Matters of Choice

  She walked down half a dozen blocks, crossed the street, and walked uptown again until she returned to the hotel. Then she went upstairs and went to bed early, as she had always done before classes during the long years of scholarship. She could hear Charlie Harris telling her, “Gotta take care of business, R.J.”

  It was a good conference, designed to be intensive and meaty, with a continental breakfast served during the first session of every morning, and lecturers during lunch and dinner. R.J. treated it very seriously. She didn’t skip a session, she took careful notes, and she arranged to purchase the tape recordings that were made of several of the lectures that particularly interested her. Evenings were reserved for entertainment, with several good choices. The first evening she saw a revival of Show Boat and enjoyed it a lot, and on the second evening she watched the Dance Theatre of Harlem with great pleasure.

  By the third morning she had accumulated enough points to guarantee her relicensing. Only the earliest of the third-day presentations interested her, and she thought that perhaps she would break away from the conference and do a little shopping before leaving New York.

  On the way back to her room to pack, she suddenly had a better idea.

  The concierge was a determinedly cheerful woman of late middle age. “But of course,” she said when R.J. asked her if she had a road map of greater New York.

  “Can you tell me how to drive to West Babylon, Long Island?”

  “If madam will give me but a moment.” The woman consulted the map and then she drew in the route with confident sweeps of her ink marker.

  R.J. stopped at the first filling station she saw once she had left the freeway, and asked the way to the House of Moses Cemetery.

  When she came to it, she followed its perimeter until she reached the cemetery entrance. There was an administration building just inside the gate, and she parked the car and went inside. A man about her own age, wearing a blue suit and a white skullcap on his head of sparse blond hair, sat behind a desk signing papers. “Good morning,” he said without looking up.

  “Good morning. I would like some help in finding a grave.”

  He nodded. “Name of deceased?”

  “Markus. Sarah Markus.”

  He swiveled his chair around to the computer behind him and typed in the name.

  “Yes, we have six by that name. Middle initial?”

  “None. Markus with a K, not a C.”

  “Ah. But there are two. Was she sixty-seven years old, or seventeen?”

  “Seventeen,” R.J. said thinly, and the man nodded. “There are so many,” he said apologetically.

  “You have such a large cemetery.”

  “Sixty acres.” He took a paper bearing a diagram of the cemetery and drew directions with his pen. “Twelve sections down from this building, you turn right. Eight sections beyond that, take a left. The grave you seek is midway in the second row. If you get lost come back, I’ll take you there myself…. Yes,” he said, glancing at the monitor to confirm the location.

  “We have everything on computer,” he said with pride, “everything. I see there was a dedication there last month.”

  “A dedication?”

  “Yes, when the memorial stone was unveiled.”

  “Oh.” She thanked him and left, clutching her paper.

  So R.J. walked slowly down the narrow roadway of gritty rock dust. Beyond the cemetery wall cars zoomed, a motorcycle burred past, brakes squealed, the sound of a horn intruded.

  Counting the sections.

  R.J.’s mother was buried in a cemetery in Cambridge, with grassy spaces between headstones. These graves were terribly close to one another, she thought. They were so many, indeed, people moving out of one city and into another.

  … Eleven … Twelve.

  She turned right and marched down eight sections.

  It should be here.

  In the section beyond, people sat in chairs next to a hole in the ground. A man in a skullcap finished talking, and mourners lined up to place a shovelful of dirt in the grave.

  R.J. went to the second row in her section, trying to move unobtrusively. Now she was looking at individual stones, not sections. EMANUEL RUBIN. LESTER ROGOVIN.

  Many of the gravestones had small stones on top of them, calling cards left to mark a visit by the living. Some graves had been planted with flowers or shrubs. One was obscured by an overgrown yew; R.J. pushed aside the branches and read the name: LEAH SCHWARTZ. There were no stones on Leah Schwartz’s memorial.

  She went through the Gutkind family plot, many Gutkinds, and then saw a double stone with two handsome, weatherproofed portraits, of a young man and a young woman. DMITRI LEVNIKOV, 1970-1992, and BASYA LEVNIKOV, 1973-1992. Husband and wife? Brother and sister? Did they die together? In a car accident? In a fire? It must be a Russian custom, the photographs on the headstone, she thought. It marked them as refugees; how sad, to come all that distance, through the sound barrier of cultures, to this.

  KIRSCHNER ROSTEN. EIDELBERG.

  MARKUS.

  MARKUS, NATALIE J., 1952-1985. ADORED WIFE, BELOVED MOTHER

  It was a double stone, one half engraved, the other half blank.

  Next to it: MARKUS, SARAH, 1977-1994. OUR CHERISHED DAUGHTER On a simple stone of square granite like Natalie’s, but this one unweathered, unmistakably new.

  On each headstone, one small “calling card” stone. It was the small stone on Sarah’s monument that caused R.J. to stand transfixed: a piece of reddish shale shaped like an irregular heart, imprinted clearly with the crablike head and lobed body of a trilobite that had lived many millions of years ago.

  She didn’t speak to Natalie or Sarah. She didn’t think they would have heard. She recalled that somewhere, in a college course probably, she had read that one of the Christian philosophers—Thomas Aquinas?—had expressed doubts that the dead had knowledge of the affairs of the living. Still, how could Aquinas have known? What did anyone know, Aquinas or David Markus or any other presuming human creature? It occurred to R.J. that Sarah had loved her. Perhaps in some way there was magic in this heartrock, a magnetism that had drawn her here and made her realize what it was necessary for her to do.

  R.J. picked up two pebbles nearby and placed one on Natalie’s marker and one on Sarah’s.

  The neighboring funeral was over, the mourners were dispersing, and many of them were coming her way, passing nearby. They averted their heads from the disturbing but commonplace sight of a broken woman by a grave. They couldn’t know that she wept as much for the living as for the dead.

  As a doctor she had always found it terrible to talk about death with those involved, and the next morning, seated in her kitchen, she struggled as she forced herself to talk with David about the death of their relationship. But she managed to tell him it was time to put an end to it.

  She asked him to recognize that it would never work.

  “You told me you had gone away to research the book. But you went to dedicate your daughter’s headstone. Yet when I’ve asked you to take me there, you’ve refused.”

  “I need time, R.J.”

  “I don’t think time will make a difference, David,” she said gently. “Even people who have been married for a long time often divorce after the death of a child. I might be able to deal with your alcoholism and the fear that some day you might drift off. But deep inside, you blame me for Sarah’s death. I believe you’ll always blame me, and I can’t deal with that.”

  His face was pale. He made no denials. “We were so good with one another. If only it hadn’t happened …”

  Her vision of him blurred. He was right. In many ways, they had been good for one another. “It did happen.”

  He accepted the truth in what she said but was slower to accept its inevitable consequence. “I thought you loved me.”

  “I did love you. I do love you, I’ll always love you and wish you happiness.” But she had made a discovery. She loved herself, too.

  That evening she was late
at her office, and when she came home, he told her he had decided to go to Colorado to join Joe Fallon’s group.

  “I’m going to take the honey separator and a couple of the best hives with me, and set the bees up on the mountain. I thought I might empty the other hives and store them in your barn.”

  “No. It would be better if you sell them.”

  He understood what she was saying, the finality of it. They looked at one another, and he nodded.

  “I won’t be able to leave for ten days or so. I want to finish the manuscript and get it off to my publisher.”

  “That’s reasonable.”

  Agunah walked by and gave R.J. a cold stare.

  “David, I would like you to do me a favor.”

  “What’s that?”

  “This time when you go, take the cat.”

  Now the hours passed very slowly, and they worked at avoiding one another. Only two days had gone by when she received a telephone call from her father, but it had seemed like a much longer time.

  When her father asked about David, she was able to tell him that she and David were parting.

  “Ah. Are you all right, R.J.?”

  “Yes, I am.”

  “I love you.”

  “I love you, too.”

  “What I’m calling about is this. How about coming down here for Thanksgiving?”

  Suddenly she wanted to see him, talk with him, absorb his comfort. “Suppose I come down early. Like right away?”

  “Can you arrange it?”

  “I don’t know. Let me try.”

  When she asked Peter Gerome if he could come back and fill in for her for another two weeks he was bemused, but he was obviously happy to agree. “I really like working up there,” he said, and she telephoned the airline and then called her father and told him she was coming to Florida the next day.

  53

  SUNSHINE AND SHADOWS

  Her heart lifted when she glimpsed her father, but his appearance troubled her; he seemed to have shrunk into himself somehow, and she was aware that between their last meeting and this, he had grown old. But his spirits were fine, and he seemed giddy with pleasure at seeing her. They began to argue almost at once, but without heat; she wanted a porter for her two pieces of luggage, knowing he would want to carry one.

  “Now, R.J., that’s foolish. I’ll take the suitcase and you can carry the garment bag.”

  Laughing in despair, she let him have his way. The moment they left the airport building, she blinked in the sunny dazzle and wilted under the moist slap of the tropical air.

  “What’s the temperature, Dad?”

  “High eighties,” he said proudly, as if the warmth were a personal reward for his good teaching. He drove out of the airport and into the city as if he knew where he was going. He had always been a confident driver. She glimpsed sailboats on the painted ocean and missed the familiar cold breath of her woods.

  He lived in a white tower owned by the university, in an impersonal two-bedroom apartment that he had barely attempted to make his own. Two oil paintings of Boston hung in the living room. One was of Harvard Square in the winter. The other depicted a moment in the Charles River regatta, with the grimacing B.U. oarsmen frozen in an explosive effort to skim their racing shell off the canvas, while the buildings of M.I.T. were a vague suggestion on the far shore. Other than the pictures and a few books, the place was militarily neat but pleasureless, like the expanded cell of a modern scholar-monk. On the desk in the guest room, which doubled as her father’s office, was the glass case containing Rob J.’s scalpel.

  In his bedroom was a photograph of R.J., near a sepia picture of her mother, a smiling young woman in an old-fashioned onepiece bathing suit, squinting against the sun on a Cape Cod beach. On the other dresser was a photograph of a woman R.J. didn’t recognize.

  “Who’s this, Dad?”

  “Friend of mine. I’ve asked her to join us for dinner, if you feel up to it?”

  “Oh, I certainly will, once I’ve had a long shower.”

  “I think you’ll like her,” he said. Evidently, she realized, her father was not a monk after all.

  He had made reservations at a seafood restaurant where they could watch the marine traffic move up and down a canal as they dined. The face in the photograph belonged to a well-dressed woman named Susan Dolby. She was chunky but not overweight, and somehow athletic. Her hair was cut in a tight gray helmet, and her nails were short and glowed with colorless polish. Her face was tanned, with laugh lines at the outside corners of eyes that were almost almond shaped. Were they green? Brown? R.J. was willing to bet she was a golfer or a tennis player.

  She was also a physician, an internist with a private practice in Fort Lauderdale.

  The three of them sat and talked medical politics. While the restaurant’s speakers spouted “Adeste Fidelis”—too early in the season, they agreed—sun glare bounced off the water and sailboats moved by like expensive swans.

  “Tell me about your practice,” Susan said.

  R.J. told them about the town and the people. They talked about influenza in Massachusetts and in Florida and compared their problem cases—shop talk, doctor talk. Susan said she had been in Lauderdale ever since finishing her internship at Michael Riis Medical Center in Chicago. She had gone to medical school at the University of Michigan. R.J. was drawn to her open manner and easy friendliness.

  Just as their shrimp dinners were being served, Susan’s pager beeped. “Uh-oh,” she said, and excused herself and went off to find a telephone.

  “Well?” R.J.’s father said a few moments later, and she realized this woman was important to him.

  “You were right. I really like her.”

  “I’m glad.”

  He had known Susan for three years, he said. They had met when she came to Boston to attend a conference at the medical school.

  “After that, we saw each other occasionally, sometimes in Miami, sometimes in Boston. But we couldn’t meet often enough, because both of us have crowded schedules. So before I retired in Boston, I contacted colleagues at the university here and was happy to get an offer.”

  “Then this is a serious relationship.”

  He smiled at her. “Yes, we’re becoming serious about one another.”

  “Dad, I’m so happy for you,” R.J. said, taking his hands in hers.

  For a moment she was conscious only that his fingers had become more gnarled with arthritis. Then she was aware of a descending, a gradual loss of energy even as she leaned toward him, smiling.

  Susan was returning to the table. “I took care of it by phone,” she said.

  “Dad, are you feeling all right?”

  Her father was pale, but his eyes were alert as he looked at her. “Yes. Shouldn’t I be?”

  “Something is going on,” R.J. said.

  Susan Dolby regarded her. “What do you mean?”

  “I think he’s having a heart attack.”

  “Robert,” Susan said steadily, “are you experiencing chest pains? Shortness of breath?”

  “No.”

  “You don’t seem to be sweating. Do you have muscular pain?”

  “No.”

  “Listen. Is this some kind of family joke?”

  R.J. felt a sinking, the falling of an internal barometer. “Where’s the nearest hospital?”

  Her father was watching her with interest. “I think we’d better listen to R.J., Susan,” he said.

  Puzzled, Susan made up her mind, nodded. “Cedars Medical Center is only minutes away. The restaurant has a wheelchair. We can call the emergency room on my car phone. It will take less time to drive him than to wait for an ambulance to get here.”

  Her father began to gasp with his first pains just as they turned into the medical center drive. Nurses and a resident were waiting in front of the door with a gurney and oxygen. They gave him a shot of streptokinase, hustled him into an examining room, and wheeled up the portable EKG.

  R.J. stood to one side. She
was listening hard, watching ferociously, but these people were good, and it was best to leave them alone so they could do their jobs. Susan Dolby was at her father’s side, holding his hand. R.J. was a bystander.

  It was late evening. Her father was resting comfortably in an oxygen tent in the intensive care unit, hooked up to beeping monitors. The hospital cafeteria was closed, so R.J. and Susan went to a small restaurant nearby and ate black bean soup and Cuban bread.

  Then they returned to the hospital and sat alone in a small waiting room.

  “He’s doing very well, I think,” Susan said. “They got the anticoagulants into him so quickly, one-point-five million units of streptokinase, aspirin, five thousand units of heparin. We’re lucky.”

  “Thank God.”

  “Now. How did you know?”

  As sparely and factually as possible, R.J. told her.

  Susan Dolby shook her head. “I would say it’s your imagination, a fairy tale. Except that I saw it happen.”

  “My father calls it the Gift. … There have been times when I’ve thought it was a burden. But I’m learning to live with it, learning to use it. Tonight, I’m so grateful for it,” R.J. said. She hesitated. “I don’t talk about this to other physicians, as you can understand. I would appreciate it if you wouldn’t …”

  “No. Who would believe me? But why did you tell me the truth? Weren’t you tempted to make up a story?”

  R.J. leaned over and kissed the tanned cheek. “I knew we would keep it in the family,” she said.

  Her father was in pain, and sublingual nitroglycerine didn’t do much good, so they gave him morphine. It made him sleep a lot. After the second day she could go away from the hospital for an hour or two at a time. She drove his car. Susan had patients to see but she pointed out the best beach, and R.J. swam. She slopped on sunscreen like a good doctor, but it felt good to have sea salt dry on her skin again, and for a few minutes she lay on her back with an orange glow above her closed eyes and nursed hurtful regrets about David. She prayed for her father and then for Greg Hinton, as promised.

  That evening she asked for a conference with her father’s cardiologist, Dr. Sumner Kellicker, and was glad when Susan wanted to join them. Kellicker was a red-faced, fussy man who wore gorgeous suits and obviously didn’t relish patients with physicians in the family.