The Cole Trilogy: The Physician, Shaman, and Matters of Choice

by Noah Gordon

  The strong arms wrapped themselves around her, his chin on her head hurt her.

  “Careful, the hook’s come loose, it will dig into your hand.”

  He spoke into her hair.

  “You finished the trail,” he said.

  PART FOUR

  THE COUNTRY DOCTOR

  45

  THE BREAKFAST TALE

  Minutes after David had terrified her on the wood trail, they sat in R.J.’s kitchen and regarded one another, still a bit fearfully. They had a very difficult time beginning to talk. When last they had been together, they had stared at each other over the body of his dead child.

  Each wasn’t what the other had remembered. It was as though he were in disguise, she thought, missing the ponytail and intimidated by the beard. “Do you want to talk about Sarah?”

  “No,” he said quickly. “That is, not now. I want to talk about us.”

  She clasped her hands in her lap very tightly, trying to keep from trembling, fluctuating between hope and despair, beset by strange combinations of emotions—joy, a fluttering exhilaration, enormous relief. Yet there was also ruinous anger. “Why have you bothered to come back?”

  “I couldn’t stop thinking about you.”

  He looked so healthy, so normal, as if nothing had happened. He was too calm, too matter-of-fact. She wanted to say tender things to him, but what came out of her mouth was different. “I’m gratified…. Just like that. Not a word for a year, and then ’Hello, good old R.J., I’m back.’ How do I know that the first time we have an argument you won’t get in your car and disappear into thin air for another year? Or five years, or eight years?”

  “Because I tell you so. Will you at least think about it?”

  “Oh, I’ll think about it,” she heard a shrewish voice say with such bitterness that he turned away.

  “Can I stay here tonight?”

  It was on her lips to refuse him, but she found she couldn’t. “Why not,” she said, and laughed.

  “I’ll need a lift to my car. I left it on the village road and walked in over Krantz’s land to pick up the wood trail at the river.”

  “Well, you just walk yourself back to it while I make supper,” she said cruelly and a bit wildly, and he nodded without replying and left the house.

  When he returned, she was under control. She told him to put his suitcase in the guest room, speaking to him politely now, as she would to any guest, to keep him from hearing her gladness, her eternal availability. She gave him a meal that wasn’t a prodigal’s feast—warmed-over veal burgers, yesterday’s baked potato, applesauce from a jar.

  They sat to eat, but before she had taken a bite, she left the table and went quickly to her room, closing the door. David heard the television being turned on and then canned laughter, a rerun of Seinfeld.

  He also heard R.J. Somehow he knew it wasn’t for them that she was sobbing, and he went to the door and knocked softly.

  She was lying on the bed, and he knelt beside her.

  “I loved her too,” she whispered.

  “I know.”

  They wept together as they should have done a year before, and she skooched over and made room for him. The first kisses were soft and tasted of tears.

  “I thought about you all the time. Every day, every moment.”

  “I hate the beard,” she said.

  In the morning R.J. felt strangely that she had spent the night with someone she had just met. It wasn’t only the facial hair and the missing ponytail, she thought as she stood in her kitchen and mixed juice.

  By the time she had made toast and scrambled the eggs, he joined her.

  “This is pretty good. What is this stuff?”

  “I mix orange juice with cranberry juice.”

  “You never used to drink it this way.”

  “Well, I drink it this way now. Things change, David. … Did it occur to you that I might have met someone else?”

  “Have you?”

  “You don’t have a right to know anymore.” Her anger broke through. “Why did you contact Joe Fallon but not me? Why did you never telephone? Why did you wait so very long to write to me? Why didn’t you let me know you were all right?”

  “I wasn’t all right,” he said.

  The eggs on their plates were untouched and growing cold, but he began to talk, to tell her.

  The color of the air had seemed to me strangely tinged after Sarah died, as if everything had been washed in a very pale yellow. Part of me was functional. I telephoned the funeral director in Roslyn, Long Island, scheduled the funeral for the next day, directed my car to New York behind the hearse, driving carefully. Carefully.

  I stayed at a motel. In the morning, the service was simple. The rabbi at our former temple was new; he hadn’t known Sarah, and I instructed him to make things very brief Employees of the funeral home served as pallbearers. The funeral director had placed a notice in the morning paper, but only a few people saw it in time to attend the funeral. At the Beth Moses Cemetery in West Babylon, two girls who had been Sarah’s friends in grammar school held hands and wept, and five adults who had known our family when it had been young in Roslyn stood distressed as I sent away the grave diggers and filled in the hole myself, the stones in the first shovelfuls thumping onto the coffin, the rest just dirt on dirt until it was level with the rest of the ground and then mounded.

  A heavy woman I hardly recognized, who had been Natalie’s best friend in a slimmer, younger version, sobbed and clasped me to her, and her husband begged me to come home with them. I was scarcely aware of what I said to them.

  I left at once, after the hearse. I drove a mile or two and turned into the empty parking lot of a church, where I waited more than an hour. When I returned to the cemetery, the people who had attended the funeral were gone.

  The two plots were close together. I sat between them, with one hand on the edge of Sarah’s grave and one hand on Natalie’s. No one bothered me.

  I knew only my grief and an incredible aloneness. Late in the afternoon I got into my car and drove away.

  I had no destination. It was as though the car were driving me, down Wellwood Avenue, over turnpikes, across bridges.

  Into New Jersey.

  In Newark I stopped at Old Glory, a workingman’s bar just off the Jersey Pike. I had three quick drinks there but became aware of the staring, the silences. If I had on overalls or jeans, it wouldn’t have mattered, but I wore a ruined and earth-stained single-breasted navy blue Hart Schaffner and Marx suit, and I was a ponytailed man, no longer young. So I paid and left the bar, walking to a package store and buying three fifths of Beefeaters that I took to the nearest motel.

  I’ve heard hundreds of drunks talk about the taste of liquor. Some describe it as “liquid stars,” “sipping nectar,” “stuff of the Gods.” I’ve always hated the taste of grain alcohols and stick to vodka or gin. In the motel room I sought oblivion, drinking until I fell asleep. Whenever I awoke, I would lie there puzzled for a few moments, fumbling with my mind, and then terrible pain, calamitous memory would flood in, and I would drink again.

  It was an old, familiar pattern, which I had perfected long ago, drinking in locked rooms where I was safe. The three bottles kept me drunk for four days. I was wretchedly ill for a day and a night, and then I had the blandest breakfast I could find and checked out of the motel and let the car take me somewhere.

  It was a routine I had lived before, familiar and easily readapted. I never drove when drunk, understanding that I was kept from disaster only by my car, my wallet with its plastic cards, and my checkbook.

  I drove slowly and automatically, my mind numb, trying to leave reality behind. But there always came a moment, sooner or later, when reality entered the car and rode with me, and whenever the pain grew beyond bearing I stopped, bought a couple of bottles, and checked into a room.

  I got drunk in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. I got drunk outside of Cincinnati, Ohio, and in places I never identified. I was drunk on and off th
rough the change of seasons.

  One warm, early-autumn morning—very early morning—badly hung over, I found myself driving down a country road. It was a nice rolling landscape, although the hills were lower than in Woodfield, and there were more worked fields than forest. I pulled the car around a horse-drawn black buggy driven by a bearded man wearing a straw hat, white shirt, and black pants with suspenders.

  Amish.

  I passed a farmhouse and saw a woman in a long dress and a little prayer cap helping two boys unload winter squash from the back of a flat wagon. Across a cornfield, another man drove a five-horse rig, harvesting oats.

  I was nauseated and my head hurt.

  I drove slowly through the farm country, houses all white or unpainted, wonderful barns, water towers with windmills, well-tended fields. I thought perhaps I was back in Pennsylvania, maybe near Lancaster, but pretty soon I came to the town line and learned I was driving out of Apple Creek, Ohio, and into the township of Kidron. I had a powerful thirst. Had I known it, I was less than a mile and a half from stores, a motel, cold Coca-Cola, food. But I didn’t know it.

  I could easily have driven by the house, but I came upon an empty buggy with the shafts resting on the macadam of the road, the broken leather traces telling a mute story of how the horse got away.

  I passed a man running after a mare that seemed to know what she was doing, keeping just ahead.

  Without a second thought, when I drove past the horse, I turned my car to block the road, then I got out and stood in front of the car and waved my arms at the approaching animal. There was a fence on one side of the road and high corn on the other; when the mare slowed I went forward, talking soothingly, and grabbed the bridle.

  The man came puffing up, glowering. “Danke. Sehr Danke. You know how to handle these creatures, yes?”

  “We used to own a horse.”

  The man’s face started to swim, and I leaned back against the car.

  “You are krank? Help you need?”

  “No, I’m fine. Just fine.” The dizziness was passing. What I needed was to get out of the sun’s bright hammer. I had Tylenol in the car. “Perhaps you know where I can get some water.”

  The man nodded and pointed at the nearby house. “Those people, they will give you water. Knock on their door.”

  The farmhouse was surrounded by cornfield but it wasn’t owned by Amish—I could see into the backyard, where a number of automobiles were parked. I had already knocked on the door when I noted the small sign: YESHIVA YISROEL. “The Study House of Israel.” Through the open windows came chanted Hebrew, unmistakably from one of the psalms, Bayt Yisroel barachu et-Adonai, bayt Aharon barachu et-Adonai. “O house of Israel, bless the Lord, O house of Aaron, bless the Lord.”

  The door was opened by a bearded man who looked Amish down to the dark trousers and the white shirt, but there was a skullcap on his head, his left shirtsleeve was rolled up, and phylacteries were wound about his forehead and his arm. Beyond him, men were seated at a table.

  He peered at me. “Come in, come in. Bist ah Yid?”

  “Yes.”

  “We’ve been waiting for you,” he said in Yiddish.

  There were no introductions. Introductions came later. “You’re the tenth man,” a graybeard offered. I understood that I made the minyan, enabling them to stop chanting the psalms and begin morning prayers. A couple of the men smiled, another grouchily muttered that Gottenyu, it was about time. Inwardly, I groaned. Under the best of circumstances I wouldn’t wish to be captive to an Orthodox service.

  Yet under these circumstances, what could I do? There were water and glasses on the table, and first they let me drink. Somebody handed me phylacteries.

  “No, thank you.”

  “What? Don’t be a nahr, you must put on the tefillin, they don’t bite,” the man growled.

  It had been too many years, they had to help me wrap the thin leather strap down my forearm, correctly across my palm, around the middle finger. And fix the box containing the Scripture between my eyes. In the meantime two other men came in and put on tefillin and said the brocha, but nobody hurried me. I learned later they were accustomed to irreligious Jews stumbling in on them; it was a mitzvah, it counted as a blessing to be able to give instruction. When the prayers started I found my neglected Hebrew rusty but very serviceable; at the seminary, in ancient days, I had been praised for my beautiful Hebrew. Near the end of the service three of the men stood for Kaddish, the prayers for the recently dead, and I stood with them.

  After we prayed, we breakfasted on oranges, hard-boiled eggs, kichlach, and strong tea. I was wondering how to escape when they cleared the table of breakfast things and brought out oversized Hebrew books, the pages yellowed and tattered, the corners of the leather covers bent and worn.

  In a moment they were studying as they sat on their unmatched kitchen chairs, but not just studying—contradicting, arguing, listening with the keenness of full attention. The topic was the extent to which humankind is composed of yetzer hatov, good inclinations, as opposed to yetzer harah, inclinations toward doing evil. I was amazed at the infrequency with which they consulted the texts before them; they plucked from their memories entire passages of the oral law redacted by Rabbi Judah eighteen hundred years ago. Their minds sped through both the Babylonian and Jerusalem Talmuds, easily and with style, like kids doing tricks on rollerblades. They engaged in pilpulistic debate over points in The Guide to the Perplexed, the Zohar, a dozen commentaries. I realized I was witnessing daily scholarship as it had been practiced for almost six thousand years and in many places, in the great Talmudic academy of Nahardea, in the beth midresh of Rashi, in the study of Maimonides, in the yeshivas of eastern Europe.

  The discussion sometimes was waged in quicksilver bursts of Yiddish, Hebrew, Aramaic, colloquial English. Much of it I couldn’t understand, but often it slowed as they considered a citation. My head still pounded, but I was fascinated by what I was able to comprehend.

  I could identify the head man, an elderly Jew with a full white beard and mane, a fat little belly under his prayer shawl, stains on his tie, round steel spectacles magnifying intense, agate-blue eyes. The Rebbe sat and answered the questions that were put to him from time to time.

  Somehow, the morning sped. I felt that I was a captive in a dream. When they broke for lunch at midday, the scholars went to get their brown-bag lunches, and I shook myself out of my reverie and prepared to leave, but the Rebbe beckoned.

  “You will come with me, please. We will eat something.”

  I followed him out of the study hall, through two small classrooms with rows of worn desks and children’s Hebrew homework pinned to the walls next to the blackboards, and up a flight of stairs.

  It was a small, neat apartment. The painted floors shone, there were lace doilies on the parlor furniture. Everything was in its place; clearly, it wasn’t the home of small children.

  “Here I live with my wife Dvora. She is at her job in the next town, women’s klayder she sells. I am Rabbi Moscowitz.”

  “David Markus.”

  We shook hands.

  The saleswoman had left tuna salad and vegetables in the fridge, and the Rebbe deftly plucked slices of challah from the freezer section and popped them into the toaster.

  “Nu,” he said when he had blessed the food and we were eating. “So what do you do? Salesman?”

  I hesitated. To say I sold real estate would provoke awkward curiosity about what might be up for sale locally. “I’m a writer.”

  “Truly? About what do you write?”

  It was what happened when one wove a tangled web, I lectured myself. “Agriculture.”

  “There’s lots of farming here,” the Rebbe said, and I nodded.

  We ate in companionable silence. When we were through, I helped clear the table.

  “Do you like apples?”

  “Yes.”

  The Rebbe took some early McIntoshes from the refrigerator. “Do you have a room to stay tonight
?”

  “Not yet.”

  “So be by us, we rent our extra room, it isn’t dear. And in the morning you will help make the minyan. Why not?”

  The apple I bit into was tart and crisp. On the wall I saw a picture calendar from a manufacturer of matzos, showing the Wailing Wall. I was very tired of being in my car, and when I had used the bathroom, it had been spotless. Why not, indeed? I thought dizzily.

  Rabbi Moscowitz got up several times during the night to go to the bathroom, shuffling on bunioned feet in carpet slippers; I figured he had an enlarged prostate.

  Dvora, the Rebbe’s wife, was a small, gray woman with a pink face and lively eyes. She reminded me of a kindly squirrel, and each morning she sang Yiddish love songs and lullabies in a sweet, quavering voice as she prepared breakfast.

  I didn’t unpack my clothing into the bureau drawers but lived out of my suitcase, aware I would be leaving soon. Every morning I made my own bed and put my things away. Dvora Moscowitz told me everybody should have such a boarder.

  On Friday for dinner there was the same fare my mother had served me when I was a boy: gefilte fish, chicken soup with mandlen, roast chicken with potato kugel, fruit compote, and tea. Friday afternoon, Dvora made a cholent for the following day, when it was for bidden to cook. She placed potatoes, onions, garlic, white pearl barley and navy beans into an earthenware pot and covered them with water. She added salt, pepper, and paprika, and set it to boiling. A couple of hours before the onset of the Sabbath, she added a large flanken and placed the pot into the oven, where it baked in low heat all through the Shabbos, until the following evening.

  There was a wonderful baked crust over everything when the cholent pot was opened, and the rich blend of aromas made me swallow.

  Rabbi Moscowitz took a bottle of Seagram’s Seven Crown whiskey from a cupboard and filled two shot glasses.

  “Not for me.”

  The Rebbe spread his hands. “No shnappsel?”

  I knew if I took the drink the bottle of vodka would come out of my car, and this house wasn’t the place to get sodden drunk.