A Book of American Martyrs(59)
“I think it was to renew our marriage. Like renewing our ‘vows.’”
These measured words she had several times said, about their adoption of Melissa.
Was this true? Renewing our vows sounded naively upbeat, optimistic. For you would certainly not want to say Out of fear that our marriage was floundering, we reached out blindly for another baby. Are we so different from other couples?
The older children were becoming mysterious to her. It was clear, they didn’t need her nearly so much as Melissa needed her. At twelve Naomi was secretive and elusive; at fifteen, Darren was unpredictable in his moods. To hug Darren was to risk being shoved away with a look of acute embarrassment—Hey Jesus, Mom.
At times her very body ached, in memory of them; in memory of the terrible intimacy of pregnancy, childbirth, nursing that had so defined her in the early years of marriage. Now, her son and her daughter regarded her warily. Since Gus had departed, they seemed to blame her.
Though only Melissa would inquire for only Melissa loved Jenna enough to trust her.
Why can’t we live with Daddy?
Don’t you love Daddy? Are you mad at Daddy?
Doesn’t Daddy like to live with us anymore?
WHEN THE CALL CAME at 9:18 A.M. of November 2, 1999, she did not answer it.
Thinking, it would not be Gus because Gus would never call at such a time. Through each weekday morning he was likely to be in surgery. And often in the early hours of the morning he performed those difficult surgical abortions that involved late-term impaired fetuses and mothers whose lives were endangered, which other surgeons would not perform.
His work wasn’t invariably abortion-on-demand. Much of his work was therapeutic abortion. Dilation and evacuation in the second trimester of a malformed fetus, a fetus whose heartbeat has ceased. In the third trimester, the malformed fetus injected with digoxin to precipitate a miscarriage. A considerable fraction of his practice was obstetrics—he did not destroy fetuses but saved them. He treated ectopic pregnancies. He treated pregnant women with cervical, uterine, ovarian cancer. He performed caesarians. He delivered babies whose mothers had been seriously injured in accidents, or were seriously ill. He repaired (surgically) the ravages of childbirth in mothers for whom childbirth had been devastating and would have proved fatal. But his enemies did not allow such distinctions and in their defamation of Gus Voorhees, it was as Baby Killer he was known.
Mustard-yellow flyers—A Baby Killer lives in your neighborhood.
(How awful, Melissa had brought one of these home! She’d found it on the sidewalk in front of their house in Saginaw.)
The bomb threat at the Center in St. Croix. Graffiti on the shuttered windows, small white wooden crosses scattered on the walk in front of the building, picket signs, kneeling protesters, rosaries. . . The maddening chant she heard sometimes in her sleep, in that twilit region between sleep and waking.
Free-choice is a lie,
Nobody’s baby chooses to die.
It was true: but you did not want to think so.
The fetus wished to live. Stubbornly, sometimes astonishingly—the fetus struggled to live. But the power of its life—or its death—had to reside with the mother. No other alternative was possible.
She tried not to think of these matters. Especially, the picket signs brandishing images of unspeakable horror—dead, mutilated, dismembered human infants any one of which (if circumstances had been altered) might have been her own beloved children. And yes, the realization that her husband was a surgeon who performed abortions, routinely. There was a kind of poison that seeped into her soul, if she allowed herself to think of such charges and of those whom Gus and his associates casually called the enemy.
It made her anxious, it made her resentful, that her husband so immersed himself in his work, and in the internal politics of his work, he seemed scarcely to know how the world regarded him, or to care.
Was it arrogance, or simple self-abnegation. Gus did not know what he might have known, if he’d cared more.
Look, Jenna! My work, my life stands for itself. That will have to be my defense.
She was climbing the stairs to the second floor. Steep and narrow and creaking beneath her weight. Feeling her heart suffused with happiness at the prospect of being, for a few hours at least, alone.
She’d laughed, breathless. Feeling so strangely free.
SHE WOULD NOT HAVE expected that she’d come to feel a kind of stoic comfort in the house on the Salt Hill Road, that had not been their first choice here in Huron County. At least, she did not hate it any longer.
In the numerous places they’d lived, since deciding to live together, and deciding to marry, the responsibility had been (tacitly) hers, to establish a household. No one had told her this—certainly, Gus had not told her—but she’d understood, and had been equal to the task, and had taken pride in it. When she and Gus Voorhees had met she’d been completing her final year of law school at the University of Michigan, while Gus was a second-year resident at the medical school hospital; already Gus was involved in public health and community medicine, and Jenna had been a volunteer for Legal Aid. She would pass her Michigan bar exam on the first try but she hadn’t been ambitious for a private career in the law. Working to reform the economic situation of women in the state, providing legal counsel to organizations promoting women’s reproductive rights, these were her missions, but they were part of her life, and not her life. A career is not a life—her mother had warned her.