by Noah Gordon
“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 morning 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.
The strong arms wrapped themselves around her, his chin on her head hurt her.
“Careful, the hook’s come loose, it will dig into your hand.”
He spoke into her hair.
“You finished the trail,” he said.
PART FOUR
THE COUNTRY DOCTOR
45
THE BREAKFAST TALE
Minutes after David had terrified her on the wood trail, they sat in R.J.’s kitchen and regarded one another, still a bit fearfully. They had a very difficult time beginning to talk. When last they had been together, they had stared at each other over the body of his dead child.
Each wasn’t what the other had remembered. It was as though he were in disguise, she thought, missing the ponytail and intimidated by the beard. “Do you want to talk about Sarah?”
“No,” he said quickly. “That is, not now. I want to talk about us.”
She clasped h
er hands in her lap very tightly, trying to keep from trembling, fluctuating between hope and despair, beset by strange combinations of emotions—joy, a fluttering exhilaration, enormous relief. Yet there was also ruinous anger. “Why have you bothered to come back?”
“I couldn’t stop thinking about you.”
He looked so healthy, so normal, as if nothing had happened. He was too calm, too matter-of-fact. She wanted to say tender things to him, but what came out of her mouth was different. “I’m gratified…. Just like that. Not a word for a year, and then ’Hello, good old R.J., I’m back.’ How do I know that the first time we have an argument you won’t get in your car and disappear into thin air for another year? Or five years, or eight years?”
“Because I tell you so. Will you at least think about it?”
“Oh, I’ll think about it,” she heard a shrewish voice say with such bitterness that he turned away.
“Can I stay here tonight?”
It was on her lips to refuse him, but she found she couldn’t. “Why not,” she said, and laughed.
“I’ll need a lift to my car. I left it on the village road and walked in over Krantz’s land to pick up the wood trail at the river.”
“Well, you just walk yourself back to it while I make supper,” she said cruelly and a bit wildly, and he nodded without replying and left the house.
When he returned, she was under control. She told him to put his suitcase in the guest room, speaking to him politely now, as she would to any guest, to keep him from hearing her gladness, her eternal availability. She gave him a meal that wasn’t a prodigal’s feast—warmed-over veal burgers, yesterday’s baked potato, applesauce from a jar.
They sat to eat, but before she had taken a bite, she left the table and went quickly to her room, closing the door. David heard the television being turned on and then canned laughter, a rerun of Seinfeld.
He also heard R.J. Somehow he knew it wasn’t for them that she was sobbing, and he went to the door and knocked softly.
She was lying on the bed, and he knelt beside her.
“I loved her too,” she whispered.
“I know.”
They wept together as they should have done a year before, and she skooched over and made room for him. The first kisses were soft and tasted of tears.
“I thought about you all the time. Every day, every moment.”
“I hate the beard,” she said.
In the morning R.J. felt strangely that she had spent the night with someone she had just met. It wasn’t only the facial hair and the missing ponytail, she thought as she stood in her kitchen and mixed juice.
By the time she had made toast and scrambled the eggs, he joined her.
“This is pretty good. What is this stuff?”
“I mix orange juice with cranberry juice.”
“You never used to drink it this way.”
“Well, I drink it this way now. Things change, David. … Did it occur to you that I might have met someone else?”
“Have you?”
“You don’t have a right to know anymore.” Her anger broke through. “Why did you contact Joe Fallon but not me? Why did you never telephone? Why did you wait so very long to write to me? Why didn’t you let me know you were all right?”
“I wasn’t all right,” he said.
The eggs on their plates were untouched and growing cold, but he began to talk, to tell her.
The color of the air had seemed to me strangely tinged after Sarah died, as if everything had been washed in a very pale yellow. Part of me was functional. I telephoned the funeral director in Roslyn, Long Island, scheduled the funeral for the next day, directed my car to New York behind the hearse, driving carefully. Carefully.
I stayed at a motel. In the morning, the service was simple. The rabbi at our former temple was new; he hadn’t known Sarah, and I instructed him to make things very brief Employees of the funeral home served as pallbearers. The funeral director had placed a notice in the morning paper, but only a few people saw it in time to attend the funeral. At the Beth Moses Cemetery in West Babylon, two girls who had been Sarah’s friends in grammar school held hands and wept, and five adults who had known our family when it had been young in Roslyn stood distressed as I sent away the grave diggers and filled in the hole myself, the stones in the first shovelfuls thumping onto the coffin, the rest just dirt on dirt until it was level with the rest of the ground and then mounded.
A heavy woman I hardly recognized, who had been Natalie’s best friend in a slimmer, younger version, sobbed and clasped me to her, and her husband begged me to come home with them. I was scarcely aware of what I said to them.
I left at once, after the hearse. I drove a mile or two and turned into the empty parking lot of a church, where I waited more than an hour. When I returned to the cemetery, the people who had attended the funeral were gone.
The two plots were close together. I sat between them, with one hand on the edge of Sarah’s grave and one hand on Natalie’s. No one bothered me.
I knew only my grief and an incredible aloneness. Late in the afternoon I got into my car and drove away.
I had no destination. It was as though the car were driving me, down Wellwood Avenue, over turnpikes, across bridges.
Into New Jersey.
In Newark I stopped at Old Glory, a workingman’s bar just off the Jersey Pike. I had three quick drinks there but became aware of the staring, the silences. If I had on overalls or jeans, it wouldn’t have mattered, but I wore a ruined and earth-stained single-breasted navy blue Hart Schaffner and Marx suit, and I was a ponytailed man, no longer young. So I paid and left the bar, walking to a package store and buying three fifths of Beefeaters that I took to the nearest motel.
I’ve heard hundreds of drunks talk about the taste of liquor. Some describe it as “liquid stars,” “sipping nectar,” “stuff of the Gods.” I’ve always hated the taste of grain alcohols and stick to vodka or gin. In the motel room I sought oblivion, drinking until I fell asleep. Whenever I awoke, I would lie there puzzled for a few moments, fumbling with my mind, and then terrible pain, calamitous memory would flood in, and I would drink again.
It was an old, familiar pattern, which I had perfected long ago, drinking in locked rooms where I was safe. The three bottles kept me drunk for four days. I was wretchedly ill for a day and a night, and then I had the blandest breakfast I could find and checked out of the motel and let the car take me somewhere.
It was a routine I had lived before, familiar and easily readapted. I never drove when drunk, understanding that I was kept from disaster only by my car, my wallet with its plastic cards, and my checkbook.
I drove slowly and automatically, my mind numb, trying to leave reality behind. But there always came a moment, sooner or later, when reality entered the car and rode with me, and whenever the pain grew beyond bearing I stopped, bought a couple of bottles, and checked into a room.
I got drunk in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. I got drunk outside of Cincinnati, Ohio, and in places I never identified. I was drunk on and off through the change of seasons.
One warm, early-autumn morning—very early morning—badly hung over, I found myself driving down a country road. It was a nice rolling landscape, although the hills were lower than in Woodfield, and there were more worked fields than forest. I pulled the car around a horse-drawn black buggy driven by a bearded man wearing a straw hat, white shirt, and black pants with suspenders.
Amish.
I passed a farmhouse and saw a woman in a long dress and a little prayer cap helping two boys unload winter squash from the back of a flat wagon. Across a cornfield, another man drove a five-horse rig, harvesting oats.
I was nauseated and my head hurt.
I drove slowly through the farm country, houses all white or unpainted, wonderful barns, water towers with windmills, well-tended fields. I thought perhaps I was back in Pennsylvania, maybe near Lancaster, but pretty soon I came to the town line and learned I was driving out o
f Apple Creek, Ohio, and into the township of Kidron. I had a powerful thirst. Had I known it, I was less than a mile and a half from stores, a motel, cold Coca-Cola, food. But I didn’t know it.
I could easily have driven by the house, but I came upon an empty buggy with the shafts resting on the macadam of the road, the broken leather traces telling a mute story of how the horse got away.
I passed a man running after a mare that seemed to know what she was doing, keeping just ahead.
Without a second thought, when I drove past the horse, I turned my car to block the road, then I got out and stood in front of the car and waved my arms at the approaching animal. There was a fence on one side of the road and high corn on the other; when the mare slowed I went forward, talking soothingly, and grabbed the bridle.
The man came puffing up, glowering. “Danke. Sehr Danke. You know how to handle these creatures, yes?”
“We used to own a horse.”
The man’s face started to swim, and I leaned back against the car.
“You are krank? Help you need?”
“No, I’m fine. Just fine.” The dizziness was passing. What I needed was to get out of the sun’s bright hammer. I had Tylenol in the car. “Perhaps you know where I can get some water.”
The man nodded and pointed at the nearby house. “Those people, they will give you water. Knock on their door.”
The farmhouse was surrounded by cornfield but it wasn’t owned by Amish—I could see into the backyard, where a number of automobiles were parked. I had already knocked on the door when I noted the small sign: YESHIVA YISROEL. “The Study House of Israel.” Through the open windows came chanted Hebrew, unmistakably from one of the psalms, Bayt Yisroel barachu et-Adonai, bayt Aharon barachu et-Adonai. “O house of Israel, bless the Lord, O house of Aaron, bless the Lord.”
The door was opened by a bearded man who looked Amish down to the dark trousers and the white shirt, but there was a skullcap on his head, his left shirtsleeve was rolled up, and phylacteries were wound about his forehead and his arm. Beyond him, men were seated at a table.
