. “Here you are knocking up 15-year-old girls like you’re some kind of nuthouse rapist. The jury is going to love it even more.”

  December 9, 1994

  “Are you okay?” Betsy Bokamper asks me in the Bake Shop. Why do you ask? I say. “Because you look like hell.”

  December 13, 1994

  “It’s inoperable, Miss O’Kell,” the doctor says. “We could take the ovaries out but it’s too late. I’m sorry to have to tell you this now.” How long? I ask. “Five months, maybe ten tops.” I don’t fe
el anything, not right away, except relief. I can finally make ready for my own demise.

  January 19, 1995

  I don’t even want to try the stem cells. I don’t want to live.

  February 1, 1995

  Diana weeps. Sliv is crying, trying not to let me see.

  March 13, 1995

  In the end I want nothing to do with sex and Diana wants everything to do with God. The irony of it is delicious, even to me.

  April 1, 1995

  I look out the window at the canal all day long. I think the thousands of Cushings let loose upon the world will surely produce ten thousand more. If only the strong shall survive, then, in the end, there shall be millions of Cushings alighting everywhere you turn, Cushings in every town, on every street corner. There might be one sitting next to you right now. That will have to pass for my immortality. For now it’s lights out.

  Oral History Project

  Columbia University

  Roots of Radical Feminism Series

  “The Tommies”

  Interview With Eleanor O’Kell

  Conducted by Dr. Edgar Griffiths

  October 16, 1978

  (Edited Transcript)

  We might as well begin with your brother, Atomic Tom O’Kell.

  Don’t even start with my brother. Not one more word about him. Not now. Not ever. As if what they wrote about him had a chance of being half-right! If you can pay off the writers they’ll write you any story you want. Have you seen his biography? It’s a joke—a best-selling joke. I pity the person who picks up that trash.

  It has sold over a million in hardcover, perhaps twice that in paper. There’s a movie set to go into production next fall.

  It’s not worth the paper it’s printed on. It’s a joke. A rape. His whole life is a rape.

  Can you be more specific?

  You’re a man. You want to start where you’re comfortable. With another man. With Atomic Tom. Or my brother Will. Or my father Jake. As if talking about men will tell you what really happened to The Tommies. I don’t know why I bothered coming here. This is a joke.

  You came because you said there was another story that needed to be told — the story of the O’Kell women and the founding of The Tommies. The story of your mother in particular.

  And you want to start with my brother?

  He’s the member of your family most familiar to a layperson—chairman of the Nuclear Energy Commission (NEC), a close advisor to President Kennedy, the man in charge of the family fortune—

  He was a layperson all right. He screwed anything that moved. Including me and my sisters.

  You have a story you seem to want to tell. I am here to hear it.

  Maybe you need to hear the truth.

  Let’s start with your mother, Kate Briody O’Kell. Maybe we can undo some of the misinformation about her. Her insanity, for instance.

  She was not insane. Atomic Tom was happy to watch her die so he could control the family money. That was the insanity.

  What can you tell us about her?

  She was brilliant, a century ahead of her time. She was responsible for every one of my father’s successes. But she was also one of Thomas Cushing’s bastard daughters. Her mother was Constance Briody, the baker’s wife. They lived in the last town along the canal. Constance and the baker had no children—she thought she was barren, as they used to call it. Her fault, in other words. But she wasn’t barren after all.

  Thomas Cushing took care of that problem.

  He knocked her up, if that’s what you mean. And that child was my mother, Kate Briody.

  And then Kate Briody—your mother—was raped by Thomas Cushing’s eldest son, and that produced Atomic Tom O’Kell, your half-brother.

  That’s right. My mother was raped by John Patrick Cushing. John Patrick and his brothers ran the last town along the canal after his father died and The Great Fire burnt everything to a crisp. He was a real prick, John Patrick was.

  So your mother’s first child, Atomic Tom O’Kell, was the son of Thomas Cushing’s daughter and his eldest son?

  Atomic Tom was inbred all right—he was all Cushing. The bastard had all the worst traits of The Great Fornicator and his son.

  The Great Fornicator?

  That’s what the priests started to call Thomas Cushing in Confession. And that’s how The Tommies got started. They were women who said they would no longer be raped by men. That’s how the whole movement began.

  I wasn’t aware that Thomas Cushing had raped anyone.

  He didn’t have to. He had their consent, if you could call it that. He was The Great Fornicator in a town full of victims. They didn’t know they had a choice—until The Tommies came along.

  You mentioned Confession.

  That’s how The Tommies got started, believe it or not. Thomas Cushing would screw anything that moved in the town all week, and then the women would show up together at The Church of the Immaculate Conception Saturdays for Confession. There were long lines—a lot of waiting around—and they started to talk to each other, to confess to each other about what they had done with Thomas Cushing.

  “Hads” and “Had Nots” both?

  All of the above. The Hads were the ones who claimed they had fucked Thomas Cushing. The Had Nots were the women in the town who wished they had. So The Tommies were founded on a lie—women lying to each other about a man.

  And there was no way to tell who was telling the truth.

  Not right away. It was as if he were screwing everyone in the town all the time, night and day and night. It was like make-believe—except for one thing. The Hads started to get pregnant with his babies. They all had Thomas Cushing’s girls.

  All girls? That seems impossible.

  When I was a nun we used to say: “The Lord works in strange ways.” Amen to that, brother. Maybe The Lord needed to make The Tommies and that was the only way She could do it. So the last town along the canal was nothing but his girls and their children. And Thomas Cushing’s Sons.

  So The Tommies are a movement born “out of wedlock,” if you will. That’s the great irony, isn’t it?

  The Tommies are all about irony, Professor. It’s a movement born of fucking that produced nothing but women tired of being fucked over.

  Including your mother?

  Especially my mother. Make no mistake. My mother’s mother, Constance Briody—my grandmother—really loved Thomas Cushing. All the women did. That’s the irony, too. The Tommies were born of the wrong kind of love.

  What is your first memory of your mother?

  She was so beautiful. My God! The kind of beauty that took everyone’s breath away—even her own children’s.

  And your father?

  The truth? Is that what you want?

  You’re angry with your father.

  He was an impostor—a fake.

  He is considered one of the great inventors of the 20th Century.

  He who pays for history is doomed to make it.

  No one paid your brother Will to write about your family.

  No one had to. His brains were already scrambled and fried.

  Let’s have the truth, then.

  Jake O’Kell, my father, was a man almost entirely devoid of talent. That’s the truth.

  How can that be? He had over 1,100 patents. He invented sockets and switches and elevators—the guts of the Industrial Age.

  You get a patent by putting your name on it. That’s doesn’t make it your idea.

  Can you give an example of your mother’s influence on your father?

  I can give you eleven hundred! How about the time he showed up in Dearborn trying to catch on with Ford?

  But you weren’t even born.

  My mother remembered it clear as day. Father took a whole Model T apart just to show Ford he knew the car inside out. But then Ford told him he had to put it back together by noon if he wanted a job.

  And your mother?

  Mother was sick as a dog, puking all the time—pregnant with At
omic Tom. But she had watched Father take the car apart, and then she had told him how to put it all back together—every gear, every screw. That’s the kind of mind she had. Without her around to tell him what to do, Father was clueless.

  Was it that bad?

  I’ll give you another example. You’ve probably know the story about the Southampton Beach Club—about how they finally let us in.