A Book of American Martyrs(213)

You will never guess . . .

Oh but I am so—ashamed . . .

Her hands were so shaky, she nearly dropped her camera onto the floor inserting it in its snug black leather bag.

Outside in the parking lot the dyed-blond Marika, chief of public relations for Dayton Fights, Inc., was smoking a cigarette and speaking on a cell phone.

“Oh. The interview’s over? How’d it go? D.D. Dunphy’s not a great talker, is she? We can send you pictures if you need more. Like, ‘The Hammer of Jesus at the heavy bag—in the boxing ring. There’s maybe going to be a local Dayton sponsor for her, a sports store—we could have some pictures there. Ernie says, she takes after Joe Louis. Meaning—I guess—they don’t talk much but they hit hard.”

Marika gave Naomi her card, and did not seem to notice that Naomi had no card to give her.

“Send me the video—Natalie, is it? Please. Next time D.D. fights, could be a title match. She could be the next women’s welterweight champion of the world. You won’t want to miss that.”





“FAMILY”


It was true. A prediction.

You won’t want to miss that.


SHE’D GONE AWAY, back to New York City. She wasn’t going to recall anything about Cincinnati. She wasn’t going to recall D.D. Dunphy for in so doing she would be forced to recall how cruelly, how crudely, even viciously she’d behaved in contriving to interview the naive young woman boxer. How unethical Naomi Voorhees’s behavior.

Fortunately, no one knew. She had not called Darren to gloat over her audacity—hardly.

Neither Gus nor Jenna could know. That was the great relief, that they be spared such knowledge. Your daughter is disfigured, warped in some way. Your daughter lacks humanity, charity, decency. Mercy.

She had not told her grandmother much about the trip, and she had not told Kinch.

(Always, there was the temptation to share a secret with Kinch. The more deliciously shameful the secret, the more the temptation to share with her father’s half-brother who inhabited his dwelling place like a spider emaciated from lack of food and thus ravenous, grateful for any morsel you could give him. But Naomi resisted.)

Yet she wasn’t readily forgetting D.D. Dunphy. How recklessly close she’d come to taking the girl’s hand, to comfort her. And what would have followed from that?—would Dunphy have shoved her violently away, with a curse? Don’t touch me! You are a heathen, you are not to touch me.

It was perhaps the most extraordinary memory of her life: how close she’d come to taking the hand of Luther Dunphy’s daughter.

In the white-walled room thirty floors above the clamorous city streets of the West Village she’d learned to sleep with part-opened eyes, unable or unwilling to sleep fully, trustingly. For fear that something terrible would happen if she relaxed. Keep your left up. Get inside. Inside! Opening her eyes when a bell rang sharply ending a round. And there were the veiled bloodshot swollen and accusing eyes confronting her and a voice that seemed to be in the room with her, close in her ear: “My fights are for the glory of Jesus so the heathen will know His name.”

Naomi understood that she’d been issued a challenge. What were her fights for? She had not a clue.


“NAOMI, DEAR. We have to talk.”

Reluctantly she came to sit near her grandmother. Icy fingers seeking hers, that were not so very warm, either.

“Oh why—now? Some other time.”

“Ah but now is precisely the ‘some other time’ of last time, chérie.”

Madelena laughed. It gave her pleasure to be witty, droll. To be witty and droll you require at least one other person to listen, to be amused or to shudder.

Fortunately at that moment a phone rang, to interrupt.

Like a coltish child the granddaughter ran to snatch up the mobile phone to bring to her grandmother seated by one of the floor-to-ceiling windows overlooking the abyss.

“Lena, for you.”


THESE FRAGILE TIMES. Thin-ice fragile. Phone calls from Sloan Kettering. Radiology lab, oncology. She’d learned to recognize the caller IDs that most exuded dread. By her estimate there was not one that guaranteed safety.

At the start of the first series of chemotherapy treatments Madelena had made a dramatic decision: rather than wait for her hair to come out in handfuls she’d had it totally buzz-cut from her scalp so that she could be fitted with a wig of a near-identical hue, but tougher and more resilient than her own hair had been.

Naomi had accompanied her grandmother to the glamorous wig emporium in a high-rise building in midtown. She and a saleswoman had helped Madelena Kein try on wigs, trying not to see how Madelena’s eyes shone with tears—of embarrassment, repugnance, self-pity or disdain you could not have said.

“No one needs to know. Even if they suspect, they don’t know. And if they don’t know, they can’t commiserate with me.”

Surgery, chemo, hair loss, wig. Madelena’s pride had been astonishing to Naomi for it had seemed to her the most obvious sort of desperation on her (rational, reasonable) grandmother’s part, meant to deflect a terror of mortality.

Over eight months Naomi had become familiar with the attractive, light-filled, just perceptibly malodorous waiting rooms at Sloan Kettering, in midtown Manhattan. She’d brought work with her, schoolwork, a laptop, waiting for the several hours of chemotherapy to run its course in an interior room to which she had no access. (For chemotherapy meant chemicals, chemicals meant hazardous medical materials. Clinical protocol surrounding chemotherapy and radiation was high-security and only specially trained nurses came anywhere near such patients.)