A Book of American Martyrs(216)

Sighing with happiness Kinch said: “Very nice, to have a ‘niece.’ For one who’d never had the slightest interest in children of his own a ‘niece’ is the perfect solution.”

“Solution to what?”

“To the problem of aloneness. Sometimes overlapping with ‘loneliness.’”

Naomi had cultivated a mildly skeptical response to Kinch’s remarks—a bright-schoolgirl manner appropriate to a young niece.

There was nowhere else that Naomi Voorhees spoke in such a way, that was both younger than she felt, yet older, “sophisticated” like a young girl in a romantic film by Jean Renoir.

(Madelena had taken her to a Renoir festival at the local Film Forum. Naomi had fallen under the spell of the visually beautiful cinematic Renoir world slow-moving and insular as a dream.)

Kinch spoke of his medical problems in a similar tone: casual, conversational, bemused. He liked to tell anecdotes of his hospital misadventures, nightmare tests and “procedures,” things that might have gone disastrously wrong but somehow did not. He did not want pity for his condition but he did want attention—an audience. When he had genuinely good news, a new medication that was working well, a new test that turned out negative, the slowing of the “progression” of his MS, Kinch had more difficulty speaking of it. What he most feared was hope, Naomi thought.

Yet there was hope in Kinch’s life, of a kind. A new intravenous medication was now available for the treatment of the kind of MS he had, and it was possible that in fact Kinch didn’t have HIV after all but a rare blood disorder—his condition might have been misdiagnosed.

Speaking of such matters Kinch maintained a light, bantering tone. Naomi understood—he did not want her to express hope of any kind. Better to fall in with Kinch’s pose of cynicism: “‘The treatment was a great success, the patient died.’”

And: “Life is what spills over from a New Yorker cartoon caption.”

She resisted Kinch. A middle-aged man who remained perennially young, unnaturally “boyish”—“childish.” To be in the presence of Karl Kinch was to seem to be conspiring, making mischief—though you did not quite know what kind of mischief you were making. She did not really want to like Kinch. She suspected that, if Gus were alive, Gus would not approve of Kinch—there was a kind of zestful morbidity in the man, much at odds with Gus Voorhees’s forthright and unironic nature.

Yet, Naomi found herself confiding in Kinch. One afternoon when she was visiting him alone in his austere dwelling at Fifteenth Street just east of Fifth Avenue. She’d recently returned from Muskegee Falls and had fallen into a fugue of inertia. Or maybe it was a fugue of self-doubt and despair which she strove to hide from her grandmother. She’d decided—finally—to stop work on the archive; yet, she had no other project of her own. Her work for the documentary filmmaker was part-time, erratic; she enjoyed it, and had learned a great deal, but the career of a documentary filmmaker was episodic, and if you could not choose your own subjects it could be sheer drudgery, unrewarding.

Yael Ravel had warned her: There is no romance of film. Except in the eye of the beholder.

Kinch had observed his young niece’s quietness. He’d observed, with his sharp, singular eye, the sadness in her manner, that had not only to do with her grandmother’s medical condition (of which he knew but obliquely) but with something more personal to her, more private. He’d asked her what was wrong, and she had told him—she’d journeyed to Muskegee Falls, she’d taken pictures, made videos.

“But it’s all exterior. No one from the Dunphy family was even there. And he’s been dead for six years.”

Kinch said, “Your father has been dead for even longer.”

Naomi winced, she had no idea what this meant. But she’d deserved it being said for she had made herself vulnerable to her father’s (rivalrous) half-brother.

Unexpectedly then Kinch began to speak of “Luther Dunphy.” She had not known that he’d had the slightest interest in Dunphy, even that he’d known the assassin’s name; still less that he’d researched the case. She could not have guessed that Kinch in his pretense of indifference to domestic relations had had much interest in Gus Voorhees. But now he lighted a cigarette and exhaled luxuriously like a man in a movie, assured of being the center of attention. It was transfixing to Naomi, that anyone should approach the obsession of her young life, which she had shared with few others.

“Dunphy. Luther Amos. As I see it the man consecrated himself as a ‘Soldier of God’—or a ‘Soldier of Christ’—if there’s any distinction. The essential thing is, Dunphy was a martyr. He didn’t expect to survive what he’d done. He precipitated his own execution. He was a suicide.”

Kinch paused. He was leaning forward in his wheelchair, smiling a ghastly wet excited smile, exhaling smoke, clearly enjoying himself. He would never have expounded on this subject if Madelena had been present, Naomi thought.

Naomi asked, “Was Jesus’s crucifixion a kind of suicide?”

“Not if Jesus was resurrected. That’s the happy ending.”

“But—we don’t believe that Jesus was resurrected. Do we?”

“We don’t, but others do. Very likely, Jesus thought he would be resurrected, at least before the crucifixion.”