Matters of Choice

by Noah Gordon

  “I’m apprehensive about the morphine, Dr. Kellicker.”

  “Why is that, Dr. Cole?”

  “It has a vagotonic effect. It can cause bradycardia or advanced degrees of heart block, no?”

  “Well, yes, that happens. But everything we do has risks, a down side. You know that.”

  “How about giving him a beta-blocker instead of morphine?”

  “Beta-blockers don’t always work. Then he’s back with the pain.”

  “But it would be worth a try, wouldn’t it?”

  Dr. Kellicker glanced at Susan Dolby, who had been listening intently, watching R.J. “I agree,” she said.

  “If that’s what the two of you want, I have no objection,” Dr. Kellicker said sourly. He nodded and walked away.

  Susan stepped close to R.J. She looked into R.J.’s eyes and put her arms around her. They stood there, swaying, and R.J. hugged her back.

  She made several telephone calls. “On your first day there, he had the attack?” Peter Gerome said. “What a way to begin your vacation!” Everything was in complete control, he assured her. People told him they missed her. People sent love. He didn’t mention David.

  Toby was terribly concerned, first for R.J.’s father and then for R.J. When R.J. asked her how she was, Toby said dolefully that her back hurt constantly and she felt she had been pregnant all her life.

  Gwen made her go over every detail of her father’s case history, and said R.J. had been wise to request the beta-blocker instead of continued use of morphine.

  She was right. The beta-blocker was successful in keeping away the pain, and after two days R.J.’s father was allowed to leave the bed and sit in a chair twice a day for half an hour. Like many physicians, he was a terrible patient. He asked a lot of questions about his own condition and demanded the results of his angiography, as well as a complete report from Kellicker.

  His mood vacillated wildly, from euphoria to severe pessimism, and back again. “I’d like you to take Rob J.’s scalpel with you when you leave,” he told his daughter during a depressed moment.

  “Why?”

  He shrugged. “It will be yours someday. Why not have it now?”

  Her eyes locked his. “Because it’s going to continue to be yours for many years,” she said, and firmly closed the subject.

  He made progress. On the third day he began standing next to his bed for short intervals, and the day after that he began to walk in the corridor. R.J. knew that the first six days after an attack were the most dangerous, and when a week had passed without mishap, she began to breathe easier.

  On R.J.’s eighth morning in Miami, she met Susan at a hotel for breakfast. They sat on the terrace overlooking the beach and the sea, and R.J. breathed in the soft salt air. “I could become accustomed to this.”

  “Could you, R.J.? Do you like Florida?”

  Her remark had been a joke, an appreciation of unaccustomed luxury. “Florida’s very nice. … I don’t really enjoy extreme heat.”

  “One becomes acclimated, though we Floridians do love our air conditioners.

  “R.J., I’m planning to retire next year. My practice is established, and the income from it is very good. I wonder if you would be interested in taking it over?”

  Oh.

  “I’m so flattered, Susan. And I thank you. But I’ve sunk roots in Woodfield. It’s important to me that I practice medicine there.”

  “Are you certain you don’t want to think it over? I could give you lots of details to consider. I could work alongside you for a year. …”

  R.J. smiled, shook her head.

  Susan made a quick chagrined face at her and smiled back. “Your father has become so important to me. I liked you at once. You’re smart and caring, and obviously you’re a very good doctor—the kind of doctor I admire, the kind my patients deserve. So I thought, here is a perfect way in which to serve everyone—my patients, R.J., Robert … and myself—all in one neat package. I don’t have family. You will forgive someone who should know better, but I allowed myself to fantasize about being a family. I should have realized that there never are perfect solutions that answer everyone’s needs.”

  R.J. admired Susan’s frankness. She didn’t know whether to laugh or cry; a little more than a year before, she had spun the same fantasy for herself.

  “I like you too, Susan, and I hope you and my father do end up together. If you do, we’ll get together regularly and often,” R.J. said.

  That noon when she came into her father’s room, he put aside his crossword puzzle. “Hi.”

  “Hi.”

  “What’s new?”

  “New? Nothing much.”

  “Did you meet Susan this morning and have a talk?”

  Ah. They had discussed it before Susan had talked with her. “Yes, I did. I told her she’s a dear, but I have a practice of my own.”

  “For Pete’s sake, R.J. … It’s a terrific opportunity,” he said crankily.

  It occurred to R.J. that perhaps there was something about her personal chemistry that made people suggest how and where she should live. “You have to learn to let me say no, Dad,” she said quietly. “I’m forty-four years old, and capable of making personal decisions.”

  He turned away. But in a little while, he turned back to her. “You know something?”

  “What, Dad?”

  “You’re absolutely right.”

  They played gin rummy, and he won two dollars and forty-five cents from her and then took a nap.

  When he woke, she told him about her practice. He was pleased that it had grown so quickly and approved that she had closed the practice at fifteen hundred patients. But it worried him when she told him she was getting ready to pay the remaining debt on the bank note he had co-signed.

  “You don’t have to wipe away the debt in two years, you know. You shouldn’t do without things you may need.”

  “I don’t do without anything,” she said, and held his hand.

  Calmly and deliberately, he placed his other hand in hers.

  It was a frightening moment for her, but the message she received from his hands placed a smile on her face as she bent to kiss him, and his relief could be seen in his own quick smile.

  * * *

  On Thanksgiving Day, she and Susan arranged to have hospital trays with him in his room.

  “I ran into Sumner Kellicker this morning when I made rounds,” Susan said. “He’s very pleased with your condition and said he hopes to release you in another two or three days.”

  R.J. knew she had to return to her patients. “We’ll have to get somebody to stay at the apartment with you for a while.”

  “Nonsense. He’s coming to stay at my house. Aren’t you, Robert?”

  “I don’t know, Susan. A patient is not the way I want you to think of me.”

  “I think it’s time we thought of each other in every possible way,” she said. In the end, he agreed to go to her house.

  “I have a good cook who comes weekdays to prepare dinner. We’ll watch Robert’s diet and see that he gets just the right amount of exercise. You’re not to worry about this man,” she said, and R.J. promised that she wouldn’t.

  She took the 6:20 P.M. plane for Hartford the next day. As they circled Bradley Airport, the pilot announced: “The temperature on the ground is twenty-two degrees. Welcome to the real world.”

  The night air was sharp and rough to breathe, New England air in late autumn. She drove home slowly, into Massachusetts and up into the hills.

  When she turned into her driveway, she sensed that something was different. She braked the car for a moment and studied the dark house that hugged the verge, but nothing seemed changed. It wasn’t until the next morning that she glanced through the window at her shingle hung by the road at the end of the driveway, and saw that the hooks below it were empty.

  54

  THE SOWING

  It was chill in the darkness before sunrise when the wind blew down from the mountain slopes and swept
across her meadow to buffet the house. In half sleep, R.J. liked the wind sounds as long as she was snug; she was awakened by burgeoning daylight and huddled under her warm double quilt and thought long thoughts until she forced herself up and out, to turn up the thermostat and jump into the shower.

  Her period was several weeks late, she realized as she toweled, and she frowned at a possibility that pushed its way into her consciousness: premenopausal amenorrhea. It forced her to confront the fact that now, or soon, her body would be slowing and changing as obsolescent organs began to shut down, presaging the permanent disappearance of menses; and then she pushed the thought from her mind.

  It was Thursday, her free day. As soon as the sun rose fully, it warmed the house, and she turned down the thermostat and built a fire in the stove. It was nice to build wood fires again, but they dried the air and caused an efflorescence of thin gray ash to settle on every surface, and the heartrocks that were everywhere made dusting her house an Augean task.

  She found herself standing and staring at a rounded gray river stone. Eventually she set down her dustcloth and went to the closet where she stored her knapsack. She put the gray stone into the knapsack and began to walk about the house, collecting the heartrocks.

  When the knapsack was almost full, she lugged it out the back door to the big construction wheelbarrow and let the contents clatter and thump into it. Then she went back into the house and collected more. She kept only the three heartrocks Sarah had given her, and the two stones she had given Sarah, the crystal and the tiny black basalt.

  It took her five trips with the knapsack to clear the house of the stones. She dressed for winter—down jacket, stocking cap, work gloves—and went out and grabbed the wheelbarrow handles. The big barrow was more than a third full, and the aggregate of the stones weighed a lot more than she could move in comfort. It took effort to bull it across twenty-five feet of lawn, but once she entered the wood trail, the ground began to dip toward the river, and the barrow seemed to move of its own accord.

  The little sunlight that came through the canopy of branches beautifully dappled the rich, deep shade. It was cold in the woods, but the trees broke up the occasional wind gusts, and the wheelbarrow’s balloon tire hissed over the damp packed pine needles and then thumped over the spaced boards of the Gwendolyn Gabler Bridge.

  She stopped pushing as soon as she reached the river, which was brisk and burbling from the autumn rains. She hadn’t emptied the last knapsack load into the barrow, and now she took the knapsack and began walking along the trail. The riverbank was lined with trees and brush, but there was access between the tree trunks, and every now and then she would pause and take a heartrock from the knapsack and throw it into the water.

  She was a woman of practical method, and she quickly realized a pattern of dispersal: the small rocks were carefully thrown into the shallows at the edge, while the larger specimens went into the depths, mostly in the occasional pools. When she had emptied the knapsack she went back to the barrow and pushed it along the trail, upstream. Then she filled the knapsack and continued to throw away heartrocks.

  The heaviest rock in the barrow was the large one she had rescued from the construction ditch in Northampton. Back straining, shoulders hunched, she carried it to the deepest pool, just downstream of a tall and wide beaver dam. It was too heavy to throw; she had to try to carry it out along the brushy dam, to the middle of the pool. At the outset her foot slipped, and she got a boot full of icy water, but slowly and gradually she made her way to a place that satisfied her and dropped the stone heart like a bomb, watching it sink to the bottom and settle in the sand.

  R.J. liked to see the rock there, where soon it would be covered with ice and snow at the winter’s coldest. In the spring mayflies might lay their eggs on it, and trout could suck up the larvae and then shelter from the current behind the heart. She imagined that in the secret silence of summer nights, beavers might hang suspended over the rock and join in the clear moonlit waters like birds coupling in midair.

  She made her way off the beaver dam, and in similar fashion she emptied the remaining contents of the barrow into the river that flowed through her land, like the funerary scattering of ashes. She had turned half a mile of beautiful mountain river into her memorial to Sarah Markus.

  It had become a river where you could find a heartrock when you needed one.

  She pushed the empty wheelbarrow home and put it away.

  She took off her outer garments in the mudroom, and her shoes and sodden socks. Barefoot, she walked to get dry woolen socks and put them on. Then in her stockinged feet she started in the kitchen and dusted every room in her house.

  When she was through, she went into the living room. The house was empty and polished, silent but for the sound of her own breathing. There was no man, there was no cat, there was no ghost. It was solely her own house again, and she sat in the living room in the silence and the gathering darkness, waiting for what was going to happen to her next.

  55

  COMING OF SNOW

  November became December under a sky of greasy clouds. In the woods the deciduous trees were bare of leaves, their branches like upraised arms, the twigs like reaching fingers. R.J. had walked the trail unafraid all summer long, yet now that most of the bears had gone into hibernation, she was perversely afflicted with fear that she would meet the big bear face-to-face on the narrow path. Next time she went to Greenfield, she stopped at a sporting goods store and bought a boat horn, a small can with a button that gave a great blast of sound when pressed. She wore the noisemaker in a belly pack when she went into the woods, but the only animal she saw was a large buck that moved through the woods not far from where she stood without scenting her; if she had been a hunter, it would have died.

  For the first time, she was fully aware of her aloneness.

  All the trees along the trail had dead lower branches, and one day she carried an extension pruning saw into the woods in mittened hands and sawed, freeing tree after tree of dried, barkless limbs. She liked the appearance of the pruned trunks, rising cleanly like natural pillars, and she determined to prune the trees all along the trail, a long-term project.

  Snow came on the third day of December, a heavy, dumping storm with no early flurries or warning. It snowed for a day and most of a night, and she wanted to ski the trail but had to contend with the nameless, irrational fear that had plagued her for days. She went to the phone and called Freda Krantz. “It’s R.J., Freda. I’m going skiing on my wood path. If I don’t call you again in about an hour and a half, will you ask Hank to come in and get me? I don’t expect any difficulty, but …”

  “Smart girl,” Freda said firmly. “Sure. You enjoy yourself out there, R.J.”

  The sun was high, in a blue sky. The new snow dazzled her, but once she was in the woods it wasn’t so bright. Her skis hissed along; it was too soon after the storm to see many tracks, but she saw a rabbit’s, a fox’s, and some mouse prints.

  There was only one bad, precipitous drop in the whole loop of trail, and on the way down her balance vanished and she fell heavily, but into snow that was new and deep. She lay in the soft cold with her eyes closed, vulnerable to whatever might spring onto her from the nearby wooded cover—a bear, a thug, a bearded David Markus.

  But nothing came, and in a little while she got up and skied home and telephoned Freda.

  There seemed to be no lasting effects of the fall, no breaks or sprains or even bruises, except that her breasts ached and were sensitive.

  That night when she went to bed, for the first time in a long time she turned on the security alarm.

  She decided to get a dog. She began by taking books from the library and reading about the different breeds. Everyone she talked with had a different preference, but she spent several weekends visiting pet shops and kennels, and she kept narrowing the list until finally she decided she wanted a giant schnauzer, a breed developed several centuries ago to provide huge, tough dogs that could herd cattle and
protect cows from predators. The breeders had matched the handsome, intelligent standard schnauzer with sheepdogs and Great Danes; one of the books said the result was “a wonderful watchdog, large, loyal, and strong.”

  She found a kennel in Springfield that specialized in giant schnauzers. “It’s best to get a puppy that will imprint on you while it’s young,” the owner cautioned. “I’ve got just the little fella.”

  R.J. was seduced by the puppy at once. He was small and clumsy, with enormous paws, a wiry black-and-gray coat, a blunt square jaw, and stubby whiskers. “He’s gonna stand over two feet tall and weigh eighty pounds,” the kennel man said. “Be warned that he’ll eat a whole lot.”

  The dog had a hoarse, excited bark that reminded R.J. of Andy Devine, the wheezy-voiced actor in the old movies she sometimes saw on television late at night. She called him Andy for the first time on the way home, when she reprimanded him for wetting the car seat.

  Toby was having terrible backaches. She managed to go to church on Christmas morning, but R.J. roasted a turkey and made Christmas dinner at the Smiths’ cabin. She purposely had bought a turkey that was too large, so leftovers would provide the Smiths with meals for the next few days. Several of Toby’s friends had been cooking and delivering meals; it was something that was done in Woodfield when it was needed, a small-town custom R.J. particularly admired.

  After dinner, R.J. played carols on their old piano, and the three of them sang, and afterward she sat sleepily in front of the fire, surprised by her own exhaustion. Sometimes there were long, comfortable silences, and Toby commented on them. “We don’t have to talk. We can just sit here and wait for my kid to be born.”

  “I can wait at home,” R.J. said crankily, and kissed them and wished them a Merry Christmas and a good night.