by Noah Gordon
“That might explain why there’s been no pregnancy,” Gwen murmured.
“Probably it does,” Dan Noyes said cheerfully, and went to work.
In an hour both the endometrial growths and the cysts had been removed, Toby was resting comfortably, and Gwen and R.J. were driving back down the Mohawk Trail so R.J. could keep office hours.
“Dr. Noyes did a neat job,” Gwen said.
“He’s very good. Retiring this year. He has a lot of women from the hills in his practice.”
Gwen nodded. “Hmmm. Then remind me to drop him a letter and admire him a whole lot,” she said, and shot R.J. her warm grin.
She was leaving on Friday, so they wanted to make Thursday count. “Let’s see,” Gwen said, “I’ve contributed mightily and generously to the welfare of your sugar pod peas, I’ve altered my entire life in order to become your associate and neighbor, and I’ve collaborated to try and help Toby. Is there anything else I can do before I leave?”
“As a matter of fact. Come with me,” R.J. said.
In the barn she found the three-pound maul and the enormous old crowbar, long and thick, that had been left there, perhaps by Harry Crawford. She gave Gwen work gloves and the maul, and she carried the crowbar as she led Gwen down the trail and around by the river, all the way to the final bridge. The three flat rocks were still just where she had abandoned them.
They got down into the brook. She positioned the crowbar and let Gwen hold it while she drove it firmly beneath the framework log on the far bank.
“Now,” she said. “We try and lift it together. On the count of three. One … Two …” R.J. had been in junior high school when she learned about Archimedes’ claim that, given a long enough lever, he could move the planet. Now she had faith. “Three.”
Sure enough, as she and Gwen grunted together and lifted their arms, the end of the timber rose.
“Little more,” R.J. said judiciously. “Now,” she said, “you’re going to have to hold it alone.”
Gwen’s face went blank.
“Okay?”
Gwen nodded. R.J. let go and dove for the flat rocks.
“R.J.” The lever wobbled as R.J. lifted one of the rocks and slid it into place. She bent for another rock, as Gwen gasped.
“R.J.! For …”
The second rock was in place.
“… crying … out … LOUD!”
“Hold it. Hold it, Gwen.”
The last rock thumped into place just as Gwen let go and sank to her haunches in the bed of the brook.
It took all of R.J.’s remaining strength to pull the crowbar from beneath the log. It grated on the top rock, but the three rocks stayed in position. R.J. climbed out of the brook and walked onto the bridge.
It was reasonably level. When she stamped on it, it appeared to be strong, a bridge for generations.
She did her tarantella. The bridge quivered a bit because it was flexible, but it didn’t move. It felt firm and permanent. She threw back her head and stared into the leafy greenness of the trees, stamping her feet as she danced.
“I christen thee the Gwendolyn T. for Terrific Gabler Bridge.” Below her, Gwen was trying to whoop but was achieving only strangled laughter.
“I can do anything. Anything,” R.J. told the spirits of the forest, “with a little help from my friends.”
40
WHAT AGUNAH FEARED
May was soft and good. The warmed earth could now be gardened, and graves could be dug in it again. On the fifth day of the month, two days before the annual Town Meeting, the body of Eva Goodhue was taken from the keeping vault at the Woodfield Cemetery and buried. John Richardson conducted a simple, moving graveside service. Only a handful of townfolk were there, mostly old people who remembered that Eva had come from a family that went far back in the town’s history.
When R.J. came back from the funeral, she planted one of her two raised beds. She set the seeds in broad rows a foot wide, so there would be little room for weeds. She planted two kinds of carrots, three varieties of lettuce, red and white radishes, shallots, beets, basil, parsley, dill, and fava beans. It was somehow meaningful to her that Eva was now part of the earth that could bestow such beneficence.
It was late afternoon by the time she finished and put the gardening tools away. She was washing up in the kitchen when the telephone rang.
“Hello. This is Dr. Cole.”
“Dr. Cole, my name is Barbara Eustis. I’m director of the Family Planning Clinic in Springfield.”
“Oh?”
Speaking slowly and quietly, Barbara Eustis conveyed her desperation. Her doctors had been intimidated by the violence of the anti-abortion zealots, the threats, the murder of Dr. Gunn in Florida.
“Well, they gave that murderer a life sentence. Surely that will be a deterrent.”
“Oh, I hope so. But the thing is … a lot of doctors aren’t willing to place themselves and their families at risk. I don’t blame them, but I’m afraid that unless I get some physicians to help, the clinic will have to close. And that would be tragic, because women really need us. I was talking with Gwen Gabler, and she suggested I give you a call.”
She didn’t! Damn you, Gwen, how could you? R.J. tasted brass.
Barbara Eustis was saying she had a couple of gutsy people who were willing to work. Gwen had promised she would work one day a week after she moved east. The voice on the phone begged R.J. to give the clinic one day a week also, to do first-trimester abortions.
“I’m sorry. I can’t. My malpractice insurance premiums come to thirty-five hundred dollars a year. If I work for you, they’ll go up to more than ten thousand dollars.”
“We’ll pay your insurance.”
“I’m as lacking in courage as anyone. I’m just plain scared.”
“Of course you are, and with reason. Let me tell you that we spend real money on security. We have armed guards. We have volunteer bodyguards and escorts who meet our doctors and accompany them to and from the clinic.”
R.J. didn’t want to have to contend with that. Or with the controversy and the crowds and the hatred. She wanted to spend her day off working in the woods, taking walks, practicing the viola da gamba.
She never wanted to see an abortion clinic again. She knew she would be forever haunted by what had happened to Sarah. But neither could she escape awareness of what had happened to the young Eva Goodhue and all those other women. She sighed.
“Suppose I give you Thursdays,” she said.
There was a fairly short stretch of woods between the Gwendolyn T. for Terrific Gabler Bridge and the backyard of her house, but it was mostly tough brush and close-set trees. She had only one Thursday left before starting work at the Springfield clinic, and she determined that she would attempt to finish the trail that day.
She arose early and got breakfast out of the way, eager to get outside and go to work. As she was putting away the breakfast things, there was a scratching at the door, and she let Agunah in.
As usual, Agunah ignored R.J., made her inspection of the house, and waited by the front door to be let out again. R.J. had abandoned offering pleasantries to the aloof visitor. She opened the door and waited for the cat to leave, but Agunah hung back, her spine becoming round, her tail rising. She looked like a cartoon caricature of a frightened cat, and she turned and ran into R.J.’s room.
“What is it, Agunah? What are you afraid of?”
She closed the door, compulsively turning the key in the lock, and began to peer out the windows.
There was a very large black shape moving at an unhurried pace across the meadow and toward her house.
The bear waded through the tall grass. R.J. never had imagined that a bear in the Massachusetts hills could become so large. The great male was doubtless the one whose sign she had been seeing in the woods for weeks. She stood transfixed, unable to leave the window long enough to run and search for her camera.
When he neared the house, he stopped at the crabapple tree and stood on his
hind legs to sniff at a couple of wrinkled apples left over from last year. Then he dropped back onto all fours and shambled out of her vision to the side of the house.
R.J. raced up the stairs to the bedroom window and looked directly down at him. He was staring at his reflection in the glass of the first-floor window; she was certain he thought he was looking at another bear, and she hoped he wouldn’t attack and break the glass. The shaggy black hair on his neck and shoulders appeared to bristle. His great, wide head was slightly bent, and his eyes, too small for the large head, glittered with hostility.
After a moment he turned from the mirrored image. From where she watched, the power of the massive shoulders and the surprisingly thick, long legs was overwhelming. For the first time in her life R.J. actually felt the hair on the back of her neck lifting. Agunah and I, she thought.
She watched until the bear entered the woods, then she returned to the kitchen and sat in a chair without moving.
The cat went to the front door again, somewhat furtively. When R.J. opened it, Agunah hesitated only a moment and then slipped out and ran in the opposite direction from the one in which the bear had disappeared.
R.J. continued to sit. She told herself that she couldn’t go into the woods now.
Yet she knew if she didn’t finish the trail that day she might not have a free day for a long time.
When half an hour had passed, she went into the barn and filled the chain saw with fuel and oil, then she carried it onto the wooden path. Jan Smith had told her that bears lived in fear of human beings and avoided them, but the moment she entered the dark, shaded trail she was terrified, aware she had left her own territory and entered the bear’s. Jon had assured her that when bears were warned of human presence they would depart, and she picked up a stick and tapped it against the handle of the saw. He had also told her that it didn’t warn a bear if you whistled, because they were accustomed to the sound of the birds. So she began to sing at the top of her voice, songs she had sung as a teenager in Harvard Square, “This Land Is Your Land,” and then “Where Have All the Flowers Gone?” She was well into “When the Saints Go Marching In” when she came to the last bridge and clumped across.
It wasn’t until the motor of the chain saw had roared to life that she felt secure, and she moved quickly to overcome her fear with the hardest labor she could perform.
41
KINDRED SPIRITS
The Family Planning Clinic in Springfield was in a handsome old brownstone house on State Street, now a bit shabby but in good repair. R.J. had told Barbara Eustis that, at least for the moment, she preferred to come and leave unaccompanied, not believing that an escort offered any real protection. But now, as she parked a block away and walked to the clinic, she wondered about the wisdom of that decision. A dozen protestors were already there with signs, and as soon as R.J. started to mount the steps, the hooting began and the signs were jabbed in her direction.
One of the demonstrators held a sign saying “JESUS WEPT.” She was a woman who looked to be in her thirties, with long honeycolored hair, a narrow nose with sculptured nostrils, regretful brown eyes. She didn’t scream or wave her sign, she just stood there. Her gaze clicked onto R.J.’s, who knew they had never met but somehow felt that they knew one another, so that she nodded, and the other woman nodded back. And then she was up the stairs and inside the building, and the tumult was left behind.
First-trimester abortions were simple to resume, but the increased tension was back as a part of her life.
The horror was there every Thursday, the terrorizing took place all through the week. They identified her car almost at once. The telephone calls to her home began only two weeks after she started work at the clinic, and they came with regularity—the name-calling, the accusations, the threats.
Murderer, you’ll die. Die, die, in pain. Your house will burn, but it won’t be smoking ruins for you to find when you get home, because you’ll be in the ashes. We know the house well, on Laurel Hill Road in Woodfield. Your apple trees need pruning, your roof soon will need some work, but don’t bother to have it done. Your house will burn. You’ll be in it.
She made no attempt to get an unlisted number; the townsfolk had to be able to reach their doctor.
She stopped at the police station in the basement of the Town Hall one morning and had a chat with Mack McCourtney. The Woodfield police chief listened hard when she told of the threats.
“You have to take them seriously,” he said. “You must. I’ll tell you something. My father was the first Catholic to move into this town. Nineteen and thirty-one, it was. The Ku Klux Klan came at night.”
“I thought that happened only in the South.”
“Oh, no, oh, no…. They came at night in their Yankee bedsheets and burned a big cross in our pasture. The fathers and uncles of a whole lot of the people you and I know, folks we serve every day, burned a big wooden cross near my father’s house because he was a Chicopee Catholic who had dared to come here to live.
“You’re a wonderful woman, Doc. I know, because I’ve seen you in action and I’ve watched you closely when you didn’t even know I was looking. Now I’ll watch you even closer. You and your house.”
R.J. had had three HIV-positive patients, a child who had contracted the AIDS virus from transfused blood, and a man who had given it to his wife.
George Palmer’s son, Harold, came to the office one morning, accompanied by his friend. Eugene Dewalski read a magazine in the waiting room while she examined Harold, and then at her patient’s request she called Mr. Dewalski into the office while she discussed her findings.
She was certain that the things she discussed with them came as no surprise; they had known for more than three years that Harold Palmer was HIV positive. Just before coming to Woodfield he had been diagnosed with his first Coxsackie tumors, the onset of the full-blown disease. During the intake interview in her office, the two men sat and answered her questions with dry, expressionless voices. When they finished discussing his symptoms, Harold Palmer told her brightly that it was wonderful for him to be back in Woodfield. “You can’t ever take the country out of a country boy.”
“How do you like the town, Mr. Dewalski?”
“Oh, I love it.” He smiled. “I was warned about coming to live with a lot of cold Yankees, but so far the Yankees I’ve met have been warm. Anyway, they seem to be outnumbered by Polish farmers hereabouts, and we’ve already had two invitations to come over and sample homemade kielbasa and golumpki and galuska. We accepted them eagerly, too.”
“You accepted them eagerly,” Harold Palmer said, smiling, and the two men left amid badinage about Polish cooking.
The following week Harold returned alone for a shot. Within minutes he had collapsed into R.J.’s arms, weeping wildly. She cradled his head against her shoulder, stroked his hair, hugged him, spoke to him a long time—practiced the art of medicine. They established the relationship they would need as he entered the long, downward spiral.
It wasn’t an easy time for many of her patients. The newscasters on network television reported that the stock market index was rising again, but in the hilltowns the economy was bad. Toby became furious because a woman had made an appointment to have only her little girl examined, then had brought all three of her children for the doctor to look at. But Toby’s fury died when she realized there was no insurance and almost assuredly no money to pay for three examinations. That evening, on the television news, R.J. heard a United States senator reiterate smugly that there was no medical care crisis in America.
Sometimes on Thursday mornings she found a large group demonstrating in front of the clinic, at other times there were only a few people. R.J. noticed that they would show up to demonstrate during a single day of lousy weather, but they tended to dwindle away after several consecutive days of rain, except for the woman with the quiet eyes. She was there every Thursday morning no matter what the weather, never shouting, never waving her sign.
Every week she a
nd R.J. nodded to one another, offering arcane, almost grudging concession of one another’s humanity. On a morning of heavy, lashing rain, R.J. came early to see the woman standing alone in the street, wearing a yellow slicker. They nodded as usual, and R.J. started up the stairs but then came back. Water was dripping from the woman’s rain hat.
“Listen, let me buy you a cup of coffee. In the coffee shop at the corner.”
They looked at one another silently. The woman made up her mind and nodded. On the way to the coffee shop she stopped to stash her sign in the back of a Volvo station wagon.
The coffee shop was warm and dry, full of the clatter of dishes and the ragging voices of men talking about sports. They took off their rain clothes and sat facing one another in a booth.
The woman smiled faintly. “Is this a five-minute truce?”
R.J. looked at her watch. “Make it ten minutes. Then I have to go in. I’m Roberta Cole, by the way.”
“Abbie Oliver.” After a moment’s hesitation she held out her hand, and R.J. shook it.
“Doctor, aren’t you?”
“Yes. You?”
“Teacher.”
“Of?”
“Freshman English.”
They each ordered decaffeinated coffee.
There was a moment or two of anxiety as they awaited the first unpleasantry, but none was forthcoming. Every fiber of R.J.’s being wanted to confront this women with facts—to tell her, for example, about Brazil, where as many illegal abortions are done annually as are done legally in the United States. The difference is that in the United States 10,000 women go to the hospital every year for complications of abortion, while in Brazil 400,000 women are hospitalized for the same reason.
But R.J. knew the woman opposite her no doubt was aching to present arguments of her own, perhaps to tell her that each blob of tissue she suctioned contained a soul screaming to be born….
“This is like a lull in the Civil War,” Abbie Oliver said, “when soldiers climbed out of the trenches and exchanged food and tobacco.”