A Book of American Martyrs(147)

In the aftershock of the death forced to realize that nothing had changed in her life after all.

Her father was still dead. Luther Dunphy had still killed him. The two names were linked together inextricably and one of these names was her own.


ANOTHER TIME she called her mother in Bennington, Vermont.

Naomi imagined a phone ringing in an empty room.

Was it March, yet? Still winter.

Still white, and still very cold.

She imagined a vast wilderness of white in Bennington, Vermont.

When she was about to give up a woman answered the phone—a woman’s voice. But it was not Jenna Matheson’s voice.

“May I speak with Jenna?—this is her daughter.”

“Her daughter!”—the voice registered a quiet sort of shock.

But then, the voice went away without further inquiry. Which daughter? might have been expected.

She had no idea if she had called Jenna’s residence, or Jenna’s office. Or maybe they were one and the same. She realized that she knew virtually nothing of her mother’s life now. So far as she knew, Darren knew nothing.

Such resentment she’d felt for years, that their mother had abandoned them! Almost she’d wished that Jenna had died with Gus. In that way her children could have continued to love her as they loved their father.

Hang up. What do you care for her.

This is your new life now. She is your old life.

But then, her mother was on the phone. “Yes? Hello?”

Jenna sounded uncertain, hesitant. Naomi had been prepared to hate her mother but at the sound of her voice she felt a wave of emotion that left her weak.

“Hello. It’s m-me.”

“Is it—Naomi?”

“Yes. Naomi.”

There was a moment’s stunned silence. How long had it been since they’d spoken together? Months, a year?

Naomi tried to speak evenly, without stammering.

“Well. I guess you know why I’m calling, Mom—he’s dead.”

How awkward, the word Mom! It had come naturally, without Naomi’s volition.

So long, she had not uttered Mom.

Jenna was saying yes—“I know.”

Then again, there was an awkward silence.

Was Jenna going to say nothing more? Would Naomi have to speak for both of them?

Recalling the hateful words—I can’t be your “Mommy” any longer.

Naomi tried to speak. In the bright clear way in which she spoke in her classes, to make a strong impression upon her instructors. Saying, the execution had been postponed so many times, it had sometimes seemed that it might never happen. In some states condemned men remained on Death Row for years . . .

Jenna murmured yes. Naomi imagined a look of fastidious distaste in her mother’s face.

Naomi asked if anyone from Chillicothe had contacted Jenna about observing the execution?—and again Jenna murmured yes.

“And you said—no.”

“That’s right. I said no.”

There was a shudder in Jenna’s voice, and something else—mirthless laughter?

“Of course—I said no.”

Daringly Naomi said, “I shocked Darren, I think—I told him that I could have witnessed the execution, if I’d been invited. I think he thought I’m barbaric.”

“Well. You weren’t serious, maybe.”

“Maybe.”

There’d been a ripple of excitement between them. In Naomi, a ticklish sensation as if her mother had reached out to lightly touch her, as a mother might.

And now she thought—If she makes some damn priggish statement about opposing capital punishment, her and Gus both, I will hang up.

In fact, she was fearful of Jenna suddenly hanging up. She had so much to say to her mother!

She said she’d been speaking with Darren at the time of the execution forty-eight hours ago. Their father’s old friend Elliot Roberts—“D’you remember him, Mom? From Detroit? Used to write for the Detroit News?”—was covering the execution for the AP and he’d volunteered to call Darren from Chillicothe as soon as it was over.

“Because Elliot knew we would want to know. As soon as it was over. Before the news was released . . .”

How eager Naomi was sounding, like a child running to bring good news to a parent who scarcely cares to hear it. She wondered if it had always been like this between them—she’d rushed to bring to her coolly distant, beautiful and elusive mother some shred of information that might bolster her standing with her mother in the humblest of ways.

But why did it matter so much? Naomi wondered. Just the other evening it had seemed, to her and to Darren, crucial that they know as soon as possible if and when Luther Dunphy had died; now, it did not seem like precious knowledge at all but something sordid, sad.

Jenna said, as if she’d just thought of it, “Darren called me too. Darren left a message.”

“I thought he might! How did he sound?”

“How did he sound?” Jenna considered this.

“I mean—what did he say?”

“He just left a message about Dunphy. That was the way I’d learned that Dunphy had died. That the execution had actually taken place, after so many delays.”

“How did you—how did you feel, then?”

“How did I feel? Like—nothing.”