by Noah Gordon
“It’s all there,” she said.
He sat and held it, examining it. He riffled through it, hefted it.
“It’s so good, David.”
“You read it?”
“Yes. How could you just abandon it like that?” The question was so absurd, even she had to laugh, and he put it into perspective.
“I walked away from you, didn’t I?”
People in the town had various reactions to the news that he had come back and was living with her. At the office, Peggy told R.J. she was happy for her. Toby said reassuring things but was unable to hide her apprehension. She had grown up with a father who drank, and R.J. knew her friend was afraid of what the future held for someone who loved an addict.
Toby quickly changed the subject. “We’re about reaching saturation point in the waiting room every day, and you never get to go home at a reasonable hour anymore.”
“How many patients do we have now, Toby?”
“Fourteen hundred and forty-two.”
“I guess we’d better not take any more new patients once we reach fifteen hundred.”
Toby nodded. “Fifteen hundred is exactly what I figured would be right. The trouble is, R.J., some days you get several new patients. And are you really going to be able to send people away untreated once you reach fifteen hundred?”
R.J. sighed. They both knew the answer. “Where are the new patients coming from, mostly?” she asked.
Together, they huddled over the computer screen and pored over a map of the county. It was easy to see that she was drawing patients from the far outskirts of her territory, mostly in towns to the west of Woodfield, where people had an extremely long trip to get to a doctor in Greenfield or Pittsfield.
“We need a doctor right here,” Toby said, placing her finger on the map at the town of Bridgeton. “There would be lots of patients for her—or him,” she said with a quick smile. “And it would make life a lot easier for you, not having to go that far for house calls.”
R.J. nodded. That night she telephoned Gwen, who was involved with the task of moving her household three quarters of the way across the continent. They discussed the patient population at length, and over the next couple of days R.J. wrote letters to the chiefs of medicine of several hospitals with good residency programs, including details of the needs and possibilities of the hill towns.
David had gone to Greenfield and brought home a computer, a printer, and a folding worktable, which he set up in the guest room. He was writing again. And he had made a difficult telephone call to his publisher, fearing that maybe Elaine Cataldo, his editor, no longer was working there, or perhaps had lost interest in the novel. But Elaine came on the line and spoke to him, very carefully at first. She voiced frank concerns about his dependability, but after they talked at length, she told him she had suffered terrible personal losses too, and that the only thing to do was to go on with life. She encouraged him to finish the book and said she would work out a new publication schedule.
Twelve days after David’s return, there was a scratching at the front door. When he opened it, Agunah came in. She walked around and around him, pressing her furry body against his legs, reclaiming him with her scent. When he picked her up, her tongue lapped at his face.
He petted her for a long time. When finally he set her down on the floor, she walked through every room before she lay down on the rug in front of the fireplace and went to sleep.
This time she didn’t run away.
Suddenly, R.J. found herself sharing her household. At David’s suggestion, he bought and prepared their food, provided the firewood, did the household chores, and paid the electric bill.
All of R.J.’s needs were tended to, and she no longer came home to an empty house when her work was done. It was a perfect arrangement.
48
THE FOSSIL
Gwen and her family arrived the Saturday after Labor Day, exhausted and cranky after three days of driving. The house she and Phil had bought overlooking the Deerfield River in Charlemont had been cleaned and was ready, but the moving van with all their furniture had broken down in Illinois and would be two days late. R.J. insisted that they move into her guest room for two nights, and she went to a rental store on Route 2 for a pair of folding cots for the children, Annie, eight, and Julian, six, whom they called Julie.
David labored mightily to make their meals a pleasure, and he got on very well with Phil, with whom he shared a love for team sports in all the seasons. Annie and Julie were attractive and lovable but they were children, full of pent-up, noisy energy, and they made the house seem small. The first morning they were at R.J.’s, the kids got into a loud and physical fight, Julie wailing because his sister insisted he had a girl’s name.
Phil and David finally took them down to the river to fish, leaving the two women alone for the first time.
“Annie’s right, you know,” R.J. said. “He does have a girl’s name.”
“Hey,” Gwen said sharply. “It’s what we’ve always called him.”
“So? You can change. Call him Julian. It’s a perfectly good name, and it will make him feel like a grown-up.”
R.J. was certain Gwen was going to tell her to mind her own business, but after a moment her friend grinned at her. “Good old R.J. You still have all the answers. I like David, by the way. What’s going to happen between you two?”
R.J. shook her head. “I don’t have any of the answers, Gwen.”
David started writing early each morning, before she left for her office, sometimes even before she was out of bed. He told her that by remembering the Amish he was able to flesh out his descriptions of people who had lived in the Massachusetts hills a hundred years ago, and describe their evenings by lamplight and their days filled with work.
The writing filled him with tension that could only be released through physical labor of his own. Late each afternoon he worked about the place, picking fruit in the small orchard, harvesting the late garden vegetables and pulling up exhausted plants and adding them to the compost pile.
He was grateful that R.J. had saved his beehives, and he set out to rehabilitate them. They offered him all the busywork he could ask for.
“They’re a mess,” he told R.J. cheerfully.
Only two of the hives still contained healthy swarms of bees. David started to be watchful, and whenever he saw bees going into the woods he followed, hoping to recapture one of the swarms that had gotten away. In some of the hives that remained, the bees were weakened by disease and parasites. He built himself a worktable of unpainted lumber in the barn and set up a honey house. He dug right in, cleaning and sterilizing hives, dosing bees with antibiotics, and turning nests of mice out of two of the hives.
He wondered aloud what had happened to his honey separator and to all the empty honey jars and printed labels.
“Those things are in a corner of the barn on your old place. I put them there myself,” R.J. told him.
That weekend, he telephoned Kenneth Dettinger. Dettinger looked in the barn and reported all the things still were there, and David drove over and collected them.
When he returned, he told R.J. that he had offered to buy back the separator and the jars, but Dettinger had insisted that he take them, along with his old honey sign and his entire inventory of filled jars, almost four dozen of them. “Dettinger said he didn’t want to be in the bee business. He said he’d settle for an occasional jar of honey. He’s a nice guy.”
“He is,” R.J. said.
“Would you mind if I sold honey again, from here?”
She smiled. “No, that would be good.”
“I’ll have to put out the sign.”
“I like the sign.”
He drilled two holes on the underside of her sign that hung out front, then he screwed in eyebolts and hung his sign under hers.
Now somebody passing the house received a barrage of messages.
THE HOUSE
ON THE VERGE
ROBERTA J. COLE, M.D.
I’M-IN-LOVE-WITH-YOU
HONEY
She began to be hopeful about the future. David started going to Alcoholics Anonymous meetings again. She went with him one evening, sitting in the low-ceilinged meeting room of a graceful stone Episcopal church with perhaps forty other people. When David’s turn came, he rose and faced the group.
“I’m David Markus, and I’m an alcoholic. I live in Woodfield, and I’m a writer,” he said.
They never quarreled. They got along sunnily, and she wouldn’t have been troubled save for one fact she could not sweep away into a cranny where it didn’t have to be examined.
He never talked to her about Sarah.
One afternoon when David had been digging up, splitting, and transplanting the tough, woody rhubarb roots that had been old when R.J. had bought the place, he came inside the house and washed something at the kitchen sink.
“Look here,” he said as he wiped it dry.
“Oh, David. It’s amazing!”
It was a heartrock. The piece of reddish shale was an irregular heart, but what made it wonderful was the clear imprint of an ancient, armored fossil that was imbedded in its surface, slightly off center.
“What is it?”
“I don’t know. It looks like some sort of a crab, doesn’t it?”
“It’s like no crab I’ve ever seen,” R.J. said. The fossil imprint was less than three inches long. It recorded a wide head, with prominent eye sockets, empty as Orphan Annie’s. Its body shell was made up of many linear segments in a row, in three distinct longitudinal lobes.
They looked under “Fossils” in the encyclopedia.
“I think it’s this one,” she said, pointing to what the book said was a trilobite, a shelled animal that lived more than 225 million years ago, when a warm, shallow sea had covered much of the United States. The little shelled animal had died in the mud. Long before the mud hardened into rock, the flesh had rotted and carbonized, leaving a hard chemical film over the imprint that was left to be discovered under a rhubarb plant.
“What a find, David! How could there be a better heartrock? Where shall we put it?”
“I don’t want to display it in the house. I want to show it to a couple of people.”
“Good idea,” she said. The subject of heartrocks reminded her of something. That morning when she had brought in the mail, there had been an envelope for him from the Beth Moses Cemetery in West Babylon, Long Island. She had read in the newspaper that before the Jewish high holidays was a traditional time for visiting cemeteries.
“Why don’t the two of us go to visit Sarah’s grave?”
“No,” he said shortly. “I can’t face that just now. I’m sure you understand,” he said, and he put the shale stone in his pocket and went out to the barn.
49
INVITATIONS
“Hello?”
“R.J.? This is Samantha.”
“Sam! How are you?”
“I’m especially fine, that’s why I’m calling. I want to get together with you and Gwen and share a little surprise, a little good news.”
“Sam. You’re getting married.”
“Now, R.J., don’t you start making all sorts of outrageous guesses, or you’re going to make my little surprise seem shabby by comparison. I want you two to come to Worcester. I’ve already talked to Gwen, welcoming her back to Massachusetts. She said she knows you have a free day next Saturday, and she’ll come if you will. Say you’ll do it too.”
R.J. checked her book and saw that Saturday still was clear, except that she had dozens of chores. “Okay.”
“Wonderful. The three of us together again. I can’t wait.”
“It’s a promotion then, isn’t it? Full professor? Associate chair of pathology?”
“R.J., you’re still an eminent pain in the ass. Good-bye. I love you.”
“I love you too,” R.J. said, and hung up, laughing.
Two afternoons later, as she drove home from her office, she came upon David, walking in the road. He had come out to intercept her, down Laurel Hill Road and up Franklin Road, knowing it was the route she took.
He was two miles from home when she spotted him, and she grinned when she saw him sticking out his thumb like a hitchhiker, and opened the car door.
He climbed in, beaming. “I couldn’t wait to tell you. I’ve been on the phone with Joe Fallon all afternoon. The Peaceful Godhead has been given a grant by the Thomas Blankenship Foundation. Big money, enough to establish and support the center in Colorado.”
“David, how wonderful for Joe. Blankenship. That English publisher?”
“New Zealander. All those newspapers and magazines. How wonderful for all of us who want peace. Joe asked us to come out there with him in a couple of months.”
“What do you mean?”
“What I said. A small group of people will live and work at the center, and participate in its interfaith peace conferences as a permanent staff. Joe’s inviting you and me to be among them.”
“Why would he invite me? I’m not a theologian.”
“Joe feels you’d be valuable. You could contribute a medical viewpoint, scientific and legal analysis. He’s interested in having a doctor there to take care of the rest of the members. You would have your work.”
As she turned the car onto Laurel Hill Road, she shook her head. She didn’t have to put it into words for him.
“I know. You already have your work, and this is where you want to be.” He reached over and touched her face. “It’s an interesting offer. I’d think about accepting it if it weren’t for you. If this is where you want to be, this is where I want to be.”
But in the morning when she awoke, he was gone. There was a scrawled sheet of paper on the kitchen table.
Dear R.J.,
I have to go away. There are some things I must do.
I should be back in a couple of days.
Love,
David
At least this time he left a note, she told herself.
50
THE THREE OF THEM
Samantha came down to the lobby of the medical center as soon as the receptionist called and told her R.J. and Gwen had arrived. Success had given her quiet assurance. Her black hair was worn short against her beautifully shaped head, with a thick white streak over her right ear; once Gwen and R.J. had accused her of helping nature along with chemicals for dramatic effect, but they knew it wasn’t so. It was Samantha’s way to accept what nature had given her and to make the very best of it.
She hugged each of them twice in turn, exuberantly.
Her announced schedule called for lunch in the hospital, followed by a guided tour of the medical center, dinner in a wonderful restaurant, and late talk in her apartment. Gwen and R.J. would stay overnight and go back to the western hills first thing in the morning.
They had scarcely started to eat their lunch before R.J. gave Samantha her lawyer’s stare. “All right, woman—give us the news we’ve driven two hours to hear.”
“News,” Samantha said sedately. “Well, this is news. I’ve been offered the job of chief pathologist at this place.”
Gwen sighed. “Oh, boy.”
They beamed and offered their congratulations. “I knew it,” R.J. said.
“It’s not going to happen for another eighteen months, until Carroll Hemingway, the present chief, leaves for the University of California. However, they’ve offered the job early, and I’ve accepted, because it’s what I’ve always wanted.”
She smiled. “But … that is not the news.”
She turned around the plain gold ring she wore on the third finger of her left hand, to reveal the stone. The blue diamond in the setting wasn’t large but it was beautifully cut, and R.J. and Gwen were out of their seats and hugging her again.
Samantha had had a number of men in her life, but she had stayed unmarried. While she had made an enviable life for herself as a single woman, they were happy she had found someone to share it.
“Let me gue
ss,” Gwen said. “I’ll bet he’s in medicine, a full professor of something-or-other.”
R.J. shook her head. “I won’t guess. I have no idea. Tell us about him, Sam.”
Samantha shook her head. “He’ll tell you himself. He’s meeting us for dessert.”
Dana Carter proved to be tall and white-haired, a compulsive forty-mile-per-week runner who was slender almost to the point of underweight, with coffee-colored skin and young eyes.
“I am nervous as a cat,” he told them. “Sam told me meeting her family in Arkansas was going to be easy but that satisfying you two would be the true test.” He was the human resources manager of a life insurance company, a widower with a grown daughter who was a freshman at Brandeis University, and he was sufficiently in love to satisfy even Samantha’s closest friends.
By the time he left them, it was mid-afternoon, and they spent another hour learning details of his history—he had been born in the Bahamas but raised in Cleveland—and telling Samantha how fortunate she was, and how “damned all-out lucky” Dana was.
Sam looked very happy as she took them through the medical center, showing off her department and then the trauma center and the heliport that serviced it, the up-to-date library, and the labs and lecture rooms of the medical school.
R.J. found herself wondering if she envied Samantha her success and her authority. It was easy to observe that the promise everyone had predicted for her when they were students had been fulfilled. R.J. saw the deference with which people at the medical center addressed her, the way they listened when she spoke and moved to carry out her suggestions.
“I think you guys should come to work here. This place is the only large medical center in the state to have a department of family medicine,” Sam said to R.J. “Wouldn’t it be nice,” she said wistfully, “if the three of us could work in the same building, see each other all the time? I know both of you could find good slots here.”
“I already have a good slot,” R.J. said, a trifle crisply, sensitive that perhaps she was being patronized, annoyed that well-meaning people kept trying to change her life.
