The Cole Trilogy: The Physician, Shaman And Matters Of Choice Part 131

"Hinton is a stubborn old skinflint. He keeps everyone waiting to be paid, so he can milk the last bit of bank interest out of every dollar. What you have to realize-what your patients must realize, too-is that you're running a business at the same time that you're doctoring them."

She needed to work out a system for collections, David said. Any dunning should be done by someone other than the doctor, so R.J. could keep her "image as a saint." Collecting debts was pretty much the same no matter what the business, he told her, and together they mapped out a program that she explained the next morning to Toby, the delegated collector, who would send out bills once a month.

Toby knew the local population well and would make the difficult decision about whether a patient truly was indigent. Anyone who couldn't pay but who wished to barter work or goods would be allowed to do so. Anyone who couldn't give money or barter wouldn't be billed.

For those whom Toby believed capable of paying, separate computer categories were programmed for accounts that were up to thirty days overdue, sixty to ninety days overdue, and more than ninety days overdue. Forty-five days after the first bill was mailed, Letter No. I was sent, asking the patient to contact the doctor with any questions about the account. After sixty days, Toby would make a telephone call reminding the patient of the outstanding balance and recording his or her response. After ninety days, Letter No. 2 was sent, a firmer request for payment by a specific date.

David suggested that after four months the account should be turned over to a collection agency. R.J. wrinkled her nose in distaste; that didn't fit her vision of the relationships she wanted to build in a small town. She realized she had to teach herself to be a businesswoman as well as a healer; still, for the time being she and Toby agreed to hold off on dealing with a collection agency.

Toby came to work one morning with a piece of paper that she handed to R.J. with a smile. It was yellowed and crumbling and had been placed for protection in a clear plastic holder.

"Mary Stern found it in the files of the Historic Society," Toby said. "Since it was addressed to an ancestor of my husband's-the brother of his great-great-grandmother-she brought it over to our house to show it to us."

It was a physician's bill, made out to Alonzo S. Sheffield, for "Office visit, grippe-50 cents." The name printed at the top was Doctor Peter Elias Hathaway, and the date on the bill was May 16, 1889. "There have been several dozen physicians in Woodfield between Dr. Hathaway and you," Toby told R.J. "Turn the bill over," she said.

A verse was printed on the back: Just on the brink of danger, not before, G.o.d and the Doctor we alike adore; The danger pa.s.sed, both are alike requited; G.o.d forgot and the Doctor slighted.

Toby returned the bill to the historical society, but not before copying the verse and placing it into the computer with Accounts Receivable.

David talked all the time about Sarah, and R.J. encouraged him to do it. One evening he brought out pictures, four fat alb.u.ms that recorded the life of one child. Here was Sarah as a newborn, held in the arms of her maternal grandmother, the late Trudi Kaufman, a plump woman with a wide smile. Here was serious little Sarah in her Teeterbabe, gravely watching her young father while he shaved. Many of the pictures engendered an anecdote. "See this snowsuit? Navy blue, her first snowsuit. She was just a year old, and Natalie and I were making a big deal over the fact that we had been able to switch her from diapers to training pants. One Sat.u.r.day we took her to A&S-Abraham and Strauss, the nice department store in downtown Brooklyn. It was January, right after the holidays, and cold. You know what it is to dress a little kid for the cold? All the layers you have to put on them?"

R.J. nodded, smiling.

"She had so many layers of clothing she was shaped like a little ball, a little Vienna roll. Well, we're in the elevator at A&S, the elevator man is announcing the merchandise, floor by floor. I had been carrying her, but now she's standing between us, Natalie and I each have a hand. And I notice the elevator man's face as he's reciting the merchandise, and I follow his eyes. And I see that all around those two little white baby shoes there is a big wet circle in the carpet on the elevator floor. And Sarah's legs are a darker, wetter blue than the rest of her snowsuit.

"We had changes for her in the car and I ran to the garage and got them. So we had to take all those wet layers off and put all those dry layers on. But the snowsuit was soaked, so we had to go to Infants' Wear and buy another snowsuit."

Sarah on her first day of school. Sarah as a skinny eight-year-old, digging in the sand on vacation at Old Lyme Beach in Connecticut. Sarah with braces on her teeth and a big, exaggerated grin to show them off.

David appeared in some of the pictures with her, but R.J. a.s.sumed that mostly he had been behind the camera, because Natalie was in many of the snapshots. R.J. studied her covertly, a pretty, self-a.s.sured young woman with long black hair, shockingly familiar because her sixteen-year-old daughter looked so much like her.

There was something wrong-sick-about envying a dead woman, but R.J. envied the woman who had been alive when all the pictures had been taken, the woman who had conceived and borne a daughter, taught and guided Sarah, given the girl her love. She recognized uncomfortably that some of her interest in David Markus stemmed from the fact that she yearned for a daughter herself, coveting the girl he and Natalie Kaufman Markus had brought into the world.

From time to time as she traveled the town she remembered Sarah and her collection, and she tried to keep her eyes out for heartrocks but never had any success. Mostly she was too busy to remember, and too short on time to spend pleasant minutes studying stones on the ground.

It happened by accident, a moment of serendipity. On a hot midsummer day she stole into the woods and took off her shoes and socks at the riverbank. She rolled up the legs of her slacks above the knee and waded blissfully in the cold water of the Catamount. In a moment she came to a pool and saw that it was full of fingerlings. She couldn't tell if they were brook trout or brown trout as they hovered in the clear water. Then, just beyond and below the trout, she saw a small whitish stone. Although she was conditioned by previous disappointments not to have expectations, she waded a few feet into deeper water, scattering fish in every direction, and reached down until her fingers closed on the stone.

A heartrock.

A crystal, probably quartz, about two inches in diameter, with a smooth surface made opaque by untold years of running water and grinding sands until the stone was just the proper shape.

She carried it home in triumph. In her bureau drawer was a small jeweler's box, and she emptied it of the pearl earrings it had contained and nestled the crystal into the velvet lining. Then she took the box and drove across town.

Fortunately, the log house looked deserted. Leaving the Explorer's motor running, she left the car and placed the little box in the middle of the top step, in front of Sarah Markus's door. Then she jumped into her car and made her getaway as gratefully as if she had just robbed a bank.

21.

FINDING HER WAY.

R.J. had said nothing to Sarah about the heartrock that had been left for her, and nothing was said by Sarah to indicate that she had found the crystal in the jewelry box.

But the following Wednesday afternoon when R.J. came home from the office, she found a small cardboard box by her front door. It contained a dark green, shiny stone with a ragged crack that started from the dip at the top and ran halfway through to the point at the base.

The next morning, on her precious day off, R.J. drove to a gravel pit in the hills that was used by the town highway department. Millions of years ago, a great torrent of ice had moved over the land, picking up and carrying soil, stones, and rocks, and great frozen chunks had broken off and fallen here to melt and become a river of water, washing up alluvial material into a moraine that now furnished material for the gravel roads of Woodfield.

R.J. spent all morning moving over the piles of stones, burrowing into them with her hands. There were stones of infinite hue and combination-brown, beige, white, blue, green, black, and gray. There were stones of diverse shape, and R.J. inspected and discarded thousands, one by one, without finding what she sought. Toward noon, sunburned and grumpy, she drove home. Pa.s.sing the Krantz place, she saw Freda in the garden, waving the car to a halt with her cane.

"Picking beets," Freda called when R.J. rolled down the window. "Want some?"

"Sure. I'll come out and help."

In the large garden on the south side of the big red Krantz barn, they had pulled the eighth big round beet when R.J. saw in the upturned dirt a piece of black basalt the size of the nail on her little finger and perfectly shaped. She began to laugh even as she pounced on it.

"May I have this?"

"Well, is it a diamond?" Freda said in astonishment.

"No, it's just a pebble," R.J. said, and bore away the beets and the heartrock in triumph.

In the house she washed the stone and wrapped it in tissue paper. Then she placed it in a plastic box that had housed a VCR tape. She found a cardboard box, fourteen inches square, and made popcorn, eating some for her lunch, and placed the VCR box in the small carton and filled it with popcorn. Then she got a larger carton, three feet by two feet, and placed the smaller carton inside, surrounded by b.a.l.l.s of crumpled newspaper, and taped it closed securely.

She had to set the alarm in order to get up early enough the next morning so that David and Sarah would still be asleep when she went to their house. The sun was still low enough to glitter on the wet gra.s.s as she pulled up on their road, not daring to drive to the door. She carried the box down their driveway and set it on the front steps, just as Chaim nickered in the field.

"Aha! So it was you," Sarah said from her open window.

In a moment she had come downstairs. "Wow. This must be a big one," she said, and R.J. laughed at her expression as she lifted the box, with its lack of weight.

"Come in. I'll give you coffee," Sarah said.

Seated at the kitchen table, they grinned at one another. "I love the two heartrocks you gave me. I'll keep them always," R.J. said.

"The crystal one is my favorite, at least at the moment. I change favorites a lot," Sarah said, careful to be honest. "They say crystal has the power to cure illness. Do you think it does?"

R.J. was just as careful. "I doubt it, but then, I've never had any experience with crystals, so I'm not in a position to say."

"Well, I think heartrocks are magical. I know they can be very lucky, and I carry one wherever I go. Do you believe in luck?"

"Oh, yes. I definitely believe in luck. I do."

While the coffee was brewing Sarah put the package on the table and cut the tape. Getting through the various layers and obstacles, she laughed a lot. When she saw the tiny black heartrock she gasped. "It's the best one yet," she said.

There were paper b.a.l.l.s and boxes and popcorn all over the table and the floor; R.J. felt as though they had been opening presents on Christmas morning. That was how David found them when he came downstairs in his pajamas, looking for coffee.

R.J. began to spend time on her house, enjoying the experience of making her own nest without having to consider the likes and dislikes of anyone else. She had received the books that had filled the library in the house on Brattle Street. Now she bartered pediatric care for four children in exchange for carpentry work by George Garroway, their father. She bought seasoned lumber from a little one-man mill deep in the hills. In Boston the black cherry boards would have been kiln-dried and prohibitively expensive. Elliot Purdy did all the labor himself, logging trees on his own land, milling and carefully stacking and air-drying the lumber, so the price was reasonable, and R.J. and David carried the boards to her house in his pickup. Garroway filled the living room walls with bookshelves. R.J. spent evening after evening sanding them and hand-rubbing them with Danish oil, often helped by David and sometimes joined by Toby and Jan, whom she rewarded with spaghetti dinners and opera on the CD player. When they were finished, the room took on the warmth that only glowing wood and the spines of many books could give.

Along with the cartons of books that she had trucked from the storage warehouse in Boston came the piano, which she placed in front of the living room window, on the Persian rug that had been her favorite possession in the Cambridge house. The antique Heriz had started out brightly colored 125 years ago, but through the long years the red had mellowed to rust, the blues and greens had softened into fine, subtle shades, and the white was now a delicate cream.

A few days later, a Federal Express van turned into R.J.'s driveway, and the driver delivered a bulky package with lading marks from the Netherlands. It turned out to be her legacy from Betts Sullivan, a beautifully worked silver tray, coffeepot, teapot, sugar bowl, and creamer. She spent an entire evening polishing the heavy pieces and then placed them on the lowboy where she could see them and the Heriz rug as she sat and played the piano in her home. She discovered deep contentment. It was an unfamiliar sensation, but one to which she could easily become addicted.

David exclaimed over the silver service. He was interested when she told him about Elizabeth Sullivan and moved when she took him to the small riverside clearing where she had buried Betts's ashes.

"Do you come here often, to speak to her?"

"I come here because I like this spot. But, no ... I don't speak to Elizabeth."

"Don't you want to tell her that her gift has arrived?"

"She isn't here, David."

"How do you know that?"

"I just know. I buried just some bits of burnt bone under that rock. Elizabeth merely wanted her remains to be added to the earth in a pretty, wild place. This town, this place by the Catamount River, they meant nothing to her during her lifetime. She didn't know them. If souls can return after death-and I don't believe that happens, I think that probably dead is dead-but if it could happen, surely Betts Sullivan would go to some place that was significant to her?"

He was shocked, she could tell. And disappointed in her, in some important way.

They were completely different kinds of people. Perhaps it was true that opposites attracted one another, she thought.

Although their relationship was full of questions and uncertainties, they shared wonderful hours. They explored her property together and found treasures. In the middle of her woods was a series of water containments like the beads in an enormous necklace. It began with a tiny dam that enclosed a trickle too small to qualify as a real brook, producing a collection of water scarcely larger than a puddle. Working with unerring engineering instinct, beavers had built a series of dams and ponds beyond the first one, each somewhat larger than the last, ending in a pond that covered more than an acre. Wading birds and other wildlife came to the largest pond for nesting and to hunt trout, and it was a place of stillness and peace.

"I wish I could walk out here without crashing through trees and undergrowth."

David agreed. "You need a trail," he said.

That weekend he brought cans of spray paint with which to mark a trail's course. They walked the route many times to make certain of it before they marked the trees, and then David came with his chain saw and went to work.

They deliberately kept the way narrow and avoided dealing with deadfalls or cutting large trees except to prune away lower branches that would impede a walker's progress. R.J. dragged away the limbs and small trees that David cut, reserving those thick enough to be firewood and making piles of the rest of the slash to provide shelters for small animals.

David pointed out animal sign, a buck tree where a deer had rubbed the velvet from his antlers, a dead trunk torn asunder by a black bear seeking grubs and insects, and now and again a pile of bear droppings, sometimes formless with berry diarrhea, sometimes exactly like human ordure except that it was of comically enormous caliber.

"Are there many bears around here?"

"Quite a few. Sooner or later you'll see one, probably from a distance. They don't let us get close. They hear us coming, smell us. They stay out of the way of human beings, for the most part."

Some of the scenery was particularly beautiful, and as they worked she made mental note of several places where she wanted to build benches. For the time being, she bought two plastic chairs from the supermarket in Greenfield, and she placed them in a clump of brush on the sh.o.r.e of the large beaver pond. She learned to sit there for long stretches of time without moving, and sometimes she was rewarded. She watched the beavers, and a gorgeous pair of wood ducks, and a blue heron wading in the shallows, and a deer come to the pond for a drink, and two snapping turtles the size of Betts's silver tray. Sometimes she felt as if she had never been in a traffic jam.

Little by little, whenever they could find the time, she and David cleared her narrow path through the whispering woods, all the way to the beaver ponds, and beyond, in the direction of the river.

22.

THE SINGERS.

Despite all kinds of misgivings, she slid into the relationship.

It frightened her that a woman of her age and experience could become so completely unglued inside, as vulnerable as a teenager. Her work kept her apart from David most of the time, but she was capable of thinking of him at random and inopportune moments-of his mouth, his voice, his eyes, the shape of his head, the way he held his body. She tried to examine her reactions scientifically, to tell herself it was all biological chemistry: When she saw him, heard his voice, sensed his presence, her brain released phenylethylamine to drive her body crazy. When he stroked her, kissed her, when they had s.e.x, the release of the hormone oxytocin made their lovemaking sweeter.

She drove him out of her mind ruthlessly during the day so she could function as a physician.

When they did get to spend time together, they couldn't keep their hands from one another.

It was a difficult time for David, a pivotal time. He had sent half his book and an outline to a leading publishing house, and in late July he was summoned to New York, to which he traveled by train on the hottest day of the summer.

He came back with a contract. The advance money wouldn't change his life-twenty thousand dollars, average support for a literary first novel that wasn't about a murder and a s.e.xy detective. But it was a victory, with the added triumph that he had allowed his editor to dine him but not to wine him.

R.J. took him for a sw.a.n.k celebratory dinner at the Deerfield Inn and then accompanied him to an A. A. meeting in Greenfield. He had confessed to her at dinner that he was terrified about his ability to finish the book. She took note at the A. A. meeting that he didn't have the confidence to identify himself as a writer.

"I'm David Markus," he said. "I'm an alcoholic, and I sell real estate in Woodfield."

When they returned to his house at the end of the evening they sat in the dark on the battered couch on the front porch, next to the jars of honey. They talked quietly and enjoyed the breeze that every now and again teased out of the woods and across his pasture.

While they were sitting there, a car came down the road and turned into the driveway, its yellow beams casting vine-shadows on David's face from the old wisteria that shaded the porch.

"It's Sarah," he said. "She went to the movies with Bobby Henderson."

As the car approached the house, they heard the sound of singing. Sarah and the Henderson boy were harmonizing to "Clementine," their voices thin and untrue. Obviously they were having a very good time.

David gave a snort of laughter.

"Shsh," R.J. said quietly. The car came to a halt in front of the house, separated from the porch by only a dozen feet of air and the thick growth of wisteria.

Sarah started the next song, "The Deacon Went Down to the Cellar to Pray," and the boy joined in. At the end of the song there was silence. Bobby Henderson must be kissing Sarah, R.J. thought. We should have let them know we're here, she realized, but already it was too late. She and David sat in the dark and held hands like an old married couple and grinned at one another in the dark.

Then Bobby began a song.

"The Ring-dang-doo, it's short and fat ..."

"Oh, Bobby, you're such a pig," Sarah said, but she giggled, and when he continued the song, she sang harmony.

"It's covered with hair ..."

("Lots of hair ...") "Like a p.u.s.s.y cat. ..."