Don’t look at them. Just look at me, we can talk together. Don’t let them upset you, Jenna. Try to smile at me. Yes! Like that.
It was bizarre to her, that the anti-abortion protesters should hate her. Didn’t they consider that she’d been punished enough, having lost her husband?
Even now, a year after Gus’s death, Jenna continued to receive sporadic hate mail from the enemy, which was forwarded to her in Ann Arbor. She rarely saw such messages, for others intervened and hid them from her, or destroyed them. She dreaded her children being approached, receiving ugly threats—You will be next following the Baby Killer Doctor. You & yours, you will not be spared. (She had sent the children away to live with their grandparents in Birmingham, Michigan, for an indeterminate period of time; in Ann Arbor, the “Voorhees” children were too visible.)
But it wasn’t opponents of abortion solely, or mentally unstable persons raging at Gus Voorhees as if he were still alive, from whom Jenna had to be protected; it was also “media people”—journalists, TV camera crews. Most of these (she believed) were sympathetic with the prosecution’s case. Especially the women were staunch supporters of abortion, pro-choice. Still, Jenna declined all requests for interviews.
“Not now. Not yet! Sometime. Please understand.”
She’d begun refusing such requests even from publications with which she and Gus had been associated immediately after Gus’s death. She had understood the political value of addressing a shocked public after the assassination of a prominent abortion-provider—(and the assassination of an abortion center escort)—but she had been too exhausted, and too stricken with grief. She had hidden even (at times) from her oldest and most loyal friends; even from her parents, and her children. And later, when she’d been a little stronger, she had not wanted to squander her strength in such a way; she did not want to talk about her husband as if he were a political “issue.”
About the trial that had been so frequently, so maddeningly delayed, she felt fierce, self-protective. The trial was all-consuming and obsessive and therefore she had nothing to say about it to an interviewer; she did not even like to speak of it with friends and pro-choice associates, and when she called her children, each night, she said little of the trial, and wanted only to know how (in obsessive detail, that made the eldest children impatient) they were.
To Jenna the trial of Luther Dunphy was an endurance like swimming underwater, holding her breath for as long as she could, and then a little longer. She dared not draw breath too quickly for she would drown.
Her friends were determined to protect her. Since Gus’s death they had surrounded her, shielded her. The trial of Luther Dunphy had loomed before them for more than a year.
“We will have justice, Jenna! Soon it will be over.”
Soon? Over? Jenna wondered what this could possibly mean. Gus’s absence from her life, and from the world, would never be over, no matter the outcome of the trial.
On the stone steps of the courthouse she took care to avoid the prayer vigil protesters. In the corner of her eye she saw how they regarded her, the widow of the man whose death they cheered. Did they hate her, as one of the enemy? Could they feel something more complicated for her—pity, if not sympathy? To them, she was the wife of a “baby killer”—that was her identity. She wanted to turn to them, to confront them—You are dangerous fanatics—religious lunatics! Your wrathful God does not exist, you are brainwashed and absurd.
But she knew it was not so simple. She knew how Gus would feel: though the protesters were mistaken, they were well-intentioned. Their religious leaders mobilized them for political reasons to undermine the “welfare state”—the “godless atheism” of a more equitably distributed economy. Like right-wing politicians who pretended to be populist to draw voters they were financed by wealthy companies and corporations who cared only for electing governments that favored business. Among gay marriage, contraception, women’s reproductive rights, abortion was the singular emotional issue, the rallying cry—No baby chooses to die.
How manipulated these people were! How naive, politically. Yet, their emotions were sincere. Their rage was certainly sincere.
In their presence Jenna wore dark glasses on even overcast days and she wore dark, woolen clothing not because she was a widow but because the occasion of the trial was a somber one and bright colors had come to offend and hurt her eyes.
Mrs. Voorhees—?