Mother Nature: The Journals of Eleanor O'Kell (24 page)

She
is a reason for living, a good reason even though I know a cut-up old sicko dike like me can never have her. I know that. But there are other ways to possess a person.

“I’m in love,” Dr. Heyer says. I tell her I am, too. “You don’t understand, Miss O’Kell. I’m in love with a
man
, a good man, an anesthesiologist from Albuquerque. He loves the Southwest and so do I.” What about your research? I say. “Being with him, having a family some day, those are the things that matter to me now. When you’re a surgeon, you don’t get to have much of a life. I need more than my work to keep going.” What about me? “I’ve done everything I can for you,” she says. “Someone else will have to perform the surgery, Miss O’Kell.” Call me
Eleanor
, I say. Helen doesn’t think that’s such a great idea.

I haven’t been able to get out of bed since she left for New Mexico. When I close my eyes I see the way her thighs move against those tight skirts that are nearly as short as I want them to be. When I open my eyes I am sure she will be there with her hair in a braid,
her eyes glowing behind her glasses. Sliv forces me to eat and to bathe, but he can’t force me to feel.

Betsy Bokamper makes me come to court to hear the arguments for and against dismissal. That’s how bad I look. I’m as hairless as a chick, my skin the color of eggshell. Judge Benning takes one look at me and orders Betsy Bokamper and Sheilah Corsetti into chambers.

Case dismissed. I’m too sick to celebrate. Or to write another  word.

“I’m sorry you’re sick,” Vincent D’Angelo says over the phone. “No, I really am. I wanted you to be healthy, to live a long life in a federal penitentiary.” Sorry to disappoint you, I say. “Don’t worry about it,” he says. “I’ve got a better idea.”

They will take the first breast first, leaving me to live as an Amazon. In time, if I let them, they will take the other. They say I have no choice.

I tell Sliv to burn every file and all the records. “It’s too late for that, Miss O’K, Sliv says. “The Feds, they beat us to the punch. They took every last paper clip.”

“I’m sorry you’re still sick,” Vincent D’Angelo says. “But we’re still going to file the mother of all class actions suits against you. Don’t you see? All they have to do is look at you, and they’ll know we’re right.” I ask him what the hell he’s talking about. “You’re Exhibit A, for God’s sake. Thanks to Eleanor O’Kell, all those little girls you manufactured in the lab have the Cushing gene for breast cancer. The geneticists I talk to have never seen anything like it. You’ve created a race of walking time bombs. You’ve brought out the worst in yourself in all of them. How can you put a price tag on that?”

“I know you think I’m crazy,” Diana says. “But I love the Convent. I’m in love with God.” History repeats itself, I say.

“Vincent D’Angelo is being clever about it,” Betsy Bokamper says. “You’re
not
named in the suit. It’s against the Lying-In. He’s saying all the women carrying the gene for breast cancer had the procedure done in the hospital.  He is looking for hundreds of millions of dollars.” Motherfucker, I say.

So it’s true? I say. “The DNA is better than a fingerprint,” Abigail Rickover says. “It’s like a blueprint for everything about you. And no two are alike.”

Sliv refuses to become a whistle-blower, God bless him. “What would your mother say if I went and did that?” he says. “What kind of a man would I be? No thanks, Miss O’K. It’s too late for me to go to another movie.” You might have to go to jail, I say. “The slammer?” Sliv says. “In Korea, that was my home away from home.”

“You’re not named in the suit,” Betsy Bokamper says. “So you have to do what’s best for you. Whatever happens, you have to take care of yourself.” I promise, I say.

My new doctor tells me I will die if I don’t go under the knife again before Christmas. I have no choice.

Sliv brings me home from the Lying-In. I feel so sore I can barely move, like they’ve cut out my heart.

Sliv settles me at home in one of our sick-people beds from the Lying-In. He cranks and cranks until I am sitting up with a view of the ice floes on the canal. I am so drugged up I don’t feel anything.

“Maybe there’s someone you can talk to about it,” Sliv says. Someone like you, I say. “I don’t know, Miss O’K,” Sliv says. “I know some things in life, but I don’t know nothing about this. I’m calling your sister the Sister.”

“I’m coming up there,” Diana says. Don’t, I say. “You need me,” my sister says. Sliv is all I need, I say. “Nonsense,” Diana says. “You’re no different than anyone else. You need family.”

Back in the hospital for a check. “I have wonderful news,” the doctor says. “We got every bit. Isn’t that wonderful!” I tell him yes. But I wonder.

Diana arrives to care for my soul. I could care less.

Diana cooks Christmas dinner for Sliv and me and G and her. There is snow on the ground along the canal and snow coming down. Everything tastes so good. I know it does. But I can barely eat.

I am dreaming about the Southwest, about tumbleweeds and tight skirts and true love.

“It’s a new year,” Diana says, “and I want to talk about your soul.” There’s nothing to talk about, I say. “Oh, but there is,” she says. “I’ve learned so much since I’ve become a Sister. I’ve learned to watch the birds, the way they fly. I’ve learned to study the way the snow falls. I’ve learned about the Holy Spirit in my life.” I used to know all about that, I say. “What happened?” she says. Hell if I know, I say.

“What about this friend of yours?” Betsy Bokamper says. “This Sister X.” Nancy? I say. Nancy is every bit as guilty as I am. So is Abigail Rickover. That’s my insurance policy. “We’re going to need
lots
of insurance,” Betsy Bokamper says.

They try to fit me for the fake breast or whatever they call it but I will have none of it. Instead I wear shirts big enough to be tents, half-again big enough for me to hide inside of.

I thought it would be better to be half a woman than none at all. Now I’m not so sure. They want to take the other breast and the ovaries, everything that makes me a woman.

The IRS miraculously appears and takes a floor at The Queen Mother. They want to see all my books, going back to the beginning. I’m beginning to believe all the conspiracy theories. I’m sure my Princess phones are bugged.

“Vincent D’Angelo is going after
everyone
in the civil suit,” Betsy Bokamper tells me at the Bake Shop. “Not just Sliv. He wants Nancy to testify against you. And Abigail Rickover. If they don’t, the government will go after them for fraud, perjury, you name it. It doesn’t look good.”

May 7, 1994

Chief Dan comes around. “You know what I need,” he says. How much? I say. “More than before,” he says. “Because they want me to talk.” I tell him to name his price.

“The Staties have decided to come in and to kick some real ass, Miss O’Kell,” Sliv says. “They’re turning the town upside down.” Aren’t there laws against that? I ask.

I was never the same after Nancy left. I see that now. I never looked at people the same way. Something inside of me died or just stopped living.

“Bad news,” Betsy Bokamper says. “Chief Dan? He’s had a wire on for the last three months. They say they’ve got you on tape offering him a bribe.” Lies, I say. Nothing but lies.

Vincent D’Angelo is trying to subpoena my diary. Over my dead body.

August 9, 1994

“They’re piecing it together,” Betsy Bokamper says. “Through Nancy, Chief Dan, Allyson Koksher. If they get Abigail Rickover to turn we’re cooked. If they get your diary, we’re dead.” I tell her that won’t happen in this life.

August 20, 1994

“Sorry ma’am,” Chief Dan says on his way out of town. “It’s business, after all, and the Feds just offered me a clean bill of health.” I tell him he’s a dead man to me. “Mutual, I’m sure,” he says.

September 23, 1994

“They already know what I know,” Abigail Rickover says. “That you were putting Cushing eggs into the mothers after you suctioned out their eggs. Without them knowing it. Nancy’s already told them what she knows. Now they know
everything
!” Nobody else has to know, I say. If you don’t tell them, it never happened.

October 1, 1994

“I had no choice,” Abigail Rickover says. “I’m sorry.”

“This trial is going to kill you,” Vincent D’Angelo says to me outside the courtroom in Boston. “That makes me the angel of death.”

October 23, 1994

And there she is, suddenly, right in front of me, in the hall outside the courtroom. Why did you do this to me? I ask. I would have given you anything. All you had to do was ask. “I was tired of begging for your blessing,” Nancy says. “I was tired of begging
period
.”

November 7, 1994

I need all the lights on all the time. I can’t sleep any other way. Some days I want to sleep forever.

Don’t worry, Sliv, I say. We will blow them
all
to kingdom come.

December 1, 1994

“We have to convince the jury that your diary is a pack of lies,” Betsy Bokamper says. I say there’s not an ounce of truth in it.

“I love it,” Vincent D’Angelo says to me on the courthouse steps. “Here you are knocking up 15-year-old girls like you’re some kind of nuthouse rapist. The jury is going to love it even more.”

December 9, 1994
“Are you okay?” Betsy Bokamper asks me in the Bake Shop. Why do you ask? I say. “Because you look like hell.”

“It’s inoperable, Miss O’Kell,” the doctor says. “We could take the o
varies out but it’s too late. I’m sorry to have to tell you this now.” How long? I ask. “Five months, maybe ten tops.” I don’t feel anything, not right away, except relief. I can finally make ready for my own demise.

I don’t even want to try the stem cells. I don’t want to live.

Diana weeps. Sliv is crying, trying not to let me see.

March 13, 1995

In the end I want nothing to do with sex and Diana wants everything to do with God. The irony of it is delicious, even to me.

I look out the window at the canal all day long. I think the thousands of Cushings let loose upon the world will surely produce ten thousand more. If only the strong shall survive, then, in the end, there shall be millions of Cushings alighting everywhere you turn, Cushings in every town, on every street corner. There might be one sitting next to you right now. That will have to pass for my immortality. For now it’s lights out.

Oral History Project

Columbia University

Roots of Radical Feminism Series

“The Tommies”

Interview With Eleanor O’Kell

Conducted by Dr. Edgar Griffiths

October 16, 1978

(Edited Transcript)

We might as well begin with your brother, Atomic Tom O’Kell.

Don’t even start with my brother. Not one more word about
him
. Not now. Not
ever
. As if what they wrote about him had a chance of being half-right! If you can pay off the writers they’ll write you any story you want. Have you seen his biography? It’s a joke—a best-selling joke. I pity the person who picks up that trash.

It has sold over a million in hardcover, perhaps twice that in paper. There’s a  movie set to go into production next fall.

It’s not worth the paper it’s printed on. It’s a joke. A
rape
. His whole life is a rape.

Can you be more specific?

You’re a man. You want to start where you’re comfortable. With
another
man. With Atomic Tom. Or my brother Will. Or my father Jake. As if talking about men will tell you what really happened to The Tommies. I don’t know why I bothered coming here. This is a joke.

You came because you said there was another story that needed to be told — the story of the O’Kell women and the founding of The Tommies. The story of your mother in particular.

And you want to start with my
brother
?

He’s the member of your family most familiar to a layperson—chairman of the Nuclear Energy Commission (NEC), a close advisor to President Kennedy, the man in charge of the family fortune—

He was a
lay
person all right. He screwed anything that moved. Including me and my sisters.

You have a story you seem to want to tell. I am here to hear it.

Maybe you need to hear the truth.

Let’s start with your mother, Kate Briody O’Kell. Maybe we can undo some of the misinformation about her. Her insanity, for instance.

She was
not
insane. Atomic Tom was happy to watch her die so he could control the family money.
That
was the insanity.

What can you tell us about her?

She was brilliant, a century ahead of her time. She was responsible for every one of my father’s successes. But she was also one of Thomas Cushing’s bastard daughters. Her mother was Constance Briody, the baker’s wife. They lived in the last town along the canal. Constance and the baker had no children—she thought she was barren, as they used to call it.
Her
fault, in other words. But she wasn’t barren after all.

Thomas Cushing took care of that problem.

He knocked her up, if that’s what you mean. And that child was my mother, Kate Briody.

And then Kate Briody—your mother—was raped by Thomas Cushing’s eldest son, and that produced Atomic Tom O’Kell, your half-brother.

That’s right. My mother was raped by John Patrick Cushing. John Patrick and his brothers ran the last town along the canal after his father died and The Great Fire burnt everything to a crisp. He was a real prick, John Patrick was.

So your mother’s first child, Atomic Tom O’Kell, was the son of Thomas Cushing’s daughter and his eldest son?

Atomic Tom was inbred all right—he was
all
Cushing. The bastard had all the worst traits of The Great Fornicator
and
his son.

The Great Fornicator?

That’s what the priests started to call Thomas Cushing in Confession. And that’s how The Tommies got started. They were women who said they would no longer be raped by men. That’s how the whole movement began.

I wasn’t aware that Thomas Cushing had raped anyone.

He didn’t have to. He had their consent, if you could call it that. He was The Great Fornicator in a town full of victims. They didn’t know they had a choice—until The Tommies came along.

You mentioned Confession.

That’s how The Tommies got started, believe it or not. Thomas Cushing would screw anything that moved in the town all week, and then the women would show up together at The Church of the Immaculate Conception Saturdays for Confession. There were long lines—a lot of waiting around—and they started to talk to each other, to
confess
to each other about what they had done with Thomas Cushing.

“Hads” and “Had Nots” both?

All of the above. The Hads were the ones who claimed they had fucked Thomas Cushing. The Had Nots were the women in the town who
wished
they had. So The Tommies were founded on a lie—women lying to each other about a man.

And there was no way to tell who was telling the truth.

Not right away. It was as if he were screwing everyone in the town all the time, night and day and night. It was like make-believe—except for one thing. The Hads started to get pregnant with his babies. They all had Thomas Cushing’s girls.

All girls? That seems impossible.

When I was a nun we used to say: “The Lord works in strange ways.” Amen to that, brother. Maybe The Lord needed to make The Tommies and that was the only way She could do it. So the last town along the canal was nothing but his girls and their children. And Thomas Cushing’s Sons.

So The Tommies are a movement born “out of wedlock,” if you will. That’s the great irony, isn’t it?

The Tommies are all about irony, Professor. It’s a movement born of fucking that produced nothing but women tired of being fucked over.

Including your mother?

Especially my mother. Make no mistake. My mother’s mother, Constance Briody
—
my grandmother
—
really loved Thomas Cushing. All the women did. That’s the irony, too. The Tommies were born of the wrong kind of love.

What is your first memory of your mother?

She was so beautiful. My God! The kind of beauty that took everyone’s breath away—even her own children’s.

And your father?

The truth? Is that what you want?

You’re angry with your father.

He was an impostor
—
a fake.

He is considered one of the great inventors of the 20th Century.

He who pays for history is doomed to make it.

No one paid your brother Will to write about your family.

No one had to. His brains were already scrambled and fried.

Let’s have the truth, then.

Jake O’Kell, my father, was a man almost entirely devoid of talent. That’s the truth.

How can that be? He had over 1,100 patents. He invented sockets and switches and elevators—the guts of the Industrial Age.

You get a patent by putting your name on it. That’s doesn’t make it your idea.

Can you give an example of your mother’s influence on your father?

I can give you eleven hundred! How about the time he showed up in Dearborn trying to catch on with Ford?

But you weren’t even born.

My mother remembered it clear as day. Father took a whole Model T apart just to show Ford he knew the car inside out. But then Ford told him he had to put it back together by noon if he wanted a job.

And your mother?

Mother was sick as a dog, puking all the time—pregnant with Atomic Tom. But she had watched Father take the car apart, and then she had told him how to put it all back together
—
every gear, every screw. That’s the kind of mind she had. Without her around to tell him what to do, Father was clueless.

Was it that bad?

I’ll give you another example. You’ve probably know the story about the Southampton Beach Club—about how they finally let us in.

You were the first Catholic family ever admitted.

So you know the Protestants were desperate. It was after the Crash, and the club needed cash. But still they forced us to bow down before them.

The filter for the pool?

Exactly. Legend has it that Father went over there one weekend and fixed it because he happened to be such a genius. The truth is Mother went with him and told him what to do. I snuck in. I saw the whole thing. I was
there
, professor. Father could have no more fixed the algae problem than the man from Roto-Rooter.

You actually make him sound stupid, almost dense.

He never had a single idea unless Mother gave it to him. Don’t you know their history? Father was Edison’s bastard son—but he was no Edison. When Mother met Father he was working for Edison—on Direct Current, for God’s sake. DC was a mistake, a disaster. That’s why no one uses it any more.

That’s how your father got his start as an inventor.

He used to go around from town to town killing off dogs in an electric chair to prove that Alternating Current wasn’t safe—killing
puppies
, for God’s sake! That was the great Edison’s brainstorm.

Isn’t that how John Patrick Cushing died? In the electric chair?

Yes. That was really Day One for The Tommies.

They found your mother in the bakery after John Patrick had raped her.

It was early in the morning. She was bleeding to death. When the women in the town saw what had happened, they lost it—they went crazy.

Is your brother Will’s account true?

It’s as close as he ever got. They all went after John Patrick Cushing and beat him to a bloody pulp. Then they threw him into a potato sack and dragged him up the hill.

To the electric chair.

My father had it all set up. He was going to execute a dog! A
puppy
! It was supposed to show how dangerous Alternating Current was going to be. This was after Mother had explained to him all the reasons why AC
was the way to go, and that Edison’s DC would never work. Father had no clue until he met her.
None
. Don’t you get it? Mother told Father what to think. That was the way it worked.

So he electrocuted John Patrick Cushing.

My mother was there. She tried to stop it, actually. She never wanted John Patrick to die.

Why not?

I don’t know. She just never blamed him the way she could have. That makes her a saint, in my book.

And that child
—
your mother’s child by John Patrick Cushing
—
was Atomic Tom O’Kell?

That’s the way it all began. Sick, isn’t it?

But then The Tommies got their revenge on the rest of the Cushing sons.

Yes they did. But first they needed the town whore. She was dying from the clap. They raped the Cushing sons and made sure the whore mounted them last so they would all get the clap and die. And that’s what happened. They all died a long, slow death—all except Mordechai, the one who got away.

Murder?

Justifiable homicide.

What happened to The Tommies?

It took them 50 years to recover from their first victory.

What do you mean?

In one day they had wiped out John Patri
ck and the rest of the Cushing sons. The bogeymen were all gone. Aside from Mordechai, and then his son Eli, there were no Cushings left to hate any more—and no one hated Mordechai. They thought he was harmless.

When did you decide to go there, to the last town along the canal?

After I left the Sisters of Mercy.

Why did you leave?

The real question is why did I join. It had nothing to do with God. It was all about escape. I had to get out of that house.