A Book of American Martyrs(156)

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?—Madelena 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.”