Her eyes were watering badly. Dry eye it was called.
Paradoxically, dry eye results in watering eyes. For the afflicted eye lacks sufficient moisture, precipitating tears and blurred vision.
Such tears are easily mistaken for the tears precipitated by emotion.
“And through here. I’ve got the door . . .”
She was being led somewhere. There was an elevator, that moved slowly. Descending into the earth.
She had not spoken more than a few words for approximately five hours. In the interim her throat seemed to have closed.
There had been no urgent need for speech for whatever had happened, had happened.
Are you sitting down? Please.
“Step through here, Mrs. Voorhees.”
Whoever these strangers were—Broome County, Ohio, medical examiner, law enforcement officer, county prosecutor—they spoke softly to her. She’d been introduced to them upstairs, she’d even shaken their hands—(had she?)—but the memory had already faded, sucked into a kind of vacuum.
This day had begun a very long time ago as if on another planet.
Ringing telephone in an empty house. Her first instinct had been the correct one: do not answer.
Beyond that now. Too late.
When confused, smile.
A faint courteous questioning smile—Yes? Excuse me?
Like most girls she’d been trained to smile since childhood. Smile at your elders, at individuals who have authority over you. Smile if frightened. Smile if you can’t quite hear what they are telling you. Smile to express yourself—sweet, docile, cooperative, surpassingly well-mannered, “good.” Smile at men.
Like crossing a balance beam, in gymnastics. You move with exquisite caution and concentration so that you will not “lose” your balance and crash ignominiously to the hardwood gym floor.
What was expected of her. As the slain man’s widow she would comport herself with dignity.
Would not dissolve into weeping, hysterics. Would not collapse into a paroxysm of self-pity.
What the widow must avoid: self-pity.
They left the slow-moving elevator and were making their way along a corridor of the ground floor of the Broome County Hospital. A strong odor of disinfectant made her nostrils pinch.
Again, a door was being opened for her. A heavy door.
“Please step through here, Mrs. Voorhees.”
Mrs. Voorhees. So carefully enunciated, you would think this was a rare medical condition or illness.
Now she felt a flurry of something like panic. Very much, her instinct warned her not to enter this room.
Yet amid a roaring on all sides she stepped—bravely—into a large refrigerated room humming with ventilators.
Her eyes glanced upward involuntarily. The ceiling was high overhead, covered in slate-colored squares. Frigid air flowed downward from vents in these squares like grimacing teeth.
“Mrs. Voorhees . . .”
The medical examiner was explaining something to her. He seemed less kindly than the other men but perhaps that was her imagination. He was a short square-built gnome-man with a bald head, tufted white eyebrows who dwelt here, in the netherworld below the hospital. He was a physician, of course—a pathologist.
What had Gus said about pathologists?—no malpractice insurance, their patients never complain.
Her brain was exhausted from strain and for a confused moment she worried that she was supposed to know the gnome-man, he’d been a medical associate of Gus’s?
In anyplace where he lived, or spent a duration of time, Gus became acquainted with many individuals and of these, a number were invariably persons of distinction.
Fellow doctors, public health officials. Local politicians—mayor, congressman, senator. Lawyers. By now Gus would know them on a first-name basis.
“It’s a formality but it’s state law. You only have to look briefly, Mrs. Voorhees.”
The roaring of the ventilators made hearing difficult. Or perhaps it was a roaring in her ears.
Gus had told her, many times—It’s just your heartbeat. Breathe calmly, relax. It will subside.
She was being led—inexorably, inescapably—to a table on aluminum rollers, beneath a pitilessly bright light. On the table was what appeared to be a human body entirely covered by a white shroud.
By the dimensions of the body and the size of the (vertical, bare) feet beneath the shroud, you would surmise that this was a man’s body.
Cautiously, the shroud was drawn away from the face and upper body.
“Oh.”
She stepped back. A gust of cold wind pushed her.
But this terribly mutilated individual was not Gus—was he? Almost, Jenna felt a wave of relief.
For it was not Gus after all. Even the hair that looked shredded, clotted with something dark like paint, was not her husband’s streaked-gray hair. There’d been some misunderstanding . . .
She was a visitor here, a guest. She did not want to make too much of such a misunderstanding. For (it was unavoidable to think) her husband’s remains might indeed be in the room, elsewhere. These well-intentioned gentlemen had led her to the wrong table and they had drawn away from the lifeless body the wrong shroud.
She was feeling light-headed. What relief!
Ridiculous errors happened all the time. No one had predicted the fall of the Berlin Wall, for instance. All the brainpower of the CIA and other intelligence agencies, highly trained individuals whose entire careers had focused upon the two Germanys, and yet—no one had seemed to anticipate what would be described in retrospect as inevitable.
No, this body was not Gus Voorhees. Certainly, the (ruined, devastated) face was not his.
Not recognizably Gus Voorhees.
The remains of Gus Voorhees.
“Mrs. Voorhees?”
Her voice was very low, almost inaudible—“Yes.”
“Excuse me? Did you say—‘yes’?”
“Yes.”
“Yes, this is—Dr. Voorhees? Is that what you are saying?”
More clearly she said now, “Yes. It is Dr. Voorhees.”
“It is your husband, Dr. Voorhees.”
Not a question now but a statement. No further reply was expected of her.
Carefully the shroud was drawn back over the devastated face. The body on the table was very still, not breathing. With wonder she stared at the contours of the white shroud, that did not move at all even in the area of the torso where there might (presumably) have been breathing.
For what seemed like a long time then she stood, staring at the body on the table covered by the shroud. Something was unclear to her—what to do? What to do now?
It was an existential predicament. Gus would have understood.
Since there is no reason for doing anything it is difficult to choose which of (pointless) possibilities you will choose to do next.
Or, you will not choose to do.
Her legs were very tired, leaden. Her hands felt oddly heavy, to lift them would require an effort.
Perversely, her head felt light. The veins and arteries were shrinking to mere pencil lines, oxygen was being shut off in her brain.
“Mrs. Voorhees, we can leave now. This way—”
Gallantly an arm was extended, to support her at the waist if required.
“Yes. Thank you.”
They would treat her as if she were a convalescent. Or rather, an invalid.
A woman who has lost her husband is invalid, thus an invalid.
In reverse the little journey was repeated. Leaving the morgue, entering the elevator. Silence of her companions in deference to her condition of invalidism.
(Did they exchange glances? She did not see but perhaps she sensed.)
At the first floor the elevator stopped, the door opened. The friends who’d driven her from Michigan were waiting for her—for a fleeting instant she would wonder why they were here, in this strange place.
In her face that was taut and drained of bloo
d and yet resolute they saw that some decision had been made in the netherworld below. A crossing-over, a point of no return.
Almost brightly she informed them yes, it was Gus. Of course. “And how surprised Gus would be, to see you here—in Ohio.”
She was staggering in a surf that had not seemed so threatening until now. She was keeping her balance by an exertion of arms, legs, uplifted head. She knew she must speak to their friends. She must console them, they’d had such a shock. It was a widow’s duty, at this awkward juncture.
“You know what Gus would say—exactly what Gus would say—seeing that you’re all here, let’s find a good place for dinner before we start back home.”
THE FACE WAS NOT a face but a raw wound. The mouth was gone, there was nothing to kiss. The eyes were gone. I think that I had planned to lie beside him and hold him if he was cold or frightened in this strange place but that was not possible. The terrible thing that had been done to him had torn him almost in two. If I had not known that this was Gus, I could not have identified him. But it was possible to see in the devastated face something of Gus’s face. He had been so handsome! In The Tibetan Book of the Dead it is said that the deceased soul remains in or near the body, in the Bardo state, for twenty days. And so, Gus might have been there, still. Though he would have laughed at me—he didn’t believe in the soul outliving the body. He was a materialist, a scientist. Yet he was an idealist. He did believe that we were spiritual beings—only that our spirits did not outlive our bodies.
Then, it was a sudden concern, that with Gus gone, the children would be taken from me. Under a state law, of which we’d known nothing beforehand. And I think—then—I began to break down, and may have begun crying, trying to explain to whoever it was, who was with me—trying to explain that the children were ours equally—their father’s and mine—and that they should not be taken from me, I would be a good mother to them—“Please believe me . . .”
REJOICE!
BABY KILLER SHOT DOWN IN OHIO
VICTORY FOR JESUS
REJOICE, THE BABY KILLER VOORHEES HAS BEEN STOPPED!
In a trance of horror and loathing he discovered such proclamations. Such revelations in luridly printed newsletters, bulletins and newspapers that made their way into the mailbox or were discovered shoved beneath a weathered welcome mat or the very windshield wiper of his mother’s car.
He could not stop himself from turning the pages. He could not stop himself from reading what was, so unbelievably, there to be read. Each time extracting from himself a promise to stop, to not succumb another time. But he could not.
Once, he would discover a cardboard box of these publications, in the trunk of a minivan belonging to a lawyer friend of his father’s. Accumulating evidence—it was explained.
Army of God, Christians Awake!, National Coalition of Life Activists, L.I.F.E. America, Children of Jesus, National Right to Life, US United for Life, Crusade for Life, Gospel of Light, Heritage Life Ministries, Libertarian Activists for Life, Midwest Coalition for Life, National League for Life.
In what would have seemed to the casual eye ordinary, small-town newspapers:
ABORTION-DOCTOR-MURDERER VOORHEES SHOT DOWN IN OHIO
ABORTION-DOCTOR-MURDERER PREVENTED FROM PERFORMING ANY MORE ABORTIONS!
NOTORIOUS BABY KILLER VOORHEES DIES, OHIO ABORTION CLINIC
OPERATION RESCUE CLAIMS VICTORY
REJOICE! ANOTHER ABORTION-MURDERER HAS CEASED HIS EVIL
SOLDIER OF JESUS IN POLICE CUSTODY FOLLOWING OHIO SHOOTING
DEFENSE FUND FOR LUTHER DUNPHY SEND CHECKS, MONEY ORDERS, CASH C/O ARMY OF GOD AMERICA
Accompanying these lurid words were photographs of his father. The likenesses of Gus Voorhees were unsmiling and grim and not Gus Voorhees as Darren recalled him for some seemed to have been defaced, disfigured.
Yet there was one photograph, had to have been a family snapshot—(but how had his father’s enemies acquired it?)—Gus Voorhees standing cross-armed in front of a white brick wall, in a khaki jacket, smiling tensely, squinting in the sun. Strangely, his father appeared older in this picture than he’d ever been in life, his hair more silver—Darren was sure.
Baby Killer Voorhees Gone to His Reward in Hell
Months ago, a year or more ago, his father had extracted from Darren a promise never to read the anti-abortion propaganda. Not ever.
He’d asked Why and his father squeezed his shoulder with a pained smile saying Because I’m asking you, Darren. Please.
The enemy. Anti-abortion activists. Threats. Ugly images. Just ignore.
Darren hadn’t quite realized, his beloved father Gus Voorhees was a particular target in these publications. In his childish naiveté he’d imagined, or perhaps he had wished to imagine, that the hostility was ideological, political.
Their beliefs are contrary to ours, Gus had explained. The debate will have to be hammered out in the voting booths of America.
Debate! The kind of adult idealism you took for granted, without questioning. (Possibly) you rolled your eyes, it was so schoolteacherish. But a good kind of schoolteacherish.
Now Darren was discovering a looking-glass world where the murderers of abortion providers were honored as “heroes”—“martyrs.” These were “soldiers of God” or “soldiers of Jesus” who had traded their lives to “defend the defenseless.” These were men named Griffin, Greene, Mitchell—and now Dunphy. In the looking-glass world of the anti-abortion movement, in the glossier publications their faces were made luminous as the faces of saints.
Just ignore, Darren. There is much garbage printed, as there is much garbage in the world, which you can’t change. But you can live your life without having to know.
But was this true? His father had been mistaken in such a belief.
His parents would never have allowed him to read such material, in the days before Gus had been killed. They’d feared “brain-rot” in all their children and so had not even owned a television set. Religious propaganda, anti-Socialist and anti-Communist publications, popular pornographic magazines like Hustler—all were equally abhorrent to them though (as Darren teased) they believed in free speech, freedom of the press and opposed censorship. It had been an innocent era, Darren would one day realize, before the Internet brought the depths of the human psyche into the household—from the infinitely precious to the unspeakably filthy, soul-withering.
For what remained of the Voorhees family it was the aftermath of life. A posthumous life. There was no one to monitor a boy as shrewd, calculating, and devious as Darren. His devastated mother had become transformed into a personage acclaimed in the world as Gus Voorhees’s widow—the more ravaged Jenna appeared, the more of a martyr. The effort of performing as Gus Voorhees’s widow required all her strength and so she had little time for such petty concerns as censoring her children’s reading materials and she was not often in close proximity to her teenaged son in any case.
He was sickened by the anti-abortion propaganda but mesmerized as well. Where other boys his age were discovering pornography Darren had discovered a very special pornography just for him.
It was like touching himself—his genitals. He did not want to, such weakness disgusted him, but in his half-sleep he found himself doing so, his hand moved of its own eager volition. And in his private hiding places for reading forbidden material his fingers moved of their own perverse volition turning pages.
Like refuse bobbing in water, the celebration of his father’s murder went on and on. Like excrement, among the refuse. Who could have predicted, there would be so much rejoicing?—so many strangers with strong opinions? Individuals who had (evidently) (without knowing him) detested Gus Voorhees and rejoiced in his murder.
And all of them self-identified Christians, rejoicing in the deaths of abortion doctors.
Of course, there had been other deaths—“executions” as they were called. Voorhees was only the most recent triumph.
And since Voorhees’s death, and the removal of his
name from WANTED: BABY KILLERS AMONG US, the abortion doctors listed below him had been moved up. At number four, where Voorhees had been, was a Dr. Friedlander aligned with an abortion clinic in Tallahassee.
The list was an invitation to “execute.” Darren wondered if Friedlander and the others knew about it, and if they monitored the anti-abortion sites. Probably, yes. For how could they resist?
Yet, his father had insisted that he did not look at these publications. He had (surely) not allowed Jenna to look. (But Jenna would not have wished to look.)
But now, Darren was alone. No one to observe.
There was a particular fascination with the murderer—Luther Dunphy.
His father’s murderer! His mouth went dry.
Luther Dunphy, 39. Muskegee Falls, Ohio. Lay minister, St. Paul Missionary Church of Jesus. Roofer, carpenter. Wife Edna Mae, two sons and two daughters. Formerly of Sandusky, Ohio. “Pray for me.”
In these pictures Dunphy was smiling faintly, shyly. He had the guarded look of a man who does not smile often or easily. In one picture taken outdoors on a summer day he stood with his family—wife, children. The scrawny grinning wife held a baby in her arms. The elder of two daughters, thick-set, plain-faced, about ten years old, smirked at the camera. There was a thin-faced boy—in the photo, about Darren’s age. Darren felt a thrill of sheer hatred for this boy, whose father was alive and not dead.
Luther Dunphy was a tall hulking slope-shouldered man who in several photographs wore a baseball cap pulled low over his forehead. His head appeared small in proportion to his body. His upper arms were muscled. His face did not suggest the face of a murderer and was in fact a face of no distinction except that on his cheek was a discoloration like a mashed red berry.
Staring at Dunphy, Darren felt hatred like black acid rising at the back of his mouth. It filled him with rage, that his father’s murderer was still alive and that, in some quarters, among avid Christians, Dunphy was revered as a kind of hero, a “soldier of Jesus” and a “martyr.”
Luther Dunphy is currently incarcerated in the Muskegee Falls Men’s Detention as police investigate the alleged shootings attributed to him. So far, Dunphy is said to have “cooperated” with the investigation. There have not yet been discovered any co-conspirators in the alleged shootings. Dunphy is not available for interviews and has indicated that he will refuse most requests. The Broome County Court has appointed a lawyer to represent him but Luther Dunphy is said to have declined legal counsel. Through his minister Reverend Dennis Kuhn of the St. Paul Missionary Church of Jesus, Muskegee Falls, Dunphy has stated that he does not consider his alleged actions of November 2, 1999, “murder” or “homicide” but “an act of God” as he was “defending the defenseless”—he was preventing the abortion-doctor Voorhees from performing abortions “that day and all days to follow.”