Shocking to us, that Grandpa Clem who’d always been such a forceful person, ready to contradict our father, genial, generous, very fit for a man of his age, seemed to have been visibly stricken by our father’s death. Grandpa was shorter than we recalled—shorter than Darren. His eyelids were tremulous and there was a tremor in his left hand which he tried to disguise by grasping it with the other hand; when he saw that we’d noticed he told us that the tremor was harmless—not to be confused with the tremor of Parkinson’s disease.
He’d cut back on his medical practice and no longer performed surgery. Yet he would not consider retiring as his wife wished; he could not bear a future, he said, in a retirement village in Florida.
He had followed the trial at a distance. But he had followed the trial fanatically. Our grandmother Adele chided him, when she thought we were out of earshot: “There’s nothing you can do about it, Clem! Your son is gone. But your grandchildren are here, you can love them.”
We were stricken with guilt hearing this. We had to laugh, hearing this. We thought—Nobody would love us, if they knew us.
It is Darren and Naomi of whom I speak. Our sweet little adopted Chinese-girl sister everyone adored was not one of us.
For mostly Darren and Naomi were hidden away upstairs in their rooms immersed in lurid fantasies of revenge as other adolescents are immersed in lurid fantasies of one another.
Darren cultivated a crude, zestful, funny sort of skill for drawing comics in imitation of R. Crumb and Zap Comix. Naomi interspersed fantasies of setting fires to houses with a renewed interest in math/algebra in which despite the distractions of her miserable life she could excel.
Elaborate plots poisoning the Dunphys’ dog. (We knew the Dunphys had to have a dog, the pictures we’d seen of the Dunphy family were of dog people.) Darren knew (thought he knew) how to acquire a gun in the city of Detroit (he’d take the Woodward Avenue bus south into the dangerous, depopulated, nearly-all-black city with three hundred dollars in cash hidden on his person) and with this gun someday soon he would shoot through the windows of the Luther Dunphy residence somewhere in Ohio, we had no idea where.
Naomi said, practically: We could just set some fires here. Some stupid Christian churches.
Darren said: That is such an asshole idea, I’ll pretend I never heard it. We are saving our revenge for the enemy.
Naomi: OK. but where is the enemy?
Darren: Shithole, Ohio. We’ll find ’em.
“JUST FOR YOU”
This is painful to recall. This is not easy.
We knew that our mother was not-well and that we should not have been judging her harshly. But (maybe) we had no one else close enough to us, to wound.
Oh your mother is such a remarkable woman! She has been so strong this past year, so brave . . .
Bullshit we knew but dared not say. To reveal any emotion was an invitation to being hugged and wept over.
In the aftermath of her husband’s death Jenna Matheson had become a (modestly) paid consultant for women’s centers in Michigan and the Midwest, as her husband had been. In addition, Jenna provided legal counsel, assisted in litigation, settlements of lawsuits. With several others in the Pro-Choice movement she addressed the Michigan state legislature with a plea for an increase in the budget for women’s health care. She was named by the governor to the Michigan State Task Force on Women’s Rights which met each month in Lansing. She was one of several lawyers representing a coalition of abortion providers suing right-to-life websites like Army of God which continued to post WANTED: BABY KILLER AMONG US lists despite the assassinations of several abortion doctors. (The lawsuit met with defeat when a federal judge ruled that such online postings, though “repellent,” were protected by the First Amendment as free speech.) Pro-choice colleagues solicited contributions to establish the Augustus Voorhees Foundation which was to fund the first Augustus Voorhees Visiting Professorship in Women’s Public Health at the University of Michigan; Jenna was actively involved in soliciting more funds to expand the foundation, to establish professorships at other universities. She gave talks and papers and keynote addresses, she participated in conferences, she served on panels fiercely discussing the heavy boot of the status quo on the napes of our necks.