Often there were times—days, weeks—when our mother did not smile much. When a smile from her felt like a rubber band being stretched tight—tighter. On the worst days of the interminable Michigan winter now behind us. (You did not ever want to think: yes, and before us, too.) On those evenings when our father didn’t come home for an evening meal because he was elsewhere, at another meal; or he was away altogether, in another part of the state, or in another state; he was “dining with” wealthy contributors (in Birmingham, Bloomfield Hills, Grosse Pointe) to women’s organizations, who happened to be (older, lonely) wealthy women for whom time spent in the company of Gus Voorhees was a thrill.
He’d become something of a male-feminist hero in Michigan, in some quarters, having made an impassioned presentation before the Michigan state legislature in 1981 that convinced enough of the (predominantly conservative) legislators to vote into law the establishment of a special commission on women’s reproductive medical rights, on which Gus Voorhees had served. The legislature also approved a budget increase for women’s community medical services, a controversial subject in Michigan as elsewhere in the United States: should public funds be used to provide abortions? And which kinds of abortion?—therapeutic, following rape or incest, elective? Should public funds be used to provide contraception? Social welfare issues that had seemed to have been decided definitively years before were revealed as not decided at all, rather they were continually under attack, and increasingly vulnerable since the Presidential election of Ronald Reagan in 1980. No issues aroused more passion in both political parties, and with each elected legislature, and each new campaign to maintain, increase, or decrease the budget, Gus Voorhees was involved as a public-health physician-spokesman.
Our father had long been “under attack” from his enemies—(we would learn after his death). We’d been allowed to see some of the friendlier responses in the media—articles in newspapers in Ann Arbor and Detroit, cover stories in the University of Michigan Alumni Bulletin, Michigan Public Health and Michigan Life, a profile on Gus Voorhees—“Crusader for Women’s Rights”—in the New York Times Magazine.
By the age of forty he’d virtually surrendered a private life. So our mother would say wistfully yet with an air (we thought) of pride.
Famous? Infamous.
Can’t separate the two.
Winter afternoons shading into dusk when we would find our mother lying on the sagging brass bed upstairs in her and Dad’s bedroom, a cheerless room with fraying wallpaper like wet tissue, with a damp towel over her face—(for she suffered every two or three weeks from what she called idiopathetic migraine); or, on better days, we would find our mother upstairs in the low-ceilinged room she called her office, at a table facing a dormer window, working on her IBM personal computer squarely before her, frowning and intense and often excited. As Jenna Matheson (who was qualified to practice law in Michigan) she sent and received countless emails; she made and received countless calls; she could immerse herself as deeply in her work as our father did in his, or nearly. She was a legal consultant for women’s rights organizations in Ann Arbor, Grand Rapids, and Saginaw, as well as Michigan Planned Parenthood, with which she was most associated; she was an editor for Women and the Law: An American Review, which was published by a coalition of women’s legal associations, at the University of Chicago Law School. She was always writing book reviews, essays—for years she’d been revising her one-hundred-page Master’s thesis (English, University of Wisconsin) titled The Battered Woman: Portraits of the Female Self in Literature, in the hope of getting it published.
Sometimes as we approached our mother’s office we would hear her on the phone; we would hear her speak sharply and incisively; we might hear her laugh in a way we did not often hear her laugh, in our presence. We might hear her muttering to herself, sighing. And again, laughing. If we knocked on the (usually ajar) door our mother would turn to us with a quick vague squinting-guilty smile—“Oh Christ! Is it that late? Time to eat?”
AT DANTE’S AUTO REPAIR Mom gave the station wagon keys to the mechanic: “It isn’t a new vehicle, obviously. It may need some fixing-up. There’s been a rattle in the engine, or somewhere beneath the hood, for a while. The left rear tire seems a little flat. Please change the oil, or—whatever you usually do. Thank you!” In a little procession we walked to the Huron County Women’s Center three blocks away on South Main Street. Now the sky had cleared, to a degree: the pale incandescent light seemed to fall directly from above, sunshine filtered through gaseous clouds. The sidewalks of St. Croix were not much populated as in a painting by Edward Hopper and so we did not imagine—We are being observed. Family of Dr. Gus Voorhees baby killer.
We’d heard much from our parents about the women’s center in St. Croix, for which our father had first been a consulting physician and, more recently, head of the staff, but we had not visited it until now—that is, Darren, Naomi, and Melissa had not visited the Center; we were not sure if our mother had, since her remarks about the Center were cryptic and ambiguous.
That place! That place that has swallowed your father’s life.