The Cole Trilogy: The Physician, Shaman And Matters Of Choice Part 148

One night I awoke and knew someone was in the room. "Roman?"

I turned on the light, but no one was there.

I even searched the shower and the closet. When I switched off the light, I felt the presence again.

"Sarah?" I said at last. Then, "Natalie? Is it you, Nat?"

n.o.body answered.

I might as well call out to Napoleon or Moses, I thought bitterly. But I couldn't rid myself of the certainty that I wasn't alone.

It wasn't a threatening presence. I kept the room unlit and lay in the dark, remembering the discussion in the study house. Reb Yehuda Nahman had quoted sages who had written that the beloved dead never are far away, and that they take an interest in the lives of the living.

I reached for the bottle and was struck by the thought of my wife and daughter watching me, seeing me weak and self-destructive in this foul room stinking of vomit. There was enough alcohol already in me to bring a sodden sleep, finally.

When I awoke I felt that I was alone again, but I lay on the bed and remembered.

Later that day I found a Turkish bath and stretched out on a bench in the steam and sweated booze for a long time. Then I took my filthy clothes to a Laundromat. While they were drying I found a barber and received a very bad haircut, saying good-bye to the ponytail; time to grow up, try to change.

The next morning I got into the car and left Akron. I wasn't surprised when the car drove me back to Kidron in time for the minyan; I felt safe there.

The scholars greeted me warmly. The Rebbe smiled and nodded as if I were just returning from an errand. He said the room was vacant, and after breakfast I carried my things upstairs. This time I emptied the suitcase, hanging some things in the closet and placing the rest in the bureau drawers.

Autumn became winter, which in Ohio was very much like winter in Woodfield except that the snow scenes were more open, field upon field. I dressed as I had in Woodfield, long underwear, jeans, woolen shirt and socks. When I went outside, I wore a heavy sweater, a stocking cap, an ancient red m.u.f.fler Dvora gave me, and a navy pea coat I had bought secondhand in Pittsfield my first year in the Berkshires. I walked a lot, my skin roughening in the cold.

Mornings I partic.i.p.ated in the minyan, more as a social obligation than because prayer made full contact with my soul. I was still interested in listening to the scholarly discussions that followed each service and found that I was understanding more of what I heard. After noons, the cheder children came noisily into their cla.s.srooms adjoining the study room, and some of the scholars taught them. I was tempted to volunteer to help in the cla.s.srooms, but I understood that the teachers received payment, and I didn't want to break anyone's rice bowl. I read a lot from the old Hebrew books, and occasionally I asked the Rebbe a question and we talked.

Each of the scholars knew it was G.o.d who made it possible for him to study, and they took their work seriously. When I watched them, it wasn't quite like Margaret Mead studying the Samoans-after all, my grandparents had belonged to this culture-but I was only a visitor, a stranger. I listened hard and like the others often dove into the tractates on the table in an attempt to b.u.t.tress an argument. Once in a while I forgot my reticence and blurted a question of my own. This happened during a discussion of the world to come.

"How do we know there is an afterlife? How do we know there's a connection with our loved ones who have died?"

The faces around the table turned to me with concern.

"Because it is written," Reb Gershom Miller murmured.

"Many things that are written are untrue."

Reb Gershom Miller was irate, but the Rebbe looked at me and smiled. "Come, Dovidel," he said. "Would you ask the Almighty, Blessed Be He, to sign a contract?" And reluctantly I joined in the general laughter.

One evening at supper we discussed the Secret Saints, the Lamed Vav. "Our tradition says that in every generation there are thirty-six righteous men, ordinary humans going about their daily work, on whose goodness the continued existence of the world depends," the Rebbe said.

"Thirty-six men. Couldn't a woman be a Lamed Vovnikit?" I asked.

The Rebbe's hand crept into his beard, scrabbled about as it did whenever he pondered. Through the open door to the pantry, I saw that Dvora had stopped what she had been doing. Her back was turned to my vision, but she was a statue, listening.

"I believe she can."

Dvora resumed her work with great energy. She looked pleased as she carried in the salmon salad.

"Could a Christian woman be a Lamed Vovnikit?"

I asked it quietly, but I sensed that they felt the weight of the question in my voice and knew it stemmed from something intensely personal. I saw that Dvora's eyes searched my face as she set the plate on the table.

The Rebbe's blue eyes were inscrutable. "What do you think is the answer?" he said.

"Of course she can."

The Rebbe nodded without surprise and gave me a little smile. "Perhaps you are a Lamed Vovnik," he said.

I took to waking up in the middle of the night with a perfume in my nostrils. I remembered breathing it in when my face was buried in your throat.

R.J. looked at David, and then she looked away. He waited a few moments before he began to speak again.

I dreamed of you s.e.xually and my sperm leaped from my body. More often I saw your face, watched you laugh. Sometimes the dreams didn't make sense. I dreamed of you sitting at the kitchen table with the Moscowitzes and some Amish. I dreamed of you driving a team of eight horses. I dreamed of you dressed in the long shapeless Amish garb, the Halsduch over your breast, the ap.r.o.n around your waist, a demure white Kapp on your dark hair....

In the yeshiva I was offered goodwill to a point, but little respect. The scholarship of the men of the study house was deeper than my own, and their faith was different.

And everyone at the yeshiva knew I was a drunk.

On a Sunday afternoon the Rebbe officiated at the marriage of the daughter of Reb Yossel Stein. Basha Stein was united with Reb Yehuda Nahman, the youngest of the scholars, a seventeen-year-old who throughout his life had been an ilui, a prodigy. The wedding was held in the barn, and everyone in the yeshiva community came. When the couple was beneath the canopy, they sang l.u.s.tily: He who is strong above all else, He who is blessed above all else, He who is great above all else, May he bless the bridegroom and bride.

Afterwards, no one turned to me to offer a gla.s.s when the schnapps was poured, as no one ever offered me a gla.s.s of wine at the Oneg Shabbat that marked the end of each Sabbath service. They treated me with gentle condescension, performing their mitzvot, their good deeds, like bearded Boy Scouts being nice to the maimed in order to earn their merit badges toward the ultimate reward.

I felt the onset of spring weather like new pain. I was certain my life was going to change, but I didn't know how. I stopped shaving, deciding to try a beard like all the other men around me. I toyed very briefly with the idea that I might make a life for myself in the yeshiva, but I recognized that I was almost as different from these Jews as I was from the Amish.

I watched the farmers become busy in their warming fields. The heavy, honeyed stink of manure was everywhere.

One day, I sought out Simon Yoder on his farm. Yoder was the farmer who rented and worked the yeshiva's land; it was his runaway horse I had stopped the day I had come to Kidron.

"I'd like to work for you," I said.

"Doing what?"

"Whatever you need."

"You can drive?"

"Behind horses? No."

Yoder looked dubiously at me, studying this strange English. "We don't pay minimum wages here, you know. Much less."

I shrugged.

So Yoder tested me, put me to work on the manure pile, and I shoveled horses.h.i.t into the spreader all day. I was in heaven. When I returned to the Moscowitz apartment that evening, muscles in protest again and clothing reeking, Dvora and the Rebbe a.s.sumed that either I had gone back to drinking or I had lost my mind.

It was an abnormally warm spring, slightly dry but with enough moisture for decent crops. After the manure was spread, Simon plowed and disked with five horses, and his brother Hans plowed behind a row of eight great beasts. "A horse produces fertilizer and other horses," Simon told me. "A tractor produces nothing but bills."

He taught me how to drive. "You already do a good job of handling one horse. That's really the most important part. Into the traces one at a time you back them. One at a time you take off the harness. They are used to working as a team." I found myself working behind two horses, plowing the corners of all the fields. By myself, I planted the cornfield surrounding the yeshiva. As I walked behind the horses, holding the reins, I was conscious that each window was filled with scholarly, bearded faces watching my every move as if I were a man from Mars.

Soon after planting was done, it was time for first hay to be cut. Each day I worked in the fields, breathing in a work perfume, a mixture of horse musk, my own sweat, and a heady olfactory slap, the scent of large areas of cut gra.s.s. I grew dark from the sun, and my body gradually strengthened and hardened. I let my hair grow long, and the beard sprang from my face. I was beginning to feel like Samson.

"Rebbe," I asked one night at the supper table, "do you believe G.o.d is really all-powerful?"

The long white fingers scrabbled in the long white beard. "In every thing except one," the Rebbe said finally. "G.o.d is in each of us. But we must give Him permission to come out."

All through the summer, I found genuine joy in work. I thought of you as I labored, allowing myself to do this because I believed I was becoming my own master. I had begun to dare to hope, but I was a realist and knew I was a drunk because I lacked a certain kind of courage. All my life I had been running away. I had run from the horror I had witnessed in Vietnam, into booze. I had run from the rabbinate, into real estate. I had run away from personal loss, into degradation. I had few illusions about myself.

A pressure was building in me. As summer waned, I tried to divert it, sometimes almost frantically, but finally it couldn't be denied. On the hottest day of August, I helped Simon Yoder store the last of the second cutting of hay in the barn, and then I drove to Akron.

The package store was just where I remembered it. I bought a liter of Seagram's Seven Crown whiskey; in a kosher bakery I found kichlach, and in the Jewish market I bought half a dozen jars of pickled herring. One of the jar lids must have been loose. Before I had driven far, my car was filled with the sharp, greasy odor of fish.

I went to a jeweler and made one more purchase, a single pearl on a delicate gold chain. I gave the little pendant to Dvora Moscowitz that evening, and a rent check in lieu of notice to vacate. She kissed me on both cheeks.

Next morning after the service, I broke out the food and whiskey for the minyan. I shook hands with everyone. The Rebbe followed me out to the car and gave me a bag Dvora had left for me, tuna sandwiches and streusel squares. I expected something more portentous from Rabbi Moscowitz, and the old man didn't disappoint.

"May the Lord bless you and keep you. May He shine his countenance on you and bring you peace."

I thanked him and started the motor. "Shalom, Rebbe." I was aware that for once I was departing a place properly. This time I told the car where to go, driving it straight toward Ma.s.sachusetts.

When finally he reached the end of the narrative, R.J. looked at him.

"So ... shall I stay?" he asked her.

"I think you should, at least for a time."

"For a time?"

"I'm not certain about you now. But stay for a little while. If we decide we shouldn't be together, at least ..."

"At least we can bring it to a decent end? Closure?"

"Something like that."

"I don't have to consider. But you take your time. R.J., I hope ..."

She touched the smooth, familiar but unfamiliar face. "I hope so, too. I need you, David. Or somebody like you," she said, to her own astonishment.

47.

SETTLING IN.

That evening, R.J. came home from the office to the rich smell of roasting leg of lamb. There was no need to announce that David had returned, she realized. If he had gone to the general store to buy the lamb, by now most of the people in town knew he was back.

He had made a wonderful meal, baby carrots and new potatoes browned in the gravy, corn on the cob, blueberry pie. She let him do the dishes while she went to her room and took the box from the bottom drawer of her bureau.

When she held it out to him, he wiped his soapy hands and carried it to the kitchen table. She could tell he was afraid to open the box, but finally he removed the cover and lifted out the fat ma.n.u.script.

"It's all there," she said.

He sat and held it, examining it. He riffled through it, hefted it.

"It's so good, David."

"You read it?"

"Yes. How could you just abandon it like that?" The question was so absurd, even she had to laugh, and he put it into perspective.

"I walked away from you, didn't I?"

People in the town had various reactions to the news that he had come back and was living with her. At the office, Peggy told R.J. she was happy for her. Toby said rea.s.suring things but was unable to hide her apprehension. She had grown up with a father who drank, and R.J. knew her friend was afraid of what the future held for someone who loved an addict.

Toby quickly changed the subject. "We're about reaching saturation point in the waiting room every day, and you never get to go home at a reasonable hour anymore."

"How many patients do we have now, Toby?"

"Fourteen hundred and forty-two."

"I guess we'd better not take any more new patients once we reach fifteen hundred."

Toby nodded. "Fifteen hundred is exactly what I figured would be right. The trouble is, R.J., some days you get several new patients. And are you really going to be able to send people away untreated once you reach fifteen hundred?"

R.J. sighed. They both knew the answer. "Where are the new patients coming from, mostly?" she asked.

Together, they huddled over the computer screen and pored over a map of the county. It was easy to see that she was drawing patients from the far outskirts of her territory, mostly in towns to the west of Woodfield, where people had an extremely long trip to get to a doctor in Greenfield or Pittsfield.

"We need a doctor right here," Toby said, placing her finger on the map at the town of Bridgeton. "There would be lots of patients for her-or him," she said with a quick smile. "And it would make life a lot easier for you, not having to go that far for house calls."

R.J. nodded. That night she telephoned Gwen, who was involved with the task of moving her household three quarters of the way across the continent. They discussed the patient population at length, and over the next couple of days R.J. wrote letters to the chiefs of medicine of several hospitals with good residency programs, including details of the needs and possibilities of the hill towns.

David had gone to Greenfield and brought home a computer, a printer, and a folding worktable, which he set up in the guest room. He was writing again. And he had made a difficult telephone call to his publisher, fearing that maybe Elaine Cataldo, his editor, no longer was working there, or perhaps had lost interest in the novel. But Elaine came on the line and spoke to him, very carefully at first. She voiced frank concerns about his dependability, but after they talked at length, she told him she had suffered terrible personal losses too, and that the only thing to do was to go on with life. She encouraged him to finish the book and said she would work out a new publication schedule.

Twelve days after David's return, there was a scratching at the front door. When he opened it, Agunah came in. She walked around and around him, pressing her furry body against his legs, reclaiming him with her scent. When he picked her up, her tongue lapped at his face.

He petted her for a long time. When finally he set her down on the floor, she walked through every room before she lay down on the rug in front of the fireplace and went to sleep.

This time she didn't run away.

Suddenly, R.J. found herself sharing her household. At David's suggestion, he bought and prepared their food, provided the firewood, did the household ch.o.r.es, and paid the electric bill.

All of R.J.'s needs were tended to, and she no longer came home to an empty house when her work was done. It was a perfect arrangement.