Matters of Choice

by Noah Gordon

  A couple who were near neighbors of hers, Pru and Albano Trigo, had a sick kid, Lucien, ten years old. They called him Luke. He was off his feed, without energy, had explosive diarrhea. It persisted, on and on. R.J. did a sigmoidoscopy, sent him for upper GI X rays, an MRI.

  Nothing.

  The boy continued to fail. R.J. referred him to a gastroenterologist in Springfield for a consult, but the Springfield physician couldn’t find anything wrong, either.

  Late one afternoon she crunched over dry leaves on the trail. Just as she reached the beaver pond she saw a body flash away underwater like a sleek, small seal.

  There were beaver colonies up and down the Catamount River. The river ran through the Trigo property, just downstream from R.J.’s.

  She hurried to her car and drove to the Trigos’ house. Lucien was lying on the couch in the living room, watching television.

  “Luke, did you go swimming this summer? In the river?”

  He nodded.

  “Did you swim in the ponds made by the beaver dams?”

  “Sure.”

  “Did you ever drink the water?”

  Prudence Trigo was paying very close attention.

  “Oh yeah, sometimes,” Lucien said. “It’s real clean and cold.”

  “It does look clean, Luke. I swim in it myself. But I just happened to think that the beaver and other wild creatures defecate and urinate in it.”

  “Defecate and …”

  “Shit and piss,” Pru said to her son. “Doctor means they shit and piss in the water, and then you drink it.” She turned to R.J. “You think that’s it?”

  “I think it might be. Animals infect water with parasites. If somebody drinks the water, the parasites reproduce and form a lining in the gut, so the intestine is no longer capable of absorbing nourishment. We won’t be sure until I send a stool sample off to the government lab. In the meantime, I’ll start him on a strong antibiotic.”

  When the test came back, the report said that Lucien’s digestive tract was laden with Giardia lamblia protozoa and showed traces of several other parasites as well. Within two weeks he was eating again, and his diarrhea had disappeared. Several weeks after that, another test revealed that his duodenum and jejunum were free of parasites, and his pent-up energy had found such release that he was getting on his mother’s nerves.

  He and R.J. agreed that next summer they would swim in Big Pond instead of in the river, and that they wouldn’t drink the lake water either.

  The cold came down from Canada, the kiss of death for all the flowers except the hardiest chrysanthemums. The hayed fields, close-cut as the heads of convicts, turned brown under the lemonish sun. R.J. paid Will Riley to bring the beehives to her place in his truck and stand them in her backyard in a row, between the house and the woods. Once they were moved, she completely ignored them, being occupied with treating humans. She had received advisories from the Centers for Disease Control warning that one of this year’s influenza strains, A/Beijing 32/92 (H3N2), was particularly virulent and debilitating, and for weeks Toby had been summoning aging patients to the office for flu shots. The vaccine didn’t make an appreciable dent in the epidemic when it came, however, and suddenly R.J.’s days were too short. The telephone ring became hateful. She prescribed antibiotics to some whose infections appeared to be bacterial, but mostly all she could do was tell them to take aspirin, drink lots of fluids, stay warm, get plenty of bed rest. Toby caught the flu, but R.J. and Peg Weiler managed to stay healthy despite the workload. “We’re too ornery to get sick, you and I,” Peggy said.

  It was the second day of November before R.J. could make time to bring cardboard cartons to the log house.

  It was as if she were closing out not only Sarah’s life, but David’s as well.

  While she folded and packed Sarah’s clothing, she tried to shut off her mind. If she could close her eyes too while she packed, she would have done it. When a carton became full, she took it to the town dump and placed it in the bin for Salvation Army collection.

  She stood for a long time over Sarah’s collection of heartrocks, trying to decide what to do with them. She couldn’t give them away or discard them; finally, she packed them all carefully and carried them out to the car as if they were jewels. Her guest room became a rock room, trays of heartrocks everywhere.

  She threw away the things in David’s medicine chest, ruthlessly dumping Sarah’s Clearasil and David’s antihistamines. Inside her there was a growing coldness at him for making it necessary for her to do these hurtful things. She saved the letters she found on his desk without reading them, placing them in a brown paper bag. In the lower left-hand drawer of the desk, she opened a typing paper box and found his book manuscript, which she took home and placed on the high shelf in her closet next to old scarves, mittens that didn’t fit anymore, and a Red Sox cap she had had since college.

  She spent Thanksgiving Day working, but the epidemic already had started its downward curve. The following week she managed to take two days in Boston for an important occasion. Her father was ten months beyond the university’s mandatory retirement age of sixty-five. Now he had to leave the chair at the medical school that he had occupied for so many years, and his department colleagues had invited R.J. to join them at a dinner in his honor at the Union Club. It was a mellow evening, full of praise, affection, and reminiscences. R.J. was very proud.

  The next morning her father took her to breakfast at the Ritz. “Are you all right?” he said gently. They had already discussed Sarah’s death at length.

  “I’m absolutely fine.”

  “What do you suppose has happened to him?”

  Her father asked timidly, afraid to cause her more hurt, but she had already faced the question squarely, and she realized she might never see him again.

  “I’m certain he’s lost in a bottle somewhere.”

  She told her father she had paid off one third of the bank loan for which he had co-signed, and both of them were relieved to change the subject.

  What lay ahead for Professor Cole was a chance to write a textbook he had been planning for years and the teaching of several courses as a guest professor at the University of Miami.

  “I have good friends in Florida, and I thirst for warmth and sunshine,” he said, holding up hands that arthritis had made gnarled as apple tree branches. He told R.J. he wanted her to have the viola da gamba that had been his grandfather’s.

  “Whatever would I do with it?”

  “Perhaps learn to play it. I don’t play it at all nowadays, and I want to travel light.”

  “Are you giving me Rob J.’s scalpel, as well?” She had always secretly been very impressed by the antique family scalpel.

  He smiled. “Rob J.’s scalpel doesn’t take up much room. I’ll hold on to it. You’ll be getting it soon enough.”

  “Not for a very long time, I hope,” she said and leaned over the table to kiss him.

  He was going to place the apartment’s furnishings in storage, and he asked her to take whatever she might want.

  “The carpet in your study,” she said at once.

  He was surprised. It was an undistinguished Belgian rug, beige and almost threadbare, not worth anything. “Take the Hamadan that’s in the living room. It’s a much better carpet than the one in my study.”

  But she already had a fine Persian rug, and what she wanted was something that was a part of her father. So the two of them went to the apartment and rolled up the rug and tied it. Even with each of them carrying one end it was a chore to get it downstairs and into the rear cargo space of the Explorer. The viola da gamba took up the entire rear seat as she drove back to Woodfield.

  She was glad to have the instrument and the carpet, but she wasn’t pleased with the fact that she kept inheriting the belongings of people who mattered to her.

  34

  WINTER NIGHTS

  One Saturday morning Kenneth Dettinger arrived at the log house to find R.J. going through the last of the Markus po
ssessions. He helped her sort through the tools and the kitchen utensils.

  “Hey, I’d like to keep the screwdrivers and some of the saws.”

  “Okay. You’ve paid for them.”

  Doubtless she sounded as depressed as she felt. He gave her a searching look. “What’s going to happen to the rest of this stuff?”

  “You’re giving it to the church ladies for their tag sale.”

  “Perfect!”

  They worked together for a time without speaking. “You married?” he asked finally.

  “No. Divorced, same as you.”

  He nodded. She saw an ache fly across his features, fleeting as a bird, coming and going in an instant. “It’s a hell of a big club, isn’t it?”

  R.J. nodded. “Members all over the world,” she said.

  She spent a lot of time with Eva, talking about the old days of Woodfield, discussing events that happened when Eva was a little girl or a young woman. Always, she watched the old woman closely, made uneasy by what was clearly a winding down of vitality, a gradual fading that had begun in Eva shortly after her niece’s death.

  R.J. asked her again and again about the Crawford children, still held captive by the mystery of the infant skeleton. Linda Rae Crawford had died in her sixth year, and Tyrone had died when he was nine, both before they had reached child-producing age. So it was on the other two siblings, Barbara Crawford and Harry Hamilton Crawford, Jr., that R.J. focused her attention.

  “Young Harry was a sweet-natured boy, but not cut out for a farm,” Eva remembered. “Always had his head buried in a book. He studied at the state college in Amherst for a while, but then he got thrown out, something to do with gambling. He just went away somewheres. I think California, or Oregon. Someplace out there.” The other daughter, Barbara, was a steadier kind of person, Eva said.

  “Was Barbara pretty? Did she have men who … you know, came around and courted her?”

  “She was pretty enough, and a very nice girl. I can’t remember her having any particular feller, but she went away to the normal school in Springfield and married one of her teachers.”

  Eva became impatient with R.J.’s questions and cranky about her presence. “You don’t have young ones, do you? Or a man at home?”

  “I do not.”

  “Well, you’re making a mistake. I could have gotten me a good man, I know I might have, if only I’d been free.”

  “Free? Why, Eva, you talk as though you were a slave back then. You’ve always been free. …”

  “Not really. I couldn’t break away. My brother always needed me to stay on the farm,” she said stiffly. Sometimes while they talked she grew visibly agitated, the fingertips of her right hand plucking at the tabletop or the bedspread or the flesh of her other hand.

  She had had a hard life, and R.J. saw that it disturbed her to be reminded of it.

  There were numerous and growing problems involving her present life. The church volunteers who cleaned her house and cooked her meals had reacted splendidly to a crisis, but they weren’t able to do it on a long-term basis. Marjorie Lassiter was empowered to hire someone to clean the apartment once a week, but Eva needed extended care, and the social worker confided to R.J. that she had begun to look for a nursing home that would take her. Eva was querulous and raised her voice a lot, and R.J. suspected that most nursing homes would try to keep her sedated. She saw problems ahead.

  In mid-December, suddenly there was snow to match the cold. Sometimes R.J. dressed in layers and ventured out onto the trail on her skis. The winter woods were still as a deserted church, but there were signs of occupancy. She saw the fresh pugmarks of a wildcat and tracks of deer of varying sizes, and a bloodied and furstrewn patch of broken snow. Now she didn’t need David to tell her that a predator had taken a rabbit; it was coyotes, their dog tracks were in the snow all about the kill.

  The beaver ponds were frozen and snow covered, and the winter river gurgled and rushed over, under, and through an atmosphere of ice. R.J. wanted to ski along the riverbank, but that was where the cleared trail ended, and she had to turn around and go back the way she had come.

  Winter was beautiful in the woods and the fields, but it would have been better shared. She ached for David. Perversely, she was tempted to telephone Tom and talk out her troubles, but she knew he was no longer available to her. She was lonely, frightened about the future. When she ventured forth into the cold whiteness, she felt like a tiny mite lost in the enormous deep freeze.

  Twice she hung beef suet in net onion bags for the birds, and each time it was stolen by a red fox. She saw his tracks and caught glimpses of him skulking, a wary thief. Finally she carried a ladder out to a young ash tree at the edge of the woods and, teetering but climbing high, hung another chunk of suet too far up for the fox to leap. She refilled her two bird feeders daily, and from the warmth of her house she watched chickadees, several kinds of nuthatches and grosbeaks, tufted titmice, a huge hairy woodpecker, a pair of cardinals. The male cardinal pissed her off; he always sent the female to the feeder first, in case there was danger there, and the female always went, a perpetual potential sacrifice.

  When will we ever learn? R.J. asked herself.

  When Kenneth Dettinger telephoned, he caught her by surprise. He was back in the hills for the weekend, and he wondered if she would care to join him for dinner.

  She opened her mouth to refuse the invitation and began arguing with herself. She should go, she thought, as the moment lengthened and he waited for her reply until the pause was embarrassing.

  “I would like that,” she said.

  She groomed carefully and chose a good dress she hadn’t worn in a while. When he picked her up he was wearing a tweed jacket, wool slacks, lightweight black hiking boots, and a heavy down jacket, the hill country dress-up outfit. They went to an inn on the Mohawk Trail and took their time over wine before ordering. She had become unaccustomed to alcohol; the wine relaxed her, and she discovered he was an interesting man, a good conversationalist. For several years he had spent three weeks annually working in Guatemala with children who had been traumatized by the murders of one or both of their parents. He asked insightful questions about her practice in the hills.

  She liked the meal, the talk about medicine and books and movies, enjoying herself enough so that when he took her home it felt natural to invite him in for coffee. She asked him to light the fire while she started the coffee.

  When he kissed her, that somehow felt natural too, and she enjoyed the experience. He was a good kisser, and she kissed him back.

  But her lips became like wood, and very soon he stopped.

  “I’m sorry, Ken. The timing is very wrong, I guess.”

  If she had hurt his ego, it didn’t show. “Do you give rain checks?”

  She hesitated too long, and he smiled. “I’m going to be in this town a lot in the future.” He held up his coffee mug to her. “Here’s to better timing. After a while if you would like to see me, let me know.”

  He kissed her on the cheek when he left.

  A week later he came up from New York for three days over the Christmas holiday, with another man and two very attractive women, both young.

  When R.J. passed them on the road in the Explorer, Ken honked his horn at her and waved.

  R.J. spent Christmas Day with Eva. She had made a small turkey at home, and she brought it over with the side dishes and a chocolate cake, but Eva derived little enjoyment from the meal. She had been told that in two weeks she would be transferred to a nursing home in Northampton. R.J. had gone there to check it out. She had told Eva it was a good place, and the old woman had listened quietly and had nodded her head without comment.

  Eva began to cough while R.J. was cleaning up after their meal. By the time the dishes were put away, her face was hot and flushed.

  R.J. had had sufficient experience with influenza so that it was an easily recognizable enemy. It had to be a flu strain not included in the vaccine Eva had received.

 
R.J. toyed with the idea of sleeping in Eva’s apartment or of getting one of the local women to stay the night.

  But Eva was so frail. In the end, R.J. called the ambulance and rode in it to Greenfield, where she signed the papers admitting Eva to the hospital.

  The next day, she was glad she had done so, because the infection had impaired Eva’s respiratory system. R.J. ordered antibiotics in the hope that the pneumonia was bacterial, but it was a viral pneumonia, and Eva sank rapidly.

  R.J. waited in the hospital room. “Eva,” she said. “Eva, I’m here with you.” She drove back and forth between Woodfield and Greenfield and sat by the bedside holding Eva’s hands, feeling the old woman’s life wind down and saying good-bye to her without any more words.

  R.J. ordered oxygen to ease her labored breathing, and toward the end, morphine. Eva died two days before the new year.

  The ground in the Woodfield cemetery was hard as flint, and a grave couldn’t be dug. Eva’s casket was placed in a holding vault. Her burial had to await the spring thaw. There was a memorial service at the Congregational church, sparsely attended because in ninety-two years not many people in town had known Eva Goodhue very well.

  The weather was beastly, a series of what Toby called “three-dog days.” R.J. had not even one dog to cuddle with against the cold, and she saw the spiritual danger of unremitting gray skies. She took responsibility for herself. In Northampton she found a teacher of viola da gamba, Olga Melnikoff, a woman in her seventies who had spent twenty-six years with the Boston Symphony. She began to have weekly lessons, and now in the still, cold house at night she sat and clamped the great viol between her knees as if it were a lover. The first strokes of the bow gave off sonorous bass vibrations that thrust their way deep into her body, and soon she was lost in the exquisite business of making sound. Mrs. Melnikoff started her on the basics, grimly correcting the way she wanted to hold the bow, ordering her to repeat the musical scale again and again. But R.J. already was a musician of piano and guitar, and soon she was doing exercises and then a few simple songs. She loved it. Sitting alone and playing, she felt that she was accompanied by the generations of Coles who had made melody with this instrument.