(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.
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.