A Book of American Martyrs(202)



“But—what did she say to you?”

“She said she was ‘checking out’—she’d changed her plans and wasn’t going to stay the night. She didn’t give any reason. She drove away around an hour ago.”

“Which direction did she drive in?”

“I think—toward the bridge.”

“Did she leave a note?”

The desk clerk checked the mail slot for Darren’s room, and for Naomi’s. In Naomi’s was a folded sheet of paper with a handwritten message—Forgive me, very sorry. Jenna.

They read the terse little message several times. Darren was muttering, “But—this isn’t possible . . .” Naomi was too shocked to speak at all.

Seeing their faces the clerk asked sympathetically, “Was Ms. Matheson some relative of yours? Are you all related?”





FIGHT NIGHT, CINCINNATI: NOVEMBER 2011


MIDWESTERN BOXING LEAGUE WOMEN’S 8-ROUND WELTERWEIGHT BOUT

PRYDE ELKA (“THE SQUAW”) VS. D.D. DUNPHY (“THE HAMMER OF JESUS”)

EAST CINCINNATI WAR MEMORIAL ARMORY —NOVEMBER 18, 2011

TICKETS AVAILABLE BOX OFFICE, MAIL ORDER & ONLINE

She bought a ticket to the fight online. Ninety-four dollars plus tax for an aisle seat, eleventh row. She had no idea what she was doing only just that she would do it.

With the same air of impulse and deliberation she bought plane tickets. Round-trip New York City–Cincinnati.

Two nights she would stay in Cincinnati. Maybe that was a mistake, one night in Cincinnati might be all she could bear.

Nonetheless, two nights she booked at an airport motel.

Naomi where are you going? Again? What on earth is there in—Cincinnati?

She had no answer to give to her grandmother Madelena. She had no explanation. It was like that first grief, she’d felt the interior of her mouth stitched together with coarse black thread.

Don’t know. Or maybe I will know, when I get there.


IN THE COLLAPSE of her life she wasn’t unhappy. In the ruins in which she stumbled she would salvage something valuable, she was sure.

Why she seemed to be returning to the Midwest every month and always clutching her camera.

Why she’d given up the archive of her father’s life (and death) yet had not destroyed the archive.

(Not a single notebook once belonging to Gus Voorhees had she destroyed. Not a single letter, postcard, Post-It, newspaper clipping, torn and creased snapshot. Not a single taped interview. All remained neatly labeled in files, folders, boxes in her room in Madelena Kein’s apartment in New York City.)

Why (in secret) she’d been tracking the career of “The Hammer of Jesus”—D.D. Dunphy.

It had been all new to her, a total surprise—that Luther Dunphy’s daughter had become a professional boxer. At first she’d been jeering, skeptical. For she disliked Dawn Dunphy, intensely.

She recalled the young girl’s sullen face in newspaper photos.

It had roused her, and Darren, to a kind of rage, that the children of Luther Dunphy existed.

After she’d returned from Muskegee Falls she’d researched “D.D. Dunphy” online and learned to her surprise (and something like chagrin) that Luther Dunphy’s daughter had acquired a solid reputation as a boxer since she’d begun fighting professionally in early 2009; Dunphy had won all of her fights except for a single draw, in venues in Cleveland, Dayton, East Chicago, Indianapolis, Gary, Scranton, Pittsburgh. She seemed to be fighting often. She was not yet a top contender for a title but on several lists “D.D. Dunphy” was ranked in the top ten in her weight division.

In some online sites she was called the female Tyson.

Naomi recalled how the desk clerk at the Muskegee Falls Inn had spoken of Luther Dunphy’s daughter as a boxer—the first time Naomi had heard of such a thing.

It had seemed bizarre to her then, repugnant. For she hated boxing—what she knew of boxing. She hated violent sports.

In this she was echoing Jenna, who had written about the exploitation of women in such violent entertainments as boxing, wrestling, mixed-martial arts. A kind of prostitution, Jenna Matheson had claimed. And as always, men were the ones who profited from this exploitation of women.

Jenna Matheson had written such feminist polemics long ago, in the 1990s. She was continuing to write, and to publish, but less frequently, so far as Naomi knew.

A coincidence: the following night, in the Muskegee Falls hotel, in the pub attached to the hotel called the Sign of the Ram, a TV had been on above the bar; and on the TV, a clip of a women’s boxing match. It was pure chance that Naomi had come into the pub for a late supper—the hotel dining room had closed. Though she hadn’t done more than glance at the TV screen she happened to overhear the bartender and several other men discussing the fight—That there is Luther Dunphy’s daughter. Jesus!

Luther Dunphy’s daughter! In an instant, Naomi’s attention was riveted.

It was not a broadcast of a live boxing match but rather a sports news program. The boxing clip had been brief. And there followed excerpts from a post-fight interview with the winning boxer who was still panting, smiling with childish excitement, covered in sweat, with heavy eyebrows and a coarse-skinned face mottled from her opponent’s stinging jabs—“D.D. Dunphy.”

Naomi stared. She would not have recognized this young woman.

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