A Book of American Martyrs(90)
You know what people (adults) tell you. Essentially, you know what people (adults) want you to know.
Too much in the media about Gus Voorhees, abortion provider, shot down, anti-abortion assassin. Too much about trial ending in a stunning upset: mistrial.
There would be another trial. Dunphy would remain in custody. (It was said.)
Another trial was imminent, and more media. More TV, more Tom McCarthy spewing hate, more front-page headlines, photos. More baby killer, Army of God, martyr.
More distraction for our mother. More dread. Ever closer to the breaking-point. (We did not want to acknowledge.)
Asshole at Ann Arbor High says to Darren if I was you, Voorhees, know what?—I’d change my last name.
Fuck you, you are not me.
Hey! Just sayin.
Just sayin fuck you, asshole.
(What followed from this Darren didn’t say. Darren’s hate stories ended in one-liners by Darren deftly uttered like TV stand-up comedy.)
(At sixteen Darren stood five feet eleven with slumped shoulders like a raptor hunched on a fence. He smiled rarely but when he did smile it was a razor-flash of pure adolescent drop-dead cynicism. His long arms were ropey-muscled and his habit of clenching and unclenching his fists did not encourage other boys to “mess” with him even when they were insulted.)
At her school where Naomi was in eighth grade the most valuable information she’d learned was to avoid restrooms between classes. These were danger zones even when no words were directed at her. Girls’ eyes shifting to her face in the mirror above the sinks, sharp like ice picks. Possibly (probably) they’d been talking about her before she entered, or maybe just the sight of the “new girl” drew their rapt and pitiless attention.
That’s her. Voorhees.
Oh God the one whose father—
Abortion-doctor—
—got himself killed?
Tried not to use a restroom if she could help it. No more than she could help it. Having to go (often badly) to the bathroom, waiting—miserably—for an opportunity not fraught with peril.
She’s pathetic. Jesus!
Feel sorry for her . . .
Oh sure it’s real sad but what’d anybody expect, killing babies for a living, someday somebody’s going to kill you.
Wasn’t sure if she actually heard these words. Maybe she dreamt them. Maybe she muttered them to herself.
It came to be frequent, so frequent she knew they were laughing at her, and her teachers were pitying her, how she would avoid the girls’ restroom and wait until she could not bear it any longer, pressure in her bladder, terror of losing control of her bladder, in class, in class where everyone would see, and smell, and would never ever forget, until at least white-faced and desperate Naomi would raise her trembling hand, and the (usually sympathetic) teacher would excuse her, and she would hurry to the nearest girls’ restroom in acute distress trying not to imagine (oh she could not allow herself to imagine!) how the teacher might be joking about her to the class—Naomi is right on time today! We were all waiting.
None of this our mother knew. Of course.
Yet we were not happy when our mother sent us to live with our father’s father and his wife in Birmingham, Michigan. Just far enough from Ann Arbor (she reasoned) that the name Voorhees wouldn’t be so potent.
For, in Birmingham, there was already a much-respected Dr. Voorhees—our grandfather. Clement Voorhees, MD, Birmingham Gastrointestinal Associates, Birmingham Medical Arts Bldg., 114 Cranbrook Way, Birmingham, Michigan.
The Voorhees grandparents wanted us badly. It was their promise, Birmingham was wholly unlike Ann Arbor where everything was left-wing, political.
Crime was virtually nonexistent in Birmingham. Suburban policemen were polite, courteous—to (white-skinned) residents.
Never could it have happened, our Voorhees grandfather said, that his son would have been shot down in broad daylight in Birmingham, Michigan!
(There was no counterpart in Birmingham to the women’s care clinics with which Gus Voorhees had been associated, that provided abortions for women without money to pay for them; but there was a private clinic in West Bloomfield, and a suite in the Birmingham Medical Arts Building, staffed by reputable OB/GYN doctors, where such surgical interventions were provided.)
At one time (we were told) it had been expected that Gus Voorhees would join his father’s lucrative practice in Birmingham. Father and son would be resident surgeons at the (top-ranked) William Beaumont Hospital in Royal Oak. But son disappointed father by becoming radicalized at U-M in the sour aftermath of the Vietnam War, one of a small but vocal number of pre-med students with an activist interest in public health, women’s rights, abortion.
Gus’s mother Madelena, who’d divorced the elder Dr. Voorhees in 1967, to depart for a new-invented life in New York City, had told her doctor-son that he was throwing away—“almost literally”—millions of dollars in income by declining gastrointestinal medicine in favor of OB/GY public-welfare medicine; and our father had reputedly said, “Well, that’s too bad. But I’m not in it for the money. Obviously!”
Amazing photos of Gus Voorhees in his early and mid-twenties. Long-wild-haired, red headband, fierce wiry beard. A defiant young man picketing with other young men and women his age, both whites and blacks, marching in streets and avenues flanked by masked and uniformed police officers in riot gear.
Oh! Oh God. Gus.