The Cole Trilogy: The Physician, Shaman, and Matters of Choice

by Noah Gordon

  “Hey. You’re some cook.”

  “I like to potchky around.”

  Dessert was homemade vanilla ice cream, with a blueberry torte he’d baked that morning. She found herself telling him about the religious mixture of her clan. “There are Protestant Coles and Quaker Regensbergs. And Jewish Coles and Jewish Regensbergs. And atheists. And my cousin Marcella Regensberg, who is a Franciscan nun at a convent in Virginia. We have something of everything.”

  Over the second cup of coffee she learned something about him that was astounding. The “graduate study” about which he had been vague was completed at the Jewish Theological Seminary of America, in New York.

  “You’re a what?”

  “A rabbi. At least, I was ordained, a long time ago. I worked at it only a while.”

  “Why did you quit? Did you have a congregation?”

  “I just …” He shrugged again. “I was too full of questions and insecurities to take a congregation. I had begun to doubt, I couldn’t make up my mind about the existence of God. And I felt a congregation at least deserved a rabbi who had made up his mind about that.”

  “And how do you feel now? Have you made up your mind since then?”

  Abraham Lincoln looked at her for a long moment. How could blue eyes become so sad, hold such fleeting pain? He slowly shook his head. “Jury’s still out.”

  He didn’t blurt things. It was only after weeks of seeing him often that she learned details. When he had finished at the seminary he had gone directly into the army, ninety days at officers’ school and then right to Vietnam as a second lieutenant chaplain. It was comparatively cushy work, safely behind the lines at a large hospital in Saigon. He had spent his days with the maimed and dying, his evenings writing letters to their families, and he had absorbed their fears and anger long before his own body was injured.

  One day he was riding in the back of a troop carrier with two Catholic chaplains, Major Joseph Fallon and Lieutenant Bernard Towers, and they were caught in the street during a rocket attack. There was a direct hit on the front of the vehicle; in the rear seat the blast was narrow and selective. Bucky Towers, seated on the left, was destroyed. Joe Fallon, seated in the middle, lost his right leg at the knee. David suffered a serious wound in his left leg, into the bone. It required three operations, long recovery. Now his left leg was shorter than the right, but the limp was negligible, she hadn’t even noticed it.

  He had returned to New York when discharged and delivered one guest sermon in application for a job. It was in Bay Path, Long Island, at Temple Beth Shalom, the House of Peace. He spoke of keeping peace in a complex world. Halfway through the sermon, he looked up to where the temple decorating committee had placed a large plaque emblazoned with the first of Maimonides’ Thirteen Articles of Faith: I have perfect faith that the Creator, blessed be His name, is the author and guide of everything that has been created; and that He alone has made, does make, and will make all things.

  It came to him in a moment of frozen terror that he could not with certainty agree, and he had somehow stumbled to the end of the sermon.

  He had applied to Lever Brothers as a real estate trainee, an agnostic rabbi too full of doubt to be anybody’s clergyman.

  “Could you still marry people?”

  He had an attractive, slightly twisted smile. “I suppose I could. Once a rabbi …”

  “It would make a great combination of signs. MARRYIN’ MARKUS. Right under I’M-IN-LOVE-WITH-YOU HONEY.”

  18

  A FELINE INTIMACY

  R.J. hadn’t fallen in love with David Markus all at once. It had started as a small seed, an admiration of his face and strong, long fingers, a response to the timbre of his voice, to the softness in his eyes. But to her surprise—even to her fear—the seed had flowered, feeling had grown. They hadn’t fallen into each other’s arms—as if with their very patience, their mature caution, they were telling one another something. But on a rainy Saturday afternoon in his house, his daughter safely at the one-dollar movie in Northampton with friends, they kissed with a familiarity that also had grown.

  He complained to her that he was having trouble describing a woman’s body in his novel. “Artists and photographers simply use models, a sensible solution.”

  Very sensible, she agreed.

  “So will you pose for me?”

  She shook her head. “No. You’ll have to write from memory.” Already they were unbuttoning buttons.

  “You’re a virgin,” he said.

  She didn’t remind him that she was a divorced woman, and forty-two years old.

  “And I’ve never seen a woman before, we’re both brand-new, blank pages.”

  Suddenly, they were. They inspected one another at length. R.J. found she had a hard time breathing. He was slow and very gentle, at first controlling the urgency and making it better, treating her as if she were made of very fine breakable stuff, without words letting her know things that were important. Both of them quickly became almost crazy.

  Afterward they lay as though comatose, still joined. When finally she turned her head, she looked into the unblinking green eyes of the cat. Agunah was seated on her haunches on a bedside chair, watching intently. R.J. had the certain knowledge that the cat understood exactly what had just been done.

  “David, if this is a test, I have failed. Get her out of here.”

  He laughed. “It isn’t a test.”

  He disengaged, took out the cat and closed the door, came back. The second time was slower, calmer, and filled R.J. with happiness. He was considerate and generous. She explained that her orgasms were apt to be long and full, but once she had had one, the next one usually was somewhere a few days down the road. She was embarrassed in the telling, certain that his last lover had had climaxes like firecrackers, but he proved easy to talk to.

  Eventually, he left her in the bed and made their supper. The door was left open again, and the cat returned to the room and the chair, but R.J. didn’t mind, and she lay there and listened to David singing Puccini off-key and sounding very happy. The scent of their joining mingled with the perfume of his omelets, onions and peppers and tiny zucchinis frying until they were sweet as his kisses, rich as the promise of life. Later, when she and David lay next to one another, dozing, Agunah settled herself at the foot of the bed between their feet. When R.J. became accustomed, she liked it.

  “Thank you for giving me a wonderful experience, all those important little details to write about.”

  She glowered. “I’ll cut your heart out.”

  “You already have,” he told her gallantly.

  One out of every six patients who came to her didn’t have medical insurance of any kind. A number of them didn’t have the twenty dollars she had set as her fee for treating the uninsured. From some, she accepted payment in kind. She accumulated six cords of hardwood, split and stacked behind her house. She acquired a once-a-week cleaning woman for the house and another for the office. She got a regular supply of dressed chickens and turkeys and several sources of fresh vegetables, berries and flowers.

  She was amused by the barter but worried about cash and about her debts.

  She developed a clinical technique for working with patients who lacked insurance, aware that she would have to try to reverse ailments long neglected. But it wasn’t people with complicated problems who bothered her most, it was those who didn’t come at all because they couldn’t pay and were too proud to accept charity. People like that sought out a doctor only in extremity, when it was too late to help them: the diabetes had resulted in blindness, the tumors had metastasized. R.J. saw several of these cases right from the start. She could do nothing but rage silently at the system and treat them.

  She depended on word of mouth to get her message out into the hills: When you’re sick, when you hurt, come to the new woman doctor. If you don’t have insurance, she makes arrangements about the money.

  As a result, some of the disenfranchised did come to her. Even when she didn’
t want their barter, some of them insisted. A man with Parkinson’s disease fought his tremors to weave her an ash splint basket. A woman with ovarian cancer was making her a patchwork quilt. But many more people were scattered throughout the hills without insurance and without any kind of medical care at all. She knew it, and it ate at her.

  She continued to see a great deal of David. To her surprise and regret, the warmth Sarah had shown toward her at their first meeting soon was noticeably lacking. R.J. understood that the girl was jealous of her, and she talked it over with David.

  “It’s natural that she should feel threatened by a woman who suddenly is occupying a good deal of her father’s life,” she said.

  He nodded. “We’ll just have to give her time to get used to it.”

  That presupposed that the two of them were on a course she wasn’t certain she wanted to follow. David was being honest about the way they had come to feel about one another. She was just as honest, with herself as well as with David.

  “I just want to continue things the way they are, without making heavy plans for the future. It’s too early for me to think about a lasting relationship. I have goals to accomplish here. I want to become established in the town as its doctor, and I’m not looking to make a permanent personal commitment right now.”

  David seemed to latch on to the words right now and to take encouragement from them. “Fine. We have to give ourselves time,” he said.

  She was full of uncertainties, unable to know her own mind, but she found it possible to tell him about her hopes, and of her worries about money.

  “I don’t know medical economics, but there should be enough of a practice here to give you a damn fine income, mucho dough.”

  “It doesn’t have to be damn fine. I just need to get by. I don’t have anybody to support but myself.”

  “Still … why merely to get by?” He looked at her the way her father had.

  “I don’t care about money. What I care about is practicing world-class medicine in this small town.”

  “That makes you some kind of saint,” he said almost fearfully.

  “Get real. No saint would do what I just did to you,” she said practically, and grinned at him.

  19

  THE HOUSE ON THE VERGE

  Slowly she and Peg and Toby worked the kinks out of the office routine. Slowly, too, R.J. learned the rhythms of the town and grew familiar with its pace. She sensed that people she met liked to nod and say “Hello, Doctor!”, felt their pride in the fact that the town had a physician again. She began making house calls, seeking out the homes of the bedridden, traveling to patients who found it difficult or impossible to get to medical care. When she had the time and they offered a piece of pie and a cup of coffee she sat with them at their kitchen tables and talked about town politics and the weather, and copied recipes into her prescription pad.

  Woodfield sprawled over forty-two square miles of rugged country, and sometimes she was called into neighboring townships as well. Summoned by a boy who hiked three and a half miles to get to a phone, she went to a cabin on top of Houghton’s Mountain and strapped a sprained ankle for Lewis Magoun, a sheep farmer. When she came down the mountain and drove back to the office, she found Toby harried and anxious. “Seth Rushton has had a heart attack. They called you first thing, but when I couldn’t reach you, I telephoned the ambulance.”

  R.J. drove to the Rushton farm to find that the ambulance had already left for Greenfield. Rushton was treated and was resting comfortably, but it was a valuable lesson. The following morning R.J. drove to Greenfield and bought a cellular bag phone. She kept it in the car, and she was never out of touch with her office again.

  Now and then, as she made her way about the town, she passed Sarah Markus. She always sounded the horn and waved. Sometimes Sarah waved back.

  Whenever David brought R.J. to the log house while Sarah was home, she could feel Sarah’s watchful eyes as the girl analyzed everything that was said.

  Driving home from the office one afternoon, R.J. passed Sarah galloping Chaim the other way. She admired how well the girl sat the horse, how effortlessly she posted, her dark hair streaming behind her. R.J. didn’t toot a greeting, for fear of spooking the animal.

  A few days later, sitting in her living room, R.J. glanced out of the window and saw, through the gaps between the apple trees, that Sarah Markus was walking her horse along Laurel Hill Road very slowly while she studied R.J.’s house.

  R.J. was interested in Sarah in part because of the girl’s father, but also because of Sarah herself, and perhaps for another reason. Somewhere in the back of her mind was an amorphous picture, a possibility she didn’t dare to consider yet—the concept of the three of them together, she, David, and this girl as her daughter.

  A few minutes later, horse and rider came back down Laurel Hill Road the other way, the girl still taking in the house and the land with her eyes. Then, when they had reached the end of the property, Sarah kicked her heels and Chaim began to trot.

  For the first time in a long while, R.J. allowed herself to think of the pregnancy that had miscarried after Charlie Harris died. If that baby had been born, she would be thirteen years old, three years younger than Sarah.

  She waited by the window, hoping Sarah would turn the horse and ride past again.

  One day when she came home from the office at dusk, R.J. found that a heart-shaped rock, as large as her hand, had been left on her porch by the front door.

  It was a beautiful heartrock composed of two outer layers of dark gray stone and an inner layer of lighter rock that sparkled with mica.

  She knew who had left it. But was it a gift of approval? A signal of truce? It was too pretty to be a declaration of war, R.J. felt certain.

  She was happy to get it, and she took it inside and set it on the living room mantel next to her mother’s brass candlesticks, a place of honor.

  Frank Sotheby stood on the porch of his general store and cleared his throat. “I think they should both of them see a nurse, mebbe, Dr. Cole? The two of them live all by themselves with a bunch of cats in that apartment above the hardware store. The smell. Whew.”

  “You mean right down the street? How come I’ve never seen them?”

  “Well, because they don’t ever come out, hardly. One of ’em, Miss Eva Goodhue, is old as sin, and the other one, Miz Helen Phillips, that’s Eva’s niece, is lots younger but more’n a little dotty. They take care of each other after a fashion.” He hesitated. “Eva calls me Fridays with her grocery list. I carry ’em an order every week. Well … her last check was refused by the bank. Insufficient funds.”

  The dark, narrow stairway had no light bulb. At the top of the stairs R.J. knocked, and after she had stood there for a long time, she knocked harder. Again and again.

  She heard no footsteps, but she sensed slight movement behind the door. “Hello?”

  “Who is it?”

  “It’s Roberta Cole. I’m the doctor.”

  “From Dr. Thorndike?”

  Oh, baby. “Dr. Thorndike has been … gone … a good while. I’m the doctor now. Please … am I speaking to Miss Goodhue or Mrs. Phillips?”

  “Eva Goodhue. What do you want?”

  “Well, I’d like to meet you, Miss Goodhue, to say hello. Will you kindly open the door and invite me in?”

  There was silence behind the door. The moment stretched and stretched. The silence thickened.

  “Miss Goodhue?”

  At last R.J. sighed. “I’ve got a new office right down the street from you. Just down Main Street, first floor at Sally Howland’s house. If you should ever need a doctor, either one of you, just telephone or send somebody to fetch me, okay?” She took one of her cards and slipped it under the door. “Okay, Miss Goodhue?”

  But there was no answer, and she went back down the stairs.

  When she and Tom had made their infrequent trips to the country, sometimes they had seen an occasional glimpse of wildlife, rabbits and squirrels, chipmunks
who nested in the overhang woodshed. But now that she lived in the house every day, she witnessed through the windows a variety of wild neighbors she hadn’t met before. She learned to keep her binoculars at close hand.

  From the kitchen window, one gray dawn, she saw a bobcat amble insolently across the meadow. From her home office overlooking the wet pasture, she saw four otter, up from the river to hunt in the marsh, running in a single undulating file so close to one another they appeared to be the curves of a serpent, a Loch Ness monster in her wet pasture. She saw turtles and snakes, a fat old woodchuck who ate the clover in the meadow every day, and a porcupine that waddled out of the woods to munch the early drop of tiny pale-green apples under the trees. The thickets and trees were full of songbirds and raptors. Without trying she saw a great blue heron and several varieties of hawk. From her front porch she witnessed a horned owl come down, fast as doom and soft as a whisper, and take a running vole from the meadow. Up, out, and away.

  She described what she had seen to Janet Cantwell. The town selectwoman taught biology at the university in Amherst. “It’s because your house is on a verge, a meeting of several different environments. Wet pasture, dry meadow, deep woods containing ponds, the good river running through the whole thing. Creatures find wonderful hunting.”

  As R.J. traveled the countryside she saw properties with names. Some signs were self-acknowledgments: SCHROEDER’S TEN ACRES, RANSOME’S TREE FARM, PETERSON’S REWARD. Others were droll: DUNROVIN and IT’S OUR PLACE; or descriptive: TEN OAKS, WINDCREST, WALNUT HILL. Some of the names were too precious. She’d have enjoyed calling her place Catamount River Farm, but for many years that name had been on a house a mile upstream; besides, it would have been presumptuous to call her property a farm nowadays.

  David, that man of many facets, had a basement full of power tools and had offered to make it possible for the new doctor to hang out a shingle.