A Book of American Martyrs(163)

Madelena was speaking rapidly, gripping Naomi’s hand. Lights from the street rippled across her face like fitful emotions. Naomi was astonished, she had never heard her usually poised and evasive grandmother speak so openly, heedlessly.

“My life is no one’s concern but my own. I don’t defend myself. Karl has nothing to do with the Voorhees family. It is none of Clement’s business. Karl is mine, exclusively—he has no one else. His father is no longer living but if he were, he wouldn’t be concerned about the state of his offspring. Though he did leave a reasonable amount of money for Karl, in trust.”

Naomi was still rather dazed thinking: uncle? Half-uncle?

She was eager to share the news with Darren.

“I am hoping that you will keep this secret, Naomi. Will you?”

Naomi murmured yes.

Reluctantly, yes.

“You see, Naomi: I am so worried about Karl. He takes medications for MS, and medications for HIV. He has a very fluctuating white blood cell count. His eyesight is worsening. Sometimes he has such tremors, he can’t hold a pen. He can’t play piano, which he needs badly to do, when he composes. After your father was killed I became vulnerable to—many things . . . And after the terrorist attack on the World Trade Center, from which some of us have yet to recover . . . I had once been fearless, or so I’d thought. People still say that about me—‘Oh, Madelena is fearless.’ But I know better. I am not fearless at all. I am filled with fear. I loathe myself, that I didn’t try to reason with Gus more—I might have pleaded with him to quit the line of medical work he was in, to channel his idealism and energy elsewhere—anywhere . . . God knows there are plenty of poor people, including children, he might have cared for. I did try a little to reason with him, but not enough. I have been such a great believer in the freedom of others, to choose their own lives. I regret that now. Maybe I could have saved him . . . I can imagine how anxious your poor mother was, all those years. For of course something was going to happen to Gus, eventually. It was terrible, terrible! Those years, and so much fear. Abortion centers were being firebombed, abortion providers were being threatened. And killed. In my dreams even now sometimes I am arguing with Gus. And Gus laughs and tells me to relax, nothing will happen, he will be fine, it’s all exaggerated—remember, Gus would so often say It’s all exaggerated . . . Do you remember? Yes? At the funeral I thought someone might say, as a joke, or rather not as a joke, in Gus’s voice—Hell, it’s all exaggerated. Or, I was thinking, that might be carved on his gravestone—It’s all exaggerated. Naomi, I’m sorry—I don’t know what I am saying. Where are we? Are we almost home?”

Naomi assured the agitated woman yes, they were almost home.

The neighborhood had become familiar to her now. She could speak of home. A taxi circling Washington Square Park, making its way to LaGuardia Place and the tall silver towers just beginning to be illuminated from within.

“You see, Naomi. I wanted you to meet. I wanted to bring you here, to meet your ‘half-uncle.’ I am so worried what will become of Karl if—when—something happens to me . . . There is enough money for him in the trust, not much but enough, and I provide for him too of course, and there is my medical insurance from the university, and my life insurance, and my social security . . . I wire the money to his bank account, for his medical expenses . . .and his other expenses. Fortunately his rent in the ‘mausoleum’ is stabilized. But Karl needs a friend. A friend who will care for him, not merely admire him from a distance. A ‘blood relative’—so to speak. And so, I have brought you together. I am so sorry it turned out as it did, dear Naomi, I am hoping—you will not judge Karl too harshly? He is your father’s half-brother, and I know that Gus would have been concerned for him, and kind to him—that was how Gus was, he couldn’t help himself. The more impaired, maimed, ‘kooky’—(remember how often Gus used that word?—it was a favorite word of his, that used to annoy me)—the more sympathetic he was. And Karl was very taken with you, however he behaved today. In fact I think he behaved badly because of you—wanting to impress you. He’d said to me beforehand, ‘But I’ve never had a niece before. How does one behave with a niece?’ And so, Naomi—I hope you will forgive me for this afternoon, which has been so upsetting. But I hope—can you promise me?—you will see Karl again? You will not—abandon him?”

The taxi had pulled up to the curb. It was time to ascend to the thirty-first floor.

Quickly Naomi said, to placate the distressed woman, “Yes.”


AFTERWARD in the solitude of the white-walled room overlooking the nighttime city calmly thinking Not ever again. Not ever again, Karl Kinch.





“UNWANTED”—“WANTED”


This is hard to speak of. And it was a long time ago.

But now that I have begun to confide in you, dear Naomi—I think that I should tell you this.

In essence—your father was not a “wanted” child. He was certainly not an “intended” child. You might say he was, very emphatically, a “not-wanted” child.

When I became pregnant—more or less by chance—with my younger son, I was well into my thirties and established in my work. Out of a kind of excess of well-being, I decided to have that child—(though “have” is a strange term; I have always disliked the “having”—“possessing”—nature of the parent-child relationship, that is so fraught with a wrongful appropriation of the younger by the elder and more powerful)—though there was never the slightest intention of establishing a family with the man who was the father, or even with the child . . .