Matters of Choice

by Noah Gordon

  He who is strong above all else,

  He who is blessed above all else,

  He who is great above all else,

  May he bless the bridegroom and bride.

  Afterwards, no one turned to me to offer a glass when the schnapps was poured, as no one ever offered me a glass of wine at the Oneg Shabbat that marked the end of each Sabbath service. They treated me with gentle condescension, performing their mitzvot, their good deeds, like bearded Boy Scouts being nice to the maimed in order to earn their merit badges toward the ultimate reward.

  I felt the onset of spring weather like new pain. I was certain my life was going to change, but I didn’t know how. I stopped shaving, deciding to try a beard like all the other men around me. I toyed very briefly with the idea that I might make a life for myself in the yeshiva, but I recognized that I was almost as different from these Jews as I was from the Amish.

  I watched the farmers become busy in their warming fields. The heavy, honeyed stink of manure was everywhere.

  One day, I sought out Simon Yoder on his farm. Yoder was the farmer who rented and worked the yeshiva’s land; it was his runaway horse I had stopped the day I had come to Kidron.

  “I’d like to work for you,” I said.

  “Doing what?”

  “Whatever you need.”

  “You can drive?”

  “Behind horses? No.”

  Yoder looked dubiously at me, studying this strange English. “We don’t pay minimum wages here, you know. Much less.”

  I shrugged.

  So Yoder tested me, put me to work on the manure pile, and I shoveled horseshit into the spreader all day. I was in heaven. When I returned to the Moscowitz apartment that evening, muscles in protest again and clothing reeking, Dvora and the Rebbe assumed that either I had gone back to drinking or I had lost my mind.

  It was an abnormally warm spring, slightly dry but with enough moisture for decent crops. After the manure was spread, Simon plowed and disked with five horses, and his brother Hans plowed behind a row of eight great beasts. “A horse produces fertilizer and other horses,” Simon told me. “A tractor produces nothing but bills.”

  He taught me how to drive. “You already do a good job of handling one horse. That’s really the most important part. Into the traces one at a time you back them. One at a time you take off the harness. They are used to working as a team.” I found myself working behind two horses, plowing the corners of all the fields. By myself, I planted the cornfield surrounding the yeshiva. As I walked behind the horses, holding the reins, I was conscious that each window was filled with scholarly, bearded faces watching my every move as if I were a man from Mars.

  Soon after planting was done, it was time for first hay to be cut. Each day I worked in the fields, breathing in a work perfume, a mixture of horse musk, my own sweat, and a heady olfactory slap, the scent of large areas of cut grass. I grew dark from the sun, and my body gradually strengthened and hardened. I let my hair grow long, and the beard sprang from my face. I was beginning to feel like Samson.

  “Rebbe,” I asked one night at the supper table, “do you believe God is really all-powerful?”

  The long white fingers scrabbled in the long white beard. “In every thing except one,” the Rebbe said finally. “God is in each of us. But we must give Him permission to come out.”

  All through the summer, I found genuine joy in work. I thought of you as I labored, allowing myself to do this because I believed I was becoming my own master. I had begun to dare to hope, but I was a realist and knew I was a drunk because I lacked a certain kind of courage. All my life I had been running away. I had run from the horror I had witnessed in Vietnam, into booze. I had run from the rabbinate, into real estate. I had run away from personal loss, into degradation. I had few illusions about myself.

  A pressure was building in me. As summer waned, I tried to divert it, sometimes almost frantically, but finally it couldn’t be denied. On the hottest day of August, I helped Simon Yoder store the last of the second cutting of hay in the barn, and then I drove to Akron.

  The package store was just where I remembered it. I bought a liter of Seagram’s Seven Crown whiskey; in a kosher bakery I found kichlach, and in the Jewish market I bought half a dozen jars of pickled herring. One of the jar lids must have been loose. Before I had driven far, my car was filled with the sharp, greasy odor of fish.

  I went to a jeweler and made one more purchase, a single pearl on a delicate gold chain. I gave the little pendant to Dvora Moscowitz that evening, and a rent check in lieu of notice to vacate. She kissed me on both cheeks.

  Next morning after the service, I broke out the food and whiskey for the minyan. I shook hands with everyone. The Rebbe followed me out to the car and gave me a bag Dvora had left for me, tuna sandwiches and streusel squares. I expected something more portentous from Rabbi Moscowitz, and the old man didn’t disappoint.

  “May the Lord bless you and keep you. May He shine his countenance on you and bring you peace.”

  I thanked him and started the motor. “Shalom, Rebbe.” I was aware that for once I was departing a place properly. This time I told the car where to go, driving it straight toward Massachusetts.

  When finally he reached the end of the narrative, R.J. looked at him.

  “So … shall I stay?” he asked her.

  “I think you should, at least for a time.”

  “For a time?”

  “I’m not certain about you now. But stay for a little while. If we decide we shouldn’t be together, at least …”

  “At least we can bring it to a decent end? Closure?”

  “Something like that.”

  “I don’t have to consider. But you take your time. R.J., I hope …”

  She touched the smooth, familiar but unfamiliar face. “I hope so, too. I need you, David. Or somebody like you,” she said, to her own astonishment.

  47

  SETTLING IN

  That evening, R.J. came home from the office to the rich smell of roasting leg of lamb. There was no need to announce that David had returned, she realized. If he had gone to the general store to buy the lamb, by now most of the people in town knew he was back.

  He had made a wonderful meal, baby carrots and new potatoes browned in the gravy, corn on the cob, blueberry pie. She let him do the dishes while she went to her room and took the box from the bottom drawer of her bureau.

  When she held it out to him, he wiped his soapy hands and carried it to the kitchen table. She could tell he was afraid to open the box, but finally he removed the cover and lifted out the fat manuscript.

  “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. “Whe
re 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 imprin
t 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.”