Out Of The Deep I Cry

by Julia Spencer-Fleming

  “Ma’am? Excuse me, ma’am?”

  Clare lifted her eyes from the gritty walk. She couldn’t help it. A lifetime of conditioned politeness kicked in, and she pasted a pleasant expression on her face.

  You know what your problem is, Fergusson? MSgt. Ashley “Hardball” Wright, her air force survival school instructor, had a tendency to leap into her thoughts at times like these. You need to have a face that says get outta my way or I’ll kill you and eat your heart! Do you know what your face says, Fergusson? It says I’m a widdle bunny rabbit! Are you going to be a combat pilot or a widdle bunny rabbit, Fergusson?

  “Yes?” she said to the protestor. Sir, a widdle bunny rabbit, sir.

  The woman looked more like a member of the PTA than a political activist. She had a hand-knit tam pulled over long, curly hair, a heavy-duty parka, and sensible snow boots. She carried her placard and a clipboard in Scandinavian-knit mittens. “Would you be willing to sign a petition asking the aldermen to remove the current head of the clinic?”

  Clare raised her gloved hands. “I’m sorry, I’m not familiar with the director or what the clinic does.” She realized a split second after the words had left her mouth that she had made a serious mistake. She might just as well have invited the woman to proselytize her.

  “You must have health insurance,” the woman said, giving Clare’s expensive new coat a once-over.

  “It’s more because I’m fairly new to the area,” Clare said. “I moved here a little over a year ago.” She glanced past the woman, toward the sedate brick facade of the Millers Kill Historical Society. So near and yet so far. “I’m actually headed for the historical society over there…”

  “The clinic provides free health care to residents who fall in the gap between private insurance and Medicaid. In other words, the working poor. Do you think that lower-income people should have substandard health services?”

  Clare blinked. “No, of course not.”

  “Dr. Rouse has been running the clinic for thirty years.” The woman compressed her generous mouth into a flat line, as if there were a lot more she would like to say about Dr. Rouse. “I’m circulating this petition because he continues to stockpile and administer vaccines containing thimerosal to the children of Millers Kill.”

  “What?” Clare had braced herself for an antiabortion screed; this sudden shift into the chemical composition of vaccines left her way off in left field. “I’m sorry, I don’t-what’s thimerosal?”

  The woman dug into her parka pocket and pulled out a brochure that looked like the product of someone’s newsletter-and-greeting-card software. She handed it to Clare. MERCURY AND AUTISM-HOW TO PROTECT YOUR CHILD, it read.

  “Thimerosal is a preservative that’s commonly used in vaccination serums. It’s almost fifty percent mercury, a poisonous metal, and exposure in children under the age of three may cause autism.” She caught Clare’s gaze and held it. She had big brown eyes, intense but not fanatical. “Do you have kids?”

  “No. I’m not married.”

  The woman let out a laugh. “I wish I had been that smart.” She moved closer to Clare and poked at the homemade pamphlet with a mitten. You’ve probably never heard, then, that recommended schedules for vaccinations have infants going in for first shots at six to eight weeks. Can you imagine injecting a two-month-old baby with mercury?”

  “No,” Clare said, interested in spite of herself. “But surely we were all vaccinated with the same stuff, and most of us are perfectly healthy. I mean, isn’t autism fairly rare?”

  “The rate of autistic-spectrum disorders has been increasing dramatically since 1990, when two major vaccines containing thimerosal were brought to market. It’s like a lot of potentially dangerous health hazards-not everyone who is exposed will be affected. There’s no way to know which children will or won’t develop autism or Asperger’s syndrome.”

  Clare glanced at the brochure in her hand, then at the clinic. On the second floor, she noticed, quilted white shades had been drawn behind the original four-over-four windows. Warmth or privacy? she wondered. “What’s this got to do with Dr. Rouse?”

  “Many major drug companies are now producing thimerosal-free vaccines due to public and governmental pressures. But there’s still a huge stockpile of the older stuff around, which drug companies can either destroy or”-she glared at the building-“sell on the cheap to clinics like ours.”

  “And Dr. Rouse is still using these vaccines?”

  “He’s not just using them. He continues to aggressively target lower-income children for vaccinations. He’s threatened to report parents who refuse to immunize their kids to DSS. To say parents who are concerned about exposing their kids to thimerosal are neglecting their children.”

  The light dawned. “Parents? You mean, like you?”

  The woman planted herself more squarely on the sidewalk. “Like me. My son developed autism when he was two, after undergoing every one of those vaccinations Dr. Rouse said he had to have. I never even questioned what they were putting into my baby. Now I’ve got another one, and I’ll be damned if I’ll expose her to any mercury-contaminated serum.”

  “I’m sorry,” Clare said. “But isn’t your quarrel more with whatever entity funds the clinic? If the doctor has to purchase older vaccines because of the cost, shouldn’t you lobby the town to give him more money with which to purchase the new stuff?”

  “I suspect”-here she dropped her voice-“that Dr. Rouse has personal financial reasons for continuing to buy the older serums.”

  Clare looked at the clinic again. One of the shades twitched. “You mean, he’s getting kickbacks from the drug companies?”

  “Who can say?” The woman spread her mittened hands. “I know he lives pretty cushy for a man whose salary has been paid by Millers Kill his whole life. Big house, a new car every three years, vacations in the tropics-better’n most of us are doing. I’m trying to get a referendum question to increase the clinic’s funding, with citizen oversight. But even if we can get more money, the budget is dependent on the tax revenues, and there wouldn’t be any change for up to a year after the referendum. In the meantime, babies are getting inoculated every day in this clinic. And parents are being intimidated into giving their consent to it. It’s not just the danger for autism, you know. The bacterial toxins in many of the common vaccines can cause retardation, disabilities, death-people have no idea. The nurse hands you a sheet of paper with a lot of small print on it while your baby is lying on the exam table screaming and you’re told you have to sign off. So you do.” She shifted the placard from one shoulder to the other. Clare could read, DR. ROUSE A DANGER TO OUR CHILDREN. “I wish to God I had educated myself before I put Skylar in his care.”

  A pickup had pulled into a snow-slick space across the street, and a woman and a small girl were crossing their way. “Ma’am,” the protestor called out, “are you aware that Dr. Rouse is trying to take away your right to make health care decisions about your daughter?”

  The mother squinted against the sun. “What’s that?”

  The door to the clinic banged open. “Get the hell off my sidewalk, Debba Clow! And leave those ladies alone!”

  A stocky man in his sixties stood in the doorway, his pale face mottled red, his white coat flapping as the cold air rushed past him into the heated vestibule beyond.

  “Dr. Rouse, I presume,” Claire said under her breath.

  “This is a public sidewalk and I have every right to be here!” the protestor shouted.

  “You’re assaulting my patients and practicing medicine without a license!”

  “I’m telling them what you won’t, you quack!”

  The red blotches on the doctor’s face turned purple. “That’s it! I’m calling the police! Then I’m calling the state! And then I’m calling my lawyer, who will sue you for defamation!” He disappeared back into the clinic, the door swinging shut behind him.

  The protestor-Debba Clow-spun around. “Is that the sort of man you want treating
your child?” she asked the mother, who responded by scooping the girl into her arms and hurrying up the stairs. Debba looked at Clare as if to say, You see what I have to fight against? “I better get out of here,” she said. “I don’t need any more trouble from the cops.” She yanked off one mitten, fished into her parka pocket, and extracted a business card. “You seem like an intelligent, concerned woman. Here’s my number. If you want to find out more, give me a call.”

  She tucked the placard beneath her arm and strode down the sidewalk. Clare looked at the card. It had a design of paint-saturated handprints running up one side. DEBORAH CLOW, ARTIST, it read.

  The artist herself stopped halfway to the next corner. “Hey, what’s your name?” she yelled.

  “Clare Fergusson,” Clare said loudly. Might as well come clean. She unzipped her parka so that her collar was clearly visible. “Rector of St. Alban’s Church.”

  Debba Clow grinned and pumped her arm. “Hot diggity,” she yelled. “I knew God was on my side!”

  ***

  Unlike the clinic, the historical society’s ornate brick Italianate building had no visible concessions to the twenty-first century. “I know,” Director Roxanne Lunt said, when Clare asked her about it. “We’re totally out of compliance with the Americans with Disabilities Act. We’re trying to get grant money for historically sensitive handicapped access. God help us if we’re forced into installing some monstrosity like they have next door. We’re keeping a low profile and praying we don’t get sued.”

  Roxanne Lunt was a sleek, well-fed woman whose streaky ash-blond hair was a testament to her colorist’s art. She had been excited to meet Clare, and ecstatic when Clare had committed to volunteering every Saturday afternoon through Lent. Clare was flattered to the point of embarrassment by Roxanne’s enthusiasm, until Clare had a chance to observe her on their tour of the historic house, and discovered Roxanne was excited about everything. Her high heels tap-tap-tapped through the public rooms with restless energy as she spoke passionately about grant writing, cataloging, preservation, architecture, and interior design. And that was just the parlor, drawing room, and kitchen.

  “I’m the only paid staff,” Roxanne said as they climbed the three flights of stairs to the collection storage rooms. “That’s why we so desperately need volunteers such as yourself.”

  “Are you full time?” Clare asked, her daydreams of solitary, monastic-like cataloging shredding before the raw energy of Hurricane Roxanne.

  “Oh, no, no, no, they can’t afford me full time. If I actually had to live on what they pay me, I’d be destitute. I work twenty hours a week here, that’s for love, and the rest of the time, I’m a Realtor, for the money.” She stopped on the landing in front of an oil of a dyspeptic-looking gentleman in black judge’s robes. “Jacob De-Weese. This was his house. His daughter bequeathed it to the historical society.” She tickled a mauve-lacquered fingernail beneath his painted chin. “They called him ‘the Hanging Judge.’ ”

  “He looks the part.”

  “It always surprises people when they hear what I do,” Roxanne went on, mounting the stairs. “I’m so passionate about preservation, they can’t believe I sell houses to keep body and soul together.”

  “I can believe it,” Clare said.

  Roxanne pinched a business card from her skirt pocket and gave it to Clare. This must be her day for collecting phone numbers. “Of course, you don’t need my services, with that delicious Dutch revival you have. That belongs to your church, right?”

  Clare nodded.

  “Well, tell them if they ever want to raise money, I can take it off their hands and get a sweet price for it. I could find a nice little condo for you, not too far out of town. And it’d be a lot easier on your budget than running that big house.”

  Clare pictured St. Alban’s leaking roof, which might as well be plugged with twenty-dollar bills for what it was going to cost to repair, and resolved to never, ever bring up to the vestry Roxanne Lunt’s name or the possibility of selling the rectory.

  “Here we are,” Roxanne caroled, turning the handle on a paneled oak door at least twice the thickness of its modern counterpart. She pressed a button in a brass light-plate, and three sets of frosted-glass globes sprang to life, illuminating dozens upon dozens of what looked like banker’s boxes stacked along the walls, butting up against a beautifully carved mantelpiece, half obscuring three tall windows running along the far wall. Clare could read descriptions in confident black marker on some of the nearest: LADIES VILLAGE IMPROVEMENT ASSOCIATION, 1916-1936 and LANGWORTHY FAMILY W/CIVIL WAR.

  “This was originally the nursery,” Roxanne said. “From back in the days when children were seen, not heard.” She led Clare through the maze of boxes toward the back of the room, where a wooden table was pushed up to a fourth window. It held a computer, a lamp, several heaps of old books, and a plastic caddy stuffed with office supplies.

  Clare leaned against the long refectory-style table to look out the windows. The ice-shrouded garden stretched out below, culminating in a green-roofed carriage house opening onto the back alley. She could see part of the clinic next door as well, shotgunning toward an identical carriage house in a series of additions that ate up any garden they might once have had.

  “What you’re going to do is very simple. You open a box, tag everything inside, and enter the descriptions into our electronic catalog,” Roxanne said, booting up the computer. “Nothing in this room’s been done. So feel free to read the notes on the outside of the boxes and start anywhere you like,” she explained, pulling up a padded folding chair and seating herself in front of the monitor. “We’ve tried to keep donations from families or institutions physically together, although we’ve taken them out of whatever god-awful decaying chests and albums they came to us in and stuck them in archival boxes. When possible, we’ve interleaved ephemera with acid-free tissue paper.”

  “Ephemera?”

  “Papers, letters, photos, that sort of thing. We’ve got three-hundred-year-old handbills touting the southern Adirondacks as the place for hardworking Scotsmen to get rich, we’ve got canal-era advertising calendars, we’ve got playbills for the Millers Kill opera house-”

  “Millers Kill had an opera house?” Clare couldn’t keep the disbelief out of her voice.

  Roxanne laughed. “This was a very lively town before the mills closed down. We had touring grand opera in the nineteenth century. We had a luxury hotel near the train station for people traveling up to the park for the summer, quite elegant. In the twenties and thirties, after the Sacandaga was dammed and the lakes were created, we had our own airport with floatplanes. And, of course, during Prohibition this whole strip along Route 9 was known as ‘Bootleggers Alley,’ with rumrunners dashing between Canada and New York City and supplying speakeasies. We have a small collection of fabulous jazz recordings made in Millers Kill clubs where you had to knock three times and whisper ‘Joe sent me’ to get in.” Roxanne’s cheeks glowed with enthusiasm. “Of course, that was then, as they say. I’m afraid our big draw nowadays is peace, quiet, and affordable housing prices.”

  Clare thought of the confrontation between the doctor and Debba Clow. “Oh, I don’t know about that. I think it’s still a very lively town. You just have to know where to look.”

  Chapter 5

  NOW

  Friday, March 10

  Clare’s 10:30 counseling session with the Garrettsons was running over. Liz Garrettson’s mother, a source of frequent conflict in the Garrettson home, had deteriorated to the point where she was going to have to be institutionalized or move in with her daughter and son-in-law. Liz and Tim circled around Liz’s anger and his impatience, two people punching at a sandbag filled with guilt. It was exhausting just being in the same room with them, and Clare couldn’t help glancing at her Apache helicopter clock as the minutes ticked past noon. The only thing worse than being late to a vestry meeting was being late to an emergency meeting she had scheduled herself.

  Finally
ushering them out of her office with a promise to put them in touch with Paul Foubert, the Infirmary’s director, Clare cocked an ear for any sounds of conversation or argument drifting down the hall. Nothing. She opened the meeting-room door and stepped into the underheated splendor of a wood-paneled, Persian-carpeted gallery that appeared to have been assumed bodily from Oxford. No one was there.

  “Lois,” she said, sticking her head into the church office, “I’ve lost the vestry.”

  The church secretary tilted her head, allowing her razor-cut strawberry blond bob to swing just so, against her jaw. “And this is a bad thing… how?”

  “Lois.”

  “They’re in the church. Taking a look at the indoor waterworks.”

  “Everybody here?”

  “Even the newbie. Let’s hope they don’t chew him up and spit him out.”

  Clare glanced over at the pink message slips accumulating on a lethally sharp spike. “Anything urgent?”

  “Yes. You had a call from Hugh Parteger.” Lois’s British accent was devastatingly accurate. “ ‘Lois, love, tell the vicar to give me a call sometime soon. She can’t spend all her time in prayer and good works. She has to be naughty sometimes.’ ” Lois looked at her significantly.

  Clare laughed. “He’s really a very nice guy.” She had met Hugh last year while he was summering in Saratoga. Since he worked for a merchant bank in New York City, they had developed a very long distance relationship, which suited her just fine. She had seen him three or four times since August, and spoke with him every other week or so.

  “He’s got money, manners, and he actually calls you. Of course he’s a nice guy,” Lois said. “Are you going to get back to him?” She nudged the phone toward Clare.

  “Eventually,” Clare said. “Right now, the most important man in my life is the structural engineer. Where did I leave that copy of the estimate the vestry got a few years back?”