A Book of American Martyrs(91)

Yes, that was Gus.

We had seen these photos in family albums, many times. We’d been fascinated, and we’d laughed at Daddy’s Afro hair, bristling beard, bell-bottom jeans.

Overall, we did not like Daddy’s beards. Even Melissa complained of scratchy kisses.

At the memorial service for Gus Voorhees in the Unitarian Church in Ann Arbor these pictures projected onto a screen evoked shrieks of wounded laughter and tears from the gathering.

In the front row the children of the deceased hid their eyes. Hid their tears. Did not want to see. Did not want to hear. These pictures of their young father filled them with dismay, despair. How they’d have liked to have known him.

The more love for the father, the more his death was awful.

Really we knew little of our father’s complicated relationship with his father. We did not often visit the elder Voorheeses, who rarely, perhaps never, visited us in our rented places in Michigan very different from their residence in Birmingham. Nor did we see much of our mother’s parents, who lived in Evanston, Illinois. There had been some estrangement between the sets of grandparents, perhaps. Disapproval, even opposition, over the “radical” lifestyle Gus Voorhees cultivated, and was responsible for having drawn Jenna with him, and “endangering the children.”

Grandfather Voorhees’s wife Adele was our step-grandmother determined to be nice to the step-grandchildren as if we were orphans which, since our mother was alive, we were not.

Grandma Adele, she wished to be called. She had no grandchildren “of her own.”

Soon, Grandma Adele would complain tearfully of Darren and Naomi to our mother: we were “withdrawn”—we were “hostile”—we were “irritable”—we did not “observe ordinary good manners.”

Note to Mom: There is a difference between living with and (merely) staying with. Jenna believed that we were living with our grandparents in the big white brick Colonial at 19 Gascoyne Drive, Birmingham, Michigan, because that was her fantasy. But even Melissa knew that we were (merely) staying with them.

For how long?—it was natural for us to ask.

But if we asked Mom, her answer was evasive—“I don’t know. We will see what happens.”

We were waiting for Mom to establish a new home for us. Though we did not quite phrase it that way, we had not the vocabulary.

We might have reasonably wondered: where was home, now that Daddy was gone?

The places we’d lived with Daddy, the houses that had been homes, though rented and temporary, were all gone.

We’d had to vacate the farmhouse on Salt Hill Road in Huron County—of course. There was nothing in that part of Michigan for Jenna. No possibilities for a life within a few miles of the St. Croix Women’s Center that had once been so crucial in our father’s life.

Ludicrous to have ever thought of that house as home.

We had taken with us only what we could fit into the station wagon that day, crushed into the rear of the vehicle: a chaotic selection of our belongings and clothing, grabbed and carried to the vehicle, flung inside. (These included several of Daddy’s sport coats, sweaters, shirts and neckties which our mother could not bear to leave behind though she left behind many of her own things—“I never want to see these again.”)

Before the farmhouse in Huron County we’d lived in a (rented) house in Saginaw, and before Saginaw, in a (rented) house in Grand Rapids. Before that, in a long-ago time when Darren had been a little boy, and Naomi newly born, and Melissa not-yet-born on the far side of the earth, we’d lived in Ann Arbor which was the only city our parents considered home—yet to us, Ann Arbor was never home.

Our parents had many friends here. Like the McMahans, many of these friends offered to open their houses to us, for “as long as you want.”

Of course, Jenna could not accept such hospitality forever. Soon she would make decisions, rent a place to establish a home.

“When things settle down. When things are less crazy. When I see where I will be working. When the trial is over . . .”

Mom spoke to us with a smile but it was a strained and unconvincing smile. It seemed likely (to us) that our mother would be working in Ann Arbor but she postponed making decisions; we looked at several places to rent, so that we could move out of the McMahans’ house, but no place was quite suitable. Where once Jenna Matheson had been capable of quick assured judgments now she seemed baffled by choices, the more choices the more baffled, and could put off for days the simplest of decisions—whether to say yes to another invitation to accept another award or honor in Gus Voorhees’s name, or whether to say, in a breathy whisper “No! No more.”

Once, when Naomi answered the phone, it was our Matheson grandmother in Evanston, Illinois, demanding to speak with Jenna; told that Jenna wasn’t home, grandmother Matheson complained tearfully to Naomi that her daughter never returned calls from her or from her father, had not replied to their repeated invitations to visit and to stay with them, had not even cashed checks they’d sent to her . . .

“Why won’t your mother speak with us? Is she so busy, doesn’t she want our help, what have we done?”

Astonished and embarrassed Naomi promised her distraught grandmother that she would tell her mother to call that very night.

(“Oh God, is my mother bothering you? Don’t answer the phone, don’t even bother checking the ID. Just don’t answer. I will go through the messages after they accumulate. I promise.”)