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

by Noah Gordon

  She told him about the harassing calls. “Isn’t there equipment the phone company offers now that gives you the telephone number for every call?”

  “Yeah, Caller ID. The service costs a few dollars a month, and you have to buy a piece of equipment that costs about the same as an answering machine. But you’re left with a bunch of phone numbers, and New England Telephone won’t reveal who they belong to.

  “If I tell them it’s a police matter, they’ll set up an annoyance call trap. That service is free, but they’ll charge you three dollars and twenty-five cents for every number they trace and identify.” Mack sighed. “The trouble is, R.J., these creeps who are calling are organized. They know all about this equipment, and all you’re going to get is a lot of numbers that belong to pay phones, a different pay phone for every call.”

  “So you don’t think it’s worth trying to trace them?”

  He shook his head.

  They saw nothing on the wood trail. “I’d bet a year’s pay they’re long gone,” he said. “But here’s the thing, these woods are deep. Lots of places to hide a pickup truck off the road. So I’d like you to lock your doors and windows tonight. I’m off at nine o’clock, and Bill Peters is the night man. We’ll keep driving by your house, and we’ll keep our eyes peeled. Okay?”

  “Okay.”

  It was a long, hot night, and it passed slowly. Several times headlights coming down the road sent light dancing into her bedroom. The car always slowed when it passed her house; she assumed it was Bill Peters in the squad car.

  Toward dawn the heat was stifling. Keeping the windows closed on the second floor was silly, she decided, since she would certainly hear it if anyone set a ladder against the house. She lay in bed and enjoyed the coolness from the window, and a little after five o’clock the coyotes started to howl behind the house. That was a good sign, she thought; if humans were in the woods, probably the coyotes wouldn’t howl.

  She had read somewhere that much of the time the howling was sexual invitation, used to arrange mating, and she smiled as she listened: Aa-ooo-ooo-ooo-ooo-yip-yip-yip. Here I am, I’m ready, come and take me.

  It had been a long time of abstinence for her. Humans, after all, were animals too, as ready for sex as the coyotes, and she lay back and opened her mouth and let the sound come out. “Aa-ooo-ooo-ooo-yip-yip-yip.” She and the pack howled back and forth as the night turned pearly gray, and she smiled to realize she could be so scared and so horny, all at the same time.

  44

  EARLY CONCERT

  It was a rich summer of joys and sadnesses for R.J., practicing among people she had come to admire for their many strengths and for the humanness of their frailties. Janet Cantwell’s mother, Elena Allen, had been suffering with diabetes mellitus for eighteen years, and finally circulatory problems had developed into gangrene that forced the amputation of her right leg. With trepidation, R.J. was treating atherosclerotic lesions on her left leg as well. Elena was eighty years old, with a mind perky as a sparrow. On crutches, she showed R.J. her prize-winning late lilies and huge tomatoes, already beginning to ripen. Elena tried to foist some of her surplus zucchini onto the doctor.

  “I have my own squash,” R.J. protested, laughing. “Would you like to accept some of mine?”

  “Glory, no!”

  Every gardener in Woodfield grew zucchini. Gregory Hinton said that anyone who parked a car on Main Street had better lock it, because if he didn’t, when he came back to it he would find that somebody had put zucchini in the backseat.

  Greg Hinton, R.J.’s early critic, had become her loyal supporter and friend, and it wounded her when he developed small-cell lung cancer. By the time he came to her, coughing and wheezing, he was in trouble. He was seventy. He had been a two-pack-a-day cigarette smoker from the time he was fifteen, and he thought there were other causes of the disease as well. “Everybody says how healthy it is to be a farmer, to work out of doors and all that. They don’t think of the poor fella inhaling hay chaff in closed barns, and breathing in chemical fertilizers and weedkillers all the time. It’s an unhealthy job in lots of ways.”

  R.J. sent him to an oncologist in Greenfield. When an MRI showed a small, ring-shaped shadow in his brain, R.J. comforted him after radiation treatments and administered chemotherapy and suffered with him.

  But there were also positive moments and weeks. There hadn’t been a mortality all summer, and R.J.’s environment was fecund. Toby’s abdomen had begun to expand like a popcorn bag in a microwave oven. She was racked with morning sickness that extended into the afternoon and evening. She found that intensely cold sparkling water containing slices of lemon helped to quell the nausea, so between vomitings she sat behind her desk in R.J.’s office holding a tall glass whose ice tinkled as she took small, dignified swallows. R.J. had scheduled her for amniocentesis in the seventeenth week of pregnancy.

  Other births already had caused ripples in the placid surface of the town. On a moist day of dreadful humidity R.J. had delivered Jessica Garland of triplets, two girls and a boy. They had known for a long time that three babies were coming, but after the uneventful birth the whole community celebrated. It was R.J.’s first delivery of triplets, and probably her last, for she had decided to refer all maternity cases to Gwen after the Gablers moved into the hills. The babies were named Clara, Julia, and John. R.J. once had thought that country doctors had babies named for them, but she supposed that no longer happened.

  One morning when Gregory Hinton came to the office for his chemotherapy, he lingered.

  “They tell me, Dr. Cole, that you perform abortions in Springfield.”

  The formal address put her on guard; for some time he had been calling her R.J. But the question didn’t take her by surprise; she had been careful not to be secretive about what she was doing. “Yes, I do, Greg. I go to the clinic there every Thursday.”

  He nodded. “We’re Catholics. Did you know that?”

  “No, I didn’t.”

  “Oh, yes. I was born here and raised Congregational. Stacia was raised a Catholic. She was Stacia Kwiatkowski. Her father was a chicken farmer in Sunderland. One Saturday night she and a couple of girlfriends came to a dance at the Woodfield town hall, and that’s where I met her. After we were married, it seemed simpler to go to one church, and I started to attend hers. No Catholic church here in town, of course, but we go to Holy Name of Jesus, in South Deerfield. Eventually, I converted.

  “We have a niece lives in Colrain, Rita Hinton, my brother Arthur’s daughter. They’re Congregational. Rita was going to Syracuse University, got herself pregnant, and the boy took off. Rita quit school, had the child, a little girl. My sister-in-law Helen takes care of the baby, and Rita does housecleaning to support her. We’re very proud of our niece.”

  “You certainly should be proud of her. If that’s what she chose to do, you should support her and be happy for her.”

  “The point is,” he said quietly, “we can’t abide abortion.”

  “I don’t like abortion much myself, Greg.”

  “Then why do you do it?”

  “Because the people who come to that clinic are in desperate need of help. A lot of women would die if they didn’t have a safe, clean abortion option. It doesn’t matter to one of those women what any other pregnant woman did or didn’t do, or what you think, or what I think, or what this group or that group thinks. The only thing that matters to her is what’s happening in her own body and soul, and she must personally decide what she has to do in order to survive.” She looked into his eyes. “Can you understand that?”

  After a moment, he nodded. “I believe I can,” he said grudgingly.

  “I’m glad,” she said.

  Still, she didn’t want to go on dreading the approach of Thursdays. When she had agreed to help out she had told Barbara Eustis her participation would be temporary, only until Eustis had an opportunity to recruit other doctors. On the final Thursday in August, R.J. went to Springfield intending to give Eustis notic
e that she was through.

  A demonstration was in progress when she drove past the clinic. As usual, she parked several blocks away and walked back. One effect of the Clinton administration’s influence was that now police officers had to keep the demonstrators across the street, where they could no longer physically impede the progress of anyone entering the clinic building. Still, as a car turned into the clinic driveway, the signs and placards were shaken and raised into the air, and the shouting began.

  Through a bullhorn: “Mommy, don’t kill me! Mommy, don’t kill me!”

  “Mother, don’t kill your baby!”

  “Turn back. Save a life.”

  Someone must have identified R.J. when she was half a dozen steps from the door.

  “Murderer … murderer … murderer … murderer …”

  Just before she went inside, she saw that the window of the administration office had been broken. The inside door of the office was open, and Barbara Eustis was on her hands and knees, picking up shards of glass.

  “Hi,” she said calmly.

  “Good morning. I wanted to talk to you for a moment, but obviously …”

  “No, come in, R.J. Always have time for you.”

  “I’m a little early. Let me help you pick up the glass. Whatever happened?”

  “Not what, who. A boy maybe thirteen years old came walking past all by himself, carrying a paper bag. Right under my window, he took that out of the bag and threw it.”

  A rock the size of a baseball was sitting on Barbara’s desk. R.J. could see that it had hit a corner of the desk and splintered it. “It’s good it didn’t land on your head. Were you cut by the glass?”

  Eustis shook her head. “I was in the ladies’ room at the time. Very lucky, a providential urge.”

  “Did the kid belong to one of the demonstrators?”

  “We don’t know. He ran up the street and down an alley that goes to Forbes Avenue. Police searched but they never found him. Probably he was picked up by a waiting car.”

  “Lord. They’re using children. Barbara, what’s going to happen? Where are we heading with this thing?”

  “Into tomorrow, doctor. The United States Supreme Court has upheld the legality of abortion in this country. And now the government has okayed the testing of the abortion pill.”

  “You think it will make a real difference?”

  “I think it will make every difference.” Eustis dumped pieces of glass into her wastebasket, swore, sucked a fingertip. “RU-486 should test fine in the United States, because it’s already been in use for years in France, England, and Sweden.

  “Once physicians are able to administer the pills and give follow-up treatment in the privacy of their offices, the war will have been won, more or less. Lots of people still will have very strong moral objections to abortion, of course, and they’ll still hold demonstrations from time to time. But when women can terminate a pregnancy just by dropping in on their family doctor, the abortion struggle will pretty much be over. It’s impossible for them to protest everywhere.”

  “When will it happen?”

  “It will take about two more years, I think. In the meantime, our job is just to hold on somehow. There are fewer and fewer doctors working in the clinics every day. In the entire state of Mississippi, there’s only one man who performs abortions. In North Dakota, only one woman does them. Doctors your age won’t do this work. A lot of the clinics are open only because elderly, retired physicians staff them.” She smiled. “Old doctors have brass balls, R.J., a lot more courage than the younger physicians. Why is that?”

  “Maybe they have less to lose than younger doctors. The younger ones still have families to raise and careers to build and worry about.”

  “Yeah. Well, thank God for the old ones. You’re a real exception, R.J. I’d give anything to find another doc like you.… So tell me—what is it you want to talk about?”

  R.J. dropped pieces of glass into the basket and shook her head.

  “It’s growing late, I’d better get to work. It wasn’t important, Barbara. I’ll catch you some other time.”

  On Friday evening she was making vegetable stir-fry for supper and listening to the radio, Mozart’s Violin Concerto, when Toby telephoned.

  “Are you watching television?”

  “No.”

  “Oh, God, R.J. Turn it on.”

  In Florida, a sixty-seven-year-old physician named John Bayard Britton had been shot and killed outside the abortion clinic where he worked. The weapon, a shotgun, had been fired by a fundamentalist Protestant minister named Paul Hill. The murder had taken place in the city of Pensacola, in the same city in which, in the previous year, Michael Griffin had killed Dr. David Gunn. R.J. sat and listened to detail after detail, scarcely moving. When the stink of burning cabbage brought her from her trance she leaped to turn off her supper and dump the smoldering mess into the kitchen sink, then she came back and watched some more.

  The assassin Hill had approached the doctor’s car just as it had pulled up to the door and had fired the shotgun into the front seat of the car at point-blank range.

  The car door and window were riddled, and the doctor had died at once. In the car with him were two volunteer escorts, a man in his seventies seated with Dr. Britton in the front, who was also killed, and the man’s wife, seated in the rear, who was hospitalized.

  The newscaster said Dr. Britton hadn’t liked abortion but had worked at the clinic in order that women might have a choice.

  There were film clips of the Reverend Paul Hill being interviewed at earlier demonstrations, during which he had praised Michael Griffin for eliminating Dr. Gunn.

  There were interviews with anti-abortion religious leaders who decried violence and murder. There was a sound bite of the leader of a national anti-abortion organization who declared that his group found the murder regrettable; but the network then showed the same man exhorting his followers to pray that calamity would come to any doctor who performed abortions.

  A news analyst recounted the recent setbacks that had occurred to the anti-abortion movement in the United States. “In the light of these new laws and attitudes, more acts of violence are expected from the most radical individuals and groups within the movement,” he said.

  R.J. sat on her couch, hugging herself very tightly, as if she couldn’t get warm. Even after the news broadcast was replaced by a game show, she remained transfixed by the flickering screen.

  All weekend she steeled herself for trouble. She remained inside the house behind locked doors and shuttered windows, wearing little clothing in the heat, trying to read and to sleep.

  Early Sunday morning she left the house to make an emergency house call. When she returned, she locked the door again.

  On Monday when she went to work, she parked off Main Street and approached the office on foot. Three houses away, she turned into a driveway. The backyards were unfenced, and she walked to her office and entered through the rear door.

  All day at work she was distracted. That night she lay sleepless, a bundle of nerves because the harassing telephone calls had stopped. She flinched at every sound, each time the old house creaked or the refrigerator motor shuddered into life.

  Finally at three A.M. she got out of bed and opened all the windows and unlocked the doors.

  Barefoot, she carried a folding chair outside and set it by the raised beds of her vegetable garden. Then she went back to the house and brought the viola da gamba outside and sat under the stars, digging her toes into the grass and drawing out of the instrument a chaconne by Marais, a piece she had been working on. It sounded wonderful in the black morning air, and as she played, she pictured the animals in the woods listening to the strange and mystical sounds. She made mistakes but didn’t care; it was music to serenade lettuce by.

  The music was a transfusion of courage, and after that she was able to behave calmly. She drove to the office next day and parked in her usual place. She functioned normally with her patients. Every morni
ng she found time to walk the trail before work, and when she returned in the afternoon she weeded the garden. She replanted bush beans and arugula that had gone to seed.

  On Wednesday Barbara Eustis telephoned and told her it had been arranged that volunteers would pick her up and drive her to the clinic.

  “No. No volunteers.”

  “Why not?”

  “Nothing’s going to happen, I feel it. Besides, volunteers didn’t help that doctor in Florida very much.”

  “All right. But you drive right into the parking lot. There will be someone there, holding the parking space next to the door. And there are more police cars here than we’ve ever seen before, so we’re very secure.”

  “Fine,” R.J. said.

  On Thursday, panic returned.

  She was grateful when a police cruiser picked her up at the Springfield line and followed her discreetly, a couple of cars behind, all the way across the city.

  There were no demonstrators. One of the clinic secretaries was holding the parking space, as promised.

  Her day turned out to be uneventful and easy, and by the time the last case was finished, even Barbara was visibly relaxed. The police, and nobody else, followed her all the way back to the city line, and suddenly she was again just one of the many drivers going north on 1-91.

  When she reached home, she was happy to see that a small bag had been left on the front porch. The bag contained tender new potatoes the size of golf balls and a note from George Palmer telling her to enjoy them boiled, with butter and a little fresh dill. They cried out to be accompanied by trout, so she dug a few worms and collected her fishing rod.

  It was seasonably warm. As the trail entered the woods the coolness was like a welcome. The sun through the tree canopy cast a rich dappled pattern.

  When the man moved out of the deepest shade, it was like her fantasies of an attack by the bear. She had time to see that he was large and bearded, long-haired as Christ, then her arm rose and fell, the fishing rod whipped across the upper part of his body, and she was striking at him. The fishing rod snapped but she kept striking at him because suddenly she knew who he was.