It would not be said of the mother-in-law Madelena Kein that she was a professional woman who gave away her services cheaply, or indeed at all.
(Madelena Kein headed the Institute for Independent Study at New York University, where she had a joint appointment in philosophy and linguistics. She’d been, for a few years, when Gus was very young, Madelena Kein-Voorhees, but she’d been Madelena Kein—Professor Madelena Kein—for a long time. Gus could not recall when his parents were divorced, precisely—his mother had moved away, to live and teach in New York City, sometime before the formal divorce from Gus’s physician-father in Birmingham, Michigan. She had willingly surrendered all claims to joint custody of her son by moving away in defiance of a court order and yet, so far as Jenna could determine, Gus did not seem to resent his ambitious mother for having left him; if he’d been hurt by her behavior, he did not dwell upon this hurt but seemed instead proud of her—at a distance. Madelena had not come to Gus’s wedding and she’d only rarely visited his family for, as she’d liked to say, as if it were a witty bon mot, she had but a “minimal interest in being someone’s gram-muddy.”)
Gus had told Jenna not to be intimidated by his mother—“It’s bad enough that I am intimidated by her. She won’t bother you.”
In fact Jenna was quite taken with the glamorous, mysterious, and absent mother who had not the slightest inclination to interfere with her son’s private life. In another lifetime, they might have been friends.
In the early years of marriage Jenna had been so grateful to be Gus Voorhees’s wife that she had not—ever—complained of being lonely, or left behind, or (subtly, not crudely) exploited by him. Gus Voorhees was the first man she had ever loved—emotionally, sexually. Intellectually.
It had seemed to her from the start that Gus did not (probably) love her quite so deeply as she loved him. Not because Gus’s attentions were scattered, rather more that Gus had not the capacity to love so deeply as she loved. Such yearning, such need, Jenna understood to be weakness and not strength.
That Gus was not weak as she was weak, she reasoned she could not blame him.
Unless—she misunderstood her husband? That a man did not need love so much as another might not mean that he did not love as much as another.
As a young wife Jenna had taken a stoic sort of pride in not-complaining of the exigencies of her married life: so much that fell totally upon her shoulders as the wife of a very busy physician-surgeon with a commitment to women’s public health issues. She had not-complained while maintaining households (one child, two children, at last three) in diverse regions of Michigan to which Gus’s work had brought him. She’d helped Gus in his career that was like a locomotive rushing ever faster along a curving track—not just typing (of course—that was the minimum) but composing, assembling, researching and preparing talks and papers on women’s reproductive health issues and legal rights for Dr. Voorhees who was frequently invited to give keynote speeches, to appear at fund-raisers, to consult, to collaborate. Gus Voorhees too was expected to work pro bono, often. It was rare that he worked fewer than one hundred hours a week.
She’d have liked to speak to Madelena Kein. Just to ask a single question.
Did you leave your family because you loved them too much? Because you understood that love and pride are a baited hook you swallow unwittingly and discover one day that it is tangled in your guts?
ALONE IN THE HOUSE, that morning. Hearing the phone ring downstairs. Glancing at her watch—9:18 A.M.
Damn phone!—she would not be distracted.
Hearing the voice mail recording, and a muffled message. For she was too far away to hear distinctly, and so immersed in her work, which was already delayed by a day, she tried not to be distracted as another woman might have been for whom aloneness was a state of unease.
And the phone ringing again, soon after.
Thinking again in exasperation, or in mounting alarm: it would not ever be Gus calling at this prime time of morning nor would it be a call from the children’s schools, she was sure.
She was sure!
Hearing the phone again. Nervously pushing back her chair.
Oh hell. All right. I will see what it is.
Rapidly descending the (steep, narrow, creaking) stairway, brushing her hair out of her face, daring to think This had better be worth it.
UNKNOWING. NOT-YET-KNOWING.
For the remainder of her life my mother will recall herself in those minutes suffused in wet-glistening light from a window.
She will try to reconstruct the scene. Envisioning the woman who imagines herself Gus Voorhees’s wife, annoyed with her husband, uncertain of her husband, rehearsing words with her (absent) husband while not knowing that she isn’t his wife any longer but his widow, descending the stairs to the first floor of the house.
A woman who is (not yet) a widow at 9:18 A.M. of November 2, 1999, in the old clapboard house on the Salt Hill Road.