A Book of American Martyrs(217)

Kinch continued: “Remember, on the cross Jesus calls out in a loud voice—‘My God, my God, why has thou forsaken me?’—‘Eli, Eli, lema sabachthani?’—the saddest words in the New Testament. (But the words are an echo of the Old Testament Psalms. Jesus was a Biblical scholar!) The rest of the story, the death, the burial in the tomb, the resurrection and the rising to heaven—is obviously of another, later era. This is the fairy-tale ending—the prescribed ending. It’s the verses leading to the crucifixion that depict a stark sort of reality. The betrayal of Judas—the denial of Peter—the anointing of Jesus’s feet by Mary, as if he were already a corpse—the matter-of-fact words of Jesus presaging his death: ‘Yet a little while is the light with you. Walk while you have the light, lest darkness come upon you: for he that walks in darkness knows not whither he goes.’”

Kinch ceased speaking as if struck dumb by words he’d only comprehended as he uttered them. Naomi was sitting straight-backed on the sofa facing him in the wheelchair, cast into a state of mind not unlike the confusion of a dream, the waking-from-a-dream, when what you have lost is yet with you, though you can’t say its name.

It had enveloped Gus—this darkness. Stealthily it continued to advance. No human effort could forestall it.

In his stricken state Kinch sucked at his ridiculous parchment-cigarette, that Naomi hated. She’d have liked to hate him.

Kinch recovered something of his jaunty composure and continued:

“What is ‘suicide’? What do we mean by ‘martyrdom’? In the Gospels Jesus clearly accepts his own death—that is, the death that precedes resurrection. ‘The poor you shall always have with you, but me you shall not.’ This is a poignant remark, matter-of-fact, not self-pitying. Jesus accepts his death but he is ‘deluded’ you might say—he believes that his Father in Heaven can save him at any moment. But he knows that he must die, to wash away the sins of humankind. It’s a tragic story if you don’t believe—if you can’t believe—that Jesus was actually a demigod, and Jesus was resurrected and ascended to the throne of the Father in Heaven. Jesus is not a ‘suicide’ because Jesus believes that he is the savior of humankind—he can be killed, but he can’t be destroyed. The man who murdered your father, and another person, is the truer suicide. He never tried to save himself, it’s said. He never lost faith and he died in the service of faith—a delusion. Yet he wasn’t entirely deluded—he knew that God would forsake him, and he would die dead. You have to admire someone like that, eh?”

Particularly, the eh? was outrageous. Naomi shrank from Kinch as if he’d uttered something obscene. She could not reply.

Kinch persisted: “Very few people would die for any ideal. Even a delusion. Such courage is rare.”

“It wasn’t ‘courage.’ It was—cruelty, stupidity . . .”

“He wasn’t insane. No one tried seriously to suggest that Luther Dunphy was insane. But what of your father Gus Voorhees? He was not insane, of course.”

Mutely Naomi stared at Karl Kinch. What was the man saying?

“But Gus Voorhees was a kind of ‘suicide’ too—de facto. In his defiance of his enemies, in the risks he took, your father was courageous, but also—as he must have known—‘suicidal.’ He weighed the likelihood of his own death against the value of his services to women who needed him and decided it was worth it, whatever happened. The perfect martyr is a suicide.”

In distress Naomi stood. She would run out and leave Kinch in his motorized wheelchair, with a forlorn, faint smell of cologne about his wasted body, and a scattering of ashes on his bony knees.

“I hate you. I don’t have to listen to this.”

“But I don’t hate you. I adore you. And your father Gus Voorhees—I admire him immensely. The more I’ve learned about him, the more I admire him; and Luther Dunphy too, in his sad deluded way . . .

“But I would worry, Gus Voorhees wouldn’t admire me.”

Kinch began to cough. The parchment cigarette in his hand trembled, and ashes fell. Naomi wanted to snatch the cigarette from him and throw it at his face.

“Excuse me, Naomi—”

Kinch’s cough worsened. Within seconds it became a wracking spasm of a cough. Naomi hoped that Sonia would come running to give aid to her invalid-employer but Sonia was feigning deafness perhaps, hiding in a remote room watching TV.

Naomi came to Kinch, hunched now in his wheelchair, white-faced, shaken, the size and heft of a prepubescent boy. With a paper napkin she wiped at his damp face. The hateful cigarette she detached from his fingers and briskly stubbed out in a tray.

Soon then, Kinch recovered. Irritably he said, “Just something I swallowed wrong. It’s nothing, much.”





THE CONSOLATION OF GRIEF:


FEBRUARY 2012


Another time, she flew to the Midwest.

The last time. She promised herself.


AT KENNEDY her flight was delayed so that the plane’s wide wings could be “de-iced”—fascinating if harrowing to watch from her window seat at the rear of the plane. At the airport outside Cleveland, runways were bordered by six-foot banks of plowed-up snow and passengers already exhausted from a turbulent flight and a bumpy landing were made to sit on the plane for forty minutes awaiting an “arrival gate”—telling herself It is your choice that you are here. It is no one else’s but your own.