Matters of Choice

  “Morning, Mr. Palmer,” Toby Smith said calmly, as though she had been greeting patients for years as they came through the door.

  “Mornin’, Toby.”

  “Morning, George.”

  “Mornin’, Peg.”

  Peg Weiler knew just what to do, ushered him into an examining room, filled in the top of his chart, took a set of vitals and recorded his data.

  R.J. enjoyed taking a very relaxed history of George Palmer. In the beginning, each of the office visits would require a lot of time because every patient was new to her and would require a full workup.

  In Boston she would have sent Mr. Palmer and his bursitis to an orthopod for a shot of cortisone. Here she gave the injection herself and asked him to make another appointment to see her.

  When she stuck her head into the waiting room, Toby showed her a bouquet of summer flowers, sent by her father, and a huge ficus plant sent by David Markus. There were six people in the waiting room, and three of them didn’t have appointments. She told Toby to practice triage; anyone in pain or severely ill should be worked in quickly. Others should be given the first available appointment. She realized suddenly, with a strange mixture of relief and regret, that she didn’t have time to spare, after all. She asked Toby to bring her a cheese sandwich on a kaiser roll from the general store, and a large decaf. “I’ll work through my lunch hour.”

  Sally Howland was coming through the front door. “I have an appointment,” she said, as if she expected to be challenged, and R.J. had to restrain herself from kissing her crabby landlady.

  Both Peg and Toby said they would work through the lunch hour too, and that they had better order sandwiches of their own. “I’ll pay,” R.J. told Toby happily.

  17

  DAVID MARKUS

  He invited her to supper at his house.

  “Will Sarah be there too?”

  “Sarah is having a big, formal dinner with the cooking club at the regional high school,” he said. He regarded her contemplatively. “You can’t come to my house unless a third person is around?”

  “No, of course I’ll come. I was just hoping Sarah would be there.”

  She liked their house, the warmth and friendliness of the thick log walls and comfortable old furniture. There were lots of paintings on the walls, the work of local artists whose names didn’t mean anything to her. He gave her the tour. Eat-in kitchen. His office, full of real estate paraphernalia, a computer, a big gray cat sleeping on his desk chair.

  “Is the cat Jewish too, like the horse?”

  “Matter of fact, she is.” He grinned. “We got her with a beat-up, horny old tomcat Sarah said was her husband. But the male hung around only two days and then ran off, so I named this one Agunah. That’s Yiddish for deserted wife.”

  His monastic bedroom. There was just a bit of sexual tension as she took in the king-size mattress and box spring on legs. There was another computer on the desk, a bookcase full of volumes about history and agriculture, and a pile of manuscript. Under probing, he admitted he was writing a novel about the death of small farms in America and about the early farmers who settled the Berkshire hills.

  “I always wanted to tell stories. After Natalie was gone, I decided to give it a try. I had Sarah to clothe and feed, so I stayed with real estate when we moved, but real estate is not exactly a pressured business out here. I have plenty of time to write.”

  “How’s it going?”

  “Oh …” He smiled, shrugged.

  Sarah’s room. Terrible multicolored drapes on the windows; he said Sarah had tie-dyed them herself. Two Barbra Streisand posters. All over the room, trays of rocks. Big rocks, little pebbles, medium-size stones, each of them roughly in the shape of a heart. Geological valentines.

  “What are they?”

  “She calls them heartrocks. She’s been collecting them since she was a little girl. It’s something Natalie started her on.”

  R. J. had taken a year of geology at Tufts. As she looked at the trays she thought she could identify quartz, shale, marble, sandstone, basalt, schist, feldspar, gneiss, slate, a red garnet, all heartshaped. There were crystals she couldn’t even guess at. “This one I moved in the bucket of the tractor,” David said, pointing to a heart-shaped granite boulder more than two feet tall, propped in the corner of the room. “Six miles, from Frank Parsons’s woods. It took three of us to carry it into the house.”

  “She just finds them on the ground?”

  “She finds them everywhere. She has a knack. I almost never find one. Sarah is tough, she rejects a lot of stones. She doesn’t call it a heartrock unless it has a true heart shape.”

  “Perhaps you should look more carefully. There are billions and billions of rocks out there. I’ll bet I can find Sarah some heartrocks.”

  “You think so, eh? You have twenty-five minutes before I serve the food. What will you bet?”

  “A pizza with everything. Twenty-five minutes should be enough time.”

  “You win, you get a pizza. I win, I get a kiss.”

  “Hey.”

  “What’s the matter, you afraid? Put your money where my mouth is.” He grinned, daring her.

  “You’re on.”

  She didn’t waste much time in their barnyard or drive, figuring they would keep the area around the house well patrolled. Their road was unpaved, full of stones. She walked down it slowly, head bent, studying the ground. She had never been aware how varied stones were, how many shapes they came in, long, round, angular, thin, flat.

  Now and then she would stoop and pick up a stone, but it was never right.

  After ten minutes had gone by, she was a quarter of a mile from the log house and had found only one stone that looked even remotely like a heart, but it was misshapen, too low on one side.

  A bad bet, she decided. She wanted to find a heartrock. She didn’t want him to think she had failed on purpose.

  At the end of the allotted time, she was back at his house. “I found one,” she said, holding it out.

  He looked at it and grinned. “This heart is missing … what’s the name of the upper chamber?”

  “Atrium.”

  “Yeah. This heart is missing the atrium on the right side.” He carried it to the door, flipped it outside.

  What happened next would be important, she told herself. If he used the bet to demonstrate his machismo, either with a clinch or an exchange of saliva, she would have no interest in him at all.

  But he bent and barely touched her mouth with his lips, a kiss that was tender and incredibly sweet.

  Ooh.

  He gave her a simple but wonderful supper: a large, crisp salad made entirely from his own garden stuff, except for the tomatoes, which were store-bought because his weren’t ripe yet. It was served with the house specialty, a honey-miso dressing, and garnished with asparagus they picked and steamed just before they sat down to eat. He had made his own sprouts from a combination of seeds and legumes he assured her was a secret, and he had baked crispy rolls filled with tiny pieces of garlic that exploded flavor as she chewed.

  “Hey. You’re some cook.”

  “I like to potchky around.”

  Dessert was homemade vanilla ice cream, with a blueberry torte he’d baked that morning. She found herself telling him about the religious mixture of her clan. “There are Protestant Coles and Quaker Regensbergs. And Jewish Coles and Jewish Regensbergs. And atheists. And my cousin Marcella Regensberg, who is a Franciscan nun at a convent in Virginia. We have something of everything.”

  Over the second cup of coffee she learned something about him that was astounding. The “graduate study” about which he had been vague was completed at the Jewish Theological Seminary of America, in New York.

  “You’re a what?”

  “A rabbi. At least, I was ordained, a long time ago. I worked at it only a while.”

  “Why did you quit? Did you have a congregation?”

  “I just …” He shrugged again. “I was too full of questions an
d insecurities to take a congregation. I had begun to doubt, I couldn’t make up my mind about the existence of God. And I felt a congregation at least deserved a rabbi who had made up his mind about that.”

  “And how do you feel now? Have you made up your mind since then?”

  Abraham Lincoln looked at her for a long moment. How could blue eyes become so sad, hold such fleeting pain? He slowly shook his head. “Jury’s still out.”

  He didn’t blurt things. It was only after weeks of seeing him often that she learned details. When he had finished at the seminary he had gone directly into the army, ninety days at officers’ school and then right to Vietnam as a second lieutenant chaplain. It was comparatively cushy work, safely behind the lines at a large hospital in Saigon. He had spent his days with the maimed and dying, his evenings writing letters to their families, and he had absorbed their fears and anger long before his own body was injured.

  One day he was riding in the back of a troop carrier with two Catholic chaplains, Major Joseph Fallon and Lieutenant Bernard Towers, and they were caught in the street during a rocket attack. There was a direct hit on the front of the vehicle; in the rear seat the blast was narrow and selective. Bucky Towers, seated on the left, was destroyed. Joe Fallon, seated in the middle, lost his right leg at the knee. David suffered a serious wound in his left leg, into the bone. It required three operations, long recovery. Now his left leg was shorter than the right, but the limp was negligible, she hadn’t even noticed it.

  He had returned to New York when discharged and delivered one guest sermon in application for a job. It was in Bay Path, Long Island, at Temple Beth Shalom, the House of Peace. He spoke of keeping peace in a complex world. Halfway through the sermon, he looked up to where the temple decorating committee had placed a large plaque emblazoned with the first of Maimonides’ Thirteen Articles of Faith: I have perfect faith that the Creator, blessed be His name, is the author and guide of everything that has been created; and that He alone has made, does make, and will make all things.

  It came to him in a moment of frozen terror that he could not with certainty agree, and he had somehow stumbled to the end of the sermon.

  He had applied to Lever Brothers as a real estate trainee, an agnostic rabbi too full of doubt to be anybody’s clergyman.

  “Could you still marry people?”

  He had an attractive, slightly twisted smile. “I suppose I could. Once a rabbi …”

  “It would make a great combination of signs. MARRYIN’ MARKUS. Right under I’M-IN-LOVE-WITH-YOU HONEY.”

  18

  A FELINE INTIMACY

  R.J. hadn’t fallen in love with David Markus all at once. It had started as a small seed, an admiration of his face and strong, long fingers, a response to the timbre of his voice, to the softness in his eyes. But to her surprise—even to her fear—the seed had flowered, feeling had grown. They hadn’t fallen into each other’s arms—as if with their very patience, their mature caution, they were telling one another something. But on a rainy Saturday afternoon in his house, his daughter safely at the one-dollar movie in Northampton with friends, they kissed with a familiarity that also had grown.

  He complained to her that he was having trouble describing a woman’s body in his novel. “Artists and photographers simply use models, a sensible solution.”

  Very sensible, she agreed.

  “So will you pose for me?”

  She shook her head. “No. You’ll have to write from memory.” Already they were unbuttoning buttons.

  “You’re a virgin,” he said.

  She didn’t remind him that she was a divorced woman, and forty-two years old.

  “And I’ve never seen a woman before, we’re both brand-new, blank pages.”

  Suddenly, they were. They inspected one another at length. R.J. found she had a hard time breathing. He was slow and very gentle, at first controlling the urgency and making it better, treating her as if she were made of very fine breakable stuff, without words letting her know things that were important. Both of them quickly became almost crazy.

  Afterward they lay as though comatose, still joined. When finally she turned her head, she looked into the unblinking green eyes of the cat. Agunah was seated on her haunches on a bedside chair, watching intently. R.J. had the certain knowledge that the cat understood exactly what had just been done.

  “David, if this is a test, I have failed. Get her out of here.”

  He laughed. “It isn’t a test.”

  He disengaged, took out the cat and closed the door, came back. The second time was slower, calmer, and filled R.J. with happiness. He was considerate and generous. She explained that her orgasms were apt to be long and full, but once she had had one, the next one usually was somewhere a few days down the road. She was embarrassed in the telling, certain that his last lover had had climaxes like firecrackers, but he proved easy to talk to.

  Eventually, he left her in the bed and made their supper. The door was left open again, and the cat returned to the room and the chair, but R.J. didn’t mind, and she lay there and listened to David singing Puccini off-key and sounding very happy. The scent of their joining mingled with the perfume of his omelets, onions and peppers and tiny zucchinis frying until they were sweet as his kisses, rich as the promise of life. Later, when she and David lay next to one another, dozing, Agunah settled herself at the foot of the bed between their feet. When R.J. became accustomed, she liked it.

  “Thank you for giving me a wonderful experience, all those important little details to write about.”

  She glowered. “I’ll cut your heart out.”

  “You already have,” he told her gallantly.

  One out of every six patients who came to her didn’t have medical insurance of any kind. A number of them didn’t have the twenty dollars she had set as her fee for treating the uninsured. From some, she accepted payment in kind. She accumulated six cords of hardwood, split and stacked behind her house. She acquired a once-a-week cleaning woman for the house and another for the office. She got a regular supply of dressed chickens and turkeys and several sources of fresh vegetables, berries and flowers.

  She was amused by the barter but worried about cash and about her debts.

  She developed a clinical technique for working with patients who lacked insurance, aware that she would have to try to reverse ailments long neglected. But it wasn’t people with complicated problems who bothered her most, it was those who didn’t come at all because they couldn’t pay and were too proud to accept charity. People like that sought out a doctor only in extremity, when it was too late to help them: the diabetes had resulted in blindness, the tumors had metastasized. R.J. saw several of these cases right from the start. She could do nothing but rage silently at the system and treat them.

  She depended on word of mouth to get her message out into the hills: When you’re sick, when you hurt, come to the new woman doctor. If you don’t have insurance, she makes arrangements about the money.

  As a result, some of the disenfranchised did come to her. Even when she didn’t want their barter, some of them insisted. A man with Parkinson’s disease fought his tremors to weave her an ash splint basket. A woman with ovarian cancer was making her a patchwork quilt. But many more people were scattered throughout the hills without insurance and without any kind of medical care at all. She knew it, and it ate at her.

  She continued to see a great deal of David. To her surprise and regret, the warmth Sarah had shown toward her at their first meeting soon was noticeably lacking. R.J. understood that the girl was jealous of her, and she talked it over with David.

  “It’s natural that she should feel threatened by a woman who suddenly is occupying a good deal of her father’s life,” she said.

  He nodded. “We’ll just have to give her time to get used to it.”

  That presupposed that the two of them were on a course she wasn’t certain she wanted to follow. David was being honest about the way they had come to feel about one another.
She was just as honest, with herself as well as with David.

  “I just want to continue things the way they are, without making heavy plans for the future. It’s too early for me to think about a lasting relationship. I have goals to accomplish here. I want to become established in the town as its doctor, and I’m not looking to make a permanent personal commitment right now.”

  David seemed to latch on to the words right now and to take encouragement from them. “Fine. We have to give ourselves time,” he said.

  She was full of uncertainties, unable to know her own mind, but she found it possible to tell him about her hopes, and of her worries about money.

  “I don’t know medical economics, but there should be enough of a practice here to give you a damn fine income, mucho dough.”

  “It doesn’t have to be damn fine. I just need to get by. I don’t have anybody to support but myself.”

  “Still … why merely to get by?” He looked at her the way her father had.

  “I don’t care about money. What I care about is practicing world-class medicine in this small town.”

  “That makes you some kind of saint,” he said almost fearfully.

  “Get real. No saint would do what I just did to you,” she said practically, and grinned at him.

  19

  THE HOUSE ON THE VERGE

  Slowly she and Peg and Toby worked the kinks out of the office routine. Slowly, too, R.J. learned the rhythms of the town and grew familiar with its pace. She sensed that people she met liked to nod and say “Hello, Doctor!”, felt their pride in the fact that the town had a physician again. She began making house calls, seeking out the homes of the bedridden, traveling to patients who found it difficult or impossible to get to medical care. When she had the time and they offered a piece of pie and a cup of coffee she sat with them at their kitchen tables and talked about town politics and the weather, and copied recipes into her prescription pad.