Matters of Choice

by Noah Gordon

  R.J. nodded. “It’s a lousy, inadequate system. There are thirty-seven million people in the United States without any form of medical insurance. Every other leading industrial nation in the world—Germany, Italy, France, Japan, England, Canada, and all the others—supplies health care to all its citizens, at a fraction of what the world’s richest country spends for inadequate health care. It’s our national shame.”

  David sighed. “I don’t think Paul will make it as a farmer even if they survive this problem. The soil in the hills is thin and rocky. We have some potato fields and a few orchards, and some farmers used to grow tobacco. But the crop that grows best up here is grass. That’s why we had a lot of dairy farms once upon a time. But the government doesn’t support milk prices anymore, and the only milk producers who can make money are the big-business outfits, enormous farms with giant herds, in states like Wisconsin and Iowa.”

  It was the subject of his novel. “Small farms around here have popped like balloons. With fewer farms, the agricultural support system has disappeared. There are only one or two veterinarians left to treat the herds, and agricultural equipment dealers have gone out of business, so if a farmer like Paul needs a part for a tractor or a baler, he has to drive clear into New York State or Vermont to find it. The small farmer is doomed. The only ones left are those with personal wealth or a few like Bonnie and Paul. Hopeless romantics.”

  She remembered how her father had characterized her desire to practice rural medicine. “The last cowboys, searching for the vanished prairie?”

  David grinned. “Something like that.”

  “Nothing wrong with romantics.” She determined to do everything in her power to help Bonnie and Paul stay on their farm.

  Sarah was off on an overnight field trip to New Haven with the school drama club, seeing a revival of Death of a Salesman, and almost shyly, David asked if he could spend the night.

  It was a new wrinkle in their relationship; he wasn’t unwelcome, but suddenly he was in her living space in a more serious way, something that took getting accustomed to. They made love, and then he was there in her room, sprawled over more than half of her bed, sleeping as soundly as if he had spent the last thousand nights there.

  At eleven o’clock, sleepless, she slipped from the bed and went into the living room and turned on the television for the evening news, keeping the volume low. In a moment she was listening to a United States senator castigating Hillary Clinton as a “dreamy do-gooder” for vowing to gain passage of a universal health care bill. The senator was a millionaire whose every medical problem was taken care of, free of charge, at the Bethesda Naval Hospital. R.J. sat alone before the flickering screen and cursed him in furious whispers until she began to laugh at her own foolishness. Then she clicked him off and returned to bed.

  Outside, the wind screamed and moaned, and it was as cold as the senator’s heart. It was good to snuggle up to David’s warmth, one spoon fitting into another, and presently she slept as soundly as he.

  28

  RISING SAP

  The advent of spring took her by surprise. The fourth week of a dun and cheerless February, while R.J. still was in the dead of winter psychologically, she began to notice people working in the woods by the roadsides as she drove past. They were tapping wooden or metal spiles into maple trees and hanging buckets on them, or running plastic lines like a giant network of intravenous tubing from the tree trunks into large collecting tanks. Early March brought the requisite weather for sugaring—frosty nights, warmer days.

  The unpaved roads thawed each morning and were transmuted into canals of glue. R.J. found trouble as soon as she turned the car into the private road on the Roche place, and very soon the Explorer had churned into the gumbo up to its wheel hubs.

  When she got out of the car, her booted feet sank as if something were pulling her into the earth. R.J. dragged the wire cable out of the winch in front of the Explorer and slogged down the road with it until more than a hundred feet of line lay in the mud behind her. She chose a huge oak tree that looked as though it were anchored in the earth for all time, encircling it with the cable and then snapping the hook over the line so the tree was captive.

  The winch came with a remote control. She stood off to one side and pressed the button, then watched in fascinated delight as, gradually and inexorably, the cable was drawn into the winch and became taut. There was a loud sucking noise as the four tires were pulled from the thick ooze, and the car began to inch forward slowly, slowly. When it had moved about twenty yards toward the oak tree, she stopped the winch and got back in and started the engine. The wheels had purchase in four-wheel drive, and within minutes she had reclaimed the cable and was rolling toward the Roche barnyard.

  Bonnie, minus her appendix, was home alone. She still couldn’t do heavy labor, and Sam Roche, Paul’s fifteen-year-old brother, came each morning before school and every evening after supper and milked the cows. Paul had taken a job as a shipper in the knife factory in Buckland in order to try to pay the bills. He came home every day after three o’clock and spent what was left of daylight collecting maple sap and boiling it in the sugar house until the wee hours of the morning. It was brutal work, collecting and boiling forty gallons of sap to get one gallon of syrup, but people paid well for the syrup, and they needed every dollar.

  “I’m scared, Dr. Cole,” Bonnie told R.J. “I’m afraid he’ll crack under the strain. Afraid one of us will get sick again. If that happens, good-bye farm.”

  R.J. had fears about the same things, but she shook her head. “We just won’t let it happen,” she said.

  Certain moments never would leave her.

  November 22, 1963. She had been going into Latin class in junior high school when she heard two teachers talking about the fact that John F. Kennedy had been gunned down in Texas.

  April 4, 1968. She had been bringing books back to the Boston Public Library when she saw a librarian crying and learned that an assassin’s bullet had found Martin Luther King, Jr.

  June 5, that same year. She had been kissing her date outside the apartment where she lived with her father—she remembered the boy was chubby and played jazz clarinet, but she no longer could recall his name. He had just touched the fabric armor, made up of her thick sweater and her bra, that enclosed her breasts. She was trying to figure out how to react to that when his father’s car radio reported that Robert Kennedy had been shot and was believed to be dying.

  She would add to those moments hearing that John Lennon had been assassinated and that the Challenger had exploded.

  Now, in Barbara Kingsmith’s house, on a rainy morning in mid-March, she had another terrible moment.

  Mrs. Kingsmith had a serious kidney infection; her fever hadn’t impaired her garrulousness, and she was complaining about the colors used by painters on the inside of the Town Hall when R.J. heard a few words of a bulletin from the television in the den, where Mrs. Kingsmith’s daughter was watching.

  “Excuse me,” she said to Mrs. Kingsmith, and went to the den. The television was reporting that in Florida a Right-to-Life activist named Michael F. Griffin had shot and killed Dr. David Gunn, a physician who worked at an abortion clinic.

  Anti-abortion activists were raising money to buy Griffin the best defense lawyer available.

  It made R.J. weak with fear.

  When she left the Kingsmiths’ she went straight to David’s house and found him in the office.

  He held her, comforted her, listened as she talked about the distorted faces she had passed on so many Thursday mornings in Jamaica Plain. She told him of the eyes filled with hate, and revealed that now she knew what she had always expected on Thursdays: a gun pointed at her, a finger pulling the trigger.

  She visited Eva more often than was necessary from a physician’s perspective. Eva’s apartment was just down the street from R.J.’s office, and she had come to admire the old woman and to use her as a means of knowing what the town was like when it was younger.

 
Usually she brought ice cream, and they sat and ate it and talked. Eva had a clear mind and a good memory. She told R.J. of the Saturday night dances that used to be held on the second floor of the Town Hall and that everybody in town came to, bringing their children. And of the days when there was an ice house at Big Pond, and a hundred men at a time swarmed out on the ice and cut it up into blocks. And of the spring morning when a loaded ice wagon and a team of four horses went through the ice and down, down in the black water, and all the horses and a man named Chink Roth were drowned.

  Eva became excited when she learned where R.J. lived. “Why, I lived only a mile or so from there most of my life. That was our farm, that place on the upper road.”

  “Where Freda and Hank Krantz live now?”

  “Yes! They bought from us.” In those days R.J.’s land was owned by a man named Harry Crawford, Eva said. “He had a wife named Rosalie. He bought your land from us, too, and built your house on it. He had a small mill on the banks of the Catamount, with a millrace to supply power. He took logs from your forest and made and sold all kinds of wooden things—buckets, butter molds, paddles and oars, ox yokes, napkin rings, sometimes furniture. The mill burned down years ago. You should be able to see the foundation on the riverbank, if you look carefully.

  “I remember, I was … oh, perhaps seven or eight years old, and I used to walk down there all the time and watch them sawing and hammering, building your house. Harry Crawford and two other men. I don’t remember who the other two were, but I recollect Mr. Crawford made me a little ring out of a two-penny nail.” She took R.J.’s hand and smiled at her warmly. “This makes me feel you and I are neighbors, don’t you know.”

  R.J. questioned Eva closely, thinking that the history of the Crawfords might shed some light on the tiny bones found when her pond was dug. But she learned nothing that was any help at all.

  A couple of days later she stopped in at the old frame house on Main Street that was the Woodfield Historical Museum and sifted through the historical society’s records, some of them yellowed and musty. The Crawfords had had four children. A son and a daughter, Tyrone Joseph and Linda Rae, had died young and were buried in the main town cemetery. Another daughter, Barbara, had died in adulthood in Ithaca, New York; her married name had been Sewall. A son, Harry Hamilton Crawford, Jr., had moved to California many years ago, and his whereabouts were unknown.

  Harry and Rosalie Crawford had been members of the First Congregational Church of Woodfield. They had buried two children in the town cemetery; was it likely, R.J. asked herself, that they would have placed another infant into mucky, unconsecrated ground without a headstone?

  It wasn’t. Unless, of course, there was something connected to that birth that the Crawfords were overwhelmingly ashamed of.

  It remained a puzzlement.

  R.J. and Toby Smith had developed into more than employee and employer. They were becoming close friends who could talk in confidence about the things that counted. It made R.J. more vulnerable in her failure to help Toby and Jan achieve a pregnancy.

  “You say my endometrial biopsy was fine, and that Jan’s sperm is okay. And we’ve been very good about doing exactly what you’ve advised us to do.”

  “Sometimes we just don’t know why there’s no pregnancy,” R.J. told her, feeling somehow guilty that she hadn’t been able to help them. “I think you should go to Boston to see a fertility specialist. Or up to Dartmouth.”

  “I don’t think I could get Jan to go. He’s tired of the whole thing. We both are, damn tired,” Toby said peevishly. “Let’s talk about something else.”

  So R.J. spoke frankly to her about David.

  But Toby said little in reaction.

  “I don’t think you like David all that much.”

  “That isn’t true,” Toby said. “I think David’s just fine. Most people I know like him, but nobody I know has become close to him. He kind of … lives within himself, if you know what I mean.”

  R.J. did.

  “The important question is, do you like him?”

  “I do, but that’s not the important question. The important question is, do I love him?”

  Toby lifted her eyebrows. “So, what’s the important answer?”

  “I don’t know. We’re so completely different. He says he’s a religious doubter, but he lives in a very spiritual place, a more spiritual place than I’m ever going to be able to share with him. I used to have faith only in antibiotics.” She smiled ruefully. “Now I don’t even have faith in them.”

  “So … where are you two heading?”

  R.J. shrugged. “I’ll have to make up my mind soon, otherwise it won’t be fair to him.”

  “I can’t imagine you ever being unfair to anyone.”

  “You’d be surprised,” R.J. said.

  David was working toward the finishing chapters of his book. They were forced to see each other less often, but he was coming to the end of a long, hard effort, and she was happy for him.

  She spent what little spare time she had by herself. Walking along the river, she found the foundation of Harry Crawford’s mill, great blocks of hewed stone. Brush and trees had grown up, hugging and hiding the foundation, and several of the stone blocks had slipped into the riverbed. She couldn’t wait until David was free so she could show him the mill site.

  Next to one of the big stone blocks she found a small heartrock, of a blue stone she couldn’t identify. It didn’t seem likely to her that it contained magic.

  On impulse, she gave Sarah a call. “Want to go see a movie with me?”

  “Uh … sure.”

  Dumb idea, she told herself severely. But to her pleasure, it worked out well. They drove to Pittsfield, where they had supper in a Thai restaurant and saw a movie.

  “We’ll do it again,” she said, meaning it. “Okay?”

  “Sure.”

  But she became busy, and three or four weeks went by. Several times she saw Sarah on Main Street, and Sarah smiled to see her. It was becoming easier and more pleasant to run into her.

  One Saturday afternoon Sarah surprised her by riding Chaim down her driveway and tying his reins to a rail of the porch.

  “Hey. How nice. You want tea?”

  “Hi. Yeah, please.”

  R.J. had just finished baking scones from a recipe given to her by Eva Goodhue, and she served them.

  “Maybe it’s missing an ingredient. What do you think?” she said doubtfully.

  Sarah hefted one. “Could be lighter … Can lots of things cause you to miss a period?” she said, and R.J. forgot her baking problems.

  “Well, yes. Lots of things. Is it the first time a period hasn’t appeared on schedule? And is it only one period that’s been missed?”

  “Several periods.”

  “I see,” R.J. said cheerfully, in her most controlled friendly-doctor voice. “Are there any other symptoms?”

  Nausea and vomiting, Sarah told her. “What you might call morning sickness, I suppose.”

  “Are you asking about these things for a friend? And would she like to come and see me at the office?”

  Sarah picked up a scone and appeared to consider whether or not to bite, and then returned it to the dish. She looked at R.J. in much the same way as she had looked at the scone. When she spoke, her voice held only the smallest amount of discernible bitterness, and just the slightest tremble.

  “I’m not asking for a friend.”

  PART THREE

  HEARTROCKS

  29

  SARAH’S REQUEST

  Sarah wore her hair that year in the fashion of dozens of smart young models and film actresses, in long, tangled ringlets. Her tender, troubled eyes were made larger and more luminous by the thick glasses. Her full-lipped mouth trembled slightly, and her hunched, tense shoulders seemed to expect the vengeful blows of a punishing God. The pimples on her chin were back, and there was another in the crease at the side of her nose. Even now, while carefully damming up her despair, she looked like th
e dead mother whose pictures R.J. had studied so covertly, but Sarah was tall and had inherited some of David’s stronger facial features; she held the promise of a beauty more interesting than had been evident in the snapshots of Natalie.

  Under R.J.’s careful questioning, what Sarah had described as “several” missed periods turned out to be three.

  “Why didn’t you come to see me sooner?” R.J. asked.

  “My period is so irregular anyway, I kept thinking it would come.”

  And then too, Sarah said, she hadn’t been able to make up her mind about what to do. Babies were so wonderful. She had spent lots of time lying on her bed, imagining the sweet softness, the warm helplessness.

  How could this be happening to her?

  “You used no contraception?”

  “No.”

  “Sarah. All those programs in your school about AIDS,” R.J. couldn’t keep from saying with ill-disguised bitterness.

  “We knew we wouldn’t get AIDS.”

  “How could you possibly know a thing like that?”

  “We hadn’t ever gone all the way before with anybody, either of us. Bobby used a condom the first time, but we didn’t have one the next time.”

  They didn’t know zilch. R.J. fought for calm wisdom. “So … have you talked about this with Bobby?”

  “He’s scared stupid,” Sarah said flatly.

  R.J. nodded.

  “He says we can get married, if I want to.”

  “Is that what you want?”

  “R.J. … I like him a lot. I even love him a lot. But I don’t love him … you know, for always. I know he’s way too young to be a good father, and I know I’m too young to be a good mother. He has plans to go to college and law school and be a big shot lawyer in Springfield like his father, and I want to go to school.” She brushed a lock of hair from her eyes. “I want to become a meteorologist.”